Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

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.

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.

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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.

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.