Friday, September 26, 2014

Book Review: Titan (by Ben Bova)

Ben Bova
2006
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Before I begin trashing the plot and characters of Ben Bova’s Titan, let me say first that the parts of this book that were actually directly related to science fiction are fine. Bova does a perfectly reasonable job of describing futuristic capabilities of medical nanotechnology, the components of a space station habitat, and the methane slush and smog on the surface of Titan. Not as great a job as, say, Kim Stanley Robinson, but perfectly good.
                                                                      
Unfortunately, the science fiction parts of this book are largely drowned out by the irritating, unlikeable characters and the tiresome soap opera going on among them. Not to mention the tremendously awkward presentation of gender conflicts.

In Titan, a group of ten thousand people have all flown out together from Earth on the spacecraft Goddard and are now living in it in the orbit of Saturn. Their voyage has been funded by a coalition of universities and is primarily meant for scientific research, but the Goddard also carries Earth exiles, administrators, mechanics, and rich tourists interested in exploring the solar system.

The book has a huge cast of characters, few of whom have identifiably distinct personalities. And they are all introduced rapid-fire in the first part of the book, so there is no real chance to get to know any of them well. This is just one book in Bova’s multi-part “Grand Tour” series of solar system exploration and it’s possible that some of these characters would be more familiar and appealing to me if I had read the earlier installments of that series, but I haven’t, and they aren’t.

If any characters can be said to be particularly central to the plot, I guess it would be protagonist Pancho Lane and antagonist Malcolm Eberly. Lane is the retired former CEO of a giant tech company and an accomplished space pilot. She is on Goddard partly because she’s there visiting her sister Holly, and partly because she’s bored with life back on Earth. Eberly is the nauseatingly selfish and manipulative chief administrator of the Goddard habitat, and he is willing to do anything it takes to enhance his own power.

For most of the book, the main dramatic tension centers around Eberly’s run for reelection. He initially thinks he is a shoe-in, since he promises untold wealth for everyone in the habitat if they allow him to mine water from Saturn’s rings for export to other space outposts. But he doesn’t count on two things:

(1) Pancho Lane teaming up with an admiral, a stuntman, and a plucky group of scientists to try to prove that there are living organisms in the rings of Saturn, which would prevent them from being mined; and

(2) Pancho’s sister Holly Lane, who decides to run against Eberly in the election.

There is also a good amount of time spent on a secondary plotline about an exploratory probe sent to Titan. The probe goes dead as soon as it gets to the moon’s surface, and the leader of the project, Edouard Urbain, drives his staff over the edge of exhaustion trying to reactivate it. This story had far more potential than the election melodrama, but, unfortunately, nothing major plot-wise ever really came from it, so I sort of wondered what the point of it was.

No, unfortunately, far more time is spent not on exploratory moon probes but on internal habitat politics and, in particular, the grossly mishandled topic of zero population growth. The Goddard has limited space, so everyone on it signed an agreement that they wouldn’t have any children on the flight out to Saturn. Now that they have reached Saturn, however, they want to start having babies. Eberly refuses to even talk about it, so Holly runs against him, not because she thinks she has a prayer of winning, but just to force the issue.

The debate quickly divides the habitat cleanly down gender lines. Nearly 100% of all women aboard are apparently universally in favor of and desperately in need of the unfettered production of children, and nearly 100% of the men aboard, are at the very most, neutral on the topic, if not actively against it.

Some women on the ship refuse to have sex with their husbands until they agree to Holly’s platform—and their men, of course, relent. Holly’s rallies are almost 100% women except for a few men who have either been forced to come by their wives or who are there to cover it for the media.

And her speeches are smugly described by her supporters as “women’s issues,” even though population control in this context is hardly only a women’s issue. People are motivated to reproduce—or not—for a host of complex motives. There are plenty of men who want to have children. There are plenty of women who don’t. There are people of both sexes who are unsure. I think Bova thought that he was making a relevant cultural statement with this presentation of the topic. I couldn’t decide whether it was actually offensive, or just plain ridiculous.

Bova handles the writing of competent women, and their relationships with men and between each other, pretty badly in general. At one point, the head of the nanotech lab doesn’t want to re-assert a request for something she needs for her work because she doesn’t want to be thought of as a “nagging little woman.” At another point, two women—the head of the biology department and the leader of the project to find life in the rings of Saturn—can’t find a way to talk to each other professionally at first, but at last bond like giggling schoolgirls over lunch talking about how to get a man to like them.

And in another sparkling incident, one of these same women, the biology department head, tries to convince Urbain to let her work on a different project than his stuck probe. He refuses and she leaves his office crying, where she bumps into the meek, shy head of the computer science department. Her crying suddenly transforms the computer science head into a paragon of assertiveness who marches into Urbain’s office and demands that he treat his employees better. And then the biology department head and the computer science head promptly start dating.

One other thing I can’t help mentioning is that the sisters Holly and Pancho Lane have an incredibly annoying accent. One of them (Holly) is the head of human resources for the habitat and is running for chief administrator, and the other (Pancho) is a former head of a giant tech company and an accomplished space pilot. And yet they have this accent in which they use slang, jargon, and contractions in ways that make them sound like Valley Girls. It’s hard to take someone seriously when their vocabulary is sprinkled with f’real, c’mon, prob’ly, coupla, damfino, dontcha, jeeps, and terrif.

Okay, one more thing. Bova seems to be preoccupied with the chin as an indicator of emotion. I counted six instances where he had someone “dip” his or her “chin” to signify agreement (instead of, I suppose, just nodding). There are also a couple of times where someone scratches their chin to indicate confusion, and a couple times when people tipped their chins in surprise. It is a habit worthy of the lip-biting of Cyteen.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Book Review: Titan (by John Varley)

John Varley
1979
Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

At the beginning of John Varley’s Titan, a small group of seven astronauts are headed out towards Saturn in the spaceship Ringmaster on an international mission of scientific exploration. Led by the independent and strong-willed but also somewhat irritatingly insecure Captain Cirocco Jones, it is a tight-knit crew with flexible romantic arrangements: by the end of the voyage, almost every person has slept with almost every other person of the opposite gender, and occasionally some people of the same gender.

The story is pretty slow to get going. During the first two chapters, which cover the voyage to Saturn, I was turned off enough by the characters’ personalities, the impersonal games of sexual musical chairs, and some of the author’s more annoying habits of prose that I was ready to give up.

Fortunately, things got better for a while. When the Ringmaster gets to Saturn, they discover a huge object in orbit around the planet. At first they think it is an undocumented moon, but as they get nearer it turns out to be an enormous, rotating torus-shaped artificial construct. They fly in close to investigate, their ship gets forcibly hauled in by a tentacled beast coming from the object, and they all go unconscious.

They then go through a surreal period of mental limbo after which they are all deposited in disparate places around the interior rim of the torus, which turns out to be an enormous oxygen-rich habitat filled with alien trees and grasses and animals. This is the best part of the book, as the members of the crew reunite and try to prevent themselves from being eaten by the native wildlife and killed by the indigenous sentient beings while they figure out how to escape and get home.

It seems very much like a combination of two earlier novels: Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go. The torus is like a mini version of Ringworld in its artificiality, its huge scale, the abruptly defined sections of night and day, and the variety of environments and life forms. And the characters’ rebirth inside it is reminiscent of the resurrection process from Farmer’s book: they emerge into a strange raw environment completely naked and hairless, and they have to rebuild their clothes, technology, and, in some cases, memories from scratch. (And, like Farmer’s characters, they also even eventually wind up traveling up a big central river in their own handmade boats.)

http://ophiuchi.deviantart.com/art/psaltery-76419411Unfortunately, the plot takes a turn for the worse in the last third of the book when Captain Jones decides she wants answers about what has happened to her crew, and that the only way to get those answers is by taking an arduous, tedious, months-long trek up to the center of the torus. I got exhausted by it long before the characters did. They would conquer one obstacle and then would be presented with another five times more daunting, including, at one point, a horrible rapist. Personally, I would have given up in the first week and gone back to the calm grassy land with the nice centaur people.

It started to seem especially pointless when they started downgrading the purpose behind the trek. Originally, they wanted to figure out how to escape the torus—which they had by this time started calling Gaea—and to get home. But later on they shift to just wanting an explanation for what happened, and then eventually they don’t care about saving themselves anymore but just want to prevent war between the indigenous sentient life forms of Gaea.

And when they do finally get to the center of Gaea, it is disappointingly anticlimactic. The entity at the center is a bit annoying, frankly, and offers pretty contrived reasoning for why they were captured, held, changed, stripped, and released. After the huge build-up of their journey, the whole thing was hastily explained in a matter of fifteen or so pages, and then everybody (or almost everybody) goes back to their preferred homes with new-found celebrity status and lives happily ever after.

One aspect of the writing that didn’t help is that descriptions of physical locations were sometimes very confusing. For the most part, the writing was very straightforward, but during particularly dramatic moments or crucial expository sections, settings suddenly became un-picturable. For example:

     The support cables came in rows of five organized into groups of fifteen, and rows of three standing alone.

     Each night region had fifteen cables associated with it. There was a row of five vertical cables that went straight up the hollow horn in the roof that was the inside of one of the spokes of Gaea’s wheel. Two of these came to the ground in the highlands and were virtually a part of the wall, one north and the other south. One emerged from a point midway between the outermost cables, and the other two were spaced evenly between the center and edge cables.

     In addition to these central cables, the night regions had two more rows of five that radiated from the spokes but attached in daylight areas, one row twenty degrees east and the other twenty degrees west of the central row.   (Titan, Page 121)

I don’t think I should have to be a geographer or an architect to be able to imagine this scene. Ringworld, too, was an artificial ring-shaped habitat created by aliens, and had more diversity of habitat on a much larger scale, but it was so vividly and clearly described that I felt like I always could picture the environment and structure with no problems—even the complicated side wall ports where ships docked and the suspended sheets creating night and day.

And one other final peeve: it seemed that in the sections of the book where the plot was laboring the hardest, Varley would slip into expressing his characters’ emotions through overdramatic physical actions that human beings don’t often really do. People chewed on their knuckles; they palmed, slammed, or slapped control panel buttons; they variously hit their palm on a bed, smacked a tree with the palm of their hand, and hit their forehead with the heel of their hand; and, of course, they bit their lips and their tongues.