Book Review: Millennium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review: 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: 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: The Guns of Avalon

Roger Zelazny
1972
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – – 

The Guns of Avalon is the second of ten books in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber fantasy series. This book feels less organized and is less satisfying than the first one; the plot is more herky-jerky. But Zelazny continues to keep his writing trippy and intense with hypnotically surreal imagery. And his main character’s dry, incongruously modern attitude keeps it from getting too drearily romantic.

The Guns of Avalon picks up right where the first book, Nine Princes in Amber, left off, which is when our plucky hero, prince Corwin, has just escaped from a deep, dark, disgusting dungeon. He had been thrown into the dungeon by his brother, Eric, in retaliation for challenging Eric’s claim to the crown of Amber. Eric had also burnt out Corwin’s eyes, which was painful and inconvenient, to say the least. 

Fortunately, Corwin’s powers of regeneration allowed him to regrow his eyes while he was in prison. And, while incarcerated, he also happened to run into Dworkin—the artist who had created the magical tarot cards that enable the princes and princesses of Amber to communicate with and teleport to each other—and convinced him to use his magical drawing powers to transport Corwin out of prison to a shadowland called Cabra.

Cabra is peaceful and far, far away from Amber, and is therefore the perfect place to recuperate after you’ve spent four years in a dungeon regrowing your eyes. After a time, though, Corwin feels like he is rested enough, and it is time for him to resume his pursuit of the throne. He heads towards Avalon, one of the many shadowlands he has lived in before (and one of many of the Chronicles’ overt nods to Arthurian legend), where he hopes to raise an army. On the way, he runs into Sir Lancelot du Lac, severely wounded from an attack. He carries Lancelot to the closest fort, the Keep of Ganelon, for medical care. 

At the Keep, he rekindles his friendship with Ganelon, whom he was kind of a jerk to many years before, but who doesn’t harbor a grudge (and who will turn out to become a steadfast friend and companion). Ganelon tells Corwin about a mysterious Circle of blackness that started somewhere in the hinterlands but is expanding steadily towards Avalon and Amber, and which spews death and horrifying monsters. Corwin, Ganelon, and Lancelot stage a brief effort to attack the Circle; they aren’t able to drive it back, but they do find out that the Circle and the evil beasts within it come from the Courts of Chaos, a sort of rival evil counterpart to Amber.

Corwin and Ganelon then continue on to Avalon, whereupon Corwin runs into another one of his brothers, Benedict, who is raising an army to fight the Circle. Corwin also meets a woman named Dara who claims to be Benedict’s great-granddaughter, and he develops kind of a crush on her. Thinking she is family, he teaches her about the trumps, and about shadow worlds and how to model them. He also tells her about the “pattern”—a maze-like construction in the palace that only descendants of the royal family of Amber can walk, and which grants them certain powers when they do. (This will prove to be a big mistake.)

Anyway, continuing Corwin’s anti-Eric vendetta: gunpowder will not burn in Amber, making normal firearms useless there. But Corwin has secretly discovered that jeweler’s rouge, which is neutral everywhere else, behaves like gunpowder in Amber. So he and Ganelon set off on a series of journeys to a past version of southwest Africa to get a whole lot of diamonds, then to World-War-I-era Antwerp to sell the diamonds and buy the rouge, and then to Switzerland to buy weapons with which to fire the rouge. He also raises a new army of hairy, fanged, clawed men from reliable shadowlands to wield those weapons.

The whole venture is head-spinning and feels a little too haphazard as they jump randomly from place to place and time to time. But, fortunately, each journey is a trademark surrealistic Zelazny hellride across shadowlands with features like lemon-yellow skies and striped, feathered houses and red-and-black striped horses.

They come back to Avalon only to discover that Benedict is pissed off at Corwin for raising an Army against Eric. Benedict pursues them as they ride at breakneck speed to Amber, the whole time running parallel to a black road, an arm of the evil Circle, that now stretches all the way to Amber. Benedict catches up with them close to Amber, and Corwin defeats him in a truly excellent swordfight on the black road.

At this point Corwin gets a tarot card message from Eric to please delay his attack, because the forces from the evil Circle have finally reached Amber and all hands are needed to defend it. As if, thinks Corwin! He rides to Amber with his forces and discovers Amber being beset by manticores and wyverns and razor-billed birds. His brothers Eric, Julian, and Caine are all fighting—and losing. Corwin feels a twinge of remorse at the carnage, and decides to use his forces to defend Amber after all, using up all his jeweler’s rouge fighting off the evil monsters.

Anti-climactically, Eric ends up getting mortally wounded in the battle. Before he dies, he gives Corwin their father’s Jewel of Judgement, symbolically granting the throne to Corwin. (The Jewel allows the wearer to control the weather, and possibly has other powers that have not yet been revealed.)

After all of this, Dara reappears; she has been tailing Corwin. And it turns out she is not Benedict’s great-granddaughter after all! She is an evil wraith from the cursed Circle and she was only following him to find the way to Amber! She races into the palace and walks the pattern, whereupon she turns into a terrifyingly evil hellbeast, threatens to destroy Amber, and then disappears. 

All in all, The Guns of Avalon feels less like a novel unto itself, and more of a bridge from one book to another. Its plot is less coherent and more like a series of randomly connected incidents than the books that precede or follow it. And the battle to defend Amber and the way Corwin takes the kingship from Eric are both oddly unsatisfying after all the buildup to them. 

But the visual intensity of Zelazny’s writing still makes it worthwhile. In this book, also, we get to hear fun snippets of Corwin’s adventures on our own Earth, which is one of his particular favorites of the shadow worlds—one where he has befriended several Earthly celebrities and lived for hundreds of years (including a few years in a prosaic two-bedroom house with attached garage in upstate New York). 

And Zelazny always keeps it funnier than the usual medieval romantic fantasy with Corwin’s wry breaks into modern thought. At one point, for example, Corwin is starting to feel like maybe neither he nor any of his siblings are really fit to take their father’s throne, and he thinks to himself, “I would have liked to blame Dad for this inadequacy, but unfortunately I had known Freud too long not to feel self-conscious about it.” When his brother Benedict is pursuing them across the plains on the way to Amber, driving his horse like crazy, Corwin describes him as “moving like something in the Kentucky Derby.” And when Corwin finally gets to Amber and sees his brothers defending their homeland from demonic creatures, he says, “The invaders were strong, numerous. I had no idea as to what Eric might have in reserve. At that moment, it was impossible for me to gauge whether war bonds for Amber would be a good investment.” 

The book is also relatively short, and it certainly keeps you going enough to get through it to book three, The Sign of the Unicorn, where we hope to at last see Corwin take the throne of Amber. But, of course, for Corwin, nothing will be easy.

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.

Book Review: The Time Ships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review: In War Times

Kathleen Ann Goonan
2007
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book is subtitled “An Alternate Universe Novel of a Different Present.” But it really is an ordinary history in which the main character is given occasional peeks into other timelines, loses friends to other timelines, and is tantalized the entire book with the possibility of being able to alter his own timeline, but never actually alters it until the very, very, very, very end. It is frustrating and disappointing if you’re a fan of alternate histories and were expecting to read one.
   
At the start of In War Times, the main character, Sam Dance, is a young American soldier in 1941 just before the U.S. enters World War II. Dance has high aptitudes for physics, chemistry, and engineering, so the Army is making him take advanced classes in all three. One of his professors, Russian émigré Dr. Eliani Hadntz, gives him all of her top-secret notes about developing a machine that could, theoretically, alter the path of history so as to eliminate all wars, and then rushes off to Hungary to try to rescue her daughter who is trapped there.

Dance doesn’t actually read Hadntz’s notes until several months later, when Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese and his brother, stationed on the U.S.S. Arizona, is killed in the attack. Bereft, Dance reads everything Hadntz gave him, thinking that maybe by building her machine he can somehow bring his brother back.
   
Then the Army activates Dance and he is sent to a variety of bases on the U.S. East Coast and in Scotland. Along the way he collects a group of buddies, the best of whom is Al “Wink” Winklemeyer. Wink and Dance bond instantly over jazz, which they both play, and there are interminable paragraphs describing their rapturous enjoyment of the music. They are rapturous whether the music they hear is recorded, played by themselves, or played live by jazz superstars of the 1940s, many of whom they get to see in New York while posted nearby, and which are listed in such rapid succession and such variety that it seems like Goonan is just trying to name every jazz musician who played in New York in the 1940s. This probably would have seemed far more cool if I was at all interested in jazz.

During this entire time, in what will prove to be a recurring pattern of inaction and procrastination, Dance shelves Hadntz’s notes and does nothing about the machine at all.
   
Eventually Dance and Wink are stationed in Tidworth, England, where the Army is preparing for Operation Overlord, and the two are put in charge of a machine shop for repairing radar equipment. Hadntz reappears, visiting from a more peaceful, more socially advanced alternate timeline in which she now lives, to urge Dance to get cracking on building the time-warping machine. He figures she’s right and, after all, he has a machine shop at his disposal, so he tells Wink about it and enlists his help.

Hadntz’s notes are only at the initial theoretical stage, so Dance and Wink do a lot of musing about how the machine might actually work. None of it is much to hang your hat on. They have a vague sense that it is some sort of “fusion of the organic with the quantum”—that it goes back in time and changes the structure of people’s DNA, and that by changing people’s DNA it changes their consciousness, and that by changing consciousness, it changes all of history. Their theory is that if they can go back and change people’s DNA to make them innately peace-loving, it will remove wars from history.
   
And Wink and Dance can’t help but do a lot of comparing of alternate histories to modern jazz: how the various merging and dividing timelines of history may be like the parallel intertwining refrains in the clashing but somehow complementary scales of be-bop. Again, this might have been more interesting if I cared about jazz.

Anyway, they get a prototype built, and we then experience the first of several occasions where they turn on the current version of whatever the machine is at the time, they have either a blackout or a surreal sense of time being suspended, and the machine itself physically changes, but nothing appears to happen to their timeline.

Their activation of the machine does block everybody’s radar, however, so they draw the suspicion of the OSS. The scrutiny makes them put aside the project and the machine sits on a shelf for several months as the war goes on.

Frustrated, Hadntz reappears to Dance from her alternate timeline to give him an inspirational tour of the horrors of the concentration camps, whereupon he is again recommitted to building the machine. He and Wink, now stationed at a base in recaptured Germany, build a revised version of the machine, turn it on, and again have nothing noticeable happen. Dance puts the machine aside yet again for several more months.

Through machinations either by Hadntz or the OSS, Dance is then forced to witness the A-bomb being dropped on Japan, which re-recommits him to building the machine before he shelves it again.

After the war is over, Dance does find that some things have actually changed. For example, according to everyone else in his timeline, Wink died while they were in Germany. But the Wink he knows is actually still alive in an alternate timeline (the same timeline as Hadntz). Alternate-timeline Wink is able to visit him occasionally during Army reunions.

At this point the storytelling speeds up and the next twenty years fly by in very few pages. Dance marries one of the OSS agents and they have three kids. The family lives through the partition of Germany, the space and nuclear arms races, the civil rights movement, and hippies. Dance goes through it all in a kind of stupor, frequently agonizing about the machine, which is hidden in a trunk in his attic, but not actually working on it.

Then suddenly, in the late 1960s, with about twenty pages to go in the book, Wink visits Dance one final time to tell him that their timelines are converging and that both will be destroyed unless he changes his to be more peaceful. Simultaneously, Dance’s oldest daughter gets hold of the machine and takes off with it to stop the Kennedy assassination. And at last we finally see some history-changing-related action from the machine—although it is really in the form of machine-assisted time travel, and the only warping of history comes from the actions of humans, not the machine.

It all ends up seeming like Goonan really just wanted to write a wartime history about an American soldier. And, indeed, her postscript reveals that Dance’s diary entries, which appear throughout the book, were all taken verbatim from her father’s real WWII journal. Which is clearly where her inspiration comes from, and which is touching and certainly adds authenticity.

But maybe it would have been better to write a straightforward wartime story in honor of her father, even a fictionalized one, rather than trying to stuff it into this thin skin of alternate history. The machine ends up being an awkward writer’s device, an almost inert and irrelevant accessory. And the alternate timeline is only glimpsed occasionally, rather than being baked integrally into the story. It is most unsatisfying.

This unsatisfying feeling is exacerbated by the descriptions of New York, London, and Berlin. They are filled with the kinds of superficial details that you might find in brief read of an encyclopedia entry or a travel guide, rather than the kinds of surprising color you might get from someone who was actually there or had done really intensive research on the period.

It also didn’t help any that the 2007 hardcover edition I read had numerous editing mistakes. There were several places where commas or periods were missing or the wrong words were used (e.g. “were” was used for “we’re” and “sun” was used for “gun”). And in one place the German word for no, nein, was misspelled as nien.

For an alternate history with real bite, I’d recommend The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick instead. And for a really well researched science fiction story set during World War II England, I’d recommend either Fire Watch or Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis.

Book Review: The Chronoliths

Robert Charles Wilson

2001
Awards: Campbell

Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Wilson really knows how to come up with a premise that immediately hooks you, and then how to reel out that premise over the course of a fast-paced, page-turning novel. The Chronoliths, is a solid case in point; it was almost as much fun as his later novel Spin.

Like Spin, The Chronoliths is set in the near future and stars ordinary people thrust into extraordinary times by threatening and mysterious futuristic technology.

When the book opens, the main character, our hero Scott Warden, is happily wasting his life away as an American ex-pat in Thailand, spending most of his time with his disreputable, drug-dealing best friend Hitch, and royally screwing up his relationship with his wife and small daughter, when he witnesses the sudden appearance, out of nowhere, of an enormous glassy blue obelisk smack in the middle of Bangkok. It has flattened most of downtown.

The writing on the obelisk explains that it is a monument commemorating the military victory of some leader named “Kuin” over Thailand—and it is dated more than twenty years in the future.

Scott and Hitch, naturally, decide they have to go investigate the monument and, naturally, they get detained almost immediately by military patrols. This means that Scott is not home when his daughter loses part of her hearing from a severe ear infection, prompting his wife to declare that she’s had enough of this lifestyle, and flies herself and their daughter back to the States.

                                                                                                      

Over the next few years, these blue monuments, dubbed “chronoliths” by the press, appear all over southeast Asia, and then start spreading elsewhere—Beijing, the Middle East, Cairo.

After the arrival of a couple chronoliths, an old physics professor of Scott’s, Sue Chopra, pulls him in to work for her. She is heading a government project to unravel the mystery of the chronoliths. She wants Scott involved because he was there at the appearance of the first one, and that makes her think his fate is somehow intertwined with theirs.

The chronoliths and the mysterious, seemingly unstoppable Kuin inspire panic, throwing the world into an economic tailspin. Poverty spikes, employment grinds to a halt, skirmishes break out everywhere. It is as if Kuin, by declaring his victories twenty years in advance, is causing countries to destroy themselves in fear and chaos before he even raises an army.

Which is exactly what Sue Chopra says is the point. The chronoliths themselves create a self-reinforcing feedback loop; by appearing, they destabilize countries and scare or impress people into following Kuin or acceding to him, thus earning him a victory before he has to fire a shot. If Sue can figure out how to disrupt the onward march of the chronoliths, she thinks that will reverse the feedback loop and prevent Kuin from coming to power in the first place.

The rest of the book is a relatively fast-paced race against time, in which Sue and Scott and their team have to figure out how the chronoliths got here and how to stop them before the twenty years are up and Kuin finally really arrives on the scene in person. Scott’s whole family ends up embroiled in it, with his daughter and his ex-wife’s new husband both getting caught up with dangerously fanatical groups of Kuin devotees.

                                   

The Chronoliths poses the usual deep-think time-travel questions, such as: What if the future is predetermined and no matter what I do now, it will inevitably contribute to bringing the chronoliths? And: What if I do prevent the chronoliths from coming and it causes some kind of paradox or parallel universe in which the things I know will no longer exist? But don’t expect anything super profound from it; it is primarily a fun, easy read.

Scott Warden kind of reminds me of the main present-day character from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Scott is a bearded hippiesh throwback and something of a ne’er-do-well, with penchants both for southeast Asian countries with beaches and for messing up his personal life. He’s not really all that appealing and not very sympathetic, except that he’s smart. But that doesn’t really matter; the ideas carry the book along in spite of Scott’s down sides.

I think Wilson could easily write a blockbuster multi-million-selling novel if he wanted to. He knows how to set up an engaging premise and then reveal its facets at a comfortable pace. I think maybe the reason they aren’t blockbusters is probably that they’re a little too subtle, and maybe a little too nerdy. Which, of course, is what makes his books better than your average blockbuster.

Book Review: Redshirts

John Scalzi

2012

Awards: Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book is so fast and so fun, you could easily read all of it in one longish day at the beach. Or in one late night (to early morning) of uninterrupted indulgence. It’s a satisfying guilty pleasure, like a special double episode of your favorite awkward but lovable cult sci-fi TV series.

The book takes place in what is basically the Star Trek universe, except that Scalzi can’t call anything by any of the Star Trek names because of potential trademark violations. The setting is the starship Intrepid, the flagship of Space Fleet, the naval arm of the Universal Union of Planets. The Intrepid has a familiar line-up of senior staff: a charismatic and sometimes overly emotive captain, a serious science officer, a skilled medical chief, a resourceful chief engineer, and a plucky lieutenant.

And the Intrepid also has a large supply of miscellaneous, low-ranking, red-shirted crewmen, whom it seems to knock off at an alarmingly fast pace.

Redshirts is told from the point of view of one of these miscellaneous low-ranking crewmen, ensign Andrew Dahl, who has just been assigned to the Intrepid straight out of Space Fleet Academy. Dahl quickly figures out that things are weird aboard his new ship.

For example, the ship’s inertial dampeners always work perfectly—except when the ship is being fired upon, and then the entire bridge crew has to jiggle around ridiculously while they perform evasive maneuvers. And the science lab where Dahl works has a piece of equipment called “the Box” that can perform scientific miracles, like synthesizing an antidote to a hitherto unknown alien illness—but it only functions when one of the senior staff members is in a crisis and there is an impossibly short time to solve it.

But the strangest thing of all is how flaky the crew is when it comes to away missions. On the Intrepid, away missions have an abnormally high mortality rate for crewmen below the rank of lieutenant. Ensigns on away missions are often killed in awful, unusual, and sometimes easily preventable ways, like by catching grotesque diseases or being eaten by rare carnivorous alien creatures. So crew members have developed an intense paranoia about it, and avoid the senior officers like the plague when a mission is likely to be called.

Dahl, being unusually brave and curious for an ensign, refuses to accept the status quo and sets it upon himself to figure out what is going on. Which, of course, gets him into deep trouble.

It’s really funny to see the quirky aspects of the Star Trek universe called out: the silly lines, the implausible situations, the use of ensign death to heighten dramatic tension. And the conversations between crew members are hilarious—snappy, sarcastic, and brusque. Everyone is always nervous because they never know when it might be their time to die a hideous death, so they tend to be testy and irritated with each other. They don’t have time to mess around, or to be caught standing around talking when a senior staff member comes by.

It is a good thing that Redshirts reads so quickly, because I don’t think the book’s central conceit would survive being dragged out much longer than it is. As it was, I did start getting worried about two-thirds through that Scalzi wouldn’t be able to keep the humor and dramatic tension going all the way to the end. And I think he could have easily dropped at least one of his three codas (preferably the first one). As a funny but sensitive exposé of the Trek characters and plot contrivances we love, I don’t think it hits the mark quite as well as Galaxy Quest. But it’s still very good, and very fun.

Book Review: The Big Time

Fritz Leiber
1957
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This book is really abstract and way out there. I think much of it was beyond me. But what I did get I really enjoyed.

The Big Time’s main premise is that the time in which we live is actually an enclosed environment, and that there is a zone surrounding us, a gray misty space outside of and separate from our time, where other beings live. These other beings can come and go into and out of our time at will, plopping onto our world at any time in our past or future that they choose.

Two groups of these beings, which we never actually see but which are called “Spiders” and “Snakes” by the main characters, are fighting a massive war against each other, using our time as their battlefield. This war involves them: (a) recruiting recently-dead people to be soldiers and support staff for their side, (b) resurrecting the ones who agree to sign up, and (c) sending the resurrected soldiers into different eras of our time to fight the forces of the other side.

Through this process, the Spider and Snake soldiers have managed to screw up history in all kinds of ways, like by changing the outcomes of important battles in ancient Rome and assassinating key people during World War II who had never been assassinated before.

The entire book takes place in the misty realm outside of our time, in a sort of behind-the-lines R&R spot for Spider soldiers. The spot is populated by resurrected formerly-dead people who serve as entertainers, prostitutes, counselors, and doctors for the troops. These “ghosts” are pretty satisfied with how things are going until one visiting soldier decides to mutiny against the Spiders, breaks the connection to real time so they’re floating lost in the timeless zone, and then starts the countdown on a portable atomic bomb.

The main character who narrates the story is one of the prostitute/counselor/entertainers. She is very appealing; she has a laid-back attitude and uses a lot of slang, and, although she is our guide to this weird world, she doesn’t feel the need to explain a heck of a lot. I also really liked the variety of the other characters. Since the Spiders can recruit from any place and time they want to, their support staff and soldiers are necessarily from all different countries and all different eras, including the future.


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

Book Review: The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

1974

Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The Forever War is a novel about a centuries-long outer space war between our Earth forces and an alien enemy we know almost nothing about.

Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, wrote The Forever War as a deliberate counterpoint to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which was published fifteen years earlier. In Starship Troopers, the insect-like enemy is relentlessly vicious and homicidal, giving the soldiers a clear purpose and justification for their fight. In The Forever War, the humanoid enemy is about as competent (and incompetent) and about as aggressive (and cautious) as we are; we seem just to battle each other to a stalemate on remote outposts over and over and over again. And the reasons for the war become ever murkier as the decades roll by.

The Forever War may have originated as a response to Heinlein, but it ended up as a key work of science fiction in its own right. The book has a good plot and good characters, vivid battle scenes, and inventive futuristic technology. It is a realistic story of the monotony and anxiety of war preparation and the terror and confusion of battle told by someone who clearly went through it himself.

The novel’s main character is William Mandella, a relatively ordinary guy blessed with common sense, luck, and a master’s degree in physics. In 1997, at the age of 22, he is drafted into Earth’s interstellar army to fight the Taurans, a humanoid species from many light years away.

We on Earth first learned about the Taurans in 1996 when one of our spaceships on a routine colonial mission (near the constellation of Taurus) went missing, and data from a follow-up probe revealed that the ship had been destroyed by an alien vessel. Based only on this information, we naturally immediately launched an all-out war against them. We don’t know where their home planet is, and they don’t know where ours is, so we fight each other in relatively even-handed skirmishes around intermediate portal planets near where the first incident happened.

Earthlings and Taurans alike get to these portal planets by going through collapsars, wormhole-like features which let you travel to a specific point light years across the galaxy in a matter of days. While traveling through collapsars, soldiers experience time dilation: they age only the time it takes to get to the other side, while years and sometimes decades are passing by in the rest of the galaxy.

                                                                                 

This means that a battalion may arrive at a new post after what feels to them to be only a few months after their last assignment, but that the Taurans they meet next may be from decades in the real-time future, with correspondingly improved weapons. Soldiers never know from battle to battle what foe they will face.

This also means, of course, that any friends and relatives the soldiers leave behind on Earth will age for many years, and even decades, while the soldiers age only months. Each time the soldiers return to port, they have to cope with lost loved ones, as well as adjusting to new customs, language, money, and technology. This is, needless to say, very hard, and causes them to bond much more closely to their fellow soldiers than to people back home.

                                                                                                

Our hero, William Mandella, starts out as a private at the beginning of the war who manages, through a combination of luck and initiative, not to get killed in his first several battles. Racking up hundreds of years of seniority on Earth after each of his collapsar jumps, he gets inexorably promoted higher in the chain of command until he is a major after only a few real-time years of service.

But the more wartime experience Mandella has, the more he wonders whether there is any point whatsoever to what he is fighting for. No one seems to have idea of a general strategy; even after hundreds of years have gone by, the soldiers still fight ad hoc battle after ad hoc battle and make adjustments on the fly. Soldiers are not interested in winning a glorious, justified war, but in avoiding being killed. The training they go through takes place in conditions that bear no relationship to actual battle situations. There is little or no recognition from home of their sacrifice, aside from the fact that Earth’s economy has grown dependent on it and will collapse if the war ends. And during his entire term of service, Mandella has had to cope with the death of almost everyone he knows and loves, whether through time dilation or gruesome death in battle.

There are a few clunky aspects to the story, and others that seem to carry too obvious of a message to work. One in particular is the way Earth’s overpopulation prompts the planet at one point to create a program of enforced homosexuality and selected cloning.

But for the most part, Haldeman writes clearly and colorfully and doesn’t trip you up with vagueness or inconsistency or too-obvious messages. He tells a good story and at the same time leaves you with a deep sense of the cost—in lost lives, friendships, wealth, and mental stability—of a pointless, protracted war.

Book Review: Timescape

Gregory Benford
1980
Awards: Nebula, Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Timescape is set in the very near future. The back story is that pesticides developed in the past few decades have made their ways into our oceans and have started changing the cellular structure of microorganisms there. These altered microorganisms consume oxygen-producing algae and are spreading like mad, slowly destroying the entire food chain. By 1998 (which is the future, in this book) this has led to massive shortages, poverty, and crime, and things are getting worse fast.

Meanwhile, a group of scientists has discovered that if they broadcast tachyons in controlled bursts to a specific location in galactic space – to a location that the Earth used to occupy – they can send a coded signal back in time. If they want to send a signal back 50 years, for example, they would beam the tachyons towards the point in space where the Earth would have been 50 years ago. They figure if they can do this, they can let the scientists of the past know about the dangers of the pesticides before the pesticides even get manufactured, and thus the future will be changed for the better.

The tricky part is that the scientists of the past don’t know about tachyons yet and won’t know the message is coming so they won't be looking for it. So the scientists of 1998 have to beam the tachyons to a time when they know there were nuclear resonance experiments going on and basically cross their fingers, hoping that the tachyons will come up as noise in those experiments and that the scientists of the past will see the noise, realize that the noise has a pattern, figure out how to decode the pattern, and believe it once they have decoded it.

The nuclear resonance experimenters of 1963 do pick up the noise, fortunately, but then have to go through a methodical scientific process of trying to figure out what it is. It feels agonizingly slow. They go down several blind alleys and get distracted by outside events. I wanted to yell at them, “It’s a message from the future already! Hurry up and figure it out before it’s too late!” But it is also realistic; you can't expect responsible scientists to go any faster with something like this. And this creates good suspense.

The science is, in fact, the best part of Timescape. Gregory Benford is a physicist himself, so the theories, processes, laboratories, and equipment are believable and solid.

The details of academia also add a lot of color and clearly are written by someone who knows what he's talking about. The characters go through totally realistic classes, publications, advisory sessions, departmental squabbles, presentations at inter-disciplinary colloquia, and even a doctoral candidacy examination.

Being a time-travel story of a sort, the book raises the usual questions about paradoxes. In particular, if the scientists of 1963 prevent the development of the pesticides, then the scientists of 1998 won't need to send the message back in time anymore. Will that mean that they won't have sent it after all and we will get stuck in an endless paradox loop? Or will the scientists of 1998 emerge from their lab babbling like madmen about an environmental catastrophe that everyone else knows was avoided decades ago? Benford’s resolution of all this is interesting.

What drags the book down is the human-interest filler stuck in between the scientific parts. I was totally bored by the personal lives of the scientists in both 1963 and 1998. I didn’t care about their love interests or their emotional baggage.

Also, when the characters are not talking about physics, their conversations are stilted and awkward. This is particularly true for the British characters, who sound forced and inauthentic. One of the Britons uses the word “sod” three times on one page and it clunks all three times.

Fortunately, the human interest sections make up only about a third of the book. If you skip over all of them, it makes for quite a good story.

(Note: see No Enemy But Time for a slightly different resolution to a similar time-travel paradox.)


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.