Womp Rat Catcher

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Book Review: Queen of Angels

Greg Bear
1990
Nominations: Hugo, Campbell, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

I am normally a Greg Bear fan, but Queen of Angels did not do it for me. It seemed like a writing experiment that failed. The post-cyberpunk style seemed half-hearted; the multi-threaded plot lines were plodding and uninteresting; and several thematic elements that were initially intriguing and seemed to be being set up to be important turned out to be disappointing dead ends.

The first of these thematic dead ends is the date. The book is set in Los Angeles in December of 2047, on the eve of the binary millennium. This means that on January 1st the year, when expressed in binary form, will flip from 11111111111 to 100000000000. For most of the book it seems like this might be a big deal, but in the end it doesn’t make any difference to anything, and winds up feeling like a piece of geeky trivia that Bear tossed in just to be clever.

In Bear’s 2047, the world is full of automated highways, nanotech, and biogenetic transformation. It is also divided into the haves, who live in luxurious, secure high-rises, and the have-nots, who live in the “jags,” or what used to be the regular old city. And it is also split into people who have been “therapied” and the maladjusted unfortunates who have not—another thematic element which there is a great stir about at first, but which ends up leading nowhere, especially since you can’t really tell who is what, and the supposed anti-untherapied discrimination doesn’t really amount to much.
   
Anyway. The plot starts out gamely enough, with a mass murder: eight students are found dead in the apartment of their professor, famed poet Emmanuel Goldsmith. Police detective Mary Choy is assigned to the case.

(Choy, incidentally, is a full-body “transform” who has had her entire skin replaced with a jet-black, slick seal-skin-like material. It’s cool, but we never learn exactly why she chose that, and what its significance is, if anything.)

At first, Choy thinks that solving these murders is going to be a breeze, but it turns out to be much more complicated than she expects. One problem is that Goldsmith, the prime suspect, is missing and is suspected to have escaped to the banana republic of Hispaniola, where his best friend is the semi-benevolent dictator. Another problem is that she can’t find any hard evidence proving that he is the culprit.

In addition, there is a rogue group of “selectors,” people who appoint themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner of justice against perpetrators of fraud and abuse who haven’t yet been caught by the police. They target powerful mafia bosses and white-collar criminals and put them through mind torture harsh enough to turn many of them into vegetables. Choy figures (correctly) that the selectors are after Goldsmith and that she has to find him before they do, and this sets up a nice bit of suspense.

If Bear had focused more on the murder investigation, he probably would have had himself a pretty good novel. He could have fashioned himself into a sort of post-cyberpunk Raymond Chandler. But, instead, he splits the story into four separate, frustratingly slow-moving plot lines with only light (or, in one case, zero) connections to each other.

In addition to Choy, he follows the story of Richard Fettle, a failed writer who was a friend of Goldsmith’s and who is suffering not only from shock at the crimes but also severe writer’s block and a dysfunctional relationship with a really annoying girlfriend. He gets more and more frustratingly aimless and pitiful over the course of the book.

We also follow brilliant psychological researcher Dr. Martin Burke, one of the only people on earth with the technology and expertise to enter another person’s brain and probe around inside what he calls “the Country of the Mind.” Burke likes to expound at length on his half-baked theories about how our personalities are actually made up of separate segments of personality that all come together in our brains to get reconciled into a whole, and that where psychological problems happen is when these segments can’t get reconciled with each other. Burke is hired by the father of one of the murder victims to probe Goldsmith’s mind and to find out why he committed the murders (if he did). Because, oh yeah, Goldsmith is not actually in Hispaniola, he is still in Los Angeles, hiding out at the house of his publisher, which makes Choy’s later trip to Hispaniola to find him feel incredibly pointless.

And finally, to add a totally random, ridiculously unconnected plot line to all of this, because clearly that is what is most needed, we also follow the adventures of a robotic probe, AXIS, that is out in the Alpha Centauri system investigating the possibility of life on planet Alpha Centauri B-2. AXIS finds mysterious structures on the planet and we are strung along for dozens of pages thinking that maybe they are artificial constructs built by intelligent life, and that something cool is going to come of this story line, only to discover that the structures are just natural byproducts of the tides and algae-like protozoans.
   
Meanwhile, because of the time lag in messages to and from Alpha Centauri, there is a clone of AXIS on earth that the scientists are using to analyze and predict what the real AXIS is doing, and yet another clone called “Jill” which analyzes the other two, and which they are watching on tenterhooks to see if she develops consciousness. Meanwhile, the real AXIS does develop consciousness and then goes into a mental breakdown upon realizing there is no intelligent life on B-2 and it is totally alone.
   
One additional issue is that the speech and thoughts of some of the characters (Choy and Fettle) are in a type of futurespeak (or futurethink) that Bear invented for this book. I’m generally game for learning new forms of speech if it is in keeping with the story, but this is a particularly annoying brand that doubles up on adjectives and leaves out most of the punctuation. For example:

“The metro-federal interface supervisor had the look of the oft therapied a man with guts stamina and manifold problems that he had spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to smooth.”

Bear himself doesn’t seem thrilled with it either, since he starts off using it frequently in the early chapters and then seems to allow it to fade away to almost nothing later in the book.

It seems like Bear had five or six different ideas for what he wanted to write about, and decided to use them all in one story. The result is a big disjointed mess, and I had no investment in any of it. The plot(s) and characters were not interesting enough to hold my attention and to make it worth the slog it took to get through the narrative. It was a disappointment, since Bear’s writing is usually so greedily consumable.

You Gotta Get With My Friends

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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.

Ray Bradbury: A Few Assorted Facts

Bradbury Landing

• In 2012, the NASA Curiosity rover landing site on the planet Mars was named "Bradbury Landing".

• In 1971, an impact crater on Earth's moon was named "Dandelion Crater" by the Apollo 15 astronauts, in honor of Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine.

• An asteroid discovered in 1992 was named "9766 Bradbury" in his honor.

• Ray Harryhausen was the best man at Ray Bradbury's wedding.

Science Fiction as Literature

Admittedly, I've only read one of the novels listed in this Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog post by Jeff Somers:

SF Novels That Should be Considered Literary Classics

But when it comes to A Canticle for Leibowitz, I wholeheartedly agree. Yes indeed.

The Triple Strand

Kim Stanley Robinson on religion, via his character Bai in The Years of Rice and Salt:

What the Chinese were fighting for, Bai decided, was …clarity, or whatever else it was that was the opposite of religion. For humanity. For compassion. For Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the triple strand that did so well in describing a relationship to the world: the religion with no God, only this world, also several other potential realms of reality, mental realms, and the void itself, but no God, no shepherd ruling with the drooling strictures of a demented old patriarch, but rather innumerable immortal spirits in a vast panoply of realms and being, including humans and many other sentient beings besides, everything living, everything holy, sacred, part of the Godhead—for yes, there was a GOD if by that you meant only a transcendent universal self-aware entity that was reality itself, the cosmos, including everything, including human ideas and mathematical forms and relationships. That idea itself was God, and evoked a kind of worship that was attention to the real world, a kind of natural study. Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye. The movements of chopping wood and carrying water. This initial study of devotion led to deeper understanding as they pursued the mathematical underpinnings of the ways of things, just out of curiosity and because it seemed to help them see even more clearly, and so they made instruments to see farther in and farther out, higher yang, deeper yin.

What followed was a kind of understanding of human reality that placed the greatest value on compassion, created by enlightened understanding, created by study of what was there in the world.

Book Review: The Years of Rice and Salt

Kim Stanley Robinson
2002
Awards: Locus
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

The Years of Rice and Salt is something of a departure from the last books of Robinson's I read (his earlier hard-SF Mars trilogy). This novel has a similarly ambitiously enormous scope and similarly thorough background research to the Mars books, but it is set entirely on Earth and focuses almost completely on history and philosophy rather than science. The main problem with it is that it is a mile wide and an inch deep: it covers a ton of ground, both physically and temporally, but doesn't get deep enough into any one character or plot line to allow me to get invested in it.

Most of the plot summaries I saw for this book, both on the cover and on bookseller websites, tease solely with its initial premise, which is: what if, when the bubonic plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages, it had had a 99% fatality rate and wiped out essentially all of the Europeans? I thought that meant that the book was going to be set in Europe, during the time of the plague, and that we were going to see what life would be like during a cataclysm such as that. But the premise is really just a brief starting point, setting the stage for what the book really is: a sweeping alternate history of the world from the Middle Ages until the present, in which the major emperors, explorers, inventors, scientists, politicians, and eventually world superpowers are Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American.

Robinson tells his story through a pair of central characters who are reincarnated over and over again in different times and places. These two people are cosmically joined, always fated to live and work closely together in some way, regardless of who they are or when they are reborn. You can tell who they are in each incarnation because their names always start with the same first letters (B and K), and they retain much of their own distinct personalities. "B" is a soft-hearted, inquisitive person who tends to be optimistic and think the best of people, while "K" tends to be ambitious, opinionated, skeptical, and sometimes violent.

These two people, or spirits, or souls, or whatever, are born into more or less difficult situations depending on how they behaved in past lives. They are usually also reincarnated together with other more peripheral members of their jati, or larger spiritual family, so some of the same supporting characters crop up repeatedly (also identifiable from the first letters of their first names).

Between lives, B and K wait in the bardo, which is a sort of a purgatory-like holding area in which they discuss the lives that just ended and await their new ones. It is only in the bardo that they can really remember the long line of people that they have been--although occasionally they do have a sense, while alive, of having been somewhere or having met someone before that they have only been to or met in a previous life.

B and K move through history, appearing as people of any nationality in any land across the world. They switch back and forth between man and woman, gay and straight, Muslim and Buddhist and agnostic. They are never biologically related, instead showing up as lovers, best friends, student and teacher, or army comrades.

They are friends, an Islamic sultana and cleric, when they lead the re-population of Europe; they are a Chinese navy man and a native girl when the Chinese "discover" North America and give the indigenous people smallpox; they are an indigenous Hodenosaunee and a Japanese immigrant when the Iroquois found their confederacy of native nations; they are variously Islamic and Indian and Chinese and Tibetan when they invent telescopes and microscopes and the printing press and come up with the law of gravity and the theory of relatively and the atomic bomb.

The book is by Kim Stanley Robinson, after all, so everything geographical and historical is impeccably researched. The settings are vivid and rich and colorful and exotic, yet familiar; the characters are well developed and their motives are understandable.

You also certainly get a sense of the vast sweep of history, and of how much all of our technological advancements rely on earlier peoples' knowledge and experimentation, so that our current achievements are the result of thousands of years of thought and learning. His more academically advanced characters have a keen awareness of this, too: that they are tiny parts part of a much greater historical picture.

I also appreciated at least one of the lessons that I think Robinson was trying to get across: that humans are fundamentally the same, for good or for ill, across all of our cultures. That if there had been no white Christian Europeans to establish a world empire, someone else from somewhere else would have. That we would have had scientific and industrial revolutions in different places led by different people. That we would have invented weapons of mass destruction and had long, bitter, pointless world wars. And that we would still struggle with the same issues of slavery, poverty, equality, and environmental destruction.

I also appreciated Robinson's dips into overt self-awareness. He makes you very aware that he is very aware of what he is doing. For example, one of K's incarnations, a teacher in an Islamic city on the west coast of repopulated France, says that musing over alternate histories is a waste of time: it is "such a useless exercise," she says, to constantly debate "what if this had happened, what if that had happened." And during another episode, a Chinese scholar talking about reincarnation references an ancient anthologist who put together a "reincarnation compendium," in which his characters were always reincarnated with names that begin with the same letters.

But it is a frustrating format because you can never get truly invested in any single incarnation. It is less like a single novel and more like a very long series of separate short stories, where you only just get familiar with the location and the people, and then it's all over and you have to move on to the next story.

And the stories and characters were not distinct enough from each other to be immediately memorable in themselves. No one single episode really stood out enough for me to remember specific names and incidents, except for one in which K makes a major mistake in one life and comes back in the next as a tiger.

And the years go by, and the characters are reborn over and over, and the names and places change, but the lives of the individual incarnations never reach any kind of satisfying resolution. After B and K get out of slavery and are done with world exploration, and achieve a sort of comfortable professorial status, they don't make that much more progress. They seem to just stay at that level, expounding and philosophizing, making the necessary era-appropriate inventions and discoveries to advance the world as a whole, but their individual lives often are disappointingly short and unresolved. They usually die without really finishing that life's work.

Maybe that's another of Robinson's points--that most lives are somewhat unresolved. One of B's incarnations reflects at one point upon how most lives are wasted, cut short, lived in "ignorance, hunger, and fear." There really are very few real-life stories with Hollywood-level excitement.

But that doesn't make for a really gripping novel. This book would have been a real page-turner if he had taken any one of the incarnations of B and K, fleshed it out and given it more drama and suspense, and let them complete a major discovery or invention and then have a moment of celebration, rather than just having them work hard for a lifetime and then slip to the next life to start all over again.

I appreciate the idea, the premise, and the effort. I really do. And in many ways, Robinson executed the individual elements excellently. I just need more of a hook and more exciting storytelling to keep me at attention.

It's All Too Much: Rape in A Game of Thrones

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Why Reality TV is Necessary for a Docile Society

Fire Chief Beatty explains to Guy Montag why books are dangerous:

“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they can win by remember the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury