Book Review: A Fire Upon the Deep

Vernor Vinge
1993
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ - - -

As advertised on the cover, this certainly is grand-scope, universe-covering sci-fi. It is generally well crafted and many of the ideas are cool. But I found that I lost interest in most of the story lines.

Vinge divides the galaxy into concentric regions, from the core to the periphery: the Unthinking Depths, the Slow Zone, and the Beyond. The regions’ names reflect the level of technology that will work in them; as you go out from the core, you are able to use progressively higher and higher levels of technology. (Faster-than-light propulsion won’t work in the Unthinking Depths, for example.)

Outside of the galaxy is a region called the Transcend which is the home of entities that are so unbelievably powerful that humans can’t even comprehend their abilities. A group of humans living at the farthest edge of the galaxy accidentally wakes up an evil entity in the Transcend, and the entity starts to take over the galaxy, turning more and more worlds to its thrall as it makes its way inwards.

One group of humans is able to escape with a space-bending tool that can stop the evil entity. Unfortunately, they end up crash-landing on a planet in the Slow Zone and all the adults are killed by the planet's medieval dog-like indigenous residents so it is up to the human children to save the galaxy.

I found the adult humans in this story generally annoying. The kids were okay and I liked the dog-creatures a lot. Each dog-creature is actually a “pack” made up of anywhere from four to six individual living “elements.” By themselves, the elements can’t think well and tend to run around randomly, but when several are combined into a pack, they can form a single highly intelligent being. The book picks up when it is focused on the dog world but it definitely slows down when it switches to the human story lines (which, unfortunately, take up most of the book). 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Klingon Kitteh

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Book Review: The Falling Woman

Pat Murphy
1986
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

The Falling Woman is set in Dzibilchaltún, a Maya archeological site near Mérida, Mexico. The main character is an archeologist, Elizabeth Butler, who can see the ghosts of the ancient Maya working and playing around her--often more realistically than she can see her own live workmen and graduate students.

Butler’s long-estranged daughter, who is going through a sort of a lost period following the death of her father, comes to see her and stays to work on the dig. Both mother and daughter then start to see the ghost of a formidable Mayan priestess who can see them too, and who has unpleasant designs on both of them, including wanting Butler to murder her daughter.

The book is clearly and straightforwardly written, the plot is decently exciting and well paced, and the subject matter certainly has potential. My major gripe with it was that there were so many, many details about both the Maya and the field work that didn’t sit right with me. And when I consulted with some Mesoamerican archeologists of my acquaintance, they confirmed that most of these details were either goofy or just plain wrong.

The first thing that jarred me out of the story’s dreamland ghost story vibe was when Butler, the head of the dig, actually puts her cigarette out on the wall of one of the site’s stone temples. Not only would a burning cigarette accelerate the disintegration of an irreplaceable artifact thousands of years old, but it would, as my experts pointed out, contaminate her charcoal and radiocarbon samples.

One of the other archeologists on Butler's crew is described as having a habit of putting any piece of pottery he finds into his mouth, straight out of the ground, and cleaning it off with his spit on the spot. My experts confirmed that you should use water; no one uses saliva because it's acidic and damaging. Also, it's gross.

One of Butler's graduate students explains that the best times to survey are at dawn and dusk, because you are better able to see regular lines and lumps in the ground that might signal human construction. My experts, who have used local history, vegetation patterns, and aerial photography to scout locations, and who know that lumps in the ground that form randomly over thousands of years can be quite deceiving, say: “Completely silly. Silly to the max.”

At one point, the archeologists in the book talk about there having been trade between Teotihuacán (in Mexico) and Guatemala, as evidenced by the fact that Teotihuacán pottery has been found in Guatemala. I had been taught by Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel to be wary of a lot of north-south trade in the Americas, so I questioned that as well. My experts said that, yes, there was indeed trade all over Mesoamerica. So some pottery from Teotihuacán did make its way to Guatemala. But it is not clear whether it was direct face-to-face trade or passed gradually from one group to another. In addition, most of the Teotihuacán-style pots in Guatemala are actually locally-made imitations.

And finally (or finally for what I have the patience to write here), the central plot of the book rests on the assumption that the Maya performed human sacrifices, in the form of throwing people into their cenotes (sacred wells). My experts say that this idea is based on a story that was published at the beginning of the 20th century, itself based primarily on one dubious statement made by a 16th century Spanish explorer.

I wanted to get into the story. I really did. And I might have been able to if it had been a little less serious about itself. I am willing to overlook a lot of flaws and suspend quite a hefty chunk of disbelief for the sake of a good story--as long as the story isn't pretending to be any more expert than it is. The main problem here is that the book purports to present a realistic portrayal of an archeological dig (aside from the ghosts), but that the inaccuracies poke too many holes in that realism and the whole thing thus falls apart.

Take Raiders of the Lost Ark as the best possible counter-example.

In Raiders, you have a guy whose primary tools, rather than a Marshalltown trowel and a whisk broom, are a .45 revolver and a bullwhip. He spends far more time punching out Nazis and romancing his lady friend than carefully sifting through ancient trash piles. It is a completely unrealistic portrayal of archeological field work. But it is an absolutely classic adventure, and doesn't pretend to be anything but.

One of my expert archeologists cited above is actually also one of the world's biggest fans of Raiders. We saw it together in the theater when it first came out; I remember him laughing heartily when Indiana Jones’s workmen are digging for the entrance to the Well of Souls with giant, artifact-destroying shovels, and they hit the roof with a huge thunk, ripping off a piece of the ancient wood.

He went out and bought a fedora the next day.


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

In Honor of The Hobbit

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Book Review: The Moon and the Sun

Vonda N. McIntyre
1996
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

The Moon and the Sun takes place at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. The main story revolves around a minor lady of the court, Marie-Josèphe, whose beloved brother Yves is one of the king’s scientific explorers. On one of Yves’ ocean voyages he manages to capture two humanoid sea monsters. One of them dies in the process but he brings them both back to Versailles, installing the live one in a pool and conducting a dissection of the dead one under observation by the king.

The living sea monster becomes the attraction of the summer at court, with nobles coming to gawk at her in her pool. Marie-Josèphe is the only person willing to pay enough attention to the sea monster (and to spend time with her outside of gawking hours) to realize that she is an intelligent creature and thinks like a human and can communicate (through song).

Unfortunately, of course, no one believes Marie-Josèphe about this. And, in fact, the king wants to cook and eat the sea monster at a banquet. So Marie-Josèphe and her brother have to engineer an escape.

This is actually a novel of alternate history, but you don’t know that until the very end. The idea is that this all really did happen; there really were intelligent sea monsters living in the ocean in the 1600s, and two were brought back to Versailles. But in our version of history, the sea monster was eaten by the king and the world was never any the wiser and all the sea monsters went extinct, most killed by sailors who didn’t know what they were killing.

In The Moon and the Sun’s version of history, Marie-Josèphe and her brother saved the sea monster, humans found out that they were not the only intelligent species on earth, human-sea monster diplomatic relations were established and it changed history right down to the modern day.

The story itself was so-so. But it served as a great vehicle for embedding you in life at Versailles. I thought the best parts of the book by far were the everyday details and nuances of court behavior – including how the women did their hair and handled their periods – which really made the era come alive.

I liked how every little part of the king’s life got blown up into something unbelievably ceremonial and elaborate. The very highest-ranking nobles at court, for example, had the dubious honor of being required to get up super-early, dressed to the nines, to attend the "awakening" of the king each morning. (The king actually woke up several hours earlier and had his hair and makeup and clothes done, so what the courtiers saw was really his second awakening, but you can’t have the king looking disheveled.)

There are also some great king-related moments around the otherwise sad scenes of the dead sea monster's dissection, which the king insists on attending in person. One day he is unable to come, so the men-at-arms bring in a portrait of the king instead and put it on the king's chair, and everyone has to act like the portrait is the actual king.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: This Immortal

Originally published in serial form as ...And Call Me Conrad
Roger Zelazny
1965
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The funny thing about this book is that it is not a terrifically complex story, and it is pretty short – 216 pages in my 1989 paperback edition – but it shared the 1966 Hugo award for best novel with the mighty Dune.

And I have to say, I agree with the Hugo voters. It’s a really good book.

I think the main reason it is up there with Dune, in spite of its plot’s relative normal-ness, is because of Roger Zelazny’s great character development and writing technique. He writes in a combination of styles: plain-spoken narrative that occasionally switches into the elaborate, archaic language of religious texts and ancient legends with total smoothness. This can be really funny and also oddly, unexpectedly moving. (Zelazny exhibits this talent to the hilt in his other Hugo-award-winning novel, Lord of Light.)

This Immortal takes place on Earth several hundred years after a three-day nuclear war wiped out most humans and destroyed most continental mainland. The few humans that survived fled to islands or to off-world colonies on space stations or other planets.

Since the war, humans have met the Vegans – that is, blue-skinned humanoid aliens from the planet Vega. They are far more advanced and civilized than us (which is especially obvious given that we have blown up our own planet) and have basically taken over Earth, buying up most of the remaining quality Terran real estate and turning the absentee human government on the planet Taler into a puppet regime.

At the beginning of the book, the Vegans send an emissary down to be led on a tour of Earth’s greatest places. He is supposedly there to write a travelogue, but some humans – especially those in the anti-Vegan resistance movement known as the Radpol – think he is there to figure out how to put the final nail in humanity’s coffin.

Fortunately for us, the puppet human government has assigned the Vegan a native Earth guide and bodyguard: Conrad Nomikos, the narrator of our story. Conrad is none too pleased about acting as a Vegan’s protector and pretty much just wants to be left to himself to lounge around on his Greek island with his wife. He is ugly, proud, grumpy, and cynical, but also a natural leader and an excellent fighter. He is also cool-headed and sane, unlike just about everyone else he runs into.

He also happens to be immortal (a side effect of a radiation-related mutation). He does his best to conceal this from his acquaintances but sometimes it just, well, you know, comes out. Especially when he runs into one of his great-great-grandchildren or someone who knew him in a previous life, or when somebody, like, for example, the Vegan emissary, takes the time to do a computer search on humans with Conrad’s unique physical characteristics and comes up with four or five matches spread out evenly across several hundred years.

Because Conrad's long lifespan, as it turns out, is why the Vegan chose him as his bodyguard and tour guide in the first place.

The story is basically just the tale of Conrad accompanying the Vegan on his mysterious tour and trying to prevent various Radpol agents from assassinating him until Conrad can figure out if the mission is for good or for ill. They run into plenty of dangerous mutants – human, animal, and combo human/animal – who want to do them both in. It’s a bit of a parallel (overtly referenced by the author) to the twelve labors of Hercules, with Conrad as the Herc.

The story is fun and plenty of the other characters and beasties are entertaining. It's simple. But what it lacks in depth and length (compared to Dune, at least), it makes up for with the quirkiness and appeal of the main character and the writing.


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

Cat Vader

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Book Review: Red Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1992
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SPOILER ALERT

Red Mars is super-great, hardest-of-the-hard science fiction.

It is the first book in Robinson’s Mars trilogy and it follows the experiences of the first hundred human colonists on Mars through their difficult first few decades of settlement. It is so practical and so thorough in its details that you can completely imagine it happening in real life. And you can picture yourself there, standing on the frozen, rocky Martian surface with them.

Robinson's “First Hundred” settlers were all carefully selected by their various governments for their technical expertise, diversity of skills, and psychological profiles. They trained together for years in Antarctica in preparation for setting up the first permanent Martian colony. After landing on Mars, they begin building ingenious living quarters, transportation systems, greenhouses, and power plants.

A small group also begins an unauthorized, clandestine effort to introduce Antarctic lichens and other hardy living organisms to the planet to start oxygenating the atmosphere.

Every detail in this book is totally realistic, from the heated pressure suits they have to wear on the surface, to the different types of structures they choose build as homes, to the machines that extract ores and elements from the air and rock.

The colonists’ inevitable arguments and power struggles are equally believable. The longer the First Hundred stay on Mars, the more they separate into the “greens,” who want to terraform Mars to make it livable for humans, and the “reds,” who want to keep Mars as it is.

Meanwhile, as each colonist is trying to create or preserve their own preferred version of Mars, Earth has become dangerously overpopulated and in serious economic trouble. The multinational corporations on Earth who funded the original colonization effort now naturally want to exploit Mars’s resources for Earth’s benefit, and they start sending up more people to do so. Many of the original colonists need the corporations’ support to do their work, but even many of the more Earth-friendly of them are resistant to this complete exploitation.

Corporate representatives eventually build a space elevator to make it easier for ships to make the trip between Earth and Mars. The elevator is a giant cable stretching from a high point on Mars’ equator up through the atmosphere to the hollowed-out shell of an asteroid which has been captured and moved into geosynchronous orbit above the surface station. Passengers and cargo use elevator cars to go up and down the cable between the asteroid and the planet's surface; ships only have to dock at the asteroid and don’t have to burn fuel to get in and out of Martian gravity.

The elevator is great for commerce and immigration. But to many of the First Hundred--especially the "reds"--it symbolizes all that is bad about the direction Mars is going. Eventually, the anti-corporate resistance organizes a revolution, which is unsuccessful and results in the corporations taking over Mars in a military crackdown, but during which they are at least able to bring down the space elevator. The collapse of the elevator is beautiful; it is tremendous slow-motion destruction on a gigantic scale.

To complicate the Earth-Mars conflict still further, a group of doctors on Mars develops treatments which can prolong life by hundreds of years--and they start giving the treatments to their fellow First Hundred colonists. They keep this secret as long as they can, but eventually Earth finds out. This causes chaos on Earth; some politicians want to keep the treatments exclusive, knowing that giving them to everyone would only worsen the population problems, while others say that the treatments are a human right and should be available to everyone for free.

Regardless of what is good for Earth, the age treatments are great for the reader, because they mean that some of the original First Hundred colonists will be able to live long enough to see the fruits of their labors in Robinson’s fantastic later books, Green Mars and Blue Mars.


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

Book Review: The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi
2009
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
 
The Windup Girl takes place in near-future Bangkok after several environmental nightmares have come true. Worldwide oil supplies are completely depleted, so all machines and vehicles are wind, hydrogen, solar, coil-spring, pressure, human, animal, or coal-powered. Global warming has made temperatures soar and sea levels rise dramatically, so Bangkok has to be protected from complete inundation by a system of pumps and levees. And nearly all plants and animals have been wiped out by diseases and have been replaced with genetically engineered variants.

This last is not an accident. Agribusiness corporations deliberately hoarded stores of seeds and then manufactured the diseases, pests, and plagues that wiped out the naturally-occurring plants and animals, so they could profit by selling the starving world their own genetically-modified, disease-resistant, but sterile products. They now basically rule the world economy.

Thailand has held their own against the agribusiness corporations relatively well because they sealed their borders to imports and hired their own secret, illegal “gene-ripper” to develop new, fertile varieties of their own native plants and distribute them on the black market. One of the major agribusiness companies has sent in a secret agent, a “calorie man,” Anderson Lake, to try to discover who the gene hacker is and where his seed bank is stored. Along the way, he meets and (sort of) falls in love with Emiko, a Japanese windup girl – a genetically modified, semi-robotic human conditioned to obey and to serve.

Thailand is ruled nominally by a child queen, and in reality by her regent, the Somdet Chaopraya. Two of her ministries – Trade and Environment – are led by strong, ambitious men who vie against each other to be the next regent. The story is a little confusing and doesn’t really have any one central plot, but essentially what happens is that Emiko and the calorie man get mixed up in the escalating power struggle and eventually serve as catalysts leading to the death of the Somdet Chaopraya and bringing on an all-out civil war.

After I finished this book, I went back and forth for a long time deciding whether I liked it or not. On balance, I decided on a somewhat lukewarm yes.

The near-future Bangkok that Bacigalupi presents is rich and multi-layered and easily pictured. He has unique inventions – the windup girl herself, the calorie men, the genetically engineered animals that populate the city, and the types of energy and propulsion that people have to use in a petroleum-depleted world.

On the other hand, there are a couple major things that are either too disturbing or too annoying to ignore.

First: language. For one thing, this book is written in the present tense, which I’m realizing I generally don’t like in a novel (although I have to admit that it isn’t nearly as annoying here as it is in the Yiddish Policemen’s Union). But the primary irritant in this one is the use of hyperbole.

Everything is described so dramatically. This over-emphasizes the minor events and makes them seem cataclysmic, so that you get desensitized to the drama, and then the parts that really are cataclysmic have less of an impact than they should.

Also, his hyperbolic phrases are pleasing and catchy at first, but after they are used for the fourth or fifth time, they begin to seem formulaic. After a while, I started writing down the particularly obvious repeats:

- Alleys running thick with blood
- Light spearing eyes
- Scalding skin / skin on fire (with heat)
- Ribs exploding with pain / ribs screaming (after beatings)
- Blossoming (e.g. Blood blossoming red after person is shot; a blossom of pain; legs blossoming with hurt)

Second, and more importantly: there are two major rape scenes, both involving Emiko. I’m not sure how to judge the necessity of a graphic rape scene, but these certainly were very disturbing and seemed to go on well past the point where the point was made. I really started to bridle viscerally at how much Bacigalupi felt he had to do to prove how Emiko’s conditioning made her obey even at the cost of her total shame and extreme physical pain.

I did particularly like one of the first scenes in the book, though, where Anderson Lake has to shoot a megodont (a genetically engineered elephant) who has gone rogue in his factory. It reminded me a lot (perhaps intentionally so) of George Orwell’s great essay Shooting an Elephant.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Dunecat

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