Book Review: The Time Ships

Stephen Baxter
1995
Awards: Campbell
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The Time Ships is a sequel to H.G. Wells’ classic 1895 novella The Time Machine. It was officially supported by Wells’ estate and was published on the 100th anniversary of the original book. 

Baxter does a brilliant job of staying true to the tone, style, language, and setting of The Time Machine. But he also does a great deal more development of the main character, and uses Wells’ original concept as a jumping-off point to explore monumentally larger questions.

The Time Ships is narrated by the same (unnamed) main character and begins in the same base time (1891) and place (Richmond, England) as Wells’ original story, shortly after the narrator returned home from 802,701 A.D. and related his adventures to his friends. Except, in The Time Ships, the narrator feels so guilty for leaving his Eloi girlfriend and escaping back to Victorian England as she was about to be captured by Morlocks, that he resolves to go back (to the future) to rescue her. So he gets into his machine, sets his control levers, and starts to see the years go rolling by as they did before…

…but, as he travels, he realizes that the future has changed drastically from what he saw on his first trip.

The first thing he notices is that, several millennia in, the sun stops oscillating. In other words, the earth no longer has a tilted axis, but is now straight up and down, with its axis perpendicular to the sun. And then the sun stops moving, staying constantly in the same place in the sky. In other words, the face of the earth he is on is permanently facing the sun. The vegetation and the River Thames dry up and wither away, and the land becomes a blazing desert. And then finally the sun appears to explode and go out entirely! 

Appalled, he brakes the machine, stopping about 600,000 years into his future.

He finds Morlocks around, on this permanently dark Earth. But they are not the Morlocks he met before; these are a highly advanced, peaceful race, who have learned how to harness the sun’s energy by enclosing it in a Dyson sphere to provide everything they need at no cost. They have no want, hunger, poverty, or war. Their lives are lived on a completely rational basis, with the highest purpose being the quest for knowledge. 

His main guide in this world ends up being a Morlock named Nebogipfel, a specialist in physics and youth education. It is Nebogipfel who explains why our narrator didn’t return to the same future as before. Based on the Morlock’s studies of Kurt Gödel in the 1950s, he theorizes that the narrator caused a divergence in history by telling his friends about his adventures when he returned to his own time. Time is full of multiple possible paths, Nebogipfel says, and the narrator’s revelation of the success of his machine led to the branching off of a different timeline from the one he had been living in originally; a timeline in which time travel was now a possibility. By inventing the time machine, the main character changed the future irrevocably.

The narrator is treated with respect and patience by his guide. And as he explores the Earth the Morlocks have made, he comes to have increasing respect for their achievements and their intelligence. But he is still unable to overcome his disgust with not only what they have done with the Earth and the sun, but also their physical appearance. And he wants to go home and fix history. 
So, eventually, he is able to trick Nebogipfel into taking him back to see his time machine, whereupon he jumps inside and sets the controls back for Victorian England. But Nebogipfel jumps in after him just before he takes off, and is carried along back with him.

The narrator has set the controls to 1873, with the idea of going back to his laboratory and convincing his younger self not to build the time machine in the first place. The narrator and Nebogipfel get to his house in 1873, hook up with his younger self, and explain their problem. But all three of them are then kidnapped by time-traveling British Army personnel from 1938, an era of perpetual war with Germany in which time travel is the ultimate weapon. Their mission is to prevent anyone—including the narrator himself—from preventing him from inventing it.

What follows is a twisting, turning adventure through time, as both instantiations of the main character and Nebogipfel travel back and forth from 1938 to the Paleocene Era to 50 million years into the future to the very beginning of time, trying to find a way home.

It is a captivating story. First of all, Baxter does a fantastic job writing from the point of view of a Wellsian, Victorian-era Englishman. The narrator’s archaic turns of phrase, his capitalization of Important Nouns, and his mental explanations of incredibly futuristic concepts in terms of the limited technology that an 1890s scientist would understand, all ring true. And his sensibilities are always being shocked by the things he encounters, particularly those that involve the human body: Morlock flesh, hair, and reproductive methods; 20th-century sexual mores; nanosurgery.Baxter also does a nice job of subtle, steady character development. In his adventures in The Time Ships, the narrator sees atomic bombs and the devastation of war, but he also sees love, community building, and inventiveness. Through one disaster after another, the narrator comes to see first-hand just how evil and, at the same time, just how compassionate and far-seeing humans can be. And he has to learn how to reconcile it all into a far more complex concept of the nature of humanity than he had before.

And, in spite of his initial (and often continuing) physical repulsion of Morlocks, the narrator gradually develops a deep relationship with Nebogipfel. It is a relationship of siblings, rather than friends, in the way they grow to care for and depend on each other, but also fight about so many things. In spite of the narrator's haughtiness, it is from Nebogipfel that he learns the biggest lessons about being comfortable with one's place in the universe.

The story itself was tight enough to keep me reading, and at the same time covered an incredibly ambitious amount of ground. Somehow Baxter was able to weave together a coherent, well-paced story that included prehistoric Earth, space elevators, climate destruction, an alternate-history world war in Europe, quantum physics, and Lovecraftian pyramidal space creatures, in addition to the aforementioned Dyson sphere. It was a little bit like reading a book that combined the writing not only of H.G. Wells, but also Connie Willis, Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman, Piers Anthony, and Michael Bishop.

It sounds chaotic, but it worked. Amazingly enough, in what at first seemed like it was going to be just a time-travel adventure, Baxter has written a story of enormous sweep and complexity of understanding. On the one hand, the narrator came face to face with the size of the universe and realized exactly how infinitesimally small he is. And, on the other hand, he saw the currents connecting him both to the past and the future, and how little changes by one person could result in huge changes over a large enough scale of time. And he came through all of this with an understanding of how important it is to continue to strive to improve life for himself and those around him, no matter how small the incremental change might seem.

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library

This spring, I was in Indianapolis and had the privilege of visiting the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. This place is fantastic. 

It is a little museum, jam-packed with artifacts from Vonnegut’s life (including at least some of his library, his purple heart, and the typewriter on which he wrote many of his novels). The best part was the curator who greeted me when I came in; he was clearly a passionate Vonnegut fan, and gave me an artifact-by-artifact personal tour of the exhibits. He brought to life the author, his life, and even his family, which I never knew much about. (He also told me that ice-nine was based on a real-life experiment, which is terrifying.)

The staff has a lot of love and respect for Vonnegut and his work, and an understanding of what him made him tick (or not tick). They hold events in honor not only of Vonnegut's humor (block parties with asterisk cookies) but also his sense of justice (banned book weeks). And they have been able to forge a close relationship with members of the Vonnegut family, which adds immeasurably to the richness of their programs and collections. 

The museum is currently raising money to move into a new building four times larger than the tiny space they are in now. It is scheduled to open in April 2017, so any Vonnegut fans visiting after that should be in for a treat. 

I do think it's funny that the library's website talks about the legacy of "Hoosier author" Kurt Vonnegut, since in Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut described the community of Hoosiers as a granfalloon.

Book Review: The Innkeeper's Song

Peter S. Beagle
1993
Awards: Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This is one of those fantasy novels set in a medieval-style place and time in which technology has not progressed beyond swords and horses and carts, and there are wizards and strange mythical beasts. And it is well told: very human and accessible, occasionally action-packed, somewhat scary, a little poetic, and a little bit cute.
   
The story starts out with a pair of young lovers: a girl, Lukassa, and a boy, Tikat. The two are billing and cooing on a bridge over a river near their village when the bridge railing suddenly gives way and Lukassa falls into the river and drowns.

The boy, Tikat, is disconsolate, weeping by the river all the next night and day. But then a mysterious warrior woman rides up, raises his dead girlfriend out of the river, brings her back to life, puts her on her horse, and takes off.

Tikat rushes after them and chases them for miles and miles and miles, never catching up. Along the way he encounters a group of bandits who are harassing an old man. He rescues the old man from the bandits and they travel for a while together. The old man turns out, however, not only to be an associate of the warrior woman who raised Tikat’s girlfriend from the dead, but also a mystical beast himself, whose natural form is that of a red fox. Promising to leave a trail that Tikat can follow to find them all, he turns into his fox self and runs off to join the women.

One of the nice techniques Beagle uses is that he switches his narrator every chapter. Each one is narrated by whichever character is most appropriate to tell that part of the story, and every character gets a chance to be the narrator at least once (including the Fox, who has some of the best narration in the whole book).

This means that while we’re following Tikat chasing after the women, we also get to find out what’s going on with the women as they race across the countryside. It turns out the warrior woman, who is named Lal, is the former student of a wizard. On the road, they join up with a woman named Nyateneri, who is another student of the same wizard and who is just as much of a bad-ass warrior as Lal. The two of them are desperately searching for their former teacher; they believe he is somewhere in the area, hiding from a terrible rival wizard who wants to kill him, and they are determined to defend him.

The three women eventually stop at a crossroads inn. The fat, cantankerous innkeeper, Karsh, has been up to now perfectly happy whiling away his days running his inn and beating up his staff, including his teenage stable boy and semi-adopted son Rosseth. But these three women are destined to turn Karsh’s and Rosseth’s lives upside down—and the inn’s staff are destined to help the three women in their goals (albeit mostly unintentionally).

Lal, Nyateneri, and the Fox manage to find the old wizard hiding in the nearby town and they bring him back to the inn to live while trying to gather their strength for the coming confrontation. They have several smaller adventures including the killing of two men sent to kill Nyateneri, a fairly lengthy episode of gender-bending group sex, and an ill-fated journey to find the wizard’s nemesis, until finally it all culminates in an enormous, inn-destroying wizard-on-wizard face-off across both physical and metaphysical planes.

Sometimes I think there are two ways storytelling can be good. If the author does a great job creating and executing a riveting overall story arc, it doesn’t matter so much if the details aren’t perfectly described. And, on the other hand, if the author keeps our interest with entertaining conversations and richly detailed scene-setting, it can be okay to have a relatively basic, less inherently exciting plot.

(If an author can do both, of course, the book has the potential to be truly amazing, rather than just good—but that seems to be relatively rare.)

This book of the second type. The overall plot is simple and not all that exciting in itself. But Beagle keeps us reading along nicely with his colorful and detailed atmospheric, emotional, and scenic descriptions, as well as the interactions between the characters. And the strength of some of the main characters (Lal, Nyateneri, the Fox) helps to distract us from how tiresome some of the supporting characters (Lukassa, Tikat) can be.

He keeps us reading along nicely, that is, until the final showdown—which starts out with a lot of suspenseful promise and then blurs out into an ill-defined and overblown abstract supernatural scene that reflects none of the detailed physical grounding so present in the rest of the book.

Book Review: Moonfall

Jack McDevitt
1998
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Moonfall is a disaster novel that does not hold back. It contains just about every kind of space- and Earth-based natural disaster you could possibly think of, except possibly killer tornadoes.  And the disasters come one after the other in rapid succession—just as one is being solved, a worse one is looming on the horizon—so the characters have no time to plan very far ahead, much less to sleep.

Before this, I had only read McDevitt’s space exploration novels, which I like very much and which are shorter and crisper and tend to be more about intrigue than action. But with Moonfall I was impressed with his creativity, his realism, and how he managed the pacing to keep the tension going at a high level from beginning to end in this longer format.

This book starts, as any good disaster novel should, with calm opening scenes of ordinary people going about their work and hobbies and family lives as usual, never suspecting that within hours everything is going to change drastically.

One of these ordinary people is Tomiko Harrington, an amateur astronomer out on a clear night in 2024 near St. Louis observing a total solar eclipse. During the eclipse she spots a star she has never seen before and that shouldn’t be there, and reports it to the authorities.

Gradually, the authorities realize that (a) the anomalous star is a comet; (b) it’s an interstellar comet traveling about a hundred times faster than a normal comet; (c) it’s headed straight for the moon and will get there in a matter of days.

Charlie Haskell, the U.S. vice president, actually happens to be on the moon at the time. He’s there with a whole bunch of staffers and Secret Service personnel to do a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the official opening of the U.S.’s new Moonbase installation. And there are also about 1,700 scientists and administrators living at Moonbase already. But nobody is all that worried; they think they have enough space vehicles of various kinds to evacuate everyone to safety either to Earth or to an orbital space station by the time the comet hits.

Except that, of course, they have mechanical difficulties with a couple of the space planes. And, with the complications that result, it turns out that they don’t actually have enough time to get everyone off the moon after all. And, unfortunately for Vice President Haskell, he has already said publicly that he’d be the last one off—to “close the door and turn out the lights”—never thinking that might mean he’d be in mortal danger.

Because by now the astronomers have realized that since the comet is traveling so fast, it has the force to actually break the moon apart completely when it hits.

And to make matters worse, if the moon breaks up, there is the distinct possibility that chunks—potentially really big chunks—of moon rock will fall onto the Earth.

As this is all happening, the tension is gradually increasing, ramping up slowly but steadily until you and all the characters are wound as tight as drums. By the time the last plane arrives at Moonbase to try to pull off a daring rescue of the vice president and five other people who have volunteered to be the last to leave, everyone is racing around, trying to get the vehicle fueled and loaded and off the ground as fast as possible. There is no time to spare, and the anxiety is palpable.

Then, seconds after they lift off, the comet actually hits the moon and everything switches almost into slow motion. The impact itself is beautifully written; it seemed very realistic, with the blinding light of the actual explosion sweeping over the moon and then the moon’s surface first shuddering and trembling and then starting to collapse.

And then, after that moment’s pause, the pace shifts into high gear again as the vice president’s plane attempts to outrun the rapidly expanding shock wave of fire and chunks of moon debris the size of city blocks.

After that, the characters have to discover, evaluate, and solve one disaster after another that with the barest of resources and almost no sleep. Sure enough, the moon does break up and pieces do fall to earth, causing earthquakes, landslides, and super-giant tidal waves that wipe out most of both U.S. coasts. And the whole time, the passenger-bearing space planes have their own mini-disasters, running out of fuel and air and being hit by moon shrapnel. McDevitt also often gives you clues as to what is about to go wrong, which is great because knowing that it’s going to happen and having to wait for it makes it all the more tense.

Eventually, the little multivariate disasters subside and the main characters’ concerns narrow down to one central final crisis: a moon rock a kilometer and a half long that is headed straight for Earth. This is a giant civilization-killer of a meteor and everybody has to pull together to figure out a solution. Except that by now they’re down to their last seven remaining space planes, and right-wing militia members, misguidedly seeing an opportunity in the pending apocalypse, are trying to use rocket launchers to shoot down the planes.

The only real issue I had with the book was that the narrative had a tendency to get scattered. McDevitt does spend most of his time on the stories of his main characters: the vice president, the president, some key space station personnel, and a couple of the space pilots. But he also sprinkles in lots of little vignettes about random minor characters, many of whom only appear once or twice: a woman at a Manhattan cocktail party; a Coast Guard cutter captain off Long Island Sound; a retiree in Rhode Island; a nurse in San Francisco; a furniture factory manager in Pennsylvania.

He does create a good diversity of characters, and it might have seemed a good way to help us monitor what was happening in different parts of the United States while the central action was happening in space, but it was just too many stories to follow, especially when they didn't lead anywhere. I didn’t know which ones to settle into and which ones I could safely coast through as just background color. And we often snapped from one to the other very quickly, so at times it made the flow feel choppy.

But, in general, McDevitt’s pacing, realism, and talent for telling the central story make up for the sometimes choppiness. As would happen in a catastrophe of this size, lots of people in leadership positions do not come out looking very good (including the president). And all kinds of people become heroes who never expected to be (including the vice president, who somehow ends up single-handedly solving almost every problem that crops up in space). And many people do die. And the tension continues right to the end; even up to the very last two pages, you still aren’t sure, after everything the Earth's people have been through, if they’re going to survive the final mega-meteor disaster or not.

Book Review: Bellwether

Connie Willis
1996
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I never thought I would say this about a book and mean it in a good way:

Bellwether is an adorable romance story.

It’s also a tremendously cute send-up of people slavishly following popular trends.

The main character, Dr. Sandra Foster, is a statistical researcher at a corporation called HiTek. Her area of research—her obsession—is to discover how fads start.
   
HiTek has several floors of researchers all engaged in different types of research, from stats to biology to physics. It is a sort of Dilbertian company in that it does not appear to actually create any products, but does spend tons of money and time holding trendy sensitivity exercises and producing reams of bureaucratic paperwork.
   
HiTek is interested in Foster’s research because they’d like to use it to create fads of their own. But Foster is doing it because she is simply fascinated by trends: the phenomenon of people blindly following the crowd’s lead in completely silly fashions, food, and entertainment. She wants to know what makes otherwise rational people subscribe to the pointless and idiotic just because it’s popular.
   
Foster is surrounded by people who subscribe to the latest fads and try to enforce them on her—not only HiTek’s management, but also her friends, her friends’ kids, her maybe-boyfriend, the baristas at her favorite café, and the assistant librarians at her local library. Foster’s life is additionally complicated by Flip, the company’s twenty-something administrative assistant (later re-titled by management the “interdepartmental communications liaison”). Flip is on the bleeding edge of fashion, with blue hair and duct tape jewelry, but cannot make copies or correctly deliver inter-office mail to save her life. She invariably ends up making more work for Foster than if Foster had just done the administrative tasks herself.

Foster’s current project is to find the source of the hair-bobbing fad of the 1920s. She has methodically eliminated all of her most promising potential sources, and feels like she’s not getting anywhere. Then, one day, Flip mis-delivers a package to Foster that is supposed to go to a Dr. Turnbull down in Biology. Foster takes it upon herself to deliver it since it is marked “perishable.” Turnbull is not in her lab at the time, but her lab mate, Dr. Bennett O’Reilly, is there. And in O’Reilly, Foster meets the first and only person she has ever met who seems to be completely immune to fads.

O’Reilly is a complete fashion disaster. He wears clashing colors and patterns and has no idea whether tiramisu or bread pudding is in or out. And not only does he not care about fads, he seems to be unaware that they even exist. This is, of course, fascinating to Foster.

O’Reilly is working on chaos theory. He is trying to observe how chaotic systems behave and understand how they can sometimes reach such a point of total chaos that they will actually spontaneously organize themselves into a new, organized-seeming equilibrium. He and Foster quickly recognize the similarities in their goals, and decide to work together on a single project to find out how cohesive trends arise out of chaos and disorganization. They launch their project—which involves borrowing a flock of sheep from Foster’s rancher maybe-boyfriend—but their progress is hampered on all sides by friends and colleagues who want them instead to help them ban smoking from the parking lot, find a Romantic Bride Barbie, and win the elusive million-dollar Niebnitz research grant.
   
O’Reilly and Foster are as cute as buttons. Really. They’re the only people at HiTek—or even apparently in the greater Denver-Boulder area—who seem to have a dose of common sense. And they’re ideal for each other, but they don’t see it at all, of course.

There’s not actually all that much that goes on as far as plot in this book. It’s like Willis’ longer books in that most of the activity involves the main characters trying to get something done—like copying a bunch of clippings on hair-bobbing—and having it take weeks because it is interrupted by management all-hands meetings, administrative assistants (or interdepartmental communications liaisons) losing the clippings, and people wanting advice about filling out the incomprehensible new simplified funding forms.

As long as you don’t need a lot of actual plot or action, and you are okay sitting back and enjoying the ride through the chaos, you’ll get a lot of funny information about trends and entertaining character studies of impossible people, and a very sweet love story between two likeable characters fighting against all odds to follow their own stars.

Compare and Contrast: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? versus Blade Runner

Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, was the inspiration behind the movie Blade Runner. Other than the core plot—a man is hired to track down escaped androids in a futuristic Los Angeles—they don't have all that much in common.

Warning: there are spoilers in here.

	Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)	Blade Runner (1982)
Setting	Los Angeles in the 2020s, after a nuclear war has left Earth largely desertified, nearly vacant, and covered with radioactive dust.	Los Angeles in 2019, which has become a run-down, ramshackle, polyglot, multicultural city with noodle bars and flying blimps advertising off-world colony living.
Main Character	Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who tracks down escaped androids. He works as an independent contractor for the Los Angeles police department but he is not a policeman himself. The words “blade runner” are never uttered.	Rick Deckard, a former police officer with the Los Angeles police department. He had served the LAPD in the capacity of a “blade runner,” a cop who tracks down escaped androids.
Main Character’s Home Life	Married to Iran Deckard. Spends much of his free time avoiding participating in either the religion or the entertainments currently popular with his wife and most other people. Owns one pet, a malfunctioning robot sheep.	Single, living in a claustrophobically cluttered apartment. Likes it that way. Often eats take-out at noodle bars. No pets.
Inciting Incident	Deckard is contracted by the LAPD to track down six Nexus-6 androids who have escaped from a colony on Mars. (Two others were killed while escaping.)	Deckard is re-hired by the LAPD to track down four Nexus-6 androids who have escaped from an unspecified off-world colony. (Two others were killed while escaping.)
Slang Term for Humanoid Robots	“Andy”	“Replicant,” “skin job”
Android Lifespan	2 years	4 years
Company that Makes the Nexus-6	Rosen Associates	Tyrell Corporation
First Android Observed to Fail the Voigt-Kampff Test of Emotional Response	Rachael Rosen	Leon Kowalski
Human Sympathizer Who Provides Shelter to Androids	J.R. Isadore, a slow-witted “special” person who works as a veterinarian’s assistant and lives in an abandoned apartment building in the suburbs	J.F. Sebastian, a quirky genetic designer for the Tyrell Corporation who lives in an abandoned apartment building in the suburbs and makes robotic toys as a hobby
Relationship between Pris Stratton and Rachael Rosen	Rachael and Pris are made from the same model and are physically identical	Rachael and Pris are made from different models because Sean Young does not look like Daryl Hannah
First Female Android Killed	Luba Luft, an opera singer	Zhora, an exotic snake dancer
First Male Android Killed	Max Polokov, smart android posing as a Soviet policeman	Leon Kowalski, somewhat slow android applying for a job at the Tyrell Corporation
Why Rachael Rosen Sleeps with Rick Deckard	Because she’s trying to get him to not to go after Pris	Because she loves him
Android Roy Batty’s Significant Other	Wife Irmgard Batty	Girlfriend Pris Stratton
Android Ruse to Attempt to Fool Rick Deckard	Setting up a completely fake police station complete with bored desk sergeant	Disguising self as one of Sebastian’s robotic toys
Ultimate Cause of Roy Batty’s Demise	Rick Deckard shoots him	His battery expires
Inexplicable Dramatic Element	Rachael Rosen’s wanton killing of Deckards’ pet	Edward James Olmos as blue-eyed cop who does origami

Book Review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick
1968
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

It is truly a pleasure to be able to review another book by the brain-twisting, reality-suspending Philip K. Dick.

This novel is probably one of his most famous since it was, as the front cover of my 1996 paperback version says, “the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner.” The book was really just that, however—an inspiration. No one should read Dick’s novel expecting it to be a direct parallel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie.
   
Both share the same basic plot skeleton: in a technologically advanced Los Angeles of the near future, protagonist Rick Deckard is hired by the L.A. police department to hunt down a group of dangerous androids who have escaped from an off-world colony.
   
However, the meat covering the book’s and movie’s respective skeletons is almost completely different. Which, as I will explain later, is not necessarily a bad thing; both are superb in their own ways.

The novel is set in the 2020s (which would have been pretty far in the future for Dick in 1968). A nuclear war has killed off most of the world’s animals and the radioactive dust that remains is slowly killing everything that was able to survive the war itself. Most of the planet is vacant, desolate desert. All of the humans who could afford to have fled to off-Earth colonies elsewhere in the Solar System; the people who remain eke out their livings while trying to avoid sterilization and death.
   
To cope with the pervasive atmosphere of despair, most people own Penfield mood organs, which offer hundreds of different settings. The machines allow them to be in complete control of their feelings at all times, whether they want to feel happy, or calm, or raunchy, or even profoundly depressed.

Most people also subscribe to Mercerism, the new masochistic religion of the times. Special devices let them connect their brains into the brain of the religion’s founder, Wilbur Mercer. They stay connected to him and to each other for hours, seeing what he sees, which mainly involves him trudging steadily uphill on a path in a desert, often being pelted with rocks by from unseen persecutors.

On an Earth with hardly any animals, owning a pet is the ultimate status symbol. But because the scarcity of real flesh-and-blood animals has driven their prices through the roof, most people can only afford mechanical copies. No one wants their neighbors to know they can’t afford a real animal, so corporations are making money hand over fist by building increasingly realistic robotic animals that can usually pass for the real thing.

Robot technology has not stopped at animals, however. Corporations are now also able to build incredibly highly-functioning androids as well. In fact, the latest models, the Nexus-6s, are indistinguishable from humans without sophisticated empathy testing. Androids are used as slave labor on off-Earth colonies, but they are illegal on Earth. Every once in a while a slave android will escape, make it to Earth, and try to blend in.

This is where our main character, Rick Deckard, comes in. At the beginning of the book, Deckard gets an emergency assignment: find and kill six escaped Nexus-6s who are believed to be hiding out in L.A. They are clever and very dangerous; one of them has already put his superior in the hospital.

Deckard and his wife Iran have so far only been able to afford a mechanical sheep. Bounty hunting is an extremely risky job, but he thinks that with the staggering reward he’d get from bagging six androids—which would be an industry record—he’ll be able to afford a much higher-status animal—maybe even a real one. Maybe even a Percheron. His wife, who is so depressed that she actually regularly sets her mood organ for more depression, urges him on.

The police chief suggests that Deckard first fly to Seattle to talk to Rosen Associates, the company that makes the Nexus-6s, so he can see a sample before he goes after them. There, he meets Rachael Rosen, a staffer who at first is presented as a relative of the company’s founder but who he learns through testing is actually one of the Nexus-6s herself.

This throws him for a loop, because he would have sworn she was human; and it’s even more disturbing to him because she didn’t know she was a robot either.

Back in L.A., Deckard methodically finds and kills the first three of his six androids. Each one is a different challenge, but the most difficult are the ones who try to befuddle him by making him doubt his entire sense of reality. They set up their own false, staffed, police station and they try to convince him that all his memories are fake, that he’s not working for the police at all, that they are the real police, and that perhaps he is an android himself. They are very convincing and he just about believes them (as do you). It is very anxiety producing—and classic Philip K. Dick.

Rachael Rosen, who is very upset upon learning she is an android, begs Deckard for help and they end up sleeping together. This makes him falter and start having doubts about his ability to kill androids and even to see them as non-people. It turns out, though, that Rosen was just trying to distract him in the hopes that he won’t go after one of the remaining androids—the one named Pris—who is the same model as her.

Roy Batty!

Eventually, the final three androids—Roy Batty, Irmgard Batty, and Pris Stratton—worm their way into the confidence, and thence the apartment, of J.R. Isadore, a sterilized, mentally deficient “special” person who lives in a vacant building in the suburbs. They hole up there until Deckard tracks them down and brings on the final showdown.

The book has just about everything: a clever premise, a gripping plot, and a sympathetic main character. It takes place in a creative but still realistic setting that you can picture yourself in, and Dick provides plenty of colorful emotional and physical details to ground you in the book’s world. His writing style itself is clear and straightforward, which is good because his ideas can be pretty twisty.

The movie Blade Runner is really, really, really good also. And the fact is that Blade Runner would probably not have been as great as it is if it had followed the book any more closely. Indeed, in spite of what an ingenious and prolific writer Dick was, there are actually only a couple movies made out of his books that are very good.

Dick’s best writing is about the questions that obsessed him—questions about the nature of reality and humanity that have a lot of potential for cerebral terror: who am I? Is what I perceive real? If someone insists my reality is wrong, should I trust them or my memories? If an android has been given feelings and memories to make it think it is human, is it human? How do I know I’m not an android that has been programmed to think I am human?

These are scary concepts that work well on the page and in the brain but seem to be difficult to translate to the screen. Usually—Total Recall aside—they don’t make for successful popular films.

Blade Runner’s screenwriters were smart to cut out Deckard’s wife, the Penfield mood organ, the Mercerist religion, and the robotic pets. And they were smart to trim down the number of androids and to make them a lot more scary and formidable. All of these changes made the movie into a different, but equally good, animal—a thrilling, gritty, futuristic film noir.

Fury Road: a Story of Recovery

Back in May 2015, Leah Schnelbach wrote an excellent post on Tor.com about the then recently-released Mad Max: Fury Road. 

Furiosa will get her vengeance.

The post was called "We All Agree that Mad Max: Fury Road is Great. Here’s Why It’s Also Important." In it, Schnelbach talked about how the movie was indeed an awesome action movie, and that it was indeed groundbreaking for the genre because of its themes of environmentalism and feminism, but that it was powerful because it was also actually a story about the recovery of survivors of abuse and trauma. And because its telling of the survivors' respective stories stood many of our Hollywood-blockbuster expectations and assumptions on their heads.

Schnelbach says that it was "one of the best films I’ve ever seen that took grief and trauma and, through the alchemy of George Miller’s kinetic action sequences, turned the healing process itself into an enjoyable movie." As she says in her conclusion:

"The people who referred to this film as a 'Trojan Horse' were completely correct—but Miller wasn’t smuggling feminist propaganda, he was disguising a story of healing as a fun summer blockbuster. By choosing to tell a story about how a bunch of traumatized, brainwashed, enslaved, objectified humans reclaim their lives as a balls-out feminist car chase epic with occasional moments of twisted humor, George Miller has subverted every single genre, and given us a story that will only gain resonance with time."

Schnelbach's post is definitely worth a read.

Book Review: In War Times

Kathleen Ann Goonan
2007
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book is subtitled “An Alternate Universe Novel of a Different Present.” But it really is an ordinary history in which the main character is given occasional peeks into other timelines, loses friends to other timelines, and is tantalized the entire book with the possibility of being able to alter his own timeline, but never actually alters it until the very, very, very, very end. It is frustrating and disappointing if you’re a fan of alternate histories and were expecting to read one.
   
At the start of In War Times, the main character, Sam Dance, is a young American soldier in 1941 just before the U.S. enters World War II. Dance has high aptitudes for physics, chemistry, and engineering, so the Army is making him take advanced classes in all three. One of his professors, Russian émigré Dr. Eliani Hadntz, gives him all of her top-secret notes about developing a machine that could, theoretically, alter the path of history so as to eliminate all wars, and then rushes off to Hungary to try to rescue her daughter who is trapped there.

Dance doesn’t actually read Hadntz’s notes until several months later, when Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese and his brother, stationed on the U.S.S. Arizona, is killed in the attack. Bereft, Dance reads everything Hadntz gave him, thinking that maybe by building her machine he can somehow bring his brother back.
   
Then the Army activates Dance and he is sent to a variety of bases on the U.S. East Coast and in Scotland. Along the way he collects a group of buddies, the best of whom is Al “Wink” Winklemeyer. Wink and Dance bond instantly over jazz, which they both play, and there are interminable paragraphs describing their rapturous enjoyment of the music. They are rapturous whether the music they hear is recorded, played by themselves, or played live by jazz superstars of the 1940s, many of whom they get to see in New York while posted nearby, and which are listed in such rapid succession and such variety that it seems like Goonan is just trying to name every jazz musician who played in New York in the 1940s. This probably would have seemed far more cool if I was at all interested in jazz.

During this entire time, in what will prove to be a recurring pattern of inaction and procrastination, Dance shelves Hadntz’s notes and does nothing about the machine at all.
   
Eventually Dance and Wink are stationed in Tidworth, England, where the Army is preparing for Operation Overlord, and the two are put in charge of a machine shop for repairing radar equipment. Hadntz reappears, visiting from a more peaceful, more socially advanced alternate timeline in which she now lives, to urge Dance to get cracking on building the time-warping machine. He figures she’s right and, after all, he has a machine shop at his disposal, so he tells Wink about it and enlists his help.

Hadntz’s notes are only at the initial theoretical stage, so Dance and Wink do a lot of musing about how the machine might actually work. None of it is much to hang your hat on. They have a vague sense that it is some sort of “fusion of the organic with the quantum”—that it goes back in time and changes the structure of people’s DNA, and that by changing people’s DNA it changes their consciousness, and that by changing consciousness, it changes all of history. Their theory is that if they can go back and change people’s DNA to make them innately peace-loving, it will remove wars from history.
   
And Wink and Dance can’t help but do a lot of comparing of alternate histories to modern jazz: how the various merging and dividing timelines of history may be like the parallel intertwining refrains in the clashing but somehow complementary scales of be-bop. Again, this might have been more interesting if I cared about jazz.

Anyway, they get a prototype built, and we then experience the first of several occasions where they turn on the current version of whatever the machine is at the time, they have either a blackout or a surreal sense of time being suspended, and the machine itself physically changes, but nothing appears to happen to their timeline.

Their activation of the machine does block everybody’s radar, however, so they draw the suspicion of the OSS. The scrutiny makes them put aside the project and the machine sits on a shelf for several months as the war goes on.

Frustrated, Hadntz reappears to Dance from her alternate timeline to give him an inspirational tour of the horrors of the concentration camps, whereupon he is again recommitted to building the machine. He and Wink, now stationed at a base in recaptured Germany, build a revised version of the machine, turn it on, and again have nothing noticeable happen. Dance puts the machine aside yet again for several more months.

Through machinations either by Hadntz or the OSS, Dance is then forced to witness the A-bomb being dropped on Japan, which re-recommits him to building the machine before he shelves it again.

After the war is over, Dance does find that some things have actually changed. For example, according to everyone else in his timeline, Wink died while they were in Germany. But the Wink he knows is actually still alive in an alternate timeline (the same timeline as Hadntz). Alternate-timeline Wink is able to visit him occasionally during Army reunions.

At this point the storytelling speeds up and the next twenty years fly by in very few pages. Dance marries one of the OSS agents and they have three kids. The family lives through the partition of Germany, the space and nuclear arms races, the civil rights movement, and hippies. Dance goes through it all in a kind of stupor, frequently agonizing about the machine, which is hidden in a trunk in his attic, but not actually working on it.

Then suddenly, in the late 1960s, with about twenty pages to go in the book, Wink visits Dance one final time to tell him that their timelines are converging and that both will be destroyed unless he changes his to be more peaceful. Simultaneously, Dance’s oldest daughter gets hold of the machine and takes off with it to stop the Kennedy assassination. And at last we finally see some history-changing-related action from the machine—although it is really in the form of machine-assisted time travel, and the only warping of history comes from the actions of humans, not the machine.

It all ends up seeming like Goonan really just wanted to write a wartime history about an American soldier. And, indeed, her postscript reveals that Dance’s diary entries, which appear throughout the book, were all taken verbatim from her father’s real WWII journal. Which is clearly where her inspiration comes from, and which is touching and certainly adds authenticity.

But maybe it would have been better to write a straightforward wartime story in honor of her father, even a fictionalized one, rather than trying to stuff it into this thin skin of alternate history. The machine ends up being an awkward writer’s device, an almost inert and irrelevant accessory. And the alternate timeline is only glimpsed occasionally, rather than being baked integrally into the story. It is most unsatisfying.

This unsatisfying feeling is exacerbated by the descriptions of New York, London, and Berlin. They are filled with the kinds of superficial details that you might find in brief read of an encyclopedia entry or a travel guide, rather than the kinds of surprising color you might get from someone who was actually there or had done really intensive research on the period.

It also didn’t help any that the 2007 hardcover edition I read had numerous editing mistakes. There were several places where commas or periods were missing or the wrong words were used (e.g. “were” was used for “we’re” and “sun” was used for “gun”). And in one place the German word for no, nein, was misspelled as nien.

For an alternate history with real bite, I’d recommend The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick instead. And for a really well researched science fiction story set during World War II England, I’d recommend either Fire Watch or Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis.

Book Review: Ancillary Justice

Ann Leckie
2013
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Clarke
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –
   
I have a knee-jerk reaction against jumping on the reading bandwagon. If everybody is raving about a book, something in me automatically rebels against liking it.

So when I found out that Ancillary Justice won three of the major science fiction awards in 2014—the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Arthur C. Clarke—I have to admit that I was skeptical about it. But I tried to resist my bias and give the book a fair shake.

~~~~~~~~~~

Ancillary Justice takes place in a galaxy where the majority of humans, on all their hundreds of disparate home planets, are ruled by a single totalitarian regime called the Radch. The Radch, which Leckie says she based loosely on the Roman Empire, is a military superpower with countless armies, bases, weapons, and machinery at its disposal.

The Radchaai expand their empire by taking over new planets one by one, co-opting existing governors into their political hierarchy when it is possible and killing them when it is not, drafting a good chunk of the able-bodied adult population into their army, and cowing everybody else into subservience with the threat of the same happening to them.

In addition to being militarily powerful, the Radchaai are also highly technologically sophisticated. Each of their spaceships—whether troop carrier, medical vessel, or warship—is actually a sentient being unto itself, with a central artificial intelligence at its core. And when the Radchaai “draft” conquered people into their army, what that actually means is kidnapping them, wiping their consciousnesses, and then linking their brains into the artificial intelligence of the ship that has captured them. These walking corpses, or “ancillaries,” become (almost always) obedient auxiliary segments of the ship, fully interconnected with each other and the central AI at all times.

The advantage to this is that everywhere an ancillary is, whether on board or on the ground, the ship can see and hear everything that is going on around it. The disadvantage is that the conquered populations of the planets the ancillaries come from are somewhat put off by their people being turned into zombie automatons in service to the Radch.

Our main character and narrator, Breq, is one of these zombie automatons: an ancillary of the Radch warship Justice of Toren. Nineteen years ago, we learn, the entire Justice of Toren was somehow destroyed, and Breq is its lone surviving segment. She has lasted, all alone, for almost two decades, driven only by a desire to find and kill those responsible for destroying her ship.

The novel's story is told in two separate narratives simultaneously. One narrative is the story of the present day, in which Breq is searching for a weapon that will allow her to exact her revenge against the mysterious and, as it turns out, extremely powerful forces that destroyed her ship. The present narrative, and the book itself, opens on the wintry planet Nilt, where Breq has run across Seivarden, one of her former human officers, high on opiates, beaten and left for dead in the snow. Out of some lingering sense of Radchaai responsibility, Breq saves Seivarden, warms her up and dries her out, and then saves her life a couple more times, all the while trying to prevent Seivarden from figuring out who she is. Seivarden becomes attached to Breq, insisting on traveling with her where ever she is going, even up to the end, when Seivarden is confronted with upsetting truths about Radch society that she never wanted to see.

The other narrative is the story of the past, which tells how the Justice of Toren was destroyed and Breq became a lone isolated ancillary in the first place. This past narrative (which was the more interesting, if confusing, of the two) also explores one more key aspect of Radch society: its rigidly hierarchical class structure.

In the Radch, people are born into “houses.” The status of your house largely determines your career success and how others will treat you. Even though there are aptitude tests supposedly designed to ensure merit-based job assignments, the upper-class houses are still disproportionately over-represented in the officer corps, and they treat officers from lower-class houses with no little scorn.
   
In addition, interactions between Radchaai citizens, especially those from the upper-class houses, are highly mannered and governed by strict societal conventions. The smallest change in tone of voice or change in wording can result in a horrible slur. It is difficult for those born into lower-class houses to avoid making mistakes and thus exposing their origins.
   
Nineteen years ago, the Justice of Toren was posted at the planet Shis’urna, a recent Radch conquest. The Radch’s representative in charge of the occupation was Lieutenant Awn. Awn was an extremely competent officer, but she had come from one of the lower-class houses, which made her a bit skeptical of the motives of the Radch ruling class. Breq, even though she was then just a segment of the larger Justice of Toren, nevertheless became personally (ancillarially?) devoted to Lieutenant Awn.
   
The occupation’s offices on Shis’urna were in the city of Ors. Ors was experiencing growing tensions between the wealthier residents in the upper city, who were obsequiously aligning themselves with the higher-status houses in the Radch regime, and the poorer residents in the lower city, who were just trying to go about their daily lives. The upper city residents variously tried to frame the lower city residents for murder and treason, but Awn wasn’t fooled by these shenanigans, and refused to arrest the poor for crimes they hadn’t committed.
   
Then, one day, Anaander Mianaai, the head of the Radch, visited a temple in the lower city, which was a slight to the wealthy, and the tension finally boiled over into full-scale rioting. Dozens of residents of the upper city came rampaging down into the temple grounds where Mianaai and Awn were. The resulting actions of Mianaai, Awn, and Breq caused one domino after another to fall, and eventually ended up causing, among other things, the destruction of the Justice of Toren.

The two narratives get alternating chapters and they intertwine and draw closer through the course of the book, until eventually they join to become the same story and Breq’s revenge is imminent.

~~~~~~~~~~

All in all, the book turned out to be fine. The main character is appealing, even if a bit (understandably) stiff; Leckie’s writing style is clear and unpretentious; and the societal and governmental structures she has created are complex enough to be believable on a galactic scale. The double plot line is a nice device; it reveals detail and background in a non-traditional order and yet still makes the tension escalate well towards the end.
My only major issue with the book is that the story spends far too much time on political discussions and its characters’ internal psychological struggles for my taste, and not enough on actual physical events. In the rigidly mannered society of the Radch, most interactions require subtle language and careful political maneuvering, which means the characters are almost always repressing their true emotions. This results in a lot of internal distress and agony which we are made aware of in detail, but which they almost never get to actually do anything about.

Certainly some authors have been able to create a riveting story that consists mostly of its characters just thinking or talking to each other. But in this book I found it made me lose interest from time to time in what was happening, and I would put it aside for days at a time between chapters without feeling any great desire to pick it up again.

The complexities of the politics in this story were also very convoluted and I am afraid I found myself having occasional flashbacks to the excruciatingly intricate political maneuverings in C.J. Cherryh’s book Cyteen.

~~~~~~~~~~

One plot device in Ancillary Justice that Leckie got both raves and rants for is that the Radchaai do not make any gender distinctions, either in their language or in their perception of individuals. To the Radchaai, every person is female. When Radchaai citizens go to a planet that does have gender distinctions, they have to study hard to figure out what those local distinctions are—whether clothing or language or physical attributes—and, out of politeness, try to correctly identify the genders of the people they are interacting with. But the whole idea is confusing to them, and internally they still end up thinking of gender-identified foreigners as “male she” or “female she.”

Since the book is told from the point of view of a Radchaai ancillary, every character in the book is therefore referred to as “she,” whether that person is female in her own culture or not. With few exceptions, you never find out if any specific person is actually male or female. And it turns out that the gender of any particular character makes zero difference to the plot—which is probably Leckie’s point.

The idea of characters that identify as neither (or both) male or female is not unique to Leckie; Ursula LeGuin used a similar idea back in 1969 in The Left Hand of Darkness. But what is great about it in Ancillary Justice is that you have to assume all characters are female until proven otherwise—a satisfying reversal of the usual state of affairs.