Space Travel Posters from the Museum of Science Fiction

Reader and science fiction fan CQ alerted me to these fantastic "retro-futuristic" travel posters by Steve Thomas. They are from an exhibition called Future of Travel at Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. 

It turns out that the Future of Travel exhibition is part of an educational campaign and PR effort by the Museum of Science Fiction, which right now is only virtual but which will open its doors in an actual building in Washington in 2018. The excitement builds!

Book Review: Deadline

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)
2011
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

BEWARE… SPOILER ALERT FOR FEED

Deadline, the second book in Grant’s zombie-apocalypse Newsflesh trilogy, picks up the story about a year after where the first book, Feed, left off. It is 2041; Senator Peter Ryman has gone on to be president of the United States; and Shaun Mason is running the After the End Times online news agency by himself, following the assassination of his sister Georgia by former vice presidential candidate David Tate.

Like Feed, this novel opens with a gripping action scene. In this one, Shaun has to rescue his most seasoned reporter and a trainee out on his first field test from a sea of about thirty zombies.

The difference this time is that Shaun’s heart is no longer really in it. His sister's death has filled him with a profound loneliness. He has gone a little bit crazy, conducting frequent, extremely realistic two-way conversations with Georgia in his head. And he worries that, without her, maybe there’s no longer any point to any of what he does. To avoid endangering his staff with his distractedness and lack of enthusiasm, he has even taken himself out of the field work he was so good at before.

But, sure enough, something happens to suck him back in. At his office in Oakland, he gets a visit from Kelly Connolly, a CDC doctor who has faked her own death and escaped from her employers so that she could get to Shaun and have him expose a sinister conspiracy that she has discovered. And this conspiracy is related to Georgia’s untimely death, which is the only reason Shaun takes the case.

Dr. Connolly’s discovery is that people like Georgia, who have non-lethal “reservoir conditions” associated with the Kimberlee zombie virus, are dying of seemingly accidental causes at much higher rates than the average population. And anyone who notices this trend and tries to research it, or even bring it up to their superiors at the CDC, winds up dead themselves.

Not coincidentally, just as Dr. Connolly is revealing her discovery to the After the End Times staff, the entire city of Oakland is massively bombed by the U.S. military, which excuses the action by claiming it is trying to stop a zombie outbreak. Shaun, Dr. Connolly, and several of Shaun’s reporters barely escape to rural California with their lives.

They are then almost constantly on the run for the rest of the book. They visit rogue scientists unaffiliated with the CDC to have them look at Dr. Connolly’s data; they go to a branch CDC office in Portland to ask them about the results; and inevitably they wind up going to CDC headquarters in Memphis to confront the director. Everywhere they go, they are held at gunpoint, threatened, shot at, or “accidentally” shut into buildings with hordes of zombies. And after they finally get out of Memphis and head home to tell the world what they know, they have to survive a cross-country drive back to California during the middle of the largest zombie outbreak in recorded history.

Deadline is set in exactly the same world as Feed, has many of the same characters, and is similarly filled with near-constant action and suspense. But it is nowhere near as compelling a story.

For one thing, the characters aren’t as interesting. Grant killed off three of the best characters in Feed—two good and one bad—leaving us mainly with second-stringers in this second book. I wasn’t really attached to any of them, so when they are in danger or even die, there wasn't nearly as much of an emotional pull. The news agency staffers’ styles are not very differentiated, so most of their blog excerpts sound very similar to each other. And there are two short-lived romantic entanglements thrown in which serve only as pointless distractions rather than plot- or character-enriching experiences.

For another thing, the chief villain’s master plan is, well, weak. It’s a tremendous anticlimax when we learn what it is. It’s hard to believe that even he believes in his goals enough to kill for them.

The medical discussions and explanations—of which there are many in this book—are abstract and confusing. It’s hard to build up enough horror or suspense about substrains, reservoirs, chimera, and immunology when the explanations of them are so muddy. Grant said that while writing Deadline she got a lot of advice from real scientists and doctors about how to talk about virology, and it almost seems like maybe that was a mistake.

I also became irritated with Grant’s technique of having the characters realize something before we (the reader) do—usually because we don’t know all the information they know—and then excruciatingly slowly drawing out the reveal of what they know as a way to amp up the dramatic tension. One conversation in which Shaun knew perfectly well what Dr. Connolly was avoiding saying went on for three pages while he tried to get her to say it instead of just explaining it himself and moving on. It was filled with dialogue like this:

     “I’m going to ask you one question, Doc, and I want you to think really hard about your answer, because you’re legally dead, and if we want to hand you to this nice lady,” I gestured toward Dr. Abbey, “for her experiments, well, there’s really not much you can do about it. Don’t lie to me. Understand?”
     Kelly nodded mutely.
     “Good. I’m glad to see that we have an agreement. Now tell me: The reservoir conditions. What do they do? What do they really do?”

And then she wouldn't answer, and he'd try another tack. I think you should either have the characters tell us what they have figured out, or don’t tell us, but don’t tell us over and over that they’ve figured out something, and then make them go pale or have their eyes widen with horror, and then act all cagey about it for several pages. It doesn’t make it more suspenseful; it makes it annoying.

And Shaun, our lone remaining hero from Feed, who I really wanted to pin my faith on, is revealed to have a serious anger management problem. When he is stressed out, or anxious, or mad, he handles it by being nasty to underlings, slamming cell phones, punching walls, and shoving computer equipment. Once, in the past, he actually punched one of his employees in the face. It made me miss Georgia’s rational, steadying influence quite a bit.

And, finally, speaking of Georgia’s steadying influence: Shaun’s conversations with Georgia’s ghost do bring her back into the book a little and do mitigate his personality problems somewhat. But Shaun consistently interrupts the nice flow of those conversations by commenting on just how whacked out everyone must be by him talking to his dead sister. To wit:

     Don’t be so hard on yourself, said George. You’re tired.
     “That’s easy for you to say,” I snapped, before I could stop myself. Then I froze, casting a careful glance toward Maggie. I was expecting… I don’t know what I was expecting. I get a lot of reactions to the fact that I still talk to my sister. Most of them aren’t good ones.

     My eyes were normal until I was almost at the amplification threshold, said George thoughtfully. The retinal distortion didn’t kick in until then.
     “I know,” I mumbled, keeping my voice low, so as to hopefully avoid reminding my team that I was crazy. 

Commenting on it a couple times, early on, to show how people are reacting to his craziness, would be fine. But when every single time he talks to Georgia he also has to make some mention of how someone rolls their eyes or looks at him funny, or how he mumbles because he doesn’t want people to hear him, it distracts from these often crucial conversations and makes them herky-jerky. I'd rather just hear what Georgia's ghost has to say.

Anyway... while reading Deadline, I really thought I was going to be done with the Newsflesh trilogy. But then, of course, Grant added a twist—or actually two twists—at the end of this book that still made me want to read the next one. So forget everything I just said, and let’s go read Blackout.

Book Review: Feed

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)

2010

Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Feed is a zombie apocalypse novel. Zombies are trendy subject matter. And, as I’ve said before, zombies are the only fictional monsters that I’m terrified of enough that I studiously avoid watching even supposedly great movies and TV shows about them. But this book is really, really fun, and it’s making me rethink my sweeping anti-zombie-story stance.

The story takes place in 2047, three decades after a zombie apocalypse has killed off much of humanity and changed America into a shuttered, defensive, constantly vigilant society.

What happened was that back in 2014, medical researchers developed two separate helper viruses: the Kellis virus, a cure for the common cold, and the Amberlee virus, a cure for cancer. Both worked as planned on their respective targets. And, separately, the two cures would have been miracles for humanity.

But when the two came into contact with each other, as they quickly did, they combined to form the highly virulent hybrid Kellis-Amberlee virus, which not only spread like wildfire through the human population, but also had the unfortunate effect of causing people to die, and then after they were dead, to rise again as flesh-eating zombies, mindlessly seeking live people to gnaw on, until they eventually fell apart and died a final, permanent death

At first, most people didn’t really know (or want to believe) that a zombie apocalypse was really happening. It was George Romero fans and people in the sci-fi internet community who first recognized it for what it was and developed strategies for survival. They rapidly discovered that everything about the Living Dead movies was true, and the films became survival guides. To wit:

• To kill a zombie, you have to shoot it in the head (or otherwise decapitate it)
• A zombie bite will kill you and then cause you to become a zombie
• Recently-turned zombies are faster and slightly more intelligent (and thus more dangerous) than longer-turned zombies

The disproportionate survival of internet users meant that by 2047, the primary news medium has become internet blogging, which provides the world’s only real information lifeline. And, accordingly, the main characters in Feed are Georgia and Shaun Mason, brother and sister journalist bloggers, whose job it is to go out into the still-dangerous parts of the country to report what is going on to the majority of the population that is too afraid to leave their homes.

Georgia is the primary narrator of the story. She is snarky, witty, anti-establishment, and standoffish to all but her closest friends. She is also entirely devoted to her brother and to reporting the truth. The fact that she has a Kellis-Amberlee-related eye condition is a constant challenge for her to overcome, and a constant tension-raising reminder of the virus.

Georgia’s brother Shaun is a little wilder; he likes to go into the countryside and poke zombies with sticks to keep the viewers entertained. But underneath the daredevil image, he is devoted to his sister and to the team of support people who work for them, and would never seriously endanger them on purpose.

The book opens with a dramatic motorcycle zombie chase scene in which Georgia and Shaun barely escape with their lives. It hooks you in immediately and the action and/or suspense don’t really let up from there. Moments after returning from the motorcycle chase, Georgia and Shaun’s news team is invited to cover Senator Peter Ryman, who is running for president. They are embedded with the Ryman campaign and are thus in the middle of it all when, after a speaking appearance, the senator’s entourage is attacked by someone who sabotages the warning systems and injects some of the supporters and security personnel with the zombifying Kellis-Amberlee virus. Georgia, Shaun, and the remainder of the senator’s staff are able to fight off the recently-turned zombies, but then the senator’s home is attacked in a similar way, and one of his daughters is killed.

At that point, they all realize that someone is set on seeing the senator dead, and it becomes a race against time for Georgia and Shaun to figure out who and why before the election—and before they get killed themselves.

Feed is as fun and easy to read as a Stephen King novel, but with an extra Generation-X snarkiness that is really appealing. This book is proof that you don’t have to have an obscure writing style or a zillion ultra-clever intertwining plot lines to make for an absorbing and fulfilling read. Engaging characters, a well-planned plot and ending, snappy and funny dialogue, and near-constant suspense will do that just fine. And although the book reads mostly as a light horror-mystery-action adventure, there is a large twist at the end that adds a great deal of seriousness and depth to the plot—and probably kills any chance of it being made into a Hollywood movie.

                                                                                            

One warning: this book is the first in a three-part trilogy. (I'll be reviewing the second installment, Deadline, in my next post.) If you think this novel might be one you want to read, and you don't like spoilers, do not read the descriptions on the backs of any of the subsequent books or any reviews of any of them before you read this one.

Book Review: Genesis

Poul Anderson

2000       

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ – – – –

I don’t know what the Campbell Award judges were thinking when they read this book. Genesis is a confused, undeveloped, sometimes pretentious story that veers from one partially-formed idea to another in a style akin to that of Vernor Vinge. The one advantage that this book has over Vinge’s novels is that it is relatively short.

The main character in Genesis is Christian Brannock, a man from near-future Earth. As a boy, Brannock dreams of discovering life in other star systems. As an adult, he finds work building transmission towers on Mercury; there he works with a semi-intelligent robot, Gimmick, with whom he is connected mentally, and the two of them come just shy of sharing a real consciousness. By the time Brannock reaches old age, Earth’s massive global computer network has acquired sentience. And when Brannock is about to die, because he had worked so closely and successfully with Gimmick, the sentient global computer network invites Brannock to upload his consciousness into it so that he can live essentially forever, virtually, as a part of its AI brain.

The sentient global computer network then somehow acquires the capability to spin off nodes of itself to do multiple separate assignments simultaneously, and to transport itself and its nodes anywhere at will. It spreads its nodes far and wide across the galaxy and the nodes take copies of Brannock’s consciousness with them as they go. Over many millennia, the virtual Brannock is able to observe and record thousands of different stars and planets—just what he dreamed of as a boy.

Finally, after several million years of exploration, the virtual Brannock gets bored and asks to be shut down. Instead of shutting him down, though, the central computer consciousness gives him a new assignment: go back—in physical form—and check on Earth. By this time, Earth is only about a hundred thousand years from being sizzled by its enlarging sun. And “Gaia,” the node of the galactic central brain that was left behind to protect Earth, has been behaving weirdly: her reports are getting more confusing and abrupt, and she doesn’t appear to be doing anything about protecting Earth from its impending sizzling.

The plot that I’ve just described is all basically fine. It’s everything about the rest of the book that is problematic.

For one thing, over the years that Brannock’s consciousness explores the galaxy, we get bits and snatches of what is happening back on Earth in the form of little periodic vignettes of human adventures. Only one of these vignettes is even semi-connected to the main story line, so they seem scattered and hodge-podge. It feels like Anderson had some random short stories that he wasn’t sure what to do with, so he just stuck them into this book where ever he thought they would fit.

For another thing, the writing is a bit pretentious; Anderson likes to use words like “sunsmitten,” “coolth,” and “laired” and is not able to make them sound natural. His descriptions are also unhelpfully poetically vague, especially at dramatic moments of tension when we most need him not to be poetic and vague. Most of the time, all he gives us is flashes of light and snatches of things almost seen. At one point when Gaia attacks Brannock’s aircraft, Anderson describes it thus: “Arcs leaped blue-white. Luminances flared and died. Power output continued; the aircraft stayed aloft…the dance of atoms, energies, and waves went uselessly random.” 

Another conflict with Gaia is pretty much just described as “strife exploded.”

And for another thing, what happens after Brannock reaches Earth seems unnecessarily convoluted and pointless. He splits into two parts: Brannock the A.I, which takes the physical form of a metallic robot, and Christian the man emulation, which takes the physical form of a human. (Maybe—or maybe Christian the man emulation is just a virtual copy of a man in a virtual environment. It’s not really clear, as it’s also unclear why he needed to split into two parts in the first place).

Brannock the metallic robot goes off to explore Earth’s surface. There he has his own little adventure, meeting up with the few humans who remain on Earth and trying to find a way to contact his home central computer core and tell it about Gaia, who, at this point, has gone completely off her rocker and is trying to kill him. It’s unclear where the home central computer core is in all of this, and why it couldn’t find out itself what is going on with Gaia, and why the core is not still on Earth since that’s where it all started anyway, and why Gaia is just a node and not the center of the galactic AI brain.

Meanwhile, Christian the man emulation goes off into some kind of maybe real, maybe virtual environment in which he meets Laurinda, the consciousness of a woman who was uploaded into Gaia long ago just like Christian was uploaded into the central galactic brain. Christian and Laurinda discover that Gaia has been running experiments, recreating various times in history and then letting them play out, to see how history might have wound up differently with different starting parameters. They take tours of the different scenarios, to try to see what Gaia is up to, and are horrified because as soon as Gaia determines that a given scenario is not going to result in the outcome she wants, she destroys it. But it is unclear to me why Laurinda doesn’t know all this already, since she’s a part of Gaia’s consciousness, and whether the scenarios are virtual or real, and if they’re real, where the heck are they stored and how she's able to get Christian's and Laurinda's hair and costumes to be chronologically appropriate instantly, and if they’re virtual, why Christian and Laurinda are so horrified at the scenarios’ destruction, since they’re not real.

It’s also unclear what Gaia hopes to gain from these experiments. At one point, Laurinda says that it seems like Gaia is trying to create a “genuinely new form of society.” What does that mean? Why is she trying to create it? What is she going to do when she gets it? If it’s virtual, what’s the point? And if it’s real, where is she going to put all the people in her simulation if she refuses to protect Earth from destruction?

Anyway, eventually Christian, Brannock, and Laurinda have to try to stop Gaia from doing her experiments but by then I’d long since stopped caring. And I never really got answers to any of my questions

There are many directions that Anderson could have developed more in this book, any of which would have provided good fodder for thought-provoking fiction. But instead it felt haphazard and undeveloped—like he was making it up as he went along.

Womp Rat Catcher

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: Queen of Angels

Greg Bear
1990
Nominations: Hugo, Campbell, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

I am normally a Greg Bear fan, but Queen of Angels did not do it for me. It seemed like a writing experiment that failed. The post-cyberpunk style seemed half-hearted; the multi-threaded plot lines were plodding and uninteresting; and several thematic elements that were initially intriguing and seemed to be being set up to be important turned out to be disappointing dead ends.

The first of these thematic dead ends is the date. The book is set in Los Angeles in December of 2047, on the eve of the binary millennium. This means that on January 1st the year, when expressed in binary form, will flip from 11111111111 to 100000000000. For most of the book it seems like this might be a big deal, but in the end it doesn’t make any difference to anything, and winds up feeling like a piece of geeky trivia that Bear tossed in just to be clever.

In Bear’s 2047, the world is full of automated highways, nanotech, and biogenetic transformation. It is also divided into the haves, who live in luxurious, secure high-rises, and the have-nots, who live in the “jags,” or what used to be the regular old city. And it is also split into people who have been “therapied” and the maladjusted unfortunates who have not—another thematic element which there is a great stir about at first, but which ends up leading nowhere, especially since you can’t really tell who is what, and the supposed anti-untherapied discrimination doesn’t really amount to much.
   
Anyway. The plot starts out gamely enough, with a mass murder: eight students are found dead in the apartment of their professor, famed poet Emmanuel Goldsmith. Police detective Mary Choy is assigned to the case.

(Choy, incidentally, is a full-body “transform” who has had her entire skin replaced with a jet-black, slick seal-skin-like material. It’s cool, but we never learn exactly why she chose that, and what its significance is, if anything.)

At first, Choy thinks that solving these murders is going to be a breeze, but it turns out to be much more complicated than she expects. One problem is that Goldsmith, the prime suspect, is missing and is suspected to have escaped to the banana republic of Hispaniola, where his best friend is the semi-benevolent dictator. Another problem is that she can’t find any hard evidence proving that he is the culprit.

In addition, there is a rogue group of “selectors,” people who appoint themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner of justice against perpetrators of fraud and abuse who haven’t yet been caught by the police. They target powerful mafia bosses and white-collar criminals and put them through mind torture harsh enough to turn many of them into vegetables. Choy figures (correctly) that the selectors are after Goldsmith and that she has to find him before they do, and this sets up a nice bit of suspense.

If Bear had focused more on the murder investigation, he probably would have had himself a pretty good novel. He could have fashioned himself into a sort of post-cyberpunk Raymond Chandler. But, instead, he splits the story into four separate, frustratingly slow-moving plot lines with only light (or, in one case, zero) connections to each other.

In addition to Choy, he follows the story of Richard Fettle, a failed writer who was a friend of Goldsmith’s and who is suffering not only from shock at the crimes but also severe writer’s block and a dysfunctional relationship with a really annoying girlfriend. He gets more and more frustratingly aimless and pitiful over the course of the book.

We also follow brilliant psychological researcher Dr. Martin Burke, one of the only people on earth with the technology and expertise to enter another person’s brain and probe around inside what he calls “the Country of the Mind.” Burke likes to expound at length on his half-baked theories about how our personalities are actually made up of separate segments of personality that all come together in our brains to get reconciled into a whole, and that where psychological problems happen is when these segments can’t get reconciled with each other. Burke is hired by the father of one of the murder victims to probe Goldsmith’s mind and to find out why he committed the murders (if he did). Because, oh yeah, Goldsmith is not actually in Hispaniola, he is still in Los Angeles, hiding out at the house of his publisher, which makes Choy’s later trip to Hispaniola to find him feel incredibly pointless.

And finally, to add a totally random, ridiculously unconnected plot line to all of this, because clearly that is what is most needed, we also follow the adventures of a robotic probe, AXIS, that is out in the Alpha Centauri system investigating the possibility of life on planet Alpha Centauri B-2. AXIS finds mysterious structures on the planet and we are strung along for dozens of pages thinking that maybe they are artificial constructs built by intelligent life, and that something cool is going to come of this story line, only to discover that the structures are just natural byproducts of the tides and algae-like protozoans.
   
Meanwhile, because of the time lag in messages to and from Alpha Centauri, there is a clone of AXIS on earth that the scientists are using to analyze and predict what the real AXIS is doing, and yet another clone called “Jill” which analyzes the other two, and which they are watching on tenterhooks to see if she develops consciousness. Meanwhile, the real AXIS does develop consciousness and then goes into a mental breakdown upon realizing there is no intelligent life on B-2 and it is totally alone.
   
One additional issue is that the speech and thoughts of some of the characters (Choy and Fettle) are in a type of futurespeak (or futurethink) that Bear invented for this book. I’m generally game for learning new forms of speech if it is in keeping with the story, but this is a particularly annoying brand that doubles up on adjectives and leaves out most of the punctuation. For example:

“The metro-federal interface supervisor had the look of the oft therapied a man with guts stamina and manifold problems that he had spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to smooth.”

Bear himself doesn’t seem thrilled with it either, since he starts off using it frequently in the early chapters and then seems to allow it to fade away to almost nothing later in the book.

It seems like Bear had five or six different ideas for what he wanted to write about, and decided to use them all in one story. The result is a big disjointed mess, and I had no investment in any of it. The plot(s) and characters were not interesting enough to hold my attention and to make it worth the slog it took to get through the narrative. It was a disappointment, since Bear’s writing is usually so greedily consumable.

You Gotta Get With My Friends

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: A Door into Ocean

Joan Slonczewski
1986
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
 
This is a tale of two worlds. 

The planet Valedon has a highly regimented, restrictive class structure. It has a cash economy in which no one gives anything away for free. And it is part of a multi-planet administrative “Protectorship” ruled from afar by a single “Patriarch” on another planet in another solar system.

Valedon is also a world built around stone. Its inhabitants use stone for everything: as their mode of currency, primarily, but also in their artwork, in their names, and as the symbols of their professions.

Valedon’s moon, Shora, is the opposite of Valedon in almost every way. The entire surface of the moon is covered by ocean, and its inhabitants live on rafts of naturally-occurring vegetable matter floating on the surface of the water. They govern themselves communally, making decisions in consensus-based, non-hierarchical “Gatherings.” They have no cash; everything they need is either provided by the planet or they make it themselves. When they have something in plenty, they give it freely to others who need it.

They are also all female. They reproduce by parthenogenesis in a carefully controlled way, making sure that their population is always roughly a constant size. To the Shorans, every form of life on their moon (a richly and originally thought-out biosphere) has a place, and the balance between all of them must be respected and carefully maintained.

This sets up a tidy contrast between a prototypical patriarchy on Valedon, with its mercantile economy and war-prone population, and an ultimate matriarchy on Shora, where they don’t have any pronouns for males and the worst possible punishment an individual can imagine is to have the rest of her raft-mates refuse to speak to her. 

At the time the book starts, the Valans have already established a beachhead of a sort on Shora: a small number of Valan traders have set up shops on empty rafts and are selling bits of manufactured metal products to the Shorans in exchange for goods that the Shorans produce anyway for themselves, like woven sea-silk and natural medications. This has already created some tension; some of the Shorans desire the Valans’ technology, while others are upset that the Valans’ loud motorboats are disrupting the undersea songs of the giant indigenous starworms. 

There is eventually enough unrest that the Shorans decide to send a delegation to Valedon to find out whether the Valans are honorable and worth continuing to deal with, or if they should be expelled forever from the moon. One member of the delegation (and one of our primary narrators), Merwen, is probably the most understanding person on Shora, and even she has a hard time relating to the Valans. 

Although, to be fair, she is pretty confusing herself, and her behavior isn’t exactly calculated to make connections. After a frustrating amount of inaction and passivity, mostly involving her sitting and weaving underneath a tree in a city park while giving incomprehensible answers to any Valan who is brave enough to approach her, she eventually forges a relationship with just one Valan: Spinel, the dissolute son of a stonecutter, whom she invites to come back to Shora with her. 

Partly because of Spinel’s visit to their world, the Shorans provisionally decide not to kick the Valans out. This turns out to be a huge mistake when the Valans’ Patriarch becomes intrigued by the “untapped mineral potential” of Shora’s ocean floor, and decides to invade. He sends General Realgar, Commander of the Protectoral Guard, up to Shora with an army to take control of the ocean moon. 

Realgar wages his invasion using traditional Protectorship methods—threats, guns, torture, imprisonment. But he finds a baffling, incomprehensible foe in the people of Shora, who meet every assault with unwavering passive resistance. Indeed, both sides find that everything they do instinctively, according to their own cultural standards, is infuriating to the other, and elicits exactly the opposite response that they expect. 

The Shorans think that the idea of killing another human being is morally repellant, and that the Valans are unprincipled, sick children who are dead inside, and everything the Valans do reinforces that impression. The Shorans refuse to react to force with force, so their numbers dwindle and their pain grows as more and more of them are kidnapped and killed by Realgar’s men. 

The Valans think that the Shorans are crazy suicidal terrorists, willing to walk by the dozens into their gunfire, and everything the Shorans do reinforces that impression. General Realgar can’t seem to comprehend that the more he tightens his grip, the more Shora will slip through his fingers. He doesn’t realize that if he continues his warlike approach, he’s going to have to continue until every single Shoran is dead.

It is a powerful thought experiment: how people can be so culturally polarized that cooperation and peace is impossible. And it’s therefore impossible to avoid comparing this book to Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Both are tales about the inhabitants of two worlds—a planet and its moon, in both cases—that have such radically different cultures that they are unable to comprehend each other. And in both books, only a very small number of people are able to make connections in both societies and to serve as potential conduits of acceptance and understanding. 

LeGuin’s book did a better job, however, at allowing you to explore the different social structures on the opposing worlds. It presented the pros and cons of both sides without a glaringly obvious bias towards one or the other. It. And it had a more interesting plot and a main character with clearer motivations. 

A Door into Ocean felt much more scattered. The plot was frustratingly meandering, the heroines and heroes were passive and inarticulate, and the confrontations between opposing sides were confusing and usually lacking in any resolution of anything. 

The Valans were cruel and brutish, so it was easy to understand where they were coming from. But it was often hard to understand the reactions and motives of the Shorans. They seemed to sink into vagueness when it was least convenient (like when they were being interrogated by a Valan official). They often answered even direct questions in riddles—not, it seems, because they wanted to, but because they got flustered and couldn’t think of what to say. And when they were most shocked or frightened, they would escape into a coma-like trance and not come out of it for days.

It also bugged me that the Shoran’s worst possible punishment was to basically give each other the silent treatment. It’s a stereotypical way that women are often accused of dealing with problems—through passive aggression—and it made them seem a bit like a society of self-righteous eighth-grade girls. 

None of these things are going to get the Valans off your moon without having a lot of your people die. Passive resistance and civil disobedience can be tremendously successful techniques for social change, but by themselves they may not be enough. Your self-sacrifice often needs to be paired with strong communicators who can articulate your issues and explain your actions. If it isn’t, you may just get slaughtered for no reason.

Ray Bradbury: A Few Assorted Facts

Bradbury Landing

• In 2012, the NASA Curiosity rover landing site on the planet Mars was named "Bradbury Landing".

• In 1971, an impact crater on Earth's moon was named "Dandelion Crater" by the Apollo 15 astronauts, in honor of Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine.

• An asteroid discovered in 1992 was named "9766 Bradbury" in his honor.

• Ray Harryhausen was the best man at Ray Bradbury's wedding.

Science Fiction as Literature

Admittedly, I've only read one of the novels listed in this Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog post by Jeff Somers:

SF Novels That Should be Considered Literary Classics

But when it comes to A Canticle for Leibowitz, I wholeheartedly agree. Yes indeed.