Book Review: The Three Body Problem

Cixin Liu
2010
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Three Body Problem is the first book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Its events are set in motion by a Chinese astrophysicist who, because of the atrocities she witnessed during the Cultural Revolution, has become so disillusioned with humanity that she invites a race of ruthless alien overlords from Alpha Centauri to come take over Earth.

If you like quick, tidy resolutions in your fiction, you may want to be aware that you won’t get anything of the sort in this novel. You will need to read the trilogy’s next two installments to find out what happens to the protagonists (not to mention humanity as a whole) But the ride of this book is worth it: it has an excellent, engaging premise, and this first part of the journey is filled with sometimes puzzling, sometimes disturbing, often funny, and increasingly surreal imagery, events, and characters.

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The book opens with a one-two punch of gut-wrenching scenes from the 1960s civil wars that followed the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The first is the shooting of a fifteen-year-old rebel by Red Union regulars. And the second is the beating death of a professor of physics during an anti-intellectual show trial, during which his wife is one of the key witnesses for the prosecution.

The physics professor’s daughter, Ye Wenjie, witnesses the whole trial, including her mother’s betrayal and her father’s death. The traumatized Ye goes to her university mentor for help, only to have her mentor commit suicide shortly thereafter. And then Ye herself, who refuses to denounce the beliefs of her dead father, is judged an enemy to the revolution and is sent to a reeducation camp in Mongolia. There, she is caught with reactionary propaganda (a copy of Rachel Smith’s Silent Spring), framed for writing a letter reporting the camp’s deforestation of the area, and thrown in prison.

However, Ye is an astrophysicist, and the military needs her expertise. So she is given a reprieve of sorts: her life is spared, and she is sent to work on a top-secret radar installation called Red Coast Base. But by this point, Ye doesn’t care. And any shred of faith she might have had in humans is long gone.

Ye’s story pauses here, in the late 1960s. The narrative fast-forwards forty years or so to 2006, when Wang Miao, an unassuming professor of applied research working on nanotechnology, is pressured by the army to try to infiltrate a secret physics society called the Frontiers of Science—a society where several prominent members have recently committed suicide.

After reluctantly accepting the assignment, strange things start to happen to Wang. Most disturbingly, he starts to see a countdown appearing in strange places: like on a roll of negatives he shot from his camera, and in the corners of his eyes while reading. The tiny numbers show up everywhere, relentlessly counting down. It is driving him crazy. So he goes to the Frontiers of Science for help. His key contact there, physics professor Shen Yufei, tells him to stop his nanotech research, and the countdown mysteriously stops.

Then, on one of his visits to Shen’s house, Wang happens to catch her playing an immersive game called 3body. Curious, he plays it himself. The game puts him onto an alien planet with three suns. The suns are sometimes big, sometimes small, never moving in a consistent direction or at a consistent speed. Sometimes they disappear for weeks or years (which he can observe because time passes much more quickly in the game than in real life). The planet is also populated by other, usually quite quirky players who take on avatars of characters from history like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. The players are all trying to find some formula that will allow them to predict the movement of the suns, but they never do. And with every play, Wang is only able to see civilization advance just a little bit further before some combination of the suns’ movements burns the planet to the ground and the inhabitants have to dehydrate themselves, waiting out the heat until the next period of solar stability.

Wang realizes that the game is an illustration of the three-body problem, a classic physics puzzle. The problem is that when a planet has three suns, the suns’ competing gravitational behavior will make them behave so erratically that their movements cannot be predicted by any known formula—and will periodically result in unexpected destruction of the planet. The game’s creators hope that it will help people to come up with an algorithm that will predict the movements of the suns, and thereby find a way to avoid the carnage that results from unfortunate solar combinations.

And when Wang attends a user group meeting, he learns that this is not just a theoretical concern. The world of the 3body game is a real place: a planet near Alpha Centauri that really does have three suns, and where the native population of “trisolarians” lives in constant danger of being wiped out by an unlucky sun alignment.

Which brings us back to Ye Wenjie’s story. Because when she was at Red Coast base in the 1960s, she discovered that she was able to use our sun’s radiation as a natural amplifier. So one day, furious with humanity, she sneaked into the control room and bounced a message off the sun in the direction of Alpha Centauri, saying, basically, “we are useless; come take over.” The trisolarians received it, and began preparing to come and take over our planet as their own.

Ye couldn’t be more strongly in favor of this idea. And, in fact, has co-founded an organization with a radical millionaire environmentalist to welcome the trisolarians with open arms. They are closely affiliated with the Frontiers of Science, and the 3body game is one of their brainchilds.

I should say at this point that I do most of my reading on the subway, on the way to and from work. I was innocently reading on the train one morning, minding my own business, when the guy sitting next to me said, “Is that The Three Body Problem? That book is crazy. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier. I read it in one night straight through, and then I read the other two books in like two more days. I can’t get enough of his writing. It’s completely nuts.”

And my traveling companion was correct. After the message gets through to the trisolarians, the book does start to get odd, eventually ramping up to the point where it is indeed pretty nuts.

For one thing, we become privy to the trisolarians’ preparations for the invasion of Earth, including their launch of a science-disrupting bombe surprise—a set of instructions encoded on the inner surfaces of two protons—which will get to Earth many light years before they will, and which they have to test with often hilarious results on their home planet first.

For another, simultaneously, Wang teams up with an international task force to gather (or steal by force) intel from the Frontiers of Science, which culminates in an effort to saw a supertanker into pieces using a device that is essentially a gigantic egg slicer.

And the 3body game keeps getting progressively more and more bizarre, with the repeated, inevitable destruction of the planet by one or another sun causing increasingly demented historical avatars to come up with increasingly wacky ideas to solve the sun problem, and to deyhdrate themselves into little people-prunes over and over again.

It all builds up intense anticipation for the arrival of the trisolarians...which, unfortunately, we have to wait until a later volume in this trilogy to see.

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This book does require a little bit of familiarization with the history of the Cultural Revolution, for those not already aware of its complexities. I took Chinese history in college, and still needed quite a bit of help, what with the confusing civil wars after the revolution, and the references to reactionaries and the material dialectic. The translator’s footnotes help a lot here.

The physics can also sometimes be difficult, and so advanced as to be almost surreal. But there is enough explanation in that area, too, that with just a little effort it’s still very possible to follow the main stream of the story.

The characters—human and alien, real and virtual—are engaging and quirky. They can be earnest, dedicated, and smart, but also sometimes inappropriately, sweetly frank and obnoxious. (The  message sent out by the Chinese equivalent of the SETI program to announce themselves to whichever alien race is listening, for example, is adorably imperious.)

Most of all, I loved the clever, off-the-wall situations in the 3body game, which do allow scientists to conduct thought experiments they never could do when constrained by Earthly physics. One of the best is when in one of Wang’s forays into the game he encounters the emperor Qin Shi Huang, who uses his vast army to create an enormous, human-scale computer processor, including a CPU, memory, system bus, and hard drive, and processor messages sent by semaphore and horseback.

It was brilliant in a way similar to the binary language instruction scene in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. And, indeed, this book had many elements in it that reminded me of Stephenson’s best work—combined with the funny and accessible multi-dimensional physics of Edwin Abbott, the surreal settings of Roger Zelazny, and the alien invasions of H.G. Wells.

Book Review: Radiomen

Eleanor Lerman
2015
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This novel is...okay. It gives a somewhat new twist to the aliens-are-among-us genre, and kept my interest up a reasonable amount of the time. But it reads a little too much like a young adult novel trying to be grittier and more hard-boiled than it actually is. It’s like Judy Blume trying to be Raymond Chandler. And some of the writing gets a bit sloppy.

The main character, Laurie Perzin, is directionless and isolated. She lives in a down-at-heel part of Queens near warehouses where shady activities go on in the wee hours of the night. Every day she shuttles back and forth from her home to her job as a night-shift bartender at Kennedy airport, keeping her head down, uninvolved in everything around her.

The one interest she has is in ham radio, a hobby borne out of her close childhood relationship with her now-deceased radio enthusiast uncle Avi. But even that hobby is soured by the memory of a vivid dream from that childhood. In the dream, she and Avi were outside the family’s summer vacation rental in Rockaway, trying to listen to signals from Sputnik. Avi lost the signal and went up to the roof to fix the antenna. While he was gone, a gray, fuzzy humanoid form appeared in front of Laurie, telling her not to make a sound while it fixed the radio.

The dream has always disturbed her. So, at the start of the book, without really intending to, Laurie calls in to a psychic appearing on a late-night radio talk show. The psychic, Ravenette, repeats the dream to Laurie unprompted. Laurie hangs up, but the psychic tracks her down and tries to get her to talk about the dream humanoid, and also tries to convert her to a cult-like religion that is almost an exact copy of Scientology called The Blue Awareness.

Ravenette won’t leave Laurie alone. So Laurie turns to the radio show’s host, Jack Shepherd, for help. Jack is sane and sympathetic, but suggests that maybe her “dream” was actually a real incident that she is repressing. Jack thinks that the gray humanoid she saw was an alien, and that there are others on Earth besides the one she saw, and that other people have seen them, and that her uncle might have known about them, too.

In fact, Jack thinks that, Howard Gilmartin, founder of the Blue Awareness, knew about the aliens too, and built his cult around them. Jack’s theory is bolstered when thugs from the Blue Awareness start harassing Laurie, insisting that she submit to “tests” using their “blue box,” which is basically just a box with an electric field in it. She makes the mistake of telling them that she has her own box—one her uncle built to prove that theirs was fake—whereupon they break in and ransack her apartment to steal it.

After the break in, Laurie’s Malian neighbor gives her a watchdog; a very strange but cute and loyal dog that protects her from other incidents and seem to have its own knowledge (and distrust) of the creepos from the Blue Awareness. Jack suspects that the dog is descended from a long line of dogs cared for by the Dogon people of Mali, which may have been given to them originally by the aliens hundreds of years ago as a gift.

Eventually, Laurie is contacted by Raymond Gilmartin, son of Howard and current leader of the Blue Awareness. Raymond thinks she has another piece of her uncle’s radio equipment, a repeater, and he wants it and won’t leave her alone about it. Then there is a weird incident where Ravenette channels an alien who says that it is the aliens who actually need the repeater.

Jack is curious about all of this, so he builds a new repeater when they can’t find Avi’s, and then Jack and Laurie agree to meet Raymond and Ravenette at Laurie’s family’s old vacation rental in Rockaway to give them the repeater, in exchange for them leaving Laurie alone. The Blue Awareness thugs show up and it all threatens to go bad until like a bazillion dogs show up to protect Laurie. And then who should show up but the alien himself, amazing everyone and silencing the Blue Awareness for good.

Lerman’s thesis is an interesting one in principle: that in spite of their superior science, the aliens visiting us are as much in the dark about god and the meaning of life and all that as we are. This could have been turned into a thought-provoking statement about how technology won’t answer those sorts of questions for you, and that no matter how smart you are, you still have to look inside yourself to find meaning in your life. But that does not happen in this novel.

Lerman tries hard to make Laurie tough, but she just doesn’t have the gravitas and attitude to pull off the noir persona it seems that Lerman is going for. She always comes across like a continually disillusioned kid. And many of her movements seem pointless, or at least needlessly slow; like her first visit to her family’s old beach rental on Rockaway, or to her uncle’s grave.

In keeping with a noir atmosphere, Lerman includes huge amounts of gritty scenery description, especially of the seedier parts of New York City, which in a Dashiell Hammett novel would give the story a crucial atmosphere, but which here get, well, boring. Everything is continually soggy, gray, forlorn.

And there are a ton of similes, often combined with comically long run-on sentences, that are pretty hard to read. To wit:

“Dr. Carpenter turned to look toward the window, where a block of dusty summer sunlight seemed to sit on the sill like a package someone had forgotten to bring inside.”

“The structure resembled a pile of dark concrete whose colonnaded facade had been stripped bare and refurbished to emanate a steampunk look that someone must have felt represented the aesthetic of early twentieth-century manufacturing even better than the name of the long-departed box-making firm still chiseled above the entranceway.”

The Blue Awareness is a little too bare-facedly and disappointingly an imitation of Scientology—even down to the Ted Merrill / Tom Cruise star spokesman—without any real significant alteration.

And the ending is awkwardly unsubtle. Characters are supposed to grow and change over the course of a novel, but it is supposed to be self-evident; not proclaimed. At the end of Radiomen, Laurie comes right out and tells the reader that she has changed from a person plodding head down through life to a curious person alive with possibilities. (Which isn’t actually all that apparent.) And, as a bonus, Laurie lists the other key characters and tells us how they have changed, too. It clanks hard.

If anything rescues this novel at all, it is the dogs. They provide the moments of real heart and meaning; they have their own agendas and personalities, and are some of the best characters in the book. If only they were the protagonists as well.

Book Review: Cuckoo’s Egg

C.J. Cherryh
1985
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –

SPOILER ALERT...but does it really matter?

You just never know where your most excruciating reading experiences are going to come from. My most recent came in the form of Cuckoo’s Egg: a slim, 200-page novel that offers the reader a unique combination of boredom and pain, and which took me a good two months to force my way through.

Cuckoo’s Egg is purportedly the story of a rigorously dutiful, misunderstood warrior and the child he sacrifices nearly everything to raise alone. But it is really the story of a co-dependent, abusive relationship, thinly disguised by an abstract writing style and held together by the thinnest of plots.

On a distant planet orbiting a distant star lives an intelligent, bipedal dog-like species with nascent spacefaring technology and a highly developed social structure. Duun, one of our two co-protagonists, is one of these dog-creatures. He is a battle-scarred, tough-as-nails, high-ranking member of the hatani, a class of soldiers who are bound by tradition and duty to do the unpleasant but necessary work that more polite society won’t do itself. The hatani are on the fringes of respectability: needed and respected by the common folk for the work that they do, but, at the same time, feared because of their military skill, and resented for the fact that they have to exist at all.

For reasons we don’t learn until the very end of the book, Duun is assigned a human baby to raise as his own. The baby is called Thorn. Duun raises Thorn as his own son, on his country estate, with no one else around but the peasants he displaced to claim his ancestral lands, who are a bit ticked off about being displaced.

As Thorn grows from babyhood into teenagehood, Duun raises him to be tough—very tough. Dunn challenges him constantly, both physically and with tricky, hostile riddles. And the masters of the hatani also put Thorn through somewhat ridiculous Kung-Fu-like tests, which include things like having to scour his rooms for the tiniest pebbles that were put there to see if he could find them all. 

But Thorn is sensitive. He can’t really be as tough as Duun wants him to be. His heart is in his throat every time he is tested; indeed, his heart has been in his throat for almost all of his entire short life up to this point. And there is no obvious reason why his upbringing has had to be this harsh. He lives in seemingly pointless fear and suffers seemingly pointless cruelty from Duun and the hatani masters, all under the guise of it being for his own protection.

When Thorn is a teenager, he actually gets up enough gumption to run away. But he is almost killed by scared villagers, and Duun has to rescue him, and has to kill a villager to do it. Which, in turn, means that Duun and Thorn have to abandon the country estate for the city where there won’t be angry villagers at every turn waiting for either one of them to make a misstep.

I think Thorn believes that Duun loves and protects him. And I think Duun believes that he loves Thorn. And I think Cherryh believes that she’s portraying a loving and protecting relationship that has been forced into harshness by circumstance. But their relationship is really one of toxic abuse and manipulation.

When they move to the city, Thorn finally gets to have company his own age; he is put into an actual classroom with four classmates. But they are more his tutors than his peers; they stay aloof from him even as they teach him; and they reinforce for him just how different he is from everyone else. And when Thorn falls for one of his classmates and tries to kiss her, he gets in trouble and she is immediately removed. (To add insult to injury, she is also revealed to have been an agent of the ghotanin, unscrupulous mercenaries who are the rivals of the hatani and who are trying to gain information about Thorn.)

As the nearly irrelevant plot plugs along, eventually, as part of his education, Thorn is forced to learn to reproduce what seem to be nonsense vocalizations, played on tapes, sound for sound. Gradually, though, he realizes that the taped voices are actually speaking a strange language, and the only known source of that language is the tapes that they’re making him memorize. And the more he listens to the tapes, the more he starts to understand them. And his dreams start to match what he hears: he starts to dream about a space station, filled with people like him—humans.

Meanwhile, the ghotani step up their attacks against the hatani, forcing Duun to step up his Thorn timeline, and finally, mercifully, forcing Cherryh to reveal Thorn’s purpose. It turns out that the tapes Thorn was forced to memorize are indeed from humans. Apparently a ship of them arrived at Duun’s planet a very long time ago. Duun’s people accidentally killed them all, but the humans back on Earth are still sending messages in an attempt to reach their long-lost ship. So the hatani created Thorn as a clone based on genetic information taken from the original ship’s passengers, and they hope that he will be able to translate what the human messages are saying—so as to hopefully either serve as an ambassador to broker a peace, or at least warn them when more humans will be coming.

Duun takes Thorn up into space, to a space station, to interpret the new messages being received from Earth by the station’s radio. And there, after about 150 pages of the total 175 or so, Duun stops manipulating and playing needless mind games, and finally gives Thorn a little honesty.

But it is about 149 pages too late. And I barely was able to make it that far as it was. Most of the time, while reading this book, I would read one paragraph and then, before I got very far into the next one, find myself zoning out, looking up, reading the ads on the bus, making grocery lists in my head. 

Sometimes it was because of the unrelentingly, needlessly cruel relationship between Duun and Thorn. It was a life that kept Thorn constantly off balance, with Duun one moment seemingly on the verge of kindness and then the next moment spinning off into anger and violence. Thorn lives in desperation; he hates Duun, but is terrified of being abandoned on a world where he knows no one else. All of his needs for trust and friendship and kindness and love are denied and invalidated.

And other times it was because I just did not care. Neither one of the main characters is in any way appealing, and neither one gave me any reason to want to find out what happened to him. And, in fact, nothing ever really does. There is zero reward for sitting through the unremitting cruelty of this dysfunctional relationship.

Book Review: Millennium

John Varley
1983
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I made the mistake of starting to read this book while on a plane. This was a very bad idea. The plot revolves around a mid-air plane collision between a DC-10 and a Boeing 747 in the skies over Oakland, California. And the first two-thirds or so of the book describe various aspects of the crash in excruciating detail, from the charred, severed limbs of the victims to the play-by-play of both cockpit voice recorders as the crew realized the trouble they were in. I had to put the book down several times mid-flight before eventually giving up and finishing it after I’d gotten safely back on the ground.

Once I did, I found that Millennium is a compact, well-plotted, well-paced time-travel novel with big, prescient warnings for those of us living in the here and now. It predicts a horrifying potential future that is the natural result of our disdain for our planet, and the least advantaged people who live on it. And it does it in a hard-boiled way that doesn't come off the least bit preachy.

The book is told in the form of intertwining testimonies from its two major characters. One testimony is that of Bill Smith, the National Transportation Safety Board Investigator in Charge who had the bad luck to be on call when the plane collision happened. He is a struggling alcoholic with the usual associated family troubles. But he's also doggedly determined to unravel all the threads of the crash mystery until he figures out what happened, and why.

The other testimony is that of Louise Baltimore, the leader of a time-traveling clean-up crew from forty thousand years in the future. Her job is to do “snatches,” during which they use a time portal to board airplanes before they crash, pull off all the still-living passengers through the portal into the future and replace them with staged, faked dead bodies—why, we don't know yet—and then go back and fix anything that went wrong during the snatch that could alter the timeline between ours and hers.

Louise and her staff are on board both of the planes, attempting to remove all the passengers before they collide, when they run into unexpected trouble: a hijacker shoots one of the Louise's crew members, and, in the subsequent confusion, one of them loses her stunner on the plane.

During his investigation, Bill starts to piece together things that make him realize that this crash is an odd one. On the bodies he has recovered, for example, all the watches are set exactly 45 minutes ahead. And on the black box recording, one of the crew is heard yelling about how everyone on the plane is burned and dead—before the crash happens. And then Bill sifts through every piece of debris and finds the stunner. Which means Louise has to go back and find Bill before he finds the stunner, and retrieve the gun from the debris before it screws up the timeline.

Inevitably, Bill and Louise meet and develop a sympathy and attachment to each other that prevent them from doing their jobs as dispassionately as they should, and the timeline starts to get more and more screwed up, and Louise's present starts to unravel.

In the process, we learn just how painful Louise's present is. The earth is next to unlivable, ecologically. And everyone suffers from all sorts of defects and degenerative organ diseases, so that the lucky ones don't die until their late twenties, having had most of their organs and limbs replaced and their bodies covered with artificial skin suits. And we learn that the stolen passengers from the crashes are part of the future's desperate, last-ditch attempt to save humanity.

The time travel in Millennium has plausible governing principles surrounding paradoxes: big events matter to the timeline, but little details generally don't, which allows Louise's clean-up crew some much-needed wiggle room. The settings, especially the future forty thousand years from now, have a bare-bones, Dashiell-Hammett-type grittiness. And so do the characters; Bill and Louise are both reluctant to get emotionally involved with anyone. If anyone in this pair is the sensitive one, it is Bill; Louise, raised in a nearly hopeless world, is a tough, hard-boiled cynic. But both of them have hearts of gold buried under their alcoholic and/or sarcastic exteriors, and they somehow are able to see that in each other and to join forces to try to save a future neither one will ever see. The result is an unexpectedly moving story.

Book Review: Probability Sun

Nancy Kress
2001
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – – 

Probability Sun starts three years after the end of Probability Moon. After losing three members of the original team that investigated the planet World in Probability Moon, Drs. Dieter Grüber and Anne Sikorski have convinced the Solar System’s governing body, the Solar Alliance Defense Network (SADN), to go back to World to investigate the “device” they discovered buried deep in the Neury Mountains.

Grüber wants to go for scientific curiosity. Sikorski wants to go for the natives, who she feels responsible for protecting from SADN. And SADN wants to for military reasons; they’re hoping the “device” will turn out to be a weapon that will help them win humanity’s war against the Fallers.

SADN Major Lyle Kaufman, a consummate diplomat, is chosen to lead the mission. Grüber convinces Kaufman to include the world’s greatest physicist and radical crank, Dr. Tom Capelo, who insists on bringing his two young daughters and their nanny. And the military insists on including Marbet Grant, a “sensitive,” who is so skilled at reading body language that her insights are often confused with telepathy. Capelo’s job will be to figure out how the device works. Grant’s job will be to interpret, in the event a Faller is captured alive for the first time.

Which, in fact, happens. While Kaufman’s team is in transit to World, another SADN ship captures a Faller, and it is transferred to the brig in Kaufman’s ship. There, Grant begins learning the Faller’s body language in unorthodox and controversial but effective ways.

While Grant is learning to communicate with the Faller, the ship arrives at World. Because of what happened during the humans’ first mission to the planet, the team is worried that the natives will view them as “unreal,” or not a part of the shared reality that all the natives feel, and thereby condemned to death. What they don’t realize is that because of the unintentionally self-sacrificing, life-saving actions of a deceased schizophrenic crew member from the last mission, the natives now think humans are “real,” and that they share reality. They are therefore surprised when they are welcomed and treated hospitably—and they are glad to be reunited with Enli, a native who they worked with on the original mission, and one who was unusually open to their ideas, even to her own acute distress.

Grüber, Capelo, and a small team spelunk through the caves under the Neury Mountains to examine the device in situ. Soon, the spelunking team runs into a problem: they learn that the buried artifact in the Neury Mountains (a) is probably a particle destabilizer; (b) could probably be made into a quantum weapon; and (c) is also probably responsible for the quantum changes in the Worlders’ brains that give them their shared reality, upon which their entire civilization is based. So they have to wonder: will happen to the Worlders when the Terran crew removes the device to make their weapon?

What happens, of course, is that the Terran military does remove it, and the Worlders experience an absence of shared reality. For most, it is terrifying; for some, it is liberating. And its removal is going to bring transformative change to Worlders’ society, whether for good or for ill, whether they want it or not.

In the end, Sikorski and Grüber decide to stay on the planet permanently—to be with each other, and to help guide the people of World through their societal transition. Capelo figures out how the artifact works, and the result brings terrible, potentially civilization-destroying capabilities to the humans. Practically everyone is thrown in the brig. And the reader is left with an extremely shaky detente between Earth, World, and the Fallers, setting us up for the final installment in the trilogy.

The implications of the ideas introduced in Probability Moon come to full fruition in Probability Sun. Sun allows Kress to explore the ways in which having an enforced shared reality enables a society to be cooperative, pleasant, and peaceful but, at the same time, limits and represses people who otherwise would be curious, creative, and different. The absence of shared reality means that violence, deceit, and crime are all possible. But it also means that for those who want to engage in it, so is independent thought. 

Enli is a case in point. In the absence of the device, and shared reality, Enli begins to realize that reality is subjective; that people can have different realities from each other, and that all of those realities may be true in their own way. But it is difficult for those Enli loves to cope with these new ideas, much less embrace them—or to embrace the new Enli. Shared reality has swaddled her in a blanket of comfort and protection. But as soon as she begins to question that shared reality, she suffers oppression and brutality. 

Enli’s struggles after the loss of shared reality, the implications of what the device on World can do, and, to a lesser extent, Grant’s attempts to communicate with the captured Faller are really where the action is in Probability Sun. These scenes have more dramatic tension in them than any of the actual action scenes in the book, like the space battles with the Fallers or the societal fallout after the removal of the device from World. In this, Kress’s writing reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s, in that the real focus of her books is not shootouts or chases or romance, but rather puzzles of logic and morality.

In Probability Moon, Enli has to go through a major, painful change in her perception of both herself and her people. She has to decide whether it is worth voluntarily accepting repression of thought in order to have peace; and if it is worth breaking away from those she loves, or possibly from the only planet she has ever known, in order to satisfy intellectual curiosity. And the Terran crew has to answer an array of similarly weighty questions, like: how can we communicate with a race wildly different from ourselves? How does the artifact work? What are our responsibilities towards others when we have the power to destroy them completely? Should we destroy their culture to save ours? The book’s drama is there, in the puzzle-solving, the logical dilemmas, the internal arguments.And, in general, because of this, Kress’s books are appealing in the same way that Asimov’s are. (Even if Probability Sun does suffer a bit with the absence of my favorite character, Dr. Ahmed Bazargan.)

Another aspect of Kress’s writing that is appealing—and also similar to Asimov’s—is that she is really good at looking through alien eyes. A sizeable chunk of the book, for example, is spent on Grant’s struggle to achieve some kind of connection with the incredibly peculiar Fallers. And Kress has a talent for explaining the things the Terrans do on World using concepts the Worlders understand. To the Worlders, the Terran spaceships are flying boats; elevators are carts with no one to pull them; almost any vehicle of any kind is a bicycle, and when a spaceship takes off, it makes a noise like “a hundred bicycle wheels grinding.” 

Kress is almost always sympathetic to the Fallers’ and Worlders’ feelings and reactions, even when they do terrible things out of ignorance or fear. She presents it all to us such that we are sympathetic to them, too. And maybe this is her central aim, in the end: to have us understand even those most alien to us.

Book Review: Probability Moon

Nancy Kress
2000
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This book did not win any of the major science fiction awards, but it is the first book in the trilogy that includes Probability Space, which won the Campbell. And it should have won an award, because it is way, way better than either Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which won the Hugo that year, and The Quantum Rose, which won the Nebula. With the minor exception of the ending, it is a well-paced, accessible, engaging, relatively original story; almost a cross between an Ursula Le Guin alien-planet story and a Jack McDevitt space adventure novel. And it is quite effective in making you want to read its sequel, Probability Sun.

In the near-future setting of Probability Moon, humans have expanded throughout the solar system with the help of a series of wormholes connecting various parts of our galaxy, which were put there by some vanished ancient alien race as yet unknown, and whose technology is still not really understood.

These wormholes have led human explorers to hundreds of habitable planets and several sentient alien species. Most of these species are humanoid and peaceful, and one, the Fallers, is definitely neither humanoid nor peaceful. The Fallers simply want to exterminate us, without negotiation or diplomacy. Humanity is now in a constant low-level war with the Fallers, with each side trying to upgrade their weapons technology as fast as possible and thereby gain military advantage over the other.

Probability Moon opens after an initial human (Terran) recon team has returned from their investigation of a new planet recently discovered via the ancient wormholes. The team reported that the inhabitants, which call their planet “World,” are peaceful and have organized their entire economy and social culture around the cultivation and worship of flowers. They also reported that of the planet’s seven moons, one is not actually a moon, and may be of intense interest to the military.

This intrigues the Terran government, which sends a larger exploratory crew to investigate World at greater length. Half of the crew—the purported reason for the mission—is a natural science team, including an anthropologist, a biologist, and a geologist. They are deployed to the surface of the planet to learn as much as they can about the native culture. The other half of the crew—the real reason for the mission—is a military astrophysics team sent to investigate the “moon” of interest.

The surface team quickly discovers that the planet’s natives have an unusual characteristic: they share a common reality. All of them understand a single, uniform truth in any situation. If someone questions that truth, it gives the natives severe head pain, sometimes to the point where they cannot function. And if someone reveals that they do not share the same common reality with the others, that person is declared “unreal.” The best that can happen to an unreal person is that they are shunned by society until they have served some sort of penance; the worst that can happen is that they are condemned to death.

The surface team ingratiates itself into the household of one of the wealthier inhabitants of World, and becomes particularly close to one of the servants, Enli, who has been declared unreal for having killed her brother, and who is serving her penance by spying on the Terrans. This outreach goes relatively well at first for the team, but gradually their position becomes more and more dangerous, since it’s obvious they do not share the same reality with each other, much less the natives, and are increasingly at risk of being designated as unreal and being condemned to death.

Eventually they do have to flee to the comparative safety of a highly radioactive mountain range where they hope to be rescued by the spacebound half of their crew—and where they discover what just might be the source of the natives’ shared reality.

The problem is that while the ground team was involved with the natives on the surface, the spacebound team was getting itself in even deeper hot water in orbit. First, they discovered that the planet’s seventh moon is not, in fact, a moon at all, but a piece of technology left there by the original wormhole builders. Then, their testing revealed that it is a weapon: a powerful one that could potentially serve to turn the tide of the war with the Fallers. And then, of course, the Fallers show up, and there is a terribly tense game of cat-and-mouse as the humans and the Fallers both try to gain control of the moon-sized weapon.

Probability Moon is somewhat unsatisfyingly unresolved at the very end. And the characters aren’t terrifically charismatic; none of the aliens really caught my interest, even Enli, and neither did most of the humans. My favorites were Bazargan, the leader of the on-planet surface team, and Gruber, the surface geologist, who were the most individual and appealing; the others were either undistinctive or creepy.

But, in general, this book is fun. It has a plausible galactic political and military structure, a well-developed alien planet ecosystem, and a non-human sentient species with a unique social structure. The Faller threat adds dramatic tension. And although the surface plot gets much more narrative time than the space plot, both are well-paced and build up nice lines of parallel suspense and then intertwining action.

And it could be that the ending is ambiguous because Kress is setting us up for the sequel, Probability Sun—so I won’t judge too harshly until I have read that one.

Book Review: Earthquake Weather

Tim Powers
1996
Awards: Locus (Fantasy) 
Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

Earthquake Weather is the third novel in Tim Powers’ somewhat roughly connected Fault Lines trilogy. It is not really a sequel, but it continues some of the story lines from both of the previous two novels, Last Call and Expiration Date. And it pulls in several of the same characters, although the main characters in this one are new.  

It also takes place in the same world of magic as the other two books. Which is most definitely not the light, floaty, Disney variety; the magic of Powers’ trilogy is a hard-boiled, real-world, practical magic conducted using everyday objects. It is an impressive amalgamation of ancient gods, ghosts, spirits, religions, superstitions, rituals, faiths, totems, and traditions—old and new and east and west.

And it, too, is set against a backdrop of the grittiest parts of America: diners, bars, mental institutions, curanderías, big city streets. The cars are always big, old, beaten-up American models. The characters are people from the edges of society—the poor, insane, criminal, fugitive, orphaned, lost. They tend to drink a lot—mostly Coors, vodka, and cheap red wine. (It can tend to get a little gross.)

At the beginning of Earthquake Weather, Janis Plumtree, a woman with multiple personality disorder, has killed Scott Crane (the man who was crowned as the Fisher King in Last Call). She killed him on a lonely road near Los Angeles by jamming a trident into his throat.

A faction of Crane’s supporters and believers—the Fisher King’s army, if you will—found his body before the police did and are hauling it around with them, trident included, preparing for the day when they can perform the necessary rituals to resurrect him. They are also protecting a pre-teen boy, Koot Hoomie "Kootie" Parganas, who appears to have been spiritually designated as Crane’s successor to the Fisher King’s throne in the event of Crane’s permanent death, as evidenced by the constantly bleeding wound in Kootie’s side, and the fact that he needs to tie his belt in a Mobius strip and drink lots of alcohol to keep himself from being found and possessed by ghosts. 

Into this picture comes Sid Cochran, a man who checked himself into a mental institution because he keeps seeing random people turning into bull-headed gods, and hearing people speak in the voice of his dead wife. Except that he’s not insane; those things actually are happening to him, because he’s been chosen to be one of the vessels of the god Dionysus, after an accident he once had in a vineyard where he almost got his hand cut off trying to protect an old vine stump from being cut down. In the institution Cochran meets Plumtree, who was put there by the police when she came to them claiming to have killed Scott Crane (whose body they can’t find). 

Cochran and Plumtree strike up a friendship (she with him and him with most of her personalities), and eventually they break out of the institution, narrowly escaping the clutches of the evil chief psychiatrist Dr. Armentrout, who “cures” his patients by eating the parts of their souls that are misbehaving. Eating soul parts gives Dr. Armentrout lots of spiritual power, and the fact that it sometimes kills his patients doesn’t really bother him at all. 

Plumtree’s good personalities want to atone for the bad one that killed the Fisher King, so she drags Cochran with her to track down the band of people preparing for the Crane’s resurrection. It isn’t hard, given all the portents pointing to their house in Long Beach, and the people drumming and dancing in front of it twenty-four hours a day. 

Kootie and his adopted parents-cum-spiritual shields, Angelica and Pete Sullivan, and Crane’s old friend Arky Mavranos, take in Cochran and Plumtree as wary allies. They then go on a chaotic journey up to San Francisco filled with pretty random-seeming diversions and plot twists, to perform the king-restoring ritual. 

The whole time they are pursued by Armentrout, who has hooked up with some anti-Fisher-King zealot thugs. Armentrout’s aim is to capture Crane’s body and to keep it alive but in a perpetual coma, so he can feed eternally on the spirit of the Fisher King, making him super powerful in the magical world. He doesn’t mind the idea of kidnaping Kootie as well, holding him coma-hostage in the event Crane dies for good. And if Cochran and Plumtree die along the way as well, so much the better for him. 

The Cochran/Plumtree/Kootie allies race around San Francisco gathering the necessary materials to prepare for the awakening ritual. All kinds of things go wrong to cause them setbacks, not least of which is the fact that one of Plumtree’s personalities is the not-quite-dead ghost of her evil father--the personality that killed Scott Crane--who keeps telling Armentrout where they are. There is also a genuinely exciting car chase scene when a ghost steals the car that has Crane’s body in it, and Angelica and Pete and Arky have to race it down and leap on to it while hurtling down the highway to regain control (over the car and the body). 

It all eventually comes to a climax in a giant turbulent scene at the Sutro Baths, where the final battle for Crane’s life (or death) is fought out with both temporal and fearsomely magical weapons. 

One of the best things about this book is that Powers has a stupefying amount of knowledge of a hugely broad range of spirit world arcana. He brings in ghosts, spells, portents, charms, remedies, and rites from a wide variety of traditions from around the world. This is no American Gods lightweight gimmicky hack job. 

And the magic is cleverly done using practical, real-world objects; for a knowledgeable person in the world of Powers’ books, almost anything can have a magical use. His characters use wind chimes made of chicken bones and radio parts as alarms to warn of incoming malevolent entities. They hook up old television sets and record players to talk to spirits. They use ashtrays as substitutes for fireplaces to send ghosts, literally, up in smoke. They use clove and regular tobacco cigarettes as masking tools, but actual rubber masks (of clowns, in this case) can serve the same purpose, in a pinch. Wine is used for all kinds of purification, masking, and sacramental purposes—although Coors can work, too, sometimes. 

The main problems with this book (which was also true of Last Call) are that it is dense, complex, and seemingly, for the most part, unplanned. Although there was generally an anticipatory build-up, a climactic confrontation, and a resolution (of a sort), the plot trucks along largely haphazardly towards those ends. 

I rarely understood why any of the specific incidents over the course of the book happened; most of them seemed to come out of left field. It felt like the characters were dropped into situation after situation with little or no lead-up or connection to the next. They went from Chinatown to a maze-house to a car chase to a hotel with no apparent logic. 

I also didn’t understand why voices spoke to Cochran when they did, or why he saw the signs he did, or what the bull-headed god meant in any particular situation; it seemed like the god was just saying, “hi, I’m here, be afraid.” I didn’t understand why Plumtree changed personalities when she did, or how they knew to use this or that piece of equipment. 

I tried to go with the flow and let it all just soak into my head naturally. And that worked to some extent, but generally it was so hard to make connections and follow the characters’ non-logic—especially when so much of it was somewhat repellently fueled by Coors and vodka—that I ended up skipping a lot of text. 

And, at the end, it didn’t feel like everything finally connected together and made sense; it felt like it all fell together by accident, in spite of itself, and in spite of the chaotic actions of the characters. All in all, it was just too much reading whiplash.