Spiral Galaxy Reviewing Laboratory

End of the Year

2011-12-30T12:42:00.014-06:00

2011 draws to a close, marking the end of a year that has probably marked the biggest single change in my life, ever. Posts have been thin on the ground here at Spiral Galaxy, but I have no regrets. I've managed to keep: my child alive and healthy, my job (and gotten into a new and awesome group at NASA), the Locus blog going, and my book draft going (although with a new deadline of August 2012 instead of March 2012). Of the things that needed to be thrown overboard, this blog and other reviewing seemed the most reasonable things to go. But I haven't stopped reading! Here's some capsule thoughts on books I've read since little Gadget was born, on August 30th.

In War Times by Kathleen Anne Goonan. I had previously bounced off Goonan's work with the Queen City Jazz cycle, and this didn't change that. There are some authors where I can see their virtues, but the work just doesn't resonate with me, and Goonan appears to be one of those. I really liked the historical bits in War Times, but the jazz lost me and I didn't find the super-physics convincing. I had planned to read this preparatory to This Shared Dream, but I think I'll let that slide.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. Charles Brown used to say that this book was the most horrific that he'd ever read, but it didn't strike me that way. One thing I liked is that between this and Ubik, I now know that I like PKD as a sentence-level writer much more than I thought I would. However, I was specifically reading these to see if they linked in with Greg Egan's altered/virtual reality futures, and I don't think that they do. PKD's characters are on very unstable ground, never knowing what their position is vis a vie reality, whereas Egan's characters are pretty much all rational actors in a rational universe, whether that universe is physical, digital, or both. Completely different affect and theme.

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. Probably not the right book to read right at the beginning of my maternity leave. However, I found it very well written, very convincing, often amusing, and definitely enlightening. Thanks to Farah Mendlesohn for the recommendation!

Book by Book by Michael Dirda. A short book full of Dirda's notes on reading. Light and charming, but pretty fluffy. I've always enjoyed reading his thoughts, and this was no exception.

Howl's Moving Castle by Dianna Wynn Jones. I'd enjoyed the film when it came out, and enjoyed this as well. I hadn't before realized just how YA the original book was. I thought the middle got into a bit of a muddle, but definitely enjoyed the characters and the whole milieu.

Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert. I appreciated this for many of the same reasons I loved Les Miserables--the in-depth and incisive character portraits. I know people today who share many depressing characteristics with M. Bovary. But I didn't fall in love with it the way I did with Les Mis, probably because it lacked Hugo's epic sweep. By the by, it was Dirda's book that finally inspired me to pick this up.

God, No! by Penn Jillette. Another book full of assorted thoughts and vignettes, rather like Dirda's book but for atheists instead of life-long readers. Lots of amusing anecdotes from Jillette's improbable career and life.

The Alchemists of Kush by Minister Faust. This book deserves a bigger, better review than what I'm writing here. I loved it. It's a twinned tale of mythology and urban African-Canadian (although I imagine African-Americans would find it equally apt) experience. The contemporary and non-fantastic part follows a troubled black teenager as he finds a role model and a place in the community--although his is not an easy story and it doesn't have an easy ending. The fantastic portion describes a young man navigating a mythic landscape, learning about his powers and leadership. Argh, that makes it all sound too pat. I've loved everything I've read by Faust, and this was no exception. If nothing else, the poetry and rhythm of his language would be worth it. If nothing else, the reading list that the mentor figure gives to young Raptor would be worth it. The whole resonant package is even more worth it. And if I'm saying this as a middle-aged white woman, when the story is so intensely young, black, and male, then that tells you something (I hope) about the power of Faust's writing. The only major critique I'd have is that I felt that the author dodged a bit when the issue of homophobia reared its head. But that's a very small matter in a book that's much bigger than its relatively short length.

Embassytown by China Mieville. I loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar. I finished Iron Council. I enjoyed The City and The City. I bounced off of Kraken. And now I've bounced off of Embassytown. Reading the book, I kept waiting for an answer to the question: how in hell can a language that can't refer to things that haven't happened allow for engineering? But about halfway through, as the plot was ramping up, I realized that the main viewpoint character, the first person narrator Avice, was a complete cipher to me. She didn't seem to have a real character or personality, and I wasn't even sure what might motivate her. So I bailed out, abandoning the book altogether. It especially suffered in comparison to the books I read before and after it.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I'd been meaning to read something of Ishiguro's for ages, and I figured that Never Let Me Go would just annoy me. Remains was a beautiful read, with effortless prose that was wonderful to just swim through. Ishiguro has perfect mastery of tone, with no word out of place. It's a quiet tale, entirely about the character of its narrator. He's an unreliable observer of himself, but there are plenty of narrative clues that let us know what he doesn't know about himself. It's the quietly tragic story of a man who made a lot of wrong choices but can't let himself admit that. If I perhaps felt that some of the clues were rather obvious, making it easy for the educated reader to say I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE, YAY GO ME! the prose style made it very easy to forgive.

The Once and Future King by T. H. White. Again, this deserves a longer post. It was quite different than I'd expected, and seemed overly grounded in the politics of post-WWII England. The tone shift as it moves from book to book is dramatic, but it worked for me. While White makes it clear that he feels that the tragedy stems from Arthur's sin in bedding his sister (while under the sway of one of her spells), I really felt that the whole 'ordering all two-year-old boys to be killed' thing (while not under anyone's spell) got rather swept under the rug. I will say that I think I've read the Arthurian stories in rather the wrong order. One should probably read L'Morte de Arthur, then Once and Future King, then The Mists of Avalon. Whereas I read Avalon years ago, then this, and will probably never get to L'Morte. I retrospectively appreciate Mists of Avalon quite a bit more now, after reading this.

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. I had bounced off of Rajaniemi's short fiction to this point, so I was happy to find that I finished this book. However, it didn't really stand out for me. It was a good read, but nothing that made me want to jump up and laud it. Again, I think Rajaniemi is just going to be one of those authors that I know I should like, that I have every reason to like, that I can see why other people like him, but I just don't like very much. C'est la vie.

Mind Children by Hans Moravec. Read this as research for the Egan book. Fascinating stuff, chock-full of techno-optimism. Not perhaps the best written ever, but you could make an entire career fleshing out the sfnal ideas in here, and one can argue that Egan did just that in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross. I've enjoyed his other Laundry series books, and I enjoyed this one. Actually, I liked this one rather more than the second book in the series, The Jennifer Morgue. Fuller Memorandum is a fun book, I've always liked the premise of the universe, and I agree with the politics in the book, so it was all a very stress-free experience. During this time I started in on some of L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt's Compleat Enchanter stories, and it was really striking how much Bob Howard of the Laundry is the heir to that sfnal-attitude-in-a-fantastic-universe tradition.

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. I've been slowly reading the Discworld books in publication order, and I lucked out that I got to Hogfather right before Christmas. Perfect time to read this one as a nice mental break.

Science as Salvation by Mary Midgley. Another one that I'm reading for the Egan book. This book is a criticism of the narrative created by some scientists, especially those involved in popularizing science such as Freeman Dyson, that promise immortality in humanity's future. I don't agree with many of Midgley's critiques, but it was excellent food for thought.

So while I've been quiet, I haven't been idle! I'm doing a lot of reading in other areas for the Egan research, which combined with the baby-related lack of free time, means that I haven't been reading much for review or for my Golden Age reading project. When the book is done I hope to get back to normal reviewing reading. In the meantime I'm having a ton of fun with the Egan project, and with the baby, and with my day job, and you really can't ask for better than that!

Histrionic Waffling

2011-09-24T10:59:00.004-05:00

Jack Williamson's Darker Than You Think [1948] is an unusual book for the "Golden Age" of science fiction; it focuses on the psychological as opposed to outward sci/tech adventure or even more purely sociological world-building. There are a lot of elements to appreciate, but the blend doesn't work for me--largely because of tone.

In the story, lycanthropes are real and less limited than simple old-school werewolves. They can transform into almost anything, are invisible to most humans when transformed, and manipulate probabilities (what today we'd more likely label quantum uncertainties) at will, enabling them to walk through walls and arrange nasty 'accidents.' However, for the most tenuous of hand-waving reasons, dogs and silver still pose a mortal threat to them.

Will Barbee is the protagonist, a decent newspaper reporter and alcoholic. The story starts as an expedition returns from an H. R. Haggard story--or rather, from an archeological/anthropological expedition in the deserts of Asia. The leader of the expedition, once a mentor of Barbee's but since estranged, begins to make a dramatic announcement, but dramatically falls dead in the middle of it. His younger assistants, contemporaries and friends of Barbee's, cut short the press conference with a show of "nothing to see here," and set about securing a green wooden MacGuffin.

Using his instincts, Barbee quickly determines that a new reporter he met at the conference, a woman wearing white fur named April Bell, is responsible for the doctor's death--she was carrying a kitten (the doctor was allergic to cats), and Barbee finds the kitten strangled and stabbed with a pin. Despite this rather disturbing scene, he becomes besotted with April Bell and starts trying to learn more about her.

Next, he begins having dreams where she calls to him, and he turns into various creatures, follows her, and helps her kill the other people involved in the expedition. It turns out that in ancient times there was a war between homo lyncanthropus and homo sapiens, which 'normal humans' more or less won. However, the lycanthropes are regaining strength, and April Bell enlists Barbee to help make sure that the anti-lycanthrope weapon the expedition brought back from Asia in the green wooden box is destroyed.

Barbee spends most of his time being psychologically torn in many directions. He's in love-or-lust with April Bell, despite the fact that everything he can find out about her paints a very unpleasant picture of a woman who is either a witch or psychotically disturbed. During his dreams of being a werewolf (or were-sabre-tooth-tiger, or were-snake, etc.) he is torn between arguing to save his friends and killing them. He checks himself into a mental institution and is torn between the fact that his dreams seem real (and the consequences are absolutely real), but everything he knows to be true about the natural world argues that lycanthropy is impossible.

Williamson's telling of Barbee's inner conflict makes this book unsatisfying and frustrating. It's obvious from the narration that Barbee's dreams are real--there are no conditionals about the language used (Barbee 'does' this and that, instead of 'feeling' like things are happening, or feeling like things 'might have' or 'could have' happened). The reader obviously is meant to understand that the fantastic explanation is the correct one, so when the psychologist explains how all this would look under a non-supernatural Freudian analysis, it is plain to us that it is so much obscuring fluff. However, it takes until the final pages of the book for Barbee to come to terms with the reality of lycanthropy and witchcraft. He spends almost the entire narrative waffling between the different poles of his inner conflict, and having general histrionics about the events he's involved with. That's a valid narrative choice--in the real world, I imagine most people would react the same way. However, for the genre reader to whom things like lycanthropy are more-or-less routine, I kept wishing that Barbee would get with the program, realize what's going on and how he's being manipulated, and seize some control of the situation. It is frustrating to read about him waffling back and forth, and disregarding really disturbing evidence, while allowing himself to be used by the very unpleasant (but apparently gorgeous) April Bell. And let's not even get into the fact that in the world-building background of the story, the Inquisition and witch-hunts were perfectly legitimate endeavors to protect humanity from a racial threat, and thus that materialist skeptics/humanists are enabling this racial threat to re-emerge by not believing in the supernatural. That's a position that I think any author in the last 30-40 years would be very hesitant to include.

So this is another classic genre piece that falls into the 'I'm glad I have finished reading it' category. As with so many seminal works, the story leans heavily on the novelty of the concept, and to readers for whom the concept is not only routine but almost cliched, the story becomes a bit tedious. This makes it harder to over-look the casual misogyny and endorsement of historical mass murder embedded in the structure of the tale. I think that the whole thing could have been more effective if the uncertainty of 'is this a dream or is this real' had been strengthened and sustained longer, but that may not have been possible when playing with some of these tropes for the first time. I like some of the world-building elements: the fact that the lycanthropes manipulate probability for their powers, their ability to turn into any number of animals, and the meshing of the world-building with the tenets of Freudian psychology was definitely novel. But overall, this story ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

Things Were So Easy Back Then

2011-08-21T19:55:00.008-05:00

So over the last couple of weeks, I've been getting back into my sf classics reading. I pulled out my 1950's-era paperback of George Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), and then downloaded a copy of L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall (1939) on my iPhone. Old text, new tech--gotta love it!

Even though about 10 years separate these two books, I couldn't help but notice some similarities. In both, a single (white, male, graduate student) protagonist is thrust into a vastly alien landscape with no warning or preparation. In Earth Abides, Ish has been doing field research alone in the California wilderness. He's bitten by a snake, and thus misses both the end of civilization and the plague that causes it. In Lest Darkness Fall, Martin falls through a crack in time into Italy at the dawn of Europe's Dark Ages.

In the first third or so of each book, the protag has some time to take stock of the situation and get his bearings. Ish realizes the enormity of what happens, and is able to travel from San Francisco to New York and back (driving) before getting settling into establishing-a-future-for-humanity mode. Within the first day of being in historical Italy, Martin is able to understand the language, get some money, food, and lodging. The next day he's secured a loan to go into business introducing more advanced products to the ancient culture (starting with distilled brandy).

Let's start with the fact that Martin doesn't keel over from an ancient disease that he's not immune to. Even though he takes great care with his hygiene, given the prevalence of air- and water-borne diseases in ancient cities, this is a lot to swallow. And I find Ish's cross-country odyssey likewise full of super-human luck. I couldn't shake the feeling that both authors were glossing over huge numbers of practical difficulties in order to tell the stories they wanted to tell.

Which are both good stories, don't get me wrong. Even though it took me awhile to warm to Stewart's style in Earth Abides, it eventually won me over, especially the periodic interludes that explained how the natural world was adapting to the absence of humans as the decades pass. Apparently Stewart wrote other books that focused on the natural world rather than the human one, and I think that's the primary strength of this classic. I was also impressed that the central human relationship of the book was interracial, even though the narrative never makes a big deal of that. That had to be incredibly progressive for the time. Lest Darkness Fall was even easier to like. Martin's interactions with the easily-caricatured Italians and Goths are really funny, and the whole thing is fast-paced thanks to the aforementioned glossing over of difficulties.

Lest Darkness ends on a more triumphal note than the more elegiac Earth Abides. Martin has clear-cut goals (introducing technological and political innovations and stabilizing an Italian-Goth kingdom so that southern Europe doesn't enter into the Dark Ages) and is 100% successful is achieving them. Ish has more nebulous goals (trying to teach the children of his community enough so that they won't have to re-invent everything once the resources of the old world finally run out), but is only moderately successful. He doesn't manage to pass on the gift of literacy, and it doesn't take more than two generations for the younger cohort to return to magical thinking about the world. However, he does manage to make sure that they know about bows and arrows and how to make fire, so that's something.

Of course, both these books are problematic from today's point of view: Lest Darkness is pretty much exactly the kind of story that uses history as an theme park that Judith Tarr talks about in this post. And Earth Abides uses a terribly inaccurate view of 'primitive' anthropology as its model for how a post-technological tribal society might evolve. However, there's no arguing how influential both these stories were: Sprague de Camp's tale helped establish the entire field of alternate history that has thrived ever since, and Stewart's post-apocalyptic tale is one of the founding models of that trope.

My Critical Reading List

2011-08-13T16:52:00.026-05:00

While I'm list-making, I thought that I might also make a post detailing the critical works related to genre that I've read and still need to read. Lists like these definitely seem to help me focus when I'm staring at my to-read piles and asking myself, "What should I read next?" I hope that other folks will find them useful too. (The dates on many of these may be inaccurate--in some cases I may have dates from a later edition instead of original publication.) In the comments, feel free to suggest works to add or works that can be skipped. I've marked the ones I think (or suspect) are especially useful/important with **.

To Read

Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction, J. O. Bailey [1947]
~~Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing~~, ed. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach [1947]
Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and its Future, ed. Reginald Bretnor [1953]
The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism [1959]
**In Search of Wonder: Essays on Science Fiction, Damon Knight [1960]
Heinlein in Dimension: A Critical Analysis, Alexei Panshin [1968]
Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow, ed. Reginald Bretnor [1974]
The Craft of Science Fiction, ed. Reginald Bretnor [1976]
**The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Samuel R. Delany [1977]
Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction, H. Bruce Franklin [1980]
Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin [1982]
David Lindsay, Gary K. Wolfe [1982]
**How to Suppress Women's Writing, Joanna Russ [1983]
The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth [1983]
Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf, Algis Budrys [1985]
**Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss [1986]
The John W. Campbell Letters, John W. Campbell [1986]
The Tale that Wags the God, James Blish [1987]
The Motion of Light in Water, Samuel R. Delany [1988]
Grumbles from the Grave, Robert A. Heinlein [1989]
Strategies of Fantasy, Brian Attebery [1992]
Reading by Starlight, Damien Broderick [1995]
Outposts: Literatures of Milieux, Algis Budrys [1996]
The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, Thomas Disch [1998]
Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Carl Freedman [2000]
Concordance to Cordwainer Smith, Anthony R. Lewis [2000]
The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, Karen L. Hellekson [2001]
Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, Brian Attebery [2002]
Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space, De Witt Douglas Kilgore [2003]
**x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction, Damien Broderick [2004]
Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly, ed. Jane Espenson [2004]
A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference, Jeffrey Allen Tucker [2004]
Bound to Please, Michael Dirda [2005]
Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life, Michael Dirda [2005]
My Mother was a Computer, N. Katherine Hayles [2005]
Daughters of the Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, Justine Larbalestier [2006]
Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, John C. Rieder [2008]
The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem, Peter Swirski [2008]
On Joanna Russ, ed. Farah Mendlesohn [2009]
A Short History of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn [2009]
The Secret Feminist Cabal, ed. Helen Merrick [2009]
Chicks Dig Timelords, ed. Lynne Thomas and Tara O'Shea [2010]
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism [2010]
Twenty-First Century Gothic, ed. Daniel Olson [2010]
Pardon this Intrusion, John Clute [2011]
**The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn [2011, pending]

Already Read

Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom, Sam Moskowitz [1954]
New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis [1960]
**The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction, William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish) [1964]
More Issues at Hand: Critical Studies in Contemporary Science Fiction, William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish) [1970]
The Futurians, Damon Knight [1970]
**The Known and the Unknown: the Iconography of Science Fiction, Gary K. Wolfe [1979]
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin [1979]
Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, James Gunn [1982]
**Starboard Wine, Samuel R. Delany [1984]
Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Gary K. Wolfe [1986]
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest of Transcendence, Alexei Panshin [1989]
I. Asimov, Isaac Asimov [1995]
Age of Wonders: Exploring the Worlds of Science Fiction, David Hartwell [1996]
Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton [1997]
**How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles [1999]
Edging into the Future, ed. Veronica Hollinger [2002]
**The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, Justine Larbalestier [2002]
**Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, Riki Wilchins [2004]
Soundings: Reviews 1992 - 1996, Gary K. Wolfe [2005]
The SEX Column and Other Misprints, David Langford [2005]
Polder: A Festschrift for John Clute and Judith Clute, ed. Farah Mendlesohn [2006]
**About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters and Five Interviews, Samuel R. Delany [2006]
**James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Philips [2006]
**The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn [2006]
**The Country You Have Never Seen, Joanna Russ [2007]
Writing the Other, Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward [2008]
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. [2008]
What it is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, Paul Kincaid [2008]
**Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn [2008]
A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed [2008]
How Fiction Works, James Wood [2009]
Hope-in-the-Mist, Michael Swanwick [2009]
The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children's and Teens' Science Fiction, Farah Mendlesohn [2009]
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, Michael Chabon [2009]
Canary Fever: Reviews, John Clute [2009]
Bearings: Reviews 1997 - 2001, Gary K. Wolfe [2010]
**Evaporating Genres, Gary K. Wolfe [2011]

Golden Age Reading List

2011-08-04T13:42:00.010-05:00

For my own reference, to be updated as I read:

~~The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volumes I, IIa, IIb~~ edited by Robert Silverberg and Ben Bova
~~World of Null-A~~, A. E. van Vogt [1945]
~~Earth Abides~~, George Stewart [1949]
~~Lest Darkness Fall~~, L. Sprague de Camp [1939]
~~Darker Than You Think~~, Jack Williamson [1948]
The Once and Future King, T. H. White [1958]
Tales of the Dying Earth, Jack Vance [1950]
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller [1960]
City, Clifford Simak [1952]
The Space Merchants, Fred Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth [1952]
Slan, A. E. van Vogt [1946]
A Case of Conscience, James Blish [1953]
Mathematics of Magic, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt [1941]
The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber [1964]
The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett [1953]
Conjure Wife, Fritz Leiber [1943]
Best of Science Fiction, ed. Groff Conklin [1946]
Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake [1946]
Fury, Henry Kuttner [1947]
The Humanoids, Jack Williamson [1949]
Star Man's Son [1952], or Star Soldiers [1953], or Uncharted Stars [1969], by Andre Norton
Long Loud Silence, Wilson Tucker [1952]
Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut [1959]
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut [1963]
Three to Dorsai, Gordon R. Dickson [1959]
Way Station, Clifford Simak [1963]
The Planet Savers, Marion Zimmer Bradley [1958]
Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper [1962]
The Big Time, Fritz Leiber [1958]
Portable Novels of Science, ed. Donald A. Wollheim [1945]
They'd Rather Be Right, Mark Clifton [1954]
Best of C. M. Kornbluth [1939-1958]
The Body Snatchers, J. Finney [1955]
What Mad Universe, F. Brown [1949]
A Star Above and Other Stories, Chad Oliver [1955]
Untouched by Human Hands, Robert Sheckley [1954]

Might hold over for the New Wave:

Ill Met in Lankhmar, Fritz Leiber [1970]
Tau Zero, Poul Anderson [1970]

A Weekend of Egan

2011-05-30T12:45:00.001-05:00

I had a really wonderful weekend up in Oakland, CA. I stayed at the Locus house for a few days, and ransacked their archives for non-fiction stuff related to Greg Egan. Everyone was wonderfully nice and accommodating--especially Amelia Beamer, who ran me around to and from the airport, Carolyn Cushman who helped me find things, and Kirsten Gong-Wong and Aaron Buchanan who took me out for Ethiopian on Friday. I had gone prepared to go to Baycon and maybe record a podcast or two if I had time, but instead I found ample material in which to bury myself for the solid two-and-a-half days I had.

I was able to find almost everything I was looking for--and even better, I found lots of things that I wasn't looking for. I think that's the biggest difference between making use of search databases + inter-library loan vs. actually having access to a large archive. I was searching mostly for reviews of Egan's books and reader responses to his stories, mostly in venues such as Locus, NYRSF, Interzone, and Foundation. I also found interesting discussions about posthumanism in sf and definitions and arguments about hard sf. I was able to pull copies of Eidolon, Utopian Studies, and SFStudies as I found them referenced in other venues. I enjoyed flipping through the Letters columns of Interzone particularly, as one got to watch decades-old flame wars unfold in slow motion--and also some letters from well-known names, before they were well-known. Most importantly, I got a great overview of critical reactions to Egan's work, how they've evolved over time, and additional avenues of research to pursue.

This was probably my last trip of the year--in July, August and September I definitely won't be able to travel for reasons of pregnancy and infancy. I don't have anything planned for June. Curtis and I are tempted by World Fantasy in San Diego (we bought tickets in Columbus last year), but it will depend entirely on the baby's health and my own. If we're both doing well I doubt I'll be able to resist the temptation, but if either of us is sickly we'll definitely let our tickets go to a good home. Anyhow, given that this was my last sf-related trip for a while, I'm glad it was such a great one.

Another thing that became clear to me is that I'm going to have to take off my reviewer-hat for awhile if I want to preserve my sanity over the next year or so when the baby and the book are both due. I've got a couple of things on tap to review, but I won't be taking any new assignments until next spring. I want to conserve energy for the book and for editing the Locus blog. I've also got a couple of articles I'm writing--I hope to be done with those by August, and also not take any new commitments along those lines. This might actually mean that I'll post more here, since I won't be 'saving my energy' for more official venues. But no promises!

Ancient Greek Folly?

2011-03-24T19:56:00.004-05:00

I'm still having fun reading the ancient Greeks. I'm about a third of the way through Thucydides, so I've been learning a lot about ancient warfare, and modern and ancient rhetoric. When it comes to war and politics, I think my favorite thing about the classical Greeks is their deep and abiding cynicism.

Which brings me to Plato's Republic. It provides one of the early selections in the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism that I've also been working through at odd hours. I remember reading the Republic for the first time, and thinking that when Socrates (or Plato) talked about literature, he must have been having a little fun at the expense of his interlocutor. After all, he proposes throwing out huge amounts of literature that we consider treasures of the Western world, including large chunks of Homer. Considering that even back then Homeric poetry was revered, I thought he must have had his tongue at least partly in cheek.

Coming across these arguments again in the Norton Anthology, I'm trying to give them their due. But is there any reason not to throw out all of his points? Is there any value in insisting that fiction literature be only upstanding, moral, virtuous, and educational; encouraging only right behavior and never giving examples of wrong action? I understand that there are probably still some folks who think this way--and any form of entertainment aimed at children will always be under a lot more scrutiny (see the cyclic uproars about: rap lyrics, video games, LGBT-positive children's stories, etc). But it seems both futile & silly.

Reading some of the Great Classics of Western Literature, I've noticed that some of them, especially those stemming from the oral tradition, probably survived partly because of their appeal to children. And in the same way that kids can watch a funny car-crash scene from Toy Story 2 twenty times in succession without any diminishing enjoyment, I can imagine some child from 2000 years ago saying "Tell it again, tell it again, Grandpa! Tell how the hero hit the bad guy so hard that his EYES flew out!" (from the Iliad). Or 1000 years ago: "Tell how Beowulf tore the monster's ARM off and BEAT him with it!" And let's not even get started on the Canterbury Tales. If you applied Socrates' standard to all literature, you'd have to throw out so much of what we now consider classic. Midsummer Night's Dream--gone!

Is there any defense of this approach today, or can I put it out of my mind? I don't want to dismiss it out of hand if there's something I'm missing, but I can't see it having much value in my own approach to literary criticism.

When it comes to the Norton Anthology, I'm looking forward to getting into Aristotle, who comes next. I haven't read Poetics or On Rhetoric before, and suspect that I'll find something that, if not more useful, will at least be new (to me).

Some Great News!

2011-03-06T10:59:00.004-06:00

OK, some of you may have noticed that I've been mentioning that I may not be able to travel to WorldCon or WorldFantasy this year. That's pretty much confirmed at this point, and here's why:

Curtis and I are expecting our first baby! It's due smack in the middle of Con season, with an ETA of August 28th. Needless to say, we are hugely excited!

The picture above is from the first ultrasound I had last week, where they estimated the little one is about 14 weeks along. I got to see it wiggling around, and we confirmed 2 arms, 2 legs, and 0 tentacles.

Now, I don't want Spiral Galaxy to become a baby blog--so of course I started a separate baby blog. For anyone who wants to follow what's going on in Curtis' and my expanding family (and see more pics), you can check out our new family blog. Spiral Galaxy should continue on uninterrupted.

Of course, babies throw a huge wrench into planning. It's easy to say that we will skip out on WorldCon and WorldFantasy this year. But what I can't predict is how much impact there will be on the rest of my activities: editing the Locus blog, reviewing for folks, and writing a book. The little one should be about 6 months old when my Greg Egan manuscript is due--how the heck is that going to work? I'll be trying to keep up with everything as long as I can, and with luck I'll be able to bow out of things gracefully when I start to get overwhelmed.

Speaking of grace: it turns out I've been pregnant since Mid-December, and I found out in mid-January. For those of you who got over-sharing, over-emo, or over-sensitive emails in that time, I most sincerely apologize. I've been cranking my internal censor up since I found out, and I'm trying to prevent that sort of thing from happening again. ::sheepish grin::

Awards Season!

2011-02-28T13:54:00.007-06:00

I'm home sick today, but apparently a squidgy stomach has given me a clear head--I admit that I've read all the 2010 fiction that I'm going to. I'm just going to have to suck it up and do my awards voting and nominations based on what I've read so far. So with some extra time on my hands, I've decided to do my Hugo nominations and Locus Awards voting today. This is going by Hugo categories--I figure the fiction categories overlap, and in the non-fiction/anthology/collection categories I don't have too much to say anyway. But here's what I've got.

Novels

I focused so much on short fiction in 2010 that of all the novels on the Locus Recommended Reading list, I've only read 3 and a half. (The half was Mieville's Kraken, which just didn't work for me and I didn't finish.) And I think I've only read about six 2010 releases in total. So I'm pretty much leaving those categories alone when it comes to the Locus awards. However, for Hugo nominations I feel free to nominate books that I want to read, since I generally manage to read all the fiction on the Hugo shortlist. So here are five books that I want to read this spring:

The Dervish House, Ian McDonald
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor
The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi
Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu

Novellas

Here I'm getting more into my comfort zone. By far the two best novellas I read this year were:

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang
The Taborin Scale, Lucius Shepard

In the category of "haven't read yet but want to:"

The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window, Rachel Swirsky
Cloud Permutations, Lavie Tidhar
The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon, Liz Hand

Novelette
All things I've read, and it was hard to narrow down to five:

"The Mad Scientist's Daughter," Theodora Goss
"The Revel," John Langan, F&SF July/Aug
"The Butterfly and the Blight at the Heart of the World," Lavie Tidhar
"Generation E: The Emoticon Generation," Guy Hasson
"The Tetrahedron," Vandana Singh

Others I could have easily added:

"And Blow Them at the Moon," Marie Brennan
"Still Life (A Sexagisimal Fairy Tale)" Ian Tregillis
"As the Wheel Turns," Aliette de Bodard, GUD Summer
"Or We Will All Hang Separately," Nancy Jane Moore

Looks like I'll be doing a lot of typing over at the Locus poll--most of these aren't on the Recommended list.

Short Story

Again, all read & hard to narrow down:

"Paul Kishosha's Children," Ken Edgett, Shine Anthology
"Throwing Stones," Mishelle Baker
"On the Banks of the River Lex," N. K. Jemisin
"The Green Book," Amal El-Mohtar
"The Ice Moon Tale," Eilis O'Neil, Abyss & Apex 3rd Quarter

Others I'd be happy to see nominated:

"Futures in the Memory Market," Nina Kiriki Hoffman
"Ghost of a Horse Under a Chandelier," Georgina Bruce
"Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain," Yoon Ha Lee
"Amid the Words of War," Cat Rambo

Looks like I'll mostly be skipping Best Related Work and Graphic Story this year. Also both the Dramatic Presentations - I'm glad to let other people tell me what I should be reading/watching in those categories.

Editor, Short Form

Jonathan Strahan
Dash (Editor of Expanded Horizons, the website doesn't list Dash's full name)
Neil Clarke, Clarkesworld
Bill Schaeffer, Subterranean
Catherynne Valente, Apex

The above represent the short fiction magazines that I enjoyed most in 2010, as well as some great anthologies and collections. I'll again leave Editor, Long form to those more knowledgeable than I.

Pro-Artist

I've been keeping track of artwork that stood out to me as well this year:

John Barry Ballaran, Clarkesworld #45
Ertaç Altınöz, Clarkesworld #49
Mitenkov Maxim, Apex #17
Adreas Rocha, Beneath Ceaseless Skies #47
Murat Turan, Clarkesworld #46

Semiprozine

I can't swear that all of these qualify, but through the year they have become my must-reads:

Fanzine

Fan Writer

Why yes, that is my peer group. Why do you ask? :p

Campbell Best New Writer

I'm never sure about the eligibility for this one--who's to say that an author that's new to me didn't have one sale five years ago that disqualifies them now? But here are a few names:

And that's it for me, putting a cap on 2010. As always I wish I'd read more, but there was some fantastic stuff that I did read. If you're eligible to nominate for the Hugos (member/supporting member of Aussiecon 4 or Renovation) the deadline is March 26th. The Locus award voting (open to everyone, but subscriber votes count double) is open until April 15th. Please make your voice heard!

New Lovecraftian Fiction

2011-02-26T20:10:00.004-06:00

It’s always nice to see a new short fiction market come online. Through SFSignal’s Free Fiction round-up, I spotted Lovecraft eZine’s debut issue and decided to take a look. I see from their submission page that they pay $50 per story, nothing to sneeze at. However, to put it charitably, it may take this magazine a few issues to find its feet. (To be fair, I thought the same thing about Lightspeed’s first issue, and they’re already producing award nominees.) All these stories have merit, but some extra TLC in the editing process would help them really stand out.

Issue #1 has four stories, starting off with “Sledding and Starlings” by Bruce L. Priddy. This was a nicely atmospheric piece about a couple who (for no good reason) decide to go sledding in the middle of nowhere in a snowstorm. Despite an ominous flock of starlings, they have fun for awhile until the wife disappears in an even more ominous fashion, sending the husband into paroxysms of grief and madness. The main problem I had with this story came in its final paragraph, which uses the “I did not think about the thing that did not happen” structure heavy-handedly to let us view the wife’s disappearance retroactively. Between deconstructing the syntax and using a late flashback to depict the story’s climax, this served to severely distance the reader from the scene, diminishing the horror of it.

“Rickman’s Plasma” by William Meikle was a story with a great premise that I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish. The premise is a nice blending of Lovecraftian magic with sf. The titular Rickman is trying to use his Dream Machine to capture the zeitgeist of the city, but he’s getting nowhere. With a flash of inspiration he points it to deep space instead, and begins to create a hypnotic and driving groove complete with a ball of plasma, and overlays it with his dreams. The plasma takes on a life of its own and starts eating people, starting with Rickman. Two policemen come to investigate. The death of one of the cops is particularly horrific, although my suspension of disbelief was shaken when her partner is unable to stop the elevator doors from closing and is forced to watch her death from the elevator door’s window. Generally speaking even the crappiest elevator won’t close the doors with an obstruction in the way. But no matter, the death was distractingly gory! Moving on!

Unfortunately, the story becomes increasingly distanced after that. The narrative viewpoint draws back to the city police as the plasma eats some city blocks off stage. It eats the cops, it eats the National Guard. I put the story down for good when the viewpoint is removed again, to the national level, as the plasma eats the state of New York, off stage. This scene shift is accomplished using exactly the same words as the first shift, which is distracting and a bit silly and once again distances the reader from any ongoing horrors the story might contain. I can see where the technique could be used to establish rhythm and ramp up tension, but here it struck me as artificial and jarring. So I’m afraid this story didn’t work for me.

“The Brown Tower” by John Prescott is the story of two young men investigating a spooky tower in a spooky small southern town. It really hits its stride at the end, as they face the consequences of poking their noses into the unknown, at night, armed only with lighters. The unspeakable horror is effectively sketched rather than shown, and the ending is genuinely gripping. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of awkward phrasing and dialog to get through before we get to that point. This bit was almost a deal-killer for me:

“Its rather unsettling isn’t it?” Mark said, but made no inclination of opting out of not entering the tower.

I can easily forgive typos, but the double negative ends up meaning the opposite of what the author wants it to mean here. And the rest of the dialog has a bad tendency to jump around in tone:

“I wonder what’s up there,” Lane said and pushed the accelerator pedal to its max.

Mark moved in his seat, drank a little from his coke can and eased forward to get a better view of the monument. “I have always wanted to check that place out. I think it’s been here since the town was founded, or that’s what my grandpa told me. I asked him about it a couple times when I was still in grade school.”

Just the inconsistent use of contractions skews the tone: given the “what’s up there” comment, I’d expect the next sentence to start “I’ve always...” instead of “I have...” Skipping between informal and formal dialog is definitely jarring.

“The Crane Horror” by Bruce Durham is a strong historical story with elements from both Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson. It ends this issue on a high note. The story is set in the late 1700’s (I believe) and the formal tone of the prose is appropriate and consistent throughout. It reads quite smoothly, which can be a challenge when evoking a historical tone. The shipwreck of a French ship on the shores of the great lakes brings horror to a nearby farmhouse. The narrator is a corporal in the local garrison, in love with the daughter of the homeowner. Despite his best efforts he cannot save the house or its people from the monstrous horrors of the lake. For Lovecraft fans, there’s a hint tying this story in with the overall Cthulhu mythos. Definitely well done, and raises my hopes for Issue #2.

By the by, I also wanted to mention that the artwork is pretty darn good throughout. It definitely adds to the atmosphere and continuity of the ‘zine. They’re all provided by an artist going by mimulux, for whom I’ll be keeping an eye peeled in the future.

Edited to add: Reflecting on this issue in the clear light of morning, it's a very woman-unfriendly collection isn't it? I mean, look at the stats:

4 stories = 4 male authors
Story #1: one female love interest, disappeared/killed
Story #2: one female neighbor, killed off-stage; one female cop, killed bloodily on-stage
Story #3: Zero female characters
Story #4: two female characters; mother killed off-stage, female love interest driven irredeemably insane
Stories passing the Bechdel test: None

The overall effect is like a big psychic "No Girlz Allowed" sign on the front isn't it? It's interesting to note that as of last month, Weird Tales, the magazine that originally published Lovecraft, is now going strong under an all-female editorial staff, making Lovecraft eZine #1 feel all the more anachronistic. Still, this is easily fixed in later issues, so I'll continue to look forward to the next issue with interest.

More Numbers: 200 Short Stories

2011-02-21T01:00:00.003-06:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been reading a lot of short fiction. This has been partly for my column in Salon Futura (column #6 is here). I've kept up with the spreadsheet thing, although I've consolidated it into 1 sheet and moved more of my note-taking out of my Moleskine notebook and onto Evernote. Thanks to all this, I know that I have now hit 200 stories, and I thought I'd update the numbers here.

[Caveat Emptor, same as the first: this is the most biased possible set of numbers. It only tracks stories that I've read, and specifically stories that I've finished. I skip a story if it doesn't grab me. So these numbers inevitably reflect my own taste. But there is an underlying field out there, and my own proclivities can only distort it so much. Elements here consist of a huge number of subjective classifications, based on nothing more substantive than my own whim. Also, I've been limiting my reading to venues that I can read in a convenient electronic form.]

Here are the genres that I've seen:

SF 108
Fantasy 76
SF w/ some F 6
Horror 3
Alt hist 3
Mainstream 24

This round skewed towards sf because of a couple of anthologies that I read for other review venues, each of which was sf-specific.

Protagonist gender:

Male 95
Female 83

Less perfectly matched than the last time, possibly because of the late skew towards sf. Other protagonist categories:

Child/Teen 20
LGB 8
Transgender 3
Gender Undefined 4
Alien 6
Ghosts 2
AI/Robots 2

The number of stories passing the Bechdel test perfectly doubled to: 40.

I've also found 34 protagonists that are human and identified by non-white ethnic markers.

I'm also keeping track of POVs, but there's nothing terribly shocking here:

1st 81
2nd 3
3rd lim 75
3rd omni 31
3rd mult 8

More interesting are settings. Of those stories set on Earth:

Earth's past 21
Earth Present 42
Near future 51
Mid future 24
Far future 17

A few more far future tales this time, although again that was skewed by a specific anthology.

How about physical settings? We're still sticking pretty close to home:

America 68
Earth 39
Generic Fantasy Earth 25

We've got 47 stories taking place in some sort of space setting, including extra-solar planets, space stations, etc.

Finally, I've been keeping track of some tropes. Here are some of the most common:

Violence 64
Aliens 40
Happy Ending? 32
Shape-shifting 25
Biotech 20
Gods/Goddesses 20
Ecological damage 19
Politics 17
Religion 17
Mythical beings 16
Magic artefact 15

So that's what I've got so far. I feel a bit odd about the themed anthologies skewing the data, but they are equally part of the field. I definitely feel the need to read a fantasy-oriented one (maybe Zombies vs. Unicorns) to even things out.

Once again, here are the venues from which I've been getting my short fiction. Let me know if there are other places I need to be looking!

Strange Horizons
Clarkesworld
Lightspeed
Futurismic
Fantasy Magazine
Abyss & Apex
Nature
Flurb
F&SF
Expanded Horizons
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Port Iris
Crossed Genres
Basement Stories
Asimov's
Subterranean Online
Daily SF
Apex
Tor.com
Weird Tales
Brain Harvest
Midnight East
GUD
Absent Willow Review
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
Albedo One
Kenyon Review
Electric Velocipede
Analog
World SF Blog
Icarus [Much easier to access now that it's available through the Wizard's Tower Press eBook store]
Destination: Future [Anthology]

Insanity and Happy Frankensteins

2011-01-16T19:47:00.005-06:00

Things are ticking along pretty well over at the Locus Blog. We've had some good posts and comments already, and there's even more interesting stuff developing behind the scenes. So I thought I'd come up for air and toss off some impressions about more stories from the SFWA Hall of Fame Volume I, edited by Robert Silverberg. I talked about the first two stories back in November, "A Martian Odyssey" and "Twilight."

The next two are "Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey and "Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon (skipping "The Roads Must Roll" by Heinlein since I had read it several times before). "Helen O'Loy" is a story I had read about but never read before. It's usually mentioned, as in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, as "One very obvious example of early sf's masculinist orientation..." Can't really argue with that. This guy builds the 'perfect woman' robot. He eventually falls in love with her, runs away with her, and lives out his life happily with her. At the end of his life, she kills herself so that no one will ever know she wasn't real. To say that this hasn't aged well is an understatement. A woman who literally exists for no other reason than to love and care for a man, where this is presented (mostly) as a positive, is just really creepy. Also, there's an aspect of what I'll call 'easy insanity' in this story as in many others from this period. The narrator suspects that towards the end, Helen's husband had simply forgotten that she wasn't human, and the narrator helps her keep up the illusion of aging. I might add that lots of people go conveniently and interestingly insane in these stories--I feel like that trope isn't quite so common these days.

"Microcosmic God" (1941) is one of the stories that will really stick with me from this anthology. When contrasted with Greg Egan's "Crystal Nights" (2008) it is especially chilling. The protagonist of Sturgeon's story is James Kidder, a self-made multi-millionaire who is good at everything he does. He goes to live on a private island to develop whatever sci-tech niftiness he sees fit. Eventually his banker (and only connection to the rest of the world) gets greedy and goes gunning for the golden goose. Kidder has been evolving a species of intelligent beings. He keeps them contained and forces them to evolve by presenting them with threats. He occasionally kills off some of them randomly to keep them from getting complacent. He makes sure that they can never survive in Earth's normal environment. When he gets attacked by the banker's forces (let's not think about that too closely), he directs the colony to invent an impenetrable force field, which they do. He is able to live out his life entirely in isolation after that.

I kept waiting for the colony to tell him to shove it and use their epic problem solving skills to escape and leave him hanging out to dry. Because that's pretty much what the beings did in Egan's story. Egan also has a self-made billionaire creating artificial life, only these are in a computer simulation. He also is using them to solve problems, although he wants them to investigate more about the nature of the universe. He also tortures them to get them to evolve: especially when he realizes that pain makes them evolve faster. In the end, hearkening back to sf's gothic roots (Frankenstein), they turn on him in a very satisfying way. To have Sturgeon's Kidder and Helen O'Loy's creator avoid the fate of all those other Dr. Frankensteins was jarring and quite disturbing. It seemed like some sort of ultra-colonialist hubris. Perhaps it's an indication of just how cocky and confident the Golden Age writers were that they thought that heroes could do things like this and not suffer any consequences for it. No wonder some people got all huffy when the New Wave came along and reminded them that the world isn't usually quite so accommodating.

That's not to say that the Sturgeon story isn't well written, I should mention. I'd put it in the top tier of stories here when judged by writing style (a tier in which I'd also include Heinlein, Blish, Keyes, and Cordwainer Smith). I also thought that this story was thoroughly thought-out and coherently executed in a way that "Baby is Three," the Sturgeon story in Volume IIa of the same series, wasn't.

Early Hugo Thoughts

2011-01-09T19:29:00.002-06:00

So the nomination period for the Hugos is open, and already folks are talking about what's eligible, what's good, etc. As usual, I am woefully behind on my reading-of-novels-that-were-published-in-2010. I am not so ill-informed when it comes to short fiction, and my picks for the Hugo noms in the short categories will get a separate post later. But when it comes to novels, I think that my strategy will be to nominate books that I really want to read, so that I'll have an excuse to read them when they're nominated. (I'm usually very good at reading all the nominees between April and June.) So right now, my list looks something like this:

Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor
Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi
Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay
The Dervish House, Ian MacDonald
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu

Or something along those lines.

I'm also wondering if I can't raise Niall Harrison's profile a smidge and help maybe get him nominated for Best Fan Writer. He got 22 votes last year, only 7 below the cut-off for the category, and I dare say that his 2010 work on Torque Control should easily convince anyone that he's a worthy nominee. Also, as he'll probably be moving more firmly into the Editor camp in 2011, having taken over as editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons, it may be that 2010 is the best possible year to get him a nod for Fan Writer. So I just want to remind anyone with a Hugo nominating ballot to consider him as one of your nominees, thanks!

Late to the Party

2010-12-11T10:41:00.002-06:00

Back in November, Niall Harrison wrote this post responding to this post by Jason Sanford. This kicked off the annual Reviewers Introspection Week, which I unfortunately missed because of Thanksgiving travels. By the time I got caught up it seemed that the moment had passed. (Sanford also posted a response-to-the-response here.)

Fast forward to yesterday, when I was in Barnes & Noble with a $25 gift card burning a hole in my pocket. I found their essays/lit crit section and a copy of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism jumped into my hands. It's on my list of Books I Ought To Read, so I bought it and started browsing. In the introduction, I found this:

The subject matter of literary criticism is an art, and criticism is evidently something of an art too. This sounds as though criticism were a parasitic form of literary expression, an art based on pre-existing art, a second-hand imitation of creative power. On this theory critics are intellectuals who have a taste for art but lack both the power to produce it and the money to patronize it, and thus form a class of cultural middlemen, distributing culture to society at a profit to themselves while exploiting the artist and increasing the strain on his public. The conception of the critic as a parasite or artist manque is still very popular, especially among artists. It is sometimes reinforced by a dubious analogy between the creative and procreative functions, so that we hear about the "impotence" and "dryness" of the critic, his hatred for genuinely creative people, and so on. The golden age of anti-critical criticism was the latter part of the nineteenth century, but some of its prejudices are still around.

Nothing new under the sun, eh? And here's Frye's take on Why We Critique:

There is another reason why criticism has to exist. Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb. In painting, sculpture, or music it is easy enough to see that the art shows forth, but cannot say anything. And, whatever it sounds like to call the poet inarticulate or speechless, there is a most important sense in which poems are as silent as statues... The artist, as John Stuart Mill saw in a wonderful flash of critical insight, is not heard but overheard. The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows. To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, is to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with.

My Dance Card Fills Up

2010-12-08T11:50:00.002-06:00

It's all official now that I'll be stepping up as the editor of the Locus Roundtable Blog. This is a great opportunity, and it's already going pretty well. We're planning to start posting new content in January, to accompany the even more exciting launch of Locus Magazine digital editions. Speaking as someone who is paying more for a digital subscription to Scientific American than I would for a print subscription, I am really looking forward to seeing this!

I'm also very happy to have found a new way to help out the Locus folks. I feel like Charles Brown and everyone at Locus were all instrumental in helping me become part of this amazing community (as I wrote when Charles passed away). Previously the best avenue I've had for helping them out in return is to help staff the Locus dealer's room table at any con where we happen to coincide. This is a way better and more intensive challenge to undertake.

So here's what my dance card looks like for 2011:

Editor at Locus Roundtable Blog
Researching and writing book on the work of Greg Egan (manuscript due March, 2012)
Short fiction columnist at Salon Futura
Occasional reviewing and podcasting at SFSignal
Occasional reviewing for Strange Horizons
Oh right, a full time job at NASA
Vanishingly rare blogging here

I think I'm just about full up. Of course I'm always thrilled to hear about new opportunities in and around the community, but these are some big plates to juggle. I'm thinking that Spiral Galaxy will get even fewer posts, if that's possible, and mostly my occasional thoughts about classic sf/f stories.

Speaking of which you may ask: But Karen, the Spiral Galaxy blog has relatively few posts, and vanishingly small amounts of traffic? How the heck are you going to handle a Big Name Blog? First off, it's much easier for me to get motivated to Get Stuff Done for Locus than it is for my own dinky blog. And more importantly, we'll be making use of the help of lots of Friends of Locus. Locus has always been central to the conversation of our genre community, and we're hoping to bring some of that conversation onto the blog. As editor-in-chief Liza Groen Trombi puts it: Locus is People! So I'm planning on recruiting a broad and diverse swath of people to chime in over the next few months. Please contact me either at my email address or at LocusRoundtable [at] gmail.com if you have any ideas for what you'd like to see there.

Luckily I managed to avoid getting roped into all this until after I finished my Master's degree, and thank all the fates that I managed to graduate early! It looks like I'm going to be ::ahem:: "Fully Engaged" in 2011, but it's shaping up to be a fun and interesting year.

An Unusal Beginning

2010-11-21T19:28:00.003-06:00

It’s weird how many different ways there are to read things. If I had picked up Greg Egan’s first novel An Unusual Angle just on a lark, I may not have finished the first chapter. That said, reading it in the context of researching Egan’s fiction for a critical book, I found it fascinating. I mentioned that I was reading it and someone asked me if it was “good.” I didn’t even know how to answer that question. The way I was reading it, “good” wasn’t even something I considered.

Here’s what Egan says about this novel when asked about it in his first interview in Eidolon:

For the benefit of those readers who have no idea what the book is about - most of them, I hope - An Unusual Angle is a kind of eccentric teenage loner story with surreal elements. The narrator literally has a movie camera inside his skull. I wrote it when I was sixteen, although I revised it slightly just before it was published, six years later.

It was very big-hearted of Norstrilia Press to publish it, but it didn't do them, or me, much good. They blew their money. I laboured under the mistaken impression that I could now write publishable fiction; it took me a while to realise that that simply wasn't true. Quarantine is the eighth novel I've written, and the first publishable one. That An Unusual Angle was published at all was really just a glitch.

He’s not wrong about that. Here’s a paragraph from the first page:

I’ll track-in from darkness, that’s a good way to start; isolate the school in a frame of blackness, cutting out all distractions. And then what? It’s too late to make more plans, here comes the vital (fatal (unexceptional)) corner.

He’s got nested parentheses, italics, and single-word paragraphs all on the first page, and the narrator even calls himself out for “melodramatic crap” in the fourth paragraph. So yeah, it’s not “good.” But it is interesting.

This is Greg Egan we’re talking about. The guy who can dramatize general relativity and talks about sex between digital entities. He’s the hardest hard sf writer since the 80’s. But in An Unusual Angle, there’s very little sf. In fact, if you wanted to be a little quirky, you could categorize this story as slipstream.

At first I thought that the ‘camera in the head’ angle of the story was purely metaphorical--that the narrator was using that as a mental technique to distance himself from his unpleasant and boring school days. But the narrative makes it clear that it has physical reality, so that pushes it from kind of mainstream over to slipstream. I think it works rather better as metaphor than it does as a concrete reality. Certainly the info-dump segments that explain (rigorously) how the camera came to be and how it operates were less than 100% convincing.

Most of the touchstones of this story are from film: counter-culture films from Britain in the 60’s and 70’s feature prominently (such as “if...”), as well as TV, movies, and sf. There’s a surreal and sarcastic rabbit that may or may not be an alien, and may or may not be a projection of the narrator’s self.

But mostly there’s a kid in high school (the story covers four out of five years of schooling), way too bright for his classes, bored almost literally out of his skull. There are no characters other than the narrator; some of the teacher’s get names but they’re just archetypes. None of his classmates even get names. There’s no real antagonist here except “the system,” probably another reflection of those counter-culture mainstays. The (unnamed) narrator is disgusted by criticism and depicts in-class lit crit as an act of disgusting vivisection. He often uses scientific imagery, and he’s always way more precise about it than your average writer: he specifies that someone’s enthusiasm is “1000 watts (RMS),” and if you don’t understand what that means you can at least see that for most people it’s enough to say “1000 Watts” without specifying the measurement system.

In interviews Egan mentions that his first love was film. He even made a student film and was admitted to film school before abandoning it. Presumably this manuscript derived from that period of his life. Reading it from the perspective I did, I have to say that I thought that this “wasn’t bad”--certainly I expected rather worse after reading that interview snippet above. Once the narrative settles down into the middle bit you can see some of the smooth and introspective style that characterizes his later work. Thank goodness by the time he published Quarantine (with Century/Legend press in 1992) he’d done away with nested parentheses. Given that I’m going to have to err on the side of brevity in my analysis, I suspect that I won’t be able to give much time to this particular work from the author’s cannon. He probably won’t mind. But I’m very glad that I read it. It’s a rare glimpse into the mind of a developing proto-author.

A Golden Age Odyssey

2010-11-12T12:08:00.003-06:00

Starting in on the Golden Age, it feels like I’ve gone back to the beginning. When, at the suggestion of Charles N. Brown and Gary K. Wolfe, I started to beef up on the classics, I first picked up Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Healy and McComas. It collected fiction from 1938 to 1946 and was extremely influential--especially because it was part of a Random House anthology series, and thus stocked widely in libraries all through America.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I is a different beast, even though it contains a few of the same stories. The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) was founded in 1965 and promptly started handing out Nebula awards. However, they needed a way to recognize the excellent sf written before the Nebulas came into existence. Instead of doing some sort of retro-Nebula award, they created these anthologies. This one covers short stories from 1934-1964, as voted on by the 1966 membership of SFWA and then tweaked by editor Robert Silverberg and others.

I haven’t finished reading the anthology yet, but I wanted to put down some initial thoughts on Stanley G. Weinbaum and John W. Campbell:

The more I read “A Martian Odyssey” (1934) by Stanley G. Weinbaum, the more I’m impressed by it. For one, it depicts a human expedition to Mars crewed by an American, Brit, Frenchman, and German. Considering the fact that it was written between the two World Wars, that must have been about as progressive as writing about joint US-Soviet expeditions in the 70’s. Next, here’s what happens when our hero Jarvis, after crash landing on the Martian surface, first sees some alien life:

“All I could see then was a bunch of black ropy arms tangled around what looked like [...] an ostrich. I wasn’t going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were dangerous, I’d have one less to worry about.

“But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!” Jarvis shuddered. “But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.”

So instead of being instantly driven mad by something with tentacles, as so many protagonists in the 1930’s did, he takes stock of the situation, identifies a creature that might be intelligent, and acts to protect it. Very cool! So he and the Martian, Tweel, become friends, and the Martian helps him get back to his base. Here’s another amazing passage:

“...don’t get the idea that there was anything screwy about Tweel. In fact, I’m not so sure but that he couldn’t teach our highly praised human intelligence a trick or two. Oh, he wasn’t an intellectual superman, I guess; but don’t overlook the point that he managed to understand a little of my mental workings, and I never even got a glimpse of his!”

Basically Tweel and Jarvis manage to communicate, but mostly on Jarvis’ level. They established some math, and the fact that Mars is the 4th planet from the sun, but Jarvis could never make heads or tails out of Tweel’s language. The Martian never used the same word for the same thing twice in a row, and seemed amused by the human’s fixed name. So Tweel wasn’t just a friendly alien (rare enough in the 30’s), he was also Other in some important way.

I also regret even more Weinbaum’s early death at age 33 (from lung cancer). He died 18 months after “Odyssey” was published (his first publication!) and only published 13 stories in his lifetime. When I read this story I notice that the dialog flows better than most stuff written at the time, that it’s funnier than most others, and that the characters are at least slightly more natural than most--and I wonder: Could Weinbaum have been the Robert Heinlein of his day? Heinlein came on the scene five years later in 1939, with “Life Line.” Then I think about Heinlein’s leaning towards social engineering and politics, and Weinbaum’s obvious love of aliens, and wonder how the field might have been different if he’d lived to age 70.

“A Martian Odyssey” is followed by “Twilight” by John W. Campbell writing as Don A. Stuart (the stories are printed in chronological order of first appearance). Never has a story suffered more by placement. Technically, both "Odyssey" and "Twilight" are club stories (as was H. G. Wells’ The Time Traveller): a person has an encounter, and we hear about it when he tells it to someone else in a safe setting. However, "Odyssey’s" club tale is a lively adventure, packed with good-natured interruptions and jokes as things build to the climax--at which point, just like a real audience, the listeners get quiet as Jarvis finishes the tale. "Twilight" is being recounted by a real estate agent who picks up a time traveller in his car. The time traveller has gone too far into the past after having gone too far into the future. He tells the agent about a future where man has forgotten how to operate the machines that run the world, and mankind is slowly dying out. It is very elegaic, with mentions of sorrowful songs and the like. However, in no way does it read as if a real person were saying it out loud. In fact, it even mentions the agent trying to sing snatches of the mentioned music, heard third hand, and somehow getting some of the impact across to the narrator. Let’s just say that it doesn’t sell the premise very well, shall we?

The other interesting thing about the Campbell story is what it shows about the mindset of the sf community in 1966. Remember, these stories were chosen by nominations and votes of the SFWA members. For the anthology they limited it to only one story per author so as to get the maximum number of authors represented. (By the by, even in 1966 they managed to avoid the all-male TOC problem--they have Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother” and Lewis Padgett, a pseudonym of husband-wife team Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, writing “Mimsy Were the Borogroves.”) I’m betting that if people had to choose a single Campbell/Don A. Stuart story today, they would pick “Who Goes There.” After all, it was turned into a movie a couple of times, and still influences the field (cf Peter Watts’ “The Things”). But apparently in 1966, people could point to “Twilight” as being more worthy in some way. (I’ll have more to say about alternate choices when I review more of the stories.) It’s interesting to see it laid out so clearly: that not only does the field evolve, but the field’s understanding of itself evolves as well.

Con Panel Bingo, Complete!

2010-11-07T16:36:00.003-06:00

As promised, an updated and completely-filled out version of the Con-Panel Bingo card. If I were a younger geek, I would have written a little java program that would randomly generate a 5 x 5 grid with the different entries shuffled for anyone who wanted to click on it--that way people could have their own custom version. If anyone wants to write an app like that, please do--I'd like to see it! For now feel free to grab this version & print it, or as Michael Lee suggested on Twitter, just use it as a drinking game! At least it will help pass the time during those panels... you know the ones I mean. ;-)

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions!

Golden Age Reading List Draft

2010-11-04T16:06:00.007-05:00

So I only wrapped up my pre-WWII genre reading list a couple months ago, but I'm starting to have thoughts about the Golden Age. As it turns out, reading classics occupies a different part of my brain than my contemporary reviews (as for Salon Futura and Strange Horizons) or my Egan research. It's a bit more relaxing, and I've found that I'm missing it. So, here are some initial thoughts towards a Golden Age list. What I'm looking for are things that are important and influential to the development of the field--things where reading the classics gives me extra insight into the field today. I'm leaving out Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Cordwainer Smith, Alfred Bester, John Wyndham, and Ray Bradbury because I'm comfortable that I've read all their most important pieces. I'm hoping for suggestions about things I need to add--or even better, things I can chuck off the list. I've added the ones I think are most important/non-negotiable in bold.

Here are books that I already own:

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volumes I, IIa, IIb edited by Robert Silverberg and Ben Bova
Slan, A. E. van Vogt
Darker Than You Think, Jack Williamson
Earth Abides, George Stewart
Tales of the Dying Earth, Jack Vance
City, Clifford Simak
The Space Merchants, Fred Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
The Big Time, Fritz Leiber
A Case of Conscience, James Blish
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller
The Complete Compleat Enchanter, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
~~Agent of the Terran Empire~~, Poul Anderson
The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber [Optional]
Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper [Optional]
They'd Rather Be Right, Mark Clifton
The Planet Savers, Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Sword of Rhiannon, Leigh Brackett
Conjure Wife, Fritz Leiber
The Once and Future King, T. H. White

Here's the list of potential acquisitions:

Lest Darkness Fall, L. Sprague de Camp
Portable Novels of Science, ed. Donald A. Wollheim
Mathematics of Magic, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
Best of Science Fiction, ed. Groff Conklin
Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake
Pilgrims Through Space and Time, J. O. Bailey [Non-fiction, the Pilgrim award is named after this book]
Fury, Henry Kuttner
World of Null-A, A. E. van Vogt
The Humanoids, Jack Williamson
What Mad Universe, F. Brown
Star Man's Son, or Star Soldiers, or Uncharted Stars, by Andre Norton [Whichever I can find first.]
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
Long Loud Silence, Wilson Tucker
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, J. Finney
Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Untouched by Human Hands, Robert Sheckley
Three to Dorsai, Gordon R. Dickson
Tau Zero, Poul Anderson
Best of C. M. Kornbluth
Ill Met in Lankhmar, Fritz Leiber
A Star Above and Other Stories, Chad Oliver
Way Station, Clifford Simak

Part of me really wants to narrow this down because I feel like I'm procrastinating in getting to the New Wave, where I'm definitely weakest. And this list could easily take me 5 years to get through at the current pace. Your thoughts?

Con Panel Bingo

2010-11-03T15:43:00.004-05:00

So there we were in the audience of a panel that started at 10pm. We were already a little less than perfectly sober, and my husband and I started playing 'Panel Bingo.' I tweeted some snippet, and a couple folks said they'd like to see that for realz. I couldn't believe that it didn't already exist, but a cursory Google search didn't bring up anything quite like what I had in mind. So here is what I've got so far. As you can see, there are still empty spaces--please help fill them! We've all been there, we've all got various panel pet peeves--here's the place to share. Thanks!

If the image isn't coming through well on your browser, here's what I've got so far:

[Center] "This is less of a question, more of a comment"
"Well, actually..."
"...Therefore..."
Audience member with more expertise than panelists
Knitting
Ranting Audience member
Author with fort made from own books
Ranting Panelist
Shameless name-dropping
Question that takes more than 1 minute to ask
Panelist interrupting other panelist
"I don't know why I'm on this panel..."
Author answering question with reference to own books
Totally unqualified panelist
"I'd like to ask the panelists to introduce themselves..."
Audience member who thinks they have more expertise than the panelists
???

I Show Up in Random Places

2010-11-03T14:07:00.003-05:00

For instance, I was in the Dealers Room at WFC, and Gary, Jonathan and Alisa waved me over to join their podcast. At the beginning I was totally nerd sniped by Jonathan's shiny new omnidirectional microphone. I've included a picture so that you can see why. It's very shiny! And the part of my brain that specialized in signal processing during my MSEE was very curious about why it was so big. After we wrapped up I picked it up and it's also pretty heavy. I'm betting it's got some up-front firmware filtering so that the software package doesn't have to wade through so much noise. Anyway, it was pretty cool and I managed to sound mostly intelligent even though I had no clue what they'd been talking about when I showed up.

I can also be found nattering on at brief length about fantasy series on the latest SFSignal Mind Meld.

My World Fantasy Con was Made of Awesome, How 'Bout Yours?

2010-11-01T20:02:00.003-05:00

Fresh off the plane from WFC (I spent so much time Tweeting the con that I wanted to put #wfc right there). I wanted to get some thoughts down before they all fly out of my head.

For one, I'm once again reinvigorated about being part of this community and doing cool things in it. I'm pretty sure that this will be the week that I *finally* get that review written for SFSignal, get a blog post about Egan's first novel up here, and get caught up on some short fiction. Heck, look at me actually blogging about it in a reasonable time frame! It makes so much difference to get together in the same room with half a dozen people who *care* about this field intensely, and who range across a huge spectrum of background and experience. This WFC was only my second, but I can see it becoming one of my non-negotiable cons, like ICFA is. It also comes at a good time of the year for my work schedule, and that's not trivial.

So, how awesome was it? Well, I had several long talks that would have made it worth my while even without all the drinking and laughter. I had long talks with Liza Groen Trombi of Locus Magazine and Mark Kelly of Locus Online. Plots were hatched that will, with any luck, come to fruition in the next few months. I also talked to Ted Chiang about something interesting we might try to cobble together for the next ICFA meeting. I was able to hang out with John DeNardo, Patrick Hester and John Anelio who've become podcast buddies--meeting folks face-to-face after so long of only knowing them online is always a thrill. I spent some time working the Locus table and got to know Alisa Krasnostein of Twelfth Planet Press, in from Australia, and even sold one of her books!

I did get out to two panels, a reading, and was on a panel myself. My panel was titled "Critical Theory and its Discontents," with Gary K. Wolfe moderating. I was spectacularly unqualified to be on that panel, and none of us had much clue on how to focus it. Gary goaded me into mentioning the difference between scientific theories and literary theories in the arena of rigor, but no one wanted to get into much of a flamewar. Luckily we got a lot of help from the audience, especially Farah Mendlesohn and Kari Sperring. So it ended up being interesting enough and I got some good feedback from audience members afterwards. Still, the best description that I heard afterwards was: "The wheels were spinning, but they never really touched the ground, did they?"

The other panels that I went to included one on John W. Campbell's Unknown magazine, and one on Religion in Tolkein. In the Unknown panel, it was interesting to hear from people like David Drake, David Hartwell and Mike Resnick about publishing back in the 40's and 50's. They listed a bunch of good stories and authors, and emphasized the importance of payment structures to authors and what they chose to write and submit. The Religion and Tolkein panel was unfortunately on at 10pm on Saturday night, and I went to support Daryl Gregory who was on it. Eric Van and Ellen Denham came well prepared with scholarly information about Tolkein's views on religion and Middle Earth, and the audience was remarkably erudite for it being so late. The reading I got to was by Siobhan Carroll, writing as Von Carr, who read from "Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain." It's a perfect story for a reading--ninjas, vampires, androids, telepaths, robot dogs and more, fast paced and funny. I also got to have dinner with her and her fellow Clarion alum Beth Wasden.

After that it would all be name dropping. I was telling Caroline Ratajski (who writes as Morgan Dempsey) and Emily Jiang that if I had intentionally structured my life with the goal of being able to have lots of interesting conversations with interesting people, I couldn't have done much better than this. (Even though apparently that sometimes includes listening to rather famous people trading colonoscopy stories--they shall remain unnamed.) I had many fascinating conversations, learned a lot, and I'm still processing and integrating all of it. But it will show up in my reviews, slowly, over time, because it's all part of learning more about this wild and woolly field we're all in.

Pardon the cliches, I think that means it must be time to try to catch up on some sleep. Forgive inaccuracies or indiscretion, and hope to see you all in San Diego next October!

My Rule-of-Thumb on Fantasy vs. SF

2010-10-14T12:52:00.002-05:00

If I had to point to one idea that divides most fantasy from most sf, it would be “Born to the Power.” In fantasy, there are at least two sets of physical laws. One for the special people (magicians, heroes) and one for everyone else. In sf the laws of the universe hold for everyone: anyone can pick up a gun and fire it, as opposed to a magic sword which may only activate for one person. [Let me point out right now that I don’t believe that this is the end-all, be-all, one-size-fits-all, Final Answer to the sf vs. fantasy genre split. It’s simply been a handy rule of thumb that I’ve found useful over the years. Certainly there’s a lot of slipstream and magic realist fiction for which this idea wouldn’t be particularly useful.]

Let me use a specific case. There was a side conversation in this thread at Torque Control about Perdido Street Station winning the Clarke award as sf. (Paging Richard Morgan!) I tended to read it as sf because the magic in its universe is technological. There are many species with many differing abilities (like aliens) and the ReMade are much like cyborgs, and the scientist Isaac is trying to learn about his universe and its laws, which seem to consistently apply to everyone there. Even the appearance of the Slakemoth, which is by far the most fantastic element of the story, is much like an alien intrusion from another dimension (a hoary sf trope). Just because it’s not our universe doesn’t mean that Bas Lag isn’t a scientific universe. There’s no one in the story wielding unique power by virtue of birth or something similar.

I should mention that in ‘wielding unique power’ I mean some sort of magical or physical power. Even in our mundane universe, lots of people wield political power by heredity, and there’s nothing inherently fantastic about that. In fact, I believe that the “Born to the Power” idea stems from the historical notion of the divine right of kings: some people are simply more special that others, by birth, and nothing can ever change that. Thus we get heroes such as Aragorn--Gondor doesn’t get to vote about who to lead them, the story simply assumes (and confirms) that Aragorn is the right person, by virtue of birth. Whereas sf is literature born during and after the enlightenment, and (mostly) rejects many of those notions of inherent ‘specialness’ and looks at science and technology as a somewhat more level playing field.

This does lead me to a few odd categorizations: Star Wars becomes a fantasy because of the Jedi (and no silly ‘midichlorian’ ret-conning will change that). Gail Carriger’s recent Parasol Protectorate series becomes sf (as well as being steampunk and romance) because in its universe: a) there is a soul and it is measurable; b) anyone with enough of it can become a werewolf/vampire/ghost with some reliability; c) its existence or lack thereof appears to be heritable.

So I’m not drawing the line based on whether things are possible or not. After all, huge amounts of stuff in sf is not actually possible (warp drives, time travel, etc.) And I’m not assuming that sf has to be set in ‘our’ universe, or anything recognizable as such. I’m focusing instead on the physical laws of the universe of the story. Are they consistent? Do they apply equally to everyone? To go back to LotR for a moment, the dagger Sting is fundamentally technological--it glows in the presence of goblins no matter who is wielding it. But spell-casting magic is the preserve of the select few. By the way, having admitted that some of the magic in Tolkein acts as technology, I must admit that in my rule-of-thumb take on things, one drop of fantasy makes it fantasy. A story with a universe exactly like our own (or even with spaceships) except for one magic sword that can only be activated by one special guy winds up in the fantasy category.

One counter argument is all the super-spiffy heroes in sf: don’t they count as being ‘Born to the Power?’ Lazarus Long is an amazingly Competent Man, as well as being effectively immortal. That’s true, and it certainly indulges the same emotional satisfaction of having a super-special fantasy hero. But Lazarus was the product of a very specific breeding program, and while he is the longest lived of his brethren, he is not fundamentally unique in his universe. So I’ll still call that one sf. I don't need much of an explanation--I just need something I can pretend is an explanation.

I now look forward to teh Internets letting me know just how wrong I am. Thanks!

Pulp Fiction Dinosaurs

2010-10-12T20:50:00.006-05:00

For my last official pre-Golden Age sf books, I went back to the pulps. The last two books I read were given as: “ACE Science Fiction Classic D-473” and “Galaxy Science Fiction Novel #13” and both were priced at 35 cents. Although my editions date from the 1950’s, the actual works are The Greatest Adventure (1929) and Seeds of Life (1931), both by John Taine. Before I get into his fiction, let me mention that John Taine is a pseudonym for Eric Temple Bell, a mathematician at Caltech in its early days. He developed, among other things, the Bell series of numbers, and wrote a number of non-fiction popular math and science books. From what I understand, he kept his fiction writing entirely separate from the rest of his life--to the point where his friends and family were surprised to find out about it after his death. The Mathematical Association of America published a biography of him: The Search for E.T. Bell, Also Known as John Taine which I plan on reading someday.

For the fiction, I started with The Greatest Adventure. This story feels like Taine had run out of Verne books to read and decided to write his own. It is structured much like The Journey to the Center of the Earth, but with a few extra characters. Two seamen come to the house of a wealthy scientist to tell him about some fishy oddities they’ve found--as well as a gushing ocean of oil. (I read this only a few weeks after the Deepwater Horizon well was finally killed, so this didn’t seem like quite so attractive a prospect to me.) The scientist agrees to finance an expedition down to Antarctica--the seamen can profit from the oil, and he’ll profit from the biological research. He also brings along his smart and pretty daughter and the smart young man obviously destined to be a son-in-law. They get to the Southern seas and start having Adventures. There are dinosaurs, and killer weed spores, and gushers of hot gas, and lots of other challenges. In the end they escape with little but their lives.

It’s a fast read, and actually has some things to recommend it to the modern reader. For one, the female lead is not insufferable. She’s actually the best pilot in the bunch and gets to do some flying--she’s not one for having to be rescued all the time (not, I'll grant, the impression you'd get from the cover). Also, the story has a sense of humor, especially in the first mate character. And the whole thing is rich trove of tropes that are more and less common now: it shares an obsession with Antarctica with many other classics (think of At the Mountains of Madness and The Purple Cloud and Who Goes There? among so many others). It must have been useful to have a huge, barely explored, and almost unreachable continent on which to project your fancies. And then there are the dinosaurs! Jurassic Park anyone? Well, these aren’t the product of Man, but nothing says Adventures quite like heroes running away from dinosaurs.

Next I picked up Seeds of Life and it couldn’t be more different. It’s fundamentally a lab story, and has far fewer redeeming qualities. An irresponsible lab tech mutates himself into a genius while mis-using equipment. He takes on a new identity and comes back to run the lab and make its corporate owners rich. Unfortunately, the same radiation that mutates him creates many other horrific beings. He marries the director’s daughter, but horrible things are happening in her womb. Also, his mutations start to wear off (!) and he comes to realize that what he’s set in motion is wrong, but he also can’t stop it. He’s neither the hero nor the viewpoint character of the book--that is another scientist instead. Our hero is simply darn smart. He’s not smart enough to thwart the bad guy, but he knows that something is wrong and does his best to warn people. In any normal novel he would get the girl (the director’s daughter) at last, but this is a very dark book that spends a lot of time teetering on (or crossing the line into) horror, and there’s no happy ending here.

While this book has some effective (horrific) imagery, that’s about the best I can say for it. The plot in a way pre-figures Flowers for Algernon, but it’s the Evil Universe version. The daughter is a horribly stereotyped cliche with no reality of her own--she lacks any semblance of agency and is horrifically punished for the crime of being attracted to the charismatic bad guy instead of the stalwart good guy. (By the way, there are some dinosaurs here as well--including one presented in a theatre to a crowd of disbelieving scientists. Shades of King Kong, two years before that story hit the screens.) The plot is awfully convoluted, and I couldn’t help but feel that it contained just as many twists as needed to fill out an installment count.

For those of you who enjoy the pulp sf adventures of the past, you could do a lot worse than pick up some Taine novels. But you might want to read some reviews first: if I pick up more of his work, I’ll be pretty choosy. I could easily enjoy another romp in the vein of The Greatest Adventure, but I’d like to avoid any more four foot wide black widow spiders dropping onto people’s heads a la Seeds of Life.

Stimulating the SF Core of the Brain

2010-10-01T16:12:00.003-05:00

After a long stint reading 1920’s fantasy, returning to Olaf Stapledon was a breath of fresh air. I had previously read Last and First Men and Star Maker, and found them fascinating. Stapledon tosses off scenarios in a paragraph that other sf writers would build a novel out of. His vision of the very far future, both for humanity and the universe, was neither utopian nor dystopian but utterly captivating. In Star Maker he explored many different kinds of aliens, including sentient stars, which diversity was pretty rare for the 30’s. Most other stories of the time either didn’t have aliens or regarded them as objects of horror and killed them on sight.

Odd John and Sirius are more intimate stories on smaller canvas. They both involve super-beings in contemporary times. Much like Gladiator by Philip Wylie, also written in the mid-1930’s, these supermen do not end well. Odd John is a human, but of a more advanced strain. He has a prolonged physical youth, but is mentally far advanced compared to those around him. He stays out of the limelight, using adult proxies for many of his activities. Eventually he is able to make telepathic contact with others like himself, and they form a colony on a remote island. Unfortunately they are eventually discovered by the British Navy. When the real world finally intrudes on their home, the super-beings decide to end themselves. There is consolation in the fact that none of them die alone, but it is a cold comfort.

Sirius frankly has an even harder time of it. He is a super-dog with human intelligence, the only one of his kind. The scientist who made him, while breeding other sheep dogs that were very smart, was never able able to replicate Sirius’ success. He is raised with the scientist’s family in Wales, again staying out of the limelight. He forms a close bond with the youngest daughter of the family, named Plaxy. He goes through many life stages: growing up and learning about the world, working as a sheep dog, going into a laboratory and learning about the larger world, and eventually running a farm more-or-less on his own. However, he loses many close friends and family in the WWII bombings of England. Finally the war-time tensions in his small town in Wales rise up against him, and he is hunted down. While he doesn’t die alone, his one small death feels more tragic and heart-breaking than that of Odd John’s colonists. They had foreknowledge and embraced their fate; Sirius still wanted to live. [By the way, I am a big ol’ softy dog person, so you can guess which narrative left me in tears.]

Stapledon thinks through these scenarios just as much as he did his far-flung futures. Odd John also goes through many stages as he progresses, systematically tackling and conquering one aspect of humanity after another. Sirius suffers constantly from his dog-like nature: his lack of hands, his lack of clear speech (only the scientist’s family can understand him easily), and his occasional return to a wolf-like nature in the Welsh hills. Stapledon also doesn’t blink when it comes to the sexuality of these isolated individuals. While leaving everything off-stage he makes it clear that incest and bestiality taboos are broken by these characters, and the out-of-wedlock sex hardly worth mentioning.

How do these stories hold up? Rather better than most sf of the time. While each covers two decades, and are firmly grounded in the world of the 1920’s-1940’s, their themes are universal. The characters remain interesting and sympathetic; their outsider perspective on the world gives us a chance to take a different look at things. I reserve the right to change my mind over time, but for now I’m willing to say that Stapledon is right up at the top of my list of favorite sf authors of all time. His stories have a density of ideas that reward re-reading and have in no way aged out. By focusing more on human universal questions he is timeless in a way that Hal Clements (to pick an author focused on science that may become dated) can’t be. While these stories are not known for their novelistic virtues (plotting and character aren’t the point here), there are moments of poetry in Stapledon’s work that accompany the sense of wonder of it all. And they are genuinely moving on an emotional level.

He writes straight to the core of what makes sf my favorite branch of literature, with its way of changing the way I perceive the world. While I am glad that the genre has progressed in the matter of those aforementioned novelistic values, Stapledon’s work still wends its electrodes into the sf-pleasure center of the brain--skipping elaborate preparations and getting straight to the Wonder.

[Old] Star Maker

2010-10-01T16:08:00.003-05:00

[This is a review that I wrote in 2007 on my old website, reprinted here so I can link to it.]

In Last and First Men Olaf Stapledon covered all of human history up to the extinction of mankind roughly two billion years from now. In Star Maker he covers the history of our entire universe, plus other universes as well. Amazingly, he provides a vision of what could be described as a secular religion.

Our narrator is a human who ends up projecting his consciousness into the cosmos and discovers the ability to see things distant in both time and space. As he encounters new species, he gathers alien compatriots with similar abilities, and together they probe the far reaches of the universe and beyond. The structure of the tale is that first he is only able to encounter species very close to humanity in consciousness and level of civilization. As he binds with more alien minds they become able to perceive aliens of much different biology and advancement, eventually leading up to the climactic encounter with the Star Maker himself.

Thus Stapledon is able to let his mind and imagination wander all over an incredibly broad canvas. First we meet aliens much like ourselves, then slightly weirder, then weirder, until we have fish/amphibian symbiotes, vegetable intelligences, the intelligences within stars (very alien), the combined minds of galaxies, and the combined mind of the universe itself. Only at that stage do we get a glimpse of the Star Maker, more accurately a shaper of Universes, and get a brief idea of where we fit in the incredibly grand scheme of things.

The end vision of this book verges on the religious, although it is a religion that even an atheist could love. The Star Maker is making a series of Universes (at least that is how our pathetically linear-time-limited intelligences perceive it), each of which reaches some new aspect of sophistication. Our universe is somewhere in the middle of this “sequence.” The Star Maker does not care about our individual lives and struggles except as they add to the tapestry that becomes the complete aesthetic vision of that particular universe. The Star Maker certainly is not meddling in day-to-day occurrences within any given universe. One of the aliens captures the sentiment thus:

He looked down once more upon the ruined city, then continued, “And if after all there is no Star Maker, if the great company of galaxies leapt into being of their own accord, and even if this little nasty world of ours is the only habitation of the spirit anywhere among the stars, and this world doomed, even so, even so, I must praise. But if there is no Star Maker, what can it be that I praise? I do not know. I will call it only the sharp tang and savour of existence. But to call it this is to say little.

The same liberal, secular humanist world view that Stapledon provided in Last and First Men informs his vision here. He posits that the only way to achieve our fullest potential is to learn to relate to even the most alien beings as “human” in some fundamental way, and to be able to blend our consciousnesses with the Other in order to achieve a higher level of mental sophistication. It is a compelling vision, one that presages much of the New Wave philosophy of alien contact that would be written in the 60s, 70s and beyond. As in the previous volume, Stapledon becomes easier to read the farther he gets from humanity; when he talks about people much like ourselves he can come off as preachy or didactic, but when he describes the truly alien he is at his strongest.

The writing of this book is not the easiest to read; it is in no way a novel, lacking any real plot, character or dialogue. It is a work of pure imagination and philosophy, and it is structured as much as myth as anything else. It is also informed with a certain urgency, written as it was during the Great Depression, close to the start of WWII. It recognizes many political issues of the day: the pacifism of Ghandi and its inability to cope with the fascist threat, the failures of capitalism and how they’re blamed on the proletariat, the numbing of the masses with popular entertainments. It is a window on politically liberal British thought of the time. More than that, however, it could almost have supplied a mythos for the Secular Humanist world view. In reality, Secular Humanism rejected any notion of the deity (see the First Humanist Manifesto: “FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”) and thus couldn’t countenance even such a distant power as Stapledon’s. This is a bit of a shame, since the overall message of the book is a brilliant balancing act between the overall futility of our individual lives and fates, and their place in the overall beauty and aesthetic of the universe. As an atheist I found it a strangely compelling and reassuring vision, one that took into account the realities and scope of the universe as a time and space infinitely vaster than one human life, while still imbuing each individual life, species, solar system and galaxy with some meaning, albeit a humble one. This is not a trivial achievement, to be so realistic without resorting to nihilism, and philosophically it may be one of science fiction’s finest accomplishments. It should be more widely read, and I recommend it to all those looking for deep intellectual engagement with their science fiction.

[Old] Last and First Men

2010-10-01T16:06:00.003-05:00

[This is a review I wrote back in 2007 on my old website, reposted here so I can link to it.]

Last and First Men is completely different from any of the classic adventure tales I’ve been reading recently, and also completely different from almost anything published today. It lacks most of the “essentials” of fiction writing: plot, characters and dialogue. However, that does not keep it from being a fascinating, thought-provoking read.

Last and First Men is written almost as a documentary about the fate of humanity projected into the very far future. Throughout descriptions of the eighteen “races” or phases of Man, humanity repeatedly almost destroys itself, only to pick itself up after millennia or eons and rise up to higher heights, until eventually falling into permanent decline and extinction. It is the work of a fertile imagination, and also a very cosmopolitan definition of “human,” as most of the ages of Man involve creatures much different than ourselves.

Stapledon obviously has a political agenda with this narrative. He pushes a secular, liberal humanist agenda throughout, always with an eye for the futility of it all in the (very) long run. In his mind diversity and cosmopolitan attitudes are key to human progress and survival; only when humans can look at almost all other humans and recognize them as equals can we work together to achieve great works. He doesn’t have much use for technology; in his universe the first race (us) gets hung up on the wonders of aviation and doesn’t progress further, and it takes until the Fifth Men for us to develop any kind of space travel (even though the Second Men were invaded by Martians), and even then it is only interplanetary. For him biology will be more important: instead of developing computers the Fourth Men are essentially gigantic brains, and they end up designing their own successors using tailored breeding programs (a common theme in this story).

The hardest part of the book to read is the first part, where he sketches out a possible future for us, the First Men. Since he was writing in 1931, it is impossible not to compare his predictions with some of what actually occurred: we certainly got to space flight a few eons before he predicted, and we haven’t formed a real world government yet. Some passages are quite prescient, though:

The economic life of the human race had for some time been based on coal, but latterly oil had been found a far more convenient source of power; and as the oil store of the planet was much smaller than its coal store, and the expenditure of oil had of course been wholly uncontrolled and wasteful, a shortage was already being felt. Thus the national ownership of the remaining oil fields had become a main factor in politics and a fertile source of wars.

It’s not a huge leap, and today it is patently obvious, but it shows the detail of his extrapolative process even back then.

Once we leave the First Men behind, surviving only through the most miraculous accident, things are easier to read since you don’t have to compare the text to reality all the time. His imagination runs rampant, through different biological forms, politics, aesthetics, philosophies and social organizations. With a two billion year canvas on which to paint, he doesn’t fill in many details but fills his narrative with variety. He throws away in a sentence or paragraph things that other authors might use to fill an entire trilogy.

The pioneer ship was manned with a navigating crew and a company of scientists, and was successfully dispatched upon a trial trip. The intention was to approach close to the surface of the moon, possibly to circumnavigate it at an altitude of ten thousand feet, and to return without landing. For many days those on earth received radio messages from the vessel’s powerful installation, reporting that all was going well. But suddenly the messages ceased, and no more was ever heard of the vessel. Almost at the moment of the last message, telescopes had revealed a sudden flash of light at a point on the vessel’s course. It was therefore surmised that she had collided with a meteor and fused with the heat of the impact.

Man’s first ever space flight, and neither the ship nor the crew even get names.

For all its distance and lack of emotion, this approach allows the author to investigate a huge scope of human intellectual territory. It is an approach that some other authors perhaps should consider even today. Stephen Baxter often deals with the entire universe in one book or series of books, but usually tries to bow to received wisdom regarding the necessity of having consistent characters that the audience can relate to. The enduring survival (if not huge commercial success) of Stapledon’s work shows that an author can abandon that approach if necessary. Likewise, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history spanning centuries. His approach to getting consistent characters was to use reincarnation. Perhaps simply writing a mock history book would have been just as successful (more so from my perspective; I wasn’t able to finish that book, although I usually enjoy Robinson’s stories).

Stapledon isn’t the sort of author that asks the reader to emotionally engage with his writing, but instead he asks for your brain power. In spanning two billion years he engenders a significant sense of awe and amazement at the huge variety of possibility that the future may hold. Even if it does turn out to be futile (spoiler alert: humanity ends up going extinct), the vast array of experience really seems to be worth it on some fundamental level. Even for the most secular of us, that is an inspiring vision.

Geeking Out: 100 Short Stories

2010-09-28T14:20:00.005-05:00

So I've been reading a lot of short fiction lately, for my new column in Salon Futura. (I've already turned in my second column, and I'm quite proud of it.) Now, it's hard to keep track of everything you need, unless you're one of those people with picture-perfect memories. I'm not. So I have a multi-tiered, way over-complicated system for keeping track that involves a Moleskein notebook and some Google doc spreadsheets.

Why spreadsheets? Because I'm a stone-cold geek at heart, and it helps me keep myself amused by the whole project. I have just finished my 100th short story since I started keeping track (which milestone would've passed me by without the Master Spreadsheet), and I've got some nice crunchy numbers to share.

[Caveat Emptor: this is the most biased possible set of numbers. It only tracks stories that I've read, and specifically stories that I've finished. I skip a story if it doesn't grab me. So these numbers inevitably reflect my own taste. But there is an underlying field out there, and my own proclivities can only distort it so much. Elements here consist of a huge number of subjective classifications, based on nothing more substantive than my own whim. Also, I've been limiting my reading to venues that I can read in a convenient electronic form.]

Here are the genres that I've seen:

SF 48
Fantasy 42
SF w/ some F 3
Horror 2
Alt hist 3
Mainstream 2

Unsurprisingly I prefer SF, but only by a slight margin. I'm trying to cast my net as widely as possible, but I'm afraid I'll never be a horror fan. By the way, I assign every story to one-and-only-one genre, because that's how I keep the master count of stories read.

I am not keeping track of author gender. There are plenty of people keeping track of stats like that, and it's not a discussion that I'm really interested in getting into. Plus, I often don't know the gender of the author I'm reading, especially if they use initials. However, I am keeping track of protagonists:

Male 41
Female 40

These two have been running close to even through the entire project, way more even than you'd expect by random coin-tossing. Those numbers don't add to 100, because we've also got:

Cyborg 3
Animated Object 3
Transgender 2
Gender Undefined 4

...&c. In another gender-related note, I've been keeping track of stories that pass the Bechdel test: 20.

I've also found 16 protagonists that are human and identified by non-white ethnic markers, ranging from Indian to Mexican, Chinese, Philippino, etc. Other protagonists include Aliens (3), Djinn (1), Fairies (1), and Demons (2).

I'm also keeping track of POVs, but there's nothing terribly shocking here:

1st 46
2nd 2
3rd lim 27
3rd omni 21
3rd mult 2

More interesting are settings. Of those stories set on Earth:

Earth's past 12
Earth Present 20
Near future 24
Mid future 8
Far
future 3

Obviously the Mid future/Far future line is quite fuzzy, but either way it's hugely outnumbered by stories set in the Earth's present and near future. And long-range futures are almost balanced by stories set in Earth's past--a slightly disturbing trend for the genre if it holds up.

How about physical settings? Again, we're sticking pretty close to home:

Earth 30
America 39
Generic Fantasy Earth 15

Other places on Earth include: India (2), Africa (3), England (2). And with one appearance each: Philippines, Burma, Antarctica, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Mexico, China, and Morocco. For more exotic settings all we've got are: Space (4), Extrasolar planets (5), Spaceships (1), Elsewhere in our solar system (3), VR (1) and the Ocean (1). And the Afterlife (1).

Finally, I've been keeping track of some tropes. Here are some of the most common:

Violence 27
Happy Ending? 20
Aliens 15
Gods/Goddesses 13
Shape-shifting 13
Sad Ending? 11
Mythical beings 9
Ecological
damage 8
Magic artefact 8
Apocalypse 7
Biotech 7
Academics 6
Brain uploading 6

None of the others have more than 5 showings, and I don't want to bore you with the whole list (93 items and counting).

What does all this add up to? Not much, I just think it's interesting. You might as well. And of course it's all skewed; I've read 4 steampunk stories so far, but if I picked up a steampunk specialty issue of a magazine or a theme anthology that would jump way up. By the way, here are the venues that I've peeked into so far (although I haven't read every recent story in every venue, not by a long shot). If you see something missing, let me know! I'm definitely trying to widen my horizons when it comes to short fiction venues.

Strange Horizons [They're doing their fund drive now, please donate!]
Clarkesworld
Lightspeed
Futurismic
Fantasy Magazine
Abyss & Apex
Nature
Flurb
F&SF
Expanded Horizons
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Port Iris
Crossed Genres
Basement Stories
Asimov's
Subterranean Online
Daily SF
Apex
Tor.com
Weird Tales
Brain Harvest
Midnight East

Declaring Victory!

2010-09-13T09:54:00.003-05:00

I now declare victory in my project to read pre-1939 genre classics! Have I read everything even vaguely genre related published before 1939? No, but I've read all the stuff that I want to, and everything that has been pointed out to me as important and/or influential. Altogether this project consisted of 45 books over roughly four years. In retrospect that doesn't sound like much, but that was squeezed in between all the other reading and work and &c.

This list doesn't include a lot of the really big, well-known classics--mostly because I'd read them in college or high school. I didn't feel the need to re-read all the Verne and Wells, or to revisit Brave New World et. al. This project was all about filling in the gaps, getting acquainted with the lesser known but still important pieces of the history. For archival purposes I wanted to put together this list, and that way I'll be able to reference it as needed. The list is ordered in the reverse order that I read them, most recent first.

So what's next? The next big thing is the reading needed for the Egan book, and I'll be starting on that shortly. And of course I'm trying to stay on top of new short fiction for Salon Futura. But I'll also look to fill in a few gaps in my Golden Age reading (for instance I've never read Lest Darkness Fall or The Space Merchants). That's a much shorter list, and eventually I'll make my way to the New Wave, which will be another Major Undertaking.

1. The Greatest Adventure, John Taine, 1929
2. The Seeds of Life, John Taine, 1931
3. Sirius, Olaf Stapledon, 1944
4. Odd John, Olaf Stapledon, 1935
5. Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees, 1926
6. The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, Edgar Allen Poe, 1838
7. The Hour of the Dragon, Robert E. Howard, 1936
8. At the Mountains of Madness, H. P. Lovecraft, 1936
9. The Shadow over Innsmouth, H. P. Lovecraft, 1936
10. The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Lord Dunsany, 1924
11. Lilith, George MacDonald, 1895
12. We, Yevgeny Zamiatin, 1921
13. The Book of Wonder, Lord Dunsany, 1912
14. The Princess and Curdie, George MacDonald, 1883
15. The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison, 1922
16. R. U. R., Karel Capek, 1920
17. Jurgen, James Branch Cabell, 1919
18. The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald, 1882
19. Phantastes, George MacDonald, 1858
20. Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsay, 1920
21. The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton, 1908
22. The Nightland, William Hope Hodgson, 1912
23. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, ~1400 [Norton Critical Edition]
24. A Dreamer’s Tales, Lord Dunsany, 1910
25. The Ghost Pirates, William Hope Hodgson, 1909
26. The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories, Lord Dunsany, 1908
27. Dracula, Bram Stoker, 1897
28. The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson, 1908
29. Kim, Rudyard Kipling, 1901
30. The Purple Cloud, M. P. Shiel, 1901
31. Utopia, Thomas More, 1561
32. Before Adam, Jack London, 1907
33. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1899
34. Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy, 1887
35. A Martian Odyssey, Stanley G. Weinbaum, 1934
36. Science Fiction of the 1930’s, ed. Damon Knight
37. The Moon Pool, A. Merritt, 1919
38. Gladiator, Philip Wylie, 1930
39. Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon, 1930
40. Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon, 1937
41. Galactic Patrol, Doc Smith, 1937
42. She, H. Rider Haggard, 1887
43. King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard, 1885
44. Princess of Mars, John Carter, 1909
45. A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887

Of all of these the ones that I flat-out enjoyed the most were: King Solomon's Mines, everything by Stapledon, A Martian Odyssey, The Sword of Welleran and Others, and At the Mountains of Madness. The ones that I was simply glad to see the end of include: She, Galactic Patrol, The Moon Pool, everything by William Hope Hodgson, Lilith, and The Hour of the Dragon.

Burned Out on Old-School Fantasy

2010-09-12T17:07:00.003-05:00

As I noted in this post, Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter didn't do much for me. Now that I've finished Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist with similar feelings, I wonder if I wasn't simply burned out on pre-Tolkein fantasy. I'd read rather a lot of it over the last year, and it was with a feeling of homecoming that I turned back to Olaf Stapledon's science fiction (to be covered in a later post).

Lud-in-the-Mist is the story of the upper class of a prosperous town dealing with drug smuggling from Fairyland. Early in the story, the entire class of the young ladies' finishing school is corrupted by the 'fairy fruit' and runs off to Fairyland. The town and the town government greets this with an upset but resigned shrug. But when the Mayor, Nat Chanticleer, feels that his only son may be in jeopardy from this source, he moves Heaven and Earth and changes his entire personality, sacrificing his role and his reputation to protect his boy. I'm really feelin' the love there. (I know, applying different standards to an older work. But *no one* goes running off after their vulnerable daughters? Really? OK.)

The transformation of Nat is a pretty dramatic one, and it's really the heart of the story. Most of the rest of the book is atmosphere and world-building as we learn about Lud, Fairyland and their historical relationship. There are also lots of satirical digs at English class relations. It's all pretty impressive, and I'm sure it was even more so for people reading it back in the 1920's. However, I found it to be easy to put down. Actually, I ended up putting it down for almost three weeks in the middle, which almost certainly didn't help me get a unified view of the book. Certainly being an American in the 21st century, the social commentary didn't really resonate with me.

One thing that stuck with me is that the people of Lud felt very much like Hobbits. I assume that Mirrlees and Tolkein were drawing off the same source material for their characters. In that, Nat's journey from inaction to action is a bit like Bilbo's at the beginning of The Hobbit. Another interesting bit is that Mirrlees' Fairy is rather more threatening than Elfland in Dunsany. Elfland was a place of dreamlike stasis, but Mirrlees' fairy is a bit more active and almost meanacing, with various denizens running around spreading mischief. It felt more alien, and in that way one can see echoes with Neil Gaiman's work (who of course provides an introduction for the volume I read).

Anyway, that wraps up my pre-Tolkein fantasy reading. What have I learned? Overall, there is a rich vein of Western fantasy that existed before Tolkein--he in no way sprang fully formed from the veins of the Norse eddas. (Not news to many of you, of course, but I had only known that in an academic way before.) You can definitely trace these early works through their influence on modern authors such as Gaiman and Kelly Link. Many of these early works are beautifully written (although some aren't: I'm looking at you, Worm Ouroboros!) and many are very psychologically and philosophically complex (I'm thinking of George MacDonald's Phantastes and David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus respectively). And of course, you've got the mix of satire, fluffy entertainment, and serious themes that we still find today. There's a lot of richness to be found in the literature of the late 19th and early 20th century. I'm very glad that I took this rather long tour through that history, I've found it to be entirely rewarding, even if I didn't uncritically love every work that I read.

A Short Fiction Bonanaza

2010-09-02T10:36:00.005-05:00

So the newest entry in the non-fiction-magazine-about-the-speculative-fiction-field has arrived! Salon Futura #1 is here, and it's got a lot of good stuff. There's a podcast with Gary K. Wolfe, Nnedi Okorafor and Fábio Fernandes, plus interviews with China Mieville and Lauren Beukes. Editor Cheryl Morgan covers the book reviews, Sam Jordison covers 19th century inventiveness, and Jonathan Clements writes on the passing of anime director Satoshi Kon. My contribution is a review of three short stories: "Coyote Barbie" by Cat Rambo (Expanded Horizons) , "Ice Moon Tale" by Eilis O'Neal (Abyss and Apex), and "Throwing Stones" by Mishelle Baker (Beneath Ceaseless Skies). I hope that you'll check it out and enjoy it!

And now, (because what teh Internets need more of is my take on short fiction) here is my review of Ted Chiang's new novella.

“Lifecycle of Software Objects” is available from Subterranean press, continuing their tradition of publishing top-rate stand-alone novellas from the field’s best authors. (To much success--I notice that "Lifecycle" is already sold out.) To drastically oversimplify the premise of this story: imagine digital pets that you could train--but that would have a human child’s potential to learn. Of course they’re very cute and responsive. They don’t cry and they go to sleep (suspended consciousness) when you tell them to. If you make a mistake, you can roll them back to a previous iteration and start over. Now imagine what happens to all these beings once their popularity fades.

Our viewpoint characters are Ana and Derek. Ana is an animal researcher originally brought in by the digients’ developers to help with their pre-training. Each model of digient is trained up to at least a toddler’s level. Then copies of that trained version are sold to the public. Derek is a programmer who helped with the visual animation routines for the digients. They each adopt digients from the original models. Derek has Marco and Polo, two instances of a panda bear character who have the same genome but were trained differently. Ana has Jax, a copper-polished robot avatar that she helped train.

We spend many years with these characters, getting vignettes at roughly one year intervals. Here Chiang takes full advantage of the novella’s length (“Lifecycle” is his longest piece to date): he is able to work through many variations and implications of the core idea of growing artificial sentient beings. There are good owners and bad owners, software hacks and platform issues. As the original digients’ popularity wanes, Ana and Derek remain part of a group of die hard owners doing their best to support them. Newer models come on the market. Jax, Marco, and Polo grow in sophistication and understanding of their own circumstances.

Throughout these years, Derek has an unrequited crush on Ana. For a long time he’s married, but eventually he divorces. Inevitably, at just that time Ana moves in with her boyfriend. They remain in close contact over the digient issues. This subplot helps to motivate both the characters in various ways. It also provides a useful illustration that human decisions often aren’t made for ‘rational’ reasons. As the digients approach the age and capability level at which a human child would become an adult, it serves as a counterpoint: at what point should we trust another being with control of its own destiny?

Everything in “Lifecycle” is laid out neatly, progressing neatly from Point A to Point B. The language is simple and smooth, told in present tense and not wasting any time. In addition to the saga of the main digients, we also get a fascinating array of variations on the same basic concept: digients trained to be OCD about game-playing, trained to be useful personal secretaries, trained (or untrained) to be aliens, given legal emancipation by their owners. It thoroughly covers a wide and thought-provoking amount of ground. It also has a rather timeless quality: for all that one can use analogies to things like Second Life and Tamagotchis, it feels like this could have been written twenty years ago or twenty years from now and been equally interesting.

Nonetheless, I wasn’t as impressed by this as I have been by some of Chiang’s other works. While it is thorough and thought-provoking, I never got that opening-out, mind-expanding moment where my understanding changes in a ‘Wow!’ moment. That is a damn high standard to set--and one that only Chiang meets with any consistency, making its absence here more noticeable. It's also a very personal standard: "Exhalation" may not have had that effector on others, but "Lifecycle" may hit that sweet spot for someone else. In addition, I felt that the Ana/Derek subplot wasn’t entirely integral to the story, that it didn’t synchronize with the overall theme of the digient’s growth and potential.

But at the end of the day there’s no question: this is one of the best sf short fiction pieces you’ll read this year. “Lifecycle” is well-written, thoughtful, and entirely award-worthy. And don’t forget the illustrations! In Subterranean’s publication, Christian Pearce supplies spare but evocative illustrations, with the digient world in grey scale and the human world in red. They provide very effective amplification to the emotional beats of the story.

An Announcement, Plus Fun Stuff

2010-08-30T09:26:00.003-05:00

As I slowly get my post-school life back on track, here are some random bits:

On the latest SFSignal podcast, I was part of a round-table about Sword & Sorcery and its sf equivalents. I think that Jay Garmon made an excellent point about the efficacy of violence, and how appealing it is in bad economic times. After the round-table I was also the interviewee of the week. That was a lot of fun--I hadn't been interviewed by anyone since high school. In the podcast I was able to announce the new project I'm undertaking: a book about Greg Egan. It will be due in March 2012, and should cover all his works, his themes, and give some background on the science behind his stories. All in ~70,000 words! I'll have my work cut out for me, but I'm really looking forward to starting in on the research.

After that 'important stuff,' I also wanted to show y'all some neat videos that have been sitting in my inbox for too long. Two of these come from my friend and fencing afficianado, John Trojanowski, and the NASA specific one comes from my Pyro co-workers.

Awesome compilation of cinematic sword fights, showing the common elements:

Jane Austen's "Fight Club"

Neil deGrasse Tyson as one of NASA's best cheerleaders:

A Bundle o' Classics

2010-08-23T16:35:00.003-05:00

As I was in the final days of my Masters degree (now completely over WOOOHOOOO!), I was still reading. But I wasn’t doing much writing. There’s too much water under the bridge now to do a separate review for each of these classic works, but I wanted to at least get my disorganized thoughts on record. As such:

H. P. Lovecraft, Shadow Over Innsmouth and At the Mountains of Madness
I’d read Lovecraft short fiction before, and this was my foray into his novels. I liked them better than I thought I would. After wading through all the “eldritch horrors that cannot be described” stuff, there’s some really good sf world building buried in there, especially in Mountains. The back stories of all the alien races and how they came into contact with humanity was pretty cool, especially if you read it as straight sf instead of getting all freaked out by it like the narrators did. It would have been fascinating to see what Lovecraft would have done 10 years later with Campbell’s Astounding as a primary market instead of Weird Tales.

Generally speaking I liked Mountains better than Shadows (and thanks to Mark Kelly for recommending the former). I’m a sucker for Arctic/Antarctic exploration narratives to begin with, having loved non-fiction such as The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard as well as fiction like Dan Simmon’s recent The Terror. I also felt that the world-building and alien archaeology hung together better, and the narrators weren’t so unmanned by their fear as the guy in Shadows. And in Shadows I’m afraid I just can’t get quite as horrified by the prospect of miscegenation as Lovecraft obviously expects. Finally, there’s a moment in Mountains where he’s ramped up the tension to a peak, then presents a picture of a Shoggoth overtaking the heroes that presented me with a perfect, and perfectly scary, visual image—much stronger than average for me. (By the way, this is also something I noticed with Van Vogt—the stand-alone visual image that is so perfect and stark that it really sticks in your head.)

Edgar Allen Poe, Narrative of Mr. Gordon A. Pym
This was referenced by Lovecraft in Mountains, so I went back and picked it up. It’s a bracelet story: a series of vignettes that can be wrapped up whenever the author’s contract runs out. This was an easy read—Poe really was a fantastic writer, especially at the sentence level—but didn’t necessarily stick in my head much. It also had a moment of vivid visual horror, when shipwreck survivors see a ship coming towards them, only to realize that it is a ship manned only by the dead. Reminded me of the Tales of the Black Freighter sequence from Alan Moore’s Watchmen. By the by, I also read this story (in places) as sf, when it describes Antarctic exploration that hadn’t yet taken place. Although I don’t necessarily think that “it will get warmer as you get nearer the Pole!” was the best piece of extrapolative prediction ever.

Robert E. Howard, The Hour of the Dragon
Speaking of bracelet tales, this is one of the Conan the Cimmerian (or Conan the Barbarian) novels. Or rather, ‘novels,’ as this is also a series of adventure vignettes. My husband Curtis pointed out that my ‘classics’ list was sorely lacking in Sword and Sorcery, and since I plan on reading Moorcock someday, I picked this up. In the spirit of Gary & Jonathan’s “Books You Don’t Need to Read” bit, Hour of the Dragon is almost exactly the book you expect. Conan is deposed from his throne and almost killed by sneaky evil magic. But his barbarian fortitude, physicality, and sex appeal to women help him win the day. It’s racist, misogynist, and has no sense of humor (much like Howard’s good friend, the above mentioned Lovecraft). I feel no need to read any more Conan stories, thank you very much.

Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter
I’m afraid to say that I was also somewhat underwhelmed by this classic of the fantasy genre. I think my expectations were set too high, both by Neil Gaiman’s frequent gushing about the book and my own gushing about Dunsany’s short fiction. It was good, don’t get me wrong. Beautifully written, with characters that feel True even when they’re obviously archetypes. And the conception of Faery as a place where nothing ever changes, the antithesis of our world of tumult and turmoil, was a fascinating one. However, I felt that it dragged at points, and the ending was a disappointment to me: in keeping with the nature of Faery, the tale eventually just stops dead. Felt a bit like stepping on a step that wasn’t there. There are lots of charming elements: the troll in the pigeon coot, the foxes and unicorns, the break in the middle to ‘historically ground’ the tale through the gift of a unicorn horn once given to a Pope, and others. But it didn’t seem to have the coherence I was expecting and it didn’t quite lift me up and carry me off to its world the way I was hoping.

So with all that I’m much closer to being finished with my pre-Campbell sf/fantasy reading. I have high hopes of finishing the last of it before the end of the year. That’s especially important since I’ll soon be embarking on an extensive project reading Greg Egan’s works, and it will be good to have the 1920’s/30’s stuff out of the way.

Emergent Systems for Dummies

2010-07-27T20:45:00.002-05:00

It's fun to think of intelligence as an emergent property of complex systems. And we've been thinking about it for decades. From The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) to (ghod save us) the 2005 movie Stealth. The latest entry in the Internet-develops-intelligence genre is Robert J. Sawyer's WWW: Wake, the first book of a proposed trilogy and a 2010 Hugo nominee for Best Novel. As with most Sawyer books it is a solid, fast read with some interesting speculation--but ultimately it feels a bit like cotton candy.

At first the story focuses on Caitlin, who was born blind. She is 16 and navigating high school in Canada. She's an internet addict and math whiz: posting on live journal, instant messaging, doing her homework and research. A researcher in Japan contacts her. Because of the specific (and very rare) nature of her blindness (her eyes receive light properly, but the signals are not correctly interpreted by her brain's visual center), he believes that she is a good candidate for an experimental technology. He'll implant a sensor to record the signals from her eyes, process them, and feed them back into her visual processing center.

It doesn't work at first. She goes back home with the signal processing unit installed and open to the internet so that it can download updates as the researcher pushes them out. At a certain point, she gets an update and begins to see... the internet. Nodes and lines of connections of different weights and colors. Obviously this isn't what her parents were hoping for, but she's pretty stoked--it's the first time she ever seen anything.

From the beginning of the book, in the interstices between chapters, we get hints of a consciousness emerging... somewhere. In China, a nascent epidemic causes the government to go in and kill everyone in a specific rural geographical region. While they're implementing this cleansing, they shut down the Chinese communication connection to the rest of the world, blocking the three main internet and telephone cables that bring data in and out of the country. We see the perspective of the Chinese premiere and a Chinese human rights activist as this is happening. The emergent Internet intelligence is very confused--first feeling lessened, then being reconnected to itself. It begins to form the concepts of Self and Other and that there are external things that effect its existence.

You can possibly see where this is going. Caitlin can see the internet, and the Internet can see her. Eventually they make contact, and things go from there. There are a lot of cool things that Sawyer brings up as the book rolls to the end (although not the end of the story; remember that Sawyer is setting up for two more books). There's the way Caitlin learns about her sight, and the internet learns about the world, and some fascinating stuff on signal processing, information theory and various mathematical techniques. The technobabble that hit my specialty (neuroengineering and signal processing) was all within the realm of possibility. There's certainly enough hard sf meat there to satisfy the Analog crowd. And frankly, I'll forgive a lot just to read about an AI learning about the world via Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg.

I guess my main problem with this book is that it feels a bit slight: everything seems to come a bit too easily to both Caitlin and the emergent AI. Everyone in this book jumps to conclusions that just so happen to be correct at various times. Things happen much faster than seems realistic, especially with the blindness research. Wake's focus is so narrow that this near future doesn't feel as fleshed out and lived in as I'd like (although it was fascinating to read about the technology available today to help blind people navigate school and work). I was also disappointed that after we'd spent the first third of the book with the Chinese plot, once the Chinese reconnect to the internet all those characters are unceremoniously dropped, never to be heard from again. What were the consequences, both international and domestic? What happened to the human rights activist, last seen breaking his leg attempting to escape from the police? I can only hope that they'll come up again in the remaining two books, but considering this book as a standalone it seemed like their only purpose was to teach the Internet AI an Important Life Lesson, and after that their stories weren't important anymore. Really a shame, because I was really hooked by that plotline and how it showed the interconnectedness of the modern world.

All in all, this is another solid but somewhat old-fashioned entry from Robert J. Sawyer. I expect that it will be a strong contender for the Hugo; it has many of the same elements that appealed to voters in his previous nominee, Rollback. It's got some excellent science speculation and a fun plot, but its world-building feels thin and the hand of the author can be rather clearly seen nudging the characters onto the right speculative tracks. A good solid read, but not exactly cutting-edge sf.

No Dystopia Like a Russian Dystopia

2010-07-15T12:14:00.004-05:00

In my stroll through the classics, I feel like I've gotten my fill of utopian literature, now thankfully out of style. However, in reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921) I filled in a gap in my dystopian literature library. I've read 1984 (1949) and Brave New World (1932) of course, and also "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forester (1909 -- a brilliant short story, if you're interested). We stands out both for its power and also for its context: an early supporter of the Communist revolution in Russia, Zamyatin quickly realized the abuses that were being perpetrated by those in power. This work is a reaction to those abuses and a classic "If This Goes On--" style warning. However, it couldn't be published in the author's native land. It was published first in English after being translated. There was an attempt to sneak it into Russia by selling a version supposedly translated from the Czech, but the book had already been banned. Apparently it wasn't published openly in Russia until 1988. Zamyatin himself was forced into exile in France starting in 1931. Those very real experiences add a lot to the power of the novel.

The novel's narrator is D-503, the chief engineer of the first interstellar space ship. He lives in a completely controlled state, the United State: one government, a walled-off nation, no privacy, everything timed down to the minute. Because of his prominent role, he is targeted by the female head of a revolutionary movement, I-330. He falls in love with her and becomes very confused--anything that happens unpredictably throws him into complete cognitive estrangement. Up until the events of the novel, his life had in every way been circumscribed and regimented. This is probably the main strength of the novel, to intensely show how someone raised under state control would be completely thrown by even the simplest unpredictable event. He doesn't understand what he is feeling for I-330, he doesn't understand what her motivations are, and he often tries to run back to the comforting regularity of the state. He is the opposite of the Competent Man--because he was never allowed to become one. This can make him a little annoying to read: in both narration and dialog he often stutters, there are many ellipses, and at times he becomes completely unhinged from reality because he cannot reconcile what is happening with what he has known. It is both effective and disconcerting to read.

"It's clear... that is...!" I wanted... (damn that cursed "it's clear!"). [p. 29]

He and I-330 manage to meet in a somewhat secret meeting-house outside the city and sometimes in their quarters in the city. Brief periods of privacy are allowed for each night for couples to have sex, and they take advantage of those times. D-503's relationship is made even more complicated by the needs of his former sexual partner, O-90, who wants desperately to have his child, and the unwanted attention of U-, an ugly woman who can foil his plans. While D-503 is obviously a very intelligent engineer (many of his metaphors are explicitly mathematical; this reminded me of Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad and also reminds one that Zamyatin was trained as an engineer in Russia), almost everyone in this book seems to have figured out what is going on politically except him.

D-503 becomes more or less incapacitated by what is going on. He goes to a doctor, who may be sympathetic to the rebellion, and is diagnosed with having developed a soul. Apparently he's not the only one; to combat the epidemic, the United State (headed by the "Well-Doer") orders mandatory lobotomies for everyone. During this time the interstellar ship Intrepid is launched, but the rebellion faction who hoped to take control of the ship is thwarted by agents of the state. D-503 is unaware of his role in tipping off the state to the takeover attempt. The end of the story, as we expect from dystopian literature, is not happy for anyone.

This book uses many of the tropes that ground the dystopian subgenre: numbers instead of names, state control through panopticon, euphemisms for horrific things, awareness of media propaganda (sometimes newspaper articles are included in the text), and a protagonist encouraged to challenge the system because of romantic love. One thing that I found interesting was that the system of state control was based on Taylorism--the first 'scientific management' system meant to maximize the output of workers. This is something we would today associate with a corporate/capitalist dystopia instead of a Communist one. So instead of having the sacred Time Tables of the United State based on a WWII fascist "make the trains run on time" idea, they are instead based on a broad expansion of labor efficiency management principles (which are often misapplied and inhumane even today).

I can't say that I liked We. Dystopian literature isn't usually the sort of thing that one enjoys. However, I appreciated the power of the narrative and the techniques used to convey it. It is a very effective piece that I think illustrates cognitive dissonance or estrangement about as much as anything I've ever read. If you only read two dystopian novels, I think they would still have to be Brave New World and 1984, just because they are such touchstones in the West. However, if you read three such books, I would recommend that We be the third.

Now, for the Fantasy Canon

2010-07-13T13:29:00.004-05:00

Of course, one can't just look at the sf side of the aisle: thanks to Neth Space, there's also the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks list. Same rules as the sf list: Bold means I've read it, Italics means I own it but haven't read it yet, and Strikethrough means that I'm not planning on reading it and I'm fully comfortable skipping it.

1 - The Book of the New Sun, Volume 1: Shadow and Claw - Gene Wolfe
2 - ~~Time and the Gods~~ - Lord Dunsany
3 - The Worm Ouroboros - E.R. Eddison
4 - Tales of the Dying Earth - Jack Vance
5 - Little, Big - John Crowley
6 - The Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny
7 - Viriconium - M. John Harrison
8 - ~~The Conan Chronicles, Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle~~ - Robert E. Howard
9 - ~~The Land of Laughs~~ - Jonathan Carroll
10 - The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea - L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

11 - Lud-in-the-Mist - Hope Mirrlees
12 - The Book of the New Sun, Volume 2: Sword and Citadel - Gene Wolfe
13 - Fevre Dream - George R. R. Martin
14 - Beauty - Sheri S. Tepper
15 - The King of Elfland's Daughter - Lord Dunsany
16 - The Conan Chronicles, Volume 2: The Hour of the Dragon - Robert E. Howard
17 - Elric - Michael Moorcock
18 - The First Book of Lankhmar - Fritz Leiber
19 - Riddle-Master - Patricia A. McKillip
20 - ~~Time and Again~~ - Jack Finney

21 - ~~Mistress of Mistresses~~ - E.R. Eddison
22 - Gloriana or the Unfulfill'd Queen - Michael Moorcock
23 - The Well of the Unicorn - Fletcher Pratt
24 - ~~The Second Book of Lankhmar~~ - Fritz Leiber
25 - ~~Voice of Our Shadow~~ - Jonathan Carroll
26 - ~~The Emperor of Dreams~~ - Clark Ashton Smith
27 - ~~Lyonesse I: Suldrun's Garden~~ - Jack Vance
28 - ~~Peace~~ - Gene Wolfe
29 - The Dragon Waiting - John M. Ford
30 - ~~Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe~~ - Michael Moorcock

31 - Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams - C.L. Moore
32 - The Broken Sword - Poul Anderson
33 - The House on the Borderland and Other Novels - William Hope Hodgson
34 - ~~The Drawing of the Dark~~ - Tim Powers
35 - ~~Lyonesse II and III: The Green Pearl and Madouc~~ - Jack Vance
36 - ~~The History of Runestaff~~ - Michael Moorcock
37 - A Voyage to Arcturus - David Lindsay
38 - Darker Than You Think - Jack Williamson
39 - ~~The Mabinogion~~ - Evangeline Walton
40 - ~~Three Hearts & Three Lions~~ - Poul Anderson

41 - Grendel - John Gardner
42 - The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick
43 - WAS - Geoff Ryman
44 - Song of Kali - Dan Simmons
45 - Replay - Ken Grimwood
46 - Sea Kings of Mars and Other Worldly Stories - Leigh Brackett
47 - The Anubis Gates - Tim Powers
48 - ~~The Forgotten Beasts of Eld~~ - Patricia A. McKillip
49 - Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury
50 - ~~The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales~~ - Rudyard Kipling

Unsurprisingly, I've read a lower percentage of the fantasy (16%) than the sf (39%). I also disagree with a higher selection of their choices. Although, usually it's because I'm planning on reading different things from the same authors--I've got almost no quibble with their choice of important authors there. Arguments welcome in the comments!

Classics Canon

2010-07-12T10:51:00.003-05:00

So there's a meme going around associated with the new group blog covering the SFF Masterworks series published by Gollancz. Since my approach to canon formation (i.e. the 'classics' that I feel I need to read) has been entirely personal and idiosyncratic, I thought I'd see how my reading list stacks up with the Masterworks list. So in this list, Bold means I've read it, Italics means I own it but haven't read it yet, and Strikethrough means that I'm not planning on reading it and I'm fully comfortable skipping it. Let me know what you think I've got totally wrong here--is there anything I must must must read that I might be skipping?

I - Dune - Frank Herbert
II - The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
III - The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick
IV - The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester
V - A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller, Jr.
VI - Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
VII - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
VIII - Ringworld - Larry Niven
IX - The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
X - The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham

2 - I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
3 - Cities in Flight - James Blish
~~4 - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?~~ - Philip K. Dick
5 - The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester
6 - ~~Babel-17~~ - Samuel R. Delany
7 - Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
8 - The Fifth Head of Cerberus - Gene Wolfe
9 - Gateway - Frederik Pohl
10 - The Rediscovery of Man - Cordwainer Smith

11 - Last and First Men - Olaf Stapledon
12 - Earth Abides - George R. Stewart
13 - ~~Martian Time-Slip~~ - Philip K. Dick
14 - The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
15 - Stand on Zanzibar - John Brunner
16 - The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin
17 - ~~The Drowned World~~ - J. G. Ballard
18 - ~~The Sirens of Titan~~ - Kurt Vonnegut
19 - ~~Emphyrio~~ - Jack Vance
20 - A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick

21 - Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon
22 - Behold the Man - Michael Moorcock
23 - ~~The Book of Skulls~~ - Robert Silverberg
24 - The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
25 - Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
26 - Ubik - Philip K. Dick
27 - Timescape - Gregory Benford
28 - More Than Human - Theodore Sturgeon
29 - Man Plus - Frederik Pohl
30 - A Case of Conscience - James Blish

31 - The Centauri Device - M. John Harrison
32 - ~~Dr. Bloodmoney~~ - Philip K. Dick
33 - ~~Non-Stop~~ - Brian Aldiss
34 - The Fountains of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke
35 - Pavane - Keith Roberts
36 - ~~Now Wait for Last Year~~ - Philip K. Dick
37 - Nova - Samuel R. Delany
38 - The First Men in the Moon - H. G. Wells
39 - The City and the Stars - Arthur C. Clarke
40 - Blood Music - Greg Bear

41 - ~~Jem~~ - Frederik Pohl
42 - Bring the Jubilee - Ward Moore
43 - VALIS - Philip K. Dick
44 - The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin
45 - ~~The Complete Roderick~~ - John Sladek
46 - ~~Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said~~ - Philip K. Dick
47 - The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells
48 - Grass - Sheri S. Tepper
49 - ~~A Fall of Moondust~~ - Arthur C. Clarke
50 - Eon - Greg Bear

51 - The Shrinking Man - Richard Matheson
52 - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K. Dick
53 - The Dancers at the End of Time - Michael Moorcock
54 - The Space Merchants - Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
55 - ~~Time Out of Joint~~ - Philip K. Dick
56 - ~~Downward to the Earth~~ - Robert Silverberg
57 - ~~The Simulacra~~ - Philip K. Dick
58 - ~~The Penultimate Truth~~ - Philip K. Dick
59 - Dying Inside - Robert Silverberg

61 - The Child Garden - Geoff Ryman
62 - Mission of Gravity - Hal Clement
63 - ~~A Maze of Death~~ - Philip K. Dick
64 - Tau Zero - Poul Anderson
65 - Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke
66 - Life During Wartime - Lucius Shepard
67 - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang - Kate Wilhelm
68 - Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
69 - ~~Dark Benediction~~ - Walter M. Miller, Jr.
70 - ~~Mockingbird~~ - Walter Tevis

74 - ~~Inverted World~~ - Christopher Priest
75 - Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
76 - H.G. Wells - The Island of Dr. Moreau
77 - Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End
78 - H.G. Wells - The Time Machine
79 - Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren (July 2010)
80 - Brian Aldiss - Helliconia (August 2010)

81 - H.G. Wells - ~~Food of the Gods~~ (Sept. 2010)
82 - Jack Finney - ~~The Body Snatchers~~ (Oct. 2010)
83 - Joanna Russ - The Female Man (Nov. 2010)
84 - M.J. Engh - ~~Arslan~~ (Dec. 2010)

Overall I feel like I've got a pretty good record here. I'm definitely weak on the New Wave, but solid on the Golden Age and Golden Age precursors. I'm not as big a fan of Philip K. Dick as the Gollancz publishers, but that's OK.

Classics Update

2010-07-12T10:27:00.008-05:00

Back in March I posted a list of the remaining genre classics that I wanted to read, and remarked at few there were left. But of course, every time I finish a book on this list, I think of another one to add. So it's been morphing quite a bit recently. But I'm pretty sure I'll be finished with my pre-Golden Age reading by the end of the year, if not sooner. Links go to my reviews.

~~The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym~~, Edgar Allen Poe (1838)
~~The Princess and Curdie~~, George MacDonald (1883) Optional
~~Lilith~~, George MacDonald (1895)
~~Book of Wonder~~, Lord Dunsany (1912) Optional
~~The Worm Ouroborous~~, E. R. Eddington (1922)
~~King of Elfland's Daughter~~, Lord Dunsany (1924)
We, George Zamiatin (1925)
~~Lud-in-the-Mist~~, Mirrlees (1926)
~~The Greatest Adventure~~, John Taine (1929)
~~Seeds of Life~~, John Taine (1931)
*The Crystal Horde, John Taine (1930)
*The Time Stream, John Taine (1931)
*Before the Dawn, John Taine (1934)
~~Odd John~~, Olaf Stapledon (1935)
(Since they're bundled together, I'll also pick up ~~Sirius~~ by Stapledon, 1944)
~~Shadows Over Innsmouth~~, Lovecraft (1936)
~~At the Mountains of Madness~~, Lovecraft (1936)
~~The Hour of the Dragon~~, Robert E. Howard (1936)

I'm going to be reading the Poe and Howard stories first, because I have them on Stanza on my iPhone. Soon I want to go back to reading mostly short fiction (I get Asimov's, Analog, F&SF, and Interzone on eReader for the iPhone through Fictionwise) on that platform. Everything else I'm planning to read in dead-tree edition.

George MacDonald Completely Loses Me

2010-07-04T14:35:00.003-05:00

Amazingly enough, even back in the 1880s you could look at a sequel and say "Dude, the original was better." The Princess and Curdie (1883) is the sequel to The Princess and the Goblin. It comes across as more moralistic and heavy-handed than the original, and lacks some of its charm. Continuing on to MacDonald's final piece of adult fantasy, Lilith (1895), I have come to the conclusion that his genre work took a downhill turn after The Princess and the Goblin and never really recovered.

Curdie begins one year after Goblin. Curdie is 15 now and turning into a teenager, with a bit of the angst that entails. However, after shooting a pigeon and realizing that it belonged to the Galadriel/Grandmother figure from the first book, he sets his life back on the right path. The fairy godmother sends him on a journey to the capital of the kingdom. She grants him a few boons: the ability to tell good people from bad by holding their hands, and a big ugly monster, Lina, who is really a good person inside. As he travels to the capital he and Lina recruit more unique and ugly monsters, which will of course come in handy later.

Curdie gets to the capital, and is immediately treated badly by the corrupt and petty townsfolk. Only one old woman and her granddaughter are nice to him. He is arrested and led off to jail in a moment rather strongly recalling Christ's journey to Gethsemane. Lina finds him and they bust out of jail and sneak into the castle. It turns out that the King is being poisoned slowly by his staff, especially the Lord Chancellor and the doctor. Princess Irene from the original book has been too naïve to see any of this (which I found a bit hard to swallow, given how with-it she was a year previous) but is immediately convinced by Curdie's testimony.

So they (mostly Curdie) separate out the bad people (lots) from the good people (few) in the castle, and all the ugly monsters come in and drive out or capture the bad people. That's all well and good, but the King isn't back to being an effective King yet, and the townsfolk are conspiring against him. They call over to the neighboring kingdom, offering to sell out their kingdom for good treatment. Eventually the King, Curdie, Irene, the lone good soldier, a page, a handmaid, and all the ugly monsters go out to face the invading army. It predictably doesn't go well until the fairy godmother saves the day.

MacDonald can't contain his cynicism even at the end. The denouement mentions that the King gets better and reforms the kingdom. Irene and Curdie marry and are a great King and Queen. But they don't have any children and the next king is so greedy that he mines all the minerals (mostly gold) out from under the castle, collapsing it and leading to the collapse and erasure of the kingdom.

So basically, this book is all about the divine right of kings and how the awful urban merchant and middle classes are corrupt and venal. It's even mentioned that Curdie and his parents are of a noble bloodline, which of course explains why they're such good people and it's OK for him to be King. And of course, the next king not from that bloodline causes the complete destruction of the kingdom. It's a bit jarring to see it laid out so heavy-handedly; sure, in Lord of the Rings Aragorn is likewise of a noble bloodline, but this is a bit different. From MacDonald's point of view it would be as if Frodo turns out to have Numenorean blood to explain why he could be so heroic. Also, being able to tell 'good people' from 'bad people' by touch is horribly reductionistic. And one can't help thinking that if the king were really that good a king, he'd have managed his staff better and not let himself be poisoned.

Basically, the good bits in this are the awesome ugly monsters, the fairy godmother getting more screen time, and the fact that it is a fast read with charming language. The bad parts, which are much worse than in the Goblin book, are the heavy-handed political and religious allegories, the reduction of Irene's role, the deus ex machina ending, and the very cynical epilogue.

Moving on to Lilith, this was another fairly heavy-handed work that failed to charm me. A young aristocrat finds himself sucked into a fantasy world where he doesn't understand the rules. However, he willfully fails to listen to the one person (a crow who is sometimes also a man) who tries to explain the rules to him. Now, the person doing the explaining is also mighty elliptical about the whole thing: heaven forefend that someone should come right out and say: "Look, you can't do that because these bad things will happen. You should do this other odd thing instead, because that way these good things will happen. Now go to it." As it is, the crow says: "Don't do that. Do this silly thing instead. The end." So our hero disobeys him completely. However, things all turn out 'OK' in the end. In fact, at the end of the book you look back and it seems that if he'd followed the crow's advice, none of the 'good things' in the book would have happened.

However, I put 'good things' in quotes. Reading from today's perspective, the ending doesn't seem all that 'good' to me. Plot-wise, the first half of the book is simply our hero stumbling around being an idiot (in my humble opinion). However, he finally stumbles onto the plot in the second half after he's completely thrown over the advice of the crow. He strikes out randomly across the countryside and has some adventures. He meets a race of good children (because you know, all children are innocent and good). Somehow, he decides that to help the children he needs to go to a city which has a bad woman as a ruler. This would be Lilith, the biblical Adam's first wife. By the way, the crow is actually that Adam, and his current wife is that Eve. Lilith is a very bad person, especially because she doesn't like children and forbids anyone in her kingdom from having them. The children in the forest are the cast-off children of this kingdom, kept from growing apparently from a lack of water. Or something. Oh, and Lilith is also vampiric, as our hero completely fails to notice when he finds her in a death-like state (before he knows who she is) and she feeds off him in his sleep to regain her strength.

Anyway, eventually he leads an army of the children to the city to overthrow Lilith's rule. He captures her and drags her back to Adam. There we get something like the sort of group therapy/public humiliation that fundamentalist Christians today sometimes use to try to 'cure' gay people. Adam gets her to admit that she is bad and by the end she is begging him to kill her or cut off her arm to rid herself of her own evil. Very allegorical. Very distasteful.

It's all a bit of a shame. Phantastes (which I read but never got around to reviewing, whoops!) wasn't the best written or plotted story ever, but it had some fascinating vignettes that put one in mind of Kelly Link. Princess and the Goblin was really charming, with some great female characters and a straightforward, fun adventure. Then Princess and Curdie took a turn for the biblical allegory and heavy-handed morality. And Lilith is almost nothing but that, surrounded by an incoherent plot that is never fully understood by the reader or the hero. Honestly, I wish I'd stopped reading at Princess and the Goblin. I'd certainly have walked away with a better impression of George MacDonald than I have now.

Gulf Link Spill

2010-06-27T10:41:00.002-05:00

I had a great time at ApolloCon yesterday. When I moved to Texas two and a half years (!) ago, I wasn't sure what the sf community would be like down here. But it's turned out to be both active and interesting. I was especially glad to spend time with John DeNardo of SFSignal, and to meet collector Scott Crup, and authors Lou Antonelli and A. Lee Martinez. ApolloCon also has some impressive costuming on display. I'm afraid that I didn't take any pictures, mostly because folks were taking pictures of me and my new tattoo art! It was a big hit. I also bought a couple small art pieces that I really liked.

Anyway, after all that, have some links:

Because I was at the Con at the time, I missed the live coverage of the Locus Awards. But I was glad to catch up on the ceremony and the commentary via the archived Cover It Live page. Thanks to Cheryl, Kevin, Jonathan, and the Locus folks for setting that up!
Speaking of Locus, Amelia Beamer's debut novel The Loving Dead will be released soon. If you'd like to take a look at the novel before it's published, catch it here before it goes offline (on July 1st). She's also found a very funny 'promotional video' for beautiful Oakland.
Futurama's back on TV! Hooray! In honor of the occasion, a 7 minute, 5 season Futurama re-cap [via SFSignal].
Over at OF Blog the Fallen, Larry has taken Jeff VanderMeer's suggestion about doing a World Cup of fiction seriously, and there's no one better suited to the task. Enjoy this lighthearted but thorough survey of world literature.
In more sci/tech related news, Bruce Sterling has a bit about what may be the world's first electronic musical instrument. Should be of interest to all those steampunk afficianados out there.
Looking ahead, Futurismic points out that a lab has developed an AI that can win at Jeopardy. This is a big advance, especially because of how it requires the AI to be able to process relatively natural language.
And in one of those far-out ideas, there's a legitimate case to be made for using urine to power fuel cells instead of water. The molecular bonds of urea are easier to break than those of water, and it has 4 hydrogen atoms in each molecule vs. only 2 in each molecule of water. Caught this one in the June issue of IEEE Spectrum.

Not my Hugo-ish Cup of Tea

2010-06-21T13:46:00.002-05:00

I realized, reading through this year's Hugo nominated novels, that I hold books to different standards depending on the context. If I had merely picked up Boneshaker because several friends told me it was a really fun read (which they did), I think I would have enjoyed it a lot. However, I really read it because it's on the Hugo ballot. In that context, I found it wanting. This says much more about me and what I want the Hugo award to mean than it says about the book. But I just wanted to put my mild disappointment with Boneshaker in context.

Boneshaker is a steampunk, alternate history adventure novel. While I've been known to enjoy all of those sub-genres and types at various times, Cherie Priest's novel didn't quite capture me. It is a fun adventure story, but I found it easy to wander away from. Also, there was a lack of conceptual rigor that probably only bothered me because of the Hugo thing.

The basic plot is: Mom has son, Mom loses son, Mom gets son again. However, in this case Mom (Briar Wilkes) has to navigate an 1880's era Seattle that has been surrounded by 200 foot high walls to contain the zombifying gas released when her former husband ran a huge mining machine underneath the banking district of Seattle. The Civil War is still going on and has apparently spurred zeppelin development, and there are air pirates with captured Confederate zeppelins who hover over the city, sucking up the zombifying gas and making street drugs from it. (I understand that one of these pirate zeppelins is the subject of Boneshaker's soon-to-be-published sequel, Clementine.) Luckily, Briar's father had been a good law man who died while releasing prisoners from the city jail so that they wouldn't succumb to the horrible gas, so that earns her some cred with the criminal under- (or over-) world.

She has to get into Seattle because her 15-year-old son Zeke is on a quest to get to their old house in Seattle and prove that his father, of the disastrous mining machine, was innocent. He takes a tunnel into the city, but a convenient earthquake promptly seals the tunnel, prolonging both his stay in the city and his mother's search for him. On their separate journeys they meet many interesting characters: deserted soldiers, a steampunk Batman-type, an evil genius bad guy, a woman with a mechanical arm, etc. The way the novel filters pulp adventure archetypes through a steampunk aesthetic is one of my favorite parts of the book. The resolution of the story is not that Briar and Zeke will find each other and survive; that's pretty much a given from the story structure. Instead, it comes down to the revelation of what Briar has been hiding about the past--revelations of the secrets that Zeke journeyed all that way to uncover.

It's all in good fun. But the major characters didn't fully engage my interest, especially to the extent that they sometimes seemed drawn from central casting. And the most interesting of the secondary characters seemed either insufficiently fleshed out, or their storylines were dropped when no longer needed (I was especially disappointed not to learn the ultimate fate of the steampunk Batman dude). And sometimes the narrative undercuts its own tension-building by its overly ornate diction.

This is the second of this year's crop of Hugo nominees to harken back to the American Civil War, the other being Julian Comstock. I'm a bit sad to see that; I want my Hugo novels to be forward-looking and conceptually weighty, it turns out. Of course, everyone's got their own internal criteria for comparing all the apples, oranges, and zebras that get on the Hugo ballots. And they're all valid! Prose style, characterization, concepts, world-building, entertainment, etc. For instance, I keep debating the value of prose style (which would incline me to vote for Julian Comstock) vs. forward-looking idea-driven sf (which would lean me over towards Windup Girl). Through no fault of its own, Boneshaker doesn't fall into my Hugo sweet spot. Even its alternate history world-building feels slight--a series of justifications for all the cool imagery. Certainly I didn't read anything in it that felt to me like a credible reason to have the Civil War lasting more than 15 years.

So generally I found this to be a fun read with some cool imagery and adventures. But I think my expectations were a) set quite high by some of the other reviews of it I'd read; and b) set very differently from what it was trying to do, since I read it as a Hugo nominee instead of just another novel. I'd say that for what it is trying to do (fun steampunk adventure), it succeeds fairly well.

Links Fear Death

2010-06-13T19:24:00.003-05:00

Ahhh, back from vacation with my husband's family. I hit all the highlights in only two full days in Florida: beach walking, swimming in bath warm water, kayaking, watching the sunset, catching up with family, and drinking a stupidly fruity rum drink. I also got some reading and writing in--specifically I've now got all the Hugo nominated novels under my belt, and can focus on the short fiction and related book categories from here on out.

A few links from around the Net:

Abigail Nussbaum continues a discussion about fantastic literature in Hebrew via a review of the essay collection With Both Feet in the Clouds. A very interesting take on culture, living in multiple cultures and multiple languages, and the impact of history.
This one I just tripped over randomly: InnoCentive. Its mission statement is: "InnoCentive harnesses collective brainpower around the world to solve problems that really matter." It appears to be some sort of crowdsourcing effort for trying to solve larger engineering problems. It seems a bit sfnal and possibly utopian, but maybe there's some promise there. One of their efforts is asking for suggestions on helping with the Oil Spill--we'll see if anything comes of it. (I saw the Oil Spill from the airplane on the way home from Florida; very sobering.)
Futurismic is also appealing to the Hive Mind in asking: Can You Help Free Webzines Make eBook Versions?
Over at Of Blog the Fallen, Larry reviews a new Zoran Živković book that sounds fascinating. Titled The Ghostwriter, it should be available in 2011, at least in the UK. Definitely looking forward to it!
Just for fun: a behind-the-scenes video clip [via SFSignal] about the fencing scenes in The Princess Bride, one of the most influential movies of my young life. I'd always assumed that the amazing sword fights were done with stunt doubles. I'm even more impressed to learn that it's all the actual actors doing the choreography. Cool!

Golden Age Adventures

2010-06-07T21:20:00.003-05:00

I published this review on November 15, 2006, on my original non-blog website. That site is now (rightfully) defunct, and very few of those reviews are still around. I was curious about what I'd written on this book today, and realized that if it's not online I can't find it easily. So I figured that I would post it here; that way I'll always be able to find it. Feel free to skip this one. It's the longest review I've ever done, ~7000 words. This book had been highly recommended to me by Charles N. Brown and Gary K. Wolfe when I first met them, and I wanted to chew over each and every story. Also, I like to think that my writing style has improved slightly over the intervening years. (If it hasn't, let me keep my illusions!)

Adventures in Time and Space is an anthology of reprinted stories that was published in 1946. The stories it contains were written between 1934 and 1945, comprising much of the “Golden Age” of science fiction. It was recommended to me, by those who should know, as one of the most influential anthologies in the history of the genre. They said that if I wanted to understand the history of science fiction, this was required reading. As it was published by Random House as part of a series designed for public libraries, it was probably the most widely available science fiction of any kind from 1946 to at least 1960, so that anyone growing up then would have found this to be their primary source of science fiction, and their basis for understanding what science fiction is. Thus the editors, Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, who make their opinions felt not only by their selections, but also in the short introductions provided to each piece, helped to define the conversation about the genre for decades to come.

As such I read the stories in this book with the greatest attention, and I want to go over each of them in their turn. I wouldn’t normally do this, but I want to get my own thoughts down so that I can refer back to them when needed. The reader may not want to hang around for all this, but I will say that this collection isn’t merely historically important, it’s also good. It contains three A. E. Van Vogt stories, Asimov’s “Nightfall,” three Heinleins, and the core stories behind two classic movies (“The Thing” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still”). I had only previously read three of the thirty-five pieces, but I had read descriptions and discussions of many more of them. Now that I have read the originals, I can read many other works with a much better sense of context.

Another point to note is the central importance of John W. Campbell, Jr. on the whole enterprise. As the editor of Astounding magazine (later Analog, still publishing today), he was one of the single most influential figures on science fiction from 1938 to at least 1953. It is no coincidence that thirty-two of the thirty-five stories were originally published in Astounding. Also, the two non-fiction pieces here strongly reflect Campbell’s idiosyncrasies. One of them is a piece on German rocketry which was exactly what you’d expect, focused on what had been done pre-war, and what might have been done during the war, with a focus on what is technically possible. The other is an odd piece on a possible occurrence of time travel that happened to two women in France in 1904 which would have seemed more at home in Fortean magazine. Campbell may have encouraged hard science fiction in his authors, but he had some strange notions about exactly what might qualify. After reading this, I find it less surprising that he was a promoter of Dianetics when L. Ron Hubbard first introduced it in the 1950s.

On to the stories! (Spoilers will inevitably ensue)

The editors start off with a classic story from Robert Heinlein’s Future History sequence, “Requiem.” In this story, the visionary man that saw to it that space travel to the Moon became a reality (“The Man Who Sold the Moon”) had never been allowed to get there himself. At the end of his life he convinces two down-on-their luck spacemen to take him there despite the risks. He finally passes away, completely content, on the lunar surface. It is a story that I had read before, but frankly it always moves me close to tears. Healy and McComas make a powerful argument here for the emotional power of space flight and belief in the future, one that all of us involved in space technology, however tangentially, share. It’s a short piece, full of imagery and lyricism.

Next up is “Forgetfulness,” by Don A. Stuart, the pseudonym used by John W. Campbell, Jr. himself. It is a story of planetary exploration. A group of scientists land on a planet that has wondrous cities. However, the alien inhabitants don’t live in the cities, they appear to be primitive. The reader is led to expect a tale of a degenerate race, but in truth it turns out that they have progressed far beyond the need for mere technology, instead having unleashed the power of their minds. They have learned to live simply and in harmony. Luckily they are benign and mean the adventurers no harm. The tale of the incredibly advanced alien hiding in plain sight has been used over and over in science fiction stories since then. Probably most of them have been done with infinitely better prose and dialogue. Reading this story made me think that one of the best things that ever happened to science fiction was when Campbell stopped writing and started editing.

“Nerves,” by Lester Del Rey was one I had never heard of before. It was surprisingly enjoyable, with a smooth writing style that put me in mind of Heinlein from the same period. It is the story of a major emergency at a nuclear power plant and the attempt to put things to right. It’s a long story, but Del Rey handles the tension very well, ratcheting it up and then easing, only to jack it up some more. It’s a classic tale of engineering saving the day, although our main characters are actually doctors having to treat all the cases of radiation poisoning that come in from workers trying to excavate, contain, and fix the problem. The engineering and scientific details bear no resemblance to the reality of nuclear power as we know them today, but that’s hardly important. One of the most important parts is how he was responding to some other tales of nuclear energy that had been written previously. Charles Brown feels that “Nerves” was written in reaction to Heinlein’s “Solution Unsatisfactory,” which focused on nuclear weapons; here Del Rey points out the potential of peaceful applications. I feel that it might be a response instead to Heinlein’s “Blowups Happen,” where Heinlein’s characters never experience a catastrophe; instead they postulate that one is inevitable and insist that nuclear power plants must all be moved off-planet. In “Nerves,” Del Rey instead puts his faith in the scientists and engineers to contain and control the dangerous energy, even when catastrophe strikes. I also appreciated the Girl Friday character, and the way the main doctor overcame his assumptions about women’s usefulness (or lack thereof) to the point that he recommended she be on the permanent staff even though she was a married woman. I started to think, gosh, this stuff wasn’t so anti-feminist. That was pretty progressive for the day. We’ll come back to that point later.

“The Sands of Time” by P. Schuyler Miller is the first time travel story in this collection, and it won’t be the last. This one hews closely to the model provided by H. G. Wells’ The Time Traveller, although in reverse. His traveler posits that time is a coil, and you can only step up or down from one turn to the next, you can’t travel around the turn except in the normal way. So he can only go 60 million years forward or 60 million years backward. He chooses to go backward, then has to convince our paleontologist narrator that he has really achieved such a feat. He provides his proof, introduces the narrator to the equipment and tells his story, then disappears into the mists of time, never to be seen again. In the past he had met futuristic humanoids of some sort and become involved in their small-scale battle. It wasn’t particularly clear what was going on, but the traveler decided to side with the pretty girl, so his loyalty was fixed. This story wasn’t terribly memorable or ground-breaking.

“The Proud Robot” by “Lewis Padgett” (really Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, a husband and wife writing team, although apparently this particular one was by Kuttner alone) was one I had read about before. It seemed an interesting choice to me to include a funny story about robots before including any serious ones. At this point in the book, no robots had yet appeared. So we’re introduced to both the robot trope (and symbol) and simultaneously to science fiction’s capacity to laugh at itself, its capacity for whimsy. Our hero is Gallegher, an inventor who can only invent when dead drunk. Upon sobering up in this story, he finds himself in possession of a perfectly useless and perfectly vain robot. He has all sorts of contractual obligations that he has to fulfill, but he can’t do a darn thing sober, and can’t get the robot to help him unless he can figure out what its actual purpose is. (It turns out it’s the world’s most complex and over-engineered can opener.) Gallegher is pretty much the inverse of the typical science fiction hero, whose superior knowledge of science and engineering and superior rationality will help him win through. Gallegher only wins through when he gets his mind turned completely off with the aid of liberal amounts of booze. It’s a fun puzzle story, and Gallegher is a great comic protagonist.

“The Black Destroyer” was the first science fiction short story that A. E. Van Vogt ever sold. This is the first sinister alien we meet in the collection, an uber-predator, the last of its kind since it wiped out all major life-forms on its planet. The arrival of human explorers is a godsend, and he proceeds to terrorize the expedition members both on the ground and in the ship. Eventually it is defeated by the superior knowledge and rationality of the crew, of course. The story is chock full of Freudian imagery, with the beast representing the id and the crew operating with the superego. The plot ends up in familiar horror movie territory with the beast in the ship; it feels very similar to the movie Alien, which was partly based upon another van Vogt story from the same period: “Discord in Scarlet” (later combined with “Black Destroyer” to make a fix-up novel, Voyage of the Space Beagle). Van Vogt’s prose turned out to be much easier to read than I had feared; other reviews of his work mention it being somewhat complicated and metaphysical, but on a sentence/paragraph level it is not hard going at all, and it is infinitely better than “Don A. Stuart’s” stories.

“Symbiotica” gives us a new batch of aliens. They’re not benign, but they’re much less sinister than the “Black Destroyer.” Eric Frank Russell’s aliens are also considerably more alien than what we have met in the collection so far. Once again we have the standard human exploration vessel landing on a new planet. The characters here are already comfortable with each other, it turns out that this is one story out of a series of linked stories featuring the same cast. It’s an admirably progressive mixed crew, both in terms of race and species (Martians), plus the actual hero of the piece is a robot. The planet they land on features lush vegetation that seems curiously self-directed and easily annoyed, as well as some humanoids that are intricately involved with the plant life. The editors tip us off in their intro that the intelligent species here are the plants; today they’d be accused of evil spoiler behavior. The tone of the piece is light and adventuresome, with a high “Gee Whiz!” factor even when the characters are running for their lives. One senses similarities to African exploration narratives, as well as to “Boy’s Own”-type juvenile literature, although the cast is all adults. It was fun to see things called “extramundane aboriginals” as opposed to today’s favored “extraterrestrial intelligences.”

“Seeds of the Dusk” by Raymond Z. Gallun again presents us with vegetable-based aliens who don’t mean humans any good, but in this case the author presents a very bleak picture of future humanity. What passes for human in this far-future tale is a degenerate race of hateful goblinoids who have completely devastated the Earth and are in the process of moving to Venus (where it will be warmer as the Sun cools down, which wouldn’t work with today’s astronomical knowledge) so they can mess that planet up too. Meanwhile a spore from freezing Mars falls to Earth and sets up shop in desolate Antarctica. The alien spore is basically the main character here, and his description of the spore’s growth process is fascinating and very detailed. This tale is more focused on bioengineering than most here, and is really a very early environmentalist warning story. Among today’s authors one can read similar things in tone and focus from Neal Asher (“The Skinner”) and Paolo Baccigalupi (“The People of Sand and Slag”).

“Heavy Planet” gives us our first taste of classically physics-based hard science fiction in the collection, being a small adventure story set on a gas giant. There is a backdrop of politics that the hero is fighting for, but it’s all very vague. The main focus is how a race evolved in gas giant conditions (although made of ultra-dense stuff, not gaseous jellyfish-types as you tend to see in today’s gas giant fiction, which are working with more current planetary science) would interact with technology made by people of our type. Our toughest alloys would practically be silly putty to them. As one would expect, Tony Russell (who uses the pseudonym Lee Gregor here) had a sideline writing popular physics books. The story is very slight, with little characterization and no follow-up, existing only as the hook to hang some nifty world building on.

For our fist repeat appearance, we have a second Lewis Padgett story. It again features the lush Gallegher, now renamed Galloway, and he has once again invented an amazing thing while stinking drunk. This one appears to feature infinite transdimensional storage, but when a shady lawyer tries to use it to hide evidence for his corporate criminal client, he discovers a very unpleasant (and bizarre) consequence of the “Time Locker.” Galloway only features at the beginning and the end, most of the tale involves a funny tale of science fictionally abetted crime. Does it make much sense? No, but it’s amusing enough.

Cleve Cartmill is better known for writing “Deadline,” a story with so accurate a description of an atomic bomb that the FBI investigated Astounding magazine for possibly leaking secrets. “The Link,” however, is a member of that rare breed of science fiction that takes place wholly in the past. It imagines that day in the distant past when a single individual has become homo sapiens, and must somehow deal with his less-evolved relatives. It has a slightly Kipling-esque feel, with Lok having conversations with the animals of the jungle. One wonders if Lok’s name is perhaps a reference to the philosopher John Locke, especially the bit about “consent of the governed.” Cartmill doesn’t pull many punches with this story, and he rigorously imagines the consequences of his scenario. It may also in some small way have influenced the famous first scene from the film 2001, quickly linking consciousness and violence.[ed. to add: Nowadays I'd compare it strongly to Jack London's Before Adam.]

“Mechanical Mice” gives us our first serious look at robots in the collection. It’s combined with a sort of time-travel viewing device, where one can see events from the future. An inventor uses the device to build amazing things, especially batteries. When he first builds a robot he doesn’t actually know what it does, much like in Padgett’s “Proud Robot.” It doesn’t take long before it turns out to be threatening, and the menace of the self-replicating robot, seen over and over again in science fiction, makes a solid appearance here. The story by Maurice A. Hugi isn’t particularly memorable, but it does wrap up well.

Then we get one of the two oddities of the collection, a non-fiction piece on rocketry. The author was Willy Ley, a German refugee from the War and previous Secretary of the German Rocket Society. He covers the state of rocketry research as done by amateurs before the war, then offers solid speculation on what was done after the research was nationalized by the Nazis, as gleaned from newspaper reports and his knowledge of the participants. His writing is very precise and engaging, and offers a window to the times. It is a reminder of how much warfare has changed when you read: “Fighter interception destroyed twenty-four percent of the [flying] bombs in flight, A.A. guns and rockets accounted for seventeen percent, balloon barrages for five percent so that only two thousand bombs, or about twenty-nine percent, actually fell on London. They killed 5,864 persons, injured 17,197 badly and 23,174 slightly, destroyed 24,491 houses, rendered another 52,293 uninhabitable and damaged over 950,000. The results were impressive as far as figures go, their influence on the course of the war was nil.” The biggest surprise looking back and knowing how the history of rocketry unfolded is that the article has no mention of Wernher von Braun.

Previous to this volume, I had only read Alfred Bester’s novels, The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. I can’t say I enjoyed them - they’re not necessarily the sort of thing one enjoys - but there is no denying their brilliance. With “Adam and No Eve,” take that feeling and square it. This apocalyptic story is like a visceral punch in the stomach. One man’s hubris in rocketry causes the entire world to be turned to ash; when he lands he ends up crawling inch by inch through the devastated landscape, flashing back to how this happened. Bester makes it very clear that no good intentions can redeem us if in our ignorance and pride we cause ultimate catastrophe, and he holds out only the slightest, most uncomforting sliver of abstract hope for the future. I would’ve said that he was keying off the now-famous bets that some of the atomic scientists were making at the Alamogordo test as to whether or not a nuclear explosion would incinerate the atmosphere, but when he wrote this story in 1941 that hadn’t happened yet. In much the same way that “Requiem” expressed the emotional power of hope in the future, “Adam and No Eve” gives us the intense emotional power of destruction. I will never forget this story.

After that solid beating by Bester, we get the (oddly) much cheerier “Nightfall,” by Isaac Asimov. To say that this short story has stood the test of time would be a drastic understatement; it is probably one of the most referenced and reprinted short stories in all of science fiction. It was later expanded to novel length with Robert Silverberg, but skip that. If you haven’t read the original yet, you should. Its pro-science, anti-religious zealot, rigorously extrapolated, and you can’t beat its most amazing image: seeing the galaxy full of stars for the first time from the heart of a globular cluster.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, we move to Harry Bates’ story, “A Matter of Size.” It is your typical adventure story of a man making his way through the world when shrunk to only an inch high or so, a scenario almost never seen anymore thanks to the wide acceptance of the square-cube law and related biological scaling laws. I found this story mostly trite and annoying, although that might be in part because it doesn’t compare well to the stunning stories that preceded it. His casual misogyny (“’Then let me congratulate you,’ he said, ‘for admitting your dumbness. I’m not accustomed to such extraordinary modesty on the part of women. I may say I find it very becoming.’”) and fundamental arrogance make Arthur Allison a most unsympathetic hero, and he never gets better. The story is overlong and takes some pointless digressions. Just about every collection ends up having a notably weak story in, regardless of the best efforts of the editor, and this is one of the worst ones in a collection otherwise packed to the gills with classics.

P. Schuyler Miller gives us another time-travel story in “As Never Was,” this one featuring the trope of the time-loop with no beginning and no end. This is one of the only stories in the book to mention alternate universes caused by time forks, an idea still quite current in today’s environment. It’s a good illustration of its type, but again not terribly memorable.

Anthony Boucher (real name William Anthony Parker White) gives us another take on robots in “Q. U. R.” This story fits smack dab in what is now the Asimovian tradition of robot stories, with robots having psychology that needs attending to (essentially puzzles that need solving). It’s one of the few examples of its type in the collection, which I was surprised to see lacked any Asimov robot stories. “Q.U.R” is a fun story with an engaging light-hearted narrator. He’s a robot repairman who is run ragged as robots start to fail in odd ways all across the city. He teams with an eccentric genius to solve the mystery and gain fame and fortune. In the background it also makes some very progressive statements against racism (as Asimov’s stories often did as well), and Boucher also includes Martian and Venusians doing business on Earth as a casual matter. Very cool stuff.

“Who Goes There” is our second Don A. Stuart/John W. Campbell Jr. story. It would later be adapted as the screenplay to the classic horror movie The Thing. However, much like Van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer,” for something that was made into a horror movie it really isn’t that scary. Campbell’s incredibly stilted info-dumping prose isn’t well suited to suspenseful tension, and once again the scientific tendency to examine and understand overcomes the horror of the unknown. When an alien is dug up from beneath the ice in Antarctica, where it had lain with its wrecked ship for some millions of years, it looked very, very scary. Red menacing eyes, tentacles, that sort of thing. However, once it thaws out and regains its shape-shifting and mimicking ability, its true potential for terror is unleashed. Again you have the monster let loose in a claustrophobic environment, where you never know which of your colleagues you can trust. Classic stuff. Really though, that’s not the point. Possibly the strongest characteristic of Golden Age science fiction, exemplified again and again in this collection, is the ability that reason and science has to conquer any threat. After a few aborted attempts to identify those who have been replaced by the monster, the doctor figures out a way to test the blood of the monsters. Each person lines up to have his blood tested, the monsters are outed, and the world is saved. The initially Horror-From-Beyond-type monster is remarkably cooperative when it comes to this method of investigation, and thus does science conquer horror yet again. There is also a telepathic element here, presented as perfectly scientific. This would continue to be Campbell’s stance pretty much until his death, much to the exasperation of some of his writers.

“The Roads Must Roll” is another story I had read before, by Robert A. Heinlein. It is part of his amazing Future History sequence. Actually, in his Future History this comes before “Requiem,” which started this collection, but each operates completely independently from the other. “Roads” is a political story, possibly the most explicitly political story in the collection (with Van Vogt’s “The Weapons Shop” coming in second). In this story, the major infrastructure of the future is moving roads, like conveyor belts on a massively industrial scale. Powered by solar power, they carry most of the trade and commerce of the country, plus the commuters. They require a vast amount of very careful, skilled, and highly regimented maintenance. Because their jobs are so important, the workers on these roads are forbidden from striking in much the same way doctors and firefighters are. However, they stage a sabotage action anyway to protest their working terms. We follow the Chief Engineer Gaines as he descends into the bowels of the Roads to confront Van Kleeck, the chief agitator of this labor movement. Van Kleeck insists that since the Road workers are so critical to the economy, they should be the kings of it. It’s basically a straw man argument; farmers, doctors, power plant workers, just about anyone can claim the same – that society will collapse if they quit doing their jobs, so they should be paid accordingly. It’s essentially holding society hostage. However, the conflict in this case isn’t solved by reasoned economic debate. It is solved when Gaines realizes that Van Kleeck has psychological issues (a Napoleon complex) that cause him to make trouble and can be used against him. It is an oddly ad hominem approach to take in a story that could have been simply a soapbox for Heinlein’s economic theories.

Our second Van Vogt story, “Asylum,” illustrates the tendency of science fiction to appropriate objects from the fantastic tradition and explain them scientifically instead. Here we have vampires who are aliens. They are vastly superior to humans in strength and intellect. However, there are also guardian aliens who are as far above them as they are above us, and it all works out fine in the end. The story is very odd, involving Leigh, our journalist hero (an example of the still-common type) being manipulated by one faction after another. In his future humanity, murder is completely unknown, since psychology has become reliable enough to adjust any potentially murderous personality back to normal. (This is almost an aside – its consequences aren’t developed at all.) Leigh turns out to be even more than he thinks he is. The story is weird, and it doesn’t really make much sense. The issues basically boil down to ones of superior intellect protecting and dominating lesser beings. This is particularly illustrated when Leigh is being manipulated to love one of the vampires: “If you think I’m going to fall in love with a dame who’s got twice my I.Q., you’re…” Van Vogt isn’t necessarily being misogynist here, since he’s got no problems portraying women vastly more intelligent than the humans. It’s more that he’s using an inversion of normal male/female relationships (at the time) to illustrate the potential uncomfortableness of the alien/human power relationships. This may also be seen when it’s pointed out that for Leigh: “The very thought of getting down on his knees to any woman was paralyzing.”

OK, so we’ve gotten through 21 stories of the Golden Age. We’ve learned about how science and reason can conquer all, that our future can be amazing, that aliens can be beneficent or frightening, etc. It’s been mostly male in terms of characters, but there hasn’t been much that’s been horribly anti-feminist really. Until Healy and McComas take “Quietus,” an interesting post-apocalyptic story with aliens by Ross Rocklynne, and proceed to use their introduction to put a specifically anti-feminist spin on it. “One might well conclude that the essentially tragic significance of this tale is its brilliant portrayal of the historical struggle of the feminine mind to cope with logic a priori.” The story is that after an apocalypse, a man has been running around with a talking crow he’s had since boyhood. After many years, he’s finally spotted a woman and is tracking her. During this time, a husband and wife pair of bird-type alien explorers has been looking around the Earth for signs of intelligent life. They look at the man and the crow. The crow scared off the woman just as the man was about to make contact with her, so he starts throwing rocks at it, mostly out of annoyance. The alien wife shoots the man, trying to protect the crow. She assumed that the crow would be the intelligent one, and the man simply a domesticated animal. Her husband has some quiet qualms about this. After being unable to make contact with the crow, they fly away. The story wouldn’t have struck me as being particularly misogynist is the editors hadn’t deliberately spun it that way, and it really surprised me. It goes to show the power of the editor’s introduction. Interestingly, the hero of “Farewell to the Master” will make exactly the same mistake, but that story will be lauded as the best they’d ever read, with no mention of men’s inability to reason logically.

“The Twonky” starts off with a light premise. A factory worker, dazed from slipping through a dimensional rift, builds what he usually does – a twonky. He finally realizes what happened and slips back to his home dimension, leaving the twonky (in the shape of a nice radio set) behind. The unsuspecting owner of the twonky soon discovers its potential, and its threat. It starts out as a scary but sort of nifty servant - lighting cigars, doing dishes, etc. However, its definition of looking out for the welfare of its owner goes overboard quickly, and things take a turn for the disturbing. In the end it is the darkest of the three Padgett stories here, sharing with the Gallagher/Galloway stories only the theme of remarkable things happening due to confusion. It certainly speaks to the fear of robots that Asimov would spend a large amount of time trying to alleviate.

“Time Travel Happens!” is the other non-fiction piece in the collection. I suppose that if “V-2: Rocket Cargo Ship” was supposed to represent adventures in space, this article is supposed to represent adventures in time. It is the story of the supposedly true experience of two English women in France in the early 1900s. They apparently were momentarily thrown back in time to around 1789 without traveling in space. They saw changes to the grounds and the buildings they had been looking at, and interacted with a few people, then returned. This happened on a few occasions. They deeply researched the area, trying to find confirming or dismissing details. They found records of the changes that had been made to the premises, and also details of clothing and uniforms they had noticed. It does all seem plausible. However, it is so extraordinary that it seems a better article for the Fortean Times magazine than a science fiction collection. Basically, it seems remarkably out of place. It may represent Campbell’s continuing credulity about certain subjects that undermined the pureness of the Golden Age paradigm of rationality.

“Robot’s Return” is a melancholy tale. An exploration crew of robots lands on Earth. They’ve been searching for knowledge of their origins, as they remember nothing from before when their Original Five progenitors had been activated. On Earth they discover the remains of our civilization, and a handy plaque describing our fate. The robots are quite human: they give us awkward expository dialog, they doubt that anything organic could have built robots, they experience the tension between logic and intuition. It’s a nicely done tale, if not terribly memorable.

“The Blue Giraffe” by L. Sprague de Camp takes us back to the African explorer model that science fiction often used, and here it is actually taking place in Africa. In the near future, a British gentleman is asked to help look into problems at an African wild animal preserve. He discovers the consequences of a mad scientist’s experiments when some mutated animal/human hybrids take him captive. Lovecraft would’ve taken this premise and made a horror story out of it, but de Camp takes us through the adventure with an air of whimsy. It’s pretty dated now: the traditional colonial era was pretty much over by 1975, and traditional colonial attitudes about Africa have either gone away or been suppressed by now. All in all this is more of a fun story than not, but one that certainly takes a look at the mutant concept in terms of “the other,” whether that other be animal or aboriginal. It’s certainly not a politically correct story, even if it does treat the native park staff as good, competent people.

“Flight Into Darkness” was written by one of the editors of the collection, J. Francis McComas, under the pseudonym “Webb Marlowe.” The editorial introduction includes some crowing about the accuracy of predictions about Nazis building a rocket. The story involves a Nazi insurgency under a post-WWII American run reconstruction. The Germans have been given control of a factory, and are using it as cover to build a rocket to escape Earth and spread Aryans and Nazi philosophy to the stars. The Nazis here are basically pure evil (they even engage in monologuing!), and the moral is not to be too lenient with conquered peoples. It does remind us that even after WWII, when everything was supposedly easy and simple, reconstructing defeated countries has never been a straight-forward task.

“The Weapons Shop” rounds out the trio of Van Vogt stories for this collection, further cementing his place as one of the central authors of the Golden Age. As with the others, this one can be justly described as strange. A Weapons Shop lands in the middle of a small town far in the future. They seem to appear in order to subvert the distant monarchy that rules over all. Their sign reads “The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to Be Free.” Fara is a true believer in the monarchy (and also a bad father with a rebellious son), and tries to challenge the weapons shop owners. He makes a large, ignorant fuss, but doesn’t get anywhere. Between his reactionary ways and his son he ends up ruined. He goes to the shop to buy a gun for suicide, but ends up traveling in time and space to a place where the folks fix most of his problems for him and send him back. The underlying philosophy ends up being a bit Heinleinian, refusing to force change on people who don’t want it, trying to change attitudes in more subtle ways, apparently by righting injustices. It all ends up being very anticlimactic, especially since Fara was never the architect of his own destiny. He was simply picked up and carried by events. It was very interesting to read, but left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.

“Farewell to the Master” is the story that was later turned into “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” As you would expect, it is very different from the movie. The philosophical thrust of it is completely different, as is the big surprise at the end. Here the “big reveal” is that the robot is the master, not the human. As one used to science fiction, this seemed anticlimactic. I wanted to know what happened afterwards. However the protagonist (another intrepid journalist), staggered away as if his whole universe had been shaken. The editors describe this as “one of the finest stories we have ever read,” but it didn’t seem that special to me. It was certainly head and shoulders above “A Matter of Size” by the same author in this collection, and it is certainly memorable, but (with 20/20 hindsight) it seems quite a missed call to draw so much attention to this story instead of say, “Nightfall.” (Also the plot of this book is one that couldn’t happen after video surveillance technology came into effect – another story that would have to be significantly re-written to work today.)

In “Within the Pyramid” by R. De Witt Miller we return to the archeologist hero, another character still pretty common in science fiction. Here there is a discovery related to the Mayan pyramids. One older archeologist wants to keep it hidden, and the young brash one wants to publish it all over the place. They’re both fairly annoying specimens of their type. It’s a very short story about aliens masquerading as gods to the Egyptians and the Mayans and hiding out, effectively immortal, waiting for rescue. It actually prefigures part of the plot of Stargate (both the movie and the original series), which is pretty cool. It’s a well done tale, but not really striking.

“He Who Shrank” is a much better example of shrinking people than “A Matter of Size,” and here Henry Hasse also takes on the (now mostly defunct) universe-inside-an-atom story that had its origins in “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (Ray Cummings, 1923). A lab assistant is co-opted by his mad scientist boss to be his guinea pig. He will undergo and infinite shrinking progression and telepathically report back what he finds. The scientist very sensibly makes him immune to vacuum so as to survive in the spaces between the worlds inside the atoms he goes through. The assistant describes his journeys, landing on world after world, approaching them as a huge space monster, landing on them as a giant, shrinking and interacting with the natives, then shrinking into another atom and repeating the process. It is a fantastic framing setting for any number of space opera plots, and we get several here before the narrator gives it up and simply says he has passed through thousands of worlds since. He meets telepathic scientific aliens, evil machine dominated planets (with early examples of von Neumann machines), and primitive jungle planets. The science of it is absolutely ridiculous, but it’s a rousing adventure tale. Finally the narrator lands on a planet much like ours and relays his story telepathically to a science fiction writer, a nice meta-fictional touch, before fading away to nothing once again, doomed to wander infinitely in the infinite regression of space. It adds a nice touch of melancholy to the story, which could have been over done in a “Gee-Whiz!” kind of way.

“By His Bootstraps” is the third Heinlein story here, under the pseudonym “Anson MacDonald. I understand why he used a pseudonym, since this story is nowhere near his standards. It’s the story of another closed time loop, a paradox with no beginning and no end. The nice bit is when he describes the same scene from three different perspectives, as the protagonist had managed to intersect himself in one spot three times over. After that, the whole thing falls flat. “As Never Was,” the P. Schuyler Miller story earlier in the collection addressed the same issue much better. This narrator is a bit of a dolt, and it’s hard to sympathize with his plight.

“The Star Mouse” by Frederic Brown is a nice, light story. A German rocket engineer, working in America after the war, befriends a mouse in his lonely lab. When the time comes to test his rocket, he says farewell to Mitkey (his way of pronouncing “Mickey,” the natural name for your pet mouse) and loads him as a test subject. Mitkey’s rocket successfully launches, then is captured by the alien civilization of really tiny people who live in a stealthed asteroid in orbit around the Earth. They make Mitkey as intelligent as a human so they can talk to him about conditions on the ground, then they send him back with the ability to make more intelligent mice. It doesn’t end up going well, as you’d expect, but you might not expect why. Brown milks the story for exactly the right amount of comic potential without ever violating the principle that Mitkey is just a mouse, not a superman(mouse). There’s a really nice tone about the whole thing, as if he’s making fun of the mad scientist and his mouse, but he really feels affection for them. I enjoyed this one, especially for its humane humor.

“Correspondance Course,” by Raymond F. Jones strained the suspension of disbelief, but was a very interesting story. A wounded veteran is feeling pretty down on himself. However, he rouses himself to work on a correspondence course he found advertised. He doesn’t expect it to amount to much, but over time he finds himself immersed in learning the principles of “Power Co-ordination.” It’s like nothing he’s ever seen before. He is so fascinated by it that he travels to try and meet the author of the course. In an odd bit of plotting that seems like page-filler, he travels to the town of the return address, fails to make contact with the author (in fact, no one in town had ever heard of him), goes back home and then gets a letter from the author asking him to come to the town for a job. It will be no surprise to the sf reader that the author is an alien. He’d been searching for someone who could understand the principles and fix his crashed ship. It’s essentially a big-brain type alien, one of the few in this collection. Our hero bargains with the alien: he’ll repair the ship if the alien will teach him enough so that humanity can build one. Finally they reach an understanding and a symbiosis, something transcendent. Jones writes a very beautiful ending, allowing humanity to integrate with and benefit from the “Other.”

“Brain,” by S. Fowler Wright, has the honor of the concluding spot in the volume. Unfortunately it is nowhere near as strong as the introductory entry by Heinlein. It’s barely a story, being mostly a description of a dystopian governmental system. It certainly doesn’t have any characters worth the name, and it’s all very improbable. Wright describes a scientific meritocracy, with the best scientists forming a ruling council. Of course they disdain the common people, regarding them as little more than lab rats. The President uses a pig to test a serum that will make the populace docile. Rather predictably he gets hoisted by his own petard. I suppose that as a warning against the easy assumption of the superiority of science and scientists that the entire rest of the volume was proclaiming, it has some value. And it does have a dark sense of humor. However, it seemed to leave the collection with a bit of a sour note at the end. A surprising choice.

And thus concludes the tales.

To sum up: lots of time travel and robots. Lots of rockets. “Atomic” is the magic word, just like “Quantum” is now. Heros are always male, usually scientists of some nature. Acceptable alternatives: journalists (good for infodumping to), archeologists. Several mad scientists, also a source of humor. A good number of humorous stories balancing out the slightly scary ones. Horror-type stories mitigated by scientific understanding of the threat. Lots of aliens, pretty evenly divided between benign and threatening (as are the robots), with a few just like us and a couple of vegetable ones for variety. Not as much explicit misogyny as expected, but basically an ignorance of the fact that 50% of the population is female. Lots of jungles, and a significant amount of time spent in the past. No explicit sex. A few stories going straight for the emotional punch, most of them more cerebral. Several stories where humanity doesn’t turn out well, with two killing off the entire race. Lots of stories where the engineer solves the problem and saves the day. More varied in tone and subject matter than the “Golden Age” is often accused of, which is impressive considering that almost every story sprang from the same magazine.

I’d like to give a note of thanks and praise to the editors of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for without it I’d never have been able to track down all the pseudonyms, and to my husband for finding me a copy.

Links Blast Off

2010-06-07T15:53:00.002-05:00

Some cool and interesting things from around my corners of the Internet:

Sandra McDonald put together a Periodic Table of Women in SF/F. [Via Cheryl Morgan] I'm heartened by the fact that Cheryl and Farah Mendlesohn are included (due to them being Hugo winners and all). Having some non-fiction-type women in there gives me hope.
You know the journal Nature, the publisher of bleeding-edge research claims in multiple fields? Turns out that they've got a pretty good website that's accessible without an institutional subscription, Nature News. They also have a special section completely dedicated to covering the Gulf Oil Spill. That's science journalism that I have confidence in.
The newest entry in the sf/f magazine field is Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams. I'm definitely sympathetic to the stated desire to have more focus on sf in the online fiction magazine field. But out of the gate I have to say that I preferred Clarkesworld's current Nina Kiriki Hoffman story "Futures in the Memories Market" to the inaugural Vylar Kaftan story in Lightspeed, "I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You in Reno." YMMV. However, Lightspeed has an iPhone app, which is mighty cool. I've already downloaded it. It's free, but I actually wish I could use it to chip in the $2.99 for a full issue. a) I'd like to support what they're doing; and b) I'd like to get the whole issue at once instead of waiting for content.
Ideas for mega-engineering projects. [Via darn near everyone, but I saw it first in Futurismic.] Make the Moon a solar collector and beam the energy to Earth! Space hotels, floating cities! Can I get a heck yeah! (Although having recently read an excellent book on engineering disasters, Inviting Disaster by James Chiles, these designs do smack a bit of hubris.)
SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket with a dummy Dragon cargo capsule. The launch had its problems and delays, but the ascent itself looked good. They hoped to recover their first stage, but apparently it broke up on either descent or landing. There's so much tension right now between NASA-centric space plans and commercial-centric space plans that everything is loaded with added baggage and significance. But I'm very happy for the SpaceX team for their success.
Over at Strange Horizons, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro has started a new reviewing project. He's planning to review all the volumes of Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories. The volumes were published between 1979 and 1992 and covered the years 1939 to 1963. I'm obviously a big fan of going back and reading the antecedents of the genre, so I wish him all the luck in tackling a project this big. You can read the first installment this week at SH.

Sorry to mix up the sf and the science so randomly there, but that's fairly indicitive of the inside of my brain right now. Only 66 days left until my Masters degree is done!

A Beautifully Written Historical Future

2010-06-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

Robert Charles Wilson has long been one of my favorite sf writers. His books combine good plotting with excellent sentence-level writing and respect for all of his characters. Sometimes I've found his science to be a bit hand-wavey (e. g. Blind Lake), but that is easily forgivable. Even when his sci-tech gets a bit sketchy, he has a clear and exciting vision. I enjoyed reading his latest novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America, very much. I'm a little disappointed that, while it is sf, it focuses almost entirely on the past rather than the future. That said, it still exhibits all of Wilson's considerable literary merits.

One hundred and fifty years from now America reverts to a state closer to that of one hundred and fifty years ago (e. g. the time of the American Civil War). Peak oil came and went and left us with a drastically reduced population. People work on estate farms, in lower-density cities (long since stripped for their resources) and fight in wars fueled by coal, steam, and good old-fashioned blood. This time the slavery system is based more on economics than race, but its effect is similar. The ongoing war isn't Civil, but is instead fought against encroaching European (and in the south, South American) forces. And while the government still has three branches, they're the 'elected'-for-life President, the toothless Senate, and the Religious Dominion. Adam Hazzard navigates this world with his friend, Julian Comstock.

Julian is the nephew of the current President-for-life. Julian's father was a good and kindly war hero and successful general, so of course he was hanged by his brother. As I read the story, I decided that the Comstock family disputes derive more from Suetonius' The Lives of the Caesars (or Robert Graves' I, Claudius) than from American history. Later on I read an interview with Wilson where he mentions that the story takes as its historical model the life of Julian the Apostate, a Roman Caesar in C. E. 360.

As the story begins, Adam and Julian are both in their late teens. Adam comes from the leasing class, a sort of middle class between Estate owners (such as Julian) and the indentured laborers (effectively slaves). But Adam's education parallels Julian's, and he becomes an aspiring writer. They escape from their small town ahead of the draft but end up in the army anyway, along with Julian's tutor and father-figure Sam Goodwin. Julian distinguishes himself in battle as an anonymous private, and survives to be discharged. The group heads to New York where it turns out that Julian's exploits have been covered by the newspapers. He is immediately unmasked as a Comstock. This gives his uncle plenty of reason to be nervous. So he does what Caesars have so often done: made their enemies generals and sent them to the most dangerous war zones, hoping that the dangers of combat will take care of the problem. It almost works: a landing unsupported by the Navy leads to a prolonged siege also unsupported by the Navy. Julian almost dies in a break-out attempt, but is eventually returned home and made president by acclimation, based largely on the strength of public opinion whipped up by Adam's war dispatches. The rest of the book details Julian's reign as president. I don't want to go into too much detail about this, since the book then takes turns that surprised me. Suffice to say, Adam's narration at times seems like a deliberate exercise in hagiography (and it develops that Adam-the-narrator is not as naïve as Adam-the-character), but the ending is far from saintly. Keep in mind, this book could be read in different ways depending on what motivations you ascribe to Adam-the-narrator--an interesting exercise.

This book hit a sweet spot for me. It combines great elements from Ken Burns' The Civil War documentary series, Robert Graves' I, Claudius (and Claudius the God) and also Robert Heinlein's "If This Goes On--," all favorites of mine. It has a wonderfully fluid prose style, evoking the 19th century of Dickens and Melville without being over-written. It also continues Robert Charles Wilson's amazing talent with characterization. He gives a character more life in a paragraph than some authors do in an entire novella. Even side characters like Adam's wife Calyxa and Julian's mother Emily spring easily to life through their dialogue and actions. I also appreciate the way that Wilson writes with a unity of purpose. He cuts the extraneous from his novels--if you find something in there, it relates to the overall theme somehow; nothing ever appears simply because it is shiny or neat. Also, he respects all his characters: very few exist simply to move the plot along. They have their own motivations, their own sense of self, and their own interesting backgrounds. No sock puppets here! Julian has a nicely diverse cast. Adam is sometimes shocked by other character's non Waspish ways (which is another part of illustrating Adam's character), but that never derails the story.

Julian Comstock works on multiple levels. It has some delightful structural elements, such as the dramatic acts of the story playing out in rhythm with the religious holidays of the year (in this future: Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving). Events echo between the ending of the novel and Julian's screenplay, "The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin" (as hilariously filtered through the dramatic imagination of a thriller writer on par with H. Rider Haggard). This book reads smoothly, and it also has a great sense of humor to it.

Reading a book that so obviously derives from several eras of history leads to the question: why set this story in the future? This may be the most cozy post-apocalypse I've ever read. It is safely distanced from the events of the "False Tribulations" (as the Dominion labels it) when at least 75% of America's population (and presumably the world's population) dies off. In the time of the novel things have assumed a new equilibrium. It is a comfortable and familiar state to many Americans, especially as we have romanticized the 19th century in so many ways (see the Ken Burns documentary series, plus the Little House on the Prairie books and many others). In asking the question, one thing stands out. I think this sort of story argues against complacency: in this future the religious authorities ban and stigmatize science. Julian (as you can see from his dramatic efforts on behalf of Charles Darwin) wants desperately to return secular thought to its rightful place, but Adam doesn't truly believe that humans have ever stood on the Moon. We like to think that human history, especially Western history, is a history of progress. But Wilson shows how easy, and even comfortable, it may be to backslide. And unlike Heinlein's fight against religious fundamentalist government in "If This Goes On--," in Julian Comstock no restoration comes easily.

In addition, I suspect that this sort of future was the only time when Wilson could get the mix of all the elements he wanted: Roman times didn't have the sort of religious fundamentalism that he depicts in the Dominion; during the American Civil War democracy kept functioning (more or less) and no dynastic feuds or White House coups popped up. In an interview, Wilson also mentioned that he specifically wanted to write an adventure in the spirit of the 19th century writers. He succeeds admirably, and I think easily exceeds the adventure writers of the time in terms of skill, craft, and subtlety. I admit that after books like Blind Lake and Spin (I haven't gotten to Spin's sequel Axis yet, much to my chagrin), I was a little sad to see a book enmeshed in history instead of looking to the future. But I loved it while I was reading it.

Premium Select Links

2010-05-31T09:38:00.003-05:00

Today is a day for writing and revising, being the last holiday before school starts up again. (Only 73 days until my Masters Degree is completed!) So let me do a quick link round-up before getting down to work here.

My critique (NOT a review, I think) of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl generated some good comments on SFSignal and a thoughtful post on the Apex Blog by John Ginsberg-Stevens. Apropos of that, Paul Raven at Futurismic points out that Windup Girl is looking depressingly predictive (although more in terms of genetically modified monoculture food crops than super-ninja geisha).
SF's favorite photographer, Kyle Cassidy, has been roaming around my old stomping grounds in central/northern Arizona. He's got an online photo-book up showing what he was able to do there using only his iPhone.
In the cool-science end of things, i09 has an article on tattoos that could help diabetics track their blood sugar. Very neat concept in the wearable/permanent body computing category.
I was very sad to hear news of Martin Gardner's passing. If it weren't for his writing, I'd be a very different person today, I think. I loved his math-puzzle book The Incredible Dr. Matrix when I was growing up. His skeptical books, along with Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World were instrumental in shaping my world-view.
Over at Torque Control, I'm a little behind on the non-fiction reading for the Masterclass (I'm reading-along-at-home, since I won't be able to get there this year). I've been particularly interested in the non-fiction articles: the one on how the sounds of railroads may have influenced the development of music and how technology has affected the practice of ethnomusicology have struck me as more sfnal than some sf. The ethnomusicology one is particularly insightful; I agree with Niall that the railroads article is a bit of a stretch and goes on a bit long.
Jonathan McCalmont's column on the video game Dead Space makes me much more interested in something that I'll never play than I have any right to be.
I've been grabbing sf/f desktop wallpapers from CreativeFan and Tor.com. Tor has wallpapers from each of this year's Best Artist Hugo nominees.
And the podcast conversations between Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan continue to be very interesting. Podcast #4 sees them explains exactly my philosophy on 'cannons' and 'reading lists' (which is how I approached my 'classics reading' project).

The Near Future Weighed Down by Today's Baggage

2010-05-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

"The People of Sand and Slag" (2004) was my first exposure to Paolo Bacigalupi's work, and it blew me away. What sort of people would we be, what would we do to this planet, if we could engineer ourselves to live on bare rock? It was disturbing and depressing and it really stuck with me. The next year I read "The Calorie Man" (2005). Again, blown away. "Calorie Man" provided a different and illuminating take on what fundamentally powers economics. Since then I've kept up with his short fiction, most of which I've loved (with last year's "The Gambler" being another favorite). I looked forward to his first novel with keen interest. What I found in Windup Girl were many of Bacigalupi's strengths, but also a great big glaring weakness that really hindered my appreciation of the book.

Windup Girl takes place in Bangkok, Thailand. In this future, like today's Netherlands, Bangkok is holding back the rising waters that (literally) threaten to drown it. The world we're in is firmly the same universe as "The Calorie Man" and "The Yellow Card Man," (2006) both of which I recommend reading before embarking on the novel. I'm not entirely sure that the 'calorie man' concept came through clearly in the narrative if you read it without knowing the background. So, we have a post-oil near future. Global warming has hit in full with rising tides drowning many boats. In the absence of oil, everything from transportation to city power has become more complicated. Interestingly, this book does not detail the actual nigh-apocalypse caused by the oil running out. The characters refer to the 'Expansion' (the time we're living in now), and then the 'Contraction,' a time of chaos and mass die-offs.

In this time of relative calm, we follow four characters in Bangkok. Anderson Lake is a westerner out to profit from Thailand's relative prosperity and farsightedness. Officially he is overseeing a factory that is developing kink-spring drives that can store energy more efficiently than current models. Unofficially he is looking for access to Thailand's enormous library of genetic material, a seed bank that stores its true natural resource. The motivation for all this is a little muddy if you read this as a stand-alone; "The Calorie Man" lays out the case for genetic diversity and its importance more clearly. Hock Seng is a 'yellow card,' a barely tolerated Chinese refugee from Malaysia. There the Islamic community rose up and slaughtered most of the Chinese community, even families who had lived there for generations. Hock Seng had been a very prosperous businessman, but was left with little more than his skin and a mass of psychic scars. He works for Lake but has only one focus: doing whatever he must to make sure that he never, ever gets trapped or taken by surprise that way again. He has plans upon plans, but what he lacks are the plans for Lake's manufacturing line, which he hopes to sell for protection and resources.

On the other side Jaidee Rojjanasukchai and Kanya Chirathivat work with the Thai customs agency. They protect Thailand from all enemies, especially foreign (and potentially plague-bearing) genetic material. Most customs officials are easily bribed, but Jaidee is the 'Tiger of Bangkok,' who actually cares about protecting his homeland. Off to the side a bit is Emiko, the eponymous 'Windup Girl.' She is genetically engineered to be a 'companion' to a Japanese businessman: a lover, but also a secretary and translator. Unfortunately, she was sold off by her former owner and wound up in a whore house, where every night she is graphically sexually humiliated in front of crowds of men. From Lake she learns of a colony of runaway windup people up north somewhere, but almost every motion marks her out as a created creature. Windups are popularly believed to be soulless, are illegal in Thailand, and are considered abominations by the new fundamentalist Christian sect, the Grahamites. (It seems that no post-apolcalyptic near-future is complete these days without some fundie Christians running around).

All of the characters proceed to navigate an *ahem* dynamically challenging environment. Thailand's government is not stable; one strong king led them through the Contraction successfully, but in the time of the book there is a child princess and a regent. The regent has one faction, and the army (including the customs agency) has another. A string of more-or-less random events brings all the pent-up conflict to a head, and everyone must survive as best they can. In fact, some of them don't survive. At the end, huge changes have been wrought in Thailand.

I definitely liked the range of characters that Bacigalupi picked for his points of view; they encompass the scene usefully from several different perspectives. Each of them is well-drawn, with clear motivations (although sometimes they fail to be much more than the collection of their motivations; I think Hock Seng and Kanya best rise above these limitations). I appreciate his vision of a post-oil future and what that might mean, how other tech could fill the gaps and what gaps might be left. I found the depiction of a political climate so volatile that any random spark sets off an explosion of pent-up conflict to be excellent.

Here's my biggest reservation about the novel, the bit that I may not be able to overcome. When you choose an exotic third world country as your setting, you have to deal with the modern-day baggage that it brings along with it in the mind of many (ignorant) Westerners--like me. The Western stereotype of places like Thailand is that they are already cesspools of political and economic chaos. (Consider Thailand's most recent flare-up of protests, violent repressions, and borderline civil war.) Basically, I feel like the future depicted here doesn't seem that much worse than the present that I imagine in Thailand and other countries in similar situations.

Likewise, Emiko is burdened by her real-world counterparts. Emiko is an enslaved whore, but lucky for her she is not only a genetically engineered geisha, she is also a genetically engineered super-ninja assassin who gets to kill the men who abuse her most horrifically and then survive the political crisis, violence and eventual flooding sparked by her revenge rampage. In fact, because of her super-abilities and the intervention of a random genetic engineer in the epilogue (a gun that was only barely and somewhat conveniently laid on the mantlepiece in the main narrative), she may be the future of humanity. (Although that future may ultimately lead us to "The People of Sand and Slag," still not a happy place.)

Now, I imagine (and Western anti-slavery activists tell us) that there are many, many women in sexual slavery in parts of the world right now who have no hope or ability to better their lot. They are not super-ninjas just waiting for the right trigger to wreck their just revenge. They live lives of torture and abuse and they often die young. Likewise, there are good government officials now standing up to corrupt ones, and there are political factions out there who don't care who they have to kill to get power, and there are Westerners seeking to take advantage of third world resources--sometimes they succeed and sometimes they get chewed up and spit out by cultures and forces they don't understand. There are barely tolerated refugees out there right now, and some of them make it and a lot of them don't. So I just keep thinking about the real enslaved prostitutes, and the real customs officials, and the real barely legal refugees out there in the world, and I wonder why, in Windup Girl's resource-depleted future, these characters seem to have more resources and more agency than their real world counterparts.

(I must note that this is a systematic bias of almost all fiction: we prefer to read about people who succeed--Heroes--or at least have the power to possibly succeed, rather than people who cannot change their own lot. But you would think that of any writer, Bacigalupi would be among the least likely to hew to this convention.)

How does this post-apocalyptic Thailand illuminate Bacigalupi's message? If we are meant to be shocked and dismayed at the sheer quantity of abuses, on levels of sex, gender, power, class, race, ethnicity and any other form you can think of, why not write a book about people living in these conditions today? Why not write non-fiction, or make a documentary? If, on the other hand, we are meant to be shocked by the horrors of this energy-scarce post-apocalyptic world, why not show the Contraction, when so much of the Earth's population died? Why depict the time when things have regained enough stability to duplicate the abuses of today? I hate to accuse the infamously depressing and dystopian Bacigalupi of having a too-optimistic ending, but too much of this book seemed like revenge fantasy: more bad guys die than good guys, the 'right' faction wins the day even though it causes huge disruptions to the nation, and the abused sex slave gets to kill those who enslaved her and in fact becomes the future hope of humanity.

Maybe this book would have worked better if I were more familiar with Thailand today; then I would clearly see the differences and be shocked by them. But it isn't so different from the images I have in my head of modern-day failed states--whether they be in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or Africa--to shock me with how much worse things would be after the energy runs out. I still appreciate Bacigalupi's detailed vision of a post-oil future, but for me this milieu wasn't the best background against which to showcase that future.

I must also mention that I was almost certainly put off the whole enterprise by the extraordinarily graphic and unpleasant descriptions of Emiko's sexual torture at the hands of her oppressors. I assume that Bacigalupi chose to show those scenes in such detail in order to make her ultimate revenge both justified and a cause of celebration. But I've never really been good at stomaching scenes like that; reading them hurt in a much more visceral way for me than most other depictions of random violence.

Aprils Links bring May...

2010-05-11T12:11:00.003-05:00

It's amazing to look back on this last spring semester and realize how inactive I was online. Only a handful of reviews, and almost no blog comments. I've been reading a lot in books, magazines and online. So in my brain I've much more connected; basically I was just lurking everywhere. So thanks to all the folks who actually post regular content--at least I feel like I know what's been going on, even if I haven't been actively involved.

Thanks as always to Niall Harrison, especially for hosting discussion on the awards lists such as the Clarke Award. I'm jealous that he'll be going to the SFF Masterclass again, and I'm looking forward to seeing what new discussions the reading list and participants will spark.
Likewise, I also appreciated Nic Clarke's take on the award nominees.
Abigail Nussbaum continues to write awesome reviews, including this one of Joe Hill's Horns. It didn't make me excited about Horns itself, but it does impress on me the necessity of picking up 20th Century Ghosts.
I've been enjoying Jonathan McCalmont's Blasphemous Geometries column on video games over at Futurismic; definitely some interesting perspectives on a field I'm less familiar with.
I've been extremely saddened by the border-crossing difficulties and abuses suffered by Cheryl Morgan, Peter Watts, and Adam Israel. So many things continue to go in the exact wrong direction instead of the right one. I am very glad that Cheryl has found a home for now and that Dr. Watts avoided jail time. I hope that Adam's case gets better instead of worse.
I loved the recent podcast with Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe. It felt just like hanging out with them at a con, except that they weren't interrupted ten times and got to actually complete some of their thoughts.
Thanks to Jay Lake's links I've been enjoying the conservative blogger Daniel Larison. It's nice to read an opposing viewpoint that you can really respect.
In more general interest news, I've been enjoying reading items from both The Atlantic and the Smithsonian online. James Fallows in particular could write about a phone book and make it interesting and worthwhile.
I was very happy to hear that Asimov's magazine will be accepting online submissions, I hope it works out well for them. I also wanted to give Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld mad props for designing their submissions system; he (and his magazine) continue to be made of awesome.

Anyway, I'm hoping to get back into the flow of things a bit more soon. I've already begun my Hugo reading, and posts will soon be following. I have plenty of draft reviews, but I want to smooth out the language a bit more. However, I doubt that I'll be going full-tilt this summer. I'll be taking a (relatively easy) summer class to finish off my Masters Degree, but I've also signed up for quite a bit of overtime work this summer. So we'll see how it goes.

Stuff that Makes Tolkien Look Like a Radical Progressive

2010-05-05T12:23:00.007-05:00

Imagine reading The Lord of the Rings. Now imagine it without any truly memorable or empathetic characters, or any good dialog. Imagine the battles scaled down, the bloodthirstiness ramped up, and the quests made kind of pointless. Now imagine no longer! E. R. Eddison's Worm Ouroboros was published in 1922.

I'm being a bit harsh here, but really, this one makes Tolkien look like a superlative genius. The fact that his characters rise to two-dimensionality is a huge improvement over Ouroboros. After so much of my pre-1930s reading, I've come to believe that the fact that Tolkien's characters are so memorable and well-beloved is what truly lifts his work above so much that came before. This makes him seem almost sui generis, but all these earlier examples show that he clearly is not. Ouroboros in particular is a direct ancestor of LotR, and apparently it is well established that Tolkien read it. But this is the book that makes me picture Tolkien reading it, throwing it down and shouting "I can write something better than this!" and stomping off to start The Hobbit. Ouroboros shares with LotR a somewhat Norse outlook on things, a supernatural bad guy, quests, etc. What it lacks is epic scope and any trace of charm.

The main players in the story are Demonland and Witchland. Despite the names, all the people involved in the conflict are basically human, and Demonland turns out to be the 'good guys.' Witchland is ruled by a King who made a deal with some sort of evil powers to get insti-reincarnation. Whenever he gets killed, he spawns again in his Iron Tower. This is symbolized in his ouroboros ring (this ring, once mentioned, will have no further importance to the story). Early in the story, Gorice XI gets killed in a wrestling match with a demon lord, and Gorice XII pops up.

To avenge the death of his previous self, Gorice summons up a eldritch sea monster to wreck the demon fleet heading home. Lord Juss, our super-heroic hero, survives, but his brother Goldry Blusco is nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, Juss is sure that Goldry isn't dead (WTF?), and heads off on a quest to rescue him. While he and his only-slightly-less super-heroic lordly sidekicks are away, the Witchlanders conquer and sack Demonland. Chalk one up for incredibly bad leadership on Juss' part.

So Juss goes off questing. This has many different phases: wandering through a peaceful landscape, holed up in a fort with several hundred men against several thousand, wandering some more and being nice to animals, and mountaineering up to the abode of a demigoddess. She confirms that his brother isn't exactly dead, and Juss can get to him with the help of a hippogriff. However, their first hippogriff gets hijacked, so they head back to Demonland and kick out the Witches.

The Demons start cleaning things up, and eventually Juss finds another hippogriff. He flies over, climbs some more, avoids some temptation, and rescues his brother. Now the Demons go on the offensive: they destroy the Witches' fleet, and land on the Witches' doorstep.

Now the Witch King Gorice has a choice: fight square or use magic? Unfortunately, there's a hitch: a prophecy related to his immortality that says if he unleashes the big magic again, he'll be really dead this time. So he fights square, but loses due to the tactical brilliance and general heroic-ness of Juss and the Demons (although Juss' hard-won brother doesn't play any pivotal role in the battle, and one of the more interestingly ambiguous side character gets killed off almost casually).

Then the Witch King goes off to try magic while his inner circle poisons itself through treachery. The Iron Tower falls (Gorice's last moments happen totally off-stage), breeching the walls and allowing the Demons to come waltzing in.

Yay, they've won! There's peace all over the world and the Demons rule everything. But, when talking to the demigoddess who helped them with the brother quest, it turns out that the Demon lords are all sad. They'll have no more epic fights in which to prove their valor and heroism, no mighty enemies worthy of their might of arms and storied weapons. They've got nothing to look forward to except peace and prosperity for all of their days; how boring! So the demigoddess actually brings all the bad guys back to life, and the last page of the book literally returns to the first page--hence the ouroboros.

So yeah, just the fact that in LotR the third age actually ends, the elves actually leave, and Frodo really can't go home again looks like a brilliant dose of realism compared to this stuff. Some of Ouroboros' other flaws: Lists of stuff in lieu of descriptions. Spending way too much time with the bad guys, seeing them be mean to each other and lewd with women. It makes them silly instead of threatening. And it doesn't help to make your battles sound really epic when you actually give the troop numbers: 800, 3000, 5000, etc. I think the biggest number is around 6,000, which is supposed to be a devastatingly huge force. Considering that this was written after WWI, I found it almost quaint--maybe the readers of the time found it comforting.

Also, there are lots of other minor plot points that are never really paid off. One good guy gets hit with a curse, and all the terms of the curse come true (of course), but it doesn't really seem to bother him that much. And generally, we are supposed to understand that things matter because the author says so, not because he shows them. These guys are awesome/heroic/really evil/really good/really attractive/etc.--because he said so! None of them really come across as any of those things in casual reading. Certainly the characters all blur together after a while (especially the three Witch lords whose names all begin with 'Cor-').

You can definitely see the Norse influences here: the emphasis on personal heroism over actual leadership and the desire for perpetual war to prove valor, among other things. There are also place names such as "Threngrim." However, it's definitely not a pure influence: "Threngrim" is in the same region as "Taranadale" and "Owlwick." That must have set the linguist in Tolkien twitching.

Of the classics I've read so far, the only one with really memorable characters is George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, which was written specifically for children. Actually, I'll throw Alice in Wonderland in there too, also for children. I suspect this may be one of the reasons that Tolkien started with The Hobbit instead of the more adult-oriented LotR. Even Lord Dunsany, whose short fiction I've enjoyed immensely, wasn't that big on character. Over time I'm definitely coming to realize why Tolkien stood out in the field the way he did.

For an interesting alternate take, see Georges T. Dodds' review at SFSite. It acknowledges all the flaws listed above but loves it anyway.

Robots: Kickin' It Old School

2010-04-15T13:51:00.005-05:00

R.U.R. is likely the shortest book that I've read during my stroll through the classics, and I finished it very quickly. It's a three act play, originally written in Czech, written by Karel Čapek in 1921. Its claim to fame comes from having introduced the word 'robot' to the world lexicon, obviously an important milestone in genre history. But the play didn't match my expectations at all.

For one, the 'robot' workers of the play are biological, not mechanical, in origin. Their commanality with today's robots rests on their production by science (rather than reproducing themselves) and their lack of souls. I had assumed that 'robot' always meant machine, but not in the early days. The fact that the focus of the play stayed almost entirely on the human actors, not on the robots, was my other big surprise. Given that this is a polemical work where the robots clearly stand in for the oppressed working class, I'd have expected a little more active participation by members of that underclass. Instead we mostly get humans talking about the robots, arguing about their fate and purpose and the ethics of oppressing them.

In Act 1, we get all the infodumping. Helena comes to visit the robot factory and learns all about their history in a convenient stretch of info-dumping. It turns out she's there to try to free the robots, but the manager assures her that they don't want to be free; they have no souls and will just keep working. As she's the only human female on the island, he also insists she marry him. She declines.

Act 2 occurs ten years later and she's married to that guy. Yes, well. Ahem. Also, she's been influencing the resident scientists to try to give the robots more soul and personality. We get some nice anti-robot invective from the only actual working class human on the cast list, Helena's maid servant. Then the robots rise up all around the world, and proceed to kill all humans. We get this information in the typically theatrical way, in dispatches from the outside and then sounds of the uprising outside Helena's room. Histrionics ensue, in the course of which Helena burns the technical specs/schematics that show how robots are made, which should make it impossible for anyone to make more robots; including the robots themselves.

In Act 3, only one of the scientists remains, and he is probably the only human left in the world. The robots are keeping him alive, hoping that he'll re-invent the technique of making more robots (they're not immortal, and in fact have limited life spans). We finally get some dialogue from the robots themselves. The scientist, half-mad at this point, starts picking out robots to dissect alive, hoping to find out what animates them. Two of the robots, a man and woman, get very self-sacrificing at this point, and the scientist diagnoses them as being in love. This proves that they've developed souls. Thus they'll be able to survive and replicate themselves from here on out. The End.

As a work of literature, this was a very quick read but filled with astonishing amounts of melodrama. Of course, in today's sf the end of the world is so commonplace that we expect our heroes to act with more composure than this. But I guess when you're witnessing one of the first robot uprisings ever in literature, it's probably not yet the time to be making the 'I for one welcome our new robot overlords' joke. As a work of polemic, it certainly gets the job done with a minimum of subtlety. Although I wonder if the moral doesn't end up being: don't be nice to (humanize) the workers, or they'll rise up and kill you all. Certainly by the end Helena ends up having to shoulder most of the blame for the death of the human race, although a couple of the other characters also own up to a share.

R.U.R. definitely signals the way robots will be used in the genre as it moves forward, as markers of Otherness and stand-ins for various categories of oppressed peoples. See examples as recent as Mike Resnick's Hugo-nominated short story, "Article of Faith" (Baen's Oct. 2008). And much like the earlier Pinocchio, these robots do turn into real humans at the end, transformed by the power of love. So it's interesting to go back and look at this first example of officially-labeled 'robots.' It won't take you much time and as long as you can stomach several pages of human whining, it is edifying.

The New Art

2010-04-04T10:56:00.003-05:00

This is the newest tattoo, debuting at ICFA a couple of weeks ago. I put a photo of it out on Twitter at the time, but we've finally gotten the ICFA photos off our camera. So here's a high-res shot of the new art. Also: hair by Liza Groen Trombi. Not only did it look awesome, but it stayed solid the entire evening without even a drop of hair spray or gel.

Answers to FAQ:
1. They're Maxwell's equations that describe electromagnetism (without which everything you see in the space art wouldn't be possible. Science: It Works!)
2. 5 sessions, 14 hours on the table. Entire process, from talking about the art to being fully inked, took 5 months.
3. Steve Comeaux, at Amazing Tattoos in North Houston
4. No, for now I think this is my last tattoo.

Some Short Thoughts on a Spare Novel

2010-03-30T10:19:00.004-05:00

Too much time has passed since I read Annie Proulx's The Shipping News to give it a proper review (I finished it back in January). However, it stuck with me enough that I want to at least jot down a few thoughts:

The main thing is, I liked it even though I suspected I wouldn't. I don't read a lot of non-genre novels these days, so I wasn't sure how this would strike me. Also, Proulx's prose is often described as 'spare,' and the stories I love tend more toward the lyrical.

So let's take the prose first: it is indeed spare. Many of her sentences are missing at least one ordinarily needed part of speech. They lack nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives, subjects, objects, or some combination of the above.

"The Aunt in her woolen coat when Quoyle came into the motel room. Tin profile with a glass eye. A bundle on the floor under the window. Wrapped in a bed sheet, tied with net twine."

This style is often used to set up scenes and tone at the beginning of a chapter. I never found myself held up by the prose--the lack of grammar never hindered understanding of the sentence or communication of the mood. I think she sacrificed grammatical correctness in favor of rhythm, and that trade-off worked for me.

In many ways this is a pure character piece; certainly to the extent that there's a plot it's about the characters and their relationships. However, what it isn't is a story of a bunch of people talking about their feelings, or having internal narration about their introspection of their feelings, or external narration about their feelings. This is a paragon of 'show, don't tell.' There is a stunning amount of pain in this novel: widowers, sexual abuse victims, insane people, parents losing children, people with thwarted dreams, etc. There's even a dead dog. However, the narration keeps all of it at a distance, as repressed as the characters experiencing it. The book is set in Newfoundland, and while I was raised (partly) in New England, this attitude felt *very* familiar. The 'proper' response to intense personal drama is to treat it at a remove; talk about it rarely if at all, and jokingly if you can. This is how the characters are handling things, and the narration does as well. The traces of pain show up instead in small details, allusions in conversations, in children's questions and the like. This made perfect sense to me, and I ended up liking it quite a bit.

There are a few bits in the story that could be interpreted as fantastic. I'm glad they weren't. Belief in odd bits of superstition, fate and fatalism are treated as matter-of-factly as buying a new boat. This jibes with my memories of intensely practical relatives of mine who had occasionally seen ghosts or had premonitions. Just a part of life up there. Today my skepticism may put a different spin on those events, but that's a very different perspective than the one held by the people with the experiences. Again, I think Proulx handled it just right.

I'm not sure I would have liked it so much a few years ago, before I started reviewing. Since then I've become more sensitive to structure and diction and what they actually do for a story. Without that I'm pretty sure most of the above would've gone right over my head. In fact, I bet in high school I would have dismissed it (as I did so many books I was forced to read) as being boring and having 'unlikable' characters. Now, combined with the perspective of having to live an adult life, I appreciate this rather quieter brand of heroism and character than I could before.

Ruined, Ruined I Tell You!

2010-03-16T10:27:00.014-05:00

Just a note: after reading Jurgen with it's innumerable double entendres, reading other classic fantasy books that talk about swords, large swords, magic swords and your father's sword is really, really hard to do without giggling. If I had it to do over again, I would finish reading all of Lord Dunsany's stuff before reading Jurgen. As it is, I still have King of Elfland's Daughter and Book of Wonder to go. Wish me luck.

Some things you just can't un-read.

However, with that in mind, I realized that I'm getting very close to finishing this period of my reading of genre precursor classics. By my estimation, here's what I have left (books that I don't have a copy of yet are marked with the *):

The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, Edgar Allen Poe (1838)
~~The Princess and Curdie~~, George MacDonald (1883) Optional
~~Lilith~~, George MacDonald (1895)
~~Book of Wonder~~, Lord Dunsany (1912) Optional
~~The Worm Ouroborous~~, E. R. Eddington (1922)
~~King of Elfland's Daughter~~, Lord Dunsany (1924)
We, George Zamiatin (1925)
Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees (1926)
The Greatest Adventure, John Taine (1929)
*The Crystal Horde, John Taine (1930)
*The Time Stream, John Taine (1931)
*Before the Dawn, John Taine (1934)
Odd John, Olaf Stapledon (1935)
(Since they're bundled together, I'll also pick up Sirius by Stapledon, 1944)
~~Shadows Over Innsmouth~~, Lovecraft (1936)
~~At the Mountains of Madness~~, Lovecraft (1936)
Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis (1938)

After which I'll be able to head into the "Golden Age" with a clear conscience, probably starting with Lest Darkness Fall (L. Sprague De Camp, 1939) and Slan (A. E. van Vogt 1946).

Depending on how I find them, I may not read all four John Taine books. However, they were highly recommended to me by the late Charles Brown, so the plan is to read them all. None of them are terribly long.

It's really quite exciting to be so close to the end of this phase. With any luck I'll be done by the end of the year. I'm really looking forward to getting into the 50s and thence on to the New Wave. I think I may be close to ready for it now.

RoboNaut Video

2010-03-13T13:48:00.004-06:00

I got the opportunity to help with some power testing on NASA's new robot project. Here they put him through his check-out Tai Chi routine. They do a good job of anthropomorphizing him by having him look at his hands as he's checking out his fingers. By the way, he is technically anthropometric: When he stretches his arms out he's got the same wingspan as Yao Ming (Houston Rockets basketball player) and biceps proportional to Arnold Schwartzenegger in his prime.

I <3 my job.

An Adventure of Cynicism

2010-03-03T18:00:00.003-06:00

Having finally finished three large personal projects in the space of two weeks, I finally have some room to breathe. Although most of that new breathing room will be directed towards homework--only two classes to go to finish my MSEE! So please enjoy this review. You can also see my latest review for Strange Horizons, of Brain Thief by Alexander Jablokov. Check out Andrew Wheeler's review of the same book for an interestingly different slant on it.

Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice by James Branch Cabell may be one of the most deeply cynical books that I have ever read. It's probably not a coincidence that it was published in 1919 in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Like so many other books I've read for my learning-about-the-classic-roots-of-the-genre project, Jurgen tells the tale of a man wandering through fantastic landscapes, having 'adventures' and dialogues about weighty topics. Unlike any of those books, but more like contemporary D. H. Lawrence, Jurgen is chock full of sex. While never using explicit or graphic language, the eponymous character has lots and lots of sex: anything that can be a double entendre is one in this novel.

Jurgen starts on his journey after he speaks in praise of the devil to a priest. The god-figure Koschei (a sinister character lifted from Slavic mythology) overhears this and takes a liking to this middle-aged pawnbroker and self-described "monstrous clever fellow." When asked for a boon, Jurgen requests to be freed from his shrewish wife. That works fine for a while, but eventually he goes off looking for her. He first encounters the centaur Nessus (Greek mythology) and is granted his shirt (the same shirt that killed Hercules, presumably). Then his adventures truly begin.

At first he meets the idealized persona of a girl (not his wife) that he loved in his youth. After that rather dispiriting encounter, he is granted youth (and a somewhat disturbing shadow) by another mythical figure. He gets to go back to that youthful lover one more time, with youth himself, but even then he cannot recapture idealism--he can't unknow the rather less pleasant woman she becomes.

Now representing himself as a duke, he rescues and woos (and has sex with) Guinevere before her marriage to Arthur (with her father's consent). Letting Guinevere go to her proper destiny, he is taken to Avalon to be the play thing of the Lady of the Lake. Even in a land of non-stop sexual pleasures he gets bored. He becomes the Sun symbol to the Lady's Moon symbol, and eventually must leave her land, following the seasons. (The tale places itself very specifically in time, with various days, seasons, and festival days mentioned. I believe the whole journey takes up one full year, reinforcing its cyclical nature.) Jurgen chooses to head to another mythological land where Queen Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, rules. He sees her, and to him she looks just like his youthful and idealized love. But she is married to Achilles. Jurgen, now representing himself as a King, instead settles down with a tree nymph. He doesn't love her the way she loves him, but he feels quite a bit of affection for her. Eventually he sneaks into Queen Helen's bedroom, and could have his way with her but after lengthy debate with himself instead walks away.

Unfortunately, then the kingdom is overrun by Philistines. (Cabell has nothing but scorn for censors, especially after they worked very hard to get Jurgen banned. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice filed an obscenity lawsuit over it; apparently Cabell eventually won and added even more derision to a new edition of the book.) Representing himself as a great philosopher, Jurgen is taken to the queen of the Philistines, and over the course of a night quite wins her over with his *ahem* mathematical discourses. But it does not avail to save his nymph, the kingdom, or Jurgen's life, and he is dispatched to Hell.

This is where the narrative becomes even more fascinating. Hell is basically ruled by the damned according to their own preferences and demands for painful atonement. Jurgen's father runs the demons ragged, insisting that he is not yet suffering enough for his sins. Jurgen (promoting himself to Emperor, but still transparent to his father) can't trick the old man into imagining him out of Hell, but he does get him to imagine a really luscious vampire/succubus for Jurgen to shack up with on the shores of a lake of blood. Here's a representative sample of the style of Jurgen's conquests (I've left out mention of several of his more casual encounters):

So Florimel [the vampire] conducted Jurgen, through the changeless twilight of Barathum, like that of a gray winter afternoon, to a quiet cleft by the Sea of Blood, which she had fitted out very cosily in imitation of her girlhood home; and she lighted a candle, and made him welcome to her cleft....

So Florimel extinguished the candle, with a good-will that delighted Jurgen. And now they were in utter darkness, and in the dark nobody can see what is happening. But that Florimel now trusted Jurgen and his Noumarian claims was evinced by her very first remark.

"I was in the beginning suspicious of your majesty," said Florimel, "because I had always heard that every emperor carried a magnificent sceptre, and you then displayed nothing of the sort. But now, somehow, I do not doubt you any longer."

Jurgen talks with Satan quite a bit, and learns that while Hell is technically a representative democracy, the demons have voted 'temporary' dictatorial powers to Satan 'for the duration of the War with Heaven.' This is probably where the 1919 publication date is most obvious, but it certainly hasn't ceased to be a problem since.

Eventually Jurgen's lover has to head back to the world, and Jurgen decides to take himself to Heaven. There as well everything is run according to the notions of the inmates, in this case Jurgen's grandmother. He first meets himself as a child--in fact, as his grandmother's idealized version of his childhood self. He bluffs himself into Heaven by pretending to be a Pope, for whom there are loopholes in the rules. Then he spends some time talking to his younger self, and in brief but poignant moment:

"And Jurgen talked with the boy that he had once been, and stood face to face with all that Jurgen had been and was not any longer. And this was the one happening which befell Jurgen that the writer of the tale lacked heart to tell of."

Eventually Jurgen goes to talk with God. Even looking at Him, Jurgen professes his unbelief. Unsurprisingly, God is not the all-powerful creator of the universe. In fact, He was created by Koschei to satisfy the imaginings of people like Jurgen's grandmother. God doesn't quite disappear in a puff of logic, but Jurgen does eventually sit upon the throne of Heaven:

Jurgen sat thus, for a long while regarding the bright vacant courts of Heaven. "And what will you do now?" says Jurgen, aloud. "Oh, fretful little Jurgen, you that have complained because you had not your desire, you are omnipotent over Earth and all the affairs of men. What now is your desire?" And sitting thus terribly enthroned, the heart of Jurgen was as lead within him, and he felt old and very tired. "For I do not know. Oh, nothing can help me, for I do not know what thing it is that I desire! And this book and this sceptre and this throne avail me nothing at all, and nothing can ever avail me: for I am Jurgen who seeks he knows not what."

He shrugs, leaves the throne, and returns "to such illusions as are congenial." After a chat with St. Peter (who is quite annoyed with horridness committed in the name of the Apostles) Jurgen begins to wend his way back towards his wife. He gets his normal shadow back and has a concluding conversation with Koschei, who offers him several beautiful and nobel women. But Jurgen decides to return to his normal life with his shrewish wife, and indeed is returned exactly to the starting point of the book.

Jurgen is the earliest book that I've yet read that contains the idea that people literally create their own heavens and hells. Obviously this has since shown up in innumerable sf/f pieces since, from Heinlein to Piers Anthony. Jurgen is an acknowledged influence on Heinlein, who titled one of his books Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984). Now Heinlein's Job, named Alex, has tribulations that are much less under his control, and instead of bluffing his way from encounter to encounter he mostly gets by through hard work and luck. Also, he doesn't do so much wooing of women as being seduced by them. Alex ditches his original shrewish wife, never looking back after picking up the gorgeous & infinitely sexually available Margrethe (a pagan herself) to accompany him on his travels through the universes.

By the way, with all the sex and also Jurgen's commentary on women, I was a bit surprised that the book did not strike me as egregiously misogynist. Frankly, the narrative gives rather more respect to the women characters than Jurgen does, imbuing several of them with rather more wisdom and intelligence than Jurgen gives them credit for.

Anyway, Heinlein's Alex has a journey of a devout Christian man coming to grips with the fact that the world is in no way what he thought it was (and that he wouldn't like it even if it was). Jurgen basically discovers that the world is pretty much exactly what he feared: devoid of any meaning or justice. In his travels he often says that he is looking for justice, but I don't see that he ever found any, except perhaps to be returned to his life as he had been living it. And Koschei, as a more-or-less hands-off creator god, who may in fact be the puppet of some even higher creator god, doesn't offer much in the way of a moral compass. Jurgen is cynical about sex, religion, mythology, literature, politics, morals, and fate. Although written in a pseudo-archaic style as seen in the above quotes, it is not grating or wearing. It is indeed a comedy, although not one that often induces outright laughter. It is thought-provoking, and still relevant to the moral and public climate we find ourselves in today. Certainly its influence on later sf/f writers is undeniable. If you don't mind lots of thinly veiled sexual humor wrapped around close-to-nihilistic philosophy, I'd highly recommend this to the student of the field.

Of Twitter, A Ballad

2010-02-08T12:21:00.006-06:00

I've never been quite so nervous posting something to my blog. This is my first public attempt at poetry--be gentle!

Oh Twitter's where I go to take
A rest from my day's cares
A needed little mental break
And thus I stay aware

Because it's where I go to find
The slap-fights of the day
Plus Adam Roberts' awful puns
The #hash games folks do play

@CherylMorgan lets us know
Of all the rugby scores
Plus cricket, racing, baseball too
As well as our awards

There's all the news that's fit to print
From SFSignal's tid-bits
Plus CNN and SFWA too
And fluffcthulhu's squid bits

The Aussies tweet while we're asleep
They talk amongst themselves
About anthologies and tea
But not so much of elves

Niall Harrison and @grahamsleight
Talk books and Dr. Who
If we could lure Nussbaum in
We would complete our crew

With Paolo and Tim Pratt we see
Just how the pros throw down
While Office Baby's antics keep
My mind on Oakland town

McCalmont's lost more weight, I see
Graham Raven has left Portsmouth
Jay Lake is still alive, thank ghod
And NASA tweets from orbit

And so my friends both far and wide
And folks I do not know
Do oddly thus enrich my life
As conversations grow

Galadriel's Secret Origins

2010-01-31T18:07:00.005-06:00

If I previously found drops and streams of modern fantasy in George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), in his children's book The Princess and the Goblin (1872) I seem to have found the headwaters. It makes sense that the fantastic imagination had more room to roam in children's literature at the time. Today's resurgence of YA sf/f (see the flap about the YA-heavy Hugo novel nominees in 2009) shows this cycle continuing. And of course, J. R. R. Tolkein wrote The Hobbit before he tackled The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, if you've read The Hobbit to your children but they're not quite old enough to head off for Harry Potter or LotR yet, pick this one up. It strikes many of the same notes, and has aged quite well.

Irene is a princess (a true princess, not spoilt at all), and she lives in one of her father's country houses. There's the household and retinue, and out in the mountains there are miners and (unbeknownst to the princess) goblins. Irene discovers her magical grandmother living in parts of her house that are only there sometimes. None of the rest of the house knows about the grandmother, and even Irene sometimes thinks she dreamed it all. However, she is true to her word and believes in herself, and the grandmother gives her a magic ring that will see her through troubling times to come.

Curdie is a brave young miner, a little older than Irene. He rescued her when she stayed out too late one night. He discovers that the goblins have hatched a plot against the miners and the King's men. However, in his spying he eventually gets captured by the goblins. Irene, following a thread (that neatly ties the plot together, literally and metaphorically) from the magic ring, finds Curdie and rescues him. He's very grateful, but doesn't believe in the ring or the grandmother, which he can't see. Irene is very vexed with him.

Curdie continues spying on the goblins, but is then captured by the King's men. They don't believe him any more than he believed Irene. However when the goblins overrun the house he escapes and helps drive them back. He knows their two weakness: recited poetry (much simpler than the lyrical verse found in Phantastes, same comparison between poetry in Hobbit vs LotR) and very tender feet. Goblins don't have toes (although their Queen does, and she's very self-conscious about it). And they've lost any and all creativity, so the creativity of others causes them pain. The princess had already escaped the goblins of her own accord, but she gets stuck with Curdie and his (very noble) parents for a while. Eventually they make it back in time to present her to her father, who had finally ridden in with his men in response to the emergency. There's one more crisis before the end, but Irene's nobility and Curdie's leadership see everyone through safe and sound.

My description makes it sound a bit trite, but there are some interesting elements here. For one, Irene rescues Curdie, and there's a lot to be said for that. Also unusually, there are three strong women here: Irene, the mysterious grandmother, and Curdie's mother. Another prominent, although a bit flibbertigibbet figure is Irene's nurse. Amazingly enough, this short novel from 1872 passes the Bechdel test with flying colors in that Irene speaks to all the other women about things that aren't boys or men or Curdie. Considering how few modern narratives can say the same, I found this quite refreshing.

The links to Tolkein are very clear. The mountain & the goblins feel just like the situation where Bilbo meets Gollum for the first time in Hobbit. The description of how the goblins evolved has strong parallels with Gollum's backstory:

There was a legend current in the country that at one time they lived above ground, and were very like other people. But for some reason or other, concerning which there were different legendary theories... and the consequence was that they had all disappeared from the face of the country. According to the legend, however, instead of going to some other country, they had taken refuge in the subterranean caverns, whence they never came out but at night... Those who had caught sight of any of them said that they had greatly altered in the course of the generations; and no wonder, seeing that they lived away from the sun, in cold and wet and dark places. They were now, not ordinarily ugly, but either absolutely hideous, or ludicrously grotesque both in face and form... The goblins themselves were not so far removed from the human as such a description would imply... as they grew in cunning, they grew in mischief, and their great delight was in every way they could think of to annoy the people who lived in the open-air storey above them.

There's a magic ring, although Irene's is limited and very specific to her adventures. And in the grandmother, I believe we have the template for Galadriel, amazingly enough. In her bedroom is a bath that appears to be the antecedent of the fountain in which Frodo & Sam see bits of the future.

'Do you see that bath behind you?'

The princess looked, and saw a large oval tub of silver, shining brilliantly in the light of the wonderful lamp.

'Go and look into it,' said the lady.

Irene went, and came back very silent with her eyes shining.

'What did you see?' asked her grandmother.

'The sky, and the moon and the stars,' she answered. 'It looked as if there were no bottom to it.'

Add to that her whole mien, her wisdom & beauty that are almost as frightening as comforting, which speaks to what would later be Tolkein's elvish.

Read today, her introduction feels a bit sinister. A magical old woman, in control of who can see her and who can't, who has intense interest in a particular child. I was all set for her to be a bad witch, which says depressing things about how wise women are portrayed today. Delightfully, she actually is good and wise. And intriguingly, she keeps her secrets! Her story isn't at all explained at the end of the book, which just left me wanting more. I understand that there's a sequel, The Princess and Curdie, and I'm hoping to track down a copy. Irene & Curdie are both nice enough, very brave & courageous children who make it through some very dark places together, but I really want to know more about that grandmother!

Here's another way that you know that a story is good: I told my mother that I was picking up some George MacDonald. She said that she felt like she'd heard the name before. I mentioned Phantastes and Lilith, but when I mentioned The Princess and the Goblin she lit up. She proceeded to tell me the whole story, which she'd loved as a girl in the 40's. I was mildly put out, since I thought Mom and Dad had read all the good English children's lit to me growing up, but apparently they missed that one. No matter, it just gives me the opportunity to discover it now, when I can appreciate just how much it relates to the genre as a whole. Chalk up another one in the "delightful!" column of the classics roster.

Philosophy Swirling Around an Exotic Sun

2010-01-20T21:39:00.004-06:00

Voyage to Arcturus (1920) is completely different from anything else I've read during my journey through the genre’s classic history. It feels allegorical, but it’s rather more subtle than, say, Pilgrim's Progress. It shares its structure with Utopian literature in that it takes a man of (approximately) our times and places him in a strange world where other people have to explain things to him. In Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, this involves the explication of an single comprehensive political/social/economic system. In Arcturus, things are more complex: the protagonist Maskull travels to Tormance, a planet orbiting Arcturus. He doesn't just talk with one set of people there, he talks with many. As he travels through the landscape he meets different people with diverse philosophies and physiologies. His own form changes several times, growing and losing new sense organs with a(n alarming) rapidity that he takes calmly in stride. In its depiction of a man wandering through diverse encounters, it puts you in mind of Gulliver's Travels. But Maskull's encounters are not directly satirical—neither are they straight-forward allegory. The names of people and objects are faintly evocative, though only enough to produce a shade of meaning in the mind. There are no well-marked sign posts for the philosophical positions that the figures represent, and I’m afraid most of the references went soaring off over my head.

To me the most interesting thing about this piece is how it shows off the potential that science fiction would grow into. Maskull travels (via handwavium) to a distant planet. He meets people that he doesn’t immediately try to kill. He learns from them and changes (both literally and metaphorically) through these encounters. The planet on which he lands has people of alien biology (tentacle arms and different sense organs) and alien physics (new colors, a technique that Lovecraft would also use to indicate alienness), but no monolithic culture. As Maskull travels he meets people living their lives in diverse ways according to different principles. The philosophical areas touched on by the story are wide ranging; I only caught a fraction of what is there. The issues raised include: good vs. evil, men vs. women, free will vs. nature, creator gods and destroyer gods, as well as many subtler points.

The story’s structure is in one way straightforward, with Maskull traveling between regions and talking to the different people he meets. In another way it is complex: in each new place Maskull unlearns things he learned before so that he can move forward. In the end he unlearns even his own identity. Thus the story wraps an interesting loop with itself, tying its ending back to its beginning in an intriguing way.

I like this book quite a bit. It is readable even at its oddest moments, and the descriptions are particularly vivid. I did not find Maskull’s reactions to events to be particularly believable, but he is not meant to be an Everyman character. While much of the characters’ oblique dialog went over my head, even just skimming the surface indicated the depth below. This is another book that I want to re-read in a few years. I had the same feeling after finishing Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Since then I’ve laid my hands on a edition annotated by the incomparable Martin Gardner. Gary K. Wolfe has written a (short) volume on David Lindsay, so perhaps I will try Arcturus again after tracking down a copy.

The Bastard Love Child of China Mieville and Richard Morgan

2010-01-13T20:57:00.003-06:00

Heart of Veridon opens with a bang, literally. In the annals of opening sentences, “I was on the Glory of Day when she fell out of the sky” ranks pretty high. What follows is a loud, messy zeppelin crash that leaves a sole survivor, our hero, Jacob Burn. In subsequent chapters we settle into a speedy thriller storming through a steampunk city. At first it feels like a bastard mash-up of China Mieville’s Bas Lag series, with its baroque, grimy, stratified cities, and Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs series, with its fast-paced vivdly described violence. Wow! I thought. And with passages like the following, it’s imagery seemed to reach towards a deeper theme:

It happened sudenly. The Artificers set down the jar and tiped it over. The swarm spilled out like glittering, jeweled honey, their tiny legs clicking against the wood as they washed across the stage. They climbed the girl and began to nest with her, become her, entering the secret machines that made up the engram. They were seeking their queen and her pattern, the song stitched into her shell and her memory, awaiting birth and creation. The girl shivered, and she became.

Much like the Remade in Mieville, people in this universe can be extensively modified for various tasks—and it’s not pretty or pleasant. The girl in the above passage is a performer; later that same artifice will make her a demonic assasin. Our hero has been extensively modified to be a zeppelin pilot, although he was only a passenger on the doomed Glory of Day. The technology used to do this is equal parts alchemy, genetic engineering and steampunk machinery; things with mystical symbols, bred to encode them, whirring with gears and metal. It seems like an excellent entry point to questions of identity and exploitation.

However, in Akers’ debut novel the story settles too easily into the rhythm of the thriller plot. Once the narrative starts down that path, nothing diverts it from its prescribed course. It hits all the beats: Jacob has a macguffin, which he doesn’t understand; there are different factions competing for it; Jacob doesn’t know whom to trust, but picks up a love interest and a sidekick; after much frantic activity, he finally comes to a moment of understanding; quickly followed by the resolution. This is all well done—it’s fast paced, easy to read, the narrator (first person) is sympathetic, the love interest and sidekick are easy to like.

I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it could have been so much more. The imagery and world-building suggested many more layers, but none of them were illuminated by the plot. These hints resurface once more during the Moment of Revelation, but by then it’s too constrained by the needs of Plot to spare time for Theme.

That said, this thriller is unflinching. Aside from the graphic violence, the narrator is given the opportunity to make a really difficult choice. Unusually, the author keeps his fingers off the scale that balances one side against the other. The hero also suffers real consequences for that choice, which is itself refreshing. Still, without the world-building aiming to add depth to the themes suggested by the excellent imagery, I felt that Veridon didn’t quite live up to its potential. However, the simple fact that it has that much potential bodes well for Akers’ next effort. I’ll be looking forward to it.

Full disclosure: Why did I pick this book to read? I met Tim Akers at two cons this year, introduced by another relatively new writer, Daryl Gregory (see full disclosure on my review of Devil’s Alphabet). I knew Tim had his first book coming out this year, and when I saw it on sale at the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, I made sure to grab it (although I neglected to get it signed, whoops). I finished the book I brought with me, and needed something to read on the plane ride home. As it happened, Heart of Veridon was the only mass-market paperback that I had out of all the pounds of books I got at WFC (Curtis and I shipped quite a few books home). So I grabbed it for plane reading, and enjoyed it enough to finish at home. The cover art didn’t hurt either. Quite striking, and it actually gives some useful indication of the book’s content. At first I thought it was a Martiniere, but the artist is actually Jon Foster.