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Book Review: Stranger in a Strange Land

Robert A. Heinlein
1961
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –

SPOILER ALERT

Ick. Ick. Ick.

I think possibly the worst part of this book is the way women are written. They are all perfect people who are calm and soothing and never get mad and are always gorgeous and often clad only in robes. They also totally adore the extremely irritating main character.

The main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is a human who was born during the first manned mission to Mars. He was raised by Martians after all the other humans in his mission died in an accident. He comes back to Earth when he is about twenty.

Because of his Martian upbringing, he has some telekinetic powers and he is dreamy and optimistic and believes in things like free love and individual freedom and self-actualization. He develops a cult of followers which eventually grows into a church and his influence spreads rapidly. He introduces humans to the concept of “grokking” which, from what I understand, became quite a popular term after the book came out. “To grok” is to understand on a much, much deeper, sort of spiritual level than just plain old ordinary superficial understanding.

There is an implication in Heinlein’s writing that if you grok what Smith is about, and you believe in his creepy libertarian vision of what we can make the world become, then you are vastly superior to other people.

Of course, a la Jesus Christ, it is inevitable that established powers on Earth don’t like that Smith is saying these things and that he is gaining quite a lot of popular power. So they try to kill him. Eventually Smith does beat the evil establishment guys but only after his non-corporeal, form-of-energy Martian foster ancestors help out at the last minute by suddenly giving him even more amazing powers than he had before and transporting him to another plane of existence. Deus ex machina.

Not too easy to buy. Or grok. Or stomach.


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

Derivative Elements in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Below is a sampling of elements I found in my reading of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that seem to be drawn directly from other works of sci-fi and fantasy. (Of course, these elements are, in many cases, themselves drawn from even earlier myth and legend.)

For my review of the book, see this earlier post.

Story Element	As Used in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire	As Used in Other Works of Fiction
Orphan hero with special abilities, raised by extended family, beset by evil forces	Harry	Wart (Sword in the Stone); Frodo (Lord of the Rings)
Main character with glasses as significant prop item	Harry	Charles (Witch Week)
Gruff but caring bearded wizard mentor	Dumbledore; Sirius	Merlin (Sword in the Stone); Gandalf (Lord of the Rings)
Female friend of main character whose immediate reactions in crisis are to (a) talk to adult teacher authority figure and (b) consult a book	Hermione Granger	Willow Rosenberg (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Irritating, long-eared, eager-to-please sycophant on the side of the good guys with semi-Caribbean accent	Dobby the House Elf	Jar Jar Binks (The Star Wars Saga)
Creepy, unattractive servant to an evil wizard	Wormtail: assistant to Lord Valdemort	Wormtongue: assistant to Saruman (Lord of the Rings)
Wizard family with last name starting with “W”	The Weasleys	The Wentworths (Witch Week)
Mean, out-of-shape, male stepfamily member in superior position over hero	Dudley Dursley	Sir Kay (Sword in the Stone)
Powerful but somewhat out-of-his-element wizard dressed in suit and tie	Bartholomew Crouch	Chrestomanci (Witch Week)
Peripheral character obsessed with violent mythological creature(s)	Hagrid and his Blast-Ended Skrewts	Lord Pellinore and his Questing Beast (Sword in the Stone)
Occasionally grouchy pet owl	Hedwig: Harry’s pet owl (used as messenger)	Archimedes: Merlin’s pet owl (can speak English) (Sword in the Stone)
Boarding school for magical youth	Hogwarts: boarding school for wizards	Larwood House: boarding school for witch orphans (Witch Week)
Cozy home where main character feels relaxed	The Burrow: the Weasley family home (named as if it was underground)	Bag End: Bilbo’s underground home (Lord of the Rings)
Phrase “Witch Week”	Name of witch industry magazine (Witch Weekly)	Name of book (Witch Week)
Wizard-on-wizard duel	Harry vs. Lord Valdemort (primarily conducted via wands)	Merlin vs. Madam Mim (primarily conducted through transfiguration into animals) (Sword in the Stone)
Magical item helping main character at key moment	Ruby-encrusted sword: came to Harry’s aid when he had thought all hope was lost	Light of Galadriel: serves as a light when all other lights have gone out (Lord of the Rings)
Sword pulled out of something by main character	Sword pulled out of Sorting Hat	Sword pulled out of Stone (Sword in the Stone)
Ancient, silvery-surfaced seeing device	Pensieve: allows you to see and organize memories	Palantír: allows you to see things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be (Lord of the Rings)

 

Schrödinger's Tube

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Book Review: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

J. K. Rowling

2000

Awards: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Like McDonald’s fries, this book goes down easily and is engineered to be delicious to a wide range of palates. And, like McDonald’s fries, once consumed, it may leave you feeling oddly hollow and a bit greasy.

For those who aren’t familiar with Harry Potter and his multi-media juggernaut, allow me to provide a brief background. Harry is a teenage wizard. When he was a baby, his parents were killed by the evil Lord Valdemort. Valdemort tried to kill Harry too, but Harry escaped, rendering Valdemort incorporeal in the process, and thus earning Valdemort’s undying hatred. Harry’s super-mean aunt and uncle then became Harry’s legal guardians. But luckily Harry has been able to spend most of his teen years away from them and with his adoring friends and the (mostly) kindly faculty at Hogwarts, a boarding school for wizards. Harry and his two best friends, Ron and Hermione, both of whom are also wizards, get into adventures and conquer various perils together with pluck and teamwork.

                                                                 

Most of the plot of The Goblet of Fire surrounds the Triwizard Tournament, a competition in which contestants have to survive through various interesting-sounding but, in the end, not very challenging trials like stealing eggs from dragons and navigating monster-laden mazes. The tournament, which is open to only an extra-special select few, pits Harry (of course) and one other Hogwarts classmate against each other and against the top students at two other wizard schools.

During the competition, the stakes are raised when Harry learns that his old nemesis, Lord Valdemort, has a spy at Hogwarts and this spy is trying to use the tournament to get Harry killed. Valdemort is also doing his best to regain physical form and wage terror on the world once again.

I had a number of irritations with this book, all related to Rowling’s writing style. For one thing, she leads us by the nose through the logical connections we’re supposed to make and the emotions we’re supposed to feel in a hyperbolic, plodding way reminiscent of Dan Brown. She inserts backstories too obviously via awkwardly contrived conversations. She explains and re-explains jokes until they lose whatever humor they might have had, and they often become even more forced and unfunny when the characters have to stifle their uncontrollable laughter by burying themselves behind a book or shoving food in their mouths.

Her characters are also either 100% good or 100% evil. Evil people (like Harry’s aunt and uncle) are unrelentingly, unreasoningly evil with no apparent motivation. Good people (like Harry and his best friends) are lauded by everyone else who is good, tend to have good luck at exactly the right times, are in with and protected by the authorities, and never do harm except to evil people.

Rowling also seems to have an oddly hostile attitude towards people who do not conform to stereotypically normal looks. Anyone who is ugly, fat, or has greasy hair is almost guaranteed to be on the evil side. Even Hermione is never noticed as a girl until she transforms her hair from its naturally unattractive “bushy” state to “sleek and shiny” for a school dance. 

And looking different seems to give everyone—even good people—license to make fun of you. For example, Harry’s evil cousin Dudley is fat. At one point in Dudley’s life, a wizard once gave him a curly pig’s tail on his rear end. So, now, when Dudley is around wizards, he is constantly grabbing his bottom in fear. It is clear that Harry has gossiped to his friend Ron about this and the two of them nearly explode with stifled laughter watching poor Dudley do this.

A school for witches (1982)

What bothered me the most, though, is that I can’t think of anything else I have read recently that felt so blatantly derivative of earlier works of myth and fantasy. I realize that authors unconsciously draw elements from others all the time. But this book seemed to consist almost entirely of pieces taken directly from a wide range of classics.

 

Next week, I will provide a sampling of some of the specific derivations that I saw. For now, I will say that I found characters, plot points, and even specific phrases pulled almost completely intact from sources like The Sword in the Stone, The Lord of the Rings, and the Star Wars saga. Rowling also seems to owe a great debt of, shall we say, inspiration to her countrywoman Diana Wynne Jones, who wrote a clever and original series of books back in the 1980s about a boarding school for young witches.

I think that what Goblet of Fire reminded me of the most was The Sword in the Stone—the animated, Disney-fied take on the story of King Arthur as a boy. Like Goblet of Fire, the Sword in the Stone has an orphaned boy hero, raised by inexplicably vindictive custodial relatives who have it in for him for no discernible reason. It has a gruff, elderly, paternal wizard mentor who trains the boy in the arts of magic. It has monsters, cute mythological creatures, and transmutation of people into animals. It has a tournament of strength and ability during which our young hero proves his magical mettle. It has a wizard duel. And it even has a kindly but sometimes grumbly owl as the wizard’s pet.

Wart, Merlin, & Archimedes in The Sword in the Stone

Both Tolkien and Arthurian legend would have been inescapable in Rowling’s own British childhood, so it’s understandable that she would have been influenced by them. But, to me, the quantity and degree of her element-borrowing goes beyond unconscious influence or even homage.

Patriotism



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Book Review: Ringworld

Larry Niven
1970
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The main idea behind this book is fantastic.

Far, far away from Earth, somewhere in the Lesser Cloud of Magellan, an unknown alien race has built a life-supporting solar system of unique design.

It is basically a small yellow star – like our own sun – with an enormous ring orbiting it. The ring is like a hoop of ribbon, with one surface always facing inwards towards the sun. Niven describes it as “an intermediate step between Dyson Spheres and planets.”

In cross-section, the ring is a million miles across and a thousand miles thick and, in total, it has the mass of Jupiter. But because the ring’s radius is so huge – 95 million miles, about the same as from Earth to our sun – it appears from a distance to be relatively narrow.

The ring is spinning around its sun at 770 miles per second, so it has gravity. Thousand-mile-high mountains at the edges prevent air from escaping off the sides. The flat side of the ring facing the sun is completely habitable and is covered with oceans, farms, forests, prairies, and deserts–and is three million times the size of the surface of the Earth.

Since one side of the hoop always faces the sun, it should always be noon everywhere on Ringworld. But to prevent that, the unknown engineers built another ring, slightly inside the first, of evenly-spaced opaque black squares connected to each other with wires. The inner ring of squares rotates at a slightly different rate than the outer ring, so that, for those living on the surface, the black squares alternately reveal and cover the sun at intervals roughly equivalent to Earth’s day and night.

Of course the book has characters and a plot, but they are almost incidental. Primarily, the characters serve as tools and the plot serves as a vehicle with which to explore the ring.

When Ringworld begins, it is well into the future. Humans have a long history of space travel, have made contact with several other alien species, and have developed "boosterspice" to lengthen their lifespans.

Humans and aliens alike know that there was a giant explosion in the galactic core ten thousand years ago that sent waves of radiation outward. The galactic core is thirty thousand light years from Earth, which means that the outer radiation wave is still twenty thousand years away, so humans aren't worried yet.

However, one race of aliens, the “puppeteers,” who are by nature extremely fearful and whose worlds are dangerously overpopulated, has started to plan ahead. They snapped a photo of the Ringworld in a long-range survey and think it might solve all their problems – a place to relocate to escape the radiation wave for several millenia and one that, conveniently, could give them a lot more room.

So the puppeteers arrange a scouting expedition to check it out. They send one of their own – Nessus, a puppeteer who is just insane enough to be brave enough to do it – to recruit a crew of three to go with him. Two of his crew are humans: two-hundred-year-old restless adventurer Louis Wu and twenty-year-old good luck charm Teela Brown. The last member of the crew is a “kzin,” an alien species that has an honor-driven, warlike culture to rival the Klingons and that looks like fluffy eight-foot-tall orange cats.

The four of them head out to Ringworld. Along the way they have personality clashes, romances (Louis & Teela), run-ins with dangerous natives, and revelations of disturbing things about each other and about Ringworld.

A structure as cool as Ringworld deserves exploring, and the crew serves to do that adequately in this book. But they do not wear well; the characters became progressively more and more silly in the many Ringworld sequels and I quickly lost interest in the franchise.


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

Awww... Where'd They Find That?

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Book Review: Hominids

Robert J. Sawyer
2002
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

In the documentary Wordplay, crossword-puzzle fan Jon Stewart admits that sometimes when he’s in a hotel he will do the USA Today puzzle. But, he says, “I don’t feel good about myself when I do it.”

I felt the same way about this book. It grabbed my attention right away and it read very easily and fast, but when it was done I didn’t feel good about myself for reading it.

Hominids has all the elements of a blockbuster best-seller: uncomplicated characters; carefully-paced rising tension; a crisis, pinch, and climax at precisely the right spots; resolution of conflicts so the good guys win; and a love story sideline. And it has just enough of a scientific veneer to qualify as science fiction.

The book is the first in Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy and sets up the premise for the whole series, which is that there exists a parallel universe in which Neanderthals became the dominant intelligent species on earth and homo sapiens was the species that died out. In the parallel universe, a couple of Neanderthal physicists conduct an experiment in quantum computing. There is an accident during the experiment causing one of them to get transported to our universe, where he lands in the middle of an experiment being conducted by a human physicist.

The human physicist spirits the Neanderthal physicist away to a doctor friend’s remote country house before the government can get its hands on him. The two humans call in a geneticist to make sure the Neanderthal, whose name is Ponter, is what they think he is and then the four of them hole up in the house to keep the press and the feds away while they figure out where Ponter came from and whether or not they can send him back home.

One of my major issues with the book is that the characters are pretty formulaic. Ponter, for example, is universally beloved in his own universe. He is kind and gentle and understanding at all times. The three humans who befriend him (the physicist, the geneticist, and the doctor) are all super-intelligent, earnest, straightforward, excellent at keeping confidences, and uniformly good-natured. So, also, are Ponter’s Neanderthal man-mate, his woman-mate, and his daughter back home.

Any opportunities for real internal crises are deftly skirted. One of the most troubling is that one of the key characters (the geneticist) is raped at the very beginning of the book. She decides to handle it by not telling anyone and going on as if nothing has happened. And while this clearly isn’t easy, and the memory of the rape comes up over and over again in her mind, she essentially all but recovers during the Neanderthal business (which spans maybe a week) and finds (thank goodness!) that she’s still attracted to men… or at least to beefy, well-endowed Neanderthals.

The other main issue I had was with the science. The New York Times is quoted on the cover of the hardcover first edition of this book saying, “Sawyer is a writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation.” I would certainly agree with that, if by “scientific extrapolation” they mean “wild and contrived applications of perfectly decent theory.”

Many reviewers give the book kudos for being so thoroughly researched, and there certainly is a long bibliography at the end. But there’s no anthropologist among the main characters, and the science about Neanderthals that comes up either seems too pat and basic or too fanciful and wacky.

For example, the Neanderthals in the parallel universe have a much more peaceful and progressive culture than ours. They use solar energy, are all secular humanists, are practically crime-free, have intimate relationships with both women and men as a matter of course, never domesticated plants or animals to any great extent and so have hardly any pathogens, and are appalled by our wars and man’s inhumanity to man. It’s definitely a message of “O, what these noble savages could teach us!” Maybe it’s just my cynical homo sapiens nature coming out but it’s hard to believe all that would result from their inherently different biology. It’s also hard to imagine it working on a large scale with hardly any missteps or conflict.

And the explanations for the parallel universes, and for how they are supposedly going to bring Ponter home to the exact right single universe out of all the infinite possibilities, both just seemed silly. Even for a blockbuster best-seller.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Portal

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