Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  hoarse

Well, the puppy didn’t recognize my voice, so I’m back to the manual approach. No time to review, but I will include the list of what’s outstanding: American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Thief of Time by Terry Pratchet, Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh and Falling Free by LMB. I’m also in the middle of her Borders of Infinity.

Remember Good Omens by Gaiman and Pratchett? I wonder whether that book began the whole fad of occult-as-comedy that is raking in the big bucks for Joss Whedon on UPN. It was, in any event, a good book. Separately, though, Gaiman and Pratchett leave something to be desired. American Gods is also, for lack of a better term, a fantasy, as is Thief of Time and, I presume, the entire Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. American Gods is entirely nondescript. It follows the fates of certain Old World deities transplanted to America and not doing well at all, and of an ex-con who gets a job working, dying and rising again for one of them. Gaiman can write well enough that one wishes he had something to write about.

Thief of Time is a better book, having a more coherent plot and less unpleasant and unenlightening realism, but it lacks the deeper level one assumes Gaiman was trying to reach. Is it better to succeed at less, or fail at more? As humor, it’s not The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - and if you mean to get by on humor alone, you have to go Hitchhiker-far with it to please me. Yet it was a fun, readable book, and if it had been scifi I’d probably be recommending it right now. Fantasy leaves me cold, though, whenever it fails to achieve Tolkienesque levels - and it always fails. Someday I’ll put into words what it is about scifi that can carry a mediocre book, and what it is about humor and fantasy that makes even above-average books fail - someday.

Two down, two to go.

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  incitement

This time I have an excuse - I’ve been too ill to blog. I have been racking up the books, however, and my sister gave me a nice stack of LMB for my birthday. I’m far enough behind, however, that I’ll have to drag out the puppy tomorrow and dictate. For now, though, let me make a note on seeing The Lord of the Rings. Today I finished rereading The Fellowship of the Ring to clean my brain out after the movie. The scenery was wonderful, and the choices of what to cut from the book were not bad choices. However, the choices to rewrite the dialogue, plot and characters were all bad choices - too many to name, but all of them poor indeed. Let me clue the producer in: You’re not J.R.R. Tolkien. You’re not even Christopher Tolkien.

If I had to pick the biggest nit, it wouldn’t be the fifty Ring-shots. It wouldn’t be Arwen oozing elfish essence into Frodo. It wouldn’t even be Aragorn the Slacker. It would be, strangely enough, Frodo moaning glassy-eyed in pain from the moment he’s stabbed by the Ringwraiths until he wakes up in Rivendell. In the book, Frodo took it like a hobbit, and formed complete sentences all the way to the Ford.

Still, the scenery was nice.

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  occult

Now that was neglecting the brog. I saw the Harry Potter movie when it came out, and read the book afterwards to check for accuracy. Someone asked what age the books were intended for. Thirty, I’d say - I see people reading them on the T nowadays about as often as I see people reading Ayn Rand. (There are no other patterns.) Ayn Rand is very, very popular, but nobody admits it.

Back to the movie. It looked like it cost a fortune; I wonder what’s left to the imagination after a show like that. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was addictive, but when I finally put it down, I realized it wasn’t The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by any stretch of the imagination. There was something amoral about it, something like what David Brin talks about in his Salon article about Star Wars. (Snagged that link from a blog…) Harry Potter, like all the Skywalker children, was born into the right family. The foundling-king is an old, old story, but Grimm had morals. Harry Potter needs a good moral, besides don’t stare in the mirror too long.

But it was a good book.

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  gentle, v.

I know I’ve been neglecting the brog, but it’s not for want of material. I’m several novels behind. First, I plowed through Catherine Asaro’s The Last Hawk. It was reasonably well-written, except for all that mangling of the innocent verb “gentled”. Her world of Coba, with its reversed gender-roles and geographic diversity, was well-drawn. The plot was passable. It all fell apart, however, as sf novels so often do, at the level of character.

The protagonist, Kelric, had some moments of solidity, such as his time in solitary confinement, but was for the most part elusive. From his first excape attempt to his final rebellion, he is a man more acted upon than acting. Ixpar, another major character, seemed slightly more promising at the start, but she blended in with the host of Managers quickly enough. Their names and locations were kept straight enough, but otherwise even Avtac, the villain presumptive, was difficult to distinguish from the general run of Amazons.

The author’s inability to make the bad girl bad deserves some note - although the evil deeds of Avtac were horrifying when related from a distance, close up she seemed to be just another Ixpar. This led to some truly jarring plot shifts, as though Avtac were a Dr. Jekyl to her countrywomen and a Mr. Hyde to outsiders.

The best characters were the incidental young people scattered across the book/planet. Kelric’s fellow prisoner at Haka, the Calani who kept falling out windows, the girl physicist/Calani with her male suitor…

It just goes to show you that too much string theory takes the joy out of a book. Ayn Rand would say that such significant things could not happen to such dull people.

Catherine Asaro has a reputation for having put the sci back in sci-fi. All I can say is that she didn’t do it with The Last Hawk. The game of Quis, while very interesting as a cultural artifact, is a mathematical implausibility. While it’s not outright impossible, it’s nowhere near believable enough to pass on just Asaro’s word. Yet not once does the author attempt to suspend my disbelief in Quis as a means of communication. I was left to my own devices to explain the black box that was Quis.

I hate black boxes. If the characters can understand something, then the author ought to be able to, say, include an appendix with the full rules of Quis. Tolkien would have. I’d forgive her Quis, though, if she hadn’t give her primitive society stunners from the get-go, yet made them discover gunpowder and lasers near the end of the book. And name them “lasers”!

There was also plenty of gratuitous sex, as Kelric sleeps his way across the planet - the effect, as Kelric’s affect, was flat. But I’ve read worse plots by people who could write better characters - I have a book beside me that I won’t even lend to people, it was so unredeemable. The Last Hawk was good enough to hand around.

But that review will have to wait…

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  Romantic

I bought The Romantic Manifesto the other day and read it on the T. I found it even more helpful than the how-to books I’ve read: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card and The Science of Science-Fiction Writing by James Gunn. The former is the industry standard, featuring the secret MICE system of writing sf/f. I’d hoped the latter was about science in sci-fi, but it wasn’t. It was barely about writing sf at all - it was more interesting as a biography of Asimov.

Anyway, back to Ayn Rand - she’s a wonderful read, if only to hear someone refer to famous works of literature as “vile” and their authors as “evil”. Technically, The Romantic Manifesto is not about the mechanics of writing but about the philosophy of art, but it still manages to cover most of the MICE mechanics, explain what the problem is with sci-fi and touch on Rand’s own motivation for writing - all on the side, as it were, of her aesthetic philosophy. She also discusses the difference between moral and aesthetic judgment of novels, and includes a fun short story at the end.

I read The Romantic Manifesto a decade ago, so it’s the most likely source of my own ideas about plot. Ayn Rand insists that the novel be plot-driven - every point of character and theme must proceed from the plot. You could think of it as a book-wide version of “show, don’t tell”. She insists that the heroes, at least, have as much personal volition as the plot has action (and the plot must have action), and she gives contrasting examples of both characterization and style.

To Ayn Rand, a novel is its own justification - it is not a gravy-train, or a morality play, or a disposable piece of entertainment. The function it serves for the reader is escapism - the reader escapes into the ideal world, the one that matches his own ideas and feelings about life, for the duration of his time between the covers. That makes it doubly strange that Rand dislikes sci-fi. (Atlas Shrugged is, arguably, sci-fi.)

Science fiction, she claims, is a mixture of the good (Romantic) and the bad (Naturalistic) tendencies of the novel. An sf plot is always Romantic (idealized, with plenty of action, a notion of good and evil, and heroes working towards the good) but the characters tend to be Naturalistic Everymen swept along by external events, sketchily drawn with little psychological consideration. No one will argue that character has always been the great weakness of sci-fi, so that when someone like LMB comes along the difference is shocking. (I had to get her in here somewhere.)

I highly recommend The Romantic Manifesto to writers; even if you disagree with Ayn Rand, she’s always a good example of what it means to have a reason for doing what you do - in this case, writing. The goal of her novels was to exhibit the ideal man. In the process she made a kind of bible out of them, which she readily refers back to to make her points. Literature is a means of conveying ideas, she mentions, that it would take reams of philosophy to explain - but you have to have something to say.

  Puppy: on
  Word of the day: aeon

One thing I forgot to mention about Parable of the Talents was how vast an improvement over The Handmaid’s Tale it was. Feminists are welcome to their nightmares, but if you want to share them with the rest of us, you’re obliged to try to make them somewhat plausible. Octavia Butler’s Christian America was a far more believable dystopic vision than the Taliban-like conditions in Margaret Atwood’s book.

I have the list of Hugo and Nebula Award-winning works from the Locus page, and it amazes me sometimes how many of them I disliked. The Mars trilogy has already been mentioned, but there’s also The Snow Queen and To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

I tried to read one of Catherine Asaro’s books, but I got only a few pages into it before I gave up and read Eon by Greg Bear instead. Now that was a good book–nice science, a light hand and a good pace. The characters were nothing special, and Greg Bear has a disturbing tendency to use young female protagonists whose actions are never properly motivated and whose lives are inevitably wasted in their formless flailing. (I’m generalizing from just two books here, the other being Moving Mars.)

Nevertheless, I liked the book–it made me want to sit down and write my own. That will do as a definition of a good book, since Hugo-award-winning is out.

  Puppy: off
  Word of the day: zazen

I don’t have much to say, I just feel I’ve been neglecting the brog. I’ve been reading China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci 1583-1610. I wanted to read the bits about memory palaces, but after checking the index I’m afraid they may not have been translated. Nevertheless, I’m reading the book for its sci-fi content. I fully expect the Chinese to be more alien than anything I’ve read in sf lately.

I picked up a couple of books from the library today, and I have a pile of Tor books from Buck-a-Book that I will get to someday. Catherine Asaro is first on the list, and I’m expecting a major disappointment. I suspect the new science she’s lauded for is as original as the usual aliens are alien. I shouldn’t be so pessimistic, but I am.

  Puppy: off
  Word of the day: apoptosis

It’s the time slip, so I had to write. I finished Foundation - I’m still amazed at what writers used to get away with. I don’t think I’m up for the rest of the series. Whatever Asimov I read in my youth I shall henceforth consider enough. I also finished Wyrms by Orson Scott Card, which was not a bad book. He claims to have written fantasy, but if this mixture of science fiction and mythology is what he was talking about, then I don’t believe him. The standard fantasy parts - the fight in the forest, the boat ride down the river, the quest in general - were unimpressive in and of themselves. Without the science and mythology, the book would not have held up to the end. The beginning was rather promising, but the characters and the fantasy world seemed to grow less complex as the story moved on. That might not have been the muse flagging; maybe it was just me flagging. Yet Tolkien’s world never lost substance, no matter where the individual characters travelled.

Maybe it’s just too late to be critiquing books - just one more, then. Parable of the Talents disappointed me. The structure, that of an angry daughter’s commentary on her mother’s journals, just took away from the main story. I wasn’t dismayed when I reached the familiar ‘there’s no room in this book for an ending’ point, because I know Octavia Butler doesn’t end her books, she just stops. No problem. But it was a problem, because she tried to end it in the usual ‘no room’ way - a flash-forward into a future where the current difficulties have already been solved. I suspect authors do this when they don’t know how to fill in those missing months or years. So the issue of how Earthseed was finally spread was just skipped over. If Nancy Kress had done it, I would have supposed that she could never in a million years describe the spread of a religion. The truly disappointing part is that Octavia Bulter could have described it; she may be the only person in sf who could, but she could and she didn’t. Why not? She’s not lazy - usually her elisions are far better timed that this one. Also, I found the study guide at the end of the trade paperback edition of Parable of the Talents a bit much. Remind me never to do that.

  Puppy: on
  Word of the day: variola

I guess I’ve always had a dim view of mankind. For example, I’ve always believed that my smallpox vaccination would come in handy someday. I find reports that my vaccination may have worn out rather disturbing–but I don’t believe it. I still have faith in the variola of older days. Someone higher up just doesn’t want me to write off everyone born since 1970; little do they know, I did that ten years ago.

And then there was nuclear war: I have to admit it’s been a while since I thought we’d wipe ourselves off the earth that way, but it seems the simple fears of childhood are back. Just today on the news I heard that a nuclear exchange is “likely” within the next thirty or sixty days, and it won’t even be us and the Russians this time.

Ah, the Russians–no one ever told me that they’d been trying to produce weapons-grade smallpox since the day mankind defeated the natural version. I just had a bad feeling… smallpox has a long history of use as a biological weapon here in the United States, most notably in the French and Indian War. At least then, it was more of the same old smallpox, rather than a plot to ressurrect something that took so long to kill. Immunization is not a modern phenomenon; the practice goes back to medieval times or further. It’s a very old dream only recently achieved, and fragile.

Putting aside the annihilation of mankind for the moment, I suppose it’s time to say something about Memory by LMB. Of course I loved it; but why? Memory immediately precedes my favorite LMB novel, Komarr, and may be seen as a dress rehearsal for that book. The situation is the same–an apparent accident that may or may not be a crime, which Miles ends up investigating in his new role of Imperial Auditor. Both novels deal with temptation; Miles begins Memory by sliding, ever so slowly, towards what could be considered a white lie or a huge betrayal, and even more temptations follow this initial battle. Both the temptations and questions of identity are more pressing in Memory, while in Komarr and the sequel, A Civil Campaign, the theme shifts to honor.

As a mystery, Komarr is by far the better book–there are plot holes in Memory, the pace is uneven, and the culprit is easily identified–but on the level of character, Memory does for Miles what Komarr does for Ekaterin–almost.

  Puppy: off
  Word of the day: fidelity

After I got Debbie to read Atlas Shrugged, including the forty-page political speech, we decided that it was a science fiction novel. Somehow I don’t think Ayn Rand had to struggle even as hard as Kurt Vonnegut to avoid the sf brand, as deadly to ’serious’ writers as a role on a Star Trek series is to serious actors. But if 1984 gets any credit for being in the speculative fiction genre, then Atlas Shrugged deserves it too. There’s absolutely no question that Rand’s novella Anthem is science fiction as well.

I have to admit that Ayn Rand impressed me immensely when I first read her, eleven years ago. First of all, I hadn’t imagined that someone could make a moral argument for capitalism, or against communism - I thought all debate on that issue would have to be pragmatic, saying that we are not saints enough for communism so we put our vices to good use through capitalism. That the woman had the gall to make selfishness a virtue, and then devote her life to making a philosophy out of it, and then, on top of that, to write novels based on her own personal aesthetic - good novels - amazed me on all the levels involved, philosophical, moral and literary. That was the day I should have known I wanted to be a writer.

“Katie, why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.” (The Fountainhead)

I’m going to have to hunt down The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature and reread it, since Christine has been quite rightly pestering me for not knowing what the point is I’m trying to make in my stories. Ayn Rand was never at a loss for the moral of the story.

• The Ayn Rand Institute