Book Review: Strange Bodies

Marcel Theroux
2013
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Theroux’s novel Strange Bodies starts in a tchotchke shop somewhere in Britain. A man comes in to see the shop owner. He claims to be her ex-boyfriend from long ago, Nicholas “Nicky” Slopen, and he can remember all sorts of things only her ex would know. The only problems are that (a) he doesn’t look anything like her ex, and (b) her ex is supposed to have died in a gruesome car accident a couple years before.

Nevertheless, the man claims to really be Nicky Slopen. And he leaves the shop owner with a flash drive that contains a troublingly credible story of what happened to him over the past few years. The rest of the novel tells that story—a story that will reveal whether or not someone has actually invented the technology to resurrect dead souls.

Slopen is a struggling academic, a specialist in the writing of Samuel Johnson. He has a loveless marriage and a strained relationship with his kids.

One day, a rich celebrity collector comes into Slopen’s bleak life to ask him to authenticate some papers that he is thinking about buying that purport to be lost letters of Samuel Johnson.

Slopen finds that the paper the letters are written on are only a couple years old, so he figures the letters must be forgeries. But the writing is absolutely, perfectly, undeniably, bafflingly Johnson’s.

Slopen insists on meeting the person who wrote the forgeries. The man appears to be an autistic savant: a Russian immigrant, Jack, who barely speaks at all, much less any English, but who produces an almost continuous stream of this very authentic Johnsonian material as Slopen watches.

Slopen starts visiting Jack regularly to try to find out more about him, and grows increasingly attached to him and his sister, Vera. Slopen’s attachment grows especially strong after his inevitable divorce.

Eventually Vera has to go back to Russia to see her doctor and leaves Jack in Slopen’s care. It is at this point that Slopen starts to put it together that Jack might actually be Johnson—or that at least his brain might be Johnson’s brain. And the more questions Slopen asks of the sinister people hovering around Jack and Vera—including the celebrity who asked him to verify the documents in the first place, and Vera’s “business associate” and bodyguard, who both live with her and Jack—the more he suspects something really unusual was going on.

Slopen confronts them all, one by one, and eventually learns that they are adherents of the philosophy of the 18th century Russian thinker Nikolai Federov, who theorized of immortality being possible for all humans. And that, following the theory that a person’s soul is present in their writing, they have developed a procedure to use a person’s collected writings to plant that person’s memories into the brain of another person.

There are just two problems with this (besides the fact that the idea that you can recreate a person’s whole personality from their writing is a shaky literary premise at best). The first problem is that they aren’t really giving a person immortality; they are creating a simulation of that person in another body. The original person still dies. (This has been explored to death in many other, better vehicles.)

And, second, in order to do this, they need to use someone else’s body as the vessel for the implanted memories. For all intents and purposes, this essentially kills the person whose body they are using.

Vera and Nicky are, to say the least, disturbed by all of this. And they know they have to stop the practice from becoming a way for wealthy few to perpetuate their personalities on the backs of unsuspecting working-class volunteers. But they know that no one else will believe their story, and that they are in mortal danger from the sinister forces behind the procedure, who will stop at nothing to shut them up.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On the plus side, the story is well written and (mostly) unfolds at a breezy clip. Theroux also does a good job of giving you just enough information that you can guess what’s happening—including the central conceit that not only has Samuel Johnson’s soul been transferred into the body of a working-class Russian man, but so also has that of our main character—but not so much information that you know how it happened, or why. So you want to keep reading to find that out.

Theroux also does a good job of telling the story discontinuously, which seems to be difficult for many writers. The story line jumps back and forth in time between the near past (the story of how Nicky Slopen in his original body met the resurrected Samuel Johnson and got involved with the Russians); the far past (the story of how Slopen and Johnson were resurrected); and the present (the story of the resurrected Slopen in the mental hospital, actually writing the narrative). The discontinuity is a little crazy-making, but completely fits the story, since Nicky himself has been driven a bit crazy by what happened to him and all he has to process to come to terms with it.

Theroux also is able to make his resurrected Samuel Johnson amazingly authentic. It makes me think Theroux must be a Johnson fan himself, well-read enough in Johnson’s papers and steeped enough in Johnson’s style to be able to make his Johnson character speak and write like the real thing.

There are just a couple problems with the book, but they are big ones for me.

For one thing, I’ve never been a big fan of Samuel Johnson’s writing. Far be it from me to use the term “navel-gazing” about the writings of such a philosophical giant. But he does spend quite a bit of time agonizing over the meaning of life, and the universe, and the nature of the soul, to the point where, if one were so inclined, one conceivably could describe it as unproductive noodling for noodling’s sake.

And, perhaps as is natural with this subject matter, his writing tends to get depressing. Which brings us to the second issue I have with the book: the tone. Samuel Johnson always leaves me feeling unproductively melancholy and pessimistic.

In several places in the novel, Slopen raves about how great it is that Johnson is able to look unblinkingly at reality, recognizing that all the things we do on Earth are most likely completely meaningless, and that the ways we try to make ourselves feel better about that fact are just Band-Aids. In a passage near the beginning of the book, Slopen writes:

I’m poor in everything but ironies, and to be truthful, I’ve forgotten what’s so good about irony in the first place. It’s just the resting state of the universe. Johnson puts it best in a section I can recall from memory. “The real state of sublunary nature,” he calls it, “in which, at the same time, the reveler is hastening to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design or purpose.”

But the truth is that the irony he describes in those easy pairings—revelers sharing the world with mourners, Wile E. Coyote foiled by the Road Runner’s cheery energy—is simply the last available meaning before the significance of anything decays to random chance. Many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design or purpose. Good becomes bad, bad good; love degenerates to dullness and senseless animosity. Irony is not order, but it gives a shape to things. We can’t believe that a rational God had a hand in this chaos, but we’re not quite ready to sign up to the devastating truth of Johnson’s last line. Our faith in irony is a sticking plaster to restore our loss of Faith in its larger sense. (Pp. 77-78)

Slopen and his idol Johnson both also have an ever-present feeling that our reality is fragile, and based simply on consensus. They are hyper-aware that the “facts” we take for granted—“the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person’s true nature”—are liable to fall apart at any moment, simply because those involved might stop believing in them.

And, because they are aware of this, they stand ever poised on the precipice of oppressive gloom and insanity. They are just this side of mental breakdown. Slopen describes Johnson as the master of “keeping it real in spite of the danger of melancholy and losing your grip on sanity.” As Slopen says,

To me, Johnson’s recognition of that is part of his acute modernity as a moralist. I think he saw the relation between individual and collective delusion: the threat of madness to the human mind and the body politic. He knew that it was a small step from religious mania to religious wars. Madness is part of that turn away from the real that Johnson was so vigilant in confronting wherever he found it—not because of his confidence in reason, but because he knew from his own experience how fragile the rule of reason is.

No one more embodies the illuminating potency of reason. Johnson was devastating in his capacity to sniff out the fake in its different guises… But this very power was riddled with its opposites: melancholy and uncertainty; fear of his own loosening grip on the nature of reality.” (P. 148)

Years ago, I used to find this kind of thinking appealing. It seemed to cut through pretense and offer an unvarnished, honest view of the world. But I find that I have grown weary of it, and now it seems pretentious itself. I don’t have the patience any longer for maudlin, self-absorbed noodling about reality and the soul. I don’t necessarily think that reality is that fragile. I think it is possible to look at the world and be cynical and skeptical and honest without falling into a pit of despair. I want to find joy where I can, and to be able to acknowledge pain without being overcome by ennui and pessimism.

But Johnson doesn’t seem to be able to do that, and neither does Slopen. They remain stubbornly forlorn and depressed.

Book Review: Blackout

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)
2012
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

BEWARE… SPOILER ALERT FOR FEED, DEADLINE, AND BLACKOUT.

And at last we arrive at Blackout, the third and final novel in Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy.

Blackout has most of the same pluses and minuses as Deadline. It has the same engaging post-zombie-apocalypse setting and the same appealing cynicism and irreverence in its main characters. It’s got the same witty writing style, which is mostly still fun to read but at times, in this third book, seems to be getting a bit sloppy.

It has the same annoying conversational techniques for attempting to draw out the suspense. It has the same crazy Shaun hearing Georgia’s ghost in his head, and the same unnecessarily disruptive commentary about it. And the plot seems similarly haphazard and forced, especially when it comes to Shaun’s story line and the motivations of the evil CDC.

But at least Georgia is back, in the flesh, which makes a huge difference for the good. Georgia is by far the best character and narrator Grant has got, and it’s great to have her again.

Blackout picks up where Deadline ended, with Georgia waking up in a cell in a CDC facility. She quickly figures out that she is a recently-awakened clone of her original self with all her memories intact, right up to the moment Shaun shot her in the back of the head when she was about to turn into a zombie.

Aside from confirming that she is a clone, the CDC staff won’t tell her anything; they won’t tell her where she is or what’s going on or even let her go to the bathroom without an escort. But through secret messages passed to her she finds out that the EIS—the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a subdivision of the CDC—has undercover agents inside the CDC and that they are working on a plan to break her out.                

The EIS agents show her other Georgia clones being grown in the lab and explain that she’s just one of many. The CDC is trying to build a malleable, docile version of her that will do what they say, and then they will use that clone to lure Shaun in and imprison him. She herself is too much like the original Georgia, inquisitive and rebellious, so she is on a time limit. Once they are able to build a more brainwashable clone, she will be “decommissioned.”

She is also able to find out one key thing on her own. Her CDC doctors let her walk for exercise in an agricultural biodome attached to the facility, which, because of her knowledge of CDC installations, lets her know that she’s in Seattle.                                                                              

Meanwhile, her brother Shaun and the rest of the After the End Times blog staff are hiding out from CDC security at Dr. Abbey’s CDC-blacklisted lab in Oregon. Their main goal is the same as it was in Deadline, which is to find out why the CDC wants to kill people who have Kellis-Amberlee reservoir conditions when they are the best hope for adaptive immunity, and to publish the answer online for the entire world to know.

And Dr. Abbey also wants to know more about the Cuban mosquitoes that are now spreading Kellis-Amberlee through Florida. The virus is too large for a normal mosquito to carry, which suggests that the Cuban species was deliberately bred.                                                           

What follows is a series of contrived misadventures designed to get Shaun and Georgia back together so they can pursue the truth as a team again. It starts with Dr. Abbey sending Shaun and Becks on a mission to Florida to try to get a sample of the mosquitoes, so she can do genetic testing to find out where they came from. Shaun and Becks make the mistake of stopping first at his adoptive parents’ house in Berkeley to get a map—a questionable plan in the first place—only to find that the Masons have told the CDC they were coming. They escape from the CDC police and flee from Berkeley, not to Florida, but instead to…

…Seattle, of course, where they meet up with Mahir and Maggie, who have gone up there to get fake IDs from a shady character called “The Monkey.” The Monkey agrees to give them IDs if, conveniently enough, they first break into the Seattle CDC and plant bugs for him.

At this point, the EIS determines it is time to enact Georgia’s escape. They have just surgically removed all her tracking chips and self-destructing bio-bombs when Shaun’s invading team causes the CDC to go into lockdown. The EIS doctors think that the lockdown is because of them, and stay to distract security while sending Georgia off in the direction of the exit, where she runs smack into Shaun without either of them running into any CDC staff first.

After fighting off a horde of zombies and at least two more CDC security detachments, they make their way back to Dr. Abbey’s lab, where it is determined that they really need to go all the way to Washington, DC, to ask the president the truth about Kellis-Amberlee and the mosquitoes and all that.

When they finally make it in to see the president, he is, of course, there with an evil CDC doctor who tells them the truth about Kellis-Amberlee and the mosquitoes and all that, and then tries to enlist them into his evil PR machine to keep it secret. And, of course, when it turns out they won’t keep it secret, he tries to kill them, and they, the president, vice president, and a bunch of Secret Service agents have to escape by shooting their way out of the White House through another horde of zombies.

A bad guy whose motivation
I can understand

The main issue I had with Blackout, as with Deadline, is that I just do not buy the bad guys’ motivation. Usually bad guys are motivated by money, revenge, religious fervor, or a desire for world domination, all of which I can completely understand. But these CDC guys seem to really be doing what they’re doing because of an always vaguely and often incomprehensively articulated societal benefit argument that doesn’t have much convincing pull. I don’t understand how they could have been willing to spend millions of dollars and kill people, much less die, for their cause.

I’ve read and re-read the sections of Deadline and Blackout where the bad guys explain themselves. From what I can piece together, their thinking seems to go like this:

• In a very, very small minority of cases, some people with reservoir conditions can either develop immunity themselves, or convey immunity to people who are close to them.
• The CDC doesn’t want to tell people that there is a tiny possibility that some people with reservoir conditions could recover or that some people might be immune, because then people will hesitate to pull the trigger when somebody amplifies, and then more people will die. Most of the time the person will turn into a zombie and then will turn around and eat the person who should have pulled the trigger.
• So, for the time being, they are killing people who have reservoir conditions.
• They think they will eventually find a strain of Kellis-Amberlee that doesn’t cause reservoir conditions. When they do, they want to infect the entire world with it.
• The genetically-engineered mosquitoes were supposed to be their distribution method, once they came up with a strain they liked. But they got out too early. So, oops—they killed millions of people on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Killing people who have reservoir conditions seems like way too much of a leap, even for crazed evil CDC doctors. I cannot believe they would really do that just based on the fear that knowing that people have the potential to be immune would lead to a few more deaths by recently-turned zombies. How about developing a test for immunity instead? Maybe that would be easier than having a secret cloning program and a secret mosquito genetic modification program and finding subtle ways to kill thousands of innocent U.S. citizens?

Early on in Blackout, Georgia observed, almost in passing, that the CDC was keeping people controlled “through unnecessary security and exaggerated fear.” We see this in real life all the time when we are required to go through blood tests or loyalty tests or other security checks to go about our normal business, security checks that are more stringent and intrusive than the real odds of danger would warrant, as a way to keep us as a population cowed and obedient. There would be plenty of potential for realistic governmental evil and oppression by means of security theater; it seems like maybe that would have been a ripe area to explore further, instead of the medical mumbo-jumbo.

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: Stand on Zanzibar

John Brunner
1968
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Stand on Zanzibar is set in the 2010s which, in 1968, was the relatively near future. The world has become severely overpopulated, which has serious effects on everyday life.

Internal combustion engines are banned in most large cities and have been replaced by fuel-cell and fly-wheel vehicles. Almost everyone has to share housing, even the rich. In jails, prisoners are tranquilized and stacked one on top of another on bunk beds which can be pulled in and out of cells like drawers in a filing cabinet.

Rich countries have enacted various forms of eugenic legislation to control birth rates. In the US, for example, you are forbidden to have children if you have genes for certain hereditary conditions like hemophilia, diabetes, phenylketonuria, or color-blindness.

~~~~~~~

The book has two semi-intertwined main plots, each of which is centered on one of the two somewhat asocial main characters, Donald Hogan and Norman House. Donald and Norman are roommates and are also probably as close to being friends as would be possible for either of them.

Norman is black, Muslim, and a VP at General Technics, the world’s largest technology firm. His company sends him to Beninia, a remote African country, to work out a deal to allow GT to mine Beninia’s natural resources before its neighboring countries can invade and do so. While there, Norman finds that Beninians are very strange – no wars, no murders, not even lost tempers – and he sets himself to learning why.

Donald is white, Christian, and a spy for the US government. He gets sent to Yatakang, a remote Asian country, which has announced that it is developing the technology that will allow it to clone embryos, select out the ones with undesirable traits, and then implant the best in any woman. This may have disastrous capacity consequences for governments, as it will allow anyone to get around eugenics laws and have a child. Donald’s mission is to either expose their claim as a fraud or, if it is not a fraud, to make it not come to pass.

~~~~~~~

Reading Stand on Zanzibar is a little like reading Shakespeare or A Clockwork Orange, in that it is pretty hard to follow at first. Brunner creates a whole new vocabulary for this future dystopia that you have to get used to. Some of the new terms are abbreviations (“dicty” for “addict”); amalgamations (“Afram” for “African-American”); free-associations (“codder,” from “codpiece,” for “man”); or just plain slang (“shiggy” for “girl”).

But if you persevere, by the time you’re halfway through the book, you can read and understand a sentence like “Sheeting hole, Frank, I’ll never forgive those bleeders!” without batting an eye.

Even the table of contents is wacky. Chapters are listed not in chronological order but by category, of which there are four:

“Continuity” (the main plot)
“Context” (explanations of the main plot)
“Tracking with Closeups” (side stories about minor characters)
“The Happening World” (jumbles of ads, gossip, conversations, and news)

The four types of chapters are interwoven throughout the book. It is a little chaotic, but that is part of what Zanzibar is all about. The combination keeps the plot going, helps you understand it, provides detail and color, and gives you an idea of the volume of stimuli constantly bombarding the populace.

~~~~~~~

Stand on Zanzibar is also similar to Neuromancer in many ways. It has a trippy style and a unique vocabulary. It has advanced technology such as fuel-cell cars and internet-like, real-time global media. It has widespread use of hard-core drugs. It has a massive self-aware computer that controls many everyday operations for all of humanity worldwide. And it even has a woman with metal eyes (in this case, chromed contact lenses).

The main difference (aside from the fact that Zanzibar came out 16 years earlier than Neuromancer) is that it is less about the self-aware central computer and more about humans coping with each other in a crazy, overcrowded world. Brunner is bitingly sarcastic and cynical and, at the same time, handles complex issues with a lot of sensitivity and understanding.

Brunner’s main focus is how the loss of privacy and property affects us psychologically and sociologically. Humans are social animals able to deal with each other pretty well...until we get overcrowded, and then we turn on each other. The world of Zanzibar is full of violence: individual killing sprees, terrorism, riots, and war. Many people try to escape from it all with drugs, most of which are legal or at least tacitly allowed: everything from marijuana to powerful, laboratory-synthesized hallucinogens with names like Triptine and Skulbustium.

Brunner shows that the pressure created by overpopulation both exacerbates the gap between rich and poor and, at the same, binds them more closely. His message (sent primarily through the character of the popular, cynical sociologist/commentator Chad Mulligan) is that even though you may think you are rich, you are not, really, if the rest of the world is horribly poor. And many elements of his analysis have come depressingly true; Mulligan (presciently) points out that water is eleven times more expensive than it was fifty years ago; that all our foods are prefabricated in factories; and that the fanciest new building being built in the world is a jail.

And throughout the whole book runs another brave, touchy debate about reproduction. In an overpopulated world, choosing to have a child is itself a political statement. There are a million different ways to have a child: donor eggs or sperm, externally-fertilized ova, adoption, cloning. Each option brings anxiety and pain. And when the Yatakangis announce their cloning program, it brings up new questions about tailored babies. Is it right to breed for certain traits and against others? And do parents really want children who are more advanced than them?

And whether or not you want a child, you still have to deal with complex emotional issues. Some couples desperately want to have a baby but are not allowed to because one partner has a bad genotype. Some have good genotypes but are infertile. Some people have excellent genotypes but don’t want children, and are constantly questioned (and constantly question themselves) why they don’t. Brunner handles all of this with perceptiveness and sensitivity, as well as humor.


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

Book Review: The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

1974

Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                 

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

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

                                                                                                

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

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

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

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

Book Review: Embassytown

China Miéville

2011

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

               

China Miéville has the ability to do the best of what science fiction authors can do: to set up unique, alien environments that allow us to become conscious of, and think differently about, what we take for granted.

                          

Embassytown does this. It makes you think about language, and what words represent, and how what you say can determine what you think and believe, and vice versa. I only wish that the plot and characters had been better able to keep up with the creativity of the concepts.

The story is set in a far-flung corner of the populated galaxy on the planet Areika. The human colony on Areika is limited to a small enclave called Embassytown, which is enclosed in an oxygen bubble to protect the colonists from the planet’s toxic air.

The Areikei, the indigenous sentient beings that populate the rest of the planet outside of Embassytown’s bubble, are big, tree-like creatures with two mouths, multiple eye stalks, and spindly spider-like hooved legs.

Humans have found it difficult to communicate with the Areikei for a number of reasons. For one thing, the Areikei are poly-vocal, which means that their language requires them to speak one part of each word out of each mouth at the same time.

The other, more imposing challenge is that for the Areikei, language is directly and inextricably connected to thought. This means that the Areikei cannot speak anything that they cannot think. Their language is explicit and concrete, short on theoretical concepts, and completely bereft of lies.

This also means that they can only understand words when they are spoken by a conscious, thinking mind. The sounds of the words themselves mean nothing to them; the meaning is produced by the thoughts coming from the mind speaking the words. Because of this, the humans’ recordings and linguistic tools like auto-translators don’t work with the Areikei. They are able to record and generate poly-vocal speech, but the Areikei don’t understand it when it is played back to them on a mindless device.

To solve this problem, humans have developed a new breed of person: an Ambassador. An Ambassador is made up of two identical clones raised from birth to think of themselves as one person; their mental connection is strengthened as they grow up with training and drugs and technology. These two people must not only say the word parts at the same time, but also must be thinking the same thing at the same time as well. If it all works, they are able to speak to the Areikei, functioning as one person with two voices. All of these Ambassadors live in Embassytown, along with police, merchants, pilots, and other staff needed to support the town’s infrastructure.

Everything is peaceable and civil on Areika between the humans and the natives for a long time, with the two races establishing beneficial trade relations. The Areikei start to use the humans to grow linguistically; they ask humans to act out scenarios in front of them, turning the human actors into similes which they can use to say something that hasn’t ever happened before. And from the humans they also learn, theoretically at least, the concept of lying.

Trouble begins in a small way with a growing group of Areikei who get a charge, a real physical high, out of the cognitive dissonance that arises when they attempt to tell a lie. Discord is whipped up even more with the arrival of a new Ambassador named EzRa, who is not made up of two identical clones, but of two distinct, very physically different individuals who have an unusually strong mental connection to each other. EzRa’s ever-so-slightly mentally misaligned speech has powerful, damaging consequences for the Areikei, eventually leading to a huge planet-wide crisis for humans and natives alike, which the two races must join together to solve or die.

This is one of those books where you acclimatize to it by immersion. It plunks you down in the middle of a strange landscape with alien technology, concepts, language, and slang, and starts using them in context with little explanation. But it’s not jarringly fakey, and everything is used consistently, so you quickly learn words like automs, turingware, and biorigging as you need to.

I liked the way the book made me think about my own language. While reading it, I found myself thinking in stilted similes like, “I am like the frog that was put in cool water which was then raised to the boiling point.” I became conscious of my sentence structures and how I am able to use words to signify something that has no relationship to how the word sounds. It was like dipping back into a college semiotics class (without having to write the papers).

And I enjoyed Embassytown, overall. But I did not get as carried away by it as some of Miéville’s other work. The plot limped to catch up with the ideas and didn’t always keep my interest; much of the time it seemed like it was only a tool to explore the premise of the poly-vocal Areikei, rather than being a good story on its own merits.

And, maybe more importantly, there were times when the premise didn’t stand up to all circumstances. The City & the City worked because the whole time, you knew that everyone really did physically have the ability to see the other city, but that they forced themselves not to see it by common agreement. In Embassytown, it sometimes seemed that the Areikei really physically couldn’t hear or speak untruths, and other times it seemed like it was just a shared illusion that could be changed with effort and willpower.

Book Review: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Kate Wilhelm
1976
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Kate Wilhelm’s writing is subtle and understated. It grows on you gradually.

This story sucked me in so slowly, in fact, that at first I thought it was going to be boring.

Also, the first part of the book, which takes up about a quarter of its total length, is basically an introduction to the rest. So many major events happen and so much time passes during that first section that it seemed like too much; I thought I was never going to be able to get into any of the characters. I would just start to get attached to one and then they were gone.

The later sections of the book go at a better speed, however. And for them to work as well as they do, I have come to think that the first part has to cover that much ground.

This is a post-apocalyptic story in which we have destroyed our environment with radiation and toxic chemicals. All the pollution and contamination cause people to become infertile and, over time, Earth’s human population gradually dies off and dwindles down to almost nothing. And, to top it off, another ice age begins and glaciers start crawling all the way down into Maryland.

Only one very organized, very wealthy family in the Shenandoah Valley continues to reproduce – by cloning themselves. They saw the writing on the wall, trained themselves on the necessary technology, and built themselves a secret compound complete with hospitals, laboratories, incubators, schools, and dormitories.

This is all very well and good and controlled at first, but then instead of sticking to producing one child at a time, the family scientists begin to produce multiple sets of identical children. At first there are twos and threes and eventually they get up to sevens and eights.

The sibling sets start to discriminate against oddball “singles” with increasing viciousness. And, at the same time, the sets grow progressively more and more group-focused until they are completely dependent on their clone brothers or sisters to function. They are unable to think originally or creatively on their own.

Ironically, this means that the clones themselves are headed for extinction, since they cannot invent new technology or repair their equipment when it breaks, much less adapt to the approaching glaciers. And they have ostracized the single children, the only ones who have a hope of doing these things.

I did think that the ending was a little too neat. But, overall, I liked the book. In particular, I thought that Wilhelm did a good job of taking an idyllic setting and a group of happy fresh-faced youths and gradually making them into something more and more sinister and unpleasant. Something almost as sinister and unpleasant as… junior high school.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Snow Queen

Joan D. Vinge

1980

Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

After having read several disappointing novels by Joan Vinge’s ex-husband Vernor, I have to admit I was kind of dreading The Snow Queen.

The story takes place on the rustic, undeveloped planet Tiamat, where the seasons are centuries long. The people of Tiamat are divided into two populations: “Summers,” unsophisticated, backwards fisher-folk who live in the rural south, and “Winters,” savvy cosmopolitans who live in the urban north. The Summers are deeply religious and their most powerful deity is the goddess of the sea, who they believe speaks to them through a few of their own people who have been called to be “sibyls,” a sort of oracle. Their religion is dismissed as blind superstition by the Winters and the offworlders alike.

As the book opens, the long winter is just ending and summer is about to start. When the seasons change from winter to summer, several things always happen. The areas of the planet where the Summers live become too hot for human habitation and they all migrate north to the cities to jostle for space with their northern Winter brethren. The proximity of the sun makes conditions too unstable for the nearby interstellar transport wormhole to stay open, so all the “offworlders” visiting and working on Tiamat pack up and head home to their own planets, taking all their advanced technology with them. And the Snow Queen, the ruler of the planet during the wintertime and traditionally a native member of the Winter population, is ritually thrown into the ocean to die and is replaced by the Summer Queen.

This winter, however, the people have been ruled by a particularly power-mad and ruthless Snow Queen named Arienrhod. Arienrhod has never wanted to give up power and die in the sea like she is supposed to. So a couple decades ago, she implanted nine embryo clones of herself in nine unsuspecting Summer women visiting her capital city for a festival, hoping that at least one clone turned out okay and she could choose that girl to be the Summer Queen. This doesn’t really prevent her from dying, of course, but at least she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that she will be the Summer Queen, too, in a way.

Of the nine clones, the only one that survives to the end of winter is a girl named Moon Dawntreader. Moon is a good-natured and unambitious girl raised among fishermen on the seaside, who thinks she’ll be able to continue living indefinitely in blissful happiness with her beloved cousin Sparks. Except that one day, to everyone’s surprise, including Arienrhod's, Moon is called by the sibyls to become a sibyl herself. 

Sparks had wanted to be a sibyl, too, so when Moon is chosen instead, he leaves in a jealous rage for the big city in the north. There he hooks up with Arienrhod and becomes a twisted, Darth-Vader-like, dark side version of his former self.

The rest of the book then follows Moon’s subsequent quest to reunite with Sparks and fulfill her destiny as a sibyl, and Arienrhod’s attempt to find Moon and achieve immortality, both of which affect the lives of a wide assortment of secondary characters and build to a climactic showdown during the end-of-winter celebrations.

In contrast to Vernor’s books, Joan Vinge’s Snow Queen at least kept me generally interested in reading from one chapter to another. She weaves her themes, characters, and technological inventions consistently and intelligently throughout the book, giving them depth and background, so that when they are used, you feel like they are coming to fruition (rather than popping them in for the first time only when they are needed to save the story line).

I also got a bit of a kick out of the matriarchal society Vinge created for Tiamat. Although the foreign offworlders were prejudiced against women in any kind of powerful position, the people of Tiamat were traditionally ruled by queens, rather than kings, and prayed primarily to an all-powerful goddess of the sea.

The matriarchy only goes so far, though. Under the woman-centric overlay, the actions of the two main female characters (and some of the secondary ones) were determined largely by their pursuit of (or escape from) a man. Most of their crushing agonies and triumphant successes revolved around whether they had gotten the male object of their affections (or ire) to do what they wanted. In particular, although Moon’s destiny does have something vaguely to do with bringing better times to her people, at every key decision point she chose her course of action by whether or not it got her closer to Sparks.

It also didn’t take me long to get fed up with the book’s romantic fantasy style. There is advanced technology available in the universe but it is withheld from the planet’s native inhabitants. So, by necessity, they resort to rustic, labor-intensive clothing, food, work, traditions, and religion straight out of the Dark Ages. People do their hair up in various forms of braid, drink ale and eat honeycake, and work as farmers and fisherman and oracles and itinerant healers. They tend to be superstitious, and like to attend large community festivals, and are partial to cries of agony and/or passion when roused in either of those ways.

Every other noun has to be archaically capitalized: the Hunt, the Change, the Transfer, the Street, the Festival, the Death, the Sea.

Otherwise ordinary nouns become romanticized by sticking an adjective onto them:“The [ship] dropped through a flattening arc, like a slingstone skimming an infinite pond.” “I’ll stay here at Street’s-end until you come out of there.” “How do you know what anybody did before the firstships sailed down out of the Great Storm?”

I’m the first one to admit that fantasy can be really fun when it is done well. I like to be carried away by it, unselfconscious of how silly the language and costumes and monsters might be to the uninitiated. But it can be giggle-making if not handled right. And I’m afraid The Snow Queen qualifies a little too often for the latter.

Book Review: Mirror Dance

Lois McMaster Bujold

1994
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
 
Once again the Hugo voters force me back into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.

The Saga is a multi-book series set in a universe of planets interconnected by trade and internecine political struggles. Space travel and warfare are at a Star-Trek-level of speed and sophistication.

                                                                                
Mirror Dance is one of the later books in the series. Its plot centers on Miles Vorkosigan, the son of the plucky, beautiful starship captain Cordelia Naismith and the handsome, strong, passionate, wise Count Aral Vorkosigan of the planet Barrayar. Enemies of the Count attacked Cordelia with a neurotoxin when she was pregnant, so her son Miles was born with an extremely small stature and brittle bones that break easily. He spent most of his first years in an incubator and later had to go through uncounted types of painful therapy.

Fortunately, Miles was also born with a quick wit, fantastic intelligence, and an innate ability to lead others. This allowed him to compensate for his physical disadvantages and he grew up to be a brilliant military tactician, a beloved ship captain, and irresistibly attractive to all ladies and hermaphrodites of intelligence.

Mirror Dance is a book about Miles in his prime and at his most powerful. It is a time when he is living a double life as the dutiful heir of the Count on Barrayar and the brilliant, daring Admiral Naismith of Barrayan Imperial Security.

It turns out that when Miles was a baby, an evil group of the Count’s enemies stole some of Miles’s cells and created a clone of Miles, whom they named Mark. In an impressive display of long-term plotting, they raised Mark from a baby and trained him to be an assassin, the idea being that they would eventually substitute Mark for Miles and he would then be able to get in and kill the Count.

The sinister lab where Mark was created and raised is also a facility that raises clones for rich people and performs brain transplants on them when the progenitor grows aged and wants a new, younger body. Unfortunately for the Count’s enemies, the head of the cloning facility has been abusive to Mark. By the time of Mirror Dance, Mark has had enough of it. He steals a spaceship and tries to free all the other clones. But his escape attempt fails and lab security clamps down. Miles comes after Mark and rescues him and the other clones, but gets shot and left behind in the process. Miles’ crew, Mark, and the rest of Miles’ friends and family spend the rest of the book trying to rescue Miles and also trying to destroy the clone lab, if they can, as a nice side project.

I’m sure if you’re a fan of the Vorkosigan Saga, you will love this book. For me, the saga is too much like a romance novel or a soap opera to get very excited about, and the plots are overly convoluted and not terribly original, and this installment is basically par for that course.

Bujold's characters are divided cleanly between those who are unjust and evil and horrifyingly ruthless, and those who are completely in love with Miles. Miles always knows exactly the right thing to do in any social, diplomatic, or wartime situation. As Admiral Naismith he is theoretically in danger of his life almost every minute, but you also never for a moment forget that he’s secretly royal and that gives him a lot of advantages in staff and equipment that others would not have. Also it lets him bestow lavish and perfect but anonymous gifts on his friends and loyal subordinates.

There is also a lot of time spent on how tedious and wasteful all the glamorous royal ceremonies are, and the primary characters spend a lot of time being forced to go and dress in fancy uniforms and stand around making cynical comments about the other guests, but underneath it all you feel like they really love it. No one could force the Count and Countess Vorkosigan to hold their own Winterfair Ball if they didn’t want to, after all, so it seems kind of hypocritical to have them standing around being snarky about it the whole time. 


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