Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I tried to post this entry with Archipelago, a Mac blogging interface, but the interface and documentation were too obscure. So the reviews will be typed up the old-fashioned way, through the web interface.

I really ought to know better than to read topical anthologies like Pharaoh Fantastic. The theme was ancient Egypt, and most of the stories took a magical approach to the topic. Some were closer to sci-fi or pulpy adventure, and several were disturbingly irreverent tales of the origins of Judaism and Christianity. Even that was better than the Wicca-style magic of other stories.

The stories I enjoyed were the ones that best recreated the spirit of ancient Egypt. “Succession” by Tanya Huff followed an aging queen in her struggles to save Egypt from the stereotypical Evil Vizier. The prose wasn’t always clear, but the characterization was good. In “The Voice of Authority,” a new Pharaoh becomes acquainted with his powers and duties as a god. “Whatever Was Forgotten” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman recounts thousands of years of the immortal dead, up to the final tomb robbery.

I picked up Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy at some library sale. It’s a typical Rip Van Winkle story, in which an insomniac has himself hypnotized to sleep in 1887 Boston, and doesn’t wake up until the year 2000. A doctor revives him and he discovers a communist paradise. Of course, the doctor has a beautiful daughter and the inevitable happens. All of that is standard for this sort of proto-scifi utopian novel. The interesting bit for me was near the end, when Our Revived Hero repents of his past capitalist sins, and becomes converted to the wonders of communism. The Christian imagery is used, and perhaps abused, by the author, but the conversion is in essence intellectual, making it a fascinating sci-fi theme.

Of course, it’s not called communism in the book. It’s just some rosy socialist view of the future, long before anyone had tried socialism and found it wanting. Looking Backward is only occasionally a novel; most of it is polemic, with Our Hero making naive protests that this workers’ paradise can’t possibly exist and the doctor telling him, “Nothing could be simpler,” and variations on that theme.

It’s easy, after 2000, to mock the doctor’s simple communism; the biggest hole in his logic is the hole in man’s motives. Whenever Our Hero asks why the workers will do their best rather than slack off, or share alike rather than hoard, or be comrades rather than asserting their power over one another, the doctor answers that they will have no incentive to do wrong. He keeps saying exactly that. The absence of selfish or evil motives is assumed. Maybe it was a reasonable assumption in 1887, though I doubt it; it’s certainly glaringly naive after the year 2000.

Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia deals with a very different sort of conversion - the Conversion of Europe. Strange lights like a giant aurora borealis fill the sky one night in 1912, and in the morning, Europe is no longer there. In its place is a jungle, and not just any jungle - a jungle with a completely different evolutionary history, where the vertebrates’ spines run up their stomachs, and the poisonous things are very, very poisonous. The population is gone; there’s nothing smarter than a pack animal on the entire continent.

The nickname for the new Europe is Darwinia, a joke, since this miracle is supposed, by most people, to have disproved Darwin. Yes, indeed, species arise out of single stupendous acts of creation. The huge, obvious (if ambiguous) miracle starts a religious revival and raises creation science to scientific respectability. A few of Our Heroes disbelieve the nouveau science, but the novel’s creation-science bashing never gets intolerable.

The reader soon finds Our Heroes on an expedition into deepest, darkest Darwinia, à la the Lewis and Clark expedition. This bothers the surviving Europeans, who don’t like the Wilson Doctrine declaring Darwinia a new world open to any colonists - which is to say, American colonists. The expedition runs into the dangers of the new continent and of the angry partisans, and makes a startling discovery. That’s just the beginning.

Early on there’s an interlude that lets the reader in on what’s really behind the “miracle,” though Our Heroes remain in the dark for quite a while longer. I don’t think I wanted to know that early on, but perhaps the truth was so strange that the author needed to work up to it. I don’t think he filled out his premise quite as far as he could, and his technical details and bad guys were a bit sketchy, but the excellent characterization more than made up for the problems.

Cool link of the day: a cartoon that could be subtitled same suit, different day. Also, Apple has released the XML schema for Keynote (their Powerpoint replacement).

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a book review. Most of the lag was for a rereading of The Lord of the Rings, which I trust every literate English-speaker on the face of the earth has read by now. Tolkien goes without reviewing. I tried to read The Shelters of Stone, but I was confused by a major POV shift on the second page, annoyed by the frequent infodumps, and bored by the end of the first chapter, so I gave up and switched to the only other novel of the ancient world on my to-read shelf.

Between the Rivers by Harry Turtledove was another one of my Buck-a-Book finds. I hadn’t heard of it elsewhere, not even on that list I once found of books based on the ideas in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The blurb sounded more interesting to me than his usual histories of wars.

The novel is an history of Mesopotamia at the dawn of consciousness, if you consider The Origin of Consciousness to be the true history. The psychological deities of Julian Jaynes are trotted out as larger-than-life gods and goddesses, jealous of the advances men have made, most especially in the new crafts of writing and bronzeworking. Men from other cities behave as Jaynes claimed the god-possessed peoples of the ancient world behaved, while Our Heros are the fully-conscious modern men who eventually arose out of the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

War is endemic between the conscious men and the followers of various regional gods, but as the novel opens the gods are especially riled up and band together against the crafty people of Gibil. Our Heroes strive to find a way to elude or appease the wrath of the angry gods.

The best part of the novel is the style of speech. All the characters sound like they’ve just stepped out of the Bible, with their poetical repetition. The book is at least a quarter longer than the story itself required because each character must restate what he himself has said, or what others have said to him. It sounds terribly annoying but somehow it never is.

The cover art features a man who looks like he’s dressed for an ice age and a woman in a burqa. Neither is appropriate for ancient Mesopotamia; the book itself specifies the minimal clothing of the well-to-do of both genders, and that the poorest went naked. I know cover art is often inaccurate, but this is the first one that actually annoyed me, probably because it reminded me of my recent bad experience with The Shelters of Stone.

Another disappointment was the gods. Having them trooping around, spying on people and tossing boulders, was too fantastic for my taste. The description of god-possessed men was more intriguing than the appearances the gods made outside of people. I would have appreciated something closer to the spirit of The Origin of Consciousness.

The ending was a good twist, but would have had more of an emotional impact for me had I found the gods more believable. Instead, their flaws made them less believable - a fantasy addition to a more realistic history. Nevertheless, it was an engrossing tale.

This weekend is your last chance to sign up for Boskone 40 at the cheap rate. This Boston con runs from February 14-16, 2003, and is the ultimate geeky way to spend Valentine’s day.

RJ’s latest entry reminded me that I had not yet reviewed Many Dimensions by Charles Williams. I was depending on him for the fantastic in Christian literature, so I was a bit surprised to find this novel was, aside from being an good example of pre-war (1931) pro-Moslem sentiment, also a work of Islamic literature in a sense I’ll define below.

The premise is as follows: a churlish Englishman buys an ancient relic from a Persian, brings it home to England, and shows it off to his friends, claiming it’s the crown of Suleiman ben Daood. The stone set therein proves to have great powers, among them that of infinite divisibility. Several copies are divided off and passed around or sold, which angers the faithful Persians to no end. One threatens to raise the Arab street, as they say, in defiance of the English infidels who are so abusing the artifact. The British government has its own plans for the stone.

Miracles, disasters and time-travel paradoxes follow the duplicate stones around the English countryside. The proper order of things is restored only when one of the characters makes the ultimate act of submission, which is to say, islam. At least, that was what I got out of it. Many Dimensions is rather a dense, philosophical work not aimed to please the modern reader, though Charles Williams was an Inkling.

It pleases me only in that it gives me an example of Islamic fiction for my list below. Let me define R fiction, where R is a religion, as fiction that has one of the following as a major theme:

• The realistic lives of modern practitioners of that faith, as such: The Chosen and Daniel Deronda (Jewish fiction)
• Fictionalized past lives of religious figures: The Last Temptation of Christ (Christian)
• Fictional recreations of religious figures in another milieu, usually a fantastic one: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Christian) and Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series (Mormon)
• Outright allegory: The Pilgrim’s Progress (Christian)
• Fantastic realism - that is, stories set in the real world in which miraculous or diabolical events occur consonant with the tenets of a particular religion: That Hideous Strength and The Screwtape Letters (Christian), also Many Dimensions (Moslem)
• Religious tourism - that is, stories set in locales postulated by the religion, or during future events predicted by the religion: The Divine Comedy, The Great Divorce, and the Left Behind series (Christian)

That’s all. That someone is a Christian does not make their fiction Christian in any useful sense of the term. Monotheism, in particular, is not synonymous with Christianity, nor are themes of faith, hope, self-sacrifice, temptation, resurrection, or ethics in general.

I have nothing against Christian literature, but I do not consider The Lord of the Rings a Christian work. It is not realistic, it contains no religious figures, and it is not an allegory. Tolkien despised allegory. He said that Middle Earth was “a monotheistic world of natural theology.” There is nothing within The Lord of the Rings that makes it Christian rather than, say, Baha’i.

Perhaps a better argument could be made for the Silmarillion as Christian fiction, but nowhere in Tolkien do I see the ideas that I would consider essentially Christian - original sin, justification by faith, the death of Christ for the forgiveness of sins, the damnation of (apparently) good people for not believing in Christ, transubstantiation, the Trinity, etc. If a person were offended by such things, Tolkien would not offend him but C.S. Lewis would.

I find the notion of islam alien, and I found Many Dimensions strange to that extent. Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, reminds me of the Norse epics that inspired Tolkien and of the (pagan) heroic tradition in general - of battles and honor and courage and fate and magic and true bloodlines. Tolkien may have softened it where it is harsh in, say, William Morris, but he did not change it into anything recognizably Christian.

Forth Eorlingas!

Cool download of the day: a free 30-day demo of Bryce 5 for OS X (and the update to 5.0.1). I couldn’t find a demo on Corel’s site, but eventually I thought to check Apple’s list of 3D and imaging software for the Mac.

The Hole wasn’t a sci-fi novel, just a psychological thriller. I found it on the library’s new book shelves. Guy Burt wrote it when he was 18, though he does seem to have taken a while to publish it. Maybe it was published earlier in Britain.

I couldn’t quite follow the rapidly rotating POV for the first few chapters. Three POV characters - two women in first person and one man in third person, swapped back and forth every scene, and they were pretty short scenes. The whole book was rather short, so when I failed to understand the ending, I read the whole thing over to see if it made more sense. It didn’t.

I’m always annoyed when authors mistake ambiguity for depth. I’m not sure what happened in The Hole, and I doubt the author knows, either. Lovecraft can convey horror by a rather sketchy approach to the darkness from outside, but that’s not plot, that’s description. When you get into XF government conspiracies, or What Really Happened in The Hole, the plot is AWOL and the reader is left empty-handed.

Teranesia by Greg Egan seemed like a sure thing. It started out well, but the plot never seemed to come together. I expected more and bigger things to come from the main characters’ youth on the eponymic island. I wanted to see more of what future evolution held for humanity. I wanted an ending, and instead I got a two-page resolution.

Teranesia was short and somewhat bitter. The main characters bashed both religion and, more amusingly, Social Text. At one point the brother worried terribly that his little sister, having fallen under the bad influence of their aunt the professor, would grow up to be a deconstructionist, but she didn’t. I had hoped there would be an explanation somewhere of why. Egan even skimped on the science, giving only enough biology for an above-average sci-fi novel, rather than his usual idea overload - which, perhaps, is an advantage to this novel over his others.

…or, The Ring Goes Astray

The rosy spectacles of memory have been working their magic on The Fellowship of the Ring for a year now, but as I look back at that blog entry, I realize that the second movie was just more of the same. Here’s what I said last time:

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.

Here’s a comment I made in Lori’s blog before I’d seen the new movie:

If it were me spending millions of dollars and years of people’s lives filming LotR, I’d follow the book. It’s the best-loved work of literature of the twentieth-century - it takes a lot of gall to think you could improve on that. Needless to say, you’d be wrong - major changes to the plot and characterization just date the movie and the producer’s neuroses.

Now Lori informs me that the producer is making the series PC - which just dates the movies and the producer’s politics. Angering Faramir-lovers is only a sideline. Having been warned about the wretched things done in Ithilien, I was more incensed by the illogic of the Ent scenes. Why didn’t Treebeard know Saruman had been cutting down trees? What kind of Ent doesn’t know about that? And why was Merry so hot to get the Ents to help him, when he’d had no contact with the outside world beyond orc kidnappers? What could he possibly have had in mind for Treebeard to do? I understand that there’s an attempt here to make the main characters more significant in the events around them, but Merry and Pippin were supposed to be baggage. (Ten to one that scene gets cut.)

On the Arwen watch, the gratuitous ring shots were replaced by gratuitous mystery-flower-jewelry shots. Arwen did give Aragorn a piece of jewelry in the books, but it wasn’t a flower. It was the Elessar - a nice green rock, if I recall correctly. [I didn’t, but I fixed it.] I suppose Grunge!Aragorn is too macho to wear jewelry on his forehead. Little as I like Arwen overuse, especially her habit of resurrecting a dying Fellowshipper every movie, I have to admit that the confrontation between her and Elrond was well-done. I liked his Middle-Earth is going down in flames - get out while the getting is good speech and the flash-forward to the consequences of not getting out.

So there’s no time to make sense of the Fangorn scenes, but there is time to add a pointless float down a non-existent river for Aragorn. Frodo also takes a major detour to a river he’s not supposed to be anywhere near, but does the audience the service of not falling in. If Peter Jackson weren’t so involved in telling his story, he’d have had time to cover the important parts of Tolkien’s story.

I thought the movie dragged - there was plenty of action but little plot to back it up. The Fangorn scenes were a typical example of that, as was Gandalf’s instant cure of Theoden. Especially after the first hour or so, I felt as if I were watching a very long music video rather than a movie. If I had the DVDs (and, of course, a DVD player), I’d watch the movies with the sound turned off. They’re beautiful, even the battle scenes. I’ve always had trouble picturing Helm’s Deep, not to mention thousands of orcs streaming in and around it. Gollum was also a special effect, which may explain why he was so good, as well as relatively true to character.

The Lord of the Rings is not a particularly psychological novel; it would be possible to film the entire thing more or less as written, the way, say, Pride and Prejudice was (in the six-hour version). Someday it may be possible to run Peter Jackson’s version through a nice graphics program and come out with the movie Tolkien would have made, or to make it from scratch without the overhead of extras, studios and travel to New Zealand. That would be a fine use of technology.

Ad of the day: Looking for Dr. Right? - a dating service spotted in Scientific American

Over Thanksgiving I had the opportunity to read some of my old children’s books. I started with A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle. I recall liking the series when I was young, but the first volume didn’t stand up to a re-read. It wasn’t quite as well-written as I expected, but my real problems were with the plot - or rather, the Plot. The batty old lady who couldn’t tell the children anything definite reminds me too much of an angelic Cigarette Smoking Man.

Madeleine L’Engle is part of a very sci-fi subgenre typified by C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy - fiction that mixes science with the fantastic, but a very particular fantastic. I read the Earthsea trilogy after my disappointment with L’Engle - now there was a nicely put-together world, in which the odd laws of magic meshed with the medieval setting. Fantasy, the genre, is rarely fantastic the way Alice in Wonderland or Kubla Khan are. While it works for a child’s dream or an adult’s pipe dream, the fantastic does not mix well with science fiction themes.

I’d like to blog a bit about how Christian themes seem to shade into the fantastic, not just in the Space Trilogies but in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Last Battle and the works of Charles Williams and George MacDonald, but it’s getting late. If anyone can think of an example of non-Christian fantastic sci-fi for me to compare to the Christian entries, please leave a comment with the author and title and I’ll come back to it later.

David Brin is not the sort of person from whom one expects religious themes, and during the majority of the drawn-out plot of Kiln People he leaves the soul more or less alone as he pursues his mystery plot. The novel is a rather gripping mystery at the start, but it bogs down in the middle (and a thick middle it is). The plot resolution is perhaps a bit too baroque for a proper mystery, but the real difficulty lies in the soul-centered wrap-up. Brin is a devout materialist, a point he makes clear early and often, so when he’s left standing alone at the end of the novel with his Soul Standing Wave he doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.

Describing the truly alien is the problem of sci-fi. You can get away with a hands-off approach, such as Catherine Asaro used when she never accurately described the game of quis, if the alien subject matter is new.
When your new alien realm is one traditionally pertaining to religion, however, it’s going to take a whole lot of technobabble to turn the inherent mysticism of, say, the soul, into materialism. If you just stand aside, as an author, and let silence speak for you, that science speaks Buddhist or Christian visions of the soul. It does not convey your new materialist mysticism - perhaps because materialist mysticism is an oxymoron.

Word count: 22,912

Sometimes, everything comes together at the end in a way you never saw coming, even though you saw the hints and you knew that they were hints. I just saw “The Sixth Sense” tonight, and I was blown away. I’m sure everyone else on the planet has seen it already; besides, I don’t know what to say about books or movies that are good.

The Greeks thought that the highest art was the drama, acted live on a stage. In principle I believe that, especially when I see M. Night Shyamalan movies. In practice, however, the novel is still my favorite art form. I go through periods when I think I’ve read all the good writers and there’s nothing left out there. Some books cannot be topped - no one is ever going to beat The Lord of the Rings at its own game. Tolkien was the sort of mad medieval throwback Oxford don genius who should have died in the Great War with the rest of his generation, but didn’t. Whether or not you like JRR, you have to admit that no one is going to create another Middle Earth with six or seven original languages and write poetry in them. Tolkien was a human vacuum fluctuation out of which an entire universe was born.

Last time I read Greg Egan, I enjoyed him despite the science and math overdose. This time I was blown away - there are still good writers out there, waiting to be read. Distress is about tabloids, politics, anarchists, intimacy, gender, isolationism, solipsism, autism, disease, bioengineering, physics, metaphysics, ethics, the eye of the observer, and the Australian psyche. The topics glide in and out of one another in the eyes of a jaded Aussie journalist whose videocamera is in his navel.

Like The Sixth Sense, Distress fooled me for most of the book into thinking it was just your average sci-fi adventure. There were themes, and I saw them and knew that they were themes. I was even sorry that one of them wasn’t more central, and then I reached the end and found out that it was more central than I could ever have imagined.

I admire Ayn Rand for writing novels in which she brought her philosophy to life, and Distress is a book that gives scientific materialism a name and a habitation. I’m surprised that it wasn’t even nominated for a Hugo or Nebula (as far as I can tell). The theme of materialism (that is, that there is nothing but matter in man and in the universe - no gods, no souls, no external meaning) is such a common one in science fiction that you would think that a novel which did for materialism what Rand did for objectivism would become the cult classic that Atlas Shrugged is.

Instead, it seems to have turned some people off, including the person who made this list of math-fiction. I guess materialism is all well and good until someone illustrates it a little too vividly.

I didn’t know, when I picked it up remaindered, that Starswarm was a children’s book. Despite several clues - the book was about children, and had an introduction that mentioned Robert Heinlein’s “juveniles” - I didn’t figure it out until I happened to take off the dust jacket and see the Jupiter imprint on the spine. I knew Tor had a young adult line, but I assumed they were kept in some YA section of bookstores.

Nevertheless, I kept reading Starswarm. The setup was interesting, despite the obvious King in Disguise plot. At some point, though, the author (Jerry Pournelle) decided he had discharged his descriptive duties and switched to talking-head, tell-as-you-go dialogue. Add the genetically modified dogs and the third cute kid and you get Scoobie Doo In Space. It was a fine cartoon, but I was expecting a book.

Neuromancer by William Gibson is the 1984 classic that is credited with launching the cyberpunk subgenre. I approached it with a sort of suspicious reverence. I have to admit that it was a good read, but not anything I’d want to carry on into an entire genre. I neither loved the characters nor loved to hate them, which made the book a rather flat experience despite the stylistic talents of the author. It reminded me of the old, hard-bitten school of sci-fi. They weren’t bad stories, but I can’t say I miss them.

Diaspora, by Greg Egan, was in several senses too good. Looking at it another way, it was too many good books stuffed into one cover. First, as a novel of the Singularity and whether man will still be man on the other side, the author describes the uploaded mind and culture better in one chapter than many entire novels do. Nor is the problem of immortality taken lightly.

Second, as a sci-fi disaster novel, Diaspora threatens human extinction with distinction, combining branches of physics from the cosmological to the quantum-mechanical to lay waste with impeccable style. Third, as a rare work of math-fiction, it makes technical definitions of Riemann surfaces, topologies, and hypercubes the stuff of novels. Fourth, there are wormholes - credible wormholes.

Fifth, Diaspora covers millenia of time, following what passes for man around the galaxy in a great mission of exploration. Sixth, there are aliens of true alienness, a rare find in a genre partially devoted to the alien. Seventh, there’s a mystery, a hunt for a lost transcendent race. And eighth, and possibly not last, there are other universes.

On the level of fresh ideas, Diaspora is not just a novel, it’s an entire career. In many spots the science, math and alienness were hard going, and could have used more, and more gradual, elaboration - like, say, a novel’s worth. This was a wonderful book, but it would have made a better series.