Book Review: Project Pope

Clifford D. Simak
1981
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I like Clifford Simak’s novels a lot, and I think part of the reason might be because he started out as a journalist. His writing is clear and accessible without being simplistic. His main characters tend to be thoughtful loners who still care about other people. And he is able to use his kind, thoughtful little stories to raise big questions about big topics, without being didactic about it.

Project Pope’s big questions all revolve around the reconciliation of faith with science in the search for truth. And as a framework for these questions, Simak invents a paradoxical thing: a society of robots trying to build a religion.

The actual plot is a little peculiar. There are certainly moments of violence, danger, and even at least one murder. But his main characters are generally trying to do the right things even if they mess up sometimes. And even though they face threat, they face it with kindness and an earnest interest in puzzling out the solution.

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The book starts with a pretty darned exciting scene. On the remote planet of Gutshot, doctor Jason Tennyson has just run afoul of the law for the crime of having his boss, a city bigwig, happen to die on his watch. In a daring escape, he stows away on the next vessel leaving Gutshot’s spaceport, which turns out to be headed to the planet End of Nothing.

As the name would suggest, End of Nothing is the most remote planet in the known galaxy. And, for that reason, it was chosen by a group of cast-off robots from Earth to be the site of their project to create a new robot Vatican, complete with a robot Pope.

On Earth, robots were forbidden from developing their own religion So the ones who founded End of Nothing are extremely skittish about visitors and publicity, and this has piqued the interest of the only other human passenger on Tennyson’s ship, reporter Jill Roberts. Having received no response to her many written requests for information from the new Vatican, she is headed there in person to get some answers.

When they arrive at the End of Nothing, one of the human residents has had a severe accident, and the only human doctor there has recently died. So the robots, who don’t ask too many questions about legality anyway, ask Tennyson to stay and be their new doctor. He assents, not having too many other options. And, in an attempt to make things more palatable for Tennyson and to co-opt Roberts, they offer her a position as Vatican historian.

Roberts and Tennyson learn that the new Vatican employs a select group of semi-telepathic humans as sort of cosmic scouts; these people are able to travel in their minds to other worlds, and they do so, searching one world after another for Heaven.

They do this in service of the new Pope, who is convinced that religion can be derived from science. He believes that if he is able to search wide enough and far enough, he will discover the physical location of Heaven, and then he will be able to have a scientific basis for his faith.

But there is an underground faction of robots that believe that this is the wrong way to approach it; that faith must come first, and science must come after. This is the fundamental tension of Project Pope: the conflict between robots who believe faith must be derived from science, and those who believe science must be derived from faith. And, unbeknownst to our main characters or the Pope, both sides have adherents that are willing to make deadly cases for their beliefs.

While this dispute is simmering, Tennyson strikes up a friendship with Decker, a cabin-dwelling loner who has been on End of Nothing for most of his life, and Decker’s close companion, a sparkly trans-dimensional being named Whisperer that can also itself travel telepathically to other worlds. Whisperer takes Tennyson and Roberts on several journeys to meet the various wacky inhabitants of different worlds, and there they make the acquaintance of a group of aliens that look like giant dice that can print mathematical equations on their surfaces.

Eventually, one of the Vatican’s scouts finds Heaven--or is at least convinced that she has. She suffers a nervous breakdown as a result, but Whisperer is able to read enough of her mind to trace the scout’s journey back to the world she thought was Heaven, and to bring Tennyson and Roberts there.

What they discover there is not actually Heaven but instead a strange city world peopled by a motley group of aliens--including a duplicate of Decker, a furry alien shaped like a haystack, and an octopus-being that constantly plops up and down making a sound like liver being slapped on a countertop. One of these creatures turns out to be one of the faith-firsters, and it is determined to destroy Heaven, and possibly the rest of the universe along with it, by blowing itself up. There is a simultaneously tense and funny climactic scene in which Whisperer, Tennyson, and Roberts are able to avert catastrophe by bringing in their equation-surface-dice friends, and everybody lives, if not happily ever after, at least to see another day, albeit with lingering questions about God, the Devil, Heaven, and the nature of the universe.

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In the introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin explained that the great thing about descriptive science fiction is that each piece is a “thought-experiment.” She said:

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed. 

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

To some extent, Simak does this with Project Pope. It is not the world’s greatest piece of science fiction. But, at the end, if he has done his job for you, you wind up having enjoyed a somewhat quirky story about robots and aliens, while also simultaneously engaging your mind on questions that might not otherwise be easy to conceptualize. Is it better, he asks, to search for universal scientific truths, and to allow religious belief to develop from that? Or to grab hold of a religion--to search for Heaven--first, and then to use that idea of truth to frame your search for scientific knowledge?

Each reader is going to have to answer that question for themselves, of course. Simak provides the framework that enables you to think about it, but does not (and cannot) provide an answer. As Tennyson tells the robot Pope: if you asked a hundred humans whether faith should come out of knowledge or knowledge out of faith, you’d get all sorts of different answers, and any of them may be right.

But, being humans, we still want to ask the question. “We grasp for knowledge;” says Simak, through the thoughts of his main character. “Panting, we cling desperately to what we snare. We work endlessly to arrive at that final answer, or perhaps many final answers which turn out not to be final answers but lead on to some other fact or factor that may not be final, either. And yet we try, we cannot give up trying, for as an intelligence we are committed to the quest.”

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: 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: 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: Ancient Shores

Jack McDevitt
1996
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I picked McDevitt’s Ancient Shores to read on a long flight because I loved his Alex Benedict novels Polaris and Seeker, and I thought any book by him had a good chance of being another fun page-turner.

The idea behind Ancient Shores was great. But its execution wasn’t nearly of the caliber of the other two books. This is one of McDevitt’s earliest full-length novels, and it seems that at the time he wrote it he hadn’t yet fully developed his nice snappy style or learned how to create solid, charismatic characters. It’s a bit sad, because with such a great premise, there’s so much he could have done with it.

The first half of the novel is the better half by far. Suspense and anticipation build naturally and effectively, with a good deal of humor, and it is mostly free from the lack of authenticity, slow plotting, and character stiffness that beset the second half.

The story starts in remote northeastern North Dakota, on a farm right on the Canadian border. Farmer (and amateur pilot) Tom Lasker is working his wheat field and discovers a complete sailboat—a ketch—buried in the ground. With help from neighbors, he digs the whole thing up and puts it in his front yard.

The fact that a fairly large boat was entirely buried in his wheat field is odd enough, in and of itself. Tom and Ginny Lasker have been farming this particular land for decades, neither of them buried it, and neither of them have any idea how anyone else could have done it without either of them noticing. 

What is odder is that the boat looks entirely new. Nothing seems to stick to the sails, or the boat itself. Nothing can damage it. Even sitting out in the weather, it doesn’t get wet or dirty. And there is writing on it where instructions and labels should be, but the writing is in incomprehensible symbols that none of the linguists at any of the nearby universities can identify. And then, one night while Tom is out of town, Ginny notices that the boat has running lights: eerie green glowy lights that go on when it gets dark.

Ginny calls their friend Max (also a pilot) to take a look, because she’s spooked out by the boat lights. Max, in turn, is spooked out by the whole boat. He sends a sample of the sail fabric to be tested at Moorhead State. April Cannon, the chemist who tests it, says that the sail material is nothing she’s ever seen before: an indestructible substance with an atomic number so high it shouldn’t exist—or at least should be highly radioactive (which it is not). 

April is the first person to suspect where the boat is really from. Her hypothesis—as crazy as it sounds—is that the boat isn’t new, but is rather thousands of years old, and that it was buried in the Laskers’ wheat field because it was abandoned there by its previous owners during the last ice age, at a time when North Dakota was at the bottom of a giant prehistoric inland sea called Lake Agassiz.

Max believes her. The two of them hire a ground-radar team to search the surrounding area for other artifacts. And they find a whole building, buried on Sioux reservation land, on what would have been the shore of a deep-water harbor on the eastern shore of Lake Agassiz. The building appears to be a port, and is made out of the same indestructible material as the boat. 

Up to this point, about halfway into the book, the story is relatively fun. The plot unfolds in a slow, steady, and pleasingly homespun way. Pages turn with somewhat gliding speed. But after the discovery of the prehistoric port, the narrative starts to get increasingly scattered and clunky. 

Max and April strike a deal with the Sioux who own the land where the port is. The Sioux let them bring in a troupe of student volunteers to dig it up, and provide a security force to protect it from the various nuts and UFO fans and generally curious people who have started to show up to see it.

Eventually, Max and April’s team finds a way inside the building. There they discover a set of controls that can transport them to a variety of beautiful, spectacular, and occasionally lethal locations around the galaxy. 

Meanwhile, everyone in the wider U.S. population starts to freak out. Scientists and artists and explorers come in droves begging to go through the portal. Deranged people try to destroy it. Local businessmen want to use it to their own financial advantage—as do the local tax collectors.

A large number of individual freak outs are described in inserts and side narratives that are disjointed, disruptive to the main plot line, and not very interesting. The press releases, FBI memos, on-screen field reporters, and official broadcast announcements all sound too conversational and informal, and, to be honest, a little dorky. 

But by far the part of the novel that rings the most hollow is what happens to world economics as a result of the discovery of the boat and port. McDevitt’s take is that when all businesses—from local retailers to global corporations—get wind first of the sail fabric of Tom Lasker’s buried boat, and then the portal to other planets, their reaction is complete and total panic. They are all convinced that they will go out of business when the technologies behind the sail fabric and the transport controls become generally available. 

Markets tank. CEOs lobby politicians aggressively to the point where the otherwise calm, pragmatic, Trumanesque U.S. president becomes convinced that the port must be blown to smithereens. And even the United Nations eventually comes calling, telling the Sioux they have no choice but to give up control of their land to the international body to preserve the economic stability of the entire world. 

Which is all a bit ridiculous. First of all, the president—at least not the theoretically pragmatic one in this book—wouldn’t bomb an Indian reservation, including killing potentially hundreds of innocent U.S. civilians, just because a few textile and transportation companies are worried they’ll go out of business. 

And, more importantly, for every corporation that sees doom and gloom in the event of a major technological breakthrough, I guarantee you there will be twice as many entrepreneurs who see potential for huge profit in it. Yes, major technological advancements have the potential to make some businesses go out of business. But others can prosper immensely. I doubt any sane national leader would  have actively tried to prevent the development of the internal combustion engine, no matter how powerful the horse-and-buggy lobby. 

Anyway, it all culminates in a heroic Standing-Rock-type stand-off at the port site between the Indians and the U.S. Marshalls. McDevitt does inject a little excitement, and almost rescues the ending, by having Max fly Tom Lasker’s antique World-War-II-era fighter plane into the fray. But he ruins the finale with a silly, fawning, deus ex machina stunt in which a small group of eminent real-life astronauts, authors, and scientists come in at the last minute to risk their lives to save the portal.

Book Review: Trumps of Doom

Roger Zelazny
1985
Awards: Locus (Fantasy)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Trumps of Doom is the sixth novel in Zelazny’s ten-novel Chronicles of Amber series, and it is the first novel in the second five-novel sub-saga of that series. So it’s really not a stand-alone book; you have to have read the first five novels to make heads or tails of it, and you have to read this one before being able to make heads or tails of any of the subsequent books. Zelazny is no fly-by-night author.

In spite of the fact that it comes smack in the middle of the Chronicles, Trumps starts out as if it is a whole separate story, unrelated to anything Amberific. The main character is different; it has a different tone, almost like a murder mystery; and—at least at first—there are no trumps, no mythic creatures, and no psychedelic hellrides.

The main character of Trumps of Doom is “Merle Corey.” To all appearances, “Merle” is just an everyday guy on contemporary Earth. When the book opens, it is the day he has quit his job of eight years to do some “wandering.”

It is also a day when he also feels certain that someone will try to kill him. Because it is April 30, and someone has tried to kill him (unsuccessfully, of course) on April 30 for each of the past seven years.

Before he heads out of town, he has drinks with Luke, one of his former coworkers, who is convinced that Merle has been working on a special secret new product idea outside of work, and he wants in on it. In spite of all Luke’s pumping, Merle denies any knowledge of such a thing. Luke then suggests to Merle that he might want to say goodbye to his old girlfriend, Julia, too—and then slips in, oddly, that Julia has become involved with some weird people and may be “in trouble.”

Merle goes to Julia’s building and finds her dead on the floor of her apartment. And then Merle is attacked by the beast that killed her: an outsize, three-toed, wolf-dog monster. This is the first clue we have that we’re not really dealing with an everyday Earth murder mystery.

Merle kills the wolf-dog and then searches Julia’s apartment for clues, only to find a pack of trumps. He pockets the pack and goes to see her current boyfriend, who tells Merle that Julia had recently joined a sort of cult. This cult is apparently into dark magic and is led by a guru of sorts, a painter named Melman, who starts to sound suspiciously like another magic painter we know.

At this point, Merle realizes he probably has started this whole thing, and flashes back to a time when he showed Julie around Amber. For Merle is, of course, not an ordinary human, but is actually Merlin, the son of Corwin of Amber and Dara of Chaos. He took Julia on a trippy trip around Amber in a fit of romance, and, after that, she was perfectly aware that magic was real, and went in search of somebody who could put her in touch with it again.

Merlin goes to see Melman to find out who killed Julia (and who likely wants him dead as well). And, of course, Melman tries to kill Merlin by pulling him into swirling Chaos, and Merlin has to kill Melman in self-defense before he can find anything out. At this point we go into full-blown Zelazny mode, with a scorpion woman coming in from Chaos to try to disable Merlin with a paralyzing sting; she almost succeeds, but he escapes through a trump of a Shadowland sphinx. After beating the sphinx at its riddle game, he runs through a dreamscape of trees, flowers, and streams back to Earth.

Troubled and annoyed, he tracks down Luke again. They dance around for a while, pretending they’re talking about normal non-magical Earth stuff, but finally they drop the pretense and Luke describes a crazy evening with Julia and Melman, in which Melman conjured monsters out of nothing. They are then shot at by somebody; Luke kills the shooter, but is then possessed by something and tries to kill Merlin himself, and Merlin has to escape again.

Merlin really would like to consult with his father, but Corwin went missing after the great “Patternfall Battle” at the end of the previous book, and nobody knows where he is.

So, to get his head on straight, Merlin goes to see someone he trusts—Corwin’s old friend and neighbor in upstate New York, Bill Roth. (At this point, because of his connections, Bill is now not only a country lawyer on Earth, but also the Counsel to the Courts of Amber.) They have a good time; Merlin amuses Bill (and us) by pulling cigars and cold beers out of Shadow for both of them, and Bill tells him everything he knows about Corwin, including some funny reminiscences about digging through his old compost pile with a fine tooth comb for some fancy jewel.

Merlin reveals to Bill that, as a child of royalty of both Amber and the Courts of Chaos, he has some advantages that the regular Princes and Princesses of Amber may not have. First, he has sets of trumps from both kingdoms. And he has also walked both the Pattern and the Logrus, the Pattern’s equivalent in Chaos. Theoretically you can’t keep both patterns in your head at the same time without going crazy, but apparently that doesn’t apply to Merlin.

At this point, they answer an emergency trump call from King Random of Amber. Someone has been taking pot-shots at princes and has killed Merlin’s uncle Caine. Everyone is wondering if it is yet another internal family vendetta—after we thought that had all been resolved!

Thinking it may help the king, Merlin shows him the special secret project he actually has been working on outside of work. He calls it a “Ghostwheel,” and it is a sort of computer that monitors all activity in the Shadowlands. It can be accessed by remote terminals, and can be used to observe or to conjure up storms and other forms of energy from anywhere, to anywhere in Shadow.

Random is appalled and tells Merlin to shut it off. But when Merlin then tries to approach his Ghostwheel, which has been running for months on its own, he is attacked by a crazy assortment of phenomena: nasty purple and red beasts, a living prison made out of giant coral-like crystals, an earth-shattering earthquake. The whole time, he hears voices warning him to go back. What has happened is that the Ghostwheel has become sentient; it doesn’t want to kill its creator, but it doesn’t want to be shut down, either.

Just as Merlin is just about to reach the Ghostwheel, who should appear again but… his old coworker Luke. For Luke is actually his cousin Rinaldo, and he’s the one with a vendetta against the royal family of Amber, because Caine killed Rinaldo’s father. Luke is hoping the Ghostwheel will be the weapon he needs to destroy all of them. He is unable to get the Ghostwheel himself, fortunately, but he imprisons Merlin in a cave nearby, and Trumps of Doom ends somewhat anticlimactically with Merlin pacing and pacing around in his cell.

It’s no wonder Trumps of Doom is the one in this series that won the Locus award. It is a more solid and consistent story, with a tightly crafted plot, and better pacing and characters and action than the other five so far.

And, for all that, it is just as beautiful and imaginative and totally out of left field as any of Zelazny’s other work, and contains plenty of the trademark synesthetic imagery that makes Zelazny’s work into art. Here is just one small portion of Merlin’s journey to the heart of the Ghostwheel:

    Three days in as many heartbeats…I breathe the air spicy…Swirl the fires, descend to purple earth…Prism in the sky…I race the course of a glowing river across a field of fungus the color of blood, spongy…Spores that turn to jewels, fall like bullets…
    Night on a plain of brass, footfalls echoing to eternity…Knobbed machinelike plants clanking, metal flowers retracting back to metal stalks, stalks to consoles…Clank, clank, sigh…Echoes only, at my back?
    I spin once.
    Was that a dark figure ducking behind a windmill tree? Or only the dance of shadows in my shadow-shifting eyes?
    Forward. Through glass and sandpaper, orange ice, landscape of pale flesh…
(p. 683)

In spite of the fact that the major battle for the survival of Amber happened in the last book, The Courts of Chaos, to me it also feels like this one is the novel where every major piece of the previous five actually comes to fruition. It is the culmination of everything we have learned about so far: Amber and Chaos, the royal families of both, the Shadowlands, the trumps. I might even venture to guess that this is the one Zelazny may have thought of writing first, and then wrote the others to set this one up.

Book Review: Beyond Apollo

Barry N. Malzberg
1972
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Do not expect a tidy, traditional science fiction novel when reading Beyond Apollo.

For one thing, it is a metafiction. Which is, as the study questions explain at the end of the 2015 paperback edition, “a narrative about narratives that is conscious of itself as a narrative.” It is a novel about a man—our main character—who is writing notes in preparation for writing a novel about a traumatic event that happened to him. And, since our main character is insane (at least at the time he is writing about writing his novel), this leads to quite a bit of surreal twisting of points of reference.

Beyond Apollo is also a story of mental exploration, rather than a story about concrete events. It is ostensibly about the death of another man, but the circumstances surrounding the other man’s death are only described after the fact by our main character, who is either this other man’s murderer or the only witness to his suicide. And our main character’s descriptions are so schizophrenic it makes you question which parts of his story are real—or if any of it is.

Our main character is Harry M. Evans, an astronaut in the early 21st century, who is the co-pilot on the first manned mission to Venus. At some point during the voyage, Harry and the Captain appear to have both gone insane. The Captain eventually ended up somehow getting into the toilet disposal module and then being ejected into space with the refuse, headed straight for the sun. It is unclear if the Captain ejected himself or if Harry did it, and, if the latter, whether Harry did it in a murderous state himself, or in self-defense against a murderous Captain.

After the Captain was ejected (or ejected himself), Harry was able to pilot the capsule back to Earth by himself, alone, and is now being held in a mental institution while the therapists try to get him to tell them what happened. They are growing increasingly frustrated because Harry tells them a wildly different version of events each time.

During his stay in the institution, Harry is taking notes and planning to write a novel about his voyage to Venus. He keeps saying in his notes—which make up many of the chapters—that once his novel is complete, it will set the record completely straight. But after so many tales, you don’t really believe it.

Some of the chapters are written in the first person, as if Harry is telling us his memories from the capsule. Some are written in the third person, as if he is telling a fiction story about some other astronaut. Some chapters are about the asylum and the experiences he is having there; some are about the voyage; and some are flashbacks to the weeks just before the voyage, when he and the Captain were going through training and still (relatively) sane (although it becomes clear that the seeds for insanity were clearly planted in both of them before they even stepped into their ship). It all gives the novel a jumbled, disjointed feeling, paralleling what is going on in Harry’s brain.

There are definitely parts of the novel that are enjoyable. The alternate versions of the Captain’s death, as told by Harry to his therapist, are usually the best parts. Malzberg also write some funny “histories” of the solar system (which usually present the solar system as coming into being at some point in the 20th century) sprinkled throughout the book. And when he is at his best, Malzberg has a cynical, absurdist sense of humor along the lines of his chronological compatriots Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. For example, at one point during their mission training, the Captain tells Harry that he has discovered that their charted course will cause the ship to miss the orbit of Venus and head directly into the sun. But he is not going to tell the technicians, because “there’s no point in making complications for them.”

For the most part, however, the book feels like frustratingly pointless, overly clever free association at the expense of the reader’s mental energy. The book sets out tantalizing mysteries—both the Captain’s murder and allusions to a similar Mars mission disaster—but never really tells us what happened in either one. Nothing ever really changes or resolves throughout the storyline; we are told one kooky version of the Captain’s death after another, and we live through flashbacks in Harry’s life that do provide us with clues as to why he might have gone mad in such a crazy-making environment, but neither he nor the plot ever really change or develop from beginning to end.

All of this would be perfectly okay if the writing was rivetingly descriptive, or funny, or artful… or if the characters were likeable, or clever, or in the least bit appealing. But unfortunately it is not, and they are not. It’s all about what is going on in Harry’s mind, and we find that it’s draining to be hitched to the mind of a psychotic.

I also found it a bit grade-schoolish that Harry (or perhaps Malzberg) seemed obsessed with the effects of various stimuli on his genitalia. We constantly had to hear how heat, cold, G-forces, fear, anger, or desire were affecting Harry’s private parts. And, in a similar vein, there are what seemed like dozens of flashback scenes of depressing, unromantic, unsexy sex between Harry and his wife, which his wife has absolutely no interest in or response to. Each incident is completely non-sensual and impersonal, with her just waiting him out. She often keeps up a running commentary the whole time about how he needs to quit the space program, and he tries to ignore her. It’s pretty repellent.

Harry obsesses about games and puzzles—crosswords, cryptograms, chess problems, anagrams, bridge hands—in an effort to find the code, the clue, the combination of logic that will help him regain his sanity. None of them work, of course, and Malzberg has Harry jump from one to another type of puzzle haphazardly, so they end up seeming just like fun games that the writer wanted to play with for a time, rather than anything meaningful to the story line.

The whole book, in fact, feels very much like a mental exercise for the benefit of the writer. And it is perhaps an exercise that is most enjoyed by other writers, who understand and appreciate the games Malzberg is playing, rather than the science fiction reader who is probably just in it for a fun story.

Beyond Apollo was written in the early 1970s, at a time when dramatic scientific discoveries were being made in outer space in real life. According to author James Reich, who wrote the introduction to the 2015 paperback edition, many writers of the time felt that real scientific discovery was killing traditional science fiction. Once we found out that Venus was utterly uninhabitable, for example, it made it impossible and pointless to write an exciting novel about discovering life on Venus. The only solution, Malzberg and other like-minded authors felt, was to turn inwards, and to write stories about adventures of the mind, rather than the physical world.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this theory is a complete cop-out. There definitely are good novels from this era that are largely journeys of the mind (like much of Roger Zelazny’s work, or Frederick Pohl’s Man Plus). Some of these good novels are even about a similar sort of post-traumatic-space-journey therapeutic recovery, like Pohl’s Gateway.

But I beg to differ with the conclusion that this kind of inner-mind focus is the only way to write science fiction in an age of scientific discovery. Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke are just two stellar examples of how increased scientific knowledge actually can provide even more fodder for beauty and inspiration in science fiction.

And, at its worst, Malzberg’s variety of inner-directed storytelling can all too often descend into self-indulgent noodling. Which is what most of Beyond Apollo felt like to me.

Book Review: The Courts of Chaos

Roger Zelazny
1978
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT (for the four earlier installments of the Chronicles of Amber)

It’s time once again for another Cliff’s Notes version of the latest adventures of Corwin, Prince of Amber, his hero’s quest to save his homeland and his family, and his own personal quest to find satisfaction within his unsettled heart.

The Courts of Chaos is the fifth book in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series. It is an important installment because it is the final episode of the first half of the Amber saga; it is the resolution of much of what the first four novels had been leading up to. 

Most of the book is taken up by the war between Amber and the Courts of Chaos—the final, open phase of a heated, bloody, intense, magic-strewn conflict that has been building for a long time. But the book also at last resolves the question of Amber’s royal line of succession, and allows Corwin to reconcile with his estranged family.

It also lays the groundwork for the next installment in the series, The Trumps of Doom, which nicely reboots the Amber franchise and starts it off again in a fresh new direction.

It’s also the only book for which I’ve ever seen this preface in the Wikipedia entry:

This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. 

Which makes me realize I’ve got to abbreviate if I don’t want to be too long and excessively detailed. Something that is all too possible to do with Zelazny. So, with no further ado…

The Courts of Chaos begins with the bombshell that ended the previous book: the revelation that Corwin’s ally and friend Ganelon was his father, Oberon, the king of Amber, all along. As Corwin and the rest of his siblings adjust to this information, Oberon offers Corwin the kingship as his chosen successor, but Corwin—surprising himself as well as us—realizes that, after everything he’s done to get the throne, he doesn’t want it.

And, in another surprise announcement, Dara reveals that she has a son by Corwin—Merlin—who therefore has royal relations in both Amber and the Courts of Chaos. This puts Merlin in a key strategic position (and will prove to be important in the next installment of the Chronicles, The Trumps of Doom).

Meanwhile, the war between Amber and the Courts rages intensely. It continues to do so for most of the rest of this book, even as Corwin dips in and out of the fray.

Complicating the war is the fact that Oberon and Dworkin, Oberon’s father, have both gone a little bit nutty and are trying to destroy the Pattern, which would thereby destroy both Amber and the Courts of Chaos. This puts some of the forces of the Courts (e.g. Dara) into an odd and edgy alliance with the forces of Amber (e.g. Corwin).

Fiona admits that she had previously been allied with Oberon and Dworkin, but isn’t any longer because she realizes they are crazy. Corwin steals the Jewel of Judgement from them and tries to walk the Pattern, with the goal of defeating them by repairing it. But Oberon thwarts him, and commands him to go to the heart of the Courts of Chaos instead, which he does, for some reason—via one of Zelazny’s trademark trippy hellrides. Along the way, Brand tries to kill him, twice, and so does an army of hostile dwarf men, and he is also temporarily blocked by a violent supernatural storm.

Corwin also has a few pretty funny encounters with surreal—or perhaps, rather, absurdist—creatures in the shadowlands, including a sentient tree, a giant sunk up to his neck in a mire who is totally depressed and just wants the world to end, and an evil crow-type bird who engages Corwin in a twisted conversation about the futility of striving and the pointlessness of the human ego.

Corwin, who is anything but existentialist, eventually hauls himself out of these conversations, eats the evil crow-bird, and finally uses the Jewel of Judgement to draw a brand-new Pattern. He is buffeted intensely all the while on all sides, psychologically and physically, but does complete it—thus putting a near-fatal kink into Oberon, Dworkin, and Brand’s plans to destroy everything.

This would be a tremendous victory except that, of course, just as Corwin finishes the Pattern, Brand appears in the middle of it, steals the Jewel, vows to destroy both Patterns, and vanishes into the ether.

At this point, Corwin uses his new Pattern to teleport himself back into the war at the Courts of Chaos. He sees most of his Amber siblings fighting the good fight against the forces of the Courts, and Brand at the center of it all, fighting everyone. Eventually, Random, Bleys, and Fiona corner Brand on a ledge, as Brand holds Dierdre hostage. Corwin uses his attunement to make the Jewel of Judgement super hot so that it burns Brand, who is wearing it, and he and Dierdre both topple over the ledge, falling (theoretically) to their deaths.

And, with this, and the creation of the new Pattern, Corwin has essentially defeated all the forces that want to destroy Amber. But he has killed Dierdre in the process, which totally bums him out. His family gathers to comfort him, and then the unicorn arrives from the battlefield to present the Jewel of Judgement to Oberon’s second choice of successor: Corwin’s brother Random. 

So, in a way, all is happy and resolved. At least for now. Corwin is reconciled with his remaining family, and everyone agrees that Random is a great choice for king. But Corwin is exhausted, disillusioned, and needs a retreat. We get the feeling it may be a while before he is ready to be his old sarcastic, resilient, lusty self again. 

Luckily for him, Zelazny gives him a break in the next part of the Amber series, letting someone else—a very able someone else—shoulder the burden of the plot and all of the assassination attempts for a while.

Book Review: The Hand of Oberon

Roger Zelazny
1976
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT (for this and the three earlier installments of The Chronicles of Amber) 

A lot more happens in this fourth episode of The Chronicles of Amber than happened in the previous three. 

Zelazny filled the third episode, The Sign of the Unicorn, with a lot of unspoken flashbacks and character-to-character retellings of what had gone on so far. In The Hand of Oberon, the plot suddenly surges ahead, story lines advance quickly, and several mysteries are unmystified.

At the end of The Sign of the Unicorn, Benedict, Corwin, and Corwin’s trusted aide Ganelon are led by a unicorn to another version of the Pattern. Ganelon, somewhat unusually (and, I may say, suspiciously) perceptively, suggests that this Pattern may actually be the real Pattern, and that the Pattern they know is just a copy.

This version of the Pattern, however, is damaged. Someone has stuck a dagger into the pattern, destroying it where the dagger struck. Impaled on the dagger is a Trump card of a guy who looks a lot like Random, but who none of them have ever seen before. Eventually they figure out that the mystery Trump card is that of Martin, Random’s son, whom he didn’t know existed.

At this point, in the form of a discussion between the siblings, Zelazny gives us a really helpful summary of the cabals that were angling for Oberon’s kingdom in the previous books. There were two—one of Bleys, Fiona, and Brand, and another of Julian, Eric, and Caine—actively working against each other, as well as against their other siblings.

After the cabal recap, Random goes off to find Martin, while Corwin goes to tell Random’s wife, Vialle, about the stabbed card. After telling Vialle, Corwin revisits his old dungeon in Amber, where he uses Dworkin’s old sketch on the cell wall to transport himself to Dworkin’s studio and confronts Dworkin. At this point, he learns two key things:

The first, as he had (somehow) suspected for a while, is that Dworkin is Oberon’s father—Corwin’s grandfather. And the second is that Dworkin and Oberon have a crazily evil plan to destroy the real, broken Pattern—and thus everything in Amber!—to start fresh. This is understandably appalling to Corwin, and he wants to try to repair the Pattern instead. The only way to do that, though, is to walk the pattern while wearing the Jewel of Judgement, and the problem is that if you do that, you might die.

While Corwin is debating this in his head, Dworkin attacks him, and Corwin is only able to escape by picking a Trump at random—which transports him right smack into the Courts of Chaos.

Corwin fights off a bunch of Chaos attackers and escapes again, this time via Gerard’s Trump. Corwin then finds out from Fiona herself that the Brand/Bleys/Fiona cabal was the one that found the primal Pattern and stabbed Random’s son Martin over it in an attempt to open the doors to the Courts of Chaos, with the somewhat misguided idea that they could ally with them to take the throne of Amber. Brand is the one who actually stabbed Martin.

If Corwin is going to use the Jewel of Judgement to repair the primal version of the Pattern, he needs the Jewel of Judgement. Which, as we may remember, he stashed in a compost pile next to his house in upstate New York. He rides through Arden on one of Zelazny’s patented psychedelic hellrides to get it, pursued by a crazy manticora, which is in turn killed by Julian, who tries to ingratiate himself, claiming he was only trying to save Corwin somehow by blinding and imprisoning him for all those years in the dungeon at Amber. 

Corwin shakes Julian off and keeps going. However, when Corwin gets to his house in New York, the compost heap is missing. Brand has been there first, and already has the Jewel!

At this point Fiona joins Corwin and claims that she and Bleys are back on Corwin’s side and aren’t working with the Courts of Chaos anymore, but that Brand is. She says Brand has gone off to walk the primal Pattern to destroy Amber. Corwin is able to stop Brand mid-Pattern-walk, but Brand escapes, still wearing the Jewel of Judgement. 

Ganelon then comes up with a (again, I may say, suspiciously) good plan: to have Benedict go to block Brand instead of Corwin, since Benedict can get there first and has an arm given to him by the Courts of Chaos, so it might be a more even fight. 

And just when we’re starting to get really suspicious about how Ganelon is coming up with all this brilliant planning and analysis all of a sudden, he reveals himself to be something entirely other than a simple faithful friend and servant to Corwin!

Even though this book furthers the plot a lot more than the previous four, and more actual action actually happens, it still also contains plenty of the free-associational impressionistic imagery we expect from a Zelazny Amber offering. Corwin’s ride from Arden back to 20th century Earth is extremely trippy; time and space are distorted, with grass and cobblestones intertwining with meteors. At one point he rides a translucent trail over space, during which he sees multiple moons.

And there is an absolutely beautiful scene when Corwin at last arrives at the Courts of Chaos; half the sky at the Courts is night, with dancing stars, and the other half is full of shimmering, shifting bands of color, and the two halves spin slowly around each other as the sky turns.

The Hand of Oberon also contains plenty of Corwin’s sarcastic attitude and snappy, anachronistic modern analysis of fantasy events. The best example is when he finds out that not only was Dworkin his grandfather, but that the unicorn was his grandmother, and his only reaction is to say that he has “mixed feelings” about being descended from a unicorn.

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.