Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Well, no one’s going to listen to me if I criticize Snow Crash, which was, I admit, a funny book. The dystopic future was spot-on; I especially appreciated Uncle Enzo. The characters didn’t rise to the same level of development - no surprise for sci-fi.

There was one twist of non-characterization that’s really beginning to annoy me, though - I call it lover ex machina. The last time I spotted it was in The Eyre Affair, in which the heroine’s ex-boyfriend is alluded to ad nauseum until the author finally produces him at the end. In Snow Crash, the hero’s ex-girlfriend makes a few cryptic remarks before disappearing for most of the novel. In the end, if you’ll pardon the spoiler, the known lead character is united with the unknown ex for happily ever after.

I object. If you’re going to write a romance, you should write it - with both characters on-stage for a significant amount of time. If you don’t want to write a romance, then don’t try to cash in on the happily-ever-after by pulling the ex out of a bag and awarding them to the hero as a literary bonus prize. It’s sheer laziness, and it’s jarring to the reader who has been rooting for the best supporting character of the opposite gender - not for some off-stage no-good ex who left Our Hero for an inadequately explained reason long before the novel began.

I would have thought that one was obvious.

I made a killing at the library last week: I snagged a copy of Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest Vorkosigan novel. I have to admit, I was disappointed. I noticed about halfway through that the novel wasn’t going anywhere in particular - it really was just another case for Miles’ unique blend of detective work and one-man space operatics. At that point I thought the pacing was off; I had to finish the whole thing before I realized I was looking for something that wasn’t there. My other pacing problem came near the end, when Miles spends what could have been a significant portion of the novel semi-conscious. Instead of following Ekaterin’s actions, LMB just let the whole section drop. I wonder if she intended to all along, or if that was an unfortunate cut.

I think Diplomatic Immunity is a triumph of the series over the novel - there is nothing new here, either in plot or characterization. Instead, everything from the sidekicks to uterine replicators to lovable misfits from Jackson’s Whole to Cetagandans is taken, in whole or in spirit, from earlier in the series, and the setting is from Falling Free. A Civil Campaign was also heavy on series background, but at least it featured some character development.

The novel, people who write how-to-write books say, is the hero’s evolution under outside pressure. Miles does not evolve here, and neither do the secondary characters. That doesn’t make Diplomatic Immunity any less entertaining as space opera, but LMB herself might admit it’s not a real book:

If anyone (and it would probably have to be Liz) can tell me what Diplomatic Immunity was about, I’d love to hear it.

I didn’t expect much from Men in Black II, so I enjoyed it. It’s a bit short, like a plot twist has been left out, and it’s the little things that make the movie. If a string of jokes, cute aliens, inhabited lockers, ugly aliens and touching moments a movie makes, it’s a movie.

If a string of thousand-year flashbacks, alien flybys, feeble digs at religion, pointless childhood flashbacks and spontaneous technical setbacks a novel makes, then The Fountains of Paradise deserves its Hugo and Nebula awards.

Plotlessness and lack of characterization can be excused if the technology is flashy enough, but I found Kim Stanley Robinson did the space elevator thing better. Whatever his flaws (including rehashing material from older novels like this one), at least KSR put in the word count. The Fountains of Paradise, on the other hand, read more like excerpts from a novel than a novel.

I enjoyed Borrowed Tides enough to try again, but The Silk Code left me cold. I think it was a genre problem: I liked the detective, Phil D’Amato, but I got the feeling that he was a series I’d walked in upon (Paul Levinson has written short stories about him) rather than the main character of someone’s first novel.

And what sort of a novel was it, anyway? Sure, the binding had the Tor crest and the words “Science Fiction” in tiny print, but there was no other indication that this was a sci-fi novel. Set in the present time, it seemed more like a disaster novel with a bit of mystery thrown in. Yet if a mystery, the eighty-page flashback to the Dark Ages was a curveball that threw the whole thing off. If a disaster, the culprit was too small-time for the dark conspiracy of the ages built up over the past and present timeframes.

That may sound like there was something for all comers, but I’ll call the glass half-empty and say there was something to disappoint any reader — medical-thriller science instead of sci-fi science, flailing timeframe instead of a tight mystery plot, and an anticlimax instead of salvation from imminent disaster. I’m a glass-half-empty kind of reader.

Much more enjoyable was rereading Komarr again, in order to do my plot-book homework. I hereby declare LMB rereadable - I kept getting into the story, despite having just reread it two weeks ago, instead of taking my homework notes. (I would have used Shards of Honor for my homework instead, but I gave my copy to Veronica.) The plot outline impressed me with just how much was going on in the novel, especially on the science side. It’s easy to fall into the sci-fi mistake of overlooking whatever science is well-written as not hard enough. The only thing that bothered me after so much rehashing was the Barrayar-bashing from the ladies. At least Miles treated the Time of Isolation as more than just a feminist straw-man.

None of these were science fiction, but they still made me think about The Genre. Sense and Sensibility goes on for chapters and chapters with straight dialogue - I still feel a little displaced, days afterwards. The lack of description gave me the same feeling that most first-person stories do - I feel like I’m floating along a stream of consciousness, or in this case, a stream of dialogue.

The other thing that never ceases to surprise me when I read Sense and Sensibility is Lucy. She’s so bad. I invariably remember her as a stupid and possibly jealous girl; I forget that a significant portion of the dialogue is devoted to the verbal sparring of innocent Elinor and guilty Lucy. The trick of my memory seems to be the after-the-fact version of getting disappointed by the direction a novel takes (as with The Hemingway Hoax). I’m subconsciously rewriting Lucy in my mind.

Why do I want Lucy to be nicer, or at least stupider? I suppose I want the additional complication of Elinor’s doubt. As it stands, Elinor knows Edward loves her, not Lucy. While this is a suitable plot for the period, it is not the Form of the Love Story. Everyone knows that in a love story, the lovers must doubt one another’s love. (Edward doesn’t doubt Elinor, either.) I suppose it would at cross-purposes with the whole Sense vs. Sensibility theme for Elinor’s to be a love story proper, as it would be for Marianne’s to be a tale of endurance of misfortune. But give me a couple of years, and I’ll remember it as a love story again.

Sarah is the first of Orson Scott Card’s Women of Genesis series. I read it out of curiosity - I couldn’t appreciate the scriptural substrate of The Memory of Earth, so I thought I’d see how he treated the matriarch. The most interesting bits for me were the unfamiliar ones; judging from the afterword, those were lifted from Mormon scripture. The end, at the traditional time of Sarah’s death but without the death or the catalyst thereof, was perhaps the most interesting plot choice of the novel. I guess it’s the “hook” for the next novel - does Isaac live or die? (Resurrection always being an option, this is an open question.)

I’m not recommending Sarah, because it’s part of a genre that very few people care for - the epic novel. Someone out there was blogging about the epic and the novel - pardon me for forgetting who. It’s not a marriage that often works out. I suspect that the epic factor is what people who don’t like LotR don’t like about it. (For the epic without the novel, try the Silmarillion. For the epic novel without any redeeming literary merit, try The Eye of Argon.)

Taking the matriarchs and keeping them biblical in their virtues is not, I strongly suspect, the way to win over readers who don’t worry like Sarah about whether or not they still believe in Asherah. Card cannot humanize Sarah the way he does, say, Hagar, and so, just like in Milton, the rebel is the most sympathetic character. Better to reign in hell and all that.

Does this mean one has to be a hero to read an epic, or a saint to read Latter Day Orson Scott Card? No, not exactly - but one has to believe in heroism, or saintliness, at least for the duration. If the disbelief is strong, it will be hard to suspend, as a certain movie showed me recently.

Veronica, her roommate and I saw Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure back when it was playing in the Omni Theater at the Museum of Science. For those unfamiliar with the Shackleton Expedition, it was a failed attempt to cross Antarctica by dogsled in 1914. It was, in fact, one of the most stunning failures known to man.

This was how Shackleton advertised for his crew:

The Endurance was trapped in ice for ten months, then crushed in a thaw. The crew camped on ice floes for the next five months, until they melted, and then set sail in their liferafts. They ended up trapped on Elephant Island - just a big rock, really - for another six months. Shackleton himself set off with five men for South Georgia Island, spending seventeen days on the open sea in a lifeboat, and then landing on the wrong side and having to hike over impassable mountains to the whaler’s town on the other side. And they made it, and every last man of them survived. (Let’s not discuss the dogs, eh?)

There are a couple of reactions one can have to a story like this - I’ll call them the Epic and the Non-Epic. The epic reaction is to be blown over by the sheer heroicism of a crew who survived 21 months in the Antarctic, doing the impossible not just once but over and over again - to be proud you’re of the same species as Sir Ernest Shackleton. If you’re a writer, there’s a side of wanting to write a story like this one, on some cold moon somewhere. The non-epic reaction is to berate Shackleton for trying to cross Antarctica in the first place - “because it’s there” is not sufficient cause for non-epic types. I won’t embarrass Veronica by saying which she chose, but that she’s never finished LotR is a significant clue.

Someone’s been reading my blog and emailed me with a question. (No, it wasn’t Who the [insert 24th-century equivalent] do you think you are, talking about [insert opinion] in your own blog?) I’ve immortalized the Q&A here in the blog, in case anyone else is interested.

What’s the best book to start with, reading about Miles Vorkosigan?

That’s a complicated question. The books are freestanding, but they are a series and it’s hard to say how much you miss by going out of order. Reading Memory after any of the subsequent novels gives away a significant plot point, but otherwise I don’t think skipping around is a big problem, unless you’re a spoiler-averse person. Then you’d want to go exactly in order. So, here’s the order, with recommendations and anti-recs:

LMB’s universe starts with Falling Free, a Nebula-award winning hard sci-fi novel that has nothing whatsoever to do with Miles or his family. If you’re looking for her space opera proper (Falling Free is a little too hard sci-fi for some LMB fans), then you can skip ahead to the next book in universe-chronological sequence: her first published novel, Shards of Honor. At this stage, Miles is just a gleam in his parents’ eyes, but the two books of the Miles-making period are very good (I think Barrayar won a Hugo), and they’re now available in a convenient one-volume edition called Cordelia’s Honor (Baen books, paperback).

The true Miles purist would start at the next volume, The Warrior’s Apprentice, though I believe the subsequent novel, The Vor Game, was better received. (Better received, with LMB, means it won a Hugo. Less well received means being on the final Hugo list.) Again, these two are now conveniently available in a one-volume paperback edition. I don’t recall the title - I gave the trade paperback edition of it I picked up (remaindered) to my sister to spread the addiction. You can get titles and shop on-line at LMB’s official site, www.dendarii.com. (Several e-books and some free opening chapters are available as well.)

The chronology gets a little hazy at this point - there’s Cetaganda and Ethan of Athos, neither of which I’ve read. I hear the latter doesn’t involve Miles, or at least not much. The important volume of this period is Borders of Infinity, a novella collection. One of the novellas won a Nebula award. Borders of Infinity is a good book to start with if you’re just curious about Miles and wondering whether you’re up for the full twelve-novel commitment or not.

Next up is the clone period, consisting of Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance, in that order. The latter won a Hugo (yes, it does get tiring pointing that out after a while) and is, if I had to guess, LMB’s most popular book. It’s not very high on my personal list, but my taste is far from the norm. If you want a one-book experience, Mirror Dance is the one book to go with.

The next two novels made me believe in scifi again: Memory and Komarr. If I were going to recommend one Miles novel, it would be Memory. Komarr barely slips past it to be my personal favorite, but there’s too much Ekaterin in it for it to be representative Miles.

That brings us to present-day Miles. I read A Civil Campaign first - it’s rather comic for LMB and probably the worst place to start in the entire series. The current novel out is Diplomatic Immunity. I can’t speak for it because I haven’t read it, but I haven’t heard it’s a new favorite in the series. We’ll see how the Hugos go…

After I stumbled over Orson Scott Card’s open letter about his Homecoming series, I had to try The Memory of Earth myself. I had an unsuccessful go once at the Book of Mormon, so I appreciated the opportunity to hear the story unencumbered by pseudo-King-James English far more than OSC intended anyone should. (Reflecting on the comparative literary merits of holy scriptures would probably not be wise. All I can say is, at least the Koran was short.)

I enjoyed The Memory of Earth, though possibly not quite enough to track down the other four volumes of the Homecoming series. Lifting the characters and plot from scripture sounds like a good, traditional epic plan, and the story rolls along quickly under this outside influence. The serialization of polygamy was especially apt. The novel’s moral focus was very sharp, of course, and Nafai’s pivotal decision a debatable one for us non-Mormons.

On the nitpicking side, the time frame was way, way off. I doubt a fleet of artificial satellites could remain in orbit of a planet with a lavendar moon for forty million years, nor do I believe human society could remain socially and genetically unchanged for that long, whatever the AI in the Sky. The cover-up of the source material was so good in general that I found myself unduly annoyed when the main characters took a more obviously Biblical jaunt into the desert at the behest of said AI in the Sky.

But that’s more nitpicking than the book deserves. OSC has evaded LMB’s line between sci-fi and fantasy, which she draws at the supernatural. Technically, an AI isn’t supernatural, but the characters react to it as if it were and the end result is more convincing than the explicit supernatural of LMB’s or Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantasy. (Let’s not even mention Gaiman, eh?)

I don’t consider the supernatural a hallmark of fantasy - it’s not required, and when something of that ilk is present, it can end up just as naturalized as OSC’s AI in the Sky. I don’t consider anything in LotR particularly supernatural, for instance. The Elves and even the Valar are integrated into the background. There are no burning bushes.

It’s not the supernatural but the unnatural that makes fantasy fantasy - the sheer lack of rational justification for elves and magic and rings and so on. (Note that I didn’t say scientific justification.) Fantasy is about what cannot be, science fiction about what can be. An invisible, divine hand moving the stars could be, but Middle Earth is purely, unabashedly counterfactual.

The moment you start justifying, say, Pern, with genetic engineering, you’ve moved into the realm of science fiction. Walter Jon Williams calls some of his work fantasy, but I didn’t see the counterfactual in Metropolitan and he doesn’t seem like the sort of person to write the fantastic. Nor, come to think of it, does LMB. She lets her deities do too much work, and that smacks of explanation. When she writes an elf, just one dying-immortal, fleet-footed, inhuman, unjustifiable elf, then I’ll enjoy her fantasy.

If you’re going to lie to me, then lie already.

Word of the day: teratogenic

I found Komarr remaindered at Buck-a-Book - they seem to get a lot of Tor and Baen hardcovers. All my unsuccessful experiments with Catherine Asaro have been $2 deals at Buck-a-Book. Komarr wasn’t a buck, but it was cheaper than A Civil Campaign, which was also there and going for $6.99. I couldn’t really front $7 for a book I’ve read twice already - my company could go out of business any month now - but I couldn’t pass up my favorite LMB book, even in space-wasting hardcover format.

I was immediately faced with the problem of stopping myself from rereading Komarr over the weekend. There aren’t many books I’ve reread; A Civil Campaign got its second go-around because I hoped to get more out of it with a stronger background in Miles Vorkosigan. The Martian Chronicles was more of a study of the short story format than a return to a beloved tome.

If I do get into a rereading relationship with a book, it quickly spirals out of control. There was a point in my life when I had to stop reading LotR because I knew what the next sentence would be. For a number of years now, I’ve read Pride and Prejudice whenever I’ve been hard up for a book, and once purely out of technical interest in the third person omniscient POV. I was a long-time rereader of the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, until I started writing myself and couldn’t take the pulps anymore. Along with the occasional revisit of Watership Down and Jane Eyre, that about covers my adult rereading.

Sometimes I wonder whether children’s books are better than adult books. My memory is fuzzy, but it seems to me that rereading was the rule rather than the exception when I was a child. Charlotte’s Web was no one-time deal, and my Little House books show a great deal of wear, and not just from Veronica dropping them in the bathtub. I had a very strange experience with The Last Battle (the final Chronicle of Narnia), probably the only time I’ve reread a book end-on, though I almost did with Komarr the first time.

Which brings me back to the topic - I resolved my Komarr problem by giving in ten minutes later and starting it on the T. It’s still a good book, though it surprised me this time how very much it was about Ekaterin - more characterization than I remembered and proportionally less busy-ness. Even Miles wasn’t as frantic as usual. I’m not complaining, but there is a part of me that still hasn’t adjusted to characterization in scifi.

On the technical side, I noticed the POV shifting back and forth between Ekaterin and Miles every chapter or so, and not a few spots where the mental commentary was very heavily interspersed with the dialogue. Somehow this didn’t throw off the pacing. I wonder whether it’s trying to break myself of the same habit that made me notice in the first place, whether I picked it up from her, and, therefore, whether I should stop trying to break a habit that hasn’t done LMB any harm. Probably not, eh?

I’ve mentioned Komarr a few other times: in comparison to Memory and regarding decking the shark. Since my favorite line was in the latter, here’s my second-favorite: “The next number up,” he breathed, “is ‘one.’”

Komarr is an allegedly dark book, at least when looking back from A Civil Campaign, but I like it that way. Miles outdoes even himself in misdirected love, Ekaterin is too burned to be afraid, and both of them are well acquainted with the evil still residing in Pandora’s box. It’s not angst, though; it’s plot - an impossible situation, but one that comes from the outside. SF is not a genre for inner flailing.

Is it, though, a genre for rereading? I’ll have to see how long Komarr manages to sit on the shelf.
(more…)

First of all, there was a very good story in the July/August Analog: “Falling Onto Mars” by Geoffrey A. Landis. It’s only four pages long, so you can read it standing up in Borders.

I find something dissatisfying about the stories that are part of series, even when interesting in themselves, like Brenda W. Clough’s second story about Captain Titus Oakes. The big disappointment, though, was “Mammoth Dawn,” by Kevin J. Anderson and Gregory Benford. As an adventure it was well-written, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the theme was supposed to be. Were the bad guys bad because of what they did, or were they bad because of what they thought? One usually resorts to demonizing the enemy when one can’t win the argument on the basis of reason - and I didn’t see the hero winning any arguments. In fact, rather than have him win an argument with his Evo opponent, the narrator instead decides that the Evo is just jealous that his name wasn’t included on a scientific paper years before. This is an ad hominem argument, not a story. All the more so when the bad guys do their thing later in the story - it’s never made clear why they do it, or how their cause could possibly profit from it. All it is is demonizing a caricature - I don’t know why or how I was supposed to enjoy this story.

I did finish the story, though. I usually read through Analog, just out of curiosity. It’s the rare story I won’t finish, and one of those was last year’s “Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s,” which was the overwhelming favorite novella of the year, according to the voting results on page 8. That put me in mind of American Gods, the hit of last year and a book I found almost entirely uninspiring.

I was beginning to believe that I was the only person who disliked American Gods, but I’ve found some company: Josh Lacey in The Richmond Review.

He goes on to say something that I was also thinking: “An ambitious failure is more interesting than a cautious success,” but I wonder why an ambitious failure is taken as a grand success in the first place. Is it just grade inflation, or is it a clash of genres in which my side (sf/f) lost but prefers to pretend it won?

I read The Big U because of its connection to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. As such, it was quite interesting, but as a novel, it was a little disjointed. The POV character was rather fuzzy (which makes me want to say it was in first person, but I think it only strayed in and out of first person). Probably Neal Stephenson’s first novel (copyrighted 1984), it was out of print a while - the copy I picked up was a new trade paper reprint.

Yes, I braved another fantasy, The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay, an 80’s classic, or so the jacket informed me. I stopped early on, but picked it up again the same day wondering what happened. Shanghaiing a bunch of Canadians for nefarious magical purposes sounds like a neat idea, but it took me a while to be able to tell them apart, or care if I could. The natives, on the other hand, were far more interesting, and I really began to enjoy the book when I got to a section with only one Canadian and a whole tribe of locals. Unfortunately that was near the end and I doubt I’ll dig up the other two volumes of the trilogy. (Dr. Deb passed this one on to me.)

The non-Canadian side of the book was a kind of primordial AU, of which all our other Earths are supposed to be pale reflections. Notable pale reflections are Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and Norse mythology. This is an interesting, fanficcish approach to the problem of all fantasy being derivative of the same - and certainly Guy Gavriel Kay does Odin better than Neil Gaiman (more on which next time), but he cannot out-Tolkien Tolkien, whatever he may name his orcs, his elves, his Angband and his Morgoth.

Just for example, Tolkien conveyed song, legend and the passage of time without repeating, over and over, that it had been a thousand or twelve hundred years since such-and-such happened. His dark power crept slowly into Mordor; it didn’t pop out a mountain and point a dramatic, smoky finger at the West (here the South). It most certainly did not spend its time raping young women, nor, had it done so, would that have been the symbol of ultimate evil for Tolkien. Did evil change so much between 1954 and 1984?

Speaking of 1984, that’s also the date of publication of The Practice Effect. I suspect this one as well of being a first novel. Although Sundiver and Startide Rising were published before it, they are such better books, structurally speaking, that it’s hard to believe this one came after them. That said, I did enjoy it more than Brin’s other books - though he fought himself the whole way, he managed to write a pulp classic, complete with jealous scientific rivals, a princess, a familiar, a medieval society, noble thieves, magic, attempted rape and a pseudo-scientific explanation of it all at the end.

The hero makes no attempt to stop the rape, which is interrupted instead by some friends of his whom he does then go out of his way to defend. The princess gets laid up for an indefinite period of time (one of the things not handled well was the passage of time) by blisters. Frodo and Sam trudging through Mordor it ain’t. The final revelation could have stood a bit more foreshadowing, and some consequences of the theory, such as changes to the English language, weren’t worked out properly - but as a one-book pulp revival, its adventurous spirit outweighs its flaws.

Sorry about all this blogging at once, but I’ve gotten behind again during the move from the other blog. Last week the sci-fi section was imported and correctly formatted. If you’re looking for even more of my unpopular opinions, they’re only a click away, along with my long, dramatic struggle to finish Blue Mars. I started the sci-fi blog before this one, so my blog has suddenly aged an extra month (September 2001) - and I bet no one noticed.

So, for those of you new to the sci-fi blog category, this is where I talk about the books I’ve read. Fortunately for me, Hugo and Nebula award-winners don’t jump down your throat when you critique them - yet another advantage of real writing: real opinions. It’s an interesting question whether those people who do the throat-dive to defend fanfic writers from the imagined slights of constructive criticism will react the same way on behalf of, say, David Brin. My email address, if you have complaints, is to the right.

On to business. In the past month, the following books have piled up: Facets, Rock of Ages and Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams, The Big U by Neal Stephenson, The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Practice Effect by David Brin and a double-edition of Analog. I’ll split them up, WJW first:

Facets is a collection of short stories, my favorite of which was “No Spot of Ground”, a civil war history with General Edgar A. Poe on the front lines fighting for the South. It’s a wonderful story all by itself, but when it turns Poe’s hatred of Whitman into an explanation of the war, it touches on the sublime:

Not that inequality is sublime in itself, but the ability to sum up an alien mindset in one conversation is. For this I consider Jane Austen a great sf writer - she builds a world incredible in its alienness, in its prejudices and social pitfalls, and makes you believe it all really happened.

Among WJW’s short stories, I also enjoyed “Side Effects,” a tale of pharmaceutical testing told in little scenes from doctors’ offices. The one I liked least was “Witness;” between the anti-hero and the superheros, there wasn’t much left that I look for in a story. “Dinosaurs,” on the other hand, was a classic sci-fi tale of a young culture’s encounter with “the ultimate product of nine million years of human evolution.” Most of the rest was the usual hard-bitten cyber-crime drama that was so popular a while back - which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it. I wish more people wrote the stuff I don’t like so well that I almost like it.

Voice of the Whirlwind was more of the hard-bitten stuff I shouldn’t have liked, but enjoyed anyway. Rock of Ages reminded me of LMB, and I was quite enjoying it until it became clear that the hero wasn’t interested in marrying and settling down. Marriage isn’t something I expect to see every day in sci-fi, but when you bring the subject up in the middle of a comedy of manners you raise certain expectations. Nevertheless, it was a fun book, and part of a series about the thief-hero which might interest LMB fans.