Book Review: The Big Time

Fritz Leiber
1957
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This book is really abstract and way out there. I think much of it was beyond me. But what I did get I really enjoyed.

The Big Time’s main premise is that the time in which we live is actually an enclosed environment, and that there is a zone surrounding us, a gray misty space outside of and separate from our time, where other beings live. These other beings can come and go into and out of our time at will, plopping onto our world at any time in our past or future that they choose.

Two groups of these beings, which we never actually see but which are called “Spiders” and “Snakes” by the main characters, are fighting a massive war against each other, using our time as their battlefield. This war involves them: (a) recruiting recently-dead people to be soldiers and support staff for their side, (b) resurrecting the ones who agree to sign up, and (c) sending the resurrected soldiers into different eras of our time to fight the forces of the other side.

Through this process, the Spider and Snake soldiers have managed to screw up history in all kinds of ways, like by changing the outcomes of important battles in ancient Rome and assassinating key people during World War II who had never been assassinated before.

The entire book takes place in the misty realm outside of our time, in a sort of behind-the-lines R&R spot for Spider soldiers. The spot is populated by resurrected formerly-dead people who serve as entertainers, prostitutes, counselors, and doctors for the troops. These “ghosts” are pretty satisfied with how things are going until one visiting soldier decides to mutiny against the Spiders, breaks the connection to real time so they’re floating lost in the timeless zone, and then starts the countdown on a portable atomic bomb.

The main character who narrates the story is one of the prostitute/counselor/entertainers. She is very appealing; she has a laid-back attitude and uses a lot of slang, and, although she is our guide to this weird world, she doesn’t feel the need to explain a heck of a lot. I also really liked the variety of the other characters. Since the Spiders can recruit from any place and time they want to, their support staff and soldiers are necessarily from all different countries and all different eras, including the future.


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

Book Review: Foundation's Edge

Isaac Asimov
1983
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT…
…for all of Isaac Asimov’s other Foundation novels.

This is one of the last books in Asimov’s Foundation series (one of the most excellent and seminal bodies of work in science fiction), and builds on the characters and themes developed over the course of that series. It is therefore hard to describe this book without giving away a lot about the previous books in the set.

This book also incorporates elements of Asimov’s Robot series (yet another excellent and seminal work).

And, because the Foundation series deals with thousands of years of galactic history, it is hard to describe this book without going into a ridiculous amount of back story, which I’m not going to do here.

Clearly, then, the only thing for you to do is to read all the Robot and other Foundation books, in the correct order, and then to read this review, and then to read Foundation’s Edge. (To help you in this pursuit, a complete chronology of Asimov’s books can be found here.)

In the 1950s, Asimov began writing a series of books telling the story of the development of humanoid robots in our near future (the Robot series). He simultaneously began a separate series of books about the rise and fall and rise again of a galaxy-wide empire ruling millions of inhabited worlds in our very far future (the Foundation series). He wrote Foundation’s Edge about thirty years after finishing the last of the original Foundation and Robot novels, but he intertwines elements of both multi-ologies in this book in his same familiar, clear style as if there had been no break at all. This is a testament to the solidity and endurance of the characters, worlds, and concepts he created.

The Foundation novels are built around one primary character, Hari Seldon, the developer of the science of psychohistory. Psychohistory is sort of a combination of mass psychology, sociology, statistical modeling, and complex mathematics. Seldon is able to use it predict the future of all of galactic society.

What he forecasts is the inevitable decline of the decadent galactic empire (which is in its heyday while Seldon is alive), followed by a painful, chaotic period of several thousand years of division and war, and then the rise of a second (more benevolent) empire bringing peace and stability back to the galaxy. 

The violent interregnum has the potential to last from one thousand years to thirty thousand years, depending on which of several courses of action people take. So Seldon sets up a secret foundation of scholars and directs them to guide humanity towards the choices that will shorten the period of chaos as much as possible. He also records a series of holographic animations of himself to be played at key times in the future so he can help guide humanity himself even after he is dead. The Foundation series plays out this “Seldon plan” across hundreds of years of ups and downs and danger and turmoil.

One strange thing about the Foundation series is that it keeps your attention even though there is usually very little action. Often the major crisis in each book involves the characters working to prevent something from happening, rather than to make something happen. These crises usually center on a single skeptic who challenges the assumptions of the majority and who has to use logic and persistence to turn the others around. But it is Asimov’s particular genius that he makes this kind of story interesting and keeps the pages turning.

It helps that the whole concept of psychohistory is awesome and the character of Hari Seldon is enduring and appealing*. And, because Asimov covers thousands of years of history in his various novels, he has to invent a ton of other characters, not to mention worlds and governments and advances in technology, and he always does it with extraordinary clarity, believability, creativity, and humor.

This book, Foundation’s Edge, takes place 500 years into the chaotic interregnum. The original First Foundation (of regular people) and the Second Foundation (of telepaths) both appear to have things well in hand. Things are going perfectly in accordance with the Seldon Plan. Maybe a little too perfectly. People in both foundations grow suspicious that someone is manipulating all of them to align with the Plan, depriving them of independent action. Eventually, their investigations center on a mysterious lost planet, Gaia, which may or may not be the original Earth, and which may or may not be controlling them all without their knowledge, and which may or may not be able to control and/or destroy the entire universe.

Foundation's Edge was a mixed bag. It exhibits all the good characteristics of Asimov’s work. It also exhibits his annoying tendencies to give his characters silly names and to include a number of pert, very young women who are attracted to much older, professorial-type men.

I liked the First and Second Foundationers, their slow realization that they are being manipulated, and their search for the source of that manipulation in the first half of the book. But the second half was unsatisfactory. I didn’t really like what Gaia turned out to be. And I didn’t buy the climax of the plot, where there was a multiple-choice decision that had to be made to determine the fate of the galaxy and only one guy in the universe could make it. I didn't feel that this book necessarily deserved the Hugo Award, and it made me think that perhaps this book won it as a sentimental choice--a win to make up for all the other Foundation series novels that came out before the award was invented.

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* Nobel-Prize-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman admits here that part of the reason he went into economics is because it is the closest thing we have to psychohistory.


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

Book Review: Powers

Ursula K. Le Guin
2007
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

This book was only available in the Young Adult section of my library. And, after reading it, I can see why; this is definitely a book for teenagers.

I have really enjoyed some of Le Guin’s books, and others not so much. The books that I don’t like usually fall into one of two groups: those that are too dreamy and those that have too heavy-handed a Message. This book fell too far into both of these negative categories for me. (The Message in this particular book is that slavery is evil.) (Which, of course, it is.)

The story is about a young slave boy, Gavir, who has been brought up in a relatively benevolent household. He is able to be in denial, at first, that it is bad to be a slave, because his life seems to be pretty good. His masters are not overtly cruel; he is able to live with his beloved sister, Sallo; and he gets to go to school with the master’s children because he is being trained to be a teacher.

But eventually his little world starts falling apart and he starts to question the system. He is bullied by some of the less benevolent members of the household. His home is invaded by people from another country. And finally his sister is murdered, which is the last straw and makes him run away.

After he runs away, he lives in several different types of societies, including a city of freed men; a camp of runaway slaves in the heart of the forest run by a misogynistic megalomaniac; and the poor marshland settlements of his own people from whom he was stolen as a baby. This all conveniently exposes him to alternative governments and different attitudes towards women, work, war, and cooperation.

The Message, which, of course, Gavir eventually learns, is that a cage is still a cage no matter how gilded it is. That slavery is an evil institution, however disguised it may be, and a limited freedom is no freedom at all.

This is all very well and good a Message, but so obviously delivered.

And the characters are so black and white. Gavir and his sister are one hundred percent good, eager naïfs. They have unquestioning obedience to and reverence for their masters. They are hard-working and earnest. And the bad guys are uniformly awful bullies.

The story is also not all that exciting. Gavir’s story is the classic monomyth: he is born under mysterious circumstances, shows early evidence of supernatural abilities (he can see visions of the future), goes on a long journey or quest, encounters several father figures from whom he has to become independent, and has to have a showdown with an arch enemy to finally prove himself. But Gavir's life really isn’t all that difficult most of the time. He is in physical danger maybe twice, and in an actual physical conflict a couple more times, but these situations are all generally over in about a minute. Even his escape from slavery is easy.

And all of the pivotal events in the book are instigated and resolved by external forces without any action on Gavir's part. He is swept along by events, not directing of them. Even his final showdown is won essentially passively, by natural forces, not by anything special he does.


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

Book Review: The Forever Machine

Also published as They'd Rather Be Right
Mark Clifton & Frank Riley
1954
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I have read several reviews of this book that call it trite and clichéd. But I generally enjoyed it.

The main character is a telepathic man, Joe Carter, who grows up ostracized and isolated because of his abilities; people are freaked out by the fact that he can tell what they are thinking. He doesn’t like being so lonely, so he becomes a brilliant scientist and invents a machine that can make other people into telepaths.

Everyone on earth theoretically has the potential to be turned into a telepath by Joe's machine. But it is next to impossible to be telepathic and to retain the judgmental natures most people have. Since telepaths know what everyone else is thinking, they have to be able to handle all the varied thoughts, good and bad, intentional and unintentional, that come into their heads, without prejudice. They have to be the most understanding, least judgmental people on earth.

Before it makes you telepathic, therefore, the machine strips out all your preconceived ideas about what is right and wrong and rebuilds you, cell by cell, from the ground up…

…and it turns out that this has the nice side effect of making old people young again. Which means that once the machine has been run on its first person, an elderly woman, and she is transformed back into a beautiful twenty-year-old, everybody else on earth wants to do it.

The catch is that the machine won’t work on anybody who is convinced that they are absolutely right about something. If you are not flexible enough to be removed of all your assumptions and prejudices, then you will come out of the machine physically and mentally unchanged.

The first third of this book, which I liked the most, tells the story of Joe's childhood. As a young boy, he instinctively reacts not to what people are saying but to what they are really thinking--which, of course, makes everyone think he is crazy. He learns, painfully, that it is best to disguise the fact that he can read minds.

In the second third of the book, which was still okay, Joe grows up and goes to college and teams up with two professors to create the telepath-making machine. Throughout the project the three of them are alternately reviled and revered by the public, because the public is both terrified of what the machine means and also greedy for it. Eventually popular opinion turns totally against them; they become the target of a witch hunt and have to go into hiding.

In the last third of the book, however, after the machine has actually been built and its three creators start doing demonstrations of the machine for the public, the book loses its way. It becomes far too heavy-handed in its lesson about how we all need to be more flexible and realize that we’re not always right. I was also very dissatisfied with their solution for what to do with the machine in the end.


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