Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

   Word of the day:  misanthropy

There’s a particular style of sci-fi that I’ve been running into lately, in The Uplift War and also “Hominid”, serialized in Analog for the past four issues. The plot parts are good, the characterization is bad. (”Isn’t that all sci-fi?” the wags ask.) I don’t mind wooden characters so much, until they start preaching their own superiority over us flesh-and-blood human beings. David Brin kept it down to a dull roar, with constant, but small, jabs at us and our backwater century. Robert J. Sawyer, on the other hand, harped on it for the duration on Hominid - how wretched we are for exterminating the wooly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger, how ignorant we are to believe in gods and big-bangs, what a bad idea agriculture was, and how much better than ours is a society in which the families of criminals are sterilized. Why don’t you just invade Poland while you’re at it?

I suppose it’s not surprising that people who hate people would be bad at characterization. Brin won a Hugo or a Nebula for his tale of teenage boy meets teenage alien girl and nothing happens. Sure there are spaceships and guerrilla war and everything, but on the character level, nothing you expect to happen happens, except with the chimps. Brin writes chimps as though they were human, and humans as though they were rocks. If you just subtracted the humans from the equation, it would have been a great book. They’re just ballast anyway.

The “Hominids” had an interesting neanderthal society, but unlike Brin’s chimps, they didn’t balance the story’s equation of missing personality. Why are all alien cultures cheesy? Tolkien created five or six races and made them believable. Why can’t sci-fi authors handle even one without descending into the familiar language of the unbelievable? Eg: “when the Two become One” - cheesy! Tolkien would have made up a word for it. Tolkien would have made the male and female subcultures more distinct - he did, in fact, with the Ents and the missing Entwives. Tolkien knew what he was doing.

It’s a good thing I have a spare LMB book to read this weekend, or I might slip into sf despair.

  Puppy:  retired
  Word of the day:  minion

My, I’m behind. I want to mention The Hemingway Hoax, and newly outstanding are The Uplift War and a re-read of The Martian Chronicles. I tried to read Cherryh’s Cyteen, but I found it implausible that so much could be alleged to have changed about man, while the politics were still like something out of Disraeli. It was so thick I couldn’t face infinitely many more chapters like the first few I’d read. Downbelow Station, on the other hand, held my interest the entire time, although the level she was writing at was not one I’d like to see another author try. I suppose it was a distance from the many characters like Kim Stanley Robinson held, although the characters themselves were more likeable. The plot was good, if, again, more politics than science. Cherryh is a nice author to visit but I wouldn’t want to read all her fic.

The Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman, started out very, very well. The sci-fi bits were few and far between, but the character and plot were so good I kept right on reading. However, the book didn’t go in the direction that I expected (which was saving the Earth). Instead, the main character lost everything in a series of universe-hops, and eventually turned into someone else in the convoluted and unsatisfying ending. I’m not even sure whether or not he died. I’m not going to run out and read more Joe Haldeman (though I do have to hunt down The Forever War someday) - there can only be one Kurt Vonnegut, fooling the masses into thinking he’s not writing scifi, and fooling the scifi readers into thinking he is. Joe Haldeman is no Kurt Vonnegut.

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  hoarse

Well, the puppy didn’t recognize my voice, so I’m back to the manual approach. No time to review, but I will include the list of what’s outstanding: American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Thief of Time by Terry Pratchet, Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh and Falling Free by LMB. I’m also in the middle of her Borders of Infinity.

Remember Good Omens by Gaiman and Pratchett? I wonder whether that book began the whole fad of occult-as-comedy that is raking in the big bucks for Joss Whedon on UPN. It was, in any event, a good book. Separately, though, Gaiman and Pratchett leave something to be desired. American Gods is also, for lack of a better term, a fantasy, as is Thief of Time and, I presume, the entire Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. American Gods is entirely nondescript. It follows the fates of certain Old World deities transplanted to America and not doing well at all, and of an ex-con who gets a job working, dying and rising again for one of them. Gaiman can write well enough that one wishes he had something to write about.

Thief of Time is a better book, having a more coherent plot and less unpleasant and unenlightening realism, but it lacks the deeper level one assumes Gaiman was trying to reach. Is it better to succeed at less, or fail at more? As humor, it’s not The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - and if you mean to get by on humor alone, you have to go Hitchhiker-far with it to please me. Yet it was a fun, readable book, and if it had been scifi I’d probably be recommending it right now. Fantasy leaves me cold, though, whenever it fails to achieve Tolkienesque levels - and it always fails. Someday I’ll put into words what it is about scifi that can carry a mediocre book, and what it is about humor and fantasy that makes even above-average books fail - someday.

Two down, two to go.

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  gentle, v.

I know I’ve been neglecting the brog, but it’s not for want of material. I’m several novels behind. First, I plowed through Catherine Asaro’s The Last Hawk. It was reasonably well-written, except for all that mangling of the innocent verb “gentled”. Her world of Coba, with its reversed gender-roles and geographic diversity, was well-drawn. The plot was passable. It all fell apart, however, as sf novels so often do, at the level of character.

The protagonist, Kelric, had some moments of solidity, such as his time in solitary confinement, but was for the most part elusive. From his first excape attempt to his final rebellion, he is a man more acted upon than acting. Ixpar, another major character, seemed slightly more promising at the start, but she blended in with the host of Managers quickly enough. Their names and locations were kept straight enough, but otherwise even Avtac, the villain presumptive, was difficult to distinguish from the general run of Amazons.

The author’s inability to make the bad girl bad deserves some note - although the evil deeds of Avtac were horrifying when related from a distance, close up she seemed to be just another Ixpar. This led to some truly jarring plot shifts, as though Avtac were a Dr. Jekyl to her countrywomen and a Mr. Hyde to outsiders.

The best characters were the incidental young people scattered across the book/planet. Kelric’s fellow prisoner at Haka, the Calani who kept falling out windows, the girl physicist/Calani with her male suitor…

It just goes to show you that too much string theory takes the joy out of a book. Ayn Rand would say that such significant things could not happen to such dull people.

Catherine Asaro has a reputation for having put the sci back in sci-fi. All I can say is that she didn’t do it with The Last Hawk. The game of Quis, while very interesting as a cultural artifact, is a mathematical implausibility. While it’s not outright impossible, it’s nowhere near believable enough to pass on just Asaro’s word. Yet not once does the author attempt to suspend my disbelief in Quis as a means of communication. I was left to my own devices to explain the black box that was Quis.

I hate black boxes. If the characters can understand something, then the author ought to be able to, say, include an appendix with the full rules of Quis. Tolkien would have. I’d forgive her Quis, though, if she hadn’t give her primitive society stunners from the get-go, yet made them discover gunpowder and lasers near the end of the book. And name them “lasers”!

There was also plenty of gratuitous sex, as Kelric sleeps his way across the planet - the effect, as Kelric’s affect, was flat. But I’ve read worse plots by people who could write better characters - I have a book beside me that I won’t even lend to people, it was so unredeemable. The Last Hawk was good enough to hand around.

But that review will have to wait…

  Puppy: on
  Word of the day: aeon

One thing I forgot to mention about Parable of the Talents was how vast an improvement over The Handmaid’s Tale it was. Feminists are welcome to their nightmares, but if you want to share them with the rest of us, you’re obliged to try to make them somewhat plausible. Octavia Butler’s Christian America was a far more believable dystopic vision than the Taliban-like conditions in Margaret Atwood’s book.

I have the list of Hugo and Nebula Award-winning works from the Locus page, and it amazes me sometimes how many of them I disliked. The Mars trilogy has already been mentioned, but there’s also The Snow Queen and To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

I tried to read one of Catherine Asaro’s books, but I got only a few pages into it before I gave up and read Eon by Greg Bear instead. Now that was a good book–nice science, a light hand and a good pace. The characters were nothing special, and Greg Bear has a disturbing tendency to use young female protagonists whose actions are never properly motivated and whose lives are inevitably wasted in their formless flailing. (I’m generalizing from just two books here, the other being Moving Mars.)

Nevertheless, I liked the book–it made me want to sit down and write my own. That will do as a definition of a good book, since Hugo-award-winning is out.

  Puppy: off
  Word of the day: apoptosis

It’s the time slip, so I had to write. I finished Foundation - I’m still amazed at what writers used to get away with. I don’t think I’m up for the rest of the series. Whatever Asimov I read in my youth I shall henceforth consider enough. I also finished Wyrms by Orson Scott Card, which was not a bad book. He claims to have written fantasy, but if this mixture of science fiction and mythology is what he was talking about, then I don’t believe him. The standard fantasy parts - the fight in the forest, the boat ride down the river, the quest in general - were unimpressive in and of themselves. Without the science and mythology, the book would not have held up to the end. The beginning was rather promising, but the characters and the fantasy world seemed to grow less complex as the story moved on. That might not have been the muse flagging; maybe it was just me flagging. Yet Tolkien’s world never lost substance, no matter where the individual characters travelled.

Maybe it’s just too late to be critiquing books - just one more, then. Parable of the Talents disappointed me. The structure, that of an angry daughter’s commentary on her mother’s journals, just took away from the main story. I wasn’t dismayed when I reached the familiar ‘there’s no room in this book for an ending’ point, because I know Octavia Butler doesn’t end her books, she just stops. No problem. But it was a problem, because she tried to end it in the usual ‘no room’ way - a flash-forward into a future where the current difficulties have already been solved. I suspect authors do this when they don’t know how to fill in those missing months or years. So the issue of how Earthseed was finally spread was just skipped over. If Nancy Kress had done it, I would have supposed that she could never in a million years describe the spread of a religion. The truly disappointing part is that Octavia Bulter could have described it; she may be the only person in sf who could, but she could and she didn’t. Why not? She’s not lazy - usually her elisions are far better timed that this one. Also, I found the study guide at the end of the trade paperback edition of Parable of the Talents a bit much. Remind me never to do that.

  Puppy: on
  Word of the day: variola

I guess I’ve always had a dim view of mankind. For example, I’ve always believed that my smallpox vaccination would come in handy someday. I find reports that my vaccination may have worn out rather disturbing–but I don’t believe it. I still have faith in the variola of older days. Someone higher up just doesn’t want me to write off everyone born since 1970; little do they know, I did that ten years ago.

And then there was nuclear war: I have to admit it’s been a while since I thought we’d wipe ourselves off the earth that way, but it seems the simple fears of childhood are back. Just today on the news I heard that a nuclear exchange is “likely” within the next thirty or sixty days, and it won’t even be us and the Russians this time.

Ah, the Russians–no one ever told me that they’d been trying to produce weapons-grade smallpox since the day mankind defeated the natural version. I just had a bad feeling… smallpox has a long history of use as a biological weapon here in the United States, most notably in the French and Indian War. At least then, it was more of the same old smallpox, rather than a plot to ressurrect something that took so long to kill. Immunization is not a modern phenomenon; the practice goes back to medieval times or further. It’s a very old dream only recently achieved, and fragile.

Putting aside the annihilation of mankind for the moment, I suppose it’s time to say something about Memory by LMB. Of course I loved it; but why? Memory immediately precedes my favorite LMB novel, Komarr, and may be seen as a dress rehearsal for that book. The situation is the same–an apparent accident that may or may not be a crime, which Miles ends up investigating in his new role of Imperial Auditor. Both novels deal with temptation; Miles begins Memory by sliding, ever so slowly, towards what could be considered a white lie or a huge betrayal, and even more temptations follow this initial battle. Both the temptations and questions of identity are more pressing in Memory, while in Komarr and the sequel, A Civil Campaign, the theme shifts to honor.

As a mystery, Komarr is by far the better book–there are plot holes in Memory, the pace is uneven, and the culprit is easily identified–but on the level of character, Memory does for Miles what Komarr does for Ekaterin–almost.

  Puppy: off
  Word of the day: fidelity

After I got Debbie to read Atlas Shrugged, including the forty-page political speech, we decided that it was a science fiction novel. Somehow I don’t think Ayn Rand had to struggle even as hard as Kurt Vonnegut to avoid the sf brand, as deadly to ’serious’ writers as a role on a Star Trek series is to serious actors. But if 1984 gets any credit for being in the speculative fiction genre, then Atlas Shrugged deserves it too. There’s absolutely no question that Rand’s novella Anthem is science fiction as well.

I have to admit that Ayn Rand impressed me immensely when I first read her, eleven years ago. First of all, I hadn’t imagined that someone could make a moral argument for capitalism, or against communism - I thought all debate on that issue would have to be pragmatic, saying that we are not saints enough for communism so we put our vices to good use through capitalism. That the woman had the gall to make selfishness a virtue, and then devote her life to making a philosophy out of it, and then, on top of that, to write novels based on her own personal aesthetic - good novels - amazed me on all the levels involved, philosophical, moral and literary. That was the day I should have known I wanted to be a writer.

“Katie, why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.” (The Fountainhead)

I’m going to have to hunt down The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature and reread it, since Christine has been quite rightly pestering me for not knowing what the point is I’m trying to make in my stories. Ayn Rand was never at a loss for the moral of the story.

• The Ayn Rand Institute

  Puppy: off
  Phrase of the day: trial by jury

I had jury duty again today, which implies that if you’re on standby and are told not to come in, then your number goes back in the hopper. I was on standby half a year ago, I think. This time I had to hike all the way out to Roxbury to do my civic duty, which involved sitting in a room for three hours before being dismissed. The prospect of twelve angry Bostonians had scared all the bad guys into plea bargains, the judge informed us. And he disapproves of Judge Judy.

While awaiting my chance to say “string ‘em high”, I read half of Asimov’s Foundation. It’s been about twenty years since I read the trilogy last, so I was surprised just how familiar it was. Maybe that’s just Asimov, though. It never ceases to amaze me what people got away with in the good old days of sci-fi. Asimov’s idea of the decline and fall of Galactic science is the disappearance of nuclear power - in other words, a shift from 1954 to 1942. Twelve thousand years of civilization and…well, it doesn’t become me to mock the Great One. Foundation stands on the principles of psychohistory rather than the cheesy terminology of “nuclear blasts”. Still, Tolkien should have gotten the Hugo for best series ever. He knew about the rise and fall of empires…

  Puppy: on
  Word of the day: areography

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

One of Kim Stanley Robinson’s characters put it best:

The two thousand pages of the Mars trilogy left me agreeing with Zo. This is not, as it is advertised to be, the ultimate in Mars fiction. Moving Mars by Greg Bear covered the political and social issues just as well and had a plot to boot. Bova’s Mars gave a more convincingly hazardous first landing scenario. Edgar Rice Burroughs (A Princess of Mars and ten sequels) is more fun to read. Even obscure samples of the art, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time Slip, at least possess the virtue of being novels.

Robinson’s erratic, fragmentary tomes most resemble the previous classic in the field, The Martian Chronicles, although he hasn’t Bradbury’s excuse of having written them as short stories beforehand. Even his flood of language, in which many passages feel more like a thesaurus than a prose work, can be traced back to an earlier Mars:

Robinson seems to have broken every rule in the book, and gotten two Hugos and a Nebula award for it. He’s set “show, don’t tell” back thirty years. He’s neglected the basics of plot in favor of a fragmentary overview of centuries of future history. His characters, while well-crafted, are largely unsympathetic.

His approach to scientific ideas is sometimes magical, as in the case of robots who build the Martian infrastructure almost unsupervised. Usually, however, it’s exhaustingly exhaustive, as if saying all the right words (and all their synonyms) about a laundry list of scientific theories were a substitute for a plot. And sometimes his ideas seem to be at odds with one another–did he make the colonists immortal just to give them enough time to watch the terraforming? And then mortal again to provide an ending for the trilogy?

None of this is to say that the trilogy was not well-written. It may even be an excellent example of a modern literary work which happens to be about scientists and Mars. What it was not was a science-fiction novel. I used to think that everything in the genre–whatever its weakness in character, science, or scene–had to have a plot. Perhaps no one has tried before to pass a series of character vignettes, scientific lectures and flights of description off as a novel before because no one has had those and only those talents. But I think it’s something else.

Realism is antithetical to science fiction–in the real world, we’re sitting on our duffs here on Earth rather than reaching for the stars. Early on in the trilogy, the characters gave me the feeling that if Man was like this, I didn’t want us to spread to other worlds. That’s not the feeling one expects when one picks up a science-fiction novel. Sci-fi is an epic genre, and epics ought to have heroes. Give me John Carter any day.

• Mars in Myth and Science Fiction - a nice historical introduction
• Mars in Popular Culture - books and movies
• Mars in Fiction - a list of titles