The Big U, The Summer Tree, The Practice Effect
I read The Big U because of its connection to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. As such, it was quite interesting, but as a novel, it was a little disjointed. The POV character was rather fuzzy (which makes me want to say it was in first person, but I think it only strayed in and out of first person). Probably Neal Stephenson’s first novel (copyrighted 1984), it was out of print a while - the copy I picked up was a new trade paper reprint.
Yes, I braved another fantasy, The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay, an 80’s classic, or so the jacket informed me. I stopped early on, but picked it up again the same day wondering what happened. Shanghaiing a bunch of Canadians for nefarious magical purposes sounds like a neat idea, but it took me a while to be able to tell them apart, or care if I could. The natives, on the other hand, were far more interesting, and I really began to enjoy the book when I got to a section with only one Canadian and a whole tribe of locals. Unfortunately that was near the end and I doubt I’ll dig up the other two volumes of the trilogy. (Dr. Deb passed this one on to me.)
The non-Canadian side of the book was a kind of primordial AU, of which all our other Earths are supposed to be pale reflections. Notable pale reflections are Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and Norse mythology. This is an interesting, fanficcish approach to the problem of all fantasy being derivative of the same - and certainly Guy Gavriel Kay does Odin better than Neil Gaiman (more on which next time), but he cannot out-Tolkien Tolkien, whatever he may name his orcs, his elves, his Angband and his Morgoth.
Just for example, Tolkien conveyed song, legend and the passage of time without repeating, over and over, that it had been a thousand or twelve hundred years since such-and-such happened. His dark power crept slowly into Mordor; it didn’t pop out a mountain and point a dramatic, smoky finger at the West (here the South). It most certainly did not spend its time raping young women, nor, had it done so, would that have been the symbol of ultimate evil for Tolkien. Did evil change so much between 1954 and 1984?
Speaking of 1984, that’s also the date of publication of The Practice Effect. I suspect this one as well of being a first novel. Although Sundiver and Startide Rising were published before it, they are such better books, structurally speaking, that it’s hard to believe this one came after them. That said, I did enjoy it more than Brin’s other books - though he fought himself the whole way, he managed to write a pulp classic, complete with jealous scientific rivals, a princess, a familiar, a medieval society, noble thieves, magic, attempted rape and a pseudo-scientific explanation of it all at the end.
The hero makes no attempt to stop the rape, which is interrupted instead by some friends of his whom he does then go out of his way to defend. The princess gets laid up for an indefinite period of time (one of the things not handled well was the passage of time) by blisters. Frodo and Sam trudging through Mordor it ain’t. The final revelation could have stood a bit more foreshadowing, and some consequences of the theory, such as changes to the English language, weren’t worked out properly - but as a one-book pulp revival, its adventurous spirit outweighs its flaws.