Book Review: Project Pope

Clifford D. Simak
1981
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I like Clifford Simak’s novels a lot, and I think part of the reason might be because he started out as a journalist. His writing is clear and accessible without being simplistic. His main characters tend to be thoughtful loners who still care about other people. And he is able to use his kind, thoughtful little stories to raise big questions about big topics, without being didactic about it.

Project Pope’s big questions all revolve around the reconciliation of faith with science in the search for truth. And as a framework for these questions, Simak invents a paradoxical thing: a society of robots trying to build a religion.

The actual plot is a little peculiar. There are certainly moments of violence, danger, and even at least one murder. But his main characters are generally trying to do the right things even if they mess up sometimes. And even though they face threat, they face it with kindness and an earnest interest in puzzling out the solution.

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The book starts with a pretty darned exciting scene. On the remote planet of Gutshot, doctor Jason Tennyson has just run afoul of the law for the crime of having his boss, a city bigwig, happen to die on his watch. In a daring escape, he stows away on the next vessel leaving Gutshot’s spaceport, which turns out to be headed to the planet End of Nothing.

As the name would suggest, End of Nothing is the most remote planet in the known galaxy. And, for that reason, it was chosen by a group of cast-off robots from Earth to be the site of their project to create a new robot Vatican, complete with a robot Pope.

On Earth, robots were forbidden from developing their own religion So the ones who founded End of Nothing are extremely skittish about visitors and publicity, and this has piqued the interest of the only other human passenger on Tennyson’s ship, reporter Jill Roberts. Having received no response to her many written requests for information from the new Vatican, she is headed there in person to get some answers.

When they arrive at the End of Nothing, one of the human residents has had a severe accident, and the only human doctor there has recently died. So the robots, who don’t ask too many questions about legality anyway, ask Tennyson to stay and be their new doctor. He assents, not having too many other options. And, in an attempt to make things more palatable for Tennyson and to co-opt Roberts, they offer her a position as Vatican historian.

Roberts and Tennyson learn that the new Vatican employs a select group of semi-telepathic humans as sort of cosmic scouts; these people are able to travel in their minds to other worlds, and they do so, searching one world after another for Heaven.

They do this in service of the new Pope, who is convinced that religion can be derived from science. He believes that if he is able to search wide enough and far enough, he will discover the physical location of Heaven, and then he will be able to have a scientific basis for his faith.

But there is an underground faction of robots that believe that this is the wrong way to approach it; that faith must come first, and science must come after. This is the fundamental tension of Project Pope: the conflict between robots who believe faith must be derived from science, and those who believe science must be derived from faith. And, unbeknownst to our main characters or the Pope, both sides have adherents that are willing to make deadly cases for their beliefs.

While this dispute is simmering, Tennyson strikes up a friendship with Decker, a cabin-dwelling loner who has been on End of Nothing for most of his life, and Decker’s close companion, a sparkly trans-dimensional being named Whisperer that can also itself travel telepathically to other worlds. Whisperer takes Tennyson and Roberts on several journeys to meet the various wacky inhabitants of different worlds, and there they make the acquaintance of a group of aliens that look like giant dice that can print mathematical equations on their surfaces.

Eventually, one of the Vatican’s scouts finds Heaven--or is at least convinced that she has. She suffers a nervous breakdown as a result, but Whisperer is able to read enough of her mind to trace the scout’s journey back to the world she thought was Heaven, and to bring Tennyson and Roberts there.

What they discover there is not actually Heaven but instead a strange city world peopled by a motley group of aliens--including a duplicate of Decker, a furry alien shaped like a haystack, and an octopus-being that constantly plops up and down making a sound like liver being slapped on a countertop. One of these creatures turns out to be one of the faith-firsters, and it is determined to destroy Heaven, and possibly the rest of the universe along with it, by blowing itself up. There is a simultaneously tense and funny climactic scene in which Whisperer, Tennyson, and Roberts are able to avert catastrophe by bringing in their equation-surface-dice friends, and everybody lives, if not happily ever after, at least to see another day, albeit with lingering questions about God, the Devil, Heaven, and the nature of the universe.

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In the introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin explained that the great thing about descriptive science fiction is that each piece is a “thought-experiment.” She said:

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed. 

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

To some extent, Simak does this with Project Pope. It is not the world’s greatest piece of science fiction. But, at the end, if he has done his job for you, you wind up having enjoyed a somewhat quirky story about robots and aliens, while also simultaneously engaging your mind on questions that might not otherwise be easy to conceptualize. Is it better, he asks, to search for universal scientific truths, and to allow religious belief to develop from that? Or to grab hold of a religion--to search for Heaven--first, and then to use that idea of truth to frame your search for scientific knowledge?

Each reader is going to have to answer that question for themselves, of course. Simak provides the framework that enables you to think about it, but does not (and cannot) provide an answer. As Tennyson tells the robot Pope: if you asked a hundred humans whether faith should come out of knowledge or knowledge out of faith, you’d get all sorts of different answers, and any of them may be right.

But, being humans, we still want to ask the question. “We grasp for knowledge;” says Simak, through the thoughts of his main character. “Panting, we cling desperately to what we snare. We work endlessly to arrive at that final answer, or perhaps many final answers which turn out not to be final answers but lead on to some other fact or factor that may not be final, either. And yet we try, we cannot give up trying, for as an intelligence we are committed to the quest.”

Book Review: The Three Body Problem

Cixin Liu
2010
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Three Body Problem is the first book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Its events are set in motion by a Chinese astrophysicist who, because of the atrocities she witnessed during the Cultural Revolution, has become so disillusioned with humanity that she invites a race of ruthless alien overlords from Alpha Centauri to come take over Earth.

If you like quick, tidy resolutions in your fiction, you may want to be aware that you won’t get anything of the sort in this novel. You will need to read the trilogy’s next two installments to find out what happens to the protagonists (not to mention humanity as a whole) But the ride of this book is worth it: it has an excellent, engaging premise, and this first part of the journey is filled with sometimes puzzling, sometimes disturbing, often funny, and increasingly surreal imagery, events, and characters.

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The book opens with a one-two punch of gut-wrenching scenes from the 1960s civil wars that followed the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The first is the shooting of a fifteen-year-old rebel by Red Union regulars. And the second is the beating death of a professor of physics during an anti-intellectual show trial, during which his wife is one of the key witnesses for the prosecution.

The physics professor’s daughter, Ye Wenjie, witnesses the whole trial, including her mother’s betrayal and her father’s death. The traumatized Ye goes to her university mentor for help, only to have her mentor commit suicide shortly thereafter. And then Ye herself, who refuses to denounce the beliefs of her dead father, is judged an enemy to the revolution and is sent to a reeducation camp in Mongolia. There, she is caught with reactionary propaganda (a copy of Rachel Smith’s Silent Spring), framed for writing a letter reporting the camp’s deforestation of the area, and thrown in prison.

However, Ye is an astrophysicist, and the military needs her expertise. So she is given a reprieve of sorts: her life is spared, and she is sent to work on a top-secret radar installation called Red Coast Base. But by this point, Ye doesn’t care. And any shred of faith she might have had in humans is long gone.

Ye’s story pauses here, in the late 1960s. The narrative fast-forwards forty years or so to 2006, when Wang Miao, an unassuming professor of applied research working on nanotechnology, is pressured by the army to try to infiltrate a secret physics society called the Frontiers of Science—a society where several prominent members have recently committed suicide.

After reluctantly accepting the assignment, strange things start to happen to Wang. Most disturbingly, he starts to see a countdown appearing in strange places: like on a roll of negatives he shot from his camera, and in the corners of his eyes while reading. The tiny numbers show up everywhere, relentlessly counting down. It is driving him crazy. So he goes to the Frontiers of Science for help. His key contact there, physics professor Shen Yufei, tells him to stop his nanotech research, and the countdown mysteriously stops.

Then, on one of his visits to Shen’s house, Wang happens to catch her playing an immersive game called 3body. Curious, he plays it himself. The game puts him onto an alien planet with three suns. The suns are sometimes big, sometimes small, never moving in a consistent direction or at a consistent speed. Sometimes they disappear for weeks or years (which he can observe because time passes much more quickly in the game than in real life). The planet is also populated by other, usually quite quirky players who take on avatars of characters from history like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. The players are all trying to find some formula that will allow them to predict the movement of the suns, but they never do. And with every play, Wang is only able to see civilization advance just a little bit further before some combination of the suns’ movements burns the planet to the ground and the inhabitants have to dehydrate themselves, waiting out the heat until the next period of solar stability.

Wang realizes that the game is an illustration of the three-body problem, a classic physics puzzle. The problem is that when a planet has three suns, the suns’ competing gravitational behavior will make them behave so erratically that their movements cannot be predicted by any known formula—and will periodically result in unexpected destruction of the planet. The game’s creators hope that it will help people to come up with an algorithm that will predict the movements of the suns, and thereby find a way to avoid the carnage that results from unfortunate solar combinations.

And when Wang attends a user group meeting, he learns that this is not just a theoretical concern. The world of the 3body game is a real place: a planet near Alpha Centauri that really does have three suns, and where the native population of “trisolarians” lives in constant danger of being wiped out by an unlucky sun alignment.

Which brings us back to Ye Wenjie’s story. Because when she was at Red Coast base in the 1960s, she discovered that she was able to use our sun’s radiation as a natural amplifier. So one day, furious with humanity, she sneaked into the control room and bounced a message off the sun in the direction of Alpha Centauri, saying, basically, “we are useless; come take over.” The trisolarians received it, and began preparing to come and take over our planet as their own.

Ye couldn’t be more strongly in favor of this idea. And, in fact, has co-founded an organization with a radical millionaire environmentalist to welcome the trisolarians with open arms. They are closely affiliated with the Frontiers of Science, and the 3body game is one of their brainchilds.

I should say at this point that I do most of my reading on the subway, on the way to and from work. I was innocently reading on the train one morning, minding my own business, when the guy sitting next to me said, “Is that The Three Body Problem? That book is crazy. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier. I read it in one night straight through, and then I read the other two books in like two more days. I can’t get enough of his writing. It’s completely nuts.”

And my traveling companion was correct. After the message gets through to the trisolarians, the book does start to get odd, eventually ramping up to the point where it is indeed pretty nuts.

For one thing, we become privy to the trisolarians’ preparations for the invasion of Earth, including their launch of a science-disrupting bombe surprise—a set of instructions encoded on the inner surfaces of two protons—which will get to Earth many light years before they will, and which they have to test with often hilarious results on their home planet first.

For another, simultaneously, Wang teams up with an international task force to gather (or steal by force) intel from the Frontiers of Science, which culminates in an effort to saw a supertanker into pieces using a device that is essentially a gigantic egg slicer.

And the 3body game keeps getting progressively more and more bizarre, with the repeated, inevitable destruction of the planet by one or another sun causing increasingly demented historical avatars to come up with increasingly wacky ideas to solve the sun problem, and to deyhdrate themselves into little people-prunes over and over again.

It all builds up intense anticipation for the arrival of the trisolarians...which, unfortunately, we have to wait until a later volume in this trilogy to see.

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This book does require a little bit of familiarization with the history of the Cultural Revolution, for those not already aware of its complexities. I took Chinese history in college, and still needed quite a bit of help, what with the confusing civil wars after the revolution, and the references to reactionaries and the material dialectic. The translator’s footnotes help a lot here.

The physics can also sometimes be difficult, and so advanced as to be almost surreal. But there is enough explanation in that area, too, that with just a little effort it’s still very possible to follow the main stream of the story.

The characters—human and alien, real and virtual—are engaging and quirky. They can be earnest, dedicated, and smart, but also sometimes inappropriately, sweetly frank and obnoxious. (The  message sent out by the Chinese equivalent of the SETI program to announce themselves to whichever alien race is listening, for example, is adorably imperious.)

Most of all, I loved the clever, off-the-wall situations in the 3body game, which do allow scientists to conduct thought experiments they never could do when constrained by Earthly physics. One of the best is when in one of Wang’s forays into the game he encounters the emperor Qin Shi Huang, who uses his vast army to create an enormous, human-scale computer processor, including a CPU, memory, system bus, and hard drive, and processor messages sent by semaphore and horseback.

It was brilliant in a way similar to the binary language instruction scene in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. And, indeed, this book had many elements in it that reminded me of Stephenson’s best work—combined with the funny and accessible multi-dimensional physics of Edwin Abbott, the surreal settings of Roger Zelazny, and the alien invasions of H.G. Wells.

Book Review: Radiomen

Eleanor Lerman
2015
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This novel is...okay. It gives a somewhat new twist to the aliens-are-among-us genre, and kept my interest up a reasonable amount of the time. But it reads a little too much like a young adult novel trying to be grittier and more hard-boiled than it actually is. It’s like Judy Blume trying to be Raymond Chandler. And some of the writing gets a bit sloppy.

The main character, Laurie Perzin, is directionless and isolated. She lives in a down-at-heel part of Queens near warehouses where shady activities go on in the wee hours of the night. Every day she shuttles back and forth from her home to her job as a night-shift bartender at Kennedy airport, keeping her head down, uninvolved in everything around her.

The one interest she has is in ham radio, a hobby borne out of her close childhood relationship with her now-deceased radio enthusiast uncle Avi. But even that hobby is soured by the memory of a vivid dream from that childhood. In the dream, she and Avi were outside the family’s summer vacation rental in Rockaway, trying to listen to signals from Sputnik. Avi lost the signal and went up to the roof to fix the antenna. While he was gone, a gray, fuzzy humanoid form appeared in front of Laurie, telling her not to make a sound while it fixed the radio.

The dream has always disturbed her. So, at the start of the book, without really intending to, Laurie calls in to a psychic appearing on a late-night radio talk show. The psychic, Ravenette, repeats the dream to Laurie unprompted. Laurie hangs up, but the psychic tracks her down and tries to get her to talk about the dream humanoid, and also tries to convert her to a cult-like religion that is almost an exact copy of Scientology called The Blue Awareness.

Ravenette won’t leave Laurie alone. So Laurie turns to the radio show’s host, Jack Shepherd, for help. Jack is sane and sympathetic, but suggests that maybe her “dream” was actually a real incident that she is repressing. Jack thinks that the gray humanoid she saw was an alien, and that there are others on Earth besides the one she saw, and that other people have seen them, and that her uncle might have known about them, too.

In fact, Jack thinks that, Howard Gilmartin, founder of the Blue Awareness, knew about the aliens too, and built his cult around them. Jack’s theory is bolstered when thugs from the Blue Awareness start harassing Laurie, insisting that she submit to “tests” using their “blue box,” which is basically just a box with an electric field in it. She makes the mistake of telling them that she has her own box—one her uncle built to prove that theirs was fake—whereupon they break in and ransack her apartment to steal it.

After the break in, Laurie’s Malian neighbor gives her a watchdog; a very strange but cute and loyal dog that protects her from other incidents and seem to have its own knowledge (and distrust) of the creepos from the Blue Awareness. Jack suspects that the dog is descended from a long line of dogs cared for by the Dogon people of Mali, which may have been given to them originally by the aliens hundreds of years ago as a gift.

Eventually, Laurie is contacted by Raymond Gilmartin, son of Howard and current leader of the Blue Awareness. Raymond thinks she has another piece of her uncle’s radio equipment, a repeater, and he wants it and won’t leave her alone about it. Then there is a weird incident where Ravenette channels an alien who says that it is the aliens who actually need the repeater.

Jack is curious about all of this, so he builds a new repeater when they can’t find Avi’s, and then Jack and Laurie agree to meet Raymond and Ravenette at Laurie’s family’s old vacation rental in Rockaway to give them the repeater, in exchange for them leaving Laurie alone. The Blue Awareness thugs show up and it all threatens to go bad until like a bazillion dogs show up to protect Laurie. And then who should show up but the alien himself, amazing everyone and silencing the Blue Awareness for good.

Lerman’s thesis is an interesting one in principle: that in spite of their superior science, the aliens visiting us are as much in the dark about god and the meaning of life and all that as we are. This could have been turned into a thought-provoking statement about how technology won’t answer those sorts of questions for you, and that no matter how smart you are, you still have to look inside yourself to find meaning in your life. But that does not happen in this novel.

Lerman tries hard to make Laurie tough, but she just doesn’t have the gravitas and attitude to pull off the noir persona it seems that Lerman is going for. She always comes across like a continually disillusioned kid. And many of her movements seem pointless, or at least needlessly slow; like her first visit to her family’s old beach rental on Rockaway, or to her uncle’s grave.

In keeping with a noir atmosphere, Lerman includes huge amounts of gritty scenery description, especially of the seedier parts of New York City, which in a Dashiell Hammett novel would give the story a crucial atmosphere, but which here get, well, boring. Everything is continually soggy, gray, forlorn.

And there are a ton of similes, often combined with comically long run-on sentences, that are pretty hard to read. To wit:

“Dr. Carpenter turned to look toward the window, where a block of dusty summer sunlight seemed to sit on the sill like a package someone had forgotten to bring inside.”

“The structure resembled a pile of dark concrete whose colonnaded facade had been stripped bare and refurbished to emanate a steampunk look that someone must have felt represented the aesthetic of early twentieth-century manufacturing even better than the name of the long-departed box-making firm still chiseled above the entranceway.”

The Blue Awareness is a little too bare-facedly and disappointingly an imitation of Scientology—even down to the Ted Merrill / Tom Cruise star spokesman—without any real significant alteration.

And the ending is awkwardly unsubtle. Characters are supposed to grow and change over the course of a novel, but it is supposed to be self-evident; not proclaimed. At the end of Radiomen, Laurie comes right out and tells the reader that she has changed from a person plodding head down through life to a curious person alive with possibilities. (Which isn’t actually all that apparent.) And, as a bonus, Laurie lists the other key characters and tells us how they have changed, too. It clanks hard.

If anything rescues this novel at all, it is the dogs. They provide the moments of real heart and meaning; they have their own agendas and personalities, and are some of the best characters in the book. If only they were the protagonists as well.

Book Review: Cuckoo’s Egg

C.J. Cherryh
1985
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –

SPOILER ALERT...but does it really matter?

You just never know where your most excruciating reading experiences are going to come from. My most recent came in the form of Cuckoo’s Egg: a slim, 200-page novel that offers the reader a unique combination of boredom and pain, and which took me a good two months to force my way through.

Cuckoo’s Egg is purportedly the story of a rigorously dutiful, misunderstood warrior and the child he sacrifices nearly everything to raise alone. But it is really the story of a co-dependent, abusive relationship, thinly disguised by an abstract writing style and held together by the thinnest of plots.

On a distant planet orbiting a distant star lives an intelligent, bipedal dog-like species with nascent spacefaring technology and a highly developed social structure. Duun, one of our two co-protagonists, is one of these dog-creatures. He is a battle-scarred, tough-as-nails, high-ranking member of the hatani, a class of soldiers who are bound by tradition and duty to do the unpleasant but necessary work that more polite society won’t do itself. The hatani are on the fringes of respectability: needed and respected by the common folk for the work that they do, but, at the same time, feared because of their military skill, and resented for the fact that they have to exist at all.

For reasons we don’t learn until the very end of the book, Duun is assigned a human baby to raise as his own. The baby is called Thorn. Duun raises Thorn as his own son, on his country estate, with no one else around but the peasants he displaced to claim his ancestral lands, who are a bit ticked off about being displaced.

As Thorn grows from babyhood into teenagehood, Duun raises him to be tough—very tough. Dunn challenges him constantly, both physically and with tricky, hostile riddles. And the masters of the hatani also put Thorn through somewhat ridiculous Kung-Fu-like tests, which include things like having to scour his rooms for the tiniest pebbles that were put there to see if he could find them all. 

But Thorn is sensitive. He can’t really be as tough as Duun wants him to be. His heart is in his throat every time he is tested; indeed, his heart has been in his throat for almost all of his entire short life up to this point. And there is no obvious reason why his upbringing has had to be this harsh. He lives in seemingly pointless fear and suffers seemingly pointless cruelty from Duun and the hatani masters, all under the guise of it being for his own protection.

When Thorn is a teenager, he actually gets up enough gumption to run away. But he is almost killed by scared villagers, and Duun has to rescue him, and has to kill a villager to do it. Which, in turn, means that Duun and Thorn have to abandon the country estate for the city where there won’t be angry villagers at every turn waiting for either one of them to make a misstep.

I think Thorn believes that Duun loves and protects him. And I think Duun believes that he loves Thorn. And I think Cherryh believes that she’s portraying a loving and protecting relationship that has been forced into harshness by circumstance. But their relationship is really one of toxic abuse and manipulation.

When they move to the city, Thorn finally gets to have company his own age; he is put into an actual classroom with four classmates. But they are more his tutors than his peers; they stay aloof from him even as they teach him; and they reinforce for him just how different he is from everyone else. And when Thorn falls for one of his classmates and tries to kiss her, he gets in trouble and she is immediately removed. (To add insult to injury, she is also revealed to have been an agent of the ghotanin, unscrupulous mercenaries who are the rivals of the hatani and who are trying to gain information about Thorn.)

As the nearly irrelevant plot plugs along, eventually, as part of his education, Thorn is forced to learn to reproduce what seem to be nonsense vocalizations, played on tapes, sound for sound. Gradually, though, he realizes that the taped voices are actually speaking a strange language, and the only known source of that language is the tapes that they’re making him memorize. And the more he listens to the tapes, the more he starts to understand them. And his dreams start to match what he hears: he starts to dream about a space station, filled with people like him—humans.

Meanwhile, the ghotani step up their attacks against the hatani, forcing Duun to step up his Thorn timeline, and finally, mercifully, forcing Cherryh to reveal Thorn’s purpose. It turns out that the tapes Thorn was forced to memorize are indeed from humans. Apparently a ship of them arrived at Duun’s planet a very long time ago. Duun’s people accidentally killed them all, but the humans back on Earth are still sending messages in an attempt to reach their long-lost ship. So the hatani created Thorn as a clone based on genetic information taken from the original ship’s passengers, and they hope that he will be able to translate what the human messages are saying—so as to hopefully either serve as an ambassador to broker a peace, or at least warn them when more humans will be coming.

Duun takes Thorn up into space, to a space station, to interpret the new messages being received from Earth by the station’s radio. And there, after about 150 pages of the total 175 or so, Duun stops manipulating and playing needless mind games, and finally gives Thorn a little honesty.

But it is about 149 pages too late. And I barely was able to make it that far as it was. Most of the time, while reading this book, I would read one paragraph and then, before I got very far into the next one, find myself zoning out, looking up, reading the ads on the bus, making grocery lists in my head. 

Sometimes it was because of the unrelentingly, needlessly cruel relationship between Duun and Thorn. It was a life that kept Thorn constantly off balance, with Duun one moment seemingly on the verge of kindness and then the next moment spinning off into anger and violence. Thorn lives in desperation; he hates Duun, but is terrified of being abandoned on a world where he knows no one else. All of his needs for trust and friendship and kindness and love are denied and invalidated.

And other times it was because I just did not care. Neither one of the main characters is in any way appealing, and neither one gave me any reason to want to find out what happened to him. And, in fact, nothing ever really does. There is zero reward for sitting through the unremitting cruelty of this dysfunctional relationship.

Book Review: Probability Sun

Nancy Kress
2001
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – – 

Probability Sun starts three years after the end of Probability Moon. After losing three members of the original team that investigated the planet World in Probability Moon, Drs. Dieter Grüber and Anne Sikorski have convinced the Solar System’s governing body, the Solar Alliance Defense Network (SADN), to go back to World to investigate the “device” they discovered buried deep in the Neury Mountains.

Grüber wants to go for scientific curiosity. Sikorski wants to go for the natives, who she feels responsible for protecting from SADN. And SADN wants to for military reasons; they’re hoping the “device” will turn out to be a weapon that will help them win humanity’s war against the Fallers.

SADN Major Lyle Kaufman, a consummate diplomat, is chosen to lead the mission. Grüber convinces Kaufman to include the world’s greatest physicist and radical crank, Dr. Tom Capelo, who insists on bringing his two young daughters and their nanny. And the military insists on including Marbet Grant, a “sensitive,” who is so skilled at reading body language that her insights are often confused with telepathy. Capelo’s job will be to figure out how the device works. Grant’s job will be to interpret, in the event a Faller is captured alive for the first time.

Which, in fact, happens. While Kaufman’s team is in transit to World, another SADN ship captures a Faller, and it is transferred to the brig in Kaufman’s ship. There, Grant begins learning the Faller’s body language in unorthodox and controversial but effective ways.

While Grant is learning to communicate with the Faller, the ship arrives at World. Because of what happened during the humans’ first mission to the planet, the team is worried that the natives will view them as “unreal,” or not a part of the shared reality that all the natives feel, and thereby condemned to death. What they don’t realize is that because of the unintentionally self-sacrificing, life-saving actions of a deceased schizophrenic crew member from the last mission, the natives now think humans are “real,” and that they share reality. They are therefore surprised when they are welcomed and treated hospitably—and they are glad to be reunited with Enli, a native who they worked with on the original mission, and one who was unusually open to their ideas, even to her own acute distress.

Grüber, Capelo, and a small team spelunk through the caves under the Neury Mountains to examine the device in situ. Soon, the spelunking team runs into a problem: they learn that the buried artifact in the Neury Mountains (a) is probably a particle destabilizer; (b) could probably be made into a quantum weapon; and (c) is also probably responsible for the quantum changes in the Worlders’ brains that give them their shared reality, upon which their entire civilization is based. So they have to wonder: will happen to the Worlders when the Terran crew removes the device to make their weapon?

What happens, of course, is that the Terran military does remove it, and the Worlders experience an absence of shared reality. For most, it is terrifying; for some, it is liberating. And its removal is going to bring transformative change to Worlders’ society, whether for good or for ill, whether they want it or not.

In the end, Sikorski and Grüber decide to stay on the planet permanently—to be with each other, and to help guide the people of World through their societal transition. Capelo figures out how the artifact works, and the result brings terrible, potentially civilization-destroying capabilities to the humans. Practically everyone is thrown in the brig. And the reader is left with an extremely shaky detente between Earth, World, and the Fallers, setting us up for the final installment in the trilogy.

The implications of the ideas introduced in Probability Moon come to full fruition in Probability Sun. Sun allows Kress to explore the ways in which having an enforced shared reality enables a society to be cooperative, pleasant, and peaceful but, at the same time, limits and represses people who otherwise would be curious, creative, and different. The absence of shared reality means that violence, deceit, and crime are all possible. But it also means that for those who want to engage in it, so is independent thought. 

Enli is a case in point. In the absence of the device, and shared reality, Enli begins to realize that reality is subjective; that people can have different realities from each other, and that all of those realities may be true in their own way. But it is difficult for those Enli loves to cope with these new ideas, much less embrace them—or to embrace the new Enli. Shared reality has swaddled her in a blanket of comfort and protection. But as soon as she begins to question that shared reality, she suffers oppression and brutality. 

Enli’s struggles after the loss of shared reality, the implications of what the device on World can do, and, to a lesser extent, Grant’s attempts to communicate with the captured Faller are really where the action is in Probability Sun. These scenes have more dramatic tension in them than any of the actual action scenes in the book, like the space battles with the Fallers or the societal fallout after the removal of the device from World. In this, Kress’s writing reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s, in that the real focus of her books is not shootouts or chases or romance, but rather puzzles of logic and morality.

In Probability Moon, Enli has to go through a major, painful change in her perception of both herself and her people. She has to decide whether it is worth voluntarily accepting repression of thought in order to have peace; and if it is worth breaking away from those she loves, or possibly from the only planet she has ever known, in order to satisfy intellectual curiosity. And the Terran crew has to answer an array of similarly weighty questions, like: how can we communicate with a race wildly different from ourselves? How does the artifact work? What are our responsibilities towards others when we have the power to destroy them completely? Should we destroy their culture to save ours? The book’s drama is there, in the puzzle-solving, the logical dilemmas, the internal arguments.And, in general, because of this, Kress’s books are appealing in the same way that Asimov’s are. (Even if Probability Sun does suffer a bit with the absence of my favorite character, Dr. Ahmed Bazargan.)

Another aspect of Kress’s writing that is appealing—and also similar to Asimov’s—is that she is really good at looking through alien eyes. A sizeable chunk of the book, for example, is spent on Grant’s struggle to achieve some kind of connection with the incredibly peculiar Fallers. And Kress has a talent for explaining the things the Terrans do on World using concepts the Worlders understand. To the Worlders, the Terran spaceships are flying boats; elevators are carts with no one to pull them; almost any vehicle of any kind is a bicycle, and when a spaceship takes off, it makes a noise like “a hundred bicycle wheels grinding.” 

Kress is almost always sympathetic to the Fallers’ and Worlders’ feelings and reactions, even when they do terrible things out of ignorance or fear. She presents it all to us such that we are sympathetic to them, too. And maybe this is her central aim, in the end: to have us understand even those most alien to us.

Book Review: Probability Moon

Nancy Kress
2000
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This book did not win any of the major science fiction awards, but it is the first book in the trilogy that includes Probability Space, which won the Campbell. And it should have won an award, because it is way, way better than either Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which won the Hugo that year, and The Quantum Rose, which won the Nebula. With the minor exception of the ending, it is a well-paced, accessible, engaging, relatively original story; almost a cross between an Ursula Le Guin alien-planet story and a Jack McDevitt space adventure novel. And it is quite effective in making you want to read its sequel, Probability Sun.

In the near-future setting of Probability Moon, humans have expanded throughout the solar system with the help of a series of wormholes connecting various parts of our galaxy, which were put there by some vanished ancient alien race as yet unknown, and whose technology is still not really understood.

These wormholes have led human explorers to hundreds of habitable planets and several sentient alien species. Most of these species are humanoid and peaceful, and one, the Fallers, is definitely neither humanoid nor peaceful. The Fallers simply want to exterminate us, without negotiation or diplomacy. Humanity is now in a constant low-level war with the Fallers, with each side trying to upgrade their weapons technology as fast as possible and thereby gain military advantage over the other.

Probability Moon opens after an initial human (Terran) recon team has returned from their investigation of a new planet recently discovered via the ancient wormholes. The team reported that the inhabitants, which call their planet “World,” are peaceful and have organized their entire economy and social culture around the cultivation and worship of flowers. They also reported that of the planet’s seven moons, one is not actually a moon, and may be of intense interest to the military.

This intrigues the Terran government, which sends a larger exploratory crew to investigate World at greater length. Half of the crew—the purported reason for the mission—is a natural science team, including an anthropologist, a biologist, and a geologist. They are deployed to the surface of the planet to learn as much as they can about the native culture. The other half of the crew—the real reason for the mission—is a military astrophysics team sent to investigate the “moon” of interest.

The surface team quickly discovers that the planet’s natives have an unusual characteristic: they share a common reality. All of them understand a single, uniform truth in any situation. If someone questions that truth, it gives the natives severe head pain, sometimes to the point where they cannot function. And if someone reveals that they do not share the same common reality with the others, that person is declared “unreal.” The best that can happen to an unreal person is that they are shunned by society until they have served some sort of penance; the worst that can happen is that they are condemned to death.

The surface team ingratiates itself into the household of one of the wealthier inhabitants of World, and becomes particularly close to one of the servants, Enli, who has been declared unreal for having killed her brother, and who is serving her penance by spying on the Terrans. This outreach goes relatively well at first for the team, but gradually their position becomes more and more dangerous, since it’s obvious they do not share the same reality with each other, much less the natives, and are increasingly at risk of being designated as unreal and being condemned to death.

Eventually they do have to flee to the comparative safety of a highly radioactive mountain range where they hope to be rescued by the spacebound half of their crew—and where they discover what just might be the source of the natives’ shared reality.

The problem is that while the ground team was involved with the natives on the surface, the spacebound team was getting itself in even deeper hot water in orbit. First, they discovered that the planet’s seventh moon is not, in fact, a moon at all, but a piece of technology left there by the original wormhole builders. Then, their testing revealed that it is a weapon: a powerful one that could potentially serve to turn the tide of the war with the Fallers. And then, of course, the Fallers show up, and there is a terribly tense game of cat-and-mouse as the humans and the Fallers both try to gain control of the moon-sized weapon.

Probability Moon is somewhat unsatisfyingly unresolved at the very end. And the characters aren’t terrifically charismatic; none of the aliens really caught my interest, even Enli, and neither did most of the humans. My favorites were Bazargan, the leader of the on-planet surface team, and Gruber, the surface geologist, who were the most individual and appealing; the others were either undistinctive or creepy.

But, in general, this book is fun. It has a plausible galactic political and military structure, a well-developed alien planet ecosystem, and a non-human sentient species with a unique social structure. The Faller threat adds dramatic tension. And although the surface plot gets much more narrative time than the space plot, both are well-paced and build up nice lines of parallel suspense and then intertwining action.

And it could be that the ending is ambiguous because Kress is setting us up for the sequel, Probability Sun—so I won’t judge too harshly until I have read that one.

Book Review: The Many-Colored Land

Julian May
1981
Awards: Locus (Science Fiction)
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Many-Colored Land opens with the spectacular crash-landing of an alien spaceship carrying alien colonists to a prehistoric Earth. The passengers escape in pods that bring them safely to the ground while their ship is smashed to bits.

The scene is riveting. But for a long time yet we won’t know what it means, which turns out to be a bit frustrating. Because the next thing that happens is that we fast-forward into our near future, to a time when Earth is part of a Foundation-like set of colonized planets and moons, and has tolerably civil relations with several alien races.

It is also a future in which a French scientist, Théo Guderian, has invented a time portal. The portal is a huge scientific breakthrough, of course, but there is a catch: it only goes one way. Once you go through, you can’t come back.

This would seem to be an insurmountable down side. Especially when you also find out that his portal goes to only one place and time: France in the Pliocene Epoch. In the Pliocene, Europe was closer to the equator and much hotter than it is now, covered with lush jungle, and populated by man-eating sabretooth cats, giant rhinos, and our early ramapithecine ancestors.

But for many hopeless and desperate people, the portal seems like the best option short of suicide. After Théo dies, in response to overwhelming demand, his widow Angélique starts to let people go through the portal in very small batches, after a rigorous screening and preparation process. And after she herself goes through the portal, an oversight committee continues her work.

Over the next hundred or so pages we then meet a series of eight people, from various parts of Earth and its outlying colonies, who are all at the ends of their ropes for one reason or another. All of them have decided to leave their current lives for whatever awaits them beyond the portal—popularly known as Exile.

These people include a profit-driven, reckless cargo ship captain alienated from his family; a Canadian ring-hockey champion shunned by her teammates; a nun questioning her faith and her purpose; an anthropologist who has just lost his wife of decades; an impish criminal; a heartsick man whose beloved went through the portal a while before; a telepath who lost her abilities in an accident; and an anger-prone Scandinavian who has proven himself too violent to last long in any Earthly job.

It takes a long time to meet all these people, and they are introduced without much sense of why they’re important or what their relationship is to each other. It was interesting for a while, but eventually I started getting fidgety and bored with all of the backstory.

Finally, though, the book moves to the next stage and the action starts. All eight of the people we’ve met go through the portal together…and run smack into the clutches of the aliens who crash-landed in the opening scene.

Because, as it turns out, there is already a society on the Pliocene side of the portal: a society of ruthlessly tyrannical aliens. These aliens call themselves the Tanu. Every time a new group of humans arrives, the Tanu capture them, confiscate their weapons and tools, evaluate their abilities, and slam a mind-controlling metal torc around their necks to ensure their obedience.

The torcs amplify the aliens’ telepathic abilities, enabling them to control humans (and our ramapithecine relatives) with psychological punishments and rewards. There are three tiers of torcs: iron, for low-level people the aliens just want to control like automatons; silver, for somewhat useful middle-manager-type humans who need to retain some level of initiative; and gold, for a privileged few who have particularly valuable skills and who proven their loyalty, but who still need to be kept under the threat of punishment or death just in case they stray. The golden torcs also have the ability to enhance telepathic abilities for those humans who have them naturally.

This psychological enslavement might actually not be worth fighting against most of the time—since many of the humans lead relatively pain-free lives and most are provided with free food and shelter—if it wasn’t for the fact that the aliens are also forcing the female humans to be incubators for their alien children. When they got to Earth the Tanu found that they were sterile, so they use the women as surrogate mothers against their will. So this sets up a nicely appalling reason for all but the most self-interested humans to unite and rebel.

After the eight humans we have been following are snatched by the Tanu they are provided with appropriate torcs, split into two groups of four, and sent off to two separate cities with many other captives. For the rest of The Many-Colored Land we mainly follow only one of the groups (the other group is the focus of the sequel, The Golden Torc).

Our primary group includes the cargo ship captain, the nun, the anthropologist, and the ring-hockey champion. As they are being transported, they plot and execute a courageous, creative escape using keen observation of the Tanu’s weaknesses, and what few tools and abilities are left to them. They break away, only to be faced with a back-breaking (and arm-breaking) slog through the Pliocene jungle to a safer location.

After they have been on the run for a while, they run into a band of free, underground humans, and are convinced to change their goals from simply escaping to defeating the Tanu and freeing all enslaved humans. And they also encounter face to face for the first time the dreaded, mind-warping Firvulag, the lower-status mutant kin of the Tanu, who might be, just possibly, more aligned with the humans’ goals than they think at first.

Humans and Firvulag embark on a daring plan to acquire the weaponry and allies that may enable them to defeat the seemingly undefeatable Tanu. The build up to the confrontation is suspenseful and nerve-wracking in the best way; it is complex and hard, but if it all works, they might—just might!—be able to save humanity.

The whole thing culminates in a satisfying onslaught on one of the largest Tanu cities. The climactic battle is impressively well done. Wars in novels too often end up being either overdramatic or incomprehensible or both, with vague micro-fights and ill-defined macro strategy, and often ridiculously magical reprieves from defeat. But May’s attack on the city has none of these weaknesses; he paints a very clear picture of the execution of the overall strategy (so you know exactly why each person is participating in the way they are), and at the same time he spices the fighting up with exciting details of individual bravery and creativity. I particularly liked the scene when a group of humans taught their Firvulag allies how to fight a mounted opponent, and the molten destruction of the barium reserves used in torc-making.

All in all, this novel tells a unique, exciting story. May has an easy-to-follow, almost Ursula-LeGuin-like, psychologically-oriented, deceptively calm style of writing. And he has clearly carefully structured his plot at all levels.

But the book did give me a number of stumbling blocks to get over. One was, of course, the slow start. Another was that the periodic deliriously rapt descriptions of French goose liver pate and fine burgundy wines were more of a turn-off for me than the turn-on they clearly were for May.

And, most importantly, I kept being bothered by the potential for paradoxes and otherwise screwing up the time continuum. Isn’t it potentially endangering the course of evolution to send cuttings of modern plants and pregnant sheep and dogs through the portal? Not to mention the interbreeding of humans, ramapithecines, and Tanu? Can we really rely on the natural preservation of the timeline to prevent all this from changing Earth’s future (our present)? And the biggest question of all is, of course, what happens six million years from now if the Tanu still exist on Earth? And, if they are not there, how could they all possibly have been eradicated?

I guess that since this is just the first installment of May’s four-volume Saga of Pliocene Exile, I am probably going to have to read the sequel to find out.

Book Review: The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula K. Le Guin
1971
Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

For one of the later editions of her novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a beautiful essay about how science fiction is powerful because it allows us to perform thought experiments—following exploratory premises to their ultimate end to see how they might play out.

She is brilliant at this herself, coming up with wild kernels of ideas and packing interesting characters and plots around them so she can explore their full consequences. She takes your mind places you never could go in reality—and, in doing so, reveals much about our real life on Earth.

The Lathe of Heaven is a perfect example of this. And it is a relatively short novel, but it plunges you right into the story and moves along at a fast clip, with every chapter advancing the central plot one more major degree until the final resolution.

George Orr, our main character, is a sensitive man by nature. And he carries a terrible burden: he knows that his dreams change waking reality. For everyone.

When Orr dreams, his dreams change the past. So everyone except him knows only the new, altered reality. Orr is the only one who carries both the memories of the original, defunct reality and the new, changed reality in his head simultaneously.

And Orr’s is a world that would be tempting to try to change. In perhaps one of the first ever appearances of climate change in a work of fiction, Orr’s Earth of the near future is one wracked by global warming and crowded with too many billions of people. Polar ice is melting, seas are rising, and entire coastlines of cities are imperiled. The weather in Portland, where he lives, is hot and constantly rainy; the city gets an average of 114” of rain per year, and it is 70° Fahrenheit in mid-March.

But Orr knows he doesn’t have the right to change reality for everyone—whether they are aware of it or not. So his conscience is making him miserable, and he tries to suppress his dreaming by taking illegal pharmaceuticals. When he is inevitably discovered, he is sent to government-mandated therapy.

His therapist, Dr. Haber, is a big man with an ego to match his size. Orr makes the mistake of being completely honest with Haber about his dreams. At first, of course, Haber thinks Orr is crazy, but after seeing his surroundings change during an induced dream state controlled by hypnotic suggestion, Haber realizes that he is telling the truth.

Haber doesn’t admit to Orr that he believes him, though. He acts like a dispassionate professional, diagnosing Orr with a severe psychological problem needing hypnotically-controlled dream therapy. Treatment provided, of course, by Haber himself.

Orr soon starts to suspect that Haber is actually using their dream sessions to remake the world as Haber wants it. And it is a scary moment indeed when we realize Orr is quite right in his suspicions. With each session, Haber becomes just a bit more powerful and famous; eventually he has become founder of his own institute of sleep research and influential with politicians and business leaders. But as things get better and better for Haber, they get potentially worse and worse for humanity.

The problem is that, even with the best intentions, Orr’s dreams have unintended consequences. Each one does what Haber asks for, but in unexpected and almost always worse ways. Each dream pulls humanity out of the frying pan and into the fire. (For example, Haber asks Orr to dream that people stop fighting wars with each other, so Orr dreams that human wars all stop… because we have had to band together to fight a terrifying alien foe.)

Eventually, Orr brings in a lawyer to witness the therapy sessions. During the session, Haber asks Orr to solve the environmental problems the world is having, and Orr dreams of a plague killing off six of the seven billion people on Earth. The lawyer is looking out the window as it happens, and sees people and buildings disappear, so she believes him too. But neither she nor Orr know how to stop Haber.

Orr tries to run away, but he can’t stop the dreams, and he can’t force himself to stay awake forever. And the pressure is turned up when he learns that Haber wants to replicate his brain waves, so that anyone can have “effective” dreams like his. And by “anyone,” of course, Haber means himself.

We have no idea how Orr is going to fix all of this, since the changes happen in dream states during which he has no control over his conscious thought. But it may just turn out that the very monsters he created with his dreams will be the source of his salvation.

There are two things that make Le Guin a seminal writer of science fiction. One is that she thinks extremely deeply, pulling all kinds of perceptive, unexpected insights out of what might appear to be a simple premise. And the other is that she has a clear, unpretentious, emotionally evocative way with words.

The Lathe of Heaven is based on an intriguing question: what would happen if you could alter reality with your dreams? The question seems fun and playful at first, but the more the story goes on, the more you realize how horrifying it could be. Dreams are uncontrollable, unpredictable, and subject to no laws of logic or law. You can make anything happen in them. And in the hands of someone like Haber, who is completely convinced of his own power and righteousness, it could result in global disaster.

By the end, you realize that the power to shift reality is a very dangerous thing. And that even if you do have the ability to do it and you think you’re doing it for humanity’s benefit, you shouldn’t. No one has the right to destroy reality for others, no matter how bad their reality is.

The Lathe of Heaven has a beautiful—and, at first, seemingly irrelevant—opening which looks at the world from the point of view of a jellyfish. The jellyfish is buffeted by the waves and directed by ocean currents. It has no real volition and no control over where it is going. It exists almost in a dream state. And it has no real problem with that unless and until it runs into rocky land.

Gradually, you realize that Orr’s state of being is akin to that of a jellyfish. He has very little control over what he does and where he is going. He is directed by the currents of his dreams when he sleeps, and by the currents of humanity when he is awake. This is particularly vivid at one point when he is riding the subway, hanging onto the strap, surrounded by people; he is actually physically held up by his fellow passengers, uncontrollably swaying to the motion of the crowd, like his spirit animal.

We might think at first that Orr and the jellyfish are weak and aimless. But I think what Le Guin wants us to see is that sometimes it is best to realize that you can’t control the currents surrounding you, and that you should flow with them instead, letting their energy propel you, judo-like, to where ever you are destined to go. And that, depending on the circumstances, this actually can be the strongest course of action—as it certainly is in Orr’s case.

Book Review: Childhood’s End

Arthur C. Clarke
1953
Nominations: Retro Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

I just finished Childhood’s End, and I have to say I am really disappointed.

I am a Clarke fan. I really liked the Rama series, and Fountains of Paradise, and 2001 (the movie). I am in awe of how he seemed to be able to see decades into the technological future. But this book—which, to be fair, is one of his earlier novels—just seemed like a halfhearted warm-up for his later work.

Childhood’s End does contain several pieces of futuristic technology which stand up extremely well even now, more than fifty years later. But the story has very little in the way of character likeability, or suspense, or excitement. The plot meanders and drags badly. And, in many places, it also is a pretty embarrassing display of Clarke’s sexism—which is easier to ignore when the story is good.

The book starts out well, with a scene straight out of Independence Day (although it would be more accurate to say that Independence Day starts out with a scene straight out of this book). Sometime in the mid-twentieth century, on the eve of the launch of one of Earth’s first satellites, a fleet of enormous alien ships arrives at our planet. The ships position themselves in the sky over every major city in the world. The chief alien—Supervisor Karellen—broadcasts one speech, in English, over all of Earth’s radio frequencies, announcing that national governments are now irrelevant, and that the aliens will be enforcing peaceful and beneficial conditions around the world, whether the humans like it or not.                                                      

For five years the ships just hover and the aliens never show themselves, but they are able to enforce the kinds of behavior they want through drones and rays and other sophisticated pieces of technology. They are able, for example, to prevent us from killing each other en masse by destroying any missiles that we fire at each other.

The only contact the humans have with the aliens (whom the humans have begun calling the Overlords) is through the Secretary General of the United Nations, Rikki Stormgren. Stormgren is periodically brought up into the ship hovering over New York, where he converses with Overlord Supervisor Karellen through a one-way mirror.

Even though the aliens are supposedly benevolent and are theoretically helping humanity by preventing them from doing stupid things to each other, the humans, of course, rankle at being controlled. Some countries try to attack the ships with nuclear bombs, but the bombs just evaporate on the ships’ surfaces. There is a little bit of a minor kerfuffle when Stormgren is kidnapped by a fringe resistance group in an attempt to get the aliens to show themselves, but Karellen is able to bust Stormgren out relatively easily.

Finally, fifty years later, the aliens decide humanity is used to their presence enough to actually reveal themselves. And it’s a good thing the aliens waited, because they are terrifying: twice our size and shaped exactly like devils, complete with horns and bat wings.

By now, though, most humans don’t care. They have been lulled into a dead stupor caused by the complete elimination of any challenge in the form of war, disease, poverty, famine, or crime. This stupor, unfortunately for us (and, as it turns out, purposefully on the part of the aliens) extends to any expression of human creativity. There is hardly any more real effort to engage in art or music or writing, and there is no more serious pursuit of science. The aliens particularly discourage any kind of investigation into alien technology, or the aliens’ origins, or any kind of space travel or astrophysics.

One human, Jan Rodricks, clinging to a shred of scientific curiosity, stows away on one of the alien ships returning to the Overlords’ home world. The aliens discover him mid-flight, but let him continue his journey.

Another group of people tries to fight the boredom by founding an island colony of the last people left who are interested in art and science, but it doesn’t really amount to much. They mainly pursue dilettante interests and hold boring parties where they have interminably immature and gossipy conversations.

Eventually, after much screwing around, the Overlords reveal their ultimate purpose, which is to prepare the current generation of children to be turned into little conduits, mindless accessories to a universal Overmind. The children eventually stop talking to their parents and start spending all their time in little meditative comas. This leads, inevitably, to the end of the human race.

The book’s ending is told from Jan Rodrick’s point of view as he returns home. Because of the relativistic time distortion from near-light-speed space travel, he returns home after all of the people that he knew are long dead, and all that is left are the weird Overmind children. And as soon as he get there, they begin casting all water and life forms out into space, in preparation for joining the Overmind. In a psychedelic scene that seems like a less powerful, less coherent rehearsal for the ending of 2001, Rodrick describes the destruction of Earth and his unification with the cosmos with sweeping galactic scope.

As I said, one thing that Clarke does still have going for him in this book is his technological prescience. In one otherwise tedious party scene, for example, the host pretends to answer the door for his guests using a realistic holographic projection tool similar to those now used in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

Clarke also invents a nascent form of virtual reality as an entertainment tool for his artist colony. He (adorably) describes it as an outgrowth of the “art of the cartoon film:”

    “First sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old ‘moving pictures’ more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses...When the goal was achieved, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become—for a while, at least—any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary…and when the ‘program’ was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life—indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself.”

However, none of this makes up for the plodding, slow-paced story, which consists mostly of conversations between his characters. Isaac Asimov could pull off this type of narrative because the ideas his characters talk about are interesting and exciting in themselves. But Clarke's characters' ideas are not; the conversations are mostly sophomoric and do nothing to further the action (such action as there is).

It also does not make up for the seedy sexism. This ranges from relatively minor incidents, such as how the women in the artist colony are somewhat condescendingly described as all taking up knitting together and knitting sweaters for all their menfolk, to more egregious ones like the conscious resignation of wives to the “fundamentally polygamous” nature of men and the resulting public series of mistresses their husbands must have.

Forty-six years later, Greg Bear wrote a book called Darwin’s Radio, which also had a plot which included the near-instant change of humanity from one species to another within one generation. Bear’s new species also included a new breed of highly empathic, emotionally interconnected children. But Bear’s novel is much better at what it does, with a comparatively interesting plot and without the 1950s era baggage.

Book Review: Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut
1969
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

In my review of Cat’s Cradle, I already talked a lot about Kurt Vonnegut’s life, the themes in his work, and the power of his writing. Everything that I said there all goes, for the most part, for Slaughterhouse Five as well.

Cat’s Cradle is a more straightforward novel, though. It is written in a chronologically linear narrative, with a more standard type of dramatic tension and a definitive ending. Slaughterhouse Five is radically structured, even more existential, and even more of an anti-war statement. It is also much more personal and autobiographical—if it is possible to say that about a novel whose main character who lives discontinuously in time and is abducted by aliens.

Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse as a way to deal with his experiences in World War II and, in particular, the firebombing of Dresden. 60,000 people were killed in that attack—more than at Hiroshima—and Vonnegut, as a German prisoner of war, worked to clear away the bodies in the aftermath. It is no wonder that it took him more than twenty years to write this book.

The main character, Billy Pilgrim, grows up as a relatively ordinary boy with a relatively uneventful boyhood in upstate New York. When World War II breaks out, he joins the army, is sent to Europe, and is stranded behind enemy lines in Luxembourg after the Battle of the Bulge. Shoeless and stupefied, he wanders in the snow with other survivors until they are captured by the Germans and put in a prisoner of war camp. He is sent to Dresden, Germany, just before its complete destruction by Allied forces and, like Vonnegut himself, Billy is put to work cleaning up corpses by day and housed in a former pig slaughterhouse by night.

After the war, Billy stays in a mental hospital for a long time and then goes home to Ilium (to a family that thought he was dead), marries basically the one woman who will have him, becomes an optometrist, has two children, and lives a pretty commonplace life into middle age.

Occasionally, during his commonplace middle age, others try to force him to be nostalgic about the war, or to think of it wistfully and romantically, when he doesn’t give a damn about it one way or another. When one history aficionado is lecturing him about how valorous and virtuous the war was, Vonnegut says that it “made the inside of poor Billy’s skull echo with balderdash.” And you can completely picture Vonnegut experiencing exactly the same thing.

There are just two exceptions to the banality of Billy's existence. The first is that during his early years he becomes “unstuck in time,” meaning that he has the unfortunate tendency to travel through time at random, living the moments of his life discontinuously. The other is that later in life he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, and is installed in a residence in a sort of a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, together with Montana Wildhack, a former Hollywood starlet.

If this all sounds a bit disjointed and surreal, it is. But if you let any need for chronological sensibility go, and follow the story where Vonnegut wants to take you, the book is powerful, mind-opening, and oddly optimistic.

One of Vonnegut’s tried-and-true reader-jarring techniques is to set up direct juxtapositions of banality with horror. Since we are following the narrative through Billy’s eyes, we jump from time to time (and planet to planet) as he does, switching from the middle of wartime Europe, to a rather boring optometrists’ cocktail party, to Billy’s cage on Tralfamador. One of the most poignant of these juxtapositions happens when, first, Billy is traveling across Europe in a P.O.W. box car, the roof of which is painted with distinctive black and orange stripes... and then the very next scene he jumps to is his own wedding, years later, where the wedding tent's roof is painted with exactly the same black and orange stripes. 

In Slaughterhouse Five, these juxtapositions not only make the horror more horrible and set up a nice dose of irony, but also give us a slanted, challenging perspective on ordinary life that is probably very good for us to have. It means that what could have been either a relatively banal story of a relatively banal man, or possibly an overwhelmingly depressing story of a soldier experiencing one of the most awful things a soldier can experience, is turned into a mind-twisting, funny, surreal, and occasionally gut-wrenching story about finding ways to make it through life when there seems to be only pain and pointlessness all around.

Vonnegut also occasionally, sparingly, inserts himself into the story, showing up in places where he actually was in real life and glimpses into his real experience. He appears, for example, in Billy’s the prisoner of war camp, suffering from food poisoning and wailing in the latrine (which did happen). He also is spilled out of the P.O.W. box cars in Dresden at the same time as Billy, standing near him as they look at Dresden for the first time, marveling at how it is the most beautiful city he has ever seen (which also did happen). These moments also have the effect of bringing you right back to earth: if you were in danger of thinking you were just reading a piece of pure fiction, Vonnegut’s appearances remind you that many of these moments happened to a real person (and that a beautiful city and its people really were pulverized by Allied forces).

Oddly, it is the Trafalmadorians that give the book what incongruous optimism it has. The Tralfamadorians live in four dimensions. Which means that they see all of time, from beginning to end, at once. When looking at a person, they see that person’s entire life, from birth to death, all at the same time. To a Tralfamadorian, therefore, when a person dies, they aren’t really dead; they are still alive somewhere else in their life timeline. When a person dies, then, the custom on Tralfamadore is to say, “so it goes.”

So every single time Vonnegut mentions someone dying in his book, he follows it with “so it goes.” This has the weird effect of making it seem like he’s taking the fact that someone died less seriously, when he's actually calling extra attention to it. After he has said “so it goes” ten or twenty or thirty times, it makes you realize just how many people have died, and in what awful and sometimes pointless ways. It also makes you realize how often we talk about people dying and we don’t stop and acknowledge what has happened, even with a silly little ritual like saying “so it goes.”

And the thing is that the idea that a person has not really died, but is still alive somewhere along their cosmic timeline, makes it easier for Billy—and presumably, Vonnegut himself—to live with the memories of what he has been through and what so many others have suffered. The wider perspective of the Tralfamadorians gives him a way to see his own life, and the lives of others, in a less painful way.

Fittingly, there is no real end to Slaughterhouse Five. The novel’s coda is set in the corpse mines of Dresden, and is told from Vonnegut’s real-life point of view. Vonnegut uses the coda to lay out a sometimes overwhelming existential dichotomy:

       There is no meaning behind the horrible things that happen to people.
       But, hopefully, on balance, most of the moments in life are nice ones.

And, hopefully, the nice moments in life are all the meaning you need—because I’m afraid that’s all you’re going to get here.

Book Review: Helliconia Spring

Brian W. Aldiss

1982

Awards: Campbell

Nominations: Nebula, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

Sometimes it seems to me that every lengthy science fiction novel published in the ‘50s and ‘60s was promoted as “the greatest epic since The Lord of the Rings,” and that every lengthy science fiction novel published in the ‘70s and ‘80s was promoted as “the greatest epic since Dune.”

Very few of the books thus described actually measure up to either of these standards. Helliconia Spring is a case in point, advertised on its back cover as “the most magnificent epic since Dune.” It certainly is epic in its ambition, but as for its magnificence, I beg to differ.

Helliconia Spring is set on Helliconia, an Earth-like planet orbiting a binary star system. Helliconia circles its primary star once every 2,000 Earth years. During each of these Helliconian years the planet suffers through a devastating, icy-cold winter that is 600 Earth years long.

This means that the inhabitants are stuck in a stultifying cycle: civilizations flourish and advance technologically during the summers, but then any progress they make is wiped out when winter comes; the cold drives them back to a hunter-gatherer existence, leaving them to scrape out whatever kind of living they can.

The novel sweeps across hundreds of Earth years, starting in the middle of one of these prolonged winters and ending with the onset of spring. It mainly tells the life stories of three principal patriarchs of the same family, several generations apart (but there are plenty of digressions into other characters’ narratives along the way).

The first of these patriarchs is Yuli, a nomadic hunter living deep in the heart of winter. Yuli and his father are out on a hunting trip when they are attacked by a band of the other intelligent beings living on Helliconia: the horned, furry, goat-like, human-hating phagors. The phagors kill Yuli’s father but Yuli himself escapes. Eventually Yuli finds his way to Pannoval, a huge and relatively advanced but repressive underground city where he is adopted into a foster family. He gets the best education Pannoval can give him and even becomes a priest, but he never forgets his former life above ground. Eventually he runs away from Pannoval with a few friends and makes his way back up to the surface where he founds a new village, Oldorando.

The story is then taken up many generations later with Yuli’s direct descendant “Little” Yuli, who is the leader of the now much larger town of Oldorando. Little Yuli gets pretty short shrift; he dies soon after he is introduced, and we learn more about his life from the stories told by the citizens gathered at his funeral rather than seeing events happen for ourselves. The main contribution Little Yuli makes to the novel is that his death opens up a succession controversy; his only child is a daughter (and everyone knows that women cannot rule), and his only grandson, Laintal Ay, is too little to govern.

The rest of the book is a frustratingly aimless recitation of Laintal Ay’s twisting, turning early life story. He grows up under a series of interim town leaders, none of whom are model citizens. He becomes a trusted lieutenant of one of them, then falls out of favor; he falls in love and is rewarded, and then rebuffed; he goes on a heart-stricken pilgrimage far away during which he contracts a horrible disease, then he comes back.

I started out optimistically at the beginning of this book, moderately bored but hopeful that it would pick up steam, and ended up actively resentful at sitting through meandering story lines with little resolution to them. Time really whips along: people grow, marry, have children, and die, and you can barely keep track of them (and barely want to). At one point, in just six pages, Oldorando changed from a backwards agricultural settlement to a village that launched mounted raids on other villages to a trade economy using metal currency.

There are occasional tantalizing hints of more interesting things we could explore further—in particular, an approaching phagor invasion, a woman who revolts against traditional women’s work and founds an academy of learning, and an Earth observation satellite hovering unseen above all the action—but we get no real long-term satisfaction from of any of them.

I think Lord of the Rings and Dune worked as epics because, even though they are incredibly long and detailed, they also center on distinctive, charismatic characters that I really grew to know and understand and often care about. Helliconia Spring, on the other hand, is more of a dispassionate biblical litany, a string of names and places and incidents happening to people to whom I felt no particular attachment.

The tone isn’t helped by Aldiss’ somewhat formal prose and his frequent use of the passive voice, as in “the Vakka had been bridged” and “his figure could be seen.” The characters’ names also tend to be a little bit ridiculous, and are easy to confuse with each other if you aren’t paying close enough attention. To wit:

                                          

Raynil Layan

Laintal Ay

Loil Bry

            Loilanun

Eline Tal

Rol Sakil

            Dol Sakil

            Hrr-Brahl Yprt

Yhamm-Whrrmar

I think I am probably more disappointed in this book than I might otherwise be because I had higher expectations for Aldiss. His novella The Saliva Tree, which won the Nebula in 1965, was really very good. It just may be that the epic is not his best format.