Book Review: The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. LeGuin
1969
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

LeGuin creates very human, reachable characters. And her writing is somehow…soft. I don’t mean wimpy-soft; I mean that it carries you along easily on a soft cushion of plot and description. You don’t have to struggle to follow the story. And you certainly don’t have to struggle to figure out what messages she’s trying to send.

Because her novels always do have messages. Most of the time they involve the idea of The Other – how society and/or individuals understand and accept or fear and reject someone who is different from themselves.

I generally appreciate these messages. Sometimes, though, they are just a little too loud. It can be hard to have fun reading when you’re too consciously aware that you’re receiving a MESSAGE.

All of the above, both the good and the bad, were generally true with this book.

There are several minor themes in this novel (the nature of patriotism; the importance of uncertainty) but the main messages are about gender and our assumptions about gender roles. It wasn’t the first piece of science fiction to deal with androgyny but it remains one of the most sensitive and was certainly groundbreaking for its time.

The main character, Genly Ai (a man), is an ambassador for the Ekumen, a peaceful association of 80-plus planets (including Earth) allied for the mutually beneficial exchange of information and trade. Ai is posted to the remote world of Winter (or “Gethen,” to the natives) to try to convince its residents to join the Ekumen.

Gethen is in the middle of an ice age, so it is covered with snow and ice and is always freezing cold.

The Gethenians are all androgynous except for a few days each month when they go into “kemmer.” During kemmer, either male or female hormones temporarily become dominant and the person’s body changes slightly to take the form of that gender. This is the only time the person can mate with somebody else (as long as that other person is also in kemmer and has taken the opposite gender role). Then they revert a few days later back to their normal neutral status. Any person can be male or female in any particular cycle; everybody has the potential to be a mother in one cycle and then a father the next.

This sets up a perfect framework in which to explore issues of difference and acceptance. As an Ekumen scout, sent to the planet undercover long ago, wrote in her report, any ambassador to Gethen “must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.”

The Gethenians are freaked out by Ai, who they see as a pervert, a person in a permanent state of kemmer. The genderlessness (or, rather, dual gendered-ness) of the Gethenians is also a challenge to Ai. He is uncomfortable thinking of his associates as both men and women – he is always trying to pigeonhole them as one or the other.

Plugging ahead with his job, though, Ai first appeals to the king of Karhide, a poor but basically happy land. The king is threatened by the idea of the Ekumen and exiles Ai and Ai’s main local ally, Prime Minister Estraven. Ai and Estraven then go to a rival country, Orgoreyn, which is richer and more technically advanced than Karhide, but which has work camps and secret police and an atmosphere of fear. Eventually they are exiled from Orgoreyn as well.

The two of them then have to go through a life-threatening mid-winter cross-country trek during which they, naturally, bond and attain a deep understanding of each other despite their differences. A major breakthrough for Ai comes when Estraven goes into kemmer as a female during their ordeal. “And then I saw again,” Ai says, “and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left was, at least, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality…I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship, to a man who was a woman, to a woman who was a man.”

In general, I liked the themes and the characters. I also liked the descriptions of the icy scenery and the incredible cold of Gethen:

“Under certain conditions our exhalations freezing instantly made a tiny cracking noise, like distant firecrackers, and a shower of crystals: each breath a snowstorm.”

Ai and Estraven traveled over a glacier “covered with great lumps and chunks of ice,” “slick blue ice hidden by a white glaze,” “broken pressure ridges taking queer shapes, overturned towers, legless giants, catapults.”

It’s just that, as I said, sometimes it felt like the main messages were kind of bald. It’s hard to define where the line is but I know it felt like too much when at one point Ai drew the yin/yang symbol for Estraven, explaining that it represented him - “Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Male, female. It is yourself...Both and one.” I get it already.

I thought that LeGuin’s Dispossessed was a slightly better exploration of the process of growing to understand people who are different from you. Or, anyway, I felt like the main character was a little stronger and that the message was a little more subtle and well integrated with the story.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Double Star

Robert A. Heinlein

1956

Awards: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This is one of Heinlein’s earlier books and is a quick and easy read. It’s not quite as irritating as some of his full-blown Randite treatises, since the libertarian proselytizing is kept to just a moderately annoying level. It also helps that the main character is supposed to be something of an egotistical jerk, so it is no stretch for him to treat the lone female character in typically demeaning Heinleinian fashion.

The book starts with an out-of-work actor, “The Great” Lorenzo Smythe, sitting in a seedy bar on Earth. He is approached by a shady space voyageur, who offers him a role in an unnamed production with a huge salary and no questions asked. Within minutes after Smythe has provisionally accepted the role, he finds himself (a) fending off an attack by tree-like Martians carrying ray guns, (b) helping the voyageur dismember and dispose of the attackers’ bodies, and (c) being smuggled off to Mars in the voyageur’s spacecraft.

It then turns out that Smythe’s mysterious “role” is to impersonate a politician: John Bonforte, the leader of the free-trade, anti-regulation Expansionist Party in the solar-system-wide parliament. The real John Bonforte has been kidnaped but his supporters don’t want to admit that to the media just yet, since he is about to be inducted into a Martian “nest” as a full citizen of Mars, and backing out of the ceremony now could have big consequences for intergalactic politics. They want Smythe to impersonate Bonforte for the induction ceremony.

This is all great up to here. (And at least a little evocative of the plot of the 1993 movie Dave.) But then Heinlein can’t help but reveal his true colors.

Smythe is resistant to the whole impersonation plan at first but eventually, in spite of himself, becomes attracted to Bonforte’s ideals and to the plucky group of Bonforte’s supporters trying to do what they believe is best for all of society.

One of these supporters is Bonforte’s secretary, Miss Penny Russell. Like all women in Heinlein’s books, she is the unattainable ready-for-the-pedestal ideal: at once “lovable” and “incredibly efficient,” young, attractive, and skilled but prone to weeping and breakdowns when her man is hurt. As a reward for being good at her job she gets called “curly top” and “honey chile” by her boss. She is the only female with a speaking role in the book, which ironically may be a good thing since when Heinlein puts more women in his stories they only get more awful.

And, unfortunately, Bonforte’s ideals are pretty much nothing but heavy-handed and unsubstantiated free-market sloganeering. At the one point where Smythe-as-Bonforte is questioned about whether or not his anti-regulation plans really will bring about a better system for everyone, he admits it is unproven and that we basically just have to have faith that it will.

                              

I do have to admit that this book taught me two things about Heinlein’s strain of libertarian philosophy that I didn’t know before. One is that a monarchy can coexist happily with libertarianism. I would have thought that the two were antithetical but it turns out no—in Double Star, there is a constitutional monarchy in addition to the representative parliament, and this suits Bonforte/Heinlein just fine. The king is relatively unmeddlesome and serves primarily as a ceremonial figurehead, as in Britain; the parliamentarians see him as protecting the head of parliament, the First Minister, from irrelevant pomp and ceremony, so he can focus just on running the government.

I also found it interesting that even though Heinlein (via Bonforte) is so obnoxious about women, he is relatively advanced about race (at least as far as alien races go). One of the key planks of Bonforte’s platform is that he wants to bring the “eetees”—the Martians, the Venerians, and the Outer Jovians—into the solar system as full citizens, complete with full representation in the parliament. He compares their disenfranchisement to that of black people in the USA in the 1950s. He pursues this goal in spite of xenophobia from Earth and to the detriment of his own career, saying that he is fighting for certain ethical basics that transcend time and space. To him, wanting the eetees to be full partners is just a logical application of the idea that a completely free-trade, free-travel system with a minimum of restrictions and maximum of participants naturally leads to a better economy for everybody.

Book Review: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Robert A. Heinlein
1966
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Normally I can't stand Heinlein and his misogynistic Ayn Randian treatises. But this novel was one of his least bothersome (second only in least-bothersome-ness to Starship Troopers).

Basically, if you are able to ignore any references of any kind to women or economic theory, you’ll be able to enjoy the solid science fiction story that makes up the bulk of this book.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress takes place, naturally, on Earth’s moon. It is the 2070s and there are large settlements on the moon, or “Luna.” Luna is primarily a penal colony – like Australia was in the early 19th century – and most of Luna’s residents are either convicts or descendants of convicts who were exiled there. Many are serving out additional sentences working as indentured servants for the tyrannical Earth-based Authority corporation.

The moon’s population is an incredibly diverse mixture of races, cultures, and languages; the only thing that all “Loonies” all have in common is a fierce resentment of Authority and the Terran domination it represents. Mistress is about how the people of Luna find their legs and their voice, join together in solidarity to fight for their independence from Earth, and form a new society once they have their freedom - ta da!

The book’s main character, Manuel (“Manny”) O’Kelly Davis, is a multi-racial, multi-lingual, highly skilled technical fix-it freedman with one arm. The entire book is told from his point of view (and, entertainingly, in his strong Russian accent).

The story starts when Manny is called in to fix a glitch in one of Authority’s central computers. During the fix, he discovers that the computer is self-aware and the glitch was a joke, a product of the computer’s malicious sense of humor. Manny names the computer Mike (after Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s brother) and the two of them become fast friends.

Initially, Manny has no interest in organized rebellion and is caught up in the Free Luna movement almost by accident, by attending one little meeting that gets raided by police. But his technical abilities and the advantages he gets from his relationship with Mike, who controls the entire network of Authority computers on Luna, propel Manny rapidly right into the center of the struggle and, eventually, the war.

The war for independence puts our hero on an interesting ethical standing. It is, in some ways, an indigenous, grassroots rebellion, but mostly it is carefully orchestrated by Manny, Mike, and a small circle of their closest friends. They provoke Terra into attacking first so they can look like justified martyrs, they fix elections, and they use censorship, semi-truthful propaganda, and harassment (or terrorism) to accomplish their goal of a free Luna.

This book was a tricky one for me to evaluate. It has a large dose of the two elements I can’t stand – and I mean really can’t stand – about Heinlein.

One of these is his awful sexism. Heinlein’s occasional claims of “respect” for women only make him look worse; he is the classic example of a man who puts women up on a pedestal so he can look up their skirts.

The other is his inescapable, simplistic, and pompous Randian economic and social philosophizing. You can never get too far in a Heinlein book before some character goes off on a smug anti-taxation rant.

But, on the other hand, Manny Davis is one of Heinlein’s more appealing characters. He is pragmatic and practical and doesn’t have time for a lot of unrealistic idealism and messing around.

And the moon of Mistress is a darned gritty and satisfyingly realistic setting. Heinlein surrounds his characters with believable underground living quarters and work environments; sensible pressure suits and other equipment; rich family histories and appropriate social structures; and a rich Loonie pidgin. It is easy to picture it as a real, functioning lunar colony.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Blackout/All Clear

Connie Willis
2010
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

Blackout/All Clear contains many of the elements that make Willis’ other books great: humor, tragedy, clear writing, impeccable historical research, and funny, telling, sweet, personal details. The problem is that it is just too long.

The story is a duology, a set of two books, each over 600 pages long in its original hardcover edition. While it has many wonderful moments, it generally reads more like a meandering personal history of World War II Britain rather than a tightly-plotted SF novel in which key historical details serve the story by adding color and realism.

Like several of Willis’ best books, Blackout/All Clear begins at Oxford University in the 2060s, where students and historians regularly travel back in time for hands-on research projects.

There are only two restrictions on Oxford’s time-travel technology. One is that a historian can’t go back to a “divergence point”—a time and place where they could significantly alter history. They can’t, for example, grab a loaded gun and arrange to be dropped into a room alone with Hitler in 1935. The calculations won’t work and the “drop” won’t open to get them there. And the other is that they cannot overlap themselves in time. So if they go to 1805 on one assignment, and then on the next assignment they go to 1804, they had better make sure to back by the end of the year or the continuum will find a way to get them killed. This is called having a “deadline.”

The main characters of Blackout/All Clear are three Oxford students who all travel back to do research in 1940 England. Polly goes to work as a shop girl in a London department store during the Blitz. Eileen goes to work as a nanny for children who have been evacuated to the countryside. And Michael goes to Dover, posing as an American reporter observing the British soldiers and their fisherman rescuers returning from the battle of Dunkirk.

All three students, in spite of themselves, manage to get into situations where they alter history. Polly prevents one of her co-workers from being at home when her house is destroyed by a bomb. Eileen prevents two evacuees from being sent to America on a ship that is sunk by a U-Boat. Michael rescues a soldier at Dunkirk who then in turn saves the lives of over five hundred other soldiers.

The first sign that they might have seriously messed something up is that their drops—the portals that open periodically to take them back to their own time—don’t open when they are scheduled to. Then the back-up drop at Oxford won’t open either. Then they try in vain to find other historians who were in World War II on earlier assignments, so they can borrow their drops. They wait for an emergency retrieval team to come rescue them, but months go by and no one arrives. And they start to realize that they may have irrevocably changed history so that their present no longer exists.

And the tension ratchets up higher when Polly reveals that she has a deadline: she already did an assignment at the V-E Day celebrations in Trafalgar Square. Which means that if she doesn’t find her way back to her present, the continuum will get her killed before 1945.

I love Connie Willis. I hate to say anything negative about her writing at all. But there were several things about Blackout/All Clear that came to bother me.

The sheer quantity of side plots and diversions made it sometimes seem like the purpose of the book was to include as many historical details about as many aspects of wartime England as possible, rather than to have selected details enrich the central plot. Many elements—including, unfortunately, a trip to Bletchley Park, my favorite World War II location—felt like they were added mainly to provide historical detail for the sake of historical detail, rather than to further the story. As informative as this was, it was distracting and slowed the pace.

One of the trademarks of Willis’ style is the breathless use of constant, timely mishaps and interruptions—usually by children or well-meaning dowagers—to prevent the main characters from receiving key information, getting where they are supposed to be, or meeting someone they need to meet. (They are, similarly, often saved in the nick of time from accident, death, or exposure as time-travelers by phone calls, door knocks, or air raid sirens.) This can be quite effective and funny (or tragic, or ironic) on a smaller scale, as in To Say Nothing of the Dog. But about three-quarters of the way through Blackout, the convoluted near-misses and the frustrating passivity of the characters in the face of them started to wear thin. It began to seem like gimmick or a style she couldn’t escape from.

And finally, throughout the entire story, Polly keeps getting sucked into doing performances of various kinds, from the pantomimes and Shakespeare plays put on by her air-raid-shelter-mates to the girlie revue she gets assigned to by the war employment office. Having no interest in performing myself, I didn’t relate to them in the first place, and the way they led to so much inconvenience and pressure and distraction made them quickly become tiresome.

On the plus side, I will say that Willis’ historical research, as always, is excellent. In spite of the problem I had with the quantity of detail, at key moments in the book it really does make history come alive. For example:

• Michael accidentally gets stuck on a boat that goes to rescue the British soldiers at Dunkirk. Her description of his experience is riveting. I felt like I could see it in full color, from the city burning on the shore and the smoke in the sky, to the men pouring onto the boats and threatening to swamp them, to the debris (including people) in the water. And it was told realistically from the point of view of the rescuers, non-combatants who waded bravely into a situation not knowing what would happen or how dangerous it was until they got there.

St. Paul's Survives, Herbert Mason, Dec. 1940




• Polly spends a considerable amount of time sleeping and otherwise passing the time during air raids in London Underground stations, which were used as public shelters during the Blitz. I learned what it felt like to sleep on the cold, hard floor of the tube stations, how they were often noisy, bright, smelly, and sometimes so crowded it was hard to find a space. I learned that there was a whole infrastructure built up for the shelters, including security guards, first aid stations, and canteens where people could buy food.

• The V-E day celebrations—which we see at various points during the book—did mean a lot more to me at the end, after watching the characters go through so much detailed deprivation and fear. As Willis says, when you’ve lived through years of electricity shortages and blackouts, it is unbelievably glorious to see all the lights turned on.

Willis also always seems to have a huge amount of empathy for people in general and tremendous skill at putting herself into the minds of others. She does an excellent job in this book, as in everything she writes, of illustrating how real people would act under unique and incredibly stressful conditions. Her heroes are normal, everyday people, who can be afraid, misguided, panicky, and irritable. And she makes you realize that courage can come from anyone. Even the most flap-headed or confused people can be heroic, even when they don’t intend to be. In fact, since real people have no knowledge of the future and imperfect knowledge of the present, it makes it even more amazing when they do something brave or foresighted.

I also very much like the attitude towards life which fills her stories. She makes me feel very settled and comfortable with the knowledge that we live in a chaotic system. No one single thing ever determines the course of history (or, in the case of Bellwether, the course of fads). History is pushed and nudged in one direction or another by millions of little actions by millions of people. We’ll never be able to identify any one thing that held the key to Allied victory in World War II; it was millions of incidents, all over the world, on both sides, including some that were major and many that seem tiny and meaningless even now.

I think if this had been one 600-page book, consisting of mostly the first half of the first book and the second half of the second book, it would have been fantastic. But, as it is, it isn’t as focused as Firewatch; it isn’t as tragically wrenching as Doomsday Book; it isn’t as sweet as Bellwether; and it isn’t as funny as To Say Nothing of the Dog. If you’ve never read anything by Connie Willis, try those first.

Book Review: Lord of Light

Roger Zelazny
1967
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This book is a work of art.

On one level it is a beautifully written and - dare I say - spiritual story (which I don’t usually have the patience for). At the same time, behind all the beauty, it is funny and sarcastic. And hard science lies under everything the characters do.

A small group of humans on a colony planet somewhere has figured out how to keep themselves alive indefinitely by changing into new bodies as their old ones wear out. This and their other pieces of superior technology allow them to set themselves up as gods – specifically, Hindu gods. Each god has his or her own Aspect (an aura or presence) and Attribute (the specific power they wield). Yama (the deathgod) and Kali (goddess of destruction) are particularly charismatic and intimidating.

These gods keep the rest of the planet’s inhabitants in abeyance by destroying any human who seems like they're about to re-develop any advanced technology such as a bicycle or a flush toilet.

Mahasamatman (or "Sam"), who was one of the first colonists on the planet and now is one of the gods – or maybe he is the Buddha? Or maybe he is just a human? – thinks this is unfair and has spent many lives trying to bring down the gods to let the masses develop in freedom.

Zelazny’s characters usually use excellent, dramatic language: "Let them come against me now and the heavens will weep upon their bodies and the Vedra run the color of blood!" But then they'll also occasionally slip out something about neutrino emissions. The imagery really is lovely and heavenly and colorful – which makes the lapses into modern content that much more funny.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog