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: A Door into Ocean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Book Review: Titan (by John Varley)

John Varley

1979

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

At the beginning of John Varley’s Titan, a small group of seven astronauts are headed out towards Saturn in the spaceship Ringmaster on an international mission of scientific exploration. Led by the independent and strong-willed but also somewhat irritatingly insecure Captain Cirocco Jones, it is a tight-knit crew with flexible romantic arrangements: by the end of the voyage, almost every person has slept with almost every other person of the opposite gender, and occasionally some people of the same gender.

The story is pretty slow to get going. During the first two chapters, which cover the voyage to Saturn, I was turned off enough by the characters’ personalities, the impersonal games of sexual musical chairs, and some of the author’s more annoying habits of prose that I was ready to give up.

Fortunately, things got better for a while. When the Ringmaster gets to Saturn, they discover a huge object in orbit around the planet. At first they think it is an undocumented moon, but as they get nearer it turns out to be an enormous, rotating torus-shaped artificial construct. They fly in close to investigate, their ship gets forcibly hauled in by a tentacled beast coming from the object, and they all go unconscious.

They then go through a surreal period of mental limbo after which they are all deposited in disparate places around the interior rim of the torus, which turns out to be an enormous oxygen-rich habitat filled with alien trees and grasses and animals. This is the best part of the book, as the members of the crew reunite and try to prevent themselves from being eaten by the native wildlife and killed by the indigenous sentient beings while they figure out how to escape and get home.

It seems very much like a combination of two earlier novels: Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go. The torus is like a mini version of Ringworld in its artificiality, its huge scale, the abruptly defined sections of night and day, and the variety of environments and life forms. And the characters’ rebirth inside it is reminiscent of the resurrection process from Farmer’s book: they emerge into a strange raw environment completely naked and hairless, and they have to rebuild their clothes, technology, and, in some cases, memories from scratch. (And, like Farmer’s characters, they also even eventually wind up traveling up a big central river in their own handmade boats.)

Unfortunately, the plot takes a turn for the worse in the last third of the book when Captain Jones decides she wants answers about what has happened to her crew, and that the only way to get those answers is by taking an arduous, tedious, months-long trek up to the center of the torus. I got exhausted by it long before the characters did. They would conquer one obstacle and then would be presented with another five times more daunting, including, at one point, a horrible rapist. Personally, I would have given up in the first week and gone back to the calm grassy land with the nice centaur people.

It started to seem especially pointless when they started downgrading the purpose behind the trek. Originally, they wanted to figure out how to escape the torus—which they had by this time started calling Gaea—and to get home. But later on they shift to just wanting an explanation for what happened, and then eventually they don’t care about saving themselves anymore but just want to prevent war between the indigenous sentient life forms of Gaea.

And when they do finally get to the center of Gaea, it is disappointingly anticlimactic. The entity at the center is a bit annoying, frankly, and offers pretty contrived reasoning for why they were captured, held, changed, stripped, and released. After the huge build-up of their journey, the whole thing was hastily explained in a matter of fifteen or so pages, and then everybody (or almost everybody) goes back to their preferred homes with new-found celebrity status and lives happily ever after.

One aspect of the writing that didn’t help is that descriptions of physical locations were sometimes very confusing. For the most part, the writing was very straightforward, but during particularly dramatic moments or crucial expository sections, settings suddenly became un-picturable. For example:

     The support cables came in rows of five organized into groups of fifteen, and rows of three standing alone.

     Each night region had fifteen cables associated with it. There was a row of five vertical cables that went straight up the hollow horn in the roof that was the inside of one of the spokes of Gaea’s wheel. Two of these came to the ground in the highlands and were virtually a part of the wall, one north and the other south. One emerged from a point midway between the outermost cables, and the other two were spaced evenly between the center and edge cables.

     In addition to these central cables, the night regions had two more rows of five that radiated from the spokes but attached in daylight areas, one row twenty degrees east and the other twenty degrees west of the central row.   (Titan, Page 121)

I don’t think I should have to be a geographer or an architect to be able to imagine this scene. Ringworld, too, was an artificial ring-shaped habitat created by aliens, and had more diversity of habitat on a much larger scale, but it was so vividly and clearly described that I felt like I always could picture the environment and structure with no problems—even the complicated side wall ports where ships docked and the suspended sheets creating night and day.

And one other final peeve: it seemed that in the sections of the book where the plot was laboring the hardest, Varley would slip into expressing his characters’ emotions through overdramatic physical actions that human beings don’t often really do. People chewed on their knuckles; they palmed, slammed, or slapped control panel buttons; they variously hit their palm on a bed, smacked a tree with the palm of their hand, and hit their forehead with the heel of their hand; and, of course, they bit their lips and their tongues.

Book Review: Redshirts

John Scalzi

2012

Awards: Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book is so fast and so fun, you could easily read all of it in one longish day at the beach. Or in one late night (to early morning) of uninterrupted indulgence. It’s a satisfying guilty pleasure, like a special double episode of your favorite awkward but lovable cult sci-fi TV series.

The book takes place in what is basically the Star Trek universe, except that Scalzi can’t call anything by any of the Star Trek names because of potential trademark violations. The setting is the starship Intrepid, the flagship of Space Fleet, the naval arm of the Universal Union of Planets. The Intrepid has a familiar line-up of senior staff: a charismatic and sometimes overly emotive captain, a serious science officer, a skilled medical chief, a resourceful chief engineer, and a plucky lieutenant.

And the Intrepid also has a large supply of miscellaneous, low-ranking, red-shirted crewmen, whom it seems to knock off at an alarmingly fast pace.

Redshirts is told from the point of view of one of these miscellaneous low-ranking crewmen, ensign Andrew Dahl, who has just been assigned to the Intrepid straight out of Space Fleet Academy. Dahl quickly figures out that things are weird aboard his new ship.

For example, the ship’s inertial dampeners always work perfectly—except when the ship is being fired upon, and then the entire bridge crew has to jiggle around ridiculously while they perform evasive maneuvers. And the science lab where Dahl works has a piece of equipment called “the Box” that can perform scientific miracles, like synthesizing an antidote to a hitherto unknown alien illness—but it only functions when one of the senior staff members is in a crisis and there is an impossibly short time to solve it.

But the strangest thing of all is how flaky the crew is when it comes to away missions. On the Intrepid, away missions have an abnormally high mortality rate for crewmen below the rank of lieutenant. Ensigns on away missions are often killed in awful, unusual, and sometimes easily preventable ways, like by catching grotesque diseases or being eaten by rare carnivorous alien creatures. So crew members have developed an intense paranoia about it, and avoid the senior officers like the plague when a mission is likely to be called.

Dahl, being unusually brave and curious for an ensign, refuses to accept the status quo and sets it upon himself to figure out what is going on. Which, of course, gets him into deep trouble.

It’s really funny to see the quirky aspects of the Star Trek universe called out: the silly lines, the implausible situations, the use of ensign death to heighten dramatic tension. And the conversations between crew members are hilarious—snappy, sarcastic, and brusque. Everyone is always nervous because they never know when it might be their time to die a hideous death, so they tend to be testy and irritated with each other. They don’t have time to mess around, or to be caught standing around talking when a senior staff member comes by.

It is a good thing that Redshirts reads so quickly, because I don’t think the book’s central conceit would survive being dragged out much longer than it is. As it was, I did start getting worried about two-thirds through that Scalzi wouldn’t be able to keep the humor and dramatic tension going all the way to the end. And I think he could have easily dropped at least one of his three codas (preferably the first one). As a funny but sensitive exposé of the Trek characters and plot contrivances we love, I don’t think it hits the mark quite as well as Galaxy Quest. But it’s still very good, and very fun.

Book Review: Blue Mars

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

SPOILER ALERT (For Red Mars and Green Mars) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Book Review: Green Mars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Book Review: Slow River

Nicola Griffith
1996
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I was generally impatient with this book.
 
It is set not too far in the future, when all of our sewage is processed and recycled by bioengineered microorganisms. The main character, Lore Van de Oest, is one of the heirs to a wealthy family that made money by creating and patenting many of these microorganisms.
 
At the beginning of the story, Lore gets kidnapped and the kidnappers demand ransom, but her emotionally-removed, dysfunctional family refuses to pay and basically writes her off as dead. Lore manages to escape from her kidnappers but ends up badly hurt in the process, lying an alley in the bad part of town. She is rescued and nursed back to health by a small-time cyber-crook named Spanner with whom she inevitably becomes romantically involved.
 
While recovering at Spanner’s apartment, Lore decides that this is her chance to escape from her family and all the baggage tied to her famous name. Spanner helps Lore get a new identity and for a while the two of them live a grimy life of cyber-crime.
 
Eventually Lore decides to investigate why she was kidnapped and why her family refused to pay her ransom. In order to figure it out she has to go undercover in one of the sewage treatment plants that uses her family’s microorganisms. This was the best part of the book. The water treatment plant uses a multi-stage ecological system to break down the sewage naturally, from pools of toxin-eating algae at the beginning down to fish farms at the end of the line. The technology behind it was really neat and not all that far off from what we could do today.
 
Unfortunately, I just didn't get into the rest of the book. Spanner is a pretty harsh and unappealing person who is willing to do just about anything for money including sell out her lover. And I didn’t really feel all that sorry for Lore as the poor little rich girl who is so beleaguered by her wealth and fame (even if she does uncover an awful history of abuse in her family). 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Dune

Frank Herbert
1965
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Dune is a complex book (and a complex world) and it is impossible to say everything I want to say about it in just a few paragraphs.

In Dune, Herbert creates a rich universe of worlds bound together by layer upon layer of intricate political intrigue and manipulation. It is easy to believe that his technology, religion, and governmental systems are results of thousands of years of evolution since our own time; they are all mixtures of the ancient and the futuristic. The interstellar space travel and the laser weaponry seem to come from far in our future, but the backward gender roles and hybrid combo-religions seem to come from deep in our past.

The story takes place almost entirely on Dune, one of the planets in Herbert’s universe. Dune is inhospitable, being almost completely covered by desert and populated by enormous man-eating worms. But it is also the only source of “the spice,” the universe’s most important natural resource, which is not only physically addictive but is also the source of energy for all inter-world space transportation. Noble off-world families are constantly jostling and scheming to control Dune and thereby control the supply of spice. The nobles also are cruelly repressive to the Fremen, the native desert people of Dune, who do the scut work in the spice mining operations, wear long robes, are deeply religious, and are somewhat repressive, in turn, to their women.

(Stop me if you see an allegory for anything in our own world here.)

To try to make a very long story short, the book begins with the good guys (Duke Leto Atreides, his wife Jessica, and his son Paul) taking over the management of Dune from the bad guys (their cousins, the evil Duke Harkonnen and his two nephews) following a lukewarm edict from the emperor. The Harkonnens don’t want to leave so they sabotage the Atreides’s takeover, planting booby traps all over their house. Duke Leto is killed and his wife and son flee into the desert.

All appears to be lost… except that Paul & his mother are taken in by the Fremen. It turns out that the Fremen have been living underground, concealing their numbers, training themselves in battle, and patiently preparing for hundreds of years to receive a prophesied messiah who will lead them in a great jihad against the imperium and help them to reclaim the planet. It takes a while for them to warm up to Paul and, especially, his mother, who is a powerful practitioner of the Bene Gesserit religion which they think of as witchcraft, but eventually the Fremen start to accept that Paul might just be the savior they have been waiting for.

I saw David Lynch’s film adaptation of Dune before I read the book for the first time. I don’t normally like to do that because it means I’m thinking about the movie’s actors and sets the whole time I’m reading, but in this case, it worked. Partly because the book is rich enough not to be boxed in by a single movie. And partly because the movie is great. Sure, it is a bit goofy, and doesn’t stick exactly to the book, but the worms are awesome and it has excellent actors in it (Kyle MacLachlan, Patrick Stewart, Sting, Linda Hunt, Max Von Sydow, Dean Stockwell, and Brad Dourif, to name just the most fabulous) who I enjoyed mentally plugging into their roles as I was reading.

The book also explores certain plot points more deeply than a two-plus-hour movie has any hope of doing. For one thing, the book talks more about the CHOAM spice corporation and its influence over the royalty of the universe of Dune. It makes even more obvious a statement about the danger of becoming dependent on a single limited resource and how this is a situation ripe for corruption.

The book also goes deeper into the role of Jessica’s Bene Gesserit religion. If you just saw the movie, you’d think the BGs were only religious priestesses and that everything that Paul and Jessica did to prove themselves to the Fremen really was entirely supernatural. But what you learn from the book is that generations of BGs have been following a specific plan. They’ve been going around to different planets, using their roles as Reverend Mothers to deliberately plant legends and prophesies, and then attempting through selective breeding and strict training to create people to make those prophesies come true.

This is not to say that there isn’t still a very strong element of magic in Paul’s powers. He does have abilities that the Bene Gesserits didn’t plan for, which eventually makes events on Dune spiral out of their control.

This is an impressive, impressive book. There were just a couple things about Herbert’s writing that were downers for me and that separated this book from being an epic on the level of Lord of the Rings.

The main problem is that all the good guys have a mystical instinct for always knowing the right thing to do in a given situation. None of the chosen people have to puzzle it out or make mistakes. Paul and his mother always get out of tight spots just by mysteriously – bing! – knowing what they have to do or exactly the right words to say. The line “Then Paul knew what he had to do” came up about two hundred times and by the one hundredth, I was pretty sick of it. Whether it was because he really was the prophesied savior or because of the BG implantation and pre-seeding of legend, it didn’t matter to me.

And then every time Paul does or says something preordained by prophesy, the Fremen around him gasp and breathlessly nod to themselves saying, “Yes, he is the one.” It gets kind of annoying with all the wonder and awe of him – especially because he can be, on occasion, a bit of a jerk.

Actually, everybody is always in awe of or enchanted by something. Paul himself is even enchanted by the simplicity of Fremen dew collectors. Really?


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Speaker for the Dead

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

SPOILER ALERT (for Ender’s Game)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.