Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

This is the inaugural entry in my new sci-fi category, for the moment. Eventually, my other blog will get imported into MT and there will be plenty of back-entries on the topic. I’ve learned a lot from fandom, and one of the most important lessons is never let your real opinions slip out. But I’ve already alienated everyone who wanted to be alienated in fandom - an unintentional slash-and-burn, but a useful one nonetheless - so I can move the other blog here without any major worries that David Brin will hate me forever for my personal opinion of his fiction.

I went shoe-shopping yesterday, and, as usual, found no shoes. I came home with a bag full of used and remaindered books, though. You should have seen the one that got away… One of the ones that got away was a new anthology by Orson Scott Card, of the best stories of the century. I glanced through the table of contents and was pleased to see my favorite short story in there: “Dark they were, and golden-eyed,” by Ray Bradbury.

I wandered over to OSC’s page today to track down the title of the anthology, but I was distracted from my quest by his Open Letter
to fellow Mormons about whether he plagiarised the Book of Mormon for one of his novels. There are bits of the letter that are rather interesting, especially the part about science fiction being the only practical method of discussing moral and cosmological issues across the gulf between worldviews. He seems like quite an interesting guy. I had no idea he was a Mormon, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

For reader convenience, here are some (non-contiguous) quotes from OSC’s open letter:

You can read the original Ender’s Game on OSC’s page. And don’t click on the “More” link below unless you’re ready for a slam from a Big Name Writer. (Don’t make me say I told you so…)

(more…)

Send in the Clones…

Lori links Salon’s review of Attack of the Clones, saying someone’s getting too deep about a shallow movie. I don’t know when demands for more on-screen rolls in the hay became intellectual - probably back when virginity became an unnatural affliction with which teens are “stricken” rather than born. Such revealing counterfactual preconceptions are scattered throughout the article. Anakin wasn’t “grim”, he was whiny. Padme wasn’t grim either; she played it cool until she decided she was going to die anyway and she might as well kiss the boy.

The reviewer gives away his ignorance when he talks about millions of cloned Boba Fetts being “gloated over” by the producer. They weren’t exactly the Ewoks, Mr. Thomson. He claims it’s never explained why the happy couple can’t just go roll in the hay, when it was actually made quite clear that Jedi don’t do the wild thing.

But what I find disturbing about this review is that it would fit any story in which two people fall in love on screen and manage to get married in the final scene, all without taking parts A and B out for a test drive. This is a criticism that could be made of Episode 2, or of Jane Austen for that matter, sight-unseen - which is to say, it’s not criticism at all. It is a statement of faith that it’s impossible to tell a love story; it is pure disbelief in romance.

Lori distracted me from what I was planning to say, so I have to back up a bit now, to Sunday night. I never meant to be trendy enough to see Episode 2 on it’s big premiere weekend. Dr. Deb and I had decided to watch the X-Files finale for old times’ sake. We used to watch XF when it was all about the fat-sucking vampires, sewer-dwelling fluke-men and UST. We went on strike when Mulder disappeared; in our minds it’s still the cult-classic of third season, when the occasional mytharc episode could be ignored as just so much inane prattle about smallpox and bees.

Imagine our disappointment when the finale turned out to be all mytharc, all the time, in a little locked room. Dr. Deb didn’t know about the Suddenly and Dramatically Resolved Sexual Tension, and I didn’t know Scully had given up Mulder’s spooky love-child - for adoption, I presume. That was the least of my problems with the new Puffy Scully. Who was that weepy woman, and what has she done with my calm and rational scientist-in-flats?

As for the episode itself, it was dreck on the level of the worst maudlin angstfic. Skinner and the prosecution posturing at each other with Scully telling-not-showing on the witness stand hardly makes for a plot, never mind a two-hour finale. So forty minutes into our abject horror and suffering, I suggested to Dr. Deb that we blow the joint and go catch Attack of the Clones instead. We made the 9:30 show, which was as man-heavy as a physics conference. “At least there are no children,” I said, little suspecting how the excess of males would contribute to later events.

After the tragedy of the mytharc, we were in the mood to be pleased. Dr. Deb made nominal protests against Jar-Jar, but when he brought an end to a thousand years of peace in the Republic, we were sufficiently avenged upon the animated pest. Jar-Jar didn’t start the trouble; Anakin Skywhiner, heir and forebear of Luke Skywhiner, did it when he confessed his undying (and extremely painful) love for Padme Clotheshorse. This was too much for the heavily-macho audience; they laughed. (Don’t tell George, eh?) I’ve seen audiences laugh at the wrong bits of movies before, but never with quite so much justification. Giggling continued on and off until the combined fashion show/love affair was interrupted by the Shmi incident and subsequent “rescue” of Obi Wan.

Let me pause to Be Like Liz here, and praise Obi Wan. He’s such the dashing hero - noble, intelligent, and forceful (sorry). I loved all his scenes, especially the ones bluffing his way through the clone factory. The poor dude was saddled with his Young Padwhine Anakin by his dying Jedi master in a massive guilt trip last movie, but does he bitch and moan about it all through this one? No. Does he complain that having a clueless idiot for an apprentice is holding him back? No. Obi Wan is a real Jedi.

Despite the audience’s impromptu laugh track, I enjoyed the follies of the One Fated to Restore Petulance to the Force. Just watching him bumble his way through the movie brought up rare questions of good and evil. When he stares at Padme that way, is he just moon-eyeing her, or is he manipulating her? Does he stop and think before his little starter-kit genocide, or was he only beserking when he killed not just the things, but their wo-things and child-things? And when he blames Obi-Wan afterwards, does he really mean it? (I think he does.)

Is the soul of evil, then, blaming others for what is your own or no one’s fault? Or is it wanting to force people to be good, or wanting the power to do so? Is it wanting to be a Jedi and get the girl, too? (Padme deserves some share of the blame for getting involved with Jedi-boy, but who can help kissing the boy when your timeline is about to dead-end gladiator-style?)

Yes, I’m reading all this into the movie because I know Jedi-boy is scheduled to do an interstellar Evil Willow in the next ep, but if I’d lived under a rock for the past few decades and walked into the movie blind, I would still have loved it. You see, I’m constitutionally unable to resist a secret wedding - I’ve written at least six of them, and I have a bad habit of keeping the wedding secret from the bride and groom themselves. It’s more than just the wedding, though; the whole self-destructive, “we’ll be living a lie and it will destroy us,” star-crossed romance is just lovely in a live-fast, rule-Naboo-young kind of way. It doesn’t matter that Lucas wrote it badly enough that the audience laughed, because he still wrote it and it’s still floating around in my head teasing the muse with ideas of love as suicide, love as greed, love as irresistible as the dark side, and the fundamental tragedy of the good.

Which brings us to the last deep theme of this laughable piece of fluff: that the Evil Overlords have a plan that’s coming together, while the Jedi Knights are falling apart. They are blind to the Sith they’ve elected provisional Emperor, blind to the clone plant cranking out Boba Fetts for the past ten years, blind to the fact that “balance” is the last thing they should want restored to the Force after a thousand years of peace, blind to their pretty-boy messiah practicing genocide and marrying a Senator, blind to the truth of the war, which is both sides against the Jedi - blind and self-defeating.

There’s nothing in the world like a good old-fashioned tragedy, unless it’s good old-fashioned badly-written science fiction into the gaps of which you unconsciously read the story you would have written, if you had millions to blow on your own personal space opera. Fanfiction, by the by, is the act of writing the shadow-story down.

   Phrase of the day: Arrow's Paradox

Who is Walter Jon Williams and where has he been all my life? He tosses off worlds like they were sentence fragments, and then he writes an entire novel in the present tense. The man has style. I couldn’t put Metropolitan down. In a novel full of good things, my favorite thing was the final pages. The pacing was amazing, the little cuts, Aiah’s pronouncement that if she knew Constantine she’d be there with him, everything was perfect. And it seems from his web page (http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/) there’s a sequel. I thought I was getting too old and jaded to find new favorites.

   Word of the day: ethereal

I don’t know why I do this to myself, but I read Catch the Lightning by Catherine Asaro. I figured that for two bucks at Buck-A-Book I couldn’t go wrong. Much.

Well, there was a lot of gratuitous sex, as usual, but this time with a minor. Even fanfic writers quail at statutory rape, and if John Ashcroft had his way Catch the Lightning would go on the fire with Romeo and Juliet. David Brin wouldn’t be happy with all this Rhon prince and princess stuff, and the worst part for me was the data dumps. Yes, Asaro is a scientist, but raw science does not scifi make - not these days, anyway. I couldn’t tell Althor apart from the Kelric of the last Asaro novel I read; it’s possible they’re the same character, or at least father and son, so that’s not the damning point it might have been.

On the positive side, the book moved along briskly and took a violent change of milieu halfway through in stride. I’m beginning to think of Asaro as a mix of hard scifi and bodice-ripping pulps, and not an unsuccessful one. That doesn’t mean I’ll blow another two bucks on her, though - there are other fish in the sea.

Right now I’m in the middle of Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams, which appears, whenever I stop to think about it, to be written in third person present. WJW is a wizard at world-building. More to follow…

Second word of the day: circadian

Make Room! Make Room! was a cross between a hard-bitten detective novel and a Malthusian jeremiad. I was spoiled for it by Soylent Green; when it turned out they weren’t eating people, I lost interest. Despite a few nods to technology, it was more dystopian fantasy than science fiction.

I wasn’t as disappointed by The Spirit Ring as I’d expected to be after the warnings I’d heard. The plot was fun; my only real objection was to the characters themselves. They were young and nebulous, an LMB-style Romeo and Juliet stumbling through the story in a daze. I can’t say that’s not acceptible in fantasy, but I think you need a different style to carry it off properly - something remote, something archetypal and Tolkienesque.

The truth is, I was looking for Forever War, but all I found was Forever Peace. It was a good book, with an interesting deus ex machina at the end, but again, hard-bitten, and at points it toed the wrong side of the line between showing and telling. To be fair, Haldeman did a good job describing being jacked, but the transcendent experience upon which the novel rides is…transcendent. Should one write about what cannot be described? My usual answer is no, but if someone else can make a good novel out of dancing around the point, I’m willing to read it.

The premise was a bit off as well - we’re long past the point where Haldeman’s necessary peace was necessary, and yet we’re still alive. His cure is no cure either - the issue of keeping the sane people from blowing up the world is, as recent events have shown, far less intractable than the problem of keeping the zanies out of the cockpit.

Nothing in the book was too much of a stretch, though, not even the sad ending for the protagonist, which is, I suppose, how this novel won the matching Hugo and Nebula to go with the ones for Forever War.

She proves that sci-fi and fantasy are both new genres, whatever history they may have in the pulps and proto-pulp adventures like this one. I read She after seeing an essay on it in a collection on sci-fi. I’m not sure it said much about women in Victorian times, and as proto-scifi it had little to recommend it beyond the simple question of immortality, treated with little more depth than a medieval morality tale might have provided.

The hero of She is the least interesting character of the novel. Though perfect in figure and aspect (as opposed to the narrator), neither he nor his ancestral race has ever actually done anything of note. In fact, he spends most of the novel unconscious and evades even immortality, but only accidentally. Pulp has never been known for characterization, but this blond, gaping void lurching through the novel is a bit much, even for H. Rider Haggard.

So, on to the sleeper of the month. I bought Aristoi in a odd-lot store and put it down a few chapters in, annoyed with all the background detail, the two-column split-personality sections, and the general alienness of it all. I gave it a second chance, though, and warmed up to it, ending up staying up too late reading it more than one night. I don’t know much about Walter Jon Williams, but I’ve picked up another book of his from Buck-A-Book, I enjoyed this one so much. It takes real talent to get me to stomach open scifi misanthropy, never mind side with the protagonist when he says, at the end, that he doesn’t want to be human. Theme aside, it was a lovely mystery/adventure. The only thing I’d criticize it for is the dearth of central characters, relative to the length of the novel - but with five or six personalities popping in and out of the protagonist himself, perhaps this was a necessary economy.

   Word of the day:  resolution

I am, of course, quite behind. The moment I get published, this blog goes off-line. I don’t need to be making enemies - I’m only here to muse about writing, to ask, for instance, why all but one of the stories in the latest Analog were in the first person. Some were good, some were so-so, but all were confusing. I couldn’t even keep track of the protagonist’s gender in a couple of them, never mind more relevant details, and it’s a trying POV for an entire magazine to be in.

Outstanding novels for recap are: The Curse of Chalion, The Spirit Ring, Aristoi, Forever Peace, She and Make Room! Make Room! I just finished The Curse of Chalion, so perhaps I should get that one in while it’s fresh in my mind.

First off, it was an amazing book, and it was very satisfying to have an LMB book that was so long - a life, and not a chapter of a life. Yet Miles was still in this purported fantasy - his little “oh”’s and “and yet”’s disturbed me at first, coming out of the mouth of a medieval character, until I decided that Miles was LMB’s ideal man, as Rand would put it. Of course he has to show up everywhere, and his absence from The Spirit Ring was that novel’s greatest flaw.

Usually Miles has a better supporting cast, but usually he has a bigger supporting universe as well. She did manage to fool me with them for most of the story, but near the end I realized that Betriz and Iselle were rather sketchy for their large role in the novel, and in fact, all the non-Miles characters were, just like those of her previous fantasy. A whole world came to her, LMB says in the acknowledgements, but it was a peninsular one. Spain was clearly painted, and the language craftily subverted, but all the variety and conflict I think of, when I think of medieval Iberia, was brushed out. The Curse of Chalion was a lot like The Spirit Ring in its attempt at historical fantasy, and I’m still not sure that LMB’s minimalist approach to fantasy works - or it is a religious approach to fantasy? The theology was certainly the best part of the novel; in fact there was too much of it. It wouldn’t have hurt to spread it through a couple of novels, or, say, ten. Why hasn’t it been in Miles’? Certainly there’s more religion in the Vorkosigan saga than one expects in space opera, but it is religion without gods - raw existential honor.

LMB waxed Chestertonian at the end of the book - I knew she had it in her. Her plot devices, both the worn old ones and the impressive weaving of threads in and out of the story, were top-notch. The climax went by a bit too quick, for such a large and slow book, yet it was a hard thing to swing and it worked rather well for all that. She drew me in, she fooled me into believing in her characters, but she didn’t top Memory, or Komarr, or Shards of Honor. In theory, she could have - what was there in Spain but honor? But in Spain religion was a horror story men are still telling today.

Strange, strange choices, but a good book nonetheless.

   Word of the day:  insurrection

I made my way through Divine Intervention (I don’t think it was capitalized on the cover) by Ken Wharton. My sister was bored enough with it that she lent it to me before she’d even finished. Reading it was like watching a movie - the cute kid, the loving yet slightly distanced parents who pull together to save the cute kid, the nasty government officials who will stop at nothing to hide what the cute kid has found, i.e., the cute alien, the heroic bumpkins who are more than they seem, the heroic military guy, etc. There were other bits, too, that wouldn’t have fit into a real movie - the history of the previous space expedition, told in epigraphs, the religion, which was too interesting an idea to come across on the big screen, and the frozen colonists endangered by the nasty government sorts. It was a good movie, but I wanted to read a book.

   Word of the day:  inscription

I was going to catch up, really I was. I was going to say how I’d enjoyed Paul Levinson’s second novel, Borrowed Tides, although on the science side it left out a lot of explanation, or at least verisimiltudinous technobabble. But like good Star Trek technobabble, it was a lack that somehow managed to leave just the right amount to the imagination.

I also took a whack at Vernor Vinge’s new short story collection. I didn’t read them all, and I didn’t care for something I couldn’t quite pin down in the general style of them, but some stood out. The pixel-picture of the purple-blossomed valley was a bit of description that redeemed the entire story around it, for example. Then again, maybe I just got used to his style after the first bunch. I gave up on The Star Road by Gordon R. Dickson. It was a classic of everything sci-fi is getting over now, I suppose, and while I enjoyed it once upon a time, I’m not up for it now. I also tried a collection of what passes for short stories by C.J. Cherryh - Realities. I read two out of three novellas, but skipped the third because, though the ideas were good, the plots tended to go around in frustrating circles. She writes too much for me, though I suspect a fantasy fan could digest her quantities easily.

I picked up a year’s-end Locus, and found out that everyone else on the planet liked Gaiman’s American Gods more than I did. Fortunately, a few reviewers agreed with me about Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, a book that thought far too highly of itself. Locus is a very depressing read - do you have any idea how much the subscription rates to sf magazines have dropped over the last twenty years? You don’t want to know. I wonder if sf is still a good field for short fiction, considering the magazine shutdowns and audience.

What can I say about a second go at The Martian Chronicles? I’d like to try it myself - it’s a very nice format for short stories. I’m not even going to praise the LMB books I’ve been catching up on (Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms). Consider them the standard by which I’m judging everything else, if you need an opinion of them. I’d put the former in my Best of LMB category along with Memory, Komarr and Shards of Honor. One of my LMB converts has a copy of The Spirit Ring for me - I think I’ll give it a shot before moving up to Curse of Chalion, if only to avoid the (rumored) disappointment afterwards.

I almost forgot: The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde is a nice, nice bit of speculative fiction. I was rooting for the sidekick and lost on that one, but Edward got his Jane - it’s always good to end a book the way it’s supposed to end. It’s a standard sort of British fantasy, but without the overt humor that tends to leave me cold. I’d still prefer something a little more serious, but I know better than to expect that from overseas. “Where is the sharpness and precipitousness…?”

   Word of the day:  misanthropy

There’s a particular style of sci-fi that I’ve been running into lately, in The Uplift War and also “Hominid”, serialized in Analog for the past four issues. The plot parts are good, the characterization is bad. (”Isn’t that all sci-fi?” the wags ask.) I don’t mind wooden characters so much, until they start preaching their own superiority over us flesh-and-blood human beings. David Brin kept it down to a dull roar, with constant, but small, jabs at us and our backwater century. Robert J. Sawyer, on the other hand, harped on it for the duration on Hominid - how wretched we are for exterminating the wooly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, how ignorant we are to believe in gods and big-bangs, what a bad idea agriculture was, and how much better than ours is a society in which the families of criminals are sterilized. Why don’t you just invade Poland while you’re at it?

I suppose it’s not surprising that people who hate people would be bad at characterization. Brin won a Hugo or a Nebula for his tale of teenage boy meets teenage alien girl and nothing happens. Sure there are spaceships and guerrilla war and everything, but on the character level, nothing you expect to happen happens, except with the chimps. Brin writes chimps as though they were human, and humans as though they were rocks. If you just subtracted the humans from the equation, it would have been a great book. They’re just ballast anyway.

The “Hominids” had an interesting neanderthal society, but unlike Brin’s chimps, they didn’t balance the story’s equation of missing personality. Why are all alien cultures cheesy? Tolkien created five or six races and made them believable. Why can’t sci-fi authors handle even one without descending into the familiar language of the unbelievable? Eg: “when the Two become One” - cheesy! Tolkien would have made up a word for it. Tolkien would have made the male and female subcultures more distinct - he did, in fact, with the Ents and the missing Entwives. Tolkien knew what he was doing.

It’s a good thing I have a spare LMB book to read this weekend, or I might slip into sf despair.

  Puppy:  retired
  Word of the day:  minion

My, I’m behind. I want to mention The Hemingway Hoax, and newly outstanding are The Uplift War and a re-read of The Martian Chronicles. I tried to read Cherryh’s Cyteen, but I found it implausible that so much could be alleged to have changed about man, while the politics were still like something out of Disraeli. It was so thick I couldn’t face infinitely many more chapters like the first few I’d read. Downbelow Station, on the other hand, held my interest the entire time, although the level she was writing at was not one I’d like to see another author try. I suppose it was a distance from the many characters like Kim Stanley Robinson held, although the characters themselves were more likeable. The plot was good, if, again, more politics than science. Cherryh is a nice author to visit but I wouldn’t want to read all her fic.

The Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman, started out very, very well. The sci-fi bits were few and far between, but the character and plot were so good I kept right on reading. However, the book didn’t go in the direction that I expected (which was saving the Earth). Instead, the main character lost everything in a series of universe-hops, and eventually turned into someone else in the convoluted and unsatisfying ending. I’m not even sure whether or not he died. I’m not going to run out and read more Joe Haldeman (though I do have to hunt down The Forever War someday) - there can only be one Kurt Vonnegut, fooling the masses into thinking he’s not writing scifi, and fooling the scifi readers into thinking he is. Joe Haldeman is no Kurt Vonnegut.