Book Review: The Einstein Intersection

Samuel R. Delany
1967
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –
 
SPOILER ALERT (Not that it matters)
 
Samuel Delany published his first novel at age 20, which earned him a reputation as a prodigy. The Einstein Intersection, which he wrote at 24, seems like a desperate effort to hold on to that reputation. 

Everything about this book – the ambitious but half-resolved plot lines, the trippy sentence structure, the trendy 1960s themes, the inclusion of his own writer’s journal in the quotations that start each chapter – gives the impression of a writer using every technique he can think of to impress us with his brilliance without having the content to back it up.
The story takes place 30,000 years after humans have disappeared from Earth for unspecified reasons. Aliens from “the other side of the universe” have colonized the empty Earth and have somehow taken human form in an attempt to adapt better to the planet. But the human form doesn’t work quite right for the aliens, so every generation has a lot of mutation. Those who are mutated range from “functionals,” who can mix with “normals” in everyday society, to “non-functionals” who have to be kept in a “kage” and tended all their lives.

The characters keep talking about how there is a lot of prejudice towards anyone who is considered “different.” You are “different” if you have a mutation of any kind, whether it is a harmful mutation or a special ability like telepathy or telekinesis (like the X-Men). According to the book’s publicists this is supposedly one of the most powerful elements of the book, but we never run into any situations where this prejudice is really manifest or where it has any major impact on the story.

The main character, Lobey, is “different.” His difference is that he can hear the music that is playing in somebody else’s head and he can play it on his flute. Lobey falls in love with a “different” woman, Friza, who is telekinetic. Friza is mysteriously killed and Lobey is told by the elders of his village to go discover what killed her and kill it.

Through a series of hallucinations and/or visions he learns that Friza’s murderer is another “different” person named Kid Death, who can look through other people’s eyes anywhere they are and see what they see. When he gets bored with looking through their eyes, he closes their eyes permanently and thereby kills them. Lobey leaves his small village, joins up with a group of dragon herders and travels with them to the big city where the Kid is. Eventually he does manage to kill the Kid with the help of the herders and manages to also learn some life lessons in the process.

There are several bothersome things about the book, not least of which are the bold but half-explained and semi-developed themes.

One of these central themes is myth. Lobey is a rough parallel to Orpheus, who was a musical genius (on the lyre) and who traveled (unsuccessfully) to Hades to bring the woman he loved back from the dead. A modern retelling of a myth is a good device in theory but Orpheus’ story seems kind of pointless to me – his lover dies, he goes to Hades to go get her, he isn’t able to bring her back so he comes back home. I’m afraid that Lobey’s journey seems equally pointless.

Another theme of the book is the “convergence of rational and irrational thought” (whatever that is). One of the elders explains to Lobey that long, long ago, Albert Einstein defined the rules of the rational world and Kurt Gödel came as close as anyone can to defining the rules of the irrational world. At the intersection of the two… well, this is where the explanation kind of peters out, but it has something to do with society reaching a pinnacle of both scientific and spiritual development. It’s not really clear how it relates to Lobey’s journey, but it certainly sounds very cool to talk about.

Myth also shows up in the cheesy references to 1960s pop culture which have supposedly become lore in Lobey’s world – the tale of the Myth of Ringo, the swearing in Elvis’ name, the referring to death as “returning to the great rock and the great roll.” These might have been funny when the book first came out but seem trite now.

Delany starts each chapter with a quotation or two. Most of the quotations are from a self-consciously eclectic mix of writers from Bob Dylan to Thomas Chatterton and the Marquis de Sade, which is annoying enough. But some of the quotations are also from the author himself, from the journal he kept while traveling through Europe and writing this book. The entries always casually mention his current exotic location while talking about how he’s struggling with telling Lobey’s story: Oh, I’m having a devil of a time expressing Lobey’s pain while sitting in a small tea shack on the Bosporus with a group of Turkish sailors with whom I’m conversing in French.

At the very end of the book, he signs off the story with “— New York, Paris, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, London / Sept. ’65 – Nov. ’66.” Almost makes you feel like he wrote the book just so he could show off where he went.

In keeping with the era in which it was written, this book uses a psychedelic vocabulary and sentence structure. This sometimes works (“Chills snarled the nerves along my vertebrae”) but often doesn’t (“My ear is funnel for all voice and trill and warble you can conceive this day”). I think the main times that it doesn’t work are when Delany himself hasn’t fully thought out what he is trying to say, as in: “Music is the pure language of temporal and co-temporal relation.” What?

Delany is self-conscious about this writing style, which also makes us too conscious of it. In one of his journal entries, Delany says, “In a week…I can start the meticulous process of overlaying another filigree across the novel’s palimpsest.” I think if your novel needs to be multi-layered and obscure, just write it that way – you don’t need to tell us that’s what you’re doing so we’ll be impressed.

One thing I do have to give Delany credit for is that he gave the people in this book three sexes – male, female, and androgynous. And this book came out two years before Ursula K. LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, which was considered groundbreaking for its treatment of androgynous characters. 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Hey, Cthul-Aid

BeastWreck's Cthul-Aid design, as seen on Boing Boing.

http://boingboing.net/2013/08/18/cthul-aid-oh-yeah.html

Book Review: The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

1974

Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                 

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

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

                                                                                                

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

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

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

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

A Battle for the Ages

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

 

Book Review: Embassytown

China Miéville

2011

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

               

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

                          

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing Wonder Woman

Ah, Wonder Woman. Why is it so hard for live-action film and TV to portray her as the "unapologetically feminist super heroine" she is? Why hasn't there been a modern major motion picture about her the way there has been about Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Thor, Ironman, Hellboy, etc.?

This post by Shoshana Kessock on Tor.com explores the difficulty of packaging the Amazon warrior in today's media.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/06/the-problem-with-wonder-woman

Book Review: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Fountains of Paradise

Arthur C. Clarke
1979
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This novel is not one of Clarke’s best, but I enjoyed it anyway.

The book follows several intertwining, somewhat-related plot lines which seem a little bit artificially mashed together. As usual with Clarke, though, the science in it is realistic and impeccable. And the last half of the book, which focuses almost completely on only one of the plots, is pretty exciting.

The main story takes place in 2069. Humans have established colonies on the moon and several other planets in our solar system. Vannevar Morgan, an engineer who has become world-famous for building a bridge across the Straights of Gibraltar, now wants to build a space elevator. This would essentially be an incredibly tall tower extending from a point on Earth’s equator all the way up through the ionosphere to a space station in geosynchronous orbit. Goods could be brought up and down the elevator using relatively cheap electricity, and ships could shuttle those goods between the space station and other planets without having to waste energy getting in and out of Earth’s atmosphere.

Morgan needs to build the earth-bound terminal station of the elevator (a) in the area of greatest gravitational stability and (b) at an elevation high enough to avoid hurricanes. The best place is one particular mountain on the fictional island of Taprobane (which Clarke has modeled after Sri Lanka) in the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, the location is already occupied by a 2,000-year-old Buddhist monastery and the monks are reluctant to leave, to say the least.

Interwoven with this modern story is the story of the corrupt and ruthless king Kalidasa who ruled Taprobane 2,000 years ago. He built an enormous pleasure palace, including elaborate fountains kept filled by water-carrying slaves, next to the same Buddhist monastery, and his disruptive presence and decadent lifestyle led to similar quarrels with the monks.

Another parallel story is that of Starglider, an interstellar probe built by aliens on a planet 52 light years away, which passes through our solar system in the early 21st century. Starglider is definitive proof that we are not alone and forever changes our understanding of our place in the universe.

Debates about God and religion come up throughout the book. There is constant tension between those who feel that you should not challenge the gods (usually represented by the monks) and those who appear to challenge them (represented primarily by Morgan, Kalidasa, and Starglider).

The God debate holds promise and the separate plots are interesting in themselves. The space elevator is particularly tantalizing because it could, in fact, be built today, if we put our minds to it (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s exploration of the idea in his Mars trilogy). Unfortunately, together, the different story lines make for a little bit of a disconcerting jumble. And the messages Clarke seems to want to send us about challenging God (if, in fact, that is what we are doing) are muddled; there are sympathetic and unsympathetic characters on both sides.

I did, of course, appreciate Clarke’s reference to R. Gabor’s Pharmacological Basis of Religion, published in 2069 by Miskatonic University Press.

One technical note: If you’re getting this book used or from the library, avoid the 1979 hardcover edition as it has a few erroneously transposed paragraphs in key places towards the end.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Claw of the Conciliator

Gene Wolfe
1981
Awards: Nebula, Locus
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

The Claw of the Conciliator is the second installment in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun quadrilogy. It takes place on Earth (or “Urth”) a very, very long time in the future. It is one of these futures in which everything is in decline; the sun is dying, the world is getting colder, and humans have forgotten how to use most of their technology and have regressed into a middle-ages-type society full of magic and lore and superstition.

In this society, most professions are organized into guilds, where young boys are taken in as apprentices and work their way up to be journeymen and then – if they’re lucky enough and good enough – masters. The four books of the New Sun series follow the life of Severian, who, as a child, was adopted into the guild of the Torturers.

The Torturers are a sort of necessary evil. They are feared and reviled by most people but they’re the only ones who are willing to do the punishing and executing of criminals. They maintain a professional, emotionally-detached front but their medieval methods for the “excruciation” of their “clients” are brutal and disgusting (or sometimes entertaining, for those of us who enjoy bloodcurdling tales of horror and the macabre).

I figured that for me to evaluate The Claw of the Conciliator accurately I should first read the first book in the trilogy, The Shadow of the Torturer. I really liked Shadow but did not feel the same way about Claw.

The first half of Shadow tells the best part of the story, when Severian is a boy apprentice living in the dorms in the Torturer’s Citadel. Things go well for him until, right after he graduates to journeyman, he makes the mistake of showing mercy to one of his “clients.” His masters show leniency on him by not killing him for this infraction, but they do have to cast him out. They get him a job as a local executioner in a hick town way up north called Thrax. The second half of Shadow describes the first leg of his journey on foot to Thrax, in which he runs into strange characters and is challenged to a duel fought with carnivorous flowers and has to learn how to do freelance executions to make money.

The entire book of Claw (and, I assume, the third and fourth books in the series) describe more of Severian’s adventures on the way to Thrax. Unfortunately, the book gets increasingly magic-based and riddle-filled as it goes on, and the things that happen in it aren’t very interesting. Sure, he stumbles into an underground cave filled with hundreds of man-beasts that he has to tame with the light of a magical gem, and that's okay. And he does take part in a weird ceremony in which he eats the flesh of a dead person and afterwards has that person’s memories as well as his own. But he also falls in with an unappealing group of itinerant actors and hefty chunks of the book are taken up with descriptions of the incredibly boring plays he performs with them as they all travel northward together.

It was a real struggle to keep reading to the end of Claw. This was too bad because I liked Severian and the way he had to be in a certain amount of denial about the profession he was trained in from childhood. The third and fourth books might make a fabulous recovery but I don’t have the energy to find out. 


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

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.