Book Review: A Time of Changes

Robert Silverberg
1971
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
 Rating: ★ – – – –

It seems as if Silverberg read The Lord of the Rings and said, “This book is great but what it needs is a lot of sloppy sex and more obvious drug references!”

This book is written in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy style, with strange fell beasts, semi-medieval customs and dress and archaic sentence structures. Many of the names of people and places could be lifted straight from Tolkien (Glin, Loimel, The Burnt Lowlands). Even the map at the front of my 2009 edition uses the same font and brushwork as the maps of Middle Earth.

Unfortunately, this book is most definitely not The Lord of the Rings.

The story is about Kinnall Darival, the second son of one of the rulers of Salla, one of the lands on a planet colonized by space-faring humans centuries ago. The strongest legacy the original colonists left their descendants is a puritanical Covenant, or code of conduct, that says that the most wicked sin is to be a “selfbarer” – a person who shows any kind of reverence to themselves or to their own private thoughts. The words “I” and “me” are banished – you can only refer to yourself obliquely as “one,” as in, “there is love in one for you.”

Kinnall falls into bad company and learns about a drug that allows you to share your inner self with anyone else taking the drug at the same time as you. After taking the drug, Kinnall realizes that it is no sin to bare one's self to other people, and in fact that it can lead to good things like being able to overtly declare one's love for someone else, so he sets out to give as many other people the drug as possible. Of course the establishment doesn’t like this and he becomes a fugitive.

Among the many problems I had with this book, there were two major ones.

1. This “I/me” thing. In the world of this book, saying “I” or “me” is the ultimate obscenity, because it emphasizes the self-ness of the speaker. Samuel Delany dealt with a similar concept in his (earlier) book Babel-17. For all that book’s faults, at least Delany took it to the next logical step – he realized that if you are not going to allow a person to think about themselves by not allowing them to say “me,” then you can’t allow them to say “you” either. If you say “you,” then you clearly have a sense of someone being other than yourself, and therefore by definition you have a sense of yourself. Not to mention that you’re calling the other person’s attention to the fact that they have a self apart from yours. This is Semiotics 101. All the people in this book saying “one” when referring to themselves and then saying “you” when referring to others made the whole premise break down into silliness.

2. Seedy hippie culture. In the preface to my edition, Silverberg says that this book reflects what was going on in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when he wrote it, but that he hopes it still stands up today, and that the themes revolving around the self-awareness drug aren’t taken too literally to make people think it's solely a drug novel. I’m afraid, however, that it definitely is a piece of its time and that it does not wear well. Taking the drug is the turning point for Kinnall; he immediately feels like his consciousness has been opened and he becomes an eager distributor. In addition, Silverberg finds some excuse for his main character to have sex about every five pages. Kinnall is a big hairy sweaty guy with a premature ejaculation problem, and the euphemisms that describe his lovemaking activities are trite, cheesy, and gross. “The rod of my sex”? Come on. He’d fit right on with Will Farrell and Rachel Dratch’s hot tub lovers. 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

R2-Bun2

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: The City & The City

China Miéville
2009
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The City & the City is, on one level, a decent but not outstanding detective novel. At the beginning of the book, a young woman is found dead in the fictional Balkan city of Besźel, and Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel policzai has to solve her murder.

What makes the book unique and interesting is the setting. The victim is discovered in Besźel, a down-at-heel, primarily Slavic city. But there is evidence that she was actually killed in Besźel’s prosperous, primarily Islamic sister city of Ul Qoma, and then later dumped in Besźel. This is a serious matter, as relations between Besźel and Ul Qoma are extremely tense.

To make matters even more complicated, Besźel and Ul Qoma are co-located. That is, the two cities are physically intermingled with each other. Some sections are total Besźel; some are total Ul Qoma; and some are “crosshatched,” meaning that streets and buildings in one city alternate with those in the other—sometimes block to block and sometimes house to house.

And if you are in one city, it is a tremendous offense not only to physically step into the other city, but also even to sense or acknowledge the people, buildings, traffic, or sounds of the other city in any way. If you do, and you are caught doing it, you can be arrested for breach, and spirited away by a sort of black ops breach enforcement unit, never to be heard from again.

Children in both cities are taught from birth to “unsee” what they aren’t supposed to see. Tourists to either city are given an intensive multi-week training program in the practice of unseeing. But even adult natives can have a hard time with it, since sometimes the only way to tell which city a thing or person is in is by the subtlest of cues—architecture, colors of clothing, or how hedges are trimmed.

Needless to say, this makes it extraordinarily difficult to conduct everyday life in either city, much less solve a murder where the person was murdered in one city and then dumped in the other. In the course of his investigation, Inspector Borlú has to use all his skills navigating the divisions and still runs afoul of breach enforcement units, militant unificationists who want to combine the two cities, and nationalist extremists on both sides who want their city to take over the other.

Reading this book, I found myself comparing the detective story (favorably) to Resurrection Men. As in Resurrection Men, the main character was an experienced, middle-aged male detective with an able younger female constable assisting him; the police hierarchy had a British flavor; and the story took place in the present day, complete with cell phones and modern attitudes and style. But The City & The City was a more interesting story, with a far more likeable detective, and it was, thank goodness, told in the past tense. The ending was a little bit deflating, but that may have just been a natural result of the mystery being explained, the unknown finally becoming known.

It was Miéville’s conception and implementation of the dual city-city, though, that made this book a real standout.

Some reviewers have called this book a “post-9/11” novel, meaning that it explores the split between Islam and Christianity. But I think the metaphor is more general than that. Besźel and Ul Qoma are like many different divided societies, past and present—Berlin, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Budapest, the Balkans, Northern Ireland. Their people live close to each other and sometimes seem alike to outsiders, but are sharply and violently divided by thought and history. Separation is perpetuated by entrenched political institutions. Prejudices strengthen with time and lack of familiarity.
What makes The City & The City a great thought experiment is that in Besźel and Ul Qoma, the separation is entirely mental. I couldn’t help but think that the inhabitants of Besźel must be aware of the Ul Qomans around them, and vice versa. I thought about how it would be so easy to commit breach by walking from a house in Besźel into an Ul Qoman one next door. And yet it hardly ever happens. For the citizens of these two cities, the mental divisions are so ingrained that they have become physically real. The inhabitants of one city really can’t see the inhabitants of the other, even in the case of danger or panic.

And, at the risk of being high-faluting, I don't think this is so far-fetched from reality. I know that there are all kinds of things—and people—in front of my face in my everyday life that might seem ridiculously obvious to others but that, for one reason or another, I don't see at all. 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

The Ten Best Dogs in Science Fiction

I enjoyed this post on Tor.com about "The 10 Best Dogs in Science Fiction" not for the ten dogs Tor chose, but rather for the gazillion reader comments at the end suggesting other SF dogs (and "dogs") that really should have made it onto the list. 

Rat Thing from Snow Crash by Cypher Calliste

Book Review: Falling Free

Lois McMaster Bujold

1988
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Falling Free is technically part of Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, as it takes place in the same universe as the other books in that series. But since there is essentially no overlap with any of the key characters in the other Vorkosigan novels, it can be read as an independent story.

I found Falling Free primarily dippy and also a bit creepy.

It is set on a remote space station owned and operated by the Ampad Corporation. Ampad has staffed the station with custom-made, genetically engineered workers called “quaddies.” The company has no intention of ever letting the quaddies walk on a planet’s surface; they are designed to spend their entire lives in a gravity-free environment. So the company engineers have manipulated the quaddies’ genes to grow an extra pair of arms where their legs should be.

The quaddies are a real money-saver for Ampad. With four hands, they are able to work better in free-fall than a regular two-handed person since they can hold on to stabilizers with one or two of their hands while working with the other two or three. And breeding their own permanent in-station work force is cheaper than hiring planet-bound contractors that have to be periodically replaced.

The quaddies have been psychologically conditioned to be good-natured and friendly. Unfortunately, however, the company doesn’t give a darn about them and sees them as expendable slaves. The quaddies aren’t ever allowed off the station. They are forced to reproduce with whomever the company says they have to reproduce with, regardless of if they like that other quaddie or not. They can be sterilized at will.
 
The quaddies make up the bulk of the station’s work force, but the company hires a few two-armed, two-legged people to fill supervisory roles like trainers and managers. For the most part, the two-legged employees are 100% evil and mean and regard the quaddies as subhuman.
 
But one of the two-legged guys, welding instructor Leo Graf, isn’t prejudiced towards the quaddies and quickly grows attached to them. And when he finds out that the company is thinking about installing cheap newly-developed artificial gravity systems in the station, which would mean they wouldn’t need free-fall-only employees anymore, he realizes that he has to help the quaddies escape before the company decides to sterilize and/or possibly kill all of them to cut costs.
 
The reason I say this book is dippy is because the plot is pretty simplistic and the characters just weren’t interesting or complex enough to make up for it. I lost most of my enthusiasm about a third of the way in. The quaddies are also almost uniformly upbeat, optimistic, charming, friendly, kind, and earnest. Annoyingly so. I wish that some of them were a little cantankerous or at least just not so innocent and nice all the time.
 
 The creepy part was that Leo Graf, who, based on his many years of experience, I understood as being a somewhat older man, had a romantic relationship with what seemed like a really, really, really young quaddie. I’d like someone to tell me I have the ages wrong because it gave me the heebie-jeebies.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Uplift War

The Uplift War

David Brin

1987

Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

The Uplift War re-enters the universe of Brin’s earlier novel Startide Rising. Both books are set in the future, at a time when spacefaring humans have joined thousands of alien races across the known Five Galaxies in subscribing to a common set of principles governing diplomacy, trade, colonization, and combat.

                                       

One of the most important of these principles is that of “Uplift.” The idea behind Uplift is that no modern species developed intelligence on their own. Every existing sapient race was “uplifted” by an earlier patron race that saw their potential, selectively bred them, educated them, made whatever biological changes they thought were necessary, and eventually, after thousands of years, declared them fully “uplifted,” free of guardianship and able to be a patron race in their own right.

Every existing sapient species was uplifted this way, that is, except humans. Humans appear to have inexplicably uplifted themselves.

Uplift is a system of respect, hierarchy, and propriety that keeps younger client races in line and obedient (some might say enslaved) to their master patrons. Many patron species therefore believe that anything that challenges Uplift is a tremendous threat. This means that many of the other sapient races in the universe are at least skeptical of, and at worst lethally hostile towards, humans. Humans constantly have to defend themselves, both politically and militarily, against aliens that want to destroy them for what they represent.

To make matters worse, the upstart humans have already just about finished the process of uplift on two client races of their own: dolphins and chimpanzees. And they allow their two client races to have horrifyingly high levels of freedom and initiative.

The Uplift War takes place on the planet Garth, a planet leased to Earth after it was all but destroyed by its previous owners. Humans and chimpanzees have been living on Garth for many years, settling towns and cultivating farms and setting up libraries and building science labs. And secretly uplifting a third client race, gorillas, without permission.

                                                                             

At the beginning of the book, the residents of Garth hear of the exploits of Streaker, the Earth ship central to the plot of Startide Rising. On its last mission, Streaker found a mysterious something that is so important and desirable that it has several alien races chasing the dolphin-captained spaceship at top speed across the universe as it flees desperately home.

                                            

One of the pursuing alien races, the bird-like Gubru, decide to hold Garth hostage in case they are unable to capture Streaker. So they send an invasion force to the planet to take it over and quarantine all the humans onto islands off the coast of the capital city. The Gubru then impose martial law on the chimpanzees left in town, thinking that, since the chimps are just a client race of somewhat suspect patrons, they pose relatively little threat.

                                             

Luckily, however, the human planetary governor and her ally, the Tymbrimi ambassador, are able to send their children (son Robert and daughter Athaclena, respectively) off into the safety of the inland mountains. There they meet up with Fiben, a chimpanzee fighter pilot who was shot down early in the invasion, and the three of them join with other refugee chimpanzees and the semi-sentient gorillas to form a resistance movement.

What follows is a long, involved guerilla war between the resistance in the mountains and the Gubru invaders in the city. The story focuses primarily on Fiben, and to a lesser extent on Athaclena and Robert, as they each adapt to a wartime lifestyle and learn things about themselves and each other that make them into strong, capable adults of their respective species. And, rest assured, the possibilities for jokes about gorillas as guerillas are anything but ignored.

I very much like the motivation behind this book. I appreciate the empathy and perhaps even love that Brin has for our fellow Earth sapients and semi-sapients. I admire his efforts to incorporate them into a future universe that recognizes their abilities. I love the idea of finding out what dolphins, chimpanzees, and gorillas would be like if we were able to communicate with them.

                                                                   

But I didn’t have the patience for the story. It was short on action and long on the agonized internal monologues of the main characters and the minutiae of the negotiations and plans of the Gubru leadership.

And I found most of the main characters really tiresome. Fiben the chimpanzee was my least favorite. He was crass and often abrasive, with a less than subtle sense of humor. He was constantly getting himself into scrapes and getting out only by luck or reversion to primeval chimp rain dances, and he protested just a little too much whenever his comrades wanted to reward him for his heroism. The story dwelt for what seemed like an incredibly long time on Fiben’s stint in a Gubru jail, while there were plenty of other chimps out and about that I would have preferred to follow.

                                                                     

The humor was also often very forced. There were times when certain jokes or puns, such as the ones about the gorilla guerillas, would have been cute if they hadn’t been being forced down our throats (usually in the form of hilariously guffawing chimpanzees).

Book Review: Startide Rising

David Brin
1983
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Startide Rising takes place in the future, at a time when the now regularly space-faring humans have made contact with the Galactics, an inter-galactic federation of alien species.

The Galactics are governed by the laws of “Uplift.” Uplift is a process in which a “patron” race of advanced, sentient beings takes on the responsibility for educating, mentoring, and, on occasion, physically modifying “client” races of less advanced, pre-sentient beings. The goal is for the clients to become sentient and space-faring and, in turn, to become patrons for client races of their own.

Uplift is the polar opposite of the Prime Directive. What it means is that as soon as you find a promising pre-sentient race, you need to swoop in and declare them to be your clients before anyone else does.

Every single sentient Galactic species alive was uplifted by another, more advanced species. The chain of patrons and clients extends back millions of years to the revered, semi-mythical “Progenitors,” the first race and the only race to have ever uplifted themselves.

The only race to have uplifted themselves, that is, besides humans.

The apparently “orphan” humans are almost universally hated. They are seen as impudent upstarts. And, just by existing, they call the whole system of uplift into question; how could humans have uplifted themselves when no species more intelligent and sophisticated was able to?

Anyway, once exposed to the idea of uplift, the humans quickly took on two client races of their own – chimpanzees and dolphins.

The plot of Startide centers on the maiden voyage of the Earth spaceship Streaker, which is captained and primarily crewed by dolphins with a small contingent of humans and one chimpanzee.

Streaker’s original mission is to test the fitness of dolphins as a space-faring race. But that quickly changes when they stumble across a derelict ghost fleet abandoned in a remote corner of the universe – a fleet that may actually be related to the Progenitors. And they are able to retrieve a corpse from the wreckage.

As soon as the rest of the universe hears about the ghost fleet, they all rush in to fight the Earthlings and each other over what the Earthlings have found. Streaker is damaged in the conflict but is temporarily able to escape, limping away and crash-landing on a semi-hospitable planet nearby.

The rest of the book takes place on this planet, with the Earthlings trying to repair their ship and get back home with their discoveries before the Galactics finish fighting each other and catch up to them.

The story is basically okay, but it does feel a bit like a contrived vehicle for illustrating the uplift concept rather than a story that arose on its own because it was inherently riveting.

Uplift is an interesting idea, and Brin creates a coherent set of laws supporting it. The other client and patron races in the book are varied and show how different patron species treat their clients very differently; some see clients as servants while others genuinely do try to make them self-sufficient.

But uplift also makes me uncomfortable. For one thing, the genetic manipulation that patron races use to speed the process – altering a dolphin’s blowhole to make human language sounds, for example, or gradually turning fins into hands – seems wrong. It leaves a lot of room for error and evil (as is borne out in the story).

For another thing, I was skeptical of the overpowering awe in which clients hold their patrons. The dolphins and chimps are capable pilots, scientists, and doctors but they humble themselves to even the lowliest human. They drop everything to aid a human in distress, even over another chimp or dolphin or their own safety. If I was a member of a client species, I don’t know if I would be so universally deferential.

This is the second novel of six that Brin set in his Uplift universe. I generally enjoyed this one and the third, The Uplift War (which I read because it was also a Hugo winner), but feel no need to read the other four.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.