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 Many-Colored Land

Julian May
1981
Awards: Locus (Science Fiction)
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Many-Colored Land opens with the spectacular crash-landing of an alien spaceship carrying alien colonists to a prehistoric Earth. The passengers escape in pods that bring them safely to the ground while their ship is smashed to bits.

The scene is riveting. But for a long time yet we won’t know what it means, which turns out to be a bit frustrating. Because the next thing that happens is that we fast-forward into our near future, to a time when Earth is part of a Foundation-like set of colonized planets and moons, and has tolerably civil relations with several alien races.

It is also a future in which a French scientist, Théo Guderian, has invented a time portal. The portal is a huge scientific breakthrough, of course, but there is a catch: it only goes one way. Once you go through, you can’t come back.

This would seem to be an insurmountable down side. Especially when you also find out that his portal goes to only one place and time: France in the Pliocene Epoch. In the Pliocene, Europe was closer to the equator and much hotter than it is now, covered with lush jungle, and populated by man-eating sabretooth cats, giant rhinos, and our early ramapithecine ancestors.

But for many hopeless and desperate people, the portal seems like the best option short of suicide. After Théo dies, in response to overwhelming demand, his widow Angélique starts to let people go through the portal in very small batches, after a rigorous screening and preparation process. And after she herself goes through the portal, an oversight committee continues her work.

Over the next hundred or so pages we then meet a series of eight people, from various parts of Earth and its outlying colonies, who are all at the ends of their ropes for one reason or another. All of them have decided to leave their current lives for whatever awaits them beyond the portal—popularly known as Exile.

These people include a profit-driven, reckless cargo ship captain alienated from his family; a Canadian ring-hockey champion shunned by her teammates; a nun questioning her faith and her purpose; an anthropologist who has just lost his wife of decades; an impish criminal; a heartsick man whose beloved went through the portal a while before; a telepath who lost her abilities in an accident; and an anger-prone Scandinavian who has proven himself too violent to last long in any Earthly job.

It takes a long time to meet all these people, and they are introduced without much sense of why they’re important or what their relationship is to each other. It was interesting for a while, but eventually I started getting fidgety and bored with all of the backstory.

Finally, though, the book moves to the next stage and the action starts. All eight of the people we’ve met go through the portal together…and run smack into the clutches of the aliens who crash-landed in the opening scene.

Because, as it turns out, there is already a society on the Pliocene side of the portal: a society of ruthlessly tyrannical aliens. These aliens call themselves the Tanu. Every time a new group of humans arrives, the Tanu capture them, confiscate their weapons and tools, evaluate their abilities, and slam a mind-controlling metal torc around their necks to ensure their obedience.

The torcs amplify the aliens’ telepathic abilities, enabling them to control humans (and our ramapithecine relatives) with psychological punishments and rewards. There are three tiers of torcs: iron, for low-level people the aliens just want to control like automatons; silver, for somewhat useful middle-manager-type humans who need to retain some level of initiative; and gold, for a privileged few who have particularly valuable skills and who proven their loyalty, but who still need to be kept under the threat of punishment or death just in case they stray. The golden torcs also have the ability to enhance telepathic abilities for those humans who have them naturally.

This psychological enslavement might actually not be worth fighting against most of the time—since many of the humans lead relatively pain-free lives and most are provided with free food and shelter—if it wasn’t for the fact that the aliens are also forcing the female humans to be incubators for their alien children. When they got to Earth the Tanu found that they were sterile, so they use the women as surrogate mothers against their will. So this sets up a nicely appalling reason for all but the most self-interested humans to unite and rebel.

After the eight humans we have been following are snatched by the Tanu they are provided with appropriate torcs, split into two groups of four, and sent off to two separate cities with many other captives. For the rest of The Many-Colored Land we mainly follow only one of the groups (the other group is the focus of the sequel, The Golden Torc).

Our primary group includes the cargo ship captain, the nun, the anthropologist, and the ring-hockey champion. As they are being transported, they plot and execute a courageous, creative escape using keen observation of the Tanu’s weaknesses, and what few tools and abilities are left to them. They break away, only to be faced with a back-breaking (and arm-breaking) slog through the Pliocene jungle to a safer location.

After they have been on the run for a while, they run into a band of free, underground humans, and are convinced to change their goals from simply escaping to defeating the Tanu and freeing all enslaved humans. And they also encounter face to face for the first time the dreaded, mind-warping Firvulag, the lower-status mutant kin of the Tanu, who might be, just possibly, more aligned with the humans’ goals than they think at first.

Humans and Firvulag embark on a daring plan to acquire the weaponry and allies that may enable them to defeat the seemingly undefeatable Tanu. The build up to the confrontation is suspenseful and nerve-wracking in the best way; it is complex and hard, but if it all works, they might—just might!—be able to save humanity.

The whole thing culminates in a satisfying onslaught on one of the largest Tanu cities. The climactic battle is impressively well done. Wars in novels too often end up being either overdramatic or incomprehensible or both, with vague micro-fights and ill-defined macro strategy, and often ridiculously magical reprieves from defeat. But May’s attack on the city has none of these weaknesses; he paints a very clear picture of the execution of the overall strategy (so you know exactly why each person is participating in the way they are), and at the same time he spices the fighting up with exciting details of individual bravery and creativity. I particularly liked the scene when a group of humans taught their Firvulag allies how to fight a mounted opponent, and the molten destruction of the barium reserves used in torc-making.

All in all, this novel tells a unique, exciting story. May has an easy-to-follow, almost Ursula-LeGuin-like, psychologically-oriented, deceptively calm style of writing. And he has clearly carefully structured his plot at all levels.

But the book did give me a number of stumbling blocks to get over. One was, of course, the slow start. Another was that the periodic deliriously rapt descriptions of French goose liver pate and fine burgundy wines were more of a turn-off for me than the turn-on they clearly were for May.

And, most importantly, I kept being bothered by the potential for paradoxes and otherwise screwing up the time continuum. Isn’t it potentially endangering the course of evolution to send cuttings of modern plants and pregnant sheep and dogs through the portal? Not to mention the interbreeding of humans, ramapithecines, and Tanu? Can we really rely on the natural preservation of the timeline to prevent all this from changing Earth’s future (our present)? And the biggest question of all is, of course, what happens six million years from now if the Tanu still exist on Earth? And, if they are not there, how could they all possibly have been eradicated?

I guess that since this is just the first installment of May’s four-volume Saga of Pliocene Exile, I am probably going to have to read the sequel to find out.

Book Review: Mindscan

Robert J. Sawyer

2005

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

Mindscan is another of Sawyer’s forays into the gray area between life and artificial intelligence, and into unanswerable philosophical questions such as: what is consciousness? And how can you prove objectively whether someone or something has it? The book is a quick read, but it is not as fully formed or as well resolved as his earlier novel The Terminal Experiment, which dealt with similar topics.

In the prologue to Mindscan, our protagonist, Jake Sullivan, is a young man in his twenties. Jake is having an argument with his father when his father suddenly drops dead due to what turns out to be a congenital defect in the blood vessels in his brain. Jake then learns that he has the same condition that killed his father, and that, in all likelihood, it will kill him, too, at an early age. Jake is then forced to severely curtail his activities to try to prolong his life.

By the time Jake is in his forties, a private company called Immortex has developed a process by which they can port a complete copy of your brain—including memories, thoughts, and feelings—into an artificial, upgradable robotic body that is durable enough to last virtually forever.

In effect, the process splits you into two identical people: one in your original organic body and one in a new mechanical one. To avoid the potential legal hassles that could come from you having two instantiations of yourself, the artificial version stays on Earth and is given all of your legal rights, and the organic original is sent up to an all-inclusive luxury resort on the dark side of the moon, where it whiles away the rest of its natural life in isolated comfort.

Because of this, and because the whole package is very, very expensive, it is primarily done only by extremely wealthy older people who have at most a year or two to live. Jake is atypically young, but he is the heir of a vast Canadian brewery fortune so he has the money to do it. Frustrated by the way his life is circumscribed by his condition, he opts to get the procedure. Afterwards, we follow the story lines of both the original organic Jake and the new mechanical one.

The new mechanical version—the “Mindscan”—has a hard time adjusting at first. His mother, his dog, and the girl he likes are all creeped out by his new form and don’t accept him as the real Jake. Fortunately, he is eventually able to find acceptance and even love with his fellow Mindscans.

Soon after he starts dating his Mindscan girlfriend Karen, Karen’s original organic version dies. Her son then files suit to have her legally declared dead and her assets distributed to him, even though the mechanical copy of her is still alive. The whole thing then turns into a big legal civil rights battle over whether a mechanical body with a mind-scanned copy of a brain is actually the person it claims to be.

Mindscan Jake stays supportively at Karen’s side through the entire trial. As it drags on, though, he starts hearing voices in his head—specifically, his own voice—which makes him suspect nefarious doings at Immortex, including them possibly making additional copies of him with whom he is somehow mentally connected.

Meanwhile, Jake’s original body—the “shed skin”—wakes up pissed off when he realizes that he is the copy of the consciousness that is going to die. (What did he think was going to happen? Of course one of them has to be the original instantiation of his brain, stuck in his original body.) He goes to the moon to live out the remainder of his life, but he remains cranky and has a hard time settling into his new lunar environment.

And then matters are complicated when a doctor on Earth develops a cure for his brain condition. His corporate caretakers/jailers agree to let the doctor fly up to give him the cure, but afterwards they won’t let organic Jake leave the moon. Too many legal complications, for them and for him, they say.

Organic Jake’s anger builds until he eventually takes drastic action to force the issue. This inevitably results in the two Jakes meeting each other—with disastrous consequences.

This book's subject matter had good solid potential. Unfortunately, its execution was awkward and uninspiring.

• First and foremost, the legal battle over Karen’s personhood, which takes up a large portion of the book, is unconvincing. The defense reveals surprise information during cross-examination that the judge already knows about but the prosecution doesn’t, which doesn’t seem allowable. Objections are sustained and overruled at weird times for tenuous reasons. And the arguments used by both sides are primarily emotional and philosophical, and practically free of legal content.

• The Mindscans’ physical construction seems inconsistent. They can feel some things (touch, heat, wind) but not others (air pressure, pain, smell).

Wall-e

• It’s strange to me that everyone reacts so negatively to the Mindscans. Almost every organic human they come in contact with on Earth is at least uncomfortable with and often overtly hostile to them. I mean, this isn’t 1938; this is the mid-21st century. Is there really no one ready to accept a sentient robot? Has no one read any Asimov? Has no one heard of R2-D2? Data? Wall-E?

• The story takes place in a North America of the very near future, and the narrative jars badly when the author’s guesses about our current time are wrong. For one thing, in this book, Pat Buchanan is a former U.S. president, when I don’t think he will realistically ever try to run again. In the book, gay marriage is illegal across the U.S., when it looks very much like that tide is moving irrevocably in the opposite direction. And perhaps the saddest non-true historical-future fact in the book is that Christopher Reeve is alive and walking, a testament to advancement in the neurosciences.

• And, finally, the whole Immortex conspiracy business is wrapped up at the end very abruptly, almost as an afterthought. It turns out to be disappointingly unambitious without any real evil intent behind it, and it is quite dissatisfying.

As I said before, this book does raise big, interesting questions, such as: Can you prove an entity has consciousness? How about a mechanical entity? If an entity of any kind passes the Turing test, and no one can tell that it isn’t conscious and self-aware, is that the same thing as it being conscious and self-aware? Should we consider it to be legally alive?

                                               

These questions deserve a solid story line to explore them. As I was reading this book and feeling frustrated by its inadequacies, I remembered that just such a solid story line did exist—in the form of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man.” 

In that episode, a scientist wants to take the android Data apart and dissect his brain for research. Data naturally objects, and eventually the controversy leads to a trial in which Data essentially has to prove that he is a sentient being and therefore deserves not be dissected if he doesn’t want to be dissected. 

The episode is wonderfully done, and is a much better presentation of the issues than Mindscan. The Star Trek trial is much more focused than the Mindscan trial on figuring out appropriate criteria for sentience and the legal provability of self-awareness. And the episode's writers are good at exposing arguments that are either red herrings or are too undefined to use as legal proof.

Book Review: Eye of Cat

Roger Zelazny

1982

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I’ve been taking a break from the old award-winner grind, reading books that I just want to read because they look like they’d be fun. I wasn’t planning on writing about any of them, but of course I can’t help it.

Eye of Cat is one of these non-award-winners that did, indeed, turn out to be fun. It has a suspenseful plot, with an appealing hero chased by a scary (and yet also oddly appealing) alien pursuer. The imagery is abstract and surreal, and yet still accessible.

The story takes place in the relatively near future, when space travel is common and humans have made contact with many alien races. The main character is Billy Singer, one of the last remaining Navajo on Earth.

Billy is an outer space hunter. He works as a sort of an independent contractor for a scientific institution (or maybe it’s really just a zoo), using a combination of traditional methods and modern technology to track and capture extraterrestrial life forms, and bringing them back to Earth for observation.

                                                     

Billy didn’t know it at the time he captured it, but one of the extraterrestrials he brought back, a Torglind metamorph, is actually sentient and highly intelligent. And it has been harboring a deep and ever-growing hatred of humans, and of Billy in particular, since he brought it to the zoo forty years ago.

When Eye of Cat opens, Billy is on the edge of retirement, but has been hired by the government for a one-off contract job. They have information that a dangerous alien assassin is somewhere on Earth and is planning to kill an alien ambassador who is visiting our planet on a diplomatic mission. Billy’s job is to track down the assassin and neutralize it. But he quickly learns that the assassin’s abilities to evade detection and capture are way above his head. And he eventually realizes that the only thing on Earth with the ability to catch it is the Torglind metamorph.

So he strikes a deal. If the metamorph helps him to catch the assassin, Billy offers to set it free—and to give it one week to try to hunt him and kill him if it can. The metamorph gladly accepts.

To survive the chase that follows, Billy learns that he must reconnect with Navajo tradition, something he tried to leave behind many years ago. It means that he has to go on not only a tough physical journey but also a trying psychological one. It becomes a semi-supernatural, often hallucinatory experience in which he faces his own life and also the history of his own people while simultaneously trying to outrun and, if possible, turn the tables on the relentless metamorph.

Zelazny is, as always, great at crafting the kind of surrealism necessary for this kind of a story. He sprinkles Navajo poems and songs throughout the book. He writes half-real, half-dream sequences with symbols full of double meaning. He presents the thoughts of both Billy and the metamorph as stream-of-consciousness passages with letters omitted, added, and misplaced. It is often disturbing and disjointed and confusing and yet still strangely understandable at the same time. I don’t know how he manages to come up with these things; I don’t know how he knows what to put where to make it have this effect.

I’ll admit that all this Native American imagery written by a Polish-Irish fellow might come off a little clichéd nowadays. But I thought he did a good job of it.  

A nice postscript to that end is that Zelazny dedicated Eye of Cat to detective writer Tony Hillerman and to his two (fictional) Navajo detectives. According to Wikipedia, Hillerman then "repaid the compliment by having one of his characters reading a Zelazny novel while on a stakeout."

Book Review: Foundation's Edge

Isaac Asimov
1983
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT…
…for all of Isaac Asimov’s other Foundation novels.

This is one of the last books in Asimov’s Foundation series (one of the most excellent and seminal bodies of work in science fiction), and builds on the characters and themes developed over the course of that series. It is therefore hard to describe this book without giving away a lot about the previous books in the set.

This book also incorporates elements of Asimov’s Robot series (yet another excellent and seminal work).

And, because the Foundation series deals with thousands of years of galactic history, it is hard to describe this book without going into a ridiculous amount of back story, which I’m not going to do here.

Clearly, then, the only thing for you to do is to read all the Robot and other Foundation books, in the correct order, and then to read this review, and then to read Foundation’s Edge. (To help you in this pursuit, a complete chronology of Asimov’s books can be found here.)

In the 1950s, Asimov began writing a series of books telling the story of the development of humanoid robots in our near future (the Robot series). He simultaneously began a separate series of books about the rise and fall and rise again of a galaxy-wide empire ruling millions of inhabited worlds in our very far future (the Foundation series). He wrote Foundation’s Edge about thirty years after finishing the last of the original Foundation and Robot novels, but he intertwines elements of both multi-ologies in this book in his same familiar, clear style as if there had been no break at all. This is a testament to the solidity and endurance of the characters, worlds, and concepts he created.

The Foundation novels are built around one primary character, Hari Seldon, the developer of the science of psychohistory. Psychohistory is sort of a combination of mass psychology, sociology, statistical modeling, and complex mathematics. Seldon is able to use it predict the future of all of galactic society.

What he forecasts is the inevitable decline of the decadent galactic empire (which is in its heyday while Seldon is alive), followed by a painful, chaotic period of several thousand years of division and war, and then the rise of a second (more benevolent) empire bringing peace and stability back to the galaxy. 

The violent interregnum has the potential to last from one thousand years to thirty thousand years, depending on which of several courses of action people take. So Seldon sets up a secret foundation of scholars and directs them to guide humanity towards the choices that will shorten the period of chaos as much as possible. He also records a series of holographic animations of himself to be played at key times in the future so he can help guide humanity himself even after he is dead. The Foundation series plays out this “Seldon plan” across hundreds of years of ups and downs and danger and turmoil.

One strange thing about the Foundation series is that it keeps your attention even though there is usually very little action. Often the major crisis in each book involves the characters working to prevent something from happening, rather than to make something happen. These crises usually center on a single skeptic who challenges the assumptions of the majority and who has to use logic and persistence to turn the others around. But it is Asimov’s particular genius that he makes this kind of story interesting and keeps the pages turning.

It helps that the whole concept of psychohistory is awesome and the character of Hari Seldon is enduring and appealing*. And, because Asimov covers thousands of years of history in his various novels, he has to invent a ton of other characters, not to mention worlds and governments and advances in technology, and he always does it with extraordinary clarity, believability, creativity, and humor.

This book, Foundation’s Edge, takes place 500 years into the chaotic interregnum. The original First Foundation (of regular people) and the Second Foundation (of telepaths) both appear to have things well in hand. Things are going perfectly in accordance with the Seldon Plan. Maybe a little too perfectly. People in both foundations grow suspicious that someone is manipulating all of them to align with the Plan, depriving them of independent action. Eventually, their investigations center on a mysterious lost planet, Gaia, which may or may not be the original Earth, and which may or may not be controlling them all without their knowledge, and which may or may not be able to control and/or destroy the entire universe.

Foundation's Edge was a mixed bag. It exhibits all the good characteristics of Asimov’s work. It also exhibits his annoying tendencies to give his characters silly names and to include a number of pert, very young women who are attracted to much older, professorial-type men.

I liked the First and Second Foundationers, their slow realization that they are being manipulated, and their search for the source of that manipulation in the first half of the book. But the second half was unsatisfactory. I didn’t really like what Gaia turned out to be. And I didn’t buy the climax of the plot, where there was a multiple-choice decision that had to be made to determine the fate of the galaxy and only one guy in the universe could make it. I didn't feel that this book necessarily deserved the Hugo Award, and it made me think that perhaps this book won it as a sentimental choice--a win to make up for all the other Foundation series novels that came out before the award was invented.

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* Nobel-Prize-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman admits here that part of the reason he went into economics is because it is the closest thing we have to psychohistory.


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

Book Review: The Forever Machine

Also published as They'd Rather Be Right
Mark Clifton & Frank Riley
1954
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I have read several reviews of this book that call it trite and clichéd. But I generally enjoyed it.

The main character is a telepathic man, Joe Carter, who grows up ostracized and isolated because of his abilities; people are freaked out by the fact that he can tell what they are thinking. He doesn’t like being so lonely, so he becomes a brilliant scientist and invents a machine that can make other people into telepaths.

Everyone on earth theoretically has the potential to be turned into a telepath by Joe's machine. But it is next to impossible to be telepathic and to retain the judgmental natures most people have. Since telepaths know what everyone else is thinking, they have to be able to handle all the varied thoughts, good and bad, intentional and unintentional, that come into their heads, without prejudice. They have to be the most understanding, least judgmental people on earth.

Before it makes you telepathic, therefore, the machine strips out all your preconceived ideas about what is right and wrong and rebuilds you, cell by cell, from the ground up…

…and it turns out that this has the nice side effect of making old people young again. Which means that once the machine has been run on its first person, an elderly woman, and she is transformed back into a beautiful twenty-year-old, everybody else on earth wants to do it.

The catch is that the machine won’t work on anybody who is convinced that they are absolutely right about something. If you are not flexible enough to be removed of all your assumptions and prejudices, then you will come out of the machine physically and mentally unchanged.

The first third of this book, which I liked the most, tells the story of Joe's childhood. As a young boy, he instinctively reacts not to what people are saying but to what they are really thinking--which, of course, makes everyone think he is crazy. He learns, painfully, that it is best to disguise the fact that he can read minds.

In the second third of the book, which was still okay, Joe grows up and goes to college and teams up with two professors to create the telepath-making machine. Throughout the project the three of them are alternately reviled and revered by the public, because the public is both terrified of what the machine means and also greedy for it. Eventually popular opinion turns totally against them; they become the target of a witch hunt and have to go into hiding.

In the last third of the book, however, after the machine has actually been built and its three creators start doing demonstrations of the machine for the public, the book loses its way. It becomes far too heavy-handed in its lesson about how we all need to be more flexible and realize that we’re not always right. I was also very dissatisfied with their solution for what to do with the machine in the end.


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

Book Review: The Einstein Intersection

Samuel R. Delany
1967
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –
 
SPOILER ALERT (Not that it matters)
 
Samuel Delany published his first novel at age 20, which earned him a reputation as a prodigy. The Einstein Intersection, which he wrote at 24, seems like a desperate effort to hold on to that reputation. 

Everything about this book – the ambitious but half-resolved plot lines, the trippy sentence structure, the trendy 1960s themes, the inclusion of his own writer’s journal in the quotations that start each chapter – gives the impression of a writer using every technique he can think of to impress us with his brilliance without having the content to back it up.
The story takes place 30,000 years after humans have disappeared from Earth for unspecified reasons. Aliens from “the other side of the universe” have colonized the empty Earth and have somehow taken human form in an attempt to adapt better to the planet. But the human form doesn’t work quite right for the aliens, so every generation has a lot of mutation. Those who are mutated range from “functionals,” who can mix with “normals” in everyday society, to “non-functionals” who have to be kept in a “kage” and tended all their lives.

The characters keep talking about how there is a lot of prejudice towards anyone who is considered “different.” You are “different” if you have a mutation of any kind, whether it is a harmful mutation or a special ability like telepathy or telekinesis (like the X-Men). According to the book’s publicists this is supposedly one of the most powerful elements of the book, but we never run into any situations where this prejudice is really manifest or where it has any major impact on the story.

The main character, Lobey, is “different.” His difference is that he can hear the music that is playing in somebody else’s head and he can play it on his flute. Lobey falls in love with a “different” woman, Friza, who is telekinetic. Friza is mysteriously killed and Lobey is told by the elders of his village to go discover what killed her and kill it.

Through a series of hallucinations and/or visions he learns that Friza’s murderer is another “different” person named Kid Death, who can look through other people’s eyes anywhere they are and see what they see. When he gets bored with looking through their eyes, he closes their eyes permanently and thereby kills them. Lobey leaves his small village, joins up with a group of dragon herders and travels with them to the big city where the Kid is. Eventually he does manage to kill the Kid with the help of the herders and manages to also learn some life lessons in the process.

There are several bothersome things about the book, not least of which are the bold but half-explained and semi-developed themes.

One of these central themes is myth. Lobey is a rough parallel to Orpheus, who was a musical genius (on the lyre) and who traveled (unsuccessfully) to Hades to bring the woman he loved back from the dead. A modern retelling of a myth is a good device in theory but Orpheus’ story seems kind of pointless to me – his lover dies, he goes to Hades to go get her, he isn’t able to bring her back so he comes back home. I’m afraid that Lobey’s journey seems equally pointless.

Another theme of the book is the “convergence of rational and irrational thought” (whatever that is). One of the elders explains to Lobey that long, long ago, Albert Einstein defined the rules of the rational world and Kurt Gödel came as close as anyone can to defining the rules of the irrational world. At the intersection of the two… well, this is where the explanation kind of peters out, but it has something to do with society reaching a pinnacle of both scientific and spiritual development. It’s not really clear how it relates to Lobey’s journey, but it certainly sounds very cool to talk about.

Myth also shows up in the cheesy references to 1960s pop culture which have supposedly become lore in Lobey’s world – the tale of the Myth of Ringo, the swearing in Elvis’ name, the referring to death as “returning to the great rock and the great roll.” These might have been funny when the book first came out but seem trite now.

Delany starts each chapter with a quotation or two. Most of the quotations are from a self-consciously eclectic mix of writers from Bob Dylan to Thomas Chatterton and the Marquis de Sade, which is annoying enough. But some of the quotations are also from the author himself, from the journal he kept while traveling through Europe and writing this book. The entries always casually mention his current exotic location while talking about how he’s struggling with telling Lobey’s story: Oh, I’m having a devil of a time expressing Lobey’s pain while sitting in a small tea shack on the Bosporus with a group of Turkish sailors with whom I’m conversing in French.

At the very end of the book, he signs off the story with “— New York, Paris, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, London / Sept. ’65 – Nov. ’66.” Almost makes you feel like he wrote the book just so he could show off where he went.

In keeping with the era in which it was written, this book uses a psychedelic vocabulary and sentence structure. This sometimes works (“Chills snarled the nerves along my vertebrae”) but often doesn’t (“My ear is funnel for all voice and trill and warble you can conceive this day”). I think the main times that it doesn’t work are when Delany himself hasn’t fully thought out what he is trying to say, as in: “Music is the pure language of temporal and co-temporal relation.” What?

Delany is self-conscious about this writing style, which also makes us too conscious of it. In one of his journal entries, Delany says, “In a week…I can start the meticulous process of overlaying another filigree across the novel’s palimpsest.” I think if your novel needs to be multi-layered and obscure, just write it that way – you don’t need to tell us that’s what you’re doing so we’ll be impressed.

One thing I do have to give Delany credit for is that he gave the people in this book three sexes – male, female, and androgynous. And this book came out two years before Ursula K. LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, which was considered groundbreaking for its treatment of androgynous characters. 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Healer's War

Elizabeth Anne Scarborough
1988
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The Healer’s War is a moving real-life account of one woman’s service in the Vietnam war in the guise of a good science fiction story.

The main character, Lieutenant Kitty McCulley, is a nurse at a U.S. Army hospital near China Beach. Her hospital treats wounded American GIs as well as South Vietnamese civilians. McCulley isn’t always great about keeping her cool or doing things exactly by the book but she genuinely cares about her patients and tries her best for all of them, whatever color they are.

The American soldiers usually stay for only a short time and then are shipped to better-equipped hospitals back home. The Vietnamese civilians, having nowhere else to go, tend to stay longer, and McCulley develops something of a bond with several of them.

One of her Vietnamese patients is a holy man, a healer, who had both legs blown off by a bomb. She cannot save him but before he dies, he gives her his magical amulet. The amulet reveals auras – clouds of color around people and animals that show how they are really feeling and where their pain is – and it also focuses her energy to give her tremendous powers of healing.

Both of these powers come in very handy when she is transporting one of her patients to another hospital and their helicopter is shot down, leaving her and her one-legged, ten-year-old patient to slog their way through miles of Vietnamese jungle until they are eventually captured by the Viet Cong.

While the jungle section contains most of the adventure in the book, my favorite parts were the first section, in the hospital, and the last little section, after McCulley gets back home to the States, because they are both so clearly based on the author’s own experiences as an Army nurse in Vietnam and as a returning vet.

In the first section, Scarborough paints vivid pictures with details. Everyday life at the hospital is largely miserable for McCulley, with the smells (disinfectant, pot, latrines), the heat, the rain, and the bugs. Her nylons fuse to her legs with sweat and the plastic earpiece on the telephone has been melted by the bug spray everyone wears. She deals with so many angry, aggressive, and/or flirtatious soldiers that the nice ones can actually be the most unsettling. But, at the same time, Vietnam can be beautiful to her, with misty mountains covered in hundreds of shades of green.

The last section of the book is equally powerful. It doesn’t give away anything about the book’s central plot to say that when McCulley comes home from Vietnam, she is suffering from shock and trauma and is isolated from those around her. She has real trouble adjusting to life with relatives and friends who have no concept of what the war was like. It is very hard to watch her go sluggishly through the motions of trying to repair herself until she finally realizes she can’t do it all on her own.

I also very much liked McCulley’s personality. She’s a realist and she makes it easy to put yourself in her shoes. She’s exhausted and depressed by the war but she doesn’t make too many excuses for herself. She thinks of herself as an inept, incompetent nurse who isn’t doing a terrific job, and sometimes she does screw up, but her compassion and care for her patients come through loud and clear.

The only major knock I have on this book is that the power of the amulet goes a little too far; in particular, it eventually allows her to understand Vietnamese perfectly. This makes communication with her VC captors conveniently easy but it seems inconsistent with the amulet’s other attributes, which are more vague and impressionistic.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Dune

Frank Herbert
1965
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Dune is a complex book (and a complex world) and it is impossible to say everything I want to say about it in just a few paragraphs.

In Dune, Herbert creates a rich universe of worlds bound together by layer upon layer of intricate political intrigue and manipulation. It is easy to believe that his technology, religion, and governmental systems are results of thousands of years of evolution since our own time; they are all mixtures of the ancient and the futuristic. The interstellar space travel and the laser weaponry seem to come from far in our future, but the backward gender roles and hybrid combo-religions seem to come from deep in our past.

The story takes place almost entirely on Dune, one of the planets in Herbert’s universe. Dune is inhospitable, being almost completely covered by desert and populated by enormous man-eating worms. But it is also the only source of “the spice,” the universe’s most important natural resource, which is not only physically addictive but is also the source of energy for all inter-world space transportation. Noble off-world families are constantly jostling and scheming to control Dune and thereby control the supply of spice. The nobles also are cruelly repressive to the Fremen, the native desert people of Dune, who do the scut work in the spice mining operations, wear long robes, are deeply religious, and are somewhat repressive, in turn, to their women.

(Stop me if you see an allegory for anything in our own world here.)

To try to make a very long story short, the book begins with the good guys (Duke Leto Atreides, his wife Jessica, and his son Paul) taking over the management of Dune from the bad guys (their cousins, the evil Duke Harkonnen and his two nephews) following a lukewarm edict from the emperor. The Harkonnens don’t want to leave so they sabotage the Atreides’s takeover, planting booby traps all over their house. Duke Leto is killed and his wife and son flee into the desert.

All appears to be lost… except that Paul & his mother are taken in by the Fremen. It turns out that the Fremen have been living underground, concealing their numbers, training themselves in battle, and patiently preparing for hundreds of years to receive a prophesied messiah who will lead them in a great jihad against the imperium and help them to reclaim the planet. It takes a while for them to warm up to Paul and, especially, his mother, who is a powerful practitioner of the Bene Gesserit religion which they think of as witchcraft, but eventually the Fremen start to accept that Paul might just be the savior they have been waiting for.

I saw David Lynch’s film adaptation of Dune before I read the book for the first time. I don’t normally like to do that because it means I’m thinking about the movie’s actors and sets the whole time I’m reading, but in this case, it worked. Partly because the book is rich enough not to be boxed in by a single movie. And partly because the movie is great. Sure, it is a bit goofy, and doesn’t stick exactly to the book, but the worms are awesome and it has excellent actors in it (Kyle MacLachlan, Patrick Stewart, Sting, Linda Hunt, Max Von Sydow, Dean Stockwell, and Brad Dourif, to name just the most fabulous) who I enjoyed mentally plugging into their roles as I was reading.

The book also explores certain plot points more deeply than a two-plus-hour movie has any hope of doing. For one thing, the book talks more about the CHOAM spice corporation and its influence over the royalty of the universe of Dune. It makes even more obvious a statement about the danger of becoming dependent on a single limited resource and how this is a situation ripe for corruption.

The book also goes deeper into the role of Jessica’s Bene Gesserit religion. If you just saw the movie, you’d think the BGs were only religious priestesses and that everything that Paul and Jessica did to prove themselves to the Fremen really was entirely supernatural. But what you learn from the book is that generations of BGs have been following a specific plan. They’ve been going around to different planets, using their roles as Reverend Mothers to deliberately plant legends and prophesies, and then attempting through selective breeding and strict training to create people to make those prophesies come true.

This is not to say that there isn’t still a very strong element of magic in Paul’s powers. He does have abilities that the Bene Gesserits didn’t plan for, which eventually makes events on Dune spiral out of their control.

This is an impressive, impressive book. There were just a couple things about Herbert’s writing that were downers for me and that separated this book from being an epic on the level of Lord of the Rings.

The main problem is that all the good guys have a mystical instinct for always knowing the right thing to do in a given situation. None of the chosen people have to puzzle it out or make mistakes. Paul and his mother always get out of tight spots just by mysteriously – bing! – knowing what they have to do or exactly the right words to say. The line “Then Paul knew what he had to do” came up about two hundred times and by the one hundredth, I was pretty sick of it. Whether it was because he really was the prophesied savior or because of the BG implantation and pre-seeding of legend, it didn’t matter to me.

And then every time Paul does or says something preordained by prophesy, the Fremen around him gasp and breathlessly nod to themselves saying, “Yes, he is the one.” It gets kind of annoying with all the wonder and awe of him – especially because he can be, on occasion, a bit of a jerk.

Actually, everybody is always in awe of or enchanted by something. Paul himself is even enchanted by the simplicity of Fremen dew collectors. Really?


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Demolished Man

Alfred Bester
1951
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –

SPOILER ALERT

A Demolished Man is tolerable until about two-thirds of the way through, and then it falls apart in a frustrating mass of pretentiousness and 1950s-era pop psychology.

The book takes place in the late 21st century, after humans have colonized the moon and several nearby planets. Evolution and training have brought about a new small but powerful minority: people with ESP, or “Espers,” who can read the thoughts of others.

There is no crime anymore, since Espers can tell when one is about to be committed and prevent it from happening (Similar to the premise of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, which came out five years later).

There are three classes of Esper, from the rudimentary and common class 3 up to the powerful and rare class 1. All Espers of all classes belong to a self-regulating Guild which prevents them from “peeping” people without their permission and otherwise using their abilities for evil.

In this world lives Ben Reich, president of the behemoth Monarch Utilities & Resources corporation. Reich is engaged in a heated battle for world capital domination with Craye D’Courtney of the D’Courtney Cartel. He is also haunted by nightmares of a mysterious Man With No Face which cause him to wake up in the middle of the night, screaming.

At the beginning of the book, Reich sends a coded message to D’Courtney proposing a merger. D’Courtney accepts, but Reich mis-decodes his answer as a refusal, and determines that the only thing he can do to preserve Monarch is to kill D’Courtney (which seems like a bit of a leap, but I guess Reich’s nightmare-addled sleep may be impeding his logic).

Reich constructs an elaborate plan involving bribery, deceit, and an inane tune he can use to distract his brain while it’s being “peeped,” to get in a position to murder D’Courtney. Once the murder is done, Reich then engages in a game of cat-and-mouse with Police Prefect (and class 1 Esper) Lincoln Powell, who knows that Reich did it but can’t prove it without solid physical evidence.

I give Bester credit for being a seminal SF writer. His ideas inspired legions of other authors; I can see his influence both on his contemporaries (like Philip K. Dick) and also on later writers (like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson).

The Espers and the way they influence societal structure are big examples of this. A smaller, more specific one is his use of language. Esper mental-talk is creative and flowing; it takes an almost physical form that other Espers can see. At parties, Espers weave patterns with their conversation to make it both witty and beautiful, which Bester shows by using different fonts for different people and spacing the words artfully on the page. He also uses shorthand and symbols like the ones we use in texting today; there are characters named Wyg& and @kins, for example, and people write notes using “thot” for “thought” and “2” for “too.”

This book suffers, however, from sloppiness, pretentiousness, and dicey amateur psychology. Not to mention a touch of misogyny for good measure.

In the sloppiness and pretentiousness department, Bester has a tendency to bring in new ideas throughout the book, flesh them out only cursorily, and, when they are not needed any more, make them disappear as conveniently and abruptly as they were brought in. And these distracting new plot points, locations, or characters often appear to be included solely as opportunities for Bester to show off his cleverness.

For example, in one late chapter Reich hides from the police in the “Reservation,” a jungle preserve we have never heard of before and which is explained to us in a clunky back-filling speech by a minor sergeant’s deputy given a speaking role only for that purpose. Prefect Powell brings in a group of class 1 Espers—pillars of society such as diplomats, politicians, and judges—to serve as a human radar screen to flush Reich out of the Reservation. This creates a convoluted situation in which these high-powered men are out in the jungle running into bears and wildcats and stuff and still referring to each other politely as “Senator” and “Your Honor.” I think their mental conversation is supposed to be hilariously clever but it comes off as contrived and unfunny. And the chapter itself sticks out like a sore thumb because nowhere else do we hear about the Reservation, and nowhere else do we see the class 1 Espers as a light-hearted, cooperative group.

The questionable psychological theories in the book are even more bothersome and crop up everywhere, from the ridiculous free-associative dream interpretation done by Reich’s analyst to the unhelpful and hyper-academic explanation of what is happening to a character who has a mental breakdown:

“It’s quite simple. Every man is a balance of two opposed drives…The Life Instinct and the Death Instinct. Both drives have the identical purpose…to win Nirvana. The Life Instinct fights for Nirvana by smashing all opposition. The Death Instinct attempts to win Nirvana by destroying itself. Usually both instincts fuse in the adapted individual. Under strain they defuse.”

This also includes the demolition referred to by the book’s title. Since Reich seems able to elude Powell at every turn, Powell eventually has to call for a “Mass Cathexis,” a process in which every Esper simultaneously “opens his psyche and contributes his latent energy to a pool” to be controlled by one single Esper. If the focal Esper is not destroyed in the process, he serves as a conduit for all the mental energy and can use it to control almost anything he chooses.

Powell directs all the energy in his Cathexis towards the “Demolition” of Reich. Demolition is the ultimate punishment and the last resort of law enforcement: your entire psyche is destroyed, all your reality is taken away, your memories are gone, but your consciousness remains. You then have the potential to be reborn as a different person.

Powell’s justification for doing this to Reich is difficult to follow. Powell explains that he had to “make [Reich] believe that all the universe was a puzzle for him to solve, that he was the only reality and all the rest was make-believe. This would lead him to inevitably confront his subconscious.” And Reich in particular had to be forced to confront his subconscious because he was a “galactic focal point,” a “crucial link between the positive past and the probable future.” “These men appear every so often,” Powell says, “…links between the past and the future. If they are permitted to mature…if the link is permitted to weld…the world finds itself chained to a dreadful tomorrow.”

Sorry, I don’t understand that at all, and what I think I do understand, I don’t buy, or there wasn’t enough setup for it in the book to make me buy it. It just comes across to me as sloppy.

And, last but not least of my criticisms, is the lovely way women are treated in the novel. Of course the main male characters don’t like the mature women who are in love with them; of course they like the ingénues and basket cases instead. And among the primary female characters in the book are:

• Maria Beaumont, society dame. Behind her back she is called the “Gilt Corpse” because she is gaudy but unattractive. She is flighty and superficial and likes to play silly party games. At one point when she is unhappy her voice is described as “screeching.”

• Duffy Wyg&, Reich’s girlfriend. She is arguably the most “positively” described woman in the book: “ the epitome of the modern career girl—the virgin seductress.” (i.e. madonna/whore.) At one point she thinks she’s being too silly and tells Reich: “punch me around a little.” 

• Barbara D’Courtney, Craye’s daughter. She is an innocent young woman who has a breakdown after witnessing the murder of her father and has to be re-educated as if she was being raised from infancy. This re-education is done, for some reason, by Powell, who, for a good long time, has to pretend to be her “daddy.” This leads, naturally, to him falling head over heels in love with her; he says he loves her “mischievousness” and “urchin look.” Ick, anyone? 

Bester winds up the book with a self-righteous coda about how, no matter how important the individual people in it may think they are, this entire story is “minute and trivial to the infinite Eye of God.” Why, then, sir, I ask, are we bothering to read the darn book?


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog