Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

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.
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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.

This is the inaugural entry in my new sci-fi category, for the moment. Eventually, my other blog will get imported into MT and there will be plenty of back-entries on the topic. I’ve learned a lot from fandom, and one of the most important lessons is never let your real opinions slip out. But I’ve already alienated everyone who wanted to be alienated in fandom - an unintentional slash-and-burn, but a useful one nonetheless - so I can move the other blog here without any major worries that David Brin will hate me forever for my personal opinion of his fiction.

I went shoe-shopping yesterday, and, as usual, found no shoes. I came home with a bag full of used and remaindered books, though. You should have seen the one that got away… One of the ones that got away was a new anthology by Orson Scott Card, of the best stories of the century. I glanced through the table of contents and was pleased to see my favorite short story in there: “Dark they were, and golden-eyed,” by Ray Bradbury.

I wandered over to OSC’s page today to track down the title of the anthology, but I was distracted from my quest by his Open Letter
to fellow Mormons about whether he plagiarised the Book of Mormon for one of his novels. There are bits of the letter that are rather interesting, especially the part about science fiction being the only practical method of discussing moral and cosmological issues across the gulf between worldviews. He seems like quite an interesting guy. I had no idea he was a Mormon, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

For reader convenience, here are some (non-contiguous) quotes from OSC’s open letter:

You can read the original Ender’s Game on OSC’s page. And don’t click on the “More” link below unless you’re ready for a slam from a Big Name Writer. (Don’t make me say I told you so…)

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   Phrase of the day: Arrow's Paradox

Who is Walter Jon Williams and where has he been all my life? He tosses off worlds like they were sentence fragments, and then he writes an entire novel in the present tense. The man has style. I couldn’t put Metropolitan down. In a novel full of good things, my favorite thing was the final pages. The pacing was amazing, the little cuts, Aiah’s pronouncement that if she knew Constantine she’d be there with him, everything was perfect. And it seems from his web page (http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/) there’s a sequel. I thought I was getting too old and jaded to find new favorites.

   Word of the day: ethereal

I don’t know why I do this to myself, but I read Catch the Lightning by Catherine Asaro. I figured that for two bucks at Buck-A-Book I couldn’t go wrong. Much.

Well, there was a lot of gratuitous sex, as usual, but this time with a minor. Even fanfic writers quail at statutory rape, and if John Ashcroft had his way Catch the Lightning would go on the fire with Romeo and Juliet. David Brin wouldn’t be happy with all this Rhon prince and princess stuff, and the worst part for me was the data dumps. Yes, Asaro is a scientist, but raw science does not scifi make - not these days, anyway. I couldn’t tell Althor apart from the Kelric of the last Asaro novel I read; it’s possible they’re the same character, or at least father and son, so that’s not the damning point it might have been.

On the positive side, the book moved along briskly and took a violent change of milieu halfway through in stride. I’m beginning to think of Asaro as a mix of hard scifi and bodice-ripping pulps, and not an unsuccessful one. That doesn’t mean I’ll blow another two bucks on her, though - there are other fish in the sea.

Right now I’m in the middle of Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams, which appears, whenever I stop to think about it, to be written in third person present. WJW is a wizard at world-building. More to follow…

Second word of the day: circadian

Make Room! Make Room! was a cross between a hard-bitten detective novel and a Malthusian jeremiad. I was spoiled for it by Soylent Green; when it turned out they weren’t eating people, I lost interest. Despite a few nods to technology, it was more dystopian fantasy than science fiction.

I wasn’t as disappointed by The Spirit Ring as I’d expected to be after the warnings I’d heard. The plot was fun; my only real objection was to the characters themselves. They were young and nebulous, an LMB-style Romeo and Juliet stumbling through the story in a daze. I can’t say that’s not acceptible in fantasy, but I think you need a different style to carry it off properly - something remote, something archetypal and Tolkienesque.

The truth is, I was looking for Forever War, but all I found was Forever Peace. It was a good book, with an interesting deus ex machina at the end, but again, hard-bitten, and at points it toed the wrong side of the line between showing and telling. To be fair, Haldeman did a good job describing being jacked, but the transcendent experience upon which the novel rides is…transcendent. Should one write about what cannot be described? My usual answer is no, but if someone else can make a good novel out of dancing around the point, I’m willing to read it.

The premise was a bit off as well - we’re long past the point where Haldeman’s necessary peace was necessary, and yet we’re still alive. His cure is no cure either - the issue of keeping the sane people from blowing up the world is, as recent events have shown, far less intractable than the problem of keeping the zanies out of the cockpit.

Nothing in the book was too much of a stretch, though, not even the sad ending for the protagonist, which is, I suppose, how this novel won the matching Hugo and Nebula to go with the ones for Forever War.

She proves that sci-fi and fantasy are both new genres, whatever history they may have in the pulps and proto-pulp adventures like this one. I read She after seeing an essay on it in a collection on sci-fi. I’m not sure it said much about women in Victorian times, and as proto-scifi it had little to recommend it beyond the simple question of immortality, treated with little more depth than a medieval morality tale might have provided.

The hero of She is the least interesting character of the novel. Though perfect in figure and aspect (as opposed to the narrator), neither he nor his ancestral race has ever actually done anything of note. In fact, he spends most of the novel unconscious and evades even immortality, but only accidentally. Pulp has never been known for characterization, but this blond, gaping void lurching through the novel is a bit much, even for H. Rider Haggard.

So, on to the sleeper of the month. I bought Aristoi in a odd-lot store and put it down a few chapters in, annoyed with all the background detail, the two-column split-personality sections, and the general alienness of it all. I gave it a second chance, though, and warmed up to it, ending up staying up too late reading it more than one night. I don’t know much about Walter Jon Williams, but I’ve picked up another book of his from Buck-A-Book, I enjoyed this one so much. It takes real talent to get me to stomach open scifi misanthropy, never mind side with the protagonist when he says, at the end, that he doesn’t want to be human. Theme aside, it was a lovely mystery/adventure. The only thing I’d criticize it for is the dearth of central characters, relative to the length of the novel - but with five or six personalities popping in and out of the protagonist himself, perhaps this was a necessary economy.

   Word of the day:  insurrection

I made my way through Divine Intervention (I don’t think it was capitalized on the cover) by Ken Wharton. My sister was bored enough with it that she lent it to me before she’d even finished. Reading it was like watching a movie - the cute kid, the loving yet slightly distanced parents who pull together to save the cute kid, the nasty government officials who will stop at nothing to hide what the cute kid has found, i.e., the cute alien, the heroic bumpkins who are more than they seem, the heroic military guy, etc. There were other bits, too, that wouldn’t have fit into a real movie - the history of the previous space expedition, told in epigraphs, the religion, which was too interesting an idea to come across on the big screen, and the frozen colonists endangered by the nasty government sorts. It was a good movie, but I wanted to read a book.

   Word of the day:  inscription

I was going to catch up, really I was. I was going to say how I’d enjoyed Paul Levinson’s second novel, Borrowed Tides, although on the science side it left out a lot of explanation, or at least verisimiltudinous technobabble. But like good Star Trek technobabble, it was a lack that somehow managed to leave just the right amount to the imagination.

I also took a whack at Vernor Vinge’s new short story collection. I didn’t read them all, and I didn’t care for something I couldn’t quite pin down in the general style of them, but some stood out. The pixel-picture of the purple-blossomed valley was a bit of description that redeemed the entire story around it, for example. Then again, maybe I just got used to his style after the first bunch. I gave up on The Star Road by Gordon R. Dickson. It was a classic of everything sci-fi is getting over now, I suppose, and while I enjoyed it once upon a time, I’m not up for it now. I also tried a collection of what passes for short stories by C.J. Cherryh - Realities. I read two out of three novellas, but skipped the third because, though the ideas were good, the plots tended to go around in frustrating circles. She writes too much for me, though I suspect a fantasy fan could digest her quantities easily.

I picked up a year’s-end Locus, and found out that everyone else on the planet liked Gaiman’s American Gods more than I did. Fortunately, a few reviewers agreed with me about Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, a book that thought far too highly of itself. Locus is a very depressing read - do you have any idea how much the subscription rates to sf magazines have dropped over the last twenty years? You don’t want to know. I wonder if sf is still a good field for short fiction, considering the magazine shutdowns and audience.

What can I say about a second go at The Martian Chronicles? I’d like to try it myself - it’s a very nice format for short stories. I’m not even going to praise the LMB books I’ve been catching up on (Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms). Consider them the standard by which I’m judging everything else, if you need an opinion of them. I’d put the former in my Best of LMB category along with Memory, Komarr and Shards of Honor. One of my LMB converts has a copy of The Spirit Ring for me - I think I’ll give it a shot before moving up to Curse of Chalion, if only to avoid the (rumored) disappointment afterwards.

I almost forgot: The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde is a nice, nice bit of speculative fiction. I was rooting for the sidekick and lost on that one, but Edward got his Jane - it’s always good to end a book the way it’s supposed to end. It’s a standard sort of British fantasy, but without the overt humor that tends to leave me cold. I’d still prefer something a little more serious, but I know better than to expect that from overseas. “Where is the sharpness and precipitousness…?”