Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’d heard of David Weber as a pillar of space opera, but never read him until I picked up a promotional copy of On Basilisk Station, remaindered. I get the feeling he’s one of the people whom Jim Baen promised to make famous if they could write three novels a year. On Basilisk Station is the first Honor Harrington novel, of which the sequels are legion.

I am a fan of the pulp/serial approach to science fiction - despite his faults, Edgar Rice Burroughs holds a high (and wide) place of honor on my bookshelves. LMB has turned the series form from a pulp and media-fiction backwater into a literary genre on its own terms. I don’t know that she did it with any help from David Weber. On Basilisk Station did not leave me wanting more Honor Harrington, and not because of any the typical penny-a-word failings of the genre. On the contrary, the characterization was unusually good and the depiction of military life more authentic than, say, LMB’s or ERB’s.

I’ve reread ERB’s Mars books more times than they deserved, and not for John Carter’s sake. What holds up a sci-fi series (and for that matter a fantasy series) is the setting. The reader wants to return to Middle-Earth, to Narnia, to Mars, to Barrayar; I’m attracted by the places and cultures more than by Eustace or Carthoris or even (forgive me, Liz) Ivan Vorpatril.

On Basilisk Station is set in a nondescript galaxy, where almost indistinguishable sides battle for…Basilisk Station, and the good guys are not the Barrayarans or the Heliumites, but the crew of a particular starship. The technology is also uninteresting - the usual hyperdrives and wormholes - and the decisive weapon itself was notable not for its science but for its tactical disadvantages. The book might have been about a true naval battle, on a more watery sea, and the plot, theme and characters wouldn’t have suffered a bit. (In fact, the battle scenes might have been easier to follow in two dimensions.)

That, of course, put me in mind of Promised Land, the sci-fi romance that was mostly romance with residual sci-fi. Military sci-fi is not a genre I follow except accidentally, so I wonder if it’s all heavy on the military and light on the sci-fi. Perhaps David Weber’s galaxy improves with a few more Honor Harrington novels; if I gave Catherine Asaro a second and third chance, he deserves four or five just on the basis of On Basilisk Station.

The Charwoman’s Shadow, one of two Del reprints of Lord Dunsany I picked up at Buck-a-Book, was covered in blurbs praising the father of fantasists. I know when a book comes loaded with that much self-promotion that I’m headed for disappointment. Remaindered disappointment sets me back only a buck or two, so I keep trying. At least the let-down was of an opposite sort: the setting was worked up marvelously, the story was recognizably fantasy, and the plot depended essentially on the magical and the medieval. The book was worth reading for the descriptive language alone.

The trouble was in the characters. The old woman, the young, bumbling hero, the lovely sister engaged to an oaf, the loving but misguided parents, and the princely Duke were all such stock characters as even ERB might have been ashamed to roll out (and he was writing contemporaneously, for pennies). Lord Dunsany is, I must protest, not the father of medieval fantasists. Reading him makes Tolkien’s claim to the title that much clearer. (I’ll leave for another entry the fantastic fantasists as well as the precise distinction between fantastic and medieval fantasy.)

Go ahead, read any of the pre-Tolkien fantasists and tell me otherwise. Try some William Morris for a blast from the medieval past. Have you ever heard of, never mind read, The Worm Ouroborus? It makes the Eye of Argon look Shakespearean. That was the state of fantasy before Tolkien. Tolkien was the first to tell the old stories in the modern form, without turning the old characters into modern man. Some may cheat and write modern men into their fantasy worlds (Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree comes immediately to mind) but no one writes in the Grendel mode anymore.

So if you want battle, read On Basilisk Station, and if you want description, read The Charwoman’s Shadow. If you’re looking for sf, well, I am too.

I keep reading Paul Levinson, even though I know it’s not going to be science fiction. My mother could read The Consciousness Plague and maybe even enjoy it. Like his past two novels, this is a cross between a murder mystery and a medical thriller. The sci-fi content is minimal, distinguishing Levinson’s novels from other thrillers only in the slightly more speculative nature and background of the medical emergency.

The Consciousness Plague is published by Tor. I don’t mind a good medical thriller myself, but I have to wonder why Levinson’s novels are being published by a sci-fi house. The SF on the spine is the Mark of Cain in the publishing business; I would think a good writer (which he clearly is) would want to pass himself off as mainstream just for the greater potential audience. Why wallow in the obscurity of the geek section of the bookstore along with wonderful authors like LMB (still unknown after four Hugo awards and two Nebulas) when you could be topping the bestseller lists like a new Robin Cook or Michael Crighton?

Speaking of passing yourself off as mainstream, I read a classic of the SF-in-denial genre, The Man in the High Castle. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick got away with pretending he wasn’t writing SF. All it takes to be mainstream literary, apparently, is an obscure ending that leaves your readers wondering whether they’re too stupid to understand your deep literary themes.

I’d prefer a book with an ending, myself, even an anti-climactic one like Paul Levinson tends to write. But Pulitzer misfires aside, there was an SF book in The Man in the High Castle, and it wasn’t the meta-book all the characters were reading. It wasn’t even the Third Reich’s planetary colonization (though I would have appreciated more about that, and about the decimation of Africa).

The SF was in the culture. What would be the cultural impact of Japanese occupation of California? If you want to know, read this book. Or you can skip the book and read the I Ching. On the other coast the Germans are having their own effect, much of which trickles west. This was one of the best depictions of a non-existent culture (two, in fact) that I’ve ever seen; it blew me away even when the plot seemed to be going nowhere fast.

I identify SF with this ability to portray a new society. The technology is secondary, or rather, the technology is not truly described until its impact on culture has been worked out. The best fantasy also hangs on the underlying culture - The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down are good stories on the surface, but the depth that makes them classics is that of the full-scale background world.

Mainstream literature never depicts a new culture. It’s a sort of fan fiction of reality; mainstream is the derivative genre, and SF the creative one. So, for example, the mainstream writer Paul Levinson couldn’t show the full effects of memory loss on a society in The Consciousness Plague without changing our society. Like a media tie-in writer, he had to leave his characters and his world intact for the next novel. The rules of the mainstream genre kept him from fleshing out the most interesting part of the story.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. … [I]t’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. –Ernest Hemingway

The River gives the book its form. But for the River, the book might be only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination. –T. S. Elliot

The truly profound meanings of the novel are generated by the impingement of the actual world of slavery, feuds, lynching, murder, and a spurious Christianity upon the ideal of the raft. –Leo Marx

(Quotes about Huckleberry Finn courtesy of English 311 at Gonzaga University.)

The Rift by Walter Jon Williams (writing as Walter J. Williams for reasons one can only wonder at), is the Huckleberry Finn of disaster novels. It begins by flashing back a thousand years to an earthquake that ravaged Mississippi Indian society. Each scene is headed with an extract of original documents from the 1811/1812 New Madrid earthquake, so you know exactly what’s going to happen by the time the novel is over. I didn’t pick up on a real pattern or progress to the captions, but they were interesting in and of themselves, for their language as well as the sharp cultural contrasts. For instance, in 1811 when people felt the earth move, they tended to assume they were having a fit or hallucinating until someone else confirmed that it was really happening. I wondered why they were so slow
to trust their own senses.

Disaster novels follow a certain format. All the random characters must be introduced in their pre-disaster settings before fate, S-waves and the River toss them together. There’s the displaced Californian teenager, the laid-off black defense worker, the ambitious stockbroker, the fire-and-brimstone preacher, the Klan sheriff on his way up in the world, the Army Corps of Engineers general in charge of keeping the Lower Mississippi between its banks, the man refueling his nuclear power plant (why is there always a nuclear power plant?), and the President of the United States, party affiliation unspecified. Those are just the main characters; the supporting characters, such as the Klansman’s wife, the defense worker’s ex-wife, the teenager’s divorced parents, the preacher’s wife with the odd craft project, the general’s banjo-playing husband, and many more, are also wonderfully drawn.

The inscriptions fueled my eagerness for earthshaking mayhem and destruction - if I didn’t want disaster, I wouldn’t have picked up a novel that promised to ravage everything near the Mississippi River from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico - but the characters themselves were so well-done that I began to get into them for their own sakes, and not just to keep track later once they were stumbling into each other through the rubble. Of course, that was when disaster struck.

The rubble, in this case, is floating down the Mississippi. The teenager survives the initial shock by luck and takes to the floodwaters in his neighbor’s fishing boat. He rescues the black man from a tree, beginning the main, Huckleberry Finnesqe plot of the novel. The preacher and the Klan Kleagle start out as sympathetic, if not particularly endearing, characters, and do a slow slide into evil that is far scarier than the earthquake itself (and it’s the worst of all possible earthquakes). The lady general and her husband are the most entertaining of all the characters, but my favorite was the President, who does his own slow slide into an indifference he insists makes no difference.

I picked this novel up intentionally to compare to Lucifer’s Hammer - one endangered nuclear power plant against another, no holds barred - but there’s no comparison. The Rift beats it on all scores besides death count, and verges on being a work of literature, besides. Someday people are going to wake up and realize that Walter Jon Williams can write circles around everyone else in SF. That he has to support himself by writing Star Wars novels is nothing short of… disastrous.

Well, it was a thriller, all right. Lucifer’s Hammer earns the title of sci-fi for being by a couple of famous sci-fi writers, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Otherwise, it’s an exercise in 70’s nihilism with a side of sci-fi tirades about how, if we’d only gotten off the Earth, this comet smashing into it, killing almost everybody and starting a whole new ice age wouldn’t matter so much.

In the fine tradition of Foundation, civilization hinges on preserving a nuclear power plant, even though the other Sign of Intelligent Life, the space program, used chemical fuel rather than nuclear power. If things weren’t black-and-white enough already, the environmentalists go cannibal and try to blow up the Last Nuclear Power Plant. The good guys fight them off with…mustard gas.

Now I’m all for bringing on an ice age, and for the disaster tradition in general, but the rather spiritless seventies characters - especially Maureen, the depressed and depressing socialite - didn’t leave me rooting for mankind. I was more interested in glaciation rates than in whether the dual male leads (corresponding to the dual male authors?) survived the winter. I found the boy scouts pairing off with girl scouts in the woods more interesting than Maureen cycling through the lead characters’ beds.

I’m not much of an anti-hero person, so I found it disappointing that the moments of true heroism happened off-screen, to be reported to the other characters as inspirational examples. Why they couldn’t be POV characters is beyond me, unless the authors just didn’t want their whiny, self-doubting POV characters to be shown up. It is important, when wiping out humanity, to make mankind sympathetic enough in the that the reader mourns his species in the large. Otherwise, it’s just an exercise in pushing tsunamis around the globe.

There are more spoilers in this entry than usual. Don’t make me say I told you so.

I’ve reached Mirror Dance in my Lois McMaster Bujold rereading project, and it’s certainly grown on me. With apologies to Liz, though, I still can’t add it to my favorites. I rank it above the pure space operatics, but below the moving themes of Shards of Honor, Memory and
Komarr.

Christine once said “psychology robs us of our complexity.” (John Irving?) The on-and-off psychoanalysis of Mark robbed him of his complexity for me. He starts out intriguingly clueless and inchoate, but then he overhears his parents talking about him, has some sort of Road to Damascus event right there on the library floor, and loses me completely.

I’m not knocking the presence of psychobabble itself - Cordelia’s analysis of Mark was wonderful, and the little bits about Gregor both taking after Cordelia and watching the watcher were lovely, too. Only Mark’s psychological insight into himself threw me, because to me self-knowledge is at the other end
of the mental health spectrum from psychological instability. This contradiction comes to a head when Mark tries to warn Kareen about his mental problems, and settles for letting Cordelia warn her. At that point, I didn’t see what was left to warn her about. (Apparently Cordelia didn’t either.)

I know Liz isn’t buying this, so let’s compare Mark to Miles. For at least the previous two books, Miles’ identity problems (Lt. Miles vs. Lord Miles vs. Admiral Miles, with a side of Amnesiac Miles) have been a significant theme, but never has anyone reduced Miles to a syndrome or a defense mechanism. Yes, Cordelia blamed it on Barrayar, but I didn’t buy that. For one thing, that’s LMB talking about how she
meant to write about the pain of a mutant in a military anti-mutant society, while the real pain has come mainly from his grandfather and his own screw-ups. More importantly, Miles has never looked for a therapeutic purpose behind “the little Admiral.” When he thinks about it at all, Miles is just as ignorant as the reader about the psychological underpinnings of his multiple personality - and just as disinterested.

That Mark can explain Mark to himself makes him fundamentally less complex than Miles. Perhaps in real life psychology does not rob us of our individuality, but in literature explaining a character too well amounts to explaining the character away. Yes, there are more pieces of Mark than of Miles at the end of the novel, but Mark’s pieces are all labelled and pinned to a board, while Miles’ pieces run free (and run him into serious trouble in Memory, as foreshadowed by Cordelia when she says she’ll only
start worrying about Miles when the little Admiral is taken away).

For all the fascinating parallels between Mark and Miles, Mark is not a mirror image of his big brother. Mark is, if you’ll pardon the math, a projection of 3-space Miles onto a rather dark plane. It does take the whole novel to get him properly pinned down, but I don’t see room for a Mark sequel beyond his comic subplot in A Civil Campaign.

Speaking of comic subplots, I think I’m in love with Ivan Vorpatril.

I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t read the whole thing myself - five hundred pages in the present tense, all from the same character’s perspective. I couldn’t put it down.

I know I should do the proper book review thing and summarize the plot,
but City on Fire is a series book. The war from last book was not
quite over, nor was Aiah’s ascent from minor clerk to major power. The book
carries both of these on - nothing much else happens, except for [spoiler
deleted]. Walter Jon Williams appears to be in the middle of a trilogy.
I don’t know that I would have been so drawn in if I hadn’t read
Metropolitan. There were few new characters, none of them major. The world was the same,
and the glimpse into space just a one-scene preview of, presumably, the next book.

City on Fire was about power. The world produces plasm,
a bit of technobabble for which WJW has called it fantasy rather than sf. Plasm
produces anything you want. The economics of near-infinite power are handled
without any obvious contradictions, but it’s the politics of power that make the
novel shine. This is not, to paraphrase “Falling Onto Mars”, a love story. The
first chapter makes that clear, fuzzy as it may get later on.

Maybe the next book will be a love story. You never can tell.

I hear the reviews of Signs have been mixed, but I thought it
was scary and moving at the same time. I’d run right out there and see it if I were you, even if you’re not in the middle of yet another movie-inducing heat wave like we are here in Beantown.

Signs is a movie about faith, by and for people who have never understood or even heard Job’s wife saying, “Curse God and die.” At least, I’m assuming the producer/writer/director is not personally acquainted with the theological vices; I prefer to think of Signs as an amazingly successful outsider’s view of faith, rather than an amazing approachable insider’s perspective. Either way, it was so clean - nothing wasted, nothing extra - that I was blown away.

Oh, yeah, and there were aliens and crop circles and the best use ever of a television test pattern. You’ll have to see it yourself to find out whether mankind goes off the air permanently. I’ve said too much already.

I enjoyed Ethan of Athos, perhaps because I wasn’t expecting much of my last unread LMB novel and one I knew all along had little to do with Miles. The beginning drew me in; I had no clue about Athos until it was made obvious, and I do love a good alien culture. I liked Ethan, especially his prejudices and his conflicted relationship with Quinn. Of course he was no Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, but who is?

I realized back in the second half of The Vor Game that I don’t particularly like the space-opera side of space-opera, and when Ethan of Athos turned into the usual hide-and-seek in spaceship/spacestation corridors, with arrests, escapes, thugs, interrogations and the whole nine meters, I was ready to write the novel off. It reclaimed my interest at the end, though, first with Quinn’s final contribution, then with the trick ending. I love a good trick ending. But then, I never claimed to have taste.

The latest Analog was good all around. I’d skipped the first part of the current serial until I ran out of the rest of the magazine to read, thinking of my bad experience with “Hominid“, which the letters section wouldn’t let me forget. When I started “Survival Instinct” by Ed Lerner, though, I thought immediately that it was a perfect piece of writing. I’m still not sure why, but that’s my recommendation for the month of October. (Sci-fi - it’s the future in more ways than one.)

First off, I must confess I’ve been mainlining LMB for a couple of weeks now, ever since Diplomatic Immunity. To get over my mild disappointment with the latest, I started over from Shards of Honor. There’s just something about Cordelia.

I stopped by the library for The Vor Game and hit unexpected paydirt - Miles, Mystery & Mayhem, the latest two-volume edition, and the last two novels I hadn’t read. I found Cetaganda a bit too much like Diplomatic Immunity - Miles running around knowing too much about the Star Creche and trying to keep his accidental discovery from touching off yet another war with the Cetagandans. A novel all about things not happening can hardly compare to a novella where they do happen, such as the weatherman half of The Vor Game, but I’m not complaining. The Cetagandans were interesting, if
something of a still-life, and I’ve always had a soft spot for that-idiot-Ivan. I suppose that’s one of the perils of having started with A Civil Campaign.

The date inflation at Analog never ceases to amaze me. I’m over a month behind on this one, but the date on the cover is September 2002. Anyway, my favorite story this time was “Protocol” by Timothy Zahn. It’s listed as a novelette; I would have called it a short story. The aliens were appropriately alien.

Promised Land was an experiment for me, and one that failed. If I had to guess, I’d say Connie Willis was the co- and Cynthia Felice was the author of this sci-fi/romance crossover. The romance side won. Nothing significant would be changed by transporting all the characters and plot events to the Wild West: the city girl returning to the family farm, the quiet but dependable cowpoke boy, the devilish rake, the flirt with a heart of gold, etc. Down to details of canning fruit, sewing sleeves and prairie fires, it’s a Western, not a sci-fi novel. The natives are fire-monkeys rather than Apaches; only the city girl’s alien pet is necessary to the plot, and you can see that resolution coming from three territories away.

Yes, I was warned by the back cover, but when I think of “an all-new novel that is not just sweeping science fiction, but an engaging romantic story as well” I think Shards of Honor. I don’t think Harlequin Romances set in space. There are genres and there are genres. Romance is one that drops anvils on your head every chapter or so. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch! The plot turns on the heroine’s slow, explicit, and stereotypical realization that the hero is her One True Love and not the neanderthal she thought. On the side, her guilt for flirting with the local Lothario dawns upon her - and I never even noticed she was flirting with him.

I don’t object to romance conventions per se, not even ones like the flirting issue that I just don’t grok. I firmly believe in a woman’s right to write off her education and spend the rest of her life on a farm pickling vegetables, baking compotes and reproducing. But that’s not science fiction. The genre is more than a sprinkling of spaceships and cute alien pets - there is a kind of story that is a sci-fi story and Promised Land isn’t that kind.

On the other hand, “K19: The Widowmaker” had a sci-fi plot, even though it was set in the past. I couldn’t help thinking of Spock in “The Wrath of Khan” when the sailors braved the reactor chamber. I’m not saying K19 was a great movie (Liam Neeson aside), but it was about the science. You could transport all the characters and plot events to a spaceship, and nothing significant would be changed.