Review - Green Mars

Green Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
1994 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy holds a special place in my heart. Red Mars won the Nebula award while Green Mars and Blue Mars both won the Hugo so it had to be good, right? Well, no. Not only is it not good, it's terrible. Painfully, horribly terrible. And over two thousand pages long for the whole thing. This was a slog along the lines of the Bataan Death March. I've read worse books in the past but the trilogy as a whole comprises the worst reading experience I've had since I made my resolution twenty years ago to avoid reading crap.

The trilogy tells the history of the colonization and terraforming of Mars. Green Mars as the second book takes place after the government has for no good reason specified in the novel attempted the very public assassination of the original founders with absolutely no repercussions for anyone involved. Now those founders who are effectively immortal are in hiding working behind the scenes to build a second civilization on Mars.

Really that's about it for what happens in the book. It goes on and on with minor story events but nothing really happens. Robinson has a droning prose that goes on at extensive length with descriptions of barren landscapes. Without the aimless descriptions of the landscape the book would be half its current length.

The characters read like an attempt to be more "real" by defining them all by psychological problems. The result doesn't make them multi-textured so much as make every single character seem like a whiny high school student. They're all completely unpleasant people to read about mainly because they're all so small-minded and petty that I seriously wondered how they could possibly have ever risen to the top of their profession and been selected for the first permanent settlement on another world. Robinson constantly tells us how great and brilliant they are but you never see it in their actions and their "brilliance" often comes across as inanity.

A perfect example of this is the economic system that Robinson drums into readers at intervals. It is, in short, the most inane adaptation of Marxism I've ever seen in a science fiction book and considering the number of authors in the sixties who wrote books trying to convince people that communism was the real way the future would go that's saying something. The idea, roughly, is that on a planet where resources are painfully scarce that people should be obligated to give things away (including very complicated manufactured goods) and organizations should be forced by the government to stay below a certain size. No totalitarian government is created to enforce this, no social structures are in place to drive this, everyone just goes along with it and for some reason it doesn't completely destroy their industrial development.

I'm only scratching the surface of how bad the Mars trilogy is but I have to same some scorn for Blue Mars which shares all of the problems of the previous books. Since the head-smackingly stupid sociology that infects this book really comes to the forefront there I'll save it (here's a preview: despite more than two hundred years passing and a bursting population the only people important on Mars are the first few people; even their children are marginalized).

The trilogy is really one very long book and I wouldn't read the middle section by itself, but then I couldn't more strongly advise you to avoid the books. If it the painfully dull story isn't enough to make you uninterested then there's the annoying characters. And if you can put up with the annoying characters then you still have to overcome the ham-handed politics and sociology. The only thing that is of any interest in this book are the broad terraforming concepts and you can get more entertainment from those by reading about them in a science text book.

Review - Doomsday Book

Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis
Tied 1993 Hugo Winner for Best Novel
1992 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

And now for something completely different: a light, comedic book about the black plague.

Willis has a series of books and stories about the time traveling history department from Oxford University in the near future which carry over many of the same characters. In Doomsday Book, which other than a quick reference has nothing to do with the Domesday Census, an ill-advised trip to the thirteenth century by a young woman coincides with with an outbreak of a severe disease in Oxford. As a professor in the present tries to make sure that she can be recovered when her trip is over she finds that she has arrived several decades too late in the middle of black plague. Needless to say, epidemics ensue.

Early on the in novel there's quite a bit of humor in the college bureaucracy but it does dry up as people start dying and Willis handles this transition from light-hearted time traveling fun to apocalyptic devastation well. Don't expect big laughs once the characters you've gotten to know both in the past and present start dropping. Willis does both the comedy and drama well.

Unfortunately I had a major problem with the pacing in Doomsday Book. It's obvious to the reader right from the start that the time-traveling historian did not land decades before the plague as intended but is instead in the middle of it. Willis attempts to be coy for the majority of the novel before finally dropping this "revelation" on the reader. Since it is so obvious I wound up grumbling "Okay, it's the plague. Get on with it." The slow build up also served to make the main character seem particularly clueless when she wasn't able to pick up on the many very large, very broad hints that thousands of people around her are dying.

And she is very dense. Despite being a well trained historian and seasoned time traveler she proceeds to make every standard time traveler error. Presents knowledge that no one should have yet? Check. Is shocked by medieval living conditions despite being a medieval historian? Check. Applies modern social standards to a medieval society? Check. On top of that she demonstrates a poor understanding of things outside her field of expertise like basic statistics. It left me wondering just how low the standards of Oxford University were going to drop in the next fifty years.

Oddly enough the time traveling protagonist is just about the only character in the story that I wasn't interested in. Willis presented the medieval people as human beings living in a radically different culture rather than the modern humans roughing it that are the standard form for so many pseudo-medieval settings. The historian spends the novel at a manor house in a tiny village and Willis captures the flavor of an illiterate priest, a socially climbing minor noble and the sullen resignation of a teenager in a political marriage. They are not the population of her local renaissance festival dropped into the book.

The slightly in the future Oxford is filled with quirky academics that are interesting in their own right. They're all caught up in their own worlds of the competitive college environment. It's something that Willis has done very well in other books and it works well here. The only problem I have is with the know-it-all kid who shows up and is predictably key to the resolution.

I enjoyed reading Doomsday Book but I don't think that it is Connie Willis's finest book mainly due to the those pacing problems. Still if you are interested in a fun time travel story with a more realistic medieval setting than you'll find in most fantasy then I'd recommend reading it.

Review - A Fire Upon the Deep

A Fire Upon the Deep
by Vernor Vinge Tied
1993 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

Of the last twenty Hugo award winners only two have aliens appearing on screen and only one other has "aliens" in it at all. The first is A Fire Upon the Deep and the second is its sequel A Deepness in the Sky. One of the big reasons for this is an increase in the popularity of the Fermi paradox which is a result of Drake's Equation. In short, the idea is that given the scale of the galaxy and the lengths of time involved that the skies should be teaming with life and the obvious signs of it. Just a one million year head start on the other side of the galaxy should mean a galaxy packed to the brim. That's less than .1% of the time since life emerged from the oceans and that's ignoring the fact that there's no reason that life couldn't start expanding while the Earth was still forming.

Which doesn't mean that there isn't intelligent life elsewhere. There's many good answers to the paradox ranging from technology using civilizations are exceptionally rare to any species that could emerge from their solar system has to walk a mine field of resource problems to get off their own world (much as we're running into right now). But part of this is that authors who want to have a space opera universe feel a need to address these problems. Brin, for example, in Uplift has the Earth as a forgotten resource in a universe that ignores anything that isn't already in their book. Vinge on the other hand comes up with one of the biggest, most mind-blowingly incredible ideas to justify it and that justification is at the core of A Fire Upon the Deep.

In short Vinge postulates that the laws of the universe are not constant as they appear to us. In particular the speed of light varies dramatically getting slower and slower as you approach the center of the galaxy. But this isn't as simple as people just go faster at the galactic edges, the speed of light limits the processing abilities of thinking machines including organic brains. There is a boundry which when you cross it the mathematics of hyperspace travel become possible and you can break the speed of light. At the heart of the galaxy are the unthinking depths where things go so slowly that minds break down while at the far end things progress so quickly that godlike intelligences are created and burn out in a few years. The earth lies in between these extremes but at some point we emerge from our slow moving section of the galaxy to find a universe overrun with life that has a written history going back millions of years.

When A Fire Upon the Deep starts a group of human researchers have found instructions for creating a transcendent AI in a forgotten ruin. Creating it unleashes a sentient plague that overwrites all thought at the edges of the galaxy and unlike other AI's it is stable, seeking only to expand and will not burn out. A few of these scientists escape with a device that can contain it but their ship is damaged and they flee to a planet that has just emerged from the slow areas; a location where the plague cannot easily reach. Meanwhile another AI has discovered the spreading plague and recruited some humans and sentient plants to retrieve the device before all of the advanced civilizations in the galaxy are absorbed. And if that's not enough the researchers have encountered a medieval civilization of pack animals that exist as a sentient network and become involved in their power struggles.

I haven't even touched on half of the fun things that Vinge throws into his book. His training as a computer scientist shows through as the galaxy has faster than light communication but very little bandwidth for it and the book is filled with USENET-style news posts from people trying to get a grip on the situation.

So there's a lot of really big ideas in here but how's the rest of the book. It's fairly well written space opera with some especially interesting aliens. The network aliens are very alien with a particularly distinct, and fragmented, point of view but the plants are equally interesting since they lack a long term memory and have to rely on a device to remember things for them. Vinge maintains these distinct voices and uses chapters that have a very tight point of view that switches characters. Those points of view are a problem when reading, though, since they are so unique that it can take readers quite a while to grasp the aliens.

Sadly the humans aren't nearly as interesting as the aliens. The children of the researchers who are the focus of the planet bound action are essentially innocents blown by fate. The humans trying to get to them have token characterization ("She's a homesick librarian, he's a time lost spacer who may be the puppet of godlike AI; how can this odd couple ever get along?") but they won't stick in your mind.

Really the best thing about A Fire Upon the Deep is the incredible concepts that Vinge throws around and makes them feel reasonable and plausible. It's those big ideas that will grab your brain and refuse to let it go. He follows up those big ideas but being a decent writer whose prose never excites me but it works well enough. It's yet another space opera but it is the single best space opera I've ever read.

Review - Barrayar

Barrayar
by Lois McMaster Bujold
1992 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

You could copy and paste my The Vor Game for pretty much every one of these novels that Bujold won for. The same strengths and weaknesses apply: mainly it's really good space opera adventure with a great cast of characters but not really that much deeper than that. Entertaining reading but not genre defining, mind-blowing science fiction. So that's the review. Go home.






What, you want more? Fine.

Barrayar is a direct sequel to Bujold's first novel Shards of Honor and it's plot ties together a lot of elements from her other books. Barrayar is about a civil war on the planet of Barrayar that the heroine from the original book is deeply involved in. The story isn't deep but it holds together much better than The Vor Game. It also doesn't suffer from the division problem of The Vor Game where that book read like two novellas stuck together.

The best thing about this book is that rather than being focused on the big battle sequences Bujold does make it a bit more personal by focusing on a narrow cast and how the war personally impacts them. There's a reoccurring theme of parents and children throughout the book as many infants and mothers are swept up in the war. But it's not adventure space opera unless there are dramatic escapes and daring missions behind enemy lines and there's plenty of that too.

Her theme of generational conflict also returns. The civil war is in part a reaction to the changes that had been occurring on Barrayar with the villains being the conservatives who want to preserve their culture and the heroes being the reformers. On the preserving primitive cultures versus bringing them up to date Bujold comes down firmly on the side of reformers. I can't help but notice that science fiction authors who are for preserving cultures always present those cultures as pastoral utopias which makes me wonder if they'd come down on the side of preserving a repressive feudal culture, but that's a question for another day.

Bujold continues to be a fine writer with a cast of interesting, well-defined characters. Or at least the heroes are all interesting characters. Her villains in this case are distant, impersonal forces. I didn't mind it here since the protagonists are so conflicted.

So in conclusion, a fine space opera adventure that is entertaining to read but not a deep or complex book. The novel is more refined than Bujold's earlier efforts and anyone who enjoys her novels would not be disappointed by it. Still because of its heavy dependence on events that occurred in earlier books I would have to say that someone should read those previous books before picking up Barrayar.

Review - The Vor Game

The Vor Game
by Lois McMaster Bujold
1991 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

So I've finally reached Her.

She deserves to be capitalized like that. No other author gave me such a rough time. She's a monster and as my difficulties with her compounded I grew convinced that she was out to get me. My archenemy: Lois McMaster Bujold. Her crimes against me are numerous and cruel.

You'll note that Cherryh and Brin were kind hearted when they won. Although the books they won the Hugo for were part of ongoing series a reader could simply pick any of them up. Bujold saw this as a chance to inflate all of her book sales and so every single book that she has won best novel for is a direct sequel to a book that has not. Oh she writes the books out of chronological order in her series thinking she can disguise it but the ones that she wins Hugos for are the ones that are directly attached to previously written books. As I result I had to read more than half of her total output just to read the books that she won the Hugo award for.

That isn't enough for Her, though. Bujold's older books are also nightmarishly hard to find in hardcover. One of the required ones doesn't even have a hard cover edition! (That would be Brothers in Arms which is required reading before Mirror Dance which won a Hugo.) There's some omnibus editions out there but most of those are just as hard to find. For one of her Hugo winners I had a choice of a leather bound reprint or a first edition hard cover. I can just envision Her sitting at stately Bujold manner on piles of first edition copies of books selling one or two off every time she feels like getting another solid ivory back scratcher. The woman is stone cold evil.

I'm also pretty sure she convinced other authors at the time to do this. I spent more on the books of the 1990's than on the rest of the collection combined.

And perhaps her worst crime of all, the one that makes me convinced of her status as an evil genius: she writes pretty good adventure novels.

Bujold's Vorkosigan books focus on the class of cultures on Barrayar who lost interstellar contact centuries ago and fell into barbarism. Rediscovered only a few decades before the start of the series they were immediately conquered and fought a decades long war which reaffirmed their military culture and feudal loyalties. This sets up a division between the people who hold to the old ways and those who are trying to rejoin galactic culture.

The Vor Game is a fine example of her usual work. After his daring adventure in The Warrior's Apprentice the brittle boned genius Miles Vorkosigan has been accepted to his home world's military academy. Despite being far in advance of everyone in his class in everything except physical conditioning he's sent to a dead-end position gathering meteorological data at an arctic training base. An incident there demonstrates how well he could fit into the military and Miles winds up embroiled in a plot involving a scheme to start an interstellar war, a missing emperor, and the mercenaries he lead in the previous book.

Bujold's style has wild swings of light humor with brooding seriousness and she deftly balances each. Miles has a very sardonic sense of humor and his comments are a high point in the novel. The situations he finds himself in are often completely outrageous.

The plot requires quite a few stretches to accept but Bujold's breezy style carries everything past the rough bumps to get into the interesting interactions. The universe seems to run on serendipity as people coincidently wind up in just the right place at the right time over and over again.

Her characters are all sharply defined and in this case are much more interesting than the story that they're involved in. Miles in particular is a fascinating construction of conflicting drives; his body is fragile but he's often involved in action scenes, he's hated by his countrymen for looking so odd but is driven by patriotism. Even though Miles is the focus of the book all the characters are richly developed.

The Vor Game makes for fun reading but its not particularly deep. But who cares if there isn't a rich message, it's an entertaining book and that's what matters.

Even if Bujold is the most evil science fiction author who has ever lived.

Review - Hyperion

Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
1990 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

A group of pilgrims share the stories that put them on the road to Canterbury. No, wait, that was Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Dan Simmons's Hyperion is about pilgrims sharing their stories on the road to the Shrike. The similarities are obviously intentional; Simmons structures his book like The Canterbury Tales and throughout the book he demonstrates an affinity for classic literature.

The Shrike that the pilgrims are traveling to is a godlike creature who is capable of nearly anything but is more likely to kill. Regular pilgrimages to the Shrike result in all the members of that party being brutally murdered save one who survives and gets their heart's desire. The Shrike is normally found among the Time Tombs, sealed chambers that move backward through time and are, at the beginning of the story, days away from unsealing. They are found on the planet Hyperion, a world initially colonized by poets.

Hyperion is doomed as a hoard of world ravaging, interstellar barbarians are approaching the planet. There is time for one last pilgrimage though, and seven individuals whose lives have already been touched by the strangeness of Hyperion and the Shrike are journeying to try to get answers to their mysteries. Among them are a priest who encountered terrifying religious icons of an ancient civilization on Hyperion, a soldier who may have seen the true shape of the Shrike, and an ancient poet whose greatest work was done while living in a city haunted by the Shrike. The most touching story is that of man whose daughter had her life tangled up by the Time Tombs and now ages backward a day every time she goes to sleep.

Each story is told in a unique style which Simmons pulls off well. The Lovecraftian overtones of "The Priest's Tale" is completely different from the noir styling of the "The Detective's Tale". There would be no mistaking which character is speaking from a sample. The characters are broad stereotypes but that works in the context of telling stories about them.

Simmons did a great job of weaving a tapestry among his stories. Each one reveals a tiny facet of a rich world and Simmons has paced it precisely to draw the reader in. It's something that a lot of writers in science fiction and fantasy attempt but very few do well. Each tale has a resolution that leads its teller to journey to Hyperion but at the same time it leaves the reader with questions and dangling plot lines that can only be resolved when the pilgrims confront the Shrike. Simmons stacks mystery on top of mystery, crisis on top of crisis until it all builds to a head.

And that's where things fall apart. I don't like handing out spoilers but Hyperion is half of a book. It ends abruptly with no resolution to any of it. The story telling is done but it's like you've just read five hundred pages of prologue. Even worse, the answers when they come (in the next book for the most part) aren't half as interesting as the set up. That's a common problem but it's rare that I've seen such a drop off between the set up and resolution.

Still I recommend reading Hyperion for the style and world building. Even though I was not happy with where Simmons went with the story after Hyperion I have to look at this book standing alone and it is well worth it.

Review - Cyteen

Cyteen
by C. H. Cherryh
1989 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

I mentioned in my review of Downbelow Station that Cherryh is a writer who can take five hundred pages to tell a two thousand page story. Imagine how much story she can cram into a full thousand pages.

Cyteen was the Hugo winner that took me the longest to read. The density of the text is just overwhelming and it took me two weeks to finish it. The only other Hugo winners that came close were some extremely overlong, extremely dull, and extremely terrible books that you'll see a lot more griping about when the time comes.

In Cyteen (which I'll grant is one of the worst titles I've ever encountered) Ariane Emory is something of a cross between Einstein and Machiavelli. She controls all of the breeding on the planet Cyteen using a Brave New World-esque system where she chooses who will be in the top caste and who will be slaves. With this power she has dominated the politics of the world for over a hundred years and people are willing to overlook her unpleasant hobbies like raping children. She's made herself necessary to running the planet and the ruling body maintaining its power so when she is murdered those rulers enact a plan to recreate her.

They start by cloning Emory but that is not sufficient enough to recreate her genius so they proceed to manipulate the clone's life to make it run as close to the original Emory's as possible. Complications set in when the clone takes an interest in the son of the man who murdered the original.

Cherryh spends a lot of time setting up this situation and just like Downbelow Station you'll spend the first few hundred pages in a daze trying to build a picture of politics on Cyteen. It isn't until about two hundred and fifty pages in when Emory is murdered that the book really takes off. This can certainly be a problem for people (I'm not a fan of being told "Just keep going through and it gets better!" since it almost never does) but the extended set up is necessary so we know Emory before we see the attempt to duplicate her.

Despite the large backdrop Cyteen is really about the raising of children and nature versus nurture. The Emory clone is just a small (and obvious) part of this; Cherryh has a new generation of characters all growing over the course of the book and the tensions between those two poles affect them all.

One thing that may bother people is that the culture of Cyteen is not particularly nice. The planet is run by a Marxist dictatorship that breeds slaves. It gives an extra layer of tension in that I would prefer that the government of Cyteen fail. They're not only destroying a young girl's life by trying to remake her into her parent, they're doing it to prop up their own oppression.

The biggest problem is that Cherryh's prose isn't as absorbing as it could be. I find that her writing is wonderful on the plotting and the structure but its density makes it rougher to read. It isn't so much that it feels like a summary of events but rather that every event and detail is significant.

I greatly enjoyed Cyteen and I would recommend it but that first quarter of the book can be tough to get through. If you do start reading it and don't enjoy then I would recommend reading to the halfway point before giving up since it does change tone so radically.

Review - The Uplift War

The Uplift War
by David Brin
1988 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

Another day, another sequel from a then hot author and once again... hey wait a second! This one is actually pretty good! Brin's The Uplift War is one of the few books where I found the sequel to be significantly better than its predecessor.

Once more Brin places his story in his Uplift universe where humanity is the underdog is a galactic civilization that is built upon the status gained from raising animals up to sentience. This time the events that are occurring in Startide Rising have caused some hostile species to move directly against humanity and their children sentients the dolphins and chimpanzees. A colony world is conquered and the governors son goes into hiding with the daughter of the ambassador of one of the few friendly alien species. They join forces with the few remaining free chimpanzees and start a guerrilla war to take back the world (don't look at me, it's Brin's pun). Unfortunately they also discover that their world holds a secret that could cause the end of humanity if it is found.

Somehow Brin took the single most cliché story possible and made it plausible. I can't say much about this since I avoid spoilers but Brin spins careful justifications for why a planet can be conquered with minimal damage and how a tiny resistance group can plausibly overthrow a completely ruthless occupational force. He spins a great adventure story out of trying to justify the space opera elements.

My problem with Startide Rising is that I could not connect with the dolphin characters that were the focus of the novel. While there are significantly less human characters (there's really only one that matters) in The Uplift War I found the chimpanzee and alien characters better written. None of them were human but their viewpoint was more understandable so when there are several chapters from stranger points of view it didn't bother me.

With the previous book I loved the concepts Brin provided for his Uplift universe but was disappointed at how little we saw them. The Uplift War gave me plenty of aliens and details on the complications for humanity in the setting. Significant portions of the book are dedicated to the invading aliens trying to hold on to the world.

The Uplift War feels like Brin read my mind and changed everything I didn't like in his previous book resulting in a wonderful book. This is an exceptional space opera and adventure story. If you've ever enjoyed either of those then you should love this book.

Review - Ender's Game

Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card
1986 Hugo Winner for Best Novel
1985 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

Ender's Game is a novel that launched thousand sequels. It's Card's masterpiece, an achievement that he has been unable to equal. It's a fix up of an earlier novella that for whatever reason didn't get as much attention as its extension but this is easily one of the greatest of science fiction novels.

Ender Wiggins is a young child but he may also be the tactical genius who can save the Earth in a war of extinction against mysterious aliens only referred to as "the buggers" (my theory is that a British person called them that and an American not knowing what it meant copied them). Ender is recruited into a military academy where he quickly demonstrates his skill at both organization and tactics while undergoing repeated tests specifically designed to place him under greater and greater stress. Those in power justify their abuse by hoping that he can complete his training in time to prevent the bugger invasion.

The end of the book is one of the greatest in science fiction and I had it spoiled for me years before I got around to reading it. I strongly recommend reading it without being spoiled which may mean that you should run out to get it right now. And if you have read Ender's Game don't think that telling someone about the ending will make them want to read it.

Ender is a very broken child which makes how he's being used by the adults around him even more tragic. In the course of the book Ender performs some horrific acts in dangerous situations manipulated by his teachers. If Ender had not been forced to continue military training then I can only imagine that he would spend the bulk of his life in an institution. Card does a wonderful job of putting us in Ender's head and seeing his distorted worldview.

By far the weakest part of the novel are the sections about Ender's siblings who through the power of blogging have become the greatest political force on Earth. Really. His brother who was being groomed for the same position as Ender but completely broke down under the strain is plotting to use political commentary on the global computer network (the book being written before the Internet was a household word) to conquer the Earth. None of this has anything to do with the actually interesting portions of the novel which left me just wondering why it was in there at all.

Card's few attempts to demonstrate Ender's tactical genius bothered me as well. A major part of it, for example, is Ender reorientating himself on a different axis from his opponents in zero-gravity combat and choosing a different direction to define as "down". This is given as the reason why Ender is so good in free fall combat but picking any orientation is a weakness in that situation.

Still despite my reservations I found that Card had crafted a strong story built on fascinating ideas and populated it with characters that are richly drawn, albeit disturbing to observe. Ender's Game is a spectacular book that deserves all of the attention it has received over the year.

Review - Neuromancer

Neuromancer
by William Gibson
1985 Hugo Winner for Best Novel
1984 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel.

I challenge you to find a better opening line to any science fiction novel. You'll be hard pressed to find better opening lines for any novel at all (though there I've got a tiny handful that I'd put past it). Besides being a great line it conveys in one sentence a lot about the novel, most importantly that it has a technology fetish that will drive it. It also says that the reader is in for something really special.

It is impossible to overstate the impact of Neuromancer. It's the atomic bomb on the unsuspecting city, the planet smashing comet wiping out the lumbering giants leaving the nimble mammals behind. Even disregarding cyberpunk which was birthed here, flared, and died Neuromancer infected just about everything that follows with its viewpoint and technology.

It's a popular refrain that some technology in the real world was first thought up by a science fiction author. Really the majority of those are tangential at best but that doesn't stop people from trying to inflate things. Neuromancer is a book where they don't have to make tenuous connections. It's not the technology predictions that matter, those were based on existing trends, it's that Gibson defined a view of computers and software that has become the basis for a lot of the common understanding of the Internet. His memes that start here are impacting you right now just by being online.

Case was a hacker at the top until he was betrayed by a client. They destroyed his nervous system, breaking his ability to surf cyberspace and killing a part of himself. He is offered a chance to fix it by a mysterious benefactor who will pay for a new procedure to fix his nerves in exchange for help in pulling of the heist of the greatest prize in the world.

Neuromancer's blend of noir and computer technology was distinctive when it was released and would have far too many imitators within a few years. It was defined by a certain technology fetish where the devices were as important as the human beings (mainly by being part of them) but Gibson didn't let the humans be overshadowed. It's a deft balancing act he used and I can't think of anyone who has been more successful at it.

My only problem is that Gibson's writing occasionally switches from florid to just plain dense. It makes the conclusion of the book particularly rough to follow. I don't think that it undermines the quality of the book as a whole but as the flowing narrative from the beginning breaks down it can be annoying.

Neuromancer is not one of my favorite books but I'd have to be blind not to see the impact that it had on science fiction. It is the most important science fiction novel of the last thirty years and any science fiction fan should read it just for that. Having a good book in there as well means that there is no excuse for not running out right now and reading it.

Review - Startide Rising

Startide Rising
by David Brin
1984 Hugo Winner for Best Novel
1983 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

Though part of my reading goals in working through all of the Hugo award winners was that I would read any preceding novels in series. As it turns out Sundiver, the first book in Brin's Uplift series, costs more than my car payment in hard cover. In fact, the two Uplift books that did win the Hugos cost more than my car payment if I purchase them in hard cover. Now I'm an obsessive nerd (obviously) and I had my mind set on a collection but that's pushing things. The omnibus that's pictured here was my compromise so that I could afford the books in hard cover. It was something that I had to do quite a bit with the winners that were printed in the 1980's which says something pretty negative about the publishers with regard to these books.

So if I wanted to add Sundiver to my collection properly then it was very expensive. Fortunately checking around I found that Sundiver is not required at all to enjoy Startide Rising so I skipped it and moved right into this book.

The Uplift universe is the real star of this book. Brin took some of the standard space opera tropes and attempted to justify them. The result is a very interesting take on some very old ideas.

A few hundred years from now humans have begun "uplifting" other animals; a process that grants them human level intelligence and reasoning. Dolphins and chimpanzees are the first and uplifted members of those species are recognized as equals to humanity. We've also built our first faster-than-light space drive but our first trip out brings a host of surprises. We encounter a friendly species immediately and it turns out that the universe is packed to overflowing with intelligent life. The species that exist breed new species of sentience and uplift them but as part of their culture any uplifted species becomes the property of their creators for one hundred thousand years. Only one species developed sentience on their own, the mysterious progenitors, who have been gone close to a billion years. Civilization is completely stagnant as everyone is certain that everything there is to know has been written down in the libraries which are commonly available to everyone.

Humanity is a polarizing force in the universe. Not only do we have the audacity to claim that we weren't uplifted by anyone we also uplifted two more species without permission which is grounds for the elimination of a species. We also avoid the dependence on the library preferring to find things on our own. And finally, and worst of all for most other sentients in the universe, human beings do things on a time scale of dozens of years rather than thousands. So humanity is a weak newcomer facing overwhelming opposition from the rest of the universe.

In Startide Rising the first dolphin commanded exploration vessel has discovered a fleet of progenitor space craft and recovered one of their bodies. It's a prize that has value beyond measure in the Uplift universe and so they immediately find themselves pursued by vast fleets of warships. The dolphins intentionally crash onto a world where the majority of the surface is an ocean and find more mysteries as a month long battle for who gets to seize them rages over their heads.

The setting of Startide Rising is extremely interesting and that was a major problem for me. All of the action in the book takes place at the planet the dolphins crash on and in space around it. We never find out details about the exploration that finds the ship (it's not part of Sundiver) and the resolution to this conflict and the consequences for the humiliated forces is not given. I wanted to know about all of that stuff and Brin occasionally gave me a glimpse of it but then he turned away back to the weaker parts.

And it may be that those "weaker parts" aren't really that bad, they just weren't interesting compared to the big space opera stuff Brin did for half-pages at a time. The bulk of the book focuses on the dolphins which he gives some distinctive viewpoints. Those viewpoints made it impossible for me to connect with them, though. I never connected with any of the dolphins who comprise three-quarters of the cast of the book. Since they're the focus of the book this was a major problem for me.

And really that's what it's going to come down to. If you can connect with those uplifted dolphins then you'll probably enjoy the book. Brin's prose is pretty good (despite having a lot of haiku, a form of poetry that has made far too many people think that counting syllables is a perfectly acceptable form of art) and his ideas are neat. I just was bored out of my skull when the dolphins were there. In the end that makes me not recommend reading it but at the same time I recognize that if someone else can get over that mental hump then they'll probably like it a lot.

I'm going to cheat a bit here and say read The Uplift War instead. It's loosely connected to Startide Rising but the previous book is not necessary and you get the same concepts in a better package. Then if you really like it try going back to Startide Rising and maybe you'll find yourself liking the dolphins more than I did.

Review - Foundation's Edge

Foundation's Edge
by Isaac Asimov
1983 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

Hey kids, here's a few warning signs that a book may be terrible:

It is the continuation of a series by an author who has not done anything with that series in more than ten years.

It is even more likely if it's an author at the end of their career revisiting their biggest success.

It attempts to combine two or more separate series by the author into one.

It is the fourth (or greater) book in a series that was originally set at three (or fewer) books.

If you see these warning signs put the book down and go get something else. Yes, I know you liked the author's previous work. Yes, I know you've read all the previous books. If it's any good then people will mention it and it will still be there to read. If it is terrible then you can be smug when people complain about it and say, "Oh, I stopped while it was still good."

So that's a long way of saying that you can tell that Foundation's Edge wouldn't be very good from a long way off. Reliving past glories decades later? Check. Tries to merge series? Check. Fourth book in the trilogy? Check. So was their a miracle?

No. Not even close. Foundation's Edge is terrible. (So is Heinlein's The Cat Who Walked Through Walls for the same reason, but at least they didn't give that one a Hugo.)

In the book a member of the Foundation suspects that the Second Foundation is hiding somewhere in the universe and is still manipulating events to rebuild a galactic empire. These statements bother the current government so they exile him under the pretense of searching for the Second Foundation. Meanwhile the Second Foundation realizes that there is a third group manipulating events but doing too good of a job at it which is making people suspect the continued existence of the Second Foundation. They send an agent of their own out to assist the exile as part of their own hunt for the manipulators who they suspect is on humanity's lost home world.

There's three things wrong with this book: the plot, the characters, and the prose. (Substitute "the characters" with "the people" if you feel a need to be alliterative.) There isn't a lot of plot here. Despite being one of the shorter novels that won this could have easily been compressed to one third the length. There's large tracts of people talking in circles, explaining things the reader already knows over and over again filling pages. Many long, pointless digressions that wear the reader down until you're just shouting "Get on with it!" Not that getting on with it would help since the book is predictable with events telegraphed so far in advance you have to wonder why the characters don't realize it themselves.

The characters themselves are paper thin and exist only to move the plot forward. Protagonists are perfect, antagonists are are mustache twirling, ineffectual twits. Our perfect protagonists effortlessly wander the universe and solve their problems while they tweak the noses of the villains. These characters are as interesting as drying paint.

Particularly annoying is the way that Asimov tries to cram in thirty years of advancement into Foundation's Edge to justify the future presented in original trilogy. He attempts to merge in his Robot stories while justifying the lack of robots in the Foundation universe before. Since the low technology of the original setting can't really be justified except in the metatextual way of just saying, "It was science fiction written in the 1940's," trying to justify it is an exercise in frustration.

The result of this whole thing is unsatisfactory at best and just a terrible novel at worst. While I can give a hesitant recommendation for the original trilogy based on its importance this follow-up is better forgotten. It's a case where the Hugo voters picked their selection based on the name of the author rather than the quality of the product and it makes Foundation's Edge one of the biggest shames of the Hugo Awards.

Review - Downbelow Station

Downbelow Station
by C. J. Cherryh
1982 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

It usually only takes me two or three days to read a novel. C. J. Cherryh's stuff took me about a week and a half. Not because it was significantly longer and not because it was so terrible that I had to keep putting down the book and walking away but because it was dense.

Some writers can take fifteen hundred pages to tell a story that could fit into five hundred (I'm looking at you fantasy series authors). Cherryh takes eight hundred pages and tells a story that could have fit comfortably into two thousand. Downbelow Station is stuffed to overflowing with complex plots that will make your head spin.

An unfortunate result of this is that you'll spend the first hundred pages with your head spinning. "Who was that? Why did they lie about that? Where was that again?" Cherryh places a rather painful history lesson at the beginning of the book to try to give readers the groundwork but it fails badly.

I had not read any of Cherryh's books before and so going into Downbelow Station I was unaware that it used an existing setting. I had resolved that for books where I had not read the earlier books in the series that I would try to read those earlier books first but I just didn't know. Cherryh's history lesson is too dry, goes on too long, and the exposition should have been incorporated into the book better. Fortunately once I was up to speed the fact that I didn't read the previous works didn't matter but it may have made the start even rockier for me.

The book is about the struggle for Pell, a trading outpost in orbit around the only planet where humans have found other intelligent life in the universe. Many factions want to control it or use the station as a pawn in their own conflicts and Cherryh essentially mixes them all up and has them fight. They are:

• The Union, a Soviet style communist dictatorship that broke away from Earth and is now returning as conquerors. Pell is the last station before they can get back into Earth's shipping lanes. After an extended war they've broken...
• The Earth Company Fleet who are now fighting a slow retreat, evacuating thousands from other stations as the Union destroys them. They've flooded Pell with refugees to throw the administation into chaos, the better to use the station as a staging ground for one last desperate gamble against the Union. However they've been betrayed by...
• The Earth Company who have lost control of the fleet. They've withdrawn all support for the fleet and are in negotiations with the Union to try to stall them long enough for Earth to prepare it's next move.
• The Konstantines have run Pell for generations as a neutral outpost and are trying to hold onto that neutrality in this conflict but...
• Jon Lukas, a businessman on Pell, has a plan to overthrow them and seize control of the station for himself. Unfortunately...
• The refugees on Pell have been forced into a cramped, quarantined section and they have plans of their own for getting out. A wild card in this is...
  
• Emilio Konstantine who has been given control of Downbelow Station, the human outpost on the planet below, and has resources of his own to put into this conflict. Meanwhile...
• The merchant alliance simply wants to stay out of it but they are preyed upon by Union and Company forces alike. The Union seizing their cargo and the Company forming press gangs.

And that's just part of it. There's the double agents, plots within plots, and everyone lying about just about everything. Downbelow Station requires careful reading because of its density of plot. The characters are all richly drawn and I didn't find any of the antagonistic characters (it's hard to call them "antagonists" when there's so many conflicting factions) to be shallow. Cherryh created a very rich book.

My only major complaint is that the prose is at best workmanlike. It's not much of a fault really but it does make it harder to get through those initial pages while you're trying to figure out who's who.

Though I had not read Downbelow Station before I was aware of the book. When Babylon 5 was airing it was often cited by the show's creator as a major influence. I could see large sections of the novel where concepts and actions were homaged (to put it politely) and so I would definitely recommend reading Downbelow Station to fans of Babylon 5 just to see where some of the things came from.

To be more precise I'd highly recommend Downbelow Station but you need to be aware going into it that you'll have to make a major investment of time and effort before the ideas come together. I know quite a few people who couldn't make it over that initial steep hill to enjoy the depth of the novel but my feeling is that it is well worth that initial effort.

Review - The Snow Queen

The Snow Queen
by Joan D. Vinge
1981 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

I have to confess that I have not read Hans Christian Anderson's original story "The Snow Queen". Vinge took the framework of Anderson's story, placed some science fiction trappings around it, and this was the result. Unfortunately I am not able to compare it to the original work but Vinge's version was entertaining.

At some point thousands of years in the future there is a planet which is the only place in the known universe where an immortality drug can be made. Unfortunately for the rich and powerful this system's access to the rest of the universe alternates between open and closed every few centuries. When this change occurs the climate of the planet changes and by tradition the barbaric tribes take over. When the gate is open the planet is ruled by the immortal Snow Queen who rules a decadent city of technology.

The current Snow Queen knows her time is short and when the gate closes she'll be sacrificed and replaced with the Summer Queen but she has a plan to continue her line. She creates clone embryos of herself and has them implanted into woman from the barbarian tribes who come into her city of a festival. She then plans on locating the child raising it to be a new version of her, and then will take her life to become the new Summer Queen.

Only one of the clones survive and before she is located this clone is allowed into an order of witches forbidden in the Queen's city. Her childhood friend travels to the city to make his fortune and falls under the Queen's spell to become her right hand man and lover. Naturally things build to a confrontation between everyone.

That is a very abridged summary and the story is even more complicated than that. There's plots, counterplots, manipulative outside forces working to limit an omniscient force, and even a quick trip with some time dilation to throw things off. The Snow Queen is a very busy novel but at the same time I never felt lost reading it. Vinge juggles the many plot threads well and builds a spectacular tapestry from them.

I have one very major problem with this book. Let's say that there is a large group of people who are omniscient. They can answer any question put to them accurately though they find it exhausting to do so. That's any question from "What did I have for dinner 428 days ago?" to "How do I build a spacecraft?" It's common knowledge that they have this ability. So do you:

a) Spy on the neighbors.
b) Using some trial and error as well as writing everything down gain basic knowledge and improve the quality of life for everyone.
c) Use them to gain military intelligence.
d) Call them witches and make them complete outcasts.

Vinge goes with option "d" and the whole book and multiple plot points hinge on this. Despite the fact that these people have been around for thousands of years. Despite the fact that anyone who takes advantage of their omniscience would gain such an advantage over someone who didn't that people trying to repress them would be crushed instantly. It's my least favorite plot element: entire planets worth of people have to be idiots for thousands of years in order for the story to work.

This could have easily sunk the whole book for me but Vinge pulled off a miracle with the characters. The Snow Queen is overstuffed with some very rich, fascinating characters. All of the antagonists are given very human perspectives which make them all fascinating. The only problem that I have with the characters is that the main character is a little too willing to forgive attempted genocide.

Vinge's prose is also vivid and brings the setting to life. The decadent city that the Snow Queen rules is very distinctive and it makes the setting for the majority of the book. You can feel the weight of years and people clinging onto the ruins of the past living there.

So the plot hole gave me a huge headache but the rest of the package for The Snow Queen was exceptionally good. For that reason I'd recommend it; the story is very enjoyable and it left me wanting to know what happened to these characters next.

Quite a few of the books I've gotten for my Hugo winner collection have book plates, the most popular being that Boris Vallejo one that every teenage boy who liked fantasy used for a period in the 80's. My copy of The Snow Queen has the most terrifying of them all:


I've removed the name to protect the guilty but looking up that name I found an alternative musician that fits the right age and location for the used book store that I got the book from. Should this person ever hit it big I have the blackmail material handy.

Review - The Fountains of Paradise

The Fountains of Paradise
by Arthur C. Clarke
1980 Hugo Winner for Best Novel
1979 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

With The Fountains of Paradise I decided that the longer works of Clarke were simply not for me. I found the book too heavy with the engineering, too light on the glossed over human elements, and just bland in general. In other words almost exactly like his previous winner Rendezvous With Rama.

Also this is the end of the almost perfectly coinciding Hugo and Nebula winners that the first fifteen years of Nebulas had (over the previous decade the winners in the novel category were the same 80% of the time). The next four years the awards do not match followed by a short run of matching winners and then finally going their separate ways only occasionally meeting again.

The Fountains of Paradise deals with the construction of the first orbital elevator in a slightly fictionalized version of Sri Lanka, a cable with the top in geostationary orbit and the bottom anchored to the ground so that one can simply climb up the thirty thousand miles to space. Complications abound such as the ancient monastery on top of the mountain where the elevator terminus would be and sabotage from the Tamil Tiger stand-ins.

I'll give Clarke full credit for having an interesting idea for the novel. There's no reason why the push to create a space elevator shouldn't be an interesting idea but Clarke writes about it like he's writing about the construction of a parking garage. I don't mean that the characters should spend time going "Gosh, wow! We're transforming the future of humanity!" but they are and everything is so passionless that it just wears me down. The best that Clarke does is near the beginning as he describes to us the wonders that will be disrupted by the massive project. I suspect that comes from his love of the country that he's describing which he would retire to after the book was published.

Oddly enough a major plot device in the book is the near total control over the weather that the Earth has (fine enough to whip up a major storm in a specific location). I would think that anyone with the technology to manipulate a chaotic system in such detail on a global scale would have no trouble with a space elevator project. Weather control on that scale is so far into Clarke's technology indistinguishable from magic that when you posit a civilization that has that has it then you might as well say they have anything.

The Fountains of Paradise is a very anti-religion novel. Besides the Buddhist monks who stand directly in the path of the superhighway there is an alien probe that passes through the solar system and essentially says, "Oh by the way, all of your religions are wrong! See ya!" Clarke tells us that this shuts down religion world wide and makes everyone happy. Except the Buddhist monks, of course.

For a book with a fantastic premise The Fountains of Paradise is just weak. If you are happy with novels about engineering then it may appeal to you more than it did to me but it ended my desire to read any more from Clarke.

Review - Dreamsnake

Dreamsnake
by Vonda McIntyre
1979 Hugo Winner for Best Novel
1978 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

Another double winner so it's clearly another high quality bit of science fiction.

That statement could not be more wrong.

Dreamsnake is on my shortlist of the worst novels to win the Hugo award. The fact that it somehow managed to get a Nebula as well makes me suspect that there was a lot of good cocaine going around at science fiction conventions in 1979. That's the only way that this piece of tripe could have won both awards.

Snake is a shamanistic healer in a post-apocalyptic world who makes people better by having her trained snakes bite them. One of the snakes is an alien species which does vague magic things which she requires to be a good healer and at the beginning of the novel it is killed by a group of tribesmen who you know are bad people because they don't have the same enlightened 1970's attitude that Snake does.

One of the tribesmen is immediately converted over to her point of view after some hot sex and follows her around for the rest of the book. Snake wanders the world looking for another magic snake making things better for the people she meets with no effort in short vignettes. Eventually she fixes everything in the world by learning where babies come from, something a society of genetic engineers haven't been able to figure out after centuries of observation.

That's a bit more information than I normally like to give but the key plot twist that drives the story is so monumentally stupid that I was disgusted. Husbandry is Animal Breeding 101; you should understand the mating habits of a creature under constant observation before you try tinkering with its genes. On top of that the people who were this insultingly stupid couldn't tell that they were dealing with a type of genetic material that was different from DNA despite being genetic engineers. (Shockingly another Hugo and Nebula winner a few years from now has the exact same situation where people who are doing genetic manipulation of a species don't understand how it reproduces or the fact that its genetic material is radically different from earth norms.) The whole book hinges on this and it took my suspension of disbelief which it beat to death with a snake.

Oh but one plot point isn't enough to hate a book even if it's one that someone who had some vague idea of how to raise animals could see through so let's get to other things. Snake is perfect. She's a flawless, modern thinking person who's idealism inspires everyone around her. People who actual act like they're living in a post-apocalyptic society where most people have to get by on sustenance farming are not nearly as smart, clever, or good looking as Snake and those she can immediately convert to modern liberal thinking (in the classical sense, not the current political stances).

Dreamsnake is packed solid with stock characters. There's the little girl who has suffered abuse at the hands of wicked people who immediate attaches herself to Snake so that Snake can put the abusive parent figure in their place with no effort. There's the good looking kid with sexual hang-ups and father issues that Snake fixes with a half page of dialog and some quick sex.

I hated this book. I found the stories to be terrible, the characters to be terrible, and the world building to be terrible. It reminded me a lot of those painfully awful fantasy novels that are pumped out by the hundreds with its technology that might as well be magic, lack of technology elsewhere, and "plot" that revolved around set pieces that seemed to exist only for the reader to be impressed at how enlightened and wonderful Snake was. Just keep away from this one.

Review - Gateway

Gateway
by Frederik Pohl
1978 Hugo Winner for Best Novel
1977 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

And now we move back into that staple of 1970's science fiction: the giant engineering project. Following in Clarke's and Niven's footsteps Pohl's aliens have built a massive structure which humanity can only fathom the most basic of information about it. Unlike Clarke and Niven, however, the people in Pohl's novels are working to do something about that.

Gateway is a huge alien space station that exists outside of the plane of the solar system close enough that people can travel there regularly. On the station are thousands of small craft that are the only thing known capable of faster than light travel. The problem is that people only know how to get them to go and stop. A course can be set but its unintelligible to the humans who gamble on these ships to find artifacts of the lost civilization that built Gateway. They've been gone for over a hundred thousand years but the few trinkets that survive can be reverse engineered. With the destinations unknown the risk for people searching for artifacts is high but someone who returns with a new find will be rich beyond imagination.

The book is about Bob Broadhead whose last trip out from Gateway made him one of the wealthiest men in the world but left him mentally shattered. As he undergoes psychiatric treatment he recounts how he spent his winnings from a lottery on a ticket to Gateway to gamble on making a real fortune but lost his nerve when he got there. How he recovers it and the tales of the journeys he makes from the station drive the story.

That narrative isn't really the point, though. Gateway is about as immersive of science fiction novel as you'll find. The station feels real and you can almost smell the stench. Everyone on the station is gambling on one big score and their triumphs and failures resonate strongly. Pohl adds to the immersion by often including tidbits of text from various publications on Gateway; advertisements, lecture notes, bits of reports, and the like. By the time the novel ends Gateway is a living breathing place.

As a viewpoint character Bob is pretty reprehensible. He does a lot of unlikable things in the novel but one gets the impression that much of it is done because of his fragile mental state and he remains interesting despite this. Still if you require a likable protagonist then you may not enjoy Gateway as much.

One of the things that I really appreciated in Gateway was the fact that people are trying to learn from the alien artifact. In Rendezvous With Rama, for example, people show up and look around but they don't do much in terms of trying to recover artifacts. Here people are taking a step up, often at great risk.

And speaking of that risk if there's one problem that I do have with Pohl's novel its that prospecting from Gateway is far too deadly. I did some quick back of the envelope calculations and found that they should run out of aliens ships to attrition in just a few years with the results that Pohl provides. It's a nitpick admittedly but since part of the atmosphere is that it is very dangerous and deadly having that danger far out of proportion to what should allow the system to function is disruptive.

But that's the worst thing I can say about Gateway. It's a wonderful book, a fine take on the alien artifact genre, and fascinating in its view of the mashed up culture that forms on this new frontier. It also has an incredibly haunting ending that will stick with you for a long time. This is one not to miss.

Review - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
by Kate Wilhelm
1977 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

I was dead certain that this book was going to be a slog and a half. The dust jacket screamed "generic crap". A one sentence synopsis is a bunch of people in rural West Virginia try to survive the collapse of civilization. That was the essence of the plot synopsis on the dust jacket. And yet this turned out to be one of the best post-apocalyptic novels I ever read. The reason is simple: characters. Wilhelm populates Where Late the Sweet Birds Sing with an army of richly written characters that are driven into conflict by their personalities. No matter how awful some of things they do are (and some of them are pretty terrible) you can understand why they think it will help them survive.

Let me give you a bit more detail on the story (and take my word for it that all of this plays better in the novel than it sounds). Pollution, wars, disease, and other stresses have finally broken humanity and worldwide everyone and most animals becomes infertile. An extended family of survivalists think that this will go away as these problems vanish but humanity has no way to last that long. To insure that humans will go on they build a large cloning facility below their home and settle in to wait out the end of the world until their descendants can have children once more. It turns out the clones don't like that plan. Batches that are decanted together have a Midwich Cuckoos style telepathic link between all of them so long as they don't individualize too much.

Jump ahead a bit and the clone society is starting to fail. The replacement parts are running out and they haven't been able to scavenge new ones. They can last a few more generations but they have to do something. They don't want to start making babies again since anyone who becomes pregnant loses the telepathic link and winds up being an outcast from their society. One brash woman struggles to be an individual in this society only to be tormented by it. Her child, who she hid from the village for almost a decade, however has many of the personality traits needed for survival the clones lost. The fate of the survivors depends on if the clone society can adapt to his way of life and if he can forgive them for his mother.

For a short book Wilhelm really packs it in. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is obviously a novel stretched over generations and yet it doesn't feel like one of those sprawling overwordy "epics" that were in style at the time (we've got new styles of sprawling overwordy epics now clogging up shelves like a blood clot going to the brain). Wilhelm has a tight focus on the characters and the problems of the society and doesn't waste a word.

As I stated the strength of this novel is in the characters all of whom are driven to have people (not just themselves) survive and to have children. The initial survivors are trying to keep humanity going long enough but find themselves overthrown by their own creation. The clones lose the ability to survive independently for the sake of their own new society and are threatened by a handful of individuals. They maneuver and squabble and undermine each other but each thinks they are doing it for the good of humanity.

Perhaps the most disturbing bit of survivalism is how the clones treat fertile women. Since there is a copy degradation problem with the clones that prevents there from being more than five generations from the original they recognize that they will need an infusion of fresh DNA to maintain their culture. To that end when the first few start becoming pregnant the women are sequestered and forced to continue breeding the next generation. It's a concept that can be understood intellectually from a standpoint of the survival of the species (the clone's reasons is the same cultural reasons why women's roles in society were limited until the recent past) it is disturbing and an unpleasant step backward for people who claim to be building a better future.

I was impressed at how Wilhelm took such a generic, standard story and turned it into something special. The whole book has a melancholy feeling as the earth goes out with a whimper rather than a bang but at the same time there is a hopeful edge that the struggles that all of the characters go through may lead to a rebirth. It's a lovely novel and even though I went in expecting something awful she won me over.

Review - The Forever War

The Forever War
by Joe Haldeman
1976 Hugo Winner for Best Novel
1975 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

The Forever War is unique among Hugo winning novels. Besides being the first reflection of the post-Viet Nam America's response to the military in these books it is the only Hugo award winning novel that is a direct rebuttal to another winner. Haldeman's novel is the dark mirror of Heinlein's Starship Troopers but it stands on its own as well.

The Forever War follows the military career of William Mandella who is drafted into a war in the far off future of 1996. While there is faster than light travel to use it often requires some travel at relativistic velocities so Mandella experiences centuries of a changing world and warfare in his few years of subjective service. Initially the interstellar war goes well for earth but it descends to a centuries long quagmire as each side advances technology asymmetrically and as high attrition wipes out those earliest veterans Mandella rapidly rises through the ranks.

Haldeman goes extensively into the changes in a society as it grows accustom to an eternal war and every time that Mandella returns from a tour the world has radically changed in his absence. These changes typically drive him to return to service despite his better judgment. The use of these science fiction changes makes it so that the reader can empathize with the disorientation returning soldier. It is by far the strongest aspect of the novel.

Haldeman drew on his experiences in Viet Nam and consequently the descriptions of combat are some of the most evocative that you are going to find in science fiction. Battles are not glorious action sequences where heroic actions sweep back the vile aliens. They're chaotic terrors; a point of view common now but almost unheard of in science fiction thirty years ago.

One thing that I found off putting is that the military in The Forever War condones soldiers raping each other as part of their service. Haldeman presents this as more loose sexual mores in the future where no one would object to just using someone else not interested in having sex but I read it as rather creepy. In the novel the only example we see is a woman forcing herself on a man which might be his attempt to mitigate it.

The narrative arc is very similar to Starship Troopers in that we follow a soldier from training to enlisted man to officer and Haldeman does his own spin on powered armor too. The difference is in the government. Heinlein's government is a largely benevolent organization (perhaps fueled by the fact that those running it are all former civil servants), the commanding officers are generally competent albeit strained, and the war is truly a just war along the lines of World War II. Haldeman's government (perhaps that should read "governments" since there are many of them over the centuries) is manipulative at best and outright corrupt at worst. While they're not so vile as to simply pitch human beings into a meat grinder they are more than willing to lie to veterans and induce psychological torments. The officers are often pretty terrible and the first close "battle" with the aliens make it seem very likely that they were massacring civilians. In essence Starship Troopers is like those old war movies where our side are the good guys and things are unambiguous while The Forever War is the modern war movie where things are rarely simple.

It is impossible for me to praise The Forever War highly enough. Despite some quirks with some of the societal impacts The Forever War remains among the greatest depictions of the military in science fiction. It was at the forefront in a change in focus that was occurring with military science fiction which continues to this day. Haldeman's characters are richly drawn and the prose is sharp. The follow-up novels lack the power of this initial novel but the the emotional wounds of the war were still fresh and it shows through.

Review - The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
1975 Hugo Winner for Best Novel
1974 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

So I went into The Left Hand of Darkness expecting to dislike it. After all Le Guin is a highly political writer and I personally dislike her politics and The Left Hand of Darkness had a reputation for being a big "important" novel ("important" being a term that can usually be interchanged with "preachy" and "pretentious"). Strong writing and a richly textured world overcame my prejudices (even if I didn't find it important) but then there's The Dispossessed, the other of Le Guin's "important" novels. Surely I'll hate a novel in which Le Guin tells the reader repeatedly how magically perfect a society without the concept of property is while capitalists are vile, evil worms.

And I was wrong again.

The Dispossessed is a wonderful novel with a real strength of characterization and a very complex pair of societies. One, Urras is fairly analogous to the United States while the other, Anarres, is a communist anarchy, they have no concept of property or almost no overarching central authority. The Anarrians shun any concept of ego or self; not even their names are their own as they are chosen randomly by computer and reused once they die.

Shevek is a scientist from Anarres and he has developed a theory along the lines of quantum physics that will radically overturn huge portions of accepted science. He finds that his work is being repressed by a scientist who manages the distribution of the limited resources available. Shevek choses to leave be the first person to leave his world for its neighbor Urras where he hopes to find the freedom to continue but quickly discovers that he has to produce results for someone. The culture shock crushes his abilities and eventually he choses to return home in order to finish his work and try to move his society back toward its ideal.

The novel is told in alternating chapters starting with the present day Shevek trying to deal with a society that has property and then flashing back to his life on Anarres which eventually brings him to leave it behind. It's a disorientating technique but one that really serves to draw the reader in to Shevek's life.

The real strength of the novel is in it's depiction of Anarres and Shevek coming to grasp the problems with his homeland. The country is an anarchy that has descended into a kind of social totalitarianism. They're blind to their own faults because of those social structures and suppress anyone who could suggest that there may be a problem. If a member of the society dares to point out that one of those who have gained a measure of power through popularity then the society viciously turns against them attacking them for having a perceived ego. It's a communist country run by mob mentality and it's both terrifying and believable.

Le Guin isn't the only person in the seventies to write about "perfected" socialists states and it's a theme that I generally despise. Typically these books are about how wonderful life is without property and how everything manages to run itself just fine with everyone being nice to each other. This is usually peppered with preachy rants about how evil twentieth century capitalists or their stand-ins were (funnily enough you don't see many of these books post Soviet collapse but there are exceptions). Le Guin at this point recognizes the real complexities with such a world view. The people in The Dispossessed are aliens so she can gloss over the issues of human nature but by building it around social pressures you can see how such a fanatical society would form and maintain itself.

From that starting point Le Guin builds a rich picture of her protagonist Shevek which propels the book forward. He doesn't set out to be a revolutionary but becomes one by default. He becomes the ideal form of the Anarres society holding up a mirror that shows their hypocrisy. He grows, forms a family, and questions his purpose and ideals in the face of societal pressures.

So once again Le Guin surprised me and brought in a good novel. In fact, let me revise that: this is a great novel. I'd mark this one down as one of the best Hugo winning novels simply because of it's rich structure and detailed examination of the societies while the compelling story of Shevek is just icing on the cake. This is a book not to miss.