Book Review: Kraken

China Miéville

2010

Awards: Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book begins as loads of fun. It starts with Miéville at his best: original ideas and a quirky, subtly comic writing style. It reads like a pulp detective novel, with snappy conversations and very short chapters, each one ending in a cliffhanger incident that pulls you into the next.

The book’s hero, Billy Harrow, is a curator in a London museum that has an enormous collection of biologically and/or historically significant dead animals preserved in glass bottles of formaldehyde. Billy is leading an ordinary tour group around the museum on an ordinary day when he finds that the museum’s prize specimen, a giant squid, has disappeared—glass bottle and all.

The police officers that come to investigate the crime are from an odd detective unit that deals with obscure occult religions. The only lead Billy can give them is a description of a man that he noticed on the tour because of the design of his lapel pin: an asterisk with two of the arms elongated and ending in squiggles. But fortunately these detectives know what to do with that information.

What the occult detectives know, and Billy is about to find out, is that London is chock full of obscure gods, ghosts, and other spirit-world powers, and that there are a large number of people in the city who are aware of it and have varying levels of ability to take advantage of it. And that there are also a number of people—including the krakenists, the wearers of the squiggly asterisk pins—who consider the giant bottled squid a kraken, a god. And that there are others who consider the squid to be at the very least a powerful ritual tool—one that can be used to start the chain of events that leads to an apocalypse—and who have the motivation to use it to that end.

At first Billy is an innocent and a pawn in all of this. The police figure he is in danger because of his status as the preparator of the bottled kraken, so they lock him in his apartment to protect him and enjoin him from talking about the incident to anyone. But of course he does, and because of that his apartment is infiltrated and he is almost killed by one set of cultists, and then he kidnapped by another set who think he can find the kraken for them, only to be re-kidnapped by yet another group. Some of the groups and sects and guilds have the world’s (and Billy’s) best interests at heart, and some don’t, and it is hard for him to tell which is which.

Eventually, though, it turns out that Dane, one of the guards at the museum where Billy works, is an elder of the krakenist church, and has secretly been keeping an eye on both the kraken and Billy the whole time. Dane seems to be one of the only people who truly (a) respects the kraken and (b) wants to prevent the world from ending, so Billy throws his lot in with him and goes from being an innocent pawn to being a fugitive believer. The two of them go on the lam, trying to find and save the bottled god kraken before whomever has it can finalize their planned apocalypse.

They are chased the whole time by all sorts of formidable pursuers, including Goss and Subby (terrifying semi-human assassins), the Tattoo (a power who exists solely as a tattoo on another man’s back, who has the power to make people into machines), and the occult police squad. And Billy learns more and more about underworld London, and learns that he has knowledge and powers he never knew he had—powers presumably given to him by his work on the preservation of the kraken.

How could this setup not be fun, eh? The trouble is that after the initial crime and the layout of the various factions, the plot careens from person to person and twist to twist without a sense of a real over-arching plan. We alternately follow Billy, Dane, the detectives, Goss and Subby, and Billy’s best friend’s girlfriend as they race back and forth across London hunting down one person or another. The entire time there are various apocalypses building, none of which is the real apocalypse, but none of which seem all that serious. I also didn’t get to know many of the characters well enough to hate, fear, or like them as I should have. It is a struggle to stay interested in the chaotic chase, and the finale is anticlimactically disappointing.

                                     

None of this is helped any by the choppy, disjointed writing style Miéville adopts more and more in the second half of the book, which is filled with arcane terminology and British-English slang. Reading it requires a vocabulary both deep and locally specialized, not to mention a willingness to overlook sentences with no verb. To wit:

                                                                                               

“Outside in the corridor furniture was tugged skew-whiff by a rubble of piscine bodies. The vivid colours of pelagic dwellers, the drabs and see-through oddities of deep water in hecatomb heaps.”

“Luckily Dr. Harris is a dab hand with Google.”

 “Those rozzers, eh! My name! My name, can you Adam and Eve it?”

“Grisamentum pops his clogs and now we’re all treading a bit softly around the Tat.”

I was predisposed to like a story about a tentacled god, so I was sorry to be so disappointed in this one in the end. I will say, however, that as a book involving personifications of ancient gods and other mythical beings, this is still a much better, less clichéd, and less seemingly self-congratulatory take on it than Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. It uses rarer and more interesting gods than the obvious Egyptian ones, fills in more information about them, and manifests them in ways that are not as trite.

Like, for example, Wati, a relatively obscure Egyptian spirit who has taken it upon himself to be a union organizer for the spirit world, and who can only take earthly form by inhabiting man-made representations of humans such as statues, dolls, and little crucifix Christs. He’s basically on Billy and Dane’s side and tries to help them out, but is constantly distracted by an ongoing strike of familiars that lasts nearly the length of the book.

And some specific bits and pieces of the story are certainly excellent, from a leaf minotaur created by an army of wizards with leaf blowers, to a sorcerer who can read what is going on in the city by pulling up chunks of sidewalk and looking at the entrails underneath. I thought Miéville was particularly clever with a character who has a knack for teleportation, and who has discovered that every time he teleports someone, he isn’t actually teleporting the actual person—he is killing them and copying a brand-new copy of that person into the new location. This man has teleported himself—and thus killed and recreated himself—so many times that he is surrounded and haunted by hundreds of spirits of his own murdered selves.

Book Review: Seventh Son

Orson Scott Card

1987

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Seventh Son is the first novel in Orson Scott Card’s multi-volume “Tales of Alvin Maker” series, which is set in the early 1800s in an alternate America. Card’s version of America has the same landscape and contains many of the same celebrities as ours, but history has taken a slightly different course, so geographical boundaries and the roles of pivotal figures are often very different.

And in Card’s fictional America, folk legends and traditional magic are real. Some people (primarily churchmen) deride it as superstition or even heresy, but it works nonetheless.

The series’ central character is Alvin Miller, Jr., the thirteenth child of a white farm family. They have settled in Wobbish Territory (what we would call “Wabash,” in central Indiana). Alvin’s birth status as the seventh son of a seventh son means that he has been born with powers of tremendous import—the ability to fix things, to create, to heal. But it also means that there are people who are suspicious and afraid of him, and that there are natural forces in the world that don’t seem to want him to survive. He’s always having to avoid suddenly falling roof beams, flooding rivers, and giant runaway millstones.

When I read the synopsis of Seventh Son on the back cover of my library’s paperback edition, and I learned that it covered the first ten years of Alvin’s life, I thought for sure it was going to be a hokey, over-sweet children’s story about magic. But it actually is, as advertised, a serious and sometimes grim tale about a boy having to carve his own path in life against tough odds, while also trying to remain sensitive and caring of others.

The book sucks you in right away by starting with the story of Alvin’s birth. Alvin’s mother (nine months pregnant with him), father, and all twelve brothers and sisters are in a wagon train making their way westward across the Hio territory. They make it about halfway across the Hatrack River when a sudden raging flood swamps them all. The local townspeople come to rescue them, but not before one brother is swept away downstream and Alvin’s mother goes into labor.

A few months after Alvin is born, his family migrates from Hatrack to the northwestern side of Wobbish Territory where they found the town of Vigor Church (named for the brother who died in the river). This is where Alvin spends his first ten years, growing up and navigating forces both human and supernatural. Some of his influences are positive, like the traveler Taleswapper, the first person who really understands Alvin and recognizes his potential, and who becomes a mentor to him. And some are negative, like the local Presbyterian preacher, Reverend Thrower, who thinks Alvin is the devil’s spawn.

Orson Scott Card is an active Mormon, which makes me think that the treatment of religion would be particularly important to him in his writing. But I’m not sure what to make of the messages Card is sending about religion in this book.

On the one hand, Alvin and many of the other people in his world are definitely in touch with something supernatural—some kind of force that lets them do things such as calm people down, protect loved ones from harm, or see into the future. They call it having a “knack.” And it is a fact that Alvin can do magical things, and has a great reserve of natural powers to draw on, and that he is in danger from other powers that mean him harm.

But at the same time, the practitioners of established religions are some of the least sympathetic characters in the book. Reverend Thrower is twenty-four years old and supremely arrogant; he sees it as his mission to convert everyone in the territory to his church, even though he really considers them all loathsome “Red Men” and “English scum”. He is full of judgment, intolerance, and hate.

Reverend Thrower is frustrated by Alvin, because Alvin constantly questions anything that doesn’t make sense to him, including most of what the Reverend preaches. What the Reverend thinks is sophisticated theological paradox (e.g. “God on His Topless Throne”), Alvin thinks is silly or funny—and you agree with Alvin.

Alvin’s sister Eleanor, who is an avid believer in folk magic, marries Armor-of-God Weaver, a devout churchman. Armor-of-God prohibits Eleanor from practicing what he thinks are her silly superstitions, but she continues to do it in secret, under his nose, and has better luck protecting her family from harm than he does with all his virtuous posturing.

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, himself practiced religious folk magic when he was younger, and drew on many of those folk beliefs (like scrying) when founding his own religion. So it is interesting to me that there are elements in this book that seem to evoke Mormon tradition while celebrating folk religion at the same time. Taleswapper, for example, carries a notebook in which he writes down new proverbs that occur to him; they come to his mind in the form of letters of flame, showing him what should be written on the page. Joseph Smith exhibited a similar mysticism when he transcribed his Book of Mormon based on visions he saw while looking at seeing stones in the bottom of a hat, and he set a precedent for other elders to add to the canon when they saw holy visions as well.

                      

Anyway, specific religious meaning aside, Orson Scott Card has a real talent for this kind of story. Like Card’s other boy hero, Ender Wiggin, Alvin Miller is a precocious child with overwhelming potential. Like Ender, Alvin is beset by ferocious enemies and bullies. And, like Ender, because of his abilities, Alvin has to grow up too quickly, largely on his own, learning from his own mistakes, first to find his own path to survival and then later to try to bring meaning to his life.

What is especially appealing about Alvin is that his powers validate life and creativity. Alvin is a maker: a person who is naturally able to put things together strongly and beautifully. He can do this on a big scale by healing gaping wounds or by building furniture and machinery, and he can do this on a small scale by making tiny woven grass “bug baskets” for fun. But no matter the scale, every time he makes something, he pushes back the great destructive forces of the universe, even a little bit. Every effort is important and worthwhile, no matter how small and pointless it seems.

The book ends with Alvin at age ten, preparing to leave his family home to become a blacksmith’s apprentice, but Alvin’s story continues on in the next book, Red Prophet.

Book Review: The Islanders

Christopher Priest
2011

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Islanders has a clever and unique set up: it is written in the form of a travel guidebook. It is a guide to the Dream Archipelago, a vast and diverse collection of fictional islands ringing the equator of a fictional planet.

It should be explained that, in addition to the Dream Archipelago, the planet has two continental land masses—one at each pole. The primary powers on the northern polar continent (Faiandland and the Glaund Republic) have been at war with each other for the past three hundred years, and, by mutual consent, they have been fighting that war almost entirely on the southern polar continent, so as not to destroy too much of their homelands.

Sitting as they do between the two polar continents, the islands of the Archipelago are necessarily affected to varying degrees by the continental wars. But they try to stay as uninvolved and independent as they can, relying on a long-standing Covenant of Neutrality.

No one knows exactly how many islands there are, or where they all are, or what all of their real names are, or if they even all have names. Part of this is because of (sometimes purposefully) imperfect record-keeping on the part of the inhabitants, and part of this is because of planetary temporal and locational distortions that make accurate mapping impossible.

The best one can do, then, if one wants to create a guide to the Archipelago, is to write a selective, anecdotal directory like this book. It gives a sampling of some of the islands, one chapter per island, in alphabetical order.

The guidebook treats each island differently. Some islands have very short chapters, with their history, geography, and governance described in a relatively straightforward gazetteer way. Other islands are described less traditionally, in the form of a letter or memoir about a particular time or incident by a resident or visitor.

What this means is that the book ends up being a series of sketches, vignettes, and short stories, rather than a single narrative tale. Some islands’ stories stand completely alone, and some have weaker or stronger connections to others.

On the plus side, this format gives Priest an opportunity to demonstrate his undeniable creativity. Each island allows him to explore a new plot line or setting or character, in as much or as little detail as he wants. Each island is also a chance to momentarily freeze the timeline at whatever point he wants.

Because the islands' chapters are organized alphabetically, the stories have a sort of dreamlike temporal disjointedness. And it means that the connections between different islands pop up somewhat randomly, adding unexpected richness to earlier stories.

Some of my particular favorite themes and stories:

• The thrymes of Aubrac: the thryme is an unassuming-appearing insect whose lethal venom at first makes its home island uninhabitable to any other form of life. It is eventually supposedly eradicated and its island is turned into the Archipelago’s silicon hub, but the tenacious thrymes keep finding ways of popping back up.

• The towers of Seevl: The island is dotted with mysterious ancient towers that seem to exude powers of evil mental suggestion. The towers are investigated by a scientific team in a story that has strong Lovecraftian echoes.

• Dryd Bathurst, painter of epics: Bathurst is not only a great artist but also a notorious rogue. As we progress from island to island, we seem to keep just missing him as he is forced by jealous husbands and irate fathers to flee to somewhere else.

The down side of the semi-connected short-story format is that it ends up making the book as a whole feel disjointed and unresolved.

                                                                                              

As a rule, I prefer novels to short stories. I like a plot I can really sink my teeth into. I am disappointed when a good story ends just when I’m getting into it and I have to switch to another. The guidebook format of The Islanders necessarily makes it a collection of short, scattered sketches, with no time to get into the specificity or character development that would bring more depth to them. I was often left with frustrating unanswered questions: What was in those paintings? What was that character’s job? What were that famous novelist’s books all about, anyway?

The short chapters made me feel negatively buffeted by the vicissitudes of Priest’s whims. The islands I liked the most seemed like they were left behind too soon, and the characters I found the least interesting—like a mime who is murdered in a small-town theater—were the ones that seemed to crop up the most often. And so many of the stories were centered around artists—novelists, theater performers, and installation artists in particular—that it actually got tiresome, and I was wishing for a couple more stories about scientists or politicians.

One more minor thing that bothered me was the way the largest cities on the islands were often just the name of the island plus “City” or “Town.” The largest city on Sentier is Sentier City; the largest city on Siff is Siff Town; and so on and on with Emmeret Town, Muriseay Town, Derril City, etc. If we did that at the same rate in real life, we’d have Hawaii Town, Cuba Town, Ireland City, and Japan City.

Book Review: Blue Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1996
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT (For Red Mars and Green Mars) 

This is the third book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about the colonization of Mars. It is, on the whole, not quite as awesome as the first two books in the set, but it has its own strengths.

After the more than one hundred years of construction, terraformation, feuds, sabotage, and war that were described in Red Mars and Green Mars, Blue Mars rewards the colonists’ perseverance (and yours) with a Mars that is now warm enough that its ice is melting and forming oceans. Plants and animals are rapidly adapting to the Martian environment. And, at sea level, humans can breathe the air without special equipment.

The people of Mars have turned the planet into a habitable world and have created a unique system of government with which to manage themselves. They actually are now doing much better than the people of Earth, who are dealing with environmental catastrophes and political chaos.

Robinson is an absolute master of the super-hard science fiction that makes up his Mars trilogy. He describes in minute, realistic detail what the colonization and terraforming of Mars could be like, and at the same time understands the emotional reactions the colonists might have to their situation. There are two themes in Blue Mars that particularly show how wise Robinson is about what people would feel at this point in their progress.

One is the colonists’ need to have some ritual way of looking back and celebrating what they have accomplished. All three of Robinson’s Mars books explore the complicated tensions between “greens,” who want to change Mars to make it habitable for humans, and “reds,” who want to keep Mars as it originally was. Obviously, by the time of Blue Mars, the greens have won. But the reds get a victory of a sort when everyone agrees on a set altitude on Olympus Mons above which nothing will be grown or built and the atmosphere will be preserved in its original state. Greens and reds (and everyone in between) begin to use this zone as a remembrance space; once a Martian year, they hike up and build a city of temporary tents like those used by the first colonists and they spend a while there remembering what it was like in the beginning and thinking about the friends who have died along the way.

The other theme I really liked was the effect of super-long lifespans on the minds of the First Hundred colonists. In Blue Mars, fewer than 35 members of the First Hundred survive; the rest have been killed in accidents, murder, and battle. Those remaining have all taken the life-extending treatments invented in Red Mars and are now over two hundred years old.

There are a number of side effects of living this long. For example, as time passes, the original colonists find they have more and more in common with each other and less and less in common with either the newer colonists or the native-born Martians. This makes them tend to draw together, even if they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum or if they originally hated each other.

Another side effect is that even though their brains are perfectly functional, so many things have happened to them that they start to forget or misremember the details of events from a hundred and fifty years ago when they first arrived. Sometimes they say they feel like their early experiences happened to someone else, not themselves. And some of them are unable to keep up with the constant changes that surround them and retreat emotionally, living only in the past.

In general, Blue Mars is a good conclusion to Robinson’s Mars trilogy. There are a couple down sides to it, however. For one thing, it is extremely long, even compared to the first two books. And also much of the last part of the book deals with the expansion of human space colonization into the rest of our solar system, which I found more abstract and less interesting than the original colonization of Mars.


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

Book Review: Green Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1993
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –
SPOILER ALERT

This is the second installment in Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It is a sequel to Red Mars, the extremely realistic story of the original hundred colonists’ landing and their first few decades of settlement on the red planet. 

In this book, the population of Mars is growing fast. Some of the growth comes from immigration from Earth, as it always has, but much of it now also comes from children born on Mars. The native children tend to be physically different from Earth people – taller and leaner, better at loping around in the lower gravity. 

Martian political conflicts still abound and are even more complicated. Most importantly, since Mars is now run by transnational corporations, there are all kinds of resistance movements across the planet trying to organize a second revolution. 

There is also still a basic tension between the “greens” (who want to terraform Mars) and the “reds” (who want to keep Mars in its original state). The greens are winning by default, having released some unauthorized lichens which have adapted to the atmosphere and have taken off. Since it would be next to impossible to bottle this up again, the reds are getting increasingly hostile and reactionary. 

Robinson tells the story while switching among the points of view of several different people. Sometimes we follow Sax Russell, one of the first hundred colonists and a terraforming proponent. Sometimes we follow Ann Clayborne, another original colonist and one of the most ardent reds. Sometimes it’s Nadia Chernyshevski, a genius at construction who has built many of the power plants and major settlements and only reluctantly gets involved in politics. And sometimes it’s Nirgal, one of the native first-generation Martians. 

This technique is great because after living in the shoes of all these different people, you find yourself being sympathetic to all sides of the political debates. You realize there is no clear-cut easy answer to any question about development. You see why they fight, and you also see how they can actually find common ground and work together sometimes. 

I think my favorite characters are Nadia, who is very practical and realistic, and Sax, who was one of those who originally started the clandestine seeding of the planet but who learns a lot from Ann and goes through a lot of changes of heart over the next hundred years. 

I found the politics less interesting than the biology, however. While all the bureaucratic conflicts are going on, the “greening” of Mars is relentlessly underway. The lichens that the first colonists distributed have started to produce oxygen and are mutating into new varieties. As the book goes on, we begin to see leafy plants and bushes and finally animals – insects, centipedes, and birds. Robinson is so good at this hard, realistic, imaginable SF. I just loved the unpredictable and very, very slow but inexorable transformation of Mars. 

Toward the end of the book there is a catastrophe on Earth when a huge chunk of Antarctic ice breaks off and begins to melt. Sea levels rise, destroying many coastal cities. I had a difficult time watching Earth descend into poverty and chaos while up on Mars people were still able to make and re-make their own societies. It reminded me a little bit of the story in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles where the population of Earth is destroyed in a nuclear war and the only humans left are the lonely colonists on Mars. 


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

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.

Book Review: The Healer's War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein
1959
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I was surprised that I liked this book as much as I did, given all the controversy about it.

It is set in the future, at a time when Earth is at war with an alien race, the hive-minded Bugs. The overly-idealistic citizen governments of Earth collapsed sometime back in the late twentieth century and the world is now governed by a (some would say fascist) military Federation. Becoming a soldier is very difficult, and only a small number of people even try, much less make it – but it alone earns you the right to vote.

You ride along with one of the tiny pawns in the Bug war, Juan “Johnnie” Rico, as he changes from a green recruit into a hard, professional soldier. Johnnie is in the Mobile Infantry, the grunts, the front line of combat against the Bugs. He is part of an epic war that will determine the fate of the human race, but he has no time to worry about higher levels of politics and strategy – his life revolves completely around getting enough sack time, not getting in trouble with the lieutenant, and keeping himself and the other members of his platoon alive.

Johnnie isn’t someone I would necessarily want to be, or even be friends with, but he is colorful and an appropriate guide to his time. Heinlein also creates a creative and consistent, if scary and hostile, world around his main character – both on the large scale (the Bugs, the state of Earth and its colonies, military and government structure) and on the small scale (boot camp, combat drops, everyday details of military life both in and out of battle).

For example - the mantra of the soldiers is to always be “on the bounce!” This comes from the heavily armored suits they wear in combat on other planets, which allow them to jump long distances and perform several tasks while in midair.

Yes, this book does glorify the military. And Heinlein does inject his tiresome personal-responsibility philosophy into the story, chiefly through Johnnie’s high school History and Moral Philosophy teacher Mr. Dubois. But the libertarian preaching wasn't as intertwined with the plot as in some of his other books, so I could skim those sections without losing much of the story. Plus, Johnnie doesn’t have an opportunity to have a lot of interaction with women, so Heinlein’s misogynistic tendencies stay mostly under cover (or, when they come out, at least they fit his rough-and-ready warrior characters).

The book was much better than Paul Verhoeven's movie, which was more war-action-oriented and didn’t go into much of the detail of the preparation and hardening of the soldiers, which was what about three-quarters of the book was about. The movie also invented characters that didn’t exist in the book and drastically altered the roles of others, to its detriment.

I think it is important to stress that I appreciated this book as a character study. I do not recommend it as a guide to attitudes about the military and government. Two excellent books already reviewed here and on Cheeze Blog were written at least partly in reaction to Troopers, and both would help in maintaining some perspective on war after reading it:

* Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
* The Forever War by Joe Haldeman 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Speaker for the Dead

Orson Scott Card
1986
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

SPOILER ALERT (for Ender’s Game)

In the introduction to my edition of Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card said that he never meant to write Ender’s Game. He had intended to make Ender’s childhood a relatively small part of the beginning of Speaker. But when he got into it, he realized that Ender’s war-gaming backstory was involved enough to deserve its own novel, so he split that part off into Ender’s Game, making that book a prequel to this one, which was the book he really wanted to write in the first place.

I think Card’s priorities were right on. I liked Ender’s Game quite a bit but this is an even better book. Not many people are able to write something so touching and sensitive without being trite or cloying, but Card was up to the task.

Before getting into the plot of Speaker, a brief review of the events detailed in Ender’s Game are in order: Thinking he is only running a computer simulation, a teenage military prodigy named Ender Wiggin brilliantly wipes out the “buggers,” the only other known sentient species in the universe, with whom we are at war.

Ender defeated the buggers due less to his tactical genius than to his ability to understand others. He grew to know his enemy well enough to intimately understand their weaknesses. This insight allowed him to learn how to kill the buggers, but it also meant that he could no longer bring himself to hate them.

Ender’s victory over the buggers makes him a hero. But when he finds out what he has done to them, his guilt wrecks him inside. He goes to the buggers’ home world and finds a cocoon containing the very last remaining bugger hive queen. He secretly takes the cocoon with him, hoping to place it on a hospitable planet one day, once all the humans have finally gotten over their fear and hatred of the buggers.

In the meantime, the hive queen in her cocoon is able to communicate telepathically with Ender. In an act of contrition, Ender writes a history of the queen and her species. This book, The Hive Queen, is published anonymously – the author is listed as “Speaker for the Dead” – and it is distributed across the populated universe. It makes humans understand the buggers so fully that they undergo a guilt-fueled reversal of opinion. The formerly-revered Ender Wiggin, Savior of Humanity, becomes reviled and hated as Ender Wiggin, Xenocide. Nobody has any idea that the Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead are actually the same person.

Speaker for the Dead becomes a model for many people. The anonymous author even inspires the growth of a sort of new religion, in which Speakers are called by the living to research and report – warts and all – on the life of someone who has died, in the hope that it will increase understanding all around.

Ender goes underground to escape the celebrity, both the good and the bad. By traveling at light speed from planet to planet, he ages only a few years while human society ages hundreds of years. By the time Ender is 35 years old, 3,000 years have passed in real time. He ends up on Trondheim, a planet of snow and ice, where he goes by his given name (Andrew) and starts teaching at an institute that trains Speakers of the Dead.

This is the point where Speaker of the Dead begins. The action is centered on the planet Lusitania. In colonizing Lusitania, a group of humans have discovered the third known sentient species in the universe, the “piggies.” The piggies appear quite primitive, so the humans establish strict rules, limiting contact to avoid influencing their development. Unfortunately, however, Pipo, one of the xenologers whose job it is to study the piggies, ends up getting killed by them in a horribly gruesome manner – dissected, with his stomach opened up and his organs strung out from his body across a hillside.

Pipo's young daughter Novinha sends out a call for a Speaker to "speak," or report on, her father's life and death. Ender takes the call himself, but he is several light years away. By the time he arrives on Lusitania, only two weeks have passed for him but 22 years have passed for everyone on the planet. In the meantime, not only has Novinha’s abusive husband Marcão died, but her friend Libo, the new xenologer, has been killed by the piggies in the same way as his father Pipo – and Novinha’s children have called for someone to speak the deaths of both of them too.

Ender researches the three men’s lives and deaths and uncovers a lot of painful and/or really cool truths not only about them but also about the colony, the piggies, and the planet’s strange biology. When he speaks the deaths, it is like a root canal to the colonists, exposing all their secrets and faults. But it is also a release and a relief for them – especially Novinha and her children, who had been living with lies and guilt their whole lives.

Although I enjoyed the story of the colony and the piggies a lot, the real strength of the book is the character of Ender, his tremendous capacity to understand those who are different from himself, and the message he carries about seeing the shades of gray in everyone.

This understanding is what made him want to be a Speaker. He knows that no one is as all-good or all-bad as people want them to be. He doesn’t glorify anyone when he speaks, and he doesn’t vilify them either; he tells the truth so the living will know them as they really were. He shows everyone that Marcão is not 100% bad, and that Pipo and Libo are not 100% good, even though that is what most people wanted to hear.

The great thing, though, is that Card doesn’t make Ender into some drippy, self-righteous spiritualist. Ender knows that sometimes it’s necessary to be threatening or cruel or to use physical force. And he makes mistakes and has doubts, just like everybody else. Almost everyone in the universe regards Ender as an extreme: genius, hero, devil, Xenocide. But he knows that he is just a human being trying to do what he thinks is right.

The one part of the story that makes me a little impatient concerns Valentine, Ender’s sister and his only real companion on his galactic travels. I know Valentine is important to Ender, as the only person who has really loved him all his life, but I never got interested in her or the political machinations she pursues. 

This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card

1985
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

Before I read Ender’s Game for the first time, I had heard a lot of hype from others about how life-changing this book was for them. It didn’t live up to the lofty expectations that the hype had set up and I was disappointed.

I read it again recently, though, and this second time I think I was able to appreciate the book much better for what it is.

The story is set in the future, when we on Earth are nearing the end of an 80-year break in an interstellar war against another species, the Buggers. The Buggers’ original two invasions were brutal and all of humanity is united in preparing to defend Earth against the expected Third Invasion. Governments have begun genetically engineering children to be soldiers in the coming war; they run them through a series of tests when they are little to see if they will be good candidates for Battle School (when they are elementary-school age) and then Command School (when they are teenagers). In school, they run the children through battle simulation after battle simulation, teaching them how to fight and kill.

The main character in the book is Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, a six-year old military genius (who is good at many other things as well). He is lonely at Battle School, ostracized and sometimes hated by many of the older students who are threatened by his skill. They do everything from not eating with him at meals to trying to kill him in the hallways. But he is so good that he still rises rapidly through the ranks at Battle School, leading first small groups and then whole battalions of his fellow students, entering Command School several years early.

Ender enjoys what he does. He is creative and adaptable. He learns his opponents’ patterns quickly and exploits them. The problem is that he doesn’t like to kill. And the more successful he becomes, the more agonized he gets inside about what he is doing. He knows he is being used as a tool and it makes him miserable.

What he doesn’t realize until it is too late is that the humans don’t just want to defend themselves against a Third Invasion – they want to completely annihilate the Buggers and their home world. And that at some point, the battles he is fighting have changed from simulations to real encounters with the enemy that he is commanding by remote control.

He does, finally, lead the human forces to victory over the Buggers, with huge loss of life. When he finds out what he has done he goes through a profound breakdown and decides to completely redirect his life and honor the memory of those he has killed.

It is a very good story and Ender is a very likeable character. I definitely identified with his loneliness and I liked the way he was always able to think his way into succeeding against huge odds. I just had a couple problems with the book.

One was that the ending seemed too abrupt. It was very quick. I guess I thought that Ender would eventually be on the actual battlefield himself, or that we would actually meet a Bugger, and when neither of those things happened, it was a bit unsatisfying.

The other was the more minor story of what was going on back home while Ender was at school. Ender’s brother Peter and sister Valentine are geniuses in their own rights, but Peter was too aggressive and Valentine too pacifistic to make good military leaders. Left out, they begin writing columns and editorials in global political nets, widening divisions between political factions (mainly between America and Russia). I didn’t really get into their story as I did Ender’s.

After reading Ender’s Game, I read the sequel, Speaker for the Dead. I just loved it. It was moving and complex and I enjoyed seeing what Ender had become as an adult, after he had turned away from the military. Later I read that Orson Scott Card originally meant both stories to be in the same book, but that when he got into it, he realized that it was too much and he should split off what was then just a backstory about Ender’s youth into its own book, which would then be a set up for Speaker. If that is indeed what he intended, it totally worked for me.

This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.