Book Review: Islands in the Net

Bruce Sterling
1988
Awards: Campbell
Nominations: Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ – – – –

Some cyberpunk novels have riveting, twisty-turny plots that hold your interest throughout the course of the book. Some have complex, interesting characters that are fascinating to follow (whether they are likeable or not). Some have future tech that is both original and well-founded, so that even if you can’t exactly follow its specifics, you can get the gist of it enough to understand its purpose and to realize how imaginative the author has been in creating it.

This is not one of any of these kinds of novels.
In Islands in the Net, Laura and David Webster, a married couple, run a lodge in Galveston, Texas on the Caribbean coast. They both work for Rizome, one of the small number of enormous international corporations that essentially run the world in this year of 2023.

Rizome has chosen the Websters’ lodge as the site for a secret gathering of data pirates, who are from data havens in Grenada, Luxembourg, and Singapore. The data havens are deeply distrustful of each other, but they are all being blackmailed by the same person or organization and want to work together to figure out who it is. For some reason they have chosen Rizome to act as mediator, even though they resent Rizome and everything it stands for.

One night, one of the Grenadian conference participants is shot dead by an aerial drone. The shadowy Free Army of Counter Terrorism (F.A.C.T.) takes credit for the assassination, saying it is part of their effort to eliminate all drug runners and data pirates.

Laura, who witnessed the shooting, is called to Grenada to testify and to prove Rizome didn’t send the drone. This begins a mostly pointless whirlwind series of adventures for her in which she travels from exotic location to exotic location across the globe, and in each place she is the center point of some kind of attack or incident that starts a bloody country-wide riot or revolution from which she (sometimes with her husband and baby) has to escape. There are also numerous chances for men to ogle her breasts.

First she goes to Grenada, where the residents bridle at all governments and corporations curtailing their freedom. They believe everything should be legal and free to all, including data, pot, and food, the last of which is grown in vast quantities on huge offshore tanker ships. After giving her testimony to the board of the Grenadian data haven, her house and all of the floating food factories are bombed by Singapore.
   
Laura, David, and their baby are rescued from the Grenadian carnage by representatives of Kymera, a Singaporean bank. David and the baby are flown home, while Laura is flown to Kymera’s headquarters in Singapore to tell them what she knows about Grenada. But while she is there, the Singaporean Prime Minister is drugged by terrorists (maybe from Grenada; maybe from F.A.C.T.) and made to babble Grenadian libertarian rhetoric on national television, causing a countrywide riot. Laura huddles on the roof of a Rizome building with some co-workers until she is rescued by what is supposedly the Viennese world police, but turns out to be, in fact, F.A.C.T.; they think she knows they have an atomic bomb, so they take her to their headquarters in Mali and throw her in prison for more than a year.

Laura escapes from the prison when it is attacked by a band of rogue Tuareg rebels, led by an American journalist who has gone native. The Tuaregs drive her across the desert to their camp, where she sleeps with the journalist (who has been ogling her). He then films her talking about all her adventures and exposing all the secrets she has learned about Grenada, Singapore, the Viennese world police, and F.A.C.T., and broadcasts it across the world. All the bad banks and pirate consortia then collapse and the world is made safe again for democracy.

The main problem with this book is that it is just plain tedious. I can overlook a whole lot of awkwardness, offensiveness, and silliness if the plot is enjoyable. But in Islands in the Net, the conversations are insipid, the characters are neither interesting nor likeable, the plot is plodding, motives are unclear, mob scenes and battles are strangely boring, and suspense is nonexistent.

Laura also has an inconsistent personality: she is sometimes demure and deferential, sometimes professional and commanding, sometimes spouting an angry stream of obscenities with little warning.

Some sections occasionally held my attention, such as portions of Laura’s time in the Mali prison and her escape in the Tuareg trucks. But most of the time I would read for a few minutes and then find myself staring off into space, not caring about what was happening. About two-thirds of the way through the book I started skipping sentences, and then whole paragraphs.
   
There are other reasons this book was disappointing, however. One is the absence of truly innovative future technology, even by 1988 standards. The spyware that Laura and David are given by Rizome when they go to Grenada and Singapore is clunky: obvious earpieces and large, dark video-equipped sunglasses that they have to wear even at night and indoors. They both wear big “watchphones” that don’t seem to do much more than tell the time and remind them of appointments. And most of the video equipment—whether for entertaining, gaming, or communicating—is based on the VCR.

Laura’s politics are also internally inconsistent and at times hypocritical. She is a firm believer in the ideals of Rizome, her employer, which is supposedly a completely democratic, egalitarian, non-hierarchical corporation. (There are no bosses or underlings; everyone is called an “associate.”) And yet neither Laura nor Rizome can tolerate a third world country running free food farms to feed its people. She is also appalled by the Tuaregs, who are fighting for their independence and sometimes have to resort to semi-terrorist tactics because they have no other avenues left. And she is stridently opposed to data havens and data pirates, never seeing that they may be offering truly equalizing power to everyday people in a world of corporate tyranny and censorship.
   
And she and David themselves actively maintain a hierarchical mini-economy with the staff of Hispanic servants working at their lodge. Although Laura says that they are all equals, it is very clear who are the bosses and who are the servants—especially when she and her husband go gallivanting off overseas whenever they want to, and the kitchen and cleaning staff have to be available to maintain the lodge and watch the baby and prepare food for guests at a moment’s notice.

And, last but not least, this book handles the intimate relationships and sexuality of its female main character so very badly. Almost all of the males that Laura encounters—Grenadians, Singaporeans, Malian jailers, and Tuareg rebels alike—are introduced to us by whether they look at her body or not, and how. And Laura actually feels more comfortable with them when they are ogling. She consciously becomes more relaxed with her Grenadian guide, for example, when he stops looking at her without interest and begins looking at her “as a man looks at a woman.”
   
Laura’s relationship with her husband is also a bit problematic. When she remembers wistfully the early days of sex with David, she describes them fondly as “scary,” “out of control,” “not entirely pleasurable,” and “too close to pain, too strange.” And when the two of them fight about whether or not she should go to Singapore, she is strident and self-assured, confident in her reasons about why she should go. But after she wins the argument, she apologizes and tries to make him feel better by explaining that she was being so strident because she was “on the rag.”

There are few books I have been happier to have in my rear view mirror.

Educational Snippits from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five

On Americans and The Poor (page 164)

While the British colonel set Lazzaro’s broken arm and mixed plaster for the cast, the German major translated out loud passages from Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s monograph. Campbell had been a fairly well-known playwright at one time. His opening line was this one:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kim Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand—glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

                                                                                   

On Christian Gospel (page 138)

Rosewater was on the next bed, reading, and Billy drew him into the conversation, asked him what he was reading this time.

So Rosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

                                                                            

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.

A Fourth-Dimensional Tralfamadorian Explains to His Peers What Time Looks Like to a Three-Dimensional Human Using a Two-Dimensional Analogy (pp. 146-147)

The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were looking across a desert at a mountain range on a day that was twinkling bright and clear. They could look at a peak or a bird or a cloud, at a stone right in front of them, or even down into a canyon behind them. But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of pipe.

This was only the beginning of Billy’s miseries in the metaphor. He was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails, and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn’t know he was on a flatcar, didn’t even know there was anything peculiar about his situation.

The flatcar sometimes crept, sometimes went extremely fast, often stopped—went uphill, downhill, around curves, along straightaways. Whatever poor Billy saw through the pipe, he had no choice but to say to himself, “That’s life.”

Book Review: Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut
1969
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

In my review of Cat’s Cradle, I already talked a lot about Kurt Vonnegut’s life, the themes in his work, and the power of his writing. Everything that I said there all goes, for the most part, for Slaughterhouse Five as well.

Cat’s Cradle is a more straightforward novel, though. It is written in a chronologically linear narrative, with a more standard type of dramatic tension and a definitive ending. Slaughterhouse Five is radically structured, even more existential, and even more of an anti-war statement. It is also much more personal and autobiographical—if it is possible to say that about a novel whose main character who lives discontinuously in time and is abducted by aliens.

Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse as a way to deal with his experiences in World War II and, in particular, the firebombing of Dresden. 60,000 people were killed in that attack—more than at Hiroshima—and Vonnegut, as a German prisoner of war, worked to clear away the bodies in the aftermath. It is no wonder that it took him more than twenty years to write this book.

The main character, Billy Pilgrim, grows up as a relatively ordinary boy with a relatively uneventful boyhood in upstate New York. When World War II breaks out, he joins the army, is sent to Europe, and is stranded behind enemy lines in Luxembourg after the Battle of the Bulge. Shoeless and stupefied, he wanders in the snow with other survivors until they are captured by the Germans and put in a prisoner of war camp. He is sent to Dresden, Germany, just before its complete destruction by Allied forces and, like Vonnegut himself, Billy is put to work cleaning up corpses by day and housed in a former pig slaughterhouse by night.

After the war, Billy stays in a mental hospital for a long time and then goes home to Ilium (to a family that thought he was dead), marries basically the one woman who will have him, becomes an optometrist, has two children, and lives a pretty commonplace life into middle age.

Occasionally, during his commonplace middle age, others try to force him to be nostalgic about the war, or to think of it wistfully and romantically, when he doesn’t give a damn about it one way or another. When one history aficionado is lecturing him about how valorous and virtuous the war was, Vonnegut says that it “made the inside of poor Billy’s skull echo with balderdash.” And you can completely picture Vonnegut experiencing exactly the same thing.

There are just two exceptions to the banality of Billy's existence. The first is that during his early years he becomes “unstuck in time,” meaning that he has the unfortunate tendency to travel through time at random, living the moments of his life discontinuously. The other is that later in life he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, and is installed in a residence in a sort of a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, together with Montana Wildhack, a former Hollywood starlet.

If this all sounds a bit disjointed and surreal, it is. But if you let any need for chronological sensibility go, and follow the story where Vonnegut wants to take you, the book is powerful, mind-opening, and oddly optimistic.

One of Vonnegut’s tried-and-true reader-jarring techniques is to set up direct juxtapositions of banality with horror. Since we are following the narrative through Billy’s eyes, we jump from time to time (and planet to planet) as he does, switching from the middle of wartime Europe, to a rather boring optometrists’ cocktail party, to Billy’s cage on Tralfamador. One of the most poignant of these juxtapositions happens when, first, Billy is traveling across Europe in a P.O.W. box car, the roof of which is painted with distinctive black and orange stripes... and then the very next scene he jumps to is his own wedding, years later, where the wedding tent's roof is painted with exactly the same black and orange stripes. 

In Slaughterhouse Five, these juxtapositions not only make the horror more horrible and set up a nice dose of irony, but also give us a slanted, challenging perspective on ordinary life that is probably very good for us to have. It means that what could have been either a relatively banal story of a relatively banal man, or possibly an overwhelmingly depressing story of a soldier experiencing one of the most awful things a soldier can experience, is turned into a mind-twisting, funny, surreal, and occasionally gut-wrenching story about finding ways to make it through life when there seems to be only pain and pointlessness all around.

Vonnegut also occasionally, sparingly, inserts himself into the story, showing up in places where he actually was in real life and glimpses into his real experience. He appears, for example, in Billy’s the prisoner of war camp, suffering from food poisoning and wailing in the latrine (which did happen). He also is spilled out of the P.O.W. box cars in Dresden at the same time as Billy, standing near him as they look at Dresden for the first time, marveling at how it is the most beautiful city he has ever seen (which also did happen). These moments also have the effect of bringing you right back to earth: if you were in danger of thinking you were just reading a piece of pure fiction, Vonnegut’s appearances remind you that many of these moments happened to a real person (and that a beautiful city and its people really were pulverized by Allied forces).

Oddly, it is the Trafalmadorians that give the book what incongruous optimism it has. The Tralfamadorians live in four dimensions. Which means that they see all of time, from beginning to end, at once. When looking at a person, they see that person’s entire life, from birth to death, all at the same time. To a Tralfamadorian, therefore, when a person dies, they aren’t really dead; they are still alive somewhere else in their life timeline. When a person dies, then, the custom on Tralfamadore is to say, “so it goes.”

So every single time Vonnegut mentions someone dying in his book, he follows it with “so it goes.” This has the weird effect of making it seem like he’s taking the fact that someone died less seriously, when he's actually calling extra attention to it. After he has said “so it goes” ten or twenty or thirty times, it makes you realize just how many people have died, and in what awful and sometimes pointless ways. It also makes you realize how often we talk about people dying and we don’t stop and acknowledge what has happened, even with a silly little ritual like saying “so it goes.”

And the thing is that the idea that a person has not really died, but is still alive somewhere along their cosmic timeline, makes it easier for Billy—and presumably, Vonnegut himself—to live with the memories of what he has been through and what so many others have suffered. The wider perspective of the Tralfamadorians gives him a way to see his own life, and the lives of others, in a less painful way.

Fittingly, there is no real end to Slaughterhouse Five. The novel’s coda is set in the corpse mines of Dresden, and is told from Vonnegut’s real-life point of view. Vonnegut uses the coda to lay out a sometimes overwhelming existential dichotomy:

       There is no meaning behind the horrible things that happen to people.
       But, hopefully, on balance, most of the moments in life are nice ones.

And, hopefully, the nice moments in life are all the meaning you need—because I’m afraid that’s all you’re going to get here.

Master List of Award Winners and Nominees

At long last, I have created a master list of the science-fiction-award-winning novels that I have reviewed to date. They are ordered first by my rating and then their year of publication.

The list will be permanently available in the Pages section of this blog.

I have added hyperlinks to the reviews of all the books yet; I will add more over time as I can. If there is no link for a particular review you would like to read, you can always find it by using the "Search This Blog" box in the upper right corner of the page.

AUTHOR	TITLE	YEAR	RATING	NEBULA	HUGO	CAMPBELL	LOCUS
Miller, Walter M., Jr.	A Canticle for Liebowitz	1960	5		Winner
Zelazny, Roger	Lord of Light	1967	5	Nominee	Winner
Robinson, Kim Stanley	Red Mars	1992	5	Winner	Nominee
Willis, Connie	Doomsday Book	1992	5	Winner	Winner		Winner (SF)
Stephenson, Neal	The Diamond Age	1995	5	Nominee	Winner		Winner (SF)
Bradbury, Ray	Fahrenheit 451	1954	4
Leiber, Fritz	The Big Time	1957	4		Winner
Dick, Philip K.	The Man in the High Castle	1962	4		Winner
Simak, Clifford	Way Station (a.k.a Here Gather the Stars)	1963	4		Winner
Vonnegut, Kurt	Cat's Cradle	1963	4		Nominee
Herbert, Frank	Dune	1965	4	Winner	Winner
Zelazny, Roger	…And Call Me Conrad (a.k.a This Immortal)	1965	4		Winner
Brunner, John	Stand on Zanzibar	1968	4	Nominee	Winner
Dick, Philip K.	Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	1968	4	Nominee
Niven, Larry	Ringworld	1970	4	Winner	Winner		Winner
Clarke, Arthur C.	Rendezvous With Rama	1972	4	Winner	Winner	Winner	Winner
Haldeman, Joe	The Forever War	1974	4	Winner	Winner		Winner
LeGuin, Ursula K.	The Dispossessed	1974	4	Winner	Winner		Winner
Pohl, Frederik	Man Plus	1976	4	Winner	Nominee
Hoban, Russell	Riddley Walker	1980	4	Nominee		Winner
Bishop, Michael	No Enemy But Time	1982	4	Winner
Niven, Larry	The Integral Trees	1984	4	Nominee	Nominee		Winner (SF)
Card, Orson Scott	Speaker for the Dead	1986	4	Winner	Winner		Winner (SF)
Card, Orson Scott	Seventh Son	1987	4		Nominee		Winner (Fantasy)
Scarborough, Elizabeth Anne	Healer's War, The	1988	4	Winner
Robinson, Kim Stanley	Green Mars	1993	4	Nominee	Winner		Winner (SF)
Baxter, Stephen	The Time Ships	1995	4		Nominee	Winner
Martin, George R.R.	A Game of Thrones	1996	4	Nominee			Winner (Fantasy)
Willis, Connie	Bellwether	1996	4	Nominee
Willis, Connie	To Say Nothing of the Dog	1997	4	Nominee	Winner		Winner (SF)
Bujold, Lois McMaster	Paladin of Souls	2003	4	Winner	Winner		Winner (Fantasy)
Moon, Elizabeth	Speed of Dark	2003	4	Winner
McDevitt, Jack	Seeker	2005	4	Winner
Wilson, Robert Charles	Spin	2005	4		Winner
Miéville, China	The City & the City	2009	4	Nominee	Winner		Winner (Fantasy)
Grant, Mira	Feed	2010	4		Nominee
Walton, Jo	Among Others	2010	4	Winner	Winner
Robinson, Kim Stanley	2312	2012	4	Winner	Nominee
Stross, Charles	The Apocalypse Codex	2012	4				Winner (Fantasy)
Clifton, Mark and Frank Riley	They'd Rather Be Right (a.k.a The Forever Machine)	1954	3		Winner
Heinlein, Robert A.	Starship Troopers	1959	3		Winner
Leiber, Fritz	Wanderer, The	1964	3		Winner
Heinlein, Robert A.	The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress	1966	3	Nominee	Winner
LeGuin, Ursula K.	Left Hand of Darkness, The	1969	3	Winner	Winner
Farmer, Philip Jose	To Your Scattered Bodies Go	1971	3		Winner
Wilhelm, Kate	Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang	1976	3	Nominee	Winner		Winner
Pohl, Frederik	Gateway	1977	3	Winner	Winner	Winner	Winner
McIntyre, Vonda N.	Dreamsnake	1978	3	Winner	Winner		Winner
Clarke, Arthur C.	Fountains of Paradise, The	1979	3	Winner	Winner
Benford, Gregory	Timescape	1980	3	Winner		Winner
Cherryh, C.J.	Downbelow Station	1981	3		Winner
Asimov, Isaac	Foundation's Edge	1983	3	Nominee	Winner		Winner (SF)
Brin, David	Startide Rising	1983	3	Winner	Winner		Winner (SF)
Gibson, William	Neuromancer	1984	3	Winner	Winner
Card, Orson Scott	Ender's Game	1985	3	Winner	Winner
Card, Orson Scott	Red Prophet	1988	3	Nominee	Nominee		Winner (Fantasy)
Simmons, Daniel	Hyperion	1989	3		Winner		Winner (SF)
Bujold, Lois McMaster	The Vor Game	1990	3		Winner
Denton, Bradley	Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede	1991	3			Winner
Powers, Tim	Last Call	1992	3				Winner (Fantasy)
Beagle, Peter S.	The Innkeeper's Song	1993	3				Winner (Fantasy)
Sawyer, Robert J.	The Terminal Experiment (a.k.a Hobson's Choice)	1995	3	Winner	Nominee
McIntyre, Vonda N.	The Moon and the Sun	1996	3	Winner
Robinson, Kim Stanley	Blue Mars	1996	3		Winner		Winner (SF)
Haldeman, Joe	Forever Peace	1997	3	Winner	Winner	Winner
Butler, Octavia E.	Parable of the Talents	1998	3	Winner
McDevitt, Jack	Moonfall	1998	3	Nominee
Bear, Greg	Darwin's Radio	1999	3	Winner	Nominee
Wilson, Robert Charles	The Chronoliths	2001	3		Nominee	Winner
Haldeman, Joe	Camouflage	2004	3	Winner
Gaiman, Neil	The Graveyard Book	2008	3		Winner
Bacigalupi, Paolo	The Windup Girl	2009	3	Winner	Winner	Winner
Priest, Cheri	Boneshaker	2009	3	Nominee	Nominee		Winner (SF)
McDonald, Ian	The Dervish House	2010	3		Nominee	Winner
Willis, Connie	Blackout/All Clear	2010	3	Winner	Winner		Winner (SF)
Mieville, China	Embassytown	2011	3	Nominee	Nominee		Winner (SF)
Priest, Christopher	The Islanders	2011	3			Winner
Grant, Mira	Blackout	2012	3		Nominee
Scalzi, John	Redshirts	2012	3		Winner		Winner (SF)
Leckie, Ann	Ancillary Justice	2013	3	Winner	Winner
Heinlein, Robert A.	Double Star	1956	2		Winner
Blish, James	A Case of Conscience	1958	2		Winner
Delany, Samuel R.	Babel-17	1966	2	Winner	Nominee
Keyes, Daniel	Flowers for Algernon	1966	2	Winner	Nominee
Panshin, Alexei	Rite of Passage	1968	2	Winner	Nominee
Bova, Ben	Titan	2006	2			Winner
Varley, John	Titan	1979	2	Nominee	Nominee		Winner
Vinge, Joan D.	The Snow Queen	1980	2	Nominee	Winner		Winner
Wolfe, Gene	Claw of the Conciliator, The	1981	2	Winner	Nominee		Winner (Fantasy)
Aldiss, Brian W.	Helliconia Spring	1982	2	Nominee		Winner
Murphy, Pat	The Falling Woman	1986	2	Winner
Slonczewski, Joan	A Door into Ocean	1986	2			Winner
Brin, David	Uplift War	1987	2	Nominee	Winner		Winner (SF)
Bujold, Lois McMaster	Falling Free	1988	2	Winner	Nominee
Bear, Greg	Queen of Angels	1990	2		Nominee
LeGuin, Ursula K.	Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea	1990	2	Winner			Winner (Fantasy)
Bujold, Lois McMaster	Barrayar	1991	2	Nominee	Winner		Winner (SF)
Bear, Greg	Moving Mars	1993	2	Winner	Nominee
Vinge, Vernor	A Fire Upon the Deep	1993	2	Nominee	Winner
Bujold, Lois McMaster	Mirror Dance	1994	2		Winner		Winner (SF)
Egan, Greg	Permutation City	1994	2			Winner
Griffith, Nicola	Slow River	1996	2	Winner
Martin, George R.R.	A Clash of Kings	1998	2	Nominee			Winner (Fantasy)
Rowling, J.K.	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	2000	2		Winner
Gaiman, Neil	American Gods	2001	2	Winner	Winner		Winner (Fantasy)
Robinson, Kim Stanley	The Years of Rice and Salt	2002	2		Nominee		Winner (SF)
Sawyer, Robert J.	Hominids	2002	2		Winner
Clarke, Susanna	Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell	2004	2	Nominee	Winner
Sawyer, Robert J.	Mindscan	2005	2			Winner
Stross, Charles	Accelerando	2005	2		Nominee		Winner (SF)
Vinge, Vernor	Rainbow's End	2006	2		Winner		Winner (SF)
Chabon, Michael	Yiddish Policemen's Union, The	2007	2	Winner	Winner		Winner (SF)
Goonan, Kathleen Ann	In War Times	2007	2			Winner
LeGuin, Ursula K.	Powers	2007	2	Winner
Miéville, China	Kraken	2010	2				Winner (Fantasy)
Grant, Mira	Deadline	2011	2		Nominee
Bester, Alfred	The Demolished Man	1951	1		Winner
Heinlein, Robert A.	Stranger in a Strange Land	1961	1		Winner
Delany, Samuel R.	The Einstein Intersection	1967	1	Winner	Nominee
Silverberg, Robert	A Time of Changes	1971	1	Winner	Nominee
Moorcock, Michael	Gloriana	1978	1			Winner
Cherryh, C.J.	Cyteen	1988	1		Winner		Winner (SF)
Sterling, Bruce	Islands in the Net	1988	1		Nominee	Winner
Swanwick, Michael	Stations of the Tide	1991	1	Winner	Nominee
Vinge, Vernor	A Deepness in the Sky	1999	1	Nominee	Winner	Winner
Anderson, Poul	Genesis	2000	1			Winner
Asaro, Catherine	Quantum Rose, The	2000	1	Winner

Book Review: Gloriana

Michael Moorcock
1978
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ – – – –

WARNING: SPOILER AND TRIGGER ALERT

Michael Moorcock says that Gloriana is not an alternate history. But it is, nevertheless, a sort of an alternate-history-like story inspired by the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. It is about a global empire called Albion which is managed from an island country in Europe; is experiencing a golden age of politics, science, and economics; and is ruled by a strong-willed, six-foot-tall, auburn-haired, unmarried queen.

The novel starts out well. The entire first chapter is a fantastic, sweeping introduction to the geography of Albion’s capital city and, simultaneously, to all of the main characters. Starting from the palace at the top of the hill, with its splendid chambers and secret warrens, the point of view swoops out to the gardens, and then down to the river and the city center itself, with its shops and pubs and whorehouses. As the viewpoint moves from one location to another, so does the focus of the narration transfer smoothly from one character to another. Moorcock uses very long run-on sentences in this chapter, which contribute to the sense that you are watching a long, slow, arcing crane shot over the entire city.

After this impressive start, unfortunately, the book goes largely downhill. The main problem is a generally dull plot line punctuated by moments of disturbingly romanticized sexual oppression and violence. And none of this is helped any by the bad poetry and tiresome pageants that are interspersed throughout the story.

One of the main characters (although arguably not the main character) is, of course, Gloriana herself. She is much like Elizabeth I not only in her size and other physical characteristics, but also in her sense of justice, intelligence, and strength of will. She rules over a gigantic worldwide empire that includes parts of Africa, Europe, and the New World (called here "Virginia").

Gloriana’s only flaw (at least in the opinion of her ladies in waiting, advisers, and subjects) is that she isn’t married and doesn’t ever seem likely to be. Her councillors scheme to marry her off to various politically appropriate suitors, but she dodges them all.

She is, in fact, deeply frustrated by the lack of romantic love in her life. She has had many lovers, but she has never met a person, either man or woman, who actually can—to be blunt about it, since Moorcock isn't—bring her to orgasm. So she puts on a strong exterior, all the while feeling discouraged and lonely. She collects a whole population of sexual play-people (dwarves, ape-men, geishas, etc.) who live in secret compartments of the palace, kept there as a personal brothel. She experiments with them enthusiastically, and they give her a sort of solace, but never what she is really aiming for.
   
We are supposed to be sad for Gloriana, and we’re supposed to believe that the people in her harem all love her and are happy to be cooped up all their lives just waiting for her to need them, hoping that they can fulfill their queen. But the truth is that they are, essentially, her sexual slaves.

And the whole premise of an otherwise successful woman who will only be truly complete if she can find a lover to satisfy her is extremely trite--not to mention just a teensy bit sexist.

As for the plot that plays out this premise: there are a few bright and even funny spots, but it is, on the whole, lackluster.

Albion is in a seemingly effortless golden age of economic boom, justice, and scientific discovery. And Gloriana’s reign is full of pomp, with frequent masques, balls, and jousts to entertain her subjects and her (somewhat decadent) nobility.

But there is a seedy underbelly to Albion’s magnificence. Gloriana’s devoted chief adviser, Lord Chancellor Mountfallcon, doesn’t want to see Albion descend again into the days of bloody tyranny that they experienced under Gloriana’s father. So Mountfallcon has taken it upon himself to manage all the dirty work needed to maintain the current peace, and to protect her from it. He, in turn, employs a thug named Quire (a stereotypically-correct, long-mustachioed, swarthy gent, of course) to actually do the dirty deeds that need doing. Quire commits endless acts of murder and espionage under Montfallcon’s direction, in service to the queen but without her knowledge.

For example, towards the start of the book, the king of Poland and the caliph of Arabia are both coming to woo the queen. Neither one is a good choice politically, so Mountfallcon tells Quire to make sure that the two royals arrive at court at the same time, so neither one will perceive the other as having an advantage. The Polish king is a day or two ahead of the caliph, so Quire connives to delay him by wrecking his entire naval convoy on a sandbar, rescuing the king himself at the last minute.

Quire is actually quite brilliant at this sort of thing. But, eventually, Quire asks Mountfallcon for a bit of recognition of his talents, and Mountfallcon responds by demeaning him and revealing his disgust at Quire’s work. Quire quickly turns against Mountfallcon and the queen, and vows revenge.

Quire then rapidly manages to murder, prison, kidnap, or embroil in scandal most of the key members of Gloriana’s court. The happiness and optimism of the people of Albion degenerate into suspicion and discontent. The nobles descend into increased debauchery. And, to top it all off, Quire works his way into the queen’s inner circle and makes her fall in love with him; she takes him with her everywhere she goes and will listen to no one’s counsel but his.

Events reach a terrible low as Albion hovers on the brink of war with both the Tatars and a disaffected segment of Albion’s nobility, and all of the queen’s formerly trusted advisers are either crazy, discredited, missing, or dead. It seems like it will take a miracle—or at least something really, really drastic—to get Albion and its queen back on their feet again. And, of course, something drastic does happen.

~~~

In Gloriana, Moorcock writes with an authentically ornate style; it is dotted with the flourishes and rococo embellishments that are entirely appropriate to the Elizabethan-esque setting he has created. And individual scenes in the book can occasionally be quite entertaining, such as the shipwreck of the Polish king’s convoy.

But the novel overall has big problems.

The least of these are its tiresome plot, verse, and pomp. The nobles in Gloriana’s court are forced to participate in a seemingly endless string of seasonal pageants. The descriptions of clothing, jewels, colors, materials, and heraldry at these events are overwrought, and the poetry the nobles have to recite at them is eminently skippable.

The most insurmountable of the book's issues are, of course, its chauvinistic treatment of the queen and its disturbing treatment of power imbalances in sexual relationships.

I talked earlier of the queen’s “problem,” in which the people around her and, more importantly, the queen herself feel that she is an incomplete person without a lover to fully satisfy her. Must a lover be the only answer? Must she always feel like less of a person than others because of her sexual issues? Must it negate all of the strength and success she has in other areas of her life?

And the sexual relationships in this book are intended to be romantic and erotic and possibly funny. But if you consider the power imbalances of the people involved, almost all of these relationships come off as disturbing instead. The queen herself, of course, gets her jollies from a personal seraglio kept for that purpose. But she is not the only one to have sex servants; many of her courtiers keep boys, girls, and madwomen for their pleasure. And when these servants are actively resistant or obviously upset by their situations, their distress is largely treated with amusement.

By far the worst handling of a sexual relationship is in the very last chapter, when Quire rapes the queen. A rape is, of course, bad enough by itself. But, of all things, during the incident, the queen at last achieves the climax she has been searching for her whole life. She is, at last, “cured” by rape. And then, after it is over, she decides to marry him.

Moorcock got so much grief for this chapter after the book was first published in 1978 that he rewrote it so that instead of Quire raping Gloriana, he just attempts to rape her, and she is able to fend him off. And yet still somehow, during her defense of her body, she has a climax that is not strictly sexual but more sort of spiritual—and at last she is, again, “cured.” The rewrite just comes across as a confused, awkward cover up; and it certainly doesn’t change all of the less direct sexual violence throughout the rest of the book.

It’s a little strange to me that all of these criticisms echo my criticisms of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. Martin, too, uses tiresomely endless descriptions of banners and heraldry. Martin’s plots, too, rely almost entirely on amoral scheming and power grabs. And Martin, too, uses a lot of rape and other sexual violence in his writing, often in an offhanded or seemingly amused way. (Interestingly, there is also an oft-referred-to tower in Gloriana called “Bran’s Tower.”) It makes me wonder if Martin, whose Game of Thrones came out eighteen years after Gloriana, has been delivering a bit of an homage to Moorcock.

Book Review: The Time Ships

Stephen Baxter
1995
Awards: Campbell
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The Time Ships is a sequel to H.G. Wells’ classic 1895 novella The Time Machine. It was officially supported by Wells’ estate and was published on the 100th anniversary of the original book. 

Baxter does a brilliant job of staying true to the tone, style, language, and setting of The Time Machine. But he also does a great deal more development of the main character, and uses Wells’ original concept as a jumping-off point to explore monumentally larger questions.

The Time Ships is narrated by the same (unnamed) main character and begins in the same base time (1891) and place (Richmond, England) as Wells’ original story, shortly after the narrator returned home from 802,701 A.D. and related his adventures to his friends. Except, in The Time Ships, the narrator feels so guilty for leaving his Eloi girlfriend and escaping back to Victorian England as she was about to be captured by Morlocks, that he resolves to go back (to the future) to rescue her. So he gets into his machine, sets his control levers, and starts to see the years go rolling by as they did before…

…but, as he travels, he realizes that the future has changed drastically from what he saw on his first trip.

The first thing he notices is that, several millennia in, the sun stops oscillating. In other words, the earth no longer has a tilted axis, but is now straight up and down, with its axis perpendicular to the sun. And then the sun stops moving, staying constantly in the same place in the sky. In other words, the face of the earth he is on is permanently facing the sun. The vegetation and the River Thames dry up and wither away, and the land becomes a blazing desert. And then finally the sun appears to explode and go out entirely! 

Appalled, he brakes the machine, stopping about 600,000 years into his future.

He finds Morlocks around, on this permanently dark Earth. But they are not the Morlocks he met before; these are a highly advanced, peaceful race, who have learned how to harness the sun’s energy by enclosing it in a Dyson sphere to provide everything they need at no cost. They have no want, hunger, poverty, or war. Their lives are lived on a completely rational basis, with the highest purpose being the quest for knowledge. 

His main guide in this world ends up being a Morlock named Nebogipfel, a specialist in physics and youth education. It is Nebogipfel who explains why our narrator didn’t return to the same future as before. Based on the Morlock’s studies of Kurt Gödel in the 1950s, he theorizes that the narrator caused a divergence in history by telling his friends about his adventures when he returned to his own time. Time is full of multiple possible paths, Nebogipfel says, and the narrator’s revelation of the success of his machine led to the branching off of a different timeline from the one he had been living in originally; a timeline in which time travel was now a possibility. By inventing the time machine, the main character changed the future irrevocably.

The narrator is treated with respect and patience by his guide. And as he explores the Earth the Morlocks have made, he comes to have increasing respect for their achievements and their intelligence. But he is still unable to overcome his disgust with not only what they have done with the Earth and the sun, but also their physical appearance. And he wants to go home and fix history. 
So, eventually, he is able to trick Nebogipfel into taking him back to see his time machine, whereupon he jumps inside and sets the controls back for Victorian England. But Nebogipfel jumps in after him just before he takes off, and is carried along back with him.

The narrator has set the controls to 1873, with the idea of going back to his laboratory and convincing his younger self not to build the time machine in the first place. The narrator and Nebogipfel get to his house in 1873, hook up with his younger self, and explain their problem. But all three of them are then kidnapped by time-traveling British Army personnel from 1938, an era of perpetual war with Germany in which time travel is the ultimate weapon. Their mission is to prevent anyone—including the narrator himself—from preventing him from inventing it.

What follows is a twisting, turning adventure through time, as both instantiations of the main character and Nebogipfel travel back and forth from 1938 to the Paleocene Era to 50 million years into the future to the very beginning of time, trying to find a way home.

It is a captivating story. First of all, Baxter does a fantastic job writing from the point of view of a Wellsian, Victorian-era Englishman. The narrator’s archaic turns of phrase, his capitalization of Important Nouns, and his mental explanations of incredibly futuristic concepts in terms of the limited technology that an 1890s scientist would understand, all ring true. And his sensibilities are always being shocked by the things he encounters, particularly those that involve the human body: Morlock flesh, hair, and reproductive methods; 20th-century sexual mores; nanosurgery.Baxter also does a nice job of subtle, steady character development. In his adventures in The Time Ships, the narrator sees atomic bombs and the devastation of war, but he also sees love, community building, and inventiveness. Through one disaster after another, the narrator comes to see first-hand just how evil and, at the same time, just how compassionate and far-seeing humans can be. And he has to learn how to reconcile it all into a far more complex concept of the nature of humanity than he had before.

And, in spite of his initial (and often continuing) physical repulsion of Morlocks, the narrator gradually develops a deep relationship with Nebogipfel. It is a relationship of siblings, rather than friends, in the way they grow to care for and depend on each other, but also fight about so many things. In spite of the narrator's haughtiness, it is from Nebogipfel that he learns the biggest lessons about being comfortable with one's place in the universe.

The story itself was tight enough to keep me reading, and at the same time covered an incredibly ambitious amount of ground. Somehow Baxter was able to weave together a coherent, well-paced story that included prehistoric Earth, space elevators, climate destruction, an alternate-history world war in Europe, quantum physics, and Lovecraftian pyramidal space creatures, in addition to the aforementioned Dyson sphere. It was a little bit like reading a book that combined the writing not only of H.G. Wells, but also Connie Willis, Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman, Piers Anthony, and Michael Bishop.

It sounds chaotic, but it worked. Amazingly enough, in what at first seemed like it was going to be just a time-travel adventure, Baxter has written a story of enormous sweep and complexity of understanding. On the one hand, the narrator came face to face with the size of the universe and realized exactly how infinitesimally small he is. And, on the other hand, he saw the currents connecting him both to the past and the future, and how little changes by one person could result in huge changes over a large enough scale of time. And he came through all of this with an understanding of how important it is to continue to strive to improve life for himself and those around him, no matter how small the incremental change might seem.

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library

This spring, I was in Indianapolis and had the privilege of visiting the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. This place is fantastic. 

It is a little museum, jam-packed with artifacts from Vonnegut’s life (including at least some of his library, his purple heart, and the typewriter on which he wrote many of his novels). The best part was the curator who greeted me when I came in; he was clearly a passionate Vonnegut fan, and gave me an artifact-by-artifact personal tour of the exhibits. He brought to life the author, his life, and even his family, which I never knew much about. (He also told me that ice-nine was based on a real-life experiment, which is terrifying.)

The staff has a lot of love and respect for Vonnegut and his work, and an understanding of what him made him tick (or not tick). They hold events in honor not only of Vonnegut's humor (block parties with asterisk cookies) but also his sense of justice (banned book weeks). And they have been able to forge a close relationship with members of the Vonnegut family, which adds immeasurably to the richness of their programs and collections. 

The museum is currently raising money to move into a new building four times larger than the tiny space they are in now. It is scheduled to open in April 2017, so any Vonnegut fans visiting after that should be in for a treat. 

I do think it's funny that the library's website talks about the legacy of "Hoosier author" Kurt Vonnegut, since in Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut described the community of Hoosiers as a granfalloon.

Book Review: The Innkeeper's Song

Peter S. Beagle
1993
Awards: Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This is one of those fantasy novels set in a medieval-style place and time in which technology has not progressed beyond swords and horses and carts, and there are wizards and strange mythical beasts. And it is well told: very human and accessible, occasionally action-packed, somewhat scary, a little poetic, and a little bit cute.
   
The story starts out with a pair of young lovers: a girl, Lukassa, and a boy, Tikat. The two are billing and cooing on a bridge over a river near their village when the bridge railing suddenly gives way and Lukassa falls into the river and drowns.

The boy, Tikat, is disconsolate, weeping by the river all the next night and day. But then a mysterious warrior woman rides up, raises his dead girlfriend out of the river, brings her back to life, puts her on her horse, and takes off.

Tikat rushes after them and chases them for miles and miles and miles, never catching up. Along the way he encounters a group of bandits who are harassing an old man. He rescues the old man from the bandits and they travel for a while together. The old man turns out, however, not only to be an associate of the warrior woman who raised Tikat’s girlfriend from the dead, but also a mystical beast himself, whose natural form is that of a red fox. Promising to leave a trail that Tikat can follow to find them all, he turns into his fox self and runs off to join the women.

One of the nice techniques Beagle uses is that he switches his narrator every chapter. Each one is narrated by whichever character is most appropriate to tell that part of the story, and every character gets a chance to be the narrator at least once (including the Fox, who has some of the best narration in the whole book).

This means that while we’re following Tikat chasing after the women, we also get to find out what’s going on with the women as they race across the countryside. It turns out the warrior woman, who is named Lal, is the former student of a wizard. On the road, they join up with a woman named Nyateneri, who is another student of the same wizard and who is just as much of a bad-ass warrior as Lal. The two of them are desperately searching for their former teacher; they believe he is somewhere in the area, hiding from a terrible rival wizard who wants to kill him, and they are determined to defend him.

The three women eventually stop at a crossroads inn. The fat, cantankerous innkeeper, Karsh, has been up to now perfectly happy whiling away his days running his inn and beating up his staff, including his teenage stable boy and semi-adopted son Rosseth. But these three women are destined to turn Karsh’s and Rosseth’s lives upside down—and the inn’s staff are destined to help the three women in their goals (albeit mostly unintentionally).

Lal, Nyateneri, and the Fox manage to find the old wizard hiding in the nearby town and they bring him back to the inn to live while trying to gather their strength for the coming confrontation. They have several smaller adventures including the killing of two men sent to kill Nyateneri, a fairly lengthy episode of gender-bending group sex, and an ill-fated journey to find the wizard’s nemesis, until finally it all culminates in an enormous, inn-destroying wizard-on-wizard face-off across both physical and metaphysical planes.

Sometimes I think there are two ways storytelling can be good. If the author does a great job creating and executing a riveting overall story arc, it doesn’t matter so much if the details aren’t perfectly described. And, on the other hand, if the author keeps our interest with entertaining conversations and richly detailed scene-setting, it can be okay to have a relatively basic, less inherently exciting plot.

(If an author can do both, of course, the book has the potential to be truly amazing, rather than just good—but that seems to be relatively rare.)

This book of the second type. The overall plot is simple and not all that exciting in itself. But Beagle keeps us reading along nicely with his colorful and detailed atmospheric, emotional, and scenic descriptions, as well as the interactions between the characters. And the strength of some of the main characters (Lal, Nyateneri, the Fox) helps to distract us from how tiresome some of the supporting characters (Lukassa, Tikat) can be.

He keeps us reading along nicely, that is, until the final showdown—which starts out with a lot of suspenseful promise and then blurs out into an ill-defined and overblown abstract supernatural scene that reflects none of the detailed physical grounding so present in the rest of the book.

Book Review: Moonfall

Jack McDevitt
1998
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Moonfall is a disaster novel that does not hold back. It contains just about every kind of space- and Earth-based natural disaster you could possibly think of, except possibly killer tornadoes.  And the disasters come one after the other in rapid succession—just as one is being solved, a worse one is looming on the horizon—so the characters have no time to plan very far ahead, much less to sleep.

Before this, I had only read McDevitt’s space exploration novels, which I like very much and which are shorter and crisper and tend to be more about intrigue than action. But with Moonfall I was impressed with his creativity, his realism, and how he managed the pacing to keep the tension going at a high level from beginning to end in this longer format.

This book starts, as any good disaster novel should, with calm opening scenes of ordinary people going about their work and hobbies and family lives as usual, never suspecting that within hours everything is going to change drastically.

One of these ordinary people is Tomiko Harrington, an amateur astronomer out on a clear night in 2024 near St. Louis observing a total solar eclipse. During the eclipse she spots a star she has never seen before and that shouldn’t be there, and reports it to the authorities.

Gradually, the authorities realize that (a) the anomalous star is a comet; (b) it’s an interstellar comet traveling about a hundred times faster than a normal comet; (c) it’s headed straight for the moon and will get there in a matter of days.

Charlie Haskell, the U.S. vice president, actually happens to be on the moon at the time. He’s there with a whole bunch of staffers and Secret Service personnel to do a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the official opening of the U.S.’s new Moonbase installation. And there are also about 1,700 scientists and administrators living at Moonbase already. But nobody is all that worried; they think they have enough space vehicles of various kinds to evacuate everyone to safety either to Earth or to an orbital space station by the time the comet hits.

Except that, of course, they have mechanical difficulties with a couple of the space planes. And, with the complications that result, it turns out that they don’t actually have enough time to get everyone off the moon after all. And, unfortunately for Vice President Haskell, he has already said publicly that he’d be the last one off—to “close the door and turn out the lights”—never thinking that might mean he’d be in mortal danger.

Because by now the astronomers have realized that since the comet is traveling so fast, it has the force to actually break the moon apart completely when it hits.

And to make matters worse, if the moon breaks up, there is the distinct possibility that chunks—potentially really big chunks—of moon rock will fall onto the Earth.

As this is all happening, the tension is gradually increasing, ramping up slowly but steadily until you and all the characters are wound as tight as drums. By the time the last plane arrives at Moonbase to try to pull off a daring rescue of the vice president and five other people who have volunteered to be the last to leave, everyone is racing around, trying to get the vehicle fueled and loaded and off the ground as fast as possible. There is no time to spare, and the anxiety is palpable.

Then, seconds after they lift off, the comet actually hits the moon and everything switches almost into slow motion. The impact itself is beautifully written; it seemed very realistic, with the blinding light of the actual explosion sweeping over the moon and then the moon’s surface first shuddering and trembling and then starting to collapse.

And then, after that moment’s pause, the pace shifts into high gear again as the vice president’s plane attempts to outrun the rapidly expanding shock wave of fire and chunks of moon debris the size of city blocks.

After that, the characters have to discover, evaluate, and solve one disaster after another that with the barest of resources and almost no sleep. Sure enough, the moon does break up and pieces do fall to earth, causing earthquakes, landslides, and super-giant tidal waves that wipe out most of both U.S. coasts. And the whole time, the passenger-bearing space planes have their own mini-disasters, running out of fuel and air and being hit by moon shrapnel. McDevitt also often gives you clues as to what is about to go wrong, which is great because knowing that it’s going to happen and having to wait for it makes it all the more tense.

Eventually, the little multivariate disasters subside and the main characters’ concerns narrow down to one central final crisis: a moon rock a kilometer and a half long that is headed straight for Earth. This is a giant civilization-killer of a meteor and everybody has to pull together to figure out a solution. Except that by now they’re down to their last seven remaining space planes, and right-wing militia members, misguidedly seeing an opportunity in the pending apocalypse, are trying to use rocket launchers to shoot down the planes.

The only real issue I had with the book was that the narrative had a tendency to get scattered. McDevitt does spend most of his time on the stories of his main characters: the vice president, the president, some key space station personnel, and a couple of the space pilots. But he also sprinkles in lots of little vignettes about random minor characters, many of whom only appear once or twice: a woman at a Manhattan cocktail party; a Coast Guard cutter captain off Long Island Sound; a retiree in Rhode Island; a nurse in San Francisco; a furniture factory manager in Pennsylvania.

He does create a good diversity of characters, and it might have seemed a good way to help us monitor what was happening in different parts of the United States while the central action was happening in space, but it was just too many stories to follow, especially when they didn't lead anywhere. I didn’t know which ones to settle into and which ones I could safely coast through as just background color. And we often snapped from one to the other very quickly, so at times it made the flow feel choppy.

But, in general, McDevitt’s pacing, realism, and talent for telling the central story make up for the sometimes choppiness. As would happen in a catastrophe of this size, lots of people in leadership positions do not come out looking very good (including the president). And all kinds of people become heroes who never expected to be (including the vice president, who somehow ends up single-handedly solving almost every problem that crops up in space). And many people do die. And the tension continues right to the end; even up to the very last two pages, you still aren’t sure, after everything the Earth's people have been through, if they’re going to survive the final mega-meteor disaster or not.

Book Review: Bellwether

Connie Willis
1996
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I never thought I would say this about a book and mean it in a good way:

Bellwether is an adorable romance story.

It’s also a tremendously cute send-up of people slavishly following popular trends.

The main character, Dr. Sandra Foster, is a statistical researcher at a corporation called HiTek. Her area of research—her obsession—is to discover how fads start.
   
HiTek has several floors of researchers all engaged in different types of research, from stats to biology to physics. It is a sort of Dilbertian company in that it does not appear to actually create any products, but does spend tons of money and time holding trendy sensitivity exercises and producing reams of bureaucratic paperwork.
   
HiTek is interested in Foster’s research because they’d like to use it to create fads of their own. But Foster is doing it because she is simply fascinated by trends: the phenomenon of people blindly following the crowd’s lead in completely silly fashions, food, and entertainment. She wants to know what makes otherwise rational people subscribe to the pointless and idiotic just because it’s popular.
   
Foster is surrounded by people who subscribe to the latest fads and try to enforce them on her—not only HiTek’s management, but also her friends, her friends’ kids, her maybe-boyfriend, the baristas at her favorite café, and the assistant librarians at her local library. Foster’s life is additionally complicated by Flip, the company’s twenty-something administrative assistant (later re-titled by management the “interdepartmental communications liaison”). Flip is on the bleeding edge of fashion, with blue hair and duct tape jewelry, but cannot make copies or correctly deliver inter-office mail to save her life. She invariably ends up making more work for Foster than if Foster had just done the administrative tasks herself.

Foster’s current project is to find the source of the hair-bobbing fad of the 1920s. She has methodically eliminated all of her most promising potential sources, and feels like she’s not getting anywhere. Then, one day, Flip mis-delivers a package to Foster that is supposed to go to a Dr. Turnbull down in Biology. Foster takes it upon herself to deliver it since it is marked “perishable.” Turnbull is not in her lab at the time, but her lab mate, Dr. Bennett O’Reilly, is there. And in O’Reilly, Foster meets the first and only person she has ever met who seems to be completely immune to fads.

O’Reilly is a complete fashion disaster. He wears clashing colors and patterns and has no idea whether tiramisu or bread pudding is in or out. And not only does he not care about fads, he seems to be unaware that they even exist. This is, of course, fascinating to Foster.

O’Reilly is working on chaos theory. He is trying to observe how chaotic systems behave and understand how they can sometimes reach such a point of total chaos that they will actually spontaneously organize themselves into a new, organized-seeming equilibrium. He and Foster quickly recognize the similarities in their goals, and decide to work together on a single project to find out how cohesive trends arise out of chaos and disorganization. They launch their project—which involves borrowing a flock of sheep from Foster’s rancher maybe-boyfriend—but their progress is hampered on all sides by friends and colleagues who want them instead to help them ban smoking from the parking lot, find a Romantic Bride Barbie, and win the elusive million-dollar Niebnitz research grant.
   
O’Reilly and Foster are as cute as buttons. Really. They’re the only people at HiTek—or even apparently in the greater Denver-Boulder area—who seem to have a dose of common sense. And they’re ideal for each other, but they don’t see it at all, of course.

There’s not actually all that much that goes on as far as plot in this book. It’s like Willis’ longer books in that most of the activity involves the main characters trying to get something done—like copying a bunch of clippings on hair-bobbing—and having it take weeks because it is interrupted by management all-hands meetings, administrative assistants (or interdepartmental communications liaisons) losing the clippings, and people wanting advice about filling out the incomprehensible new simplified funding forms.

As long as you don’t need a lot of actual plot or action, and you are okay sitting back and enjoying the ride through the chaos, you’ll get a lot of funny information about trends and entertaining character studies of impossible people, and a very sweet love story between two likeable characters fighting against all odds to follow their own stars.