Book Review: Way Station

Clifford Simak
1963
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This is a little gem of a book. Simak’s writing is calm and un-showy, but it also keeps you very much engaged. His main character, Enoch Wallace, is a very appealing person: unusually understanding and tolerant of strangeness.

As a young man, Wallace was a soldier in the Civil War. Very disturbed by the experience, he returned from the war to his small house in an isolated part of rural Wisconsin to become basically a hermit.

As the years go by, Wallace keeps very much to himself. His neighbors comment to each other that he doesn’t really seem to be aging very fast but otherwise they hardly give him a thought.

The decades come and go and eventually it is the 1960s. The government authorities have finally started to pay attention to the vague local folklore about this man who supposedly was a soldier in the Civil War and yet still looks like he’s thirty. So they start snooping around his innocuous-looking shack of a house.

What they don’t realize is that Wallace is the keeper of a way station for interstellar travelers. When he first came back from the war, a benevolent intergalactic travel consortium identified him as someone who would be receptive and open to them and also as someone who could keep a very large secret. They began to use his house as a rest stop and a transfer point during their light-speed journeys across the universe. In return, they provide him with everything he needs to maintain the station, and they have made it so that he does not age at all when he’s inside his house. The only time he gets any older is when he goes outside to get the mail.

An added benefit to Wallace is that, as the keeper of the way station, he gets to meet many different kinds of extraterrestrials. He is a curious person, and wants to learn about these other beings, and even makes friends with some of them. He manages, with the aliens’ help, to keep up to date on technology and physics and current events so he knows what is going on in the world around him.

He very much enjoys his job--and I enjoyed it with him. I found myself admiring the open-minded, galactic-level perspective of the aliens. And I got caught up in the easy pace of Wallace's intellectually-stimulating responsibilities, wishing that the snoopers would just go away and his station-keeper life could just go on and on the way it has been forever.

But, inevitably, of course, there is trouble. The whole situation threatens to blow wide open after an alien traveler dies at his house while waiting for a transfer and the government investigators discover the body respectfully buried outside in Wallace’s 19th-century family plot.

The only real problem I had with the book was a bit of deus ex machina used at the end to resolve everything, which was unfortunate. But overall this was a fun and unexpectedly touching story.


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

Batman & Robin

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Book Review: American Gods

Neil Gaiman

2001

Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

At the beginning of American Gods, the main character, Shadow, is in prison serving the last few days of a multi-year sentence. Shadow is in jail because he allowed himself to be roped into participating in a stupid robbery and ended up taking the full rap for it, but he has a good heart and no intention of getting back into crime. He plans to return to live with his beloved wife and work at a job promised him by his best friend.

                     

The day Shadow gets out of jail, though, he learns that his wife and his friend have both died in a car accident just the day before. Bereft and in need of money, he is lured under the wing of a creepy grifter named Wednesday who offers him a job as his bodyguard/driver/gopher/assistant.

Shadow quickly discovers that Wednesday is no ordinary con man; he is actually the embodiment of the Norse god Odin. And, through Wednesday, he learns that there are gods all over the United States in human (or semi-human) form. They are old gods from the “old countries” (mainly Europe, Africa, and India, with a tiny bit of representation from East Asia), brought over in the heads and hearts of immigrants.

But America is not a fertile country for gods. They tend to wither and die, forgotten in favor of the modern gods of money and technology. Those old gods that do survive subsist by stealing and cheating, clinging thinly to the edges of society.

Wednesday tells Shadow that there is a war coming between the old gods and the new gods. He takes Shadow along with him as he goes around the country trying to get the tired, recalcitrant old gods prepared to fight, as the story progresses (somewhat) inexorably towards that final showdown.

                                                                                                                    

Gaiman’s writing is quite good—up close, on the small scale. He’s a skilled inventor of characters and craftsman of scenery; each setting is well-described and colorful, whether it is peaceful and dreamy or gross and oppressive. A starvation vigil that Shadow has to sit at one point is particularly vivid and pain-filled. And Gaiman sprinkles in several quite entertaining three-or four-page vignettes that tell the mini-histories of particular spirits brought to the new world, like Papa ‘Legba or the piskies from Cornwall.

The problem is that this is a very long book. While individual scenes are often good by themselves, they aren’t well connected to each other. The overall plot meanders, often wandering widely off track, and it had a tendency to lose me. Every time Gaiman kills off one or another main character, I thought that was going to finally be the end of the story, but it just kept going and going.

It almost seems as if he went through the ancient religions section of the encyclopedia and decided to base a book on all of the coolest ones, so he cobbled together some characters and a plot to string them together and dumped it all into the town from Stephen King’s NeedfulThings.

And while the idea of gods in human form is intriguing at first, over the course of the book (especially as I was getting bored with the overall story line) it becomes more and more tiresome and begins to feel like a gimmick. It reminded me a little of a Saturday Night Live skit where the original idea is good but they just work it to death until it’s no longer funny.

Bast (Bastet)

Some of the god representations are more clever than others. I liked Mad Sweeney the Leprechaun and the very cat-like Bast. But I thought the modern gods of Media and financial Intangibles were pretty darned clunky.

And the primary god, Wednesday, is slimy and unethical and mean. He is a grifter with no conscience. I was prepared to cut him a tremendous amount of slack, since he was Odin, after all, but after about a hundred pages I didn’t like him one bit and I didn’t want to hear any more of his slick patter. And I didn’t want to hear any more about his creepy attitude towards women (to wit: they are a dime a dozen, and the best ones to sleep with are naïve, innocent virgins that you can despoil).

Which brings me to my final complaint: by and large, women come out really badly in this book. They are either (a) beautiful, innocent nymphs; (b) horrifying man-eaters; (c) motherly, house-bound caretakers; or (d) priggish, controlling, and sour.

Many of the female gods use their bodies as their primary weapon and their exploits involve titillation, sex, pregnancies, and/or a lot of blood. The male gods have a wide range of attributes—they can be furtive or powerful, showy or gray-suited, efficient and businesslike or sleazy and alcoholic—but are rarely sexualized. Female gods are often shown partially or completely naked as a matter of course; male gods are hardly ever undressed except as part of a specific religious ritual. When female characters are not sexy they are usually crabby, and the male characters commiserate with each other about what joy-killers they are.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes on this topic from the book: “Shadow smiled at the pretty women, because they made him feel pleasantly male, and he smiled at the other women too, because he was having a good time.” (p. 459)

Oh, thank you so much, Shadow.

One woman in the book, Samantha Black Crow, does actually come off as a relatively realistic person. She is snappy, sarcastic, and not averse to telling some tall tales herself. She goes by the name “Sam,” has a face that is described as “slightly mannish” and is leaning decidedly towards the lesbian end of the bisexual scale. Maybe since she isn’t interested in any of the male characters, she can be allowed to have a deeper character development.

If you want a better book about gods who appear in human form to create trouble, I would recommend Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light instead. (Gaimain does acknowledge Zelazny at the end of the book; not as an inspiration but as someone who has tackled this premise before.)

Book Review: The Wanderer

Fritz Leiber
1964
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ - -
 
SPOILER ALERT
 
The first half of this book was quite fun. One night, a new moon suddenly appears in the sky. It is right next to our original moon, but four times bigger and covered with purple and yellow designs. 

At first the new moon appears to be benign. But then it puts out tendrils towards our moon and begins ingesting the moon’s material, as if it was grinding it into dust and sucking it through several straws. 

At the same time, the pull of this gigantic new mass in our orbit begins to cause all kinds of disasters, including earthquakes and super-duper high tides, which destroy most of the world’s coastal cities.
 
A group of several humans and one cat are all vacationing at a beach in Los Angeles on the first night that the new moon appears in the sky and  manage to survive the tidal destruction. They realize that LA must have been reduced to rubble and they band together to survive and find higher ground.
 
One of the guys in the group happens to be holding the cat when he and the cat both get sucked up by some kind of ray into the new purple and yellow moon. And of course the moon turns out not to be a moon at all but a spaceship, powered by moon-matter and crewed by aliens that look like human-sized cats, and they sucked him up because they were really just trying to suck up the cat, thinking that the cat was the more intelligent species.
 
From here, unfortunately, the book goes rapidly downhill. After some initial confusion and hostility (and a bit of embarrassment) on both sides, the human reaches a sort of accord with the aliens and finds out that they are a renegade space-faring group trying to escape from a fascistic federation of worlds that wants to make them conform to a rigid code of behavior, and they are running away from the federation's enforcers. 

I thought there was potential for plenty of action as the humans and the cat-aliens figure out how to work together and resolve what to do about the enforcer-aliens who are chasing them and what they’re going to do about not us having a moon anymore. But the resolution was disappointing--simplistic and chummy, like a stereotypical 1960s-era space movie. And the cat-alien was irritating and, well, catty. 


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

Book Review: Camouflage

Joe Haldeman
2004
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

Camouflage is not a deep or complex book, but it is a real treat to read. It’s a fast-paced, excellently-written story with an interesting central character, and it’s funny.

The plot is this: millions of years ago, two aliens landed on earth. They don’t know about each other, having come from different planets and having landed at different times and different places. One came in a spaceship that crashed on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. We’re not sure where or how the other one arrived.

Both aliens are shape-shifters and can take the shape of any one or any thing they want. The body chemistry that allows them to do this also makes them invulnerable to any germ or weapon or predator so they can, theoretically, live forever.

The alien that arrived in the spaceship, “the changeling,” is primarily interested in gaining knowledge of the world around it. The other alien, “the chameleon,” is primarily interested in eliminating competition and staying at the top of the food chain.

The two aliens take the form of various animate or inanimate objects as necessary to best pursue their respective goals. Over the centuries, the memory of who they are and where they came from becomes hazier and hazier, but they both know they are not like the rest of life on earth and both are constantly searching for others like themselves (for different reasons, in keeping with their different aims).

Being drawn to intra-species violence, the chameleon makes the transition to human form quite early, several millennia B.C. The changeling, on the other hand, finds itself drawn to the Pacific Ocean and spends a lot of time as sharks and whales and only takes human form for the first time in 1931.

Eventually, in 2020, the changeling’s crashed spaceship is discovered and hauled up on land to be analyzed. This gets a lot of press which immediately attracts the attention of both aliens, who then wangle their respective ways into the closely-guarded spaceship analysis project where they inevitably meet other.
 
At first the changeling, like the chameleon, is only concerned with survival; it has no concept of human emotions and makes several terrible mistakes which hurt people around it. But little by little it gains understanding and sympathy. The chameleon gains no such understanding.

Both the changeling and the chameleon experience war but have opposite reactions to it. The chameleon feeds off of the violence and joins in as often as possible. The changeling, who in one incarnation does a stint as an American prisoner of war in the Bataan Death March, is confused by atrocities and our inconsistent behavior and eventually becomes repulsed by the killing.

The only real gripes I had with the book were that (a) the chameleon’s pre-Earth background was so undefined, (b) the suspense about the inevitable confrontation between the two aliens builds through the entire book and then at the end everything is wrapped up in a nice bow in just a couple pages, and (c) I didn't really like the human characters all that much.

But that’s okay. It is all made up for by Haldeman’s terrific writing, which, to me, is the best thing about the whole book. He is succinct, matter-of-fact, and funny. He writes the way I’d hope I could write if I wrote a novel.

I know that individual paragraphs will not do him justice, because, out of context, they lose much of the book’s overall flavor. Nevertheless, here are a couple examples from Camouflage.

Describing the changeling’s experiences as a Marine at boot camp in 1941:

“For the first week they did little other than run, march, and suffer through calisthenics, from five in the morning until chow call at night – and sometimes a few more miles’ run after dinner, just to settle their stomachs. The changeling found it all fairly restful, but observed other people’s responses to the stress and did an exactly average amount of sweating and groaning. At the rifle range, it aimed to miss the bull’s eye most of the time, without being conspicuously bad.”

On how the changeling spent much of the ‘80s and ‘90s:

“It was an exotic dancer and part-time prostitute in Baltimore for a while, then a short-order cook back in Iowa City. As an old lady, it read palms on the county-fair circuit in the Midwest, and returned to California in its old Jimmy body to be a surf bum for a couple of seasons.

Sacrificing half its mass, it became a juggling dwarf with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, making contacts in the freak world. It met some interesting people, but they all seemed to be from Earth, no matter what they claimed.

It married the Bearded Lady, an even-tempered and sardonic hermaphrodite, and they lived together until 1996. The changeling left behind a hundred ounces of gold and no explanation, and became a student again.”

When the scientists studying the alien spaceship realize that there is likely at least one alien on earth, and that the alien will likely have taken human form and could be anyone, and that the way to identify the alien is that it will not have human DNA:

“In fact, by the time Jack said this, every employee at the CIA had donated a few cheek cells to the agency, as had employees of NSA and Homeland Security. A ‘suggestion’ had come down from the White House that all of the country’s leaders be tested. …

The tests proved that every member of the American intelligence community was human, at least in a nominal sense, and so were all prominent politicians, including the president, which surprised a few people.”

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

Book Review: Darwin's Radio

Greg Bear
1999
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

I really enjoy Greg Bear’s books. His writing is straightforward and his ideas are original and satisfyingly weird. He’s like the Stephen King of sci-fi. This particular book isn’t overwhelmingly great, but it does have a Bear-ishly unique plot and is fun to read.

Since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, there has been a debate over the extent to which evolution happens gradually and the extent to which it is punctuated by relatively sudden leaps. In Darwin’s Radio, not only does evolution occur in sudden leaps, but the leaps can be very dramatic, with an entire species reaching a new stage of biological development within a generation or two.

This includes humans.

The book begins with the discovery of the frozen, mummified remains of a prehistoric family – a man, a woman, and a baby – in the Alps. At first, the paleontologist who discovers them thinks they are Neanderthals. But it turns out, upon further investigation, that the baby is Homo sapiens and that the adults were Neanderthals who appear to have physically changed into Homo sapiens shortly around the time their baby was born. It looks as if the parents literally shed their skin to reveal the new evolutionary form. It also looks like these three early humans were murdered.

(Note: I think that at the time this book was written, the scientific consensus still was that Homo sapiens evolved from Neanderthals. In order to get into the story, you just have to go along with that.)

At the same time that all this prehistorical investigation is going on, something strange is happening to contemporary humans. A new flu-like retrovirus is spreading around the world. Men can be carriers but only women get infected. When a pregnant woman contracts the virus, it makes her abort the fetus. This is very upsetting, of course, and people start panicking. What it takes people a while to realize is that before the fetus aborts, it itself ovulates and leaves behind a new viable fetus… with six extra chromosomes than normal... that continues to develop.

And then, even weirder, when a man and a woman are about to have a baby from one of these new extra-chromosome fetuses, they both start to change physically. Their vocal chords and sense of smell get more sensitive and their facial skin starts peeling off, revealing new patches that change color with emotion.

A biological researcher investigating the retrovirus eventually hooks up with the paleontologist who found the mummies and they put two and two together. They develop the theory that a Homo sapiens gene existed all along in early hominids, in the form of a dormant retrovirus. At some point some kind of species-wide biological clock determined that it was time for the next evolutionary step and activated the virus in the Neanderthals. It caused them to have Homo sapiens babies and caused the parents to change form too, to match their children. Because they were different, these new-form humans were likely feared and persecuted and sometimes even murdered by their earlier-form relatives.

And this is also, of course, what is happening to modern humans. The biological master clock has activated another dormant part of our genetic code. When the first few extra-chromosome babies are born they, too, have sensory patches of color on their faces and they can communicate with their parents in an almost empathic or telepathic way. They are a new stage of human. And they, too, are feared and persecuted by regular old-style humans, and are forced to go into hiding from their families and neighbors and the government. (Setting us up nicely for a sequel, Darwin’s Children.)

My main problem with Darwin’s Radio was that I didn't really like the main characters very much - either the paleontologist or the biologist working on the retrovirus or the modern evolutionarily advanced families. They seemed more like tools for telling the story rather than real rounded personalities. Fortunately, however, the basic ideas were cool and well-developed enough to carry me through the book in spite of the people not being very appealing.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.