Review - No Enemy But Time

No Enemy But Time
by Michael Bishop
1982 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

You know a novel is dated when its reformers have become monsters. I found the positive references to Robert Mugabe in the book ironic given recent history. Not that this has a whole lot to do with the quality of the book but it stood out to me.

When I picked up No Enemy But Time I noticed it was published by Timescape Books and I became concerned. A publishing line based on a pretentious, poorly attempted fusion of mainstream fiction and traditional science fiction? I had a bad feeling but then I had second thoughts. How could I start basing a first impression of a book from a book by another author? Just because a large publisher used a lousy book as the launching point for a line doesn't mean that every book in that line is going to share the faults of that book. Should I assume that ever book from Dan Brown's publisher is an overhyped mess written to the level of ten year olds? So having chided myself I abandoned those preconceptions and started reading.

Then I hit page four.

As a note to any potential authors reading this putting a thinly disguised metaphor intended to excuse your novel's choppy structure in the first few pages is a very bad idea. Nothing says I'm a self-important writer with delusions of artistic grandeur but little actual talent than wrapping up things in unnecessary metaphor.

After being told that the novel will be randomly shuffled like a deck of cards and that I should just go along with it because minor details like a narrative arc don't really matter I did something that I don't usually do: I started keeping notes on all the flaws and things that got on my nerves.
Typically I don't keep notes because I'm reading these books mainly for my own pleasure and just relating my opinion on them but for a book to take such a deadly misstep immediately I knew I was in for a Hominids-esque crawl. I stopped this when I got annoyed with stopping every page or two to note a new problem.

Sufficed to say I hated this book. It recounts the life of a man who dreams of Africa a hundred thousand years ago. A process is invented that allows people who dream of distant times to soft-of time travel to them. Exactly what "sort-of" is rather confusing, involves spoilers, and goes well outside the scope of this review except to say that it involves a deus ex machina that isn't really consistent with the other ways time travel is used in the book. As he travels to the distant past he follows a pre-human tribe and gets involved in a sexual relationship with one of them. The chapters detailing the time travel are intersped with scenes from his life before he went on the trip; sometimes these flashbacks play off of the events in the previous chapter but more often they're just random sequences.

One of my pet peeves is on full display in this novel as the research time travel trip to the dawn of humanity is so fundamentally unprepared for even the elementary aspects of this research. He isn't carrying so much as a pad and pencil to take notes on, lacks any kind of camera, and takes only the barest of supplies. When the communication device for contacting the future immediately fails he plunges on to intentionally spend weeks out of contact rather than going right back through the open hole in time which they can reopen at any time so they can double check things before proceeding.

On a particularly creepy note when the narrator encounters one of the female members of the tribe he follows the descriptions make it clear that even though the other people aren't quite human (or even homo erectus) she's sexually attractive. It makes it obvious that this woman will be the love interest despite the fact that it's dancing on the line of beastiality.

Continuing my lessons of what not to do as a writer do not make your main character a smarmy, self righteous jerk who is always morally and intellectually right. Do not make them the focus of the book so they can constantly put all the lesser beings in the book (which would be everyone) in their place with a few words. Do not make the conflicts in your novel be about how everyone else is wrong and that obnoxious main character is always right.

If the plot wasn't bad enough the writing carries similar flaws. For example, at the beginning of one chapter the tense changes from present tense to past tense in an attempt to demonstrate the time travel division but this isn't carried over to any other divisions between past and present in the novel which just makes it feel sloppy. Bishop alternates between using first person and third person view completely unnecessarily between chapters.

This book is terrible on so many levels. The plot is painful. The characters are among the worst I've ever read about. If that wasn't enough the prose feels like the results of a college English major trying to write the most important book ever. Avoid this one like the pages are printed on pressed ebola virus pulp.

Review - "The Hemingway Hoax", "The Manamouki", and "Bears Discover Fire"

Michael Whelan
1991 Hugo Winner for Professional Artist

Once again I was relatively impressed with the short fiction that won this year. Every one of these stories is good. I'm starting to wonder if there was a short fiction renaissance for science fiction in the early 90's that I missed.

"The Hemingway Hoax"
by Joe Haldeman
1991 Hugo Winner for Best Novella
1990 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

I'm not a fan of Ernest Hemingway; I've read a few of the novels and a couple of short stories but none if it really thrilled me. Perhaps I'll give it a try again someday now that it's been a couple of decades.

The reason I mention that is "The Hemingway Hoax" is Haldeman's tribute to the author and I'm not really qualified to judge how well Haldeman's pseudo-Hemingway matches with the real thing. That's okay then because I found "The Hemingway Hoax" to be a fascinating story that was only let down by a weak ending.

A student of Hemingway's works, his wife, and a con man come up with a plan to make forgeries of several lost stories and a novel fragment. They had been lost when Hemingway's wife took the originals and copies on a train trip and the bag was stolen (so don't expect them to turn up like Metropolis has). Their scheme however is setting off a chain of dominoes that will result in a nuclear war and a supernatural being who prunes dangerous points in the time line is determined to kill the writer before this occurs. The problem for that being is that when the writer dies he wakes up in a parallel world where the plan is continuing.

Haldeman's prose is just as strong as it ever was and the story itself manages to be an interesting examination of Hemingway without ever feeling like a exposition dump. The characters are a bit on the shallow side and I can recognize some of the archetypes from what I've read of Hemingway but I think its fine for the story that Haldeman wants to tell. Where it becomes a problem is the ending which is particularly unsatisfying due to its confusing nature; a lot of stuff happens that I can follow the events but why these things are happening is beyond me. Still the vast majority of the story is worth it so I can't say that the last five pages make it necessary to discard the rest.

"The Manamouki"
by Mike Resnick
1991 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

You might recall Resnick's "Kirinyaga" from a few weeks ago. I enjoyed that story but I was concerned that I was applying my own deconstructionist view on the story. "The Manamouki" is another tale in that setting where an ultra-traditional Kenyan tribe has been moved to a space colony so that they could maintain their way of life. And what I took from it was that I was not putting my own perceptions on the original story: Resnick is making a story where the conservative forces of an African tribe are not morally "better" by virtue of not being industrialized.

This time new immigrants arrive at the colony, a Kenyan man and his American wife. The American is determined to fit into her new life but even beyond a few missteps the newcomer is initiating changes in the society simply through her attitudes. For example, despite accepting her subservient role as an owned woman she doesn't respect the cultural hierarchy. By seeking to do the best she can she initiates anger and jealousy in her neighbors. The witchdoctor who rules over these people is forced to intervene in this conflict among women.

What I found effective in the story is that once again Resnick establishing a situation that is morally complicated. How far does an immigrant have to adjust to a society? What if that society holds to standards that are abhorrent to outsiders? And how far can cultural conservatism extend? How he manages to fit all of this into such a tight package I have no idea.

"Bears Discover Fire"
by Terry Bisson
1991 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story
1990 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

Bears have figured out how to use fire and are organizing themselves into tribes but that's background to this story about a man who is dealing with his mother who has been dying for years. She has been in a retirement home for some time and he has been trying to maintain his connection with her in the last years of her life. Bisson crafts a gentle story that reminds me a lot of the better works of Clifford Simak; it's about a pastoral life that has a bit of wonder injected into it. Eventually Bisson brings the separate elements together in a touching conclusion that sticks with you.

Review - Man Plus

Man Plus
by Frederik Pohl
1976 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

Pop quiz for you. You're the administrator of a manned mission to Mars which is supposed to help pull the world back from the brink of World War III. Part of this involved converting a human being to a cyborg capable of surviving unaided on the surface of Mars. The previous test subject for this project developed a mental instability, had a stroke and died. You are now performing the same conversion on a man whose wife is having an affair with the engineer who designed most of the cybernetic body. Do you:

A. Lay out a specific plan and schedule in advance keeping the astronaut being changed apprised of every variation and step so that nothing can come as a shock to him.

B. Don't tell him anything and use meaningless euphemisms when talking about the procedures in front of him; when he wakes up castrated he'll figure out what that last "minor cosmetic modification" was.

Question two: As stated this mission is vital to the survival of the earth. As such you:

A. Plan and train in multiple waves of back ups for years in advance; you can always use the people training as back ups for later flights after all.

B. Work in someone for a complete body replacement two months before launch and substitute a trained astronaut for someone with no training nine days before launch.

Question three: the appropriate time for astronauts to be apprised of mission details for their trip to Mars is:

A. Several years in advance so they can take advantage of every valuable second that they're there.

B. Once they're on Mars.

If you've answered B to these three questions then you too can be an administrator for NASA in Man Plus!

Now I'm not an astronaut. I'm not even an astronaut buff. Yet somehow I came away from this book certain that I could manage the space program better. The decisions and choices made in Man Plus revolve around generating drama and as such feel completely artificial and forced. While having the man who's cuckolding him castrate the astronaut might make a good parallel it also makes an incredibly stupid plot twist.

But I've only begun to scratch the surface of how bad Man Plus is. For example, it's fifty pages in before we are informed that in the future monogamous marriage relationships are not normal and both the protagonist astronaut and his wife have had affairs before. This vital piece of information radically changes the nature of the central story but it's not a surprise twist or a shocking reveal; it's just a fact that's dropped and it left me feeling annoyed.

It's worse than that with the withheld information, though; after nearly one hundred and thirty pages of being repeatedly hold how vital getting a man on Mars is it's mentioned in passing that this isn't the first manned Mars mission. If putting a man on Mars is so vital to the psychology of the world then why weren't any of the other trips (at least five other missions; probably more) important?

And finally the majority of the book is written in an omniscient third person voice. Then occasionally for a paragraph or two it slips to a first person. This is supposed to be a mysterious party for the big twist ending but it just feels sloppy and the reveal when it comes isn't even that interesting. It doesn't even have an impact on the book; it would have been exactly the same story without the twist only there wouldn't have been some of the clumsy writing.

So characters presented as cliches and idiots for the sake of the story, a story that doesn't make any sense, and is poorly told. Man Plus is a loser all the way around. I strongly suspect the book of being one of the early examples of personal politics running the Nebula awards, especially since Pohl was the president of the SFWA which hands out the awards at the time Man Plus was published and when he received the award.

Review - Rite of Passage

Rite of Passage
by Alexei Panshin
1968 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

First off, don't expect me to follow up this review with Panshin's Hugo winning non-fiction; the only hard cover edition that exists is a signed and numbered first edition. It's unfortunate but most of the non-fiction winners left on my list are apparently somewhat rare. But that's his The World Beneath the Hill, let's talk Rite of Passage.

There are vast colony ships that travel a circuit around hundreds of human colonies. For the most part the people who live on the ship have a life of technological ease while those on the colony worlds toil to grow food. The exception to this is that shortly after their fourteenth birthday all of the shipdwellers are dropped into the wilderness of a planet with minimal supplies and they must survive a month. Once that ordeal has been completed they are considered adults.

Rite of Passage covers a few years in the life of the daughter of the leader of one of these ships. It is the usual coming of age story; she moves to a new neighborhood, makes friends, finds a first love, develops a more complex relationship with her father, and deals with problems in school. The twist is that at the end of all those usual things it also is a survival adventure.

I both read and seen a lot of coming of age stories (it's practically become the default story for any "independent" media) so it takes a lot to interest me in that theme. Panshin succeeded at that. I found Rite of Passage completely engrossing. Part of that I think is that the survival test builds an inherent tension in the book; you know it isn't going to go well since "And then they built a camp fire and all sat around it toasting marshmallows for a month," isn't good storytelling. There's plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong and Panshin builds a large cast of potential victims through the book. And since dying isn't the only way for things to fail even the success of the main character is in doubt.

And its those characters where Panshin really excels. Unlike modern coming of age stories Panshin doesn't fill his cast with "zany" characters; he remembers that all of the children he features are going through the exact same process as his main character and everyone grows up as the novel continues. Panshin paints an image of a world where everyone is dealing with their problems and we only get to see one small view of it.

One particularly interesting thing I found was the politics in Rite of Passage. The patronizing attitude that the people living on the ship have toward the people living on the colony is deeply embedded in their culture but Panshin avoids the stereotypes that often come up in science fiction about conflicting cultures. I don't want to say too much for fear of spoiling the novel but the people on board ships know that they are disliked by the colonists but they also hold the upper hand in their relationships and take advantage of that. So the actions and reactions of different political factions as they arise in the book are very understandable.

The worst thing I can say about the book is that the prose was not outstanding. Which is not to say it was bad; just not brilliant. Panshin's narrative and characters carry the weight of this novel and his words and style never get in the way of that but they don't lift it up further either.

And that's not really much of a complaint. Where Delany's novels that I talked about last week were heavy on the style with little substance as their foundation Panshin is the other way around. He's not poetic but his story is as solid as they come and I greatly enjoyed it.

Review - The Einstein Intersection

The Einstein Intersection
by Samuel R. Delany
1967 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

There's a line in The Einstein Intersection that when I read it I thought it summed up the book perfectly. Unfortunately I have been unable to locate it scanning through the pages again but what it said essentially was that the characters were just repeating old stories until they were all used up and then they could start making their own. And that's The Einstein Intersection; Delany borrowing meaning and identity from a dozen other sources with little of his own in it. It's the novel of a young man (Delany was twenty-one when he wrote it) who is borrowing the clever ideas of more developed writers and eventually when he has run out of them he'll write his own.

In a distant future where humanity has vanished from the earth our myths and legends are being echoed by the species that follows us. When his lover dies a shepherd is directed to descend into the underworld and confront Kid Death, a malicious spirit who kills at will. The shepherd journeys across the world encountering analogues of other myths.

There's a lot to like in The Einstein Intersection but unlike Babel-17 I don't think it comes together well enough in the end to make the book worthwhile. Part of my problem is that for all the myths and legends that populate the novel it didn't feel to me that Delany was really saying anything about myth. It came across more as borrowing meaning from other works than finding meaning. The beings are shaped by myth, a theme that should be packed with meaning and inferences, and yet it seems like Delany just stopped at the concept.

(As an aside here you might notice that the edition I read had a forward by Neil Gaiman, an author who has built his career on exploring that very theme.)

The narrative is also very abrupt. Sequences sometimes don't feel like they connect to each other and the climax of the central conflict occurs in the space of the last three pages in a chapter after Delany puts out a thematic climax.

But enough complaints, there are good points as well. The characters are all very strong and interesting. The central concept is a solid enough hook even if I thought it wasn't built on enough. The post-human culture that Delany sets up (and quickly abandons) is also one of the more fascinating post-apocalyptic cultures I've read about; the people ruthlessly cull their population which is rife with mutations while changing the line of what is acceptable.

And really that's early Samuel R. Delany to me. A whole lot of really clever, literary ideas put in solid prose that just has problems gelling together into a solid work. He was so radically different from the traditional Cambellian stuff that came before that it doesn't surprise me that he gained a lot of attention from a writer's organization. The Einstein Intersection left me feeling dissatisfied and for that reason I wouldn't recommend it.

Review - Babel-17

Babel-17
by Samuel R. Delany
Tied for 1966 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

Babel-17 is an odd book for me as I started out with a strong negative opinion and in the end reversed it. This change didn't occur because of any aspect of the novel but strictly in my point of view.

In the middle of an extended interstellar war acts of sabotage have been accompanied by a strange, indecipherable transmission. It is given the name "Babel-17" by the military code breakers and when they cannot solve it they hand it over to a former cryptographer who has become the universe's most famous poet and has a near supernatural gift for linguistics. She quickly determined that Babel-17 is its own language instead of a code and understands enough of it that she knows where the next attack will be. She gathers a motley crew together to follow the signals as she works out more and more of the language and its secrets.

I was annoyed with this book at first for one simple reason: the linguistics that are the center of the book both narratively and philosophically are nonsense. Narratively Delany goes into great depth on how the language of Babel-17 is more densely packed with information than any other known language. It's super-efficient and allows the speakers of it to gain insights through that language. The problem with that is to have the level of information that Delany describes would actually make the language significantly less efficient; to pack it in all as densely as the novel uses would require layers of context that would slow down the thought processes. In addition the nature of the language requires that many characters in the book behave like idiots so that the main character can demonstrate how great she is.

What changed for me is a discussion on suspension of disbelief. I made the point that you have to allow the movie or novel its premise and as long as that was internally consistent to let it go. I realized then that I had been viewing Babel-17 through a hard SF filter and it's not. I don't just dismiss stories that feature pseudoscience faster-than-light drives as a problem even when the author wastes my time pretending to explain it. Babel-17 is about as soft as science fiction gets only its choice of science is different.

So taking a second look the protagonist who's so perfect that everyone falls in love with her and she changes the world view of everyone she meets makes a bit more sense. Delany is telling a story about language and the hows and whys of it don't matter even if he tries to explain it. The protagonist's mastery of language affects those around her.

It still isn't entirely successful. The way the story jumps from episode to episode without a real purpose or connection is annoying. Even when I understand where Delany is coming from with his perfect character it doesn't make her more endearing to the reader. It doesn't make the strawmen characters who exist mainly to be shown the right way by the protagonist more interesting.

What does work is that once you allow for the unreality of the premise Delany has some fun with the idea of an incredibly powerful language. It not only shapes the world view of those who use it, at several points it actually shapes the text of novel. Delany's prose is sharp in this regard and is a good match for a book on language.

In addition the adventure story being told in Babel-17 is interesting and packed with some fairly unique concepts; many of which really deserve a novel of their own to focus on the concept. Humanity is losing meaning as people modify their bodies wildly to their whim but this is a superficial detail in the novel. The dead are raised and serve as both crew and a kind of synaesthetic sensor system.

So in the end I found the novel worth reading but overstretched in certain respects that might turn off many readers. There's a lot of interesting to read about concepts but few of them are supported well. I liked it but it's a borderline case.

Review - Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes
Tied for 1966 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

One of the classic arguments in science fiction is if the original short story or the novel is better. There's a lot of stories that have been expanded to full length novels and a good way to start a fight in a room full of nerds is to say that one was better than the other. The original short story "Flowers for Algernon" won the Hugo award in 1960 and Keyes reworked it into this book which managed to win the Nebula.

Charlie is a mentally handicapped man who has been selected for an experiment to raise his intelligence. Through his journal entries the reader can see his developmental progress as he both becomes smarter and seeks emotional maturity. With his new viewpoint Charlie seeks to make peace with his childhood. And in this confusion the possibility that the change is temporary arises.

Flowers for Algernon is a superior novel. Charlie's story has a real punch to it thanks to the developing first person narrative which gives you a chance to see his development on multiple levels. Starting with the childish writing it builds perfectly over the course of the story. It makes the book one of the best constructed novels I have ever encountered.

It helps that Charlie is a fascinating character. He starts innocent but the fruit of the tree of knowledge changes that quickly. I never found him to be particularly likable but he was sympathetic; you could understand him despite the exotic situation. In addition Keyes manages to avoid a simplistic equating of knowledge with unhappiness that some authors use; knowledge makes Charlie unhappy but there's underlying problems. Ignorance wasn't complete bliss.

So what is the real difference between the book and the short story? Primarily the arc of short story is intellectual, the arc of the novel is emotional. The short story is about what happens and the novel is about what Charlie does about it. I think Keyes was more effective in the short story since the events contain their own drama but if someone told me that they preferred the exploration of Charlie's past and emotional development in the novel it wouldn't surprise me. Each will appeal to a different group of readers.

You'll note I had nothing negative to say about Flowers for Algernon. I can't help that since it's not just a great work of science fiction, it's one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
If you have never read the book then I cannot recommend it highly enough. My preferences lie with the short story but the book has its own strengths. If you're going to read one book that I recommend this is the one.

Review - "Lost Dorsai", "The Cloak and the Staff", and "Grotto of the Dancing Deer"

Michael Whelan
1981 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist
1981 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Artist

For the second time ever and the second year in a row an author won two awards in the short fiction categories.

"Lost Dorsai"
by Gordon R. Dickson
1981 Hugo Winner for Best Novella

Perhaps this story would be more effective if you are a fan of Dickson's Dorsai universe. I'm not and Dickson does not provide much in the way of exposition in this story which makes it hard to follow at some points.

A group of highly skilled professionals from a planet where everyone is a mercenary are tricked into taking a contract that puts them in the unwinnable position of defending a fortress with a marching band against an army of thousands. One of those mercenaries happens to be a pacifist which is why he left home to be the bandmaster. To Dickson's credit he doesn't go the completely obvious route with the concept but he makes up for that in other places. I found the characters to be interesting but it wasn't enough for me. I found it to be a fine attempt that I just couldn't connect with.

"The Cloak and the Staff"
by Gordon R. Dickson
1981 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

This on the other hand I found to be a very effective story. A highly placed slave of invincible alien conquerors rebels in little ways until he is found by the real resistance. Dickson does a suburb job in setting up the desperation of humanity being reduced to barely tolerated livestock. The villains are distant impersonal forces while the humans are are lost. It's a bleak, depressing tale that I think works because it takes time to set up the desperation. It makes "The Cloak and the Staff" well worth checking out.

"Grotto of the Dancing Deer"
by Clifford D. Simak
1981 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story
1980 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

Simak's story falls under the heading of "tribute Hugos". He was at the end of his career and this not particularly good story won both the Nebula and Hugo. The only way I can take it is that they were given on the basis of his career. An archaeologist who has been on a dig at a cave with extensive paintings goes back for one more look, meets a mysterious local who helped him on the dig, and finds a hidden set of paintings and artifacts. You're probably able to guess where this goes from just that brief description and the story offers zero surprises. The characters are flat despite the opportunity for some depth and the story appears to exist mainly to justify it's blindingly obvious twist.

Review - Rainbows End

Rainbows End
by Vernor Vinge
2007 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

That's not a typo, the novel's title is explicitly Rainbows End with no apostrophe.

For Vinge's third Hugo for best novel (putting him in spitting range of Heinlein and Bujold's record for four) he goes once more to one of his favorite subjects: information science. The book is about what happens when we can process vast amounts of information efficiently.

In the not too distant future a poet suffering from Alzheimer's is cured and has his body revitalized. He's lost his memory of the past twenty years as a result though and so has to be reeducated in the ways of the modern world where everyone is always connected to data. As he's recovering he discovers that libraries around the world are being destroyed for the sake of making perfect digital copies of all of the information and through that becomes embroiled in a terrorist plot.

Much like the other Vinge novels the description only covers the barest surface of what is occurring in Rainbows End but unlike A Deepness in the Sky I don't feel that Vinge ever loses track of what he's doing with his book. His storytelling is exceptional in this book as he juggles a dozen plot lines with a host of conflicting characters wonderfully.

The real star of the novel is the technology which makes me think of the book as a kind of info-punk novel (much in the same way that Stephenson's The Diamond Age is a nano-punk novel). Vinge spends a lot of time detailing how access to and being able to handle vast quantities of data will transform society. Medicine is customized to the individual's genetic code, schools teach how to find answers in the flood of information rather than the information itself, and architecture consists of unsteady thin boxes held up by systems balancing the building continually and the appearance governed by the selected viewpoint of the individual. And if that's not enough fandoms due to their tightly linked communities have become political forces; Pokémon fandom in particular is a major player.

Technology alone doesn't make a great novel. Vinge gives us a great cast playing off each other. The poet who acts as the viewpoint character was a particularly nasty person before he recovered from Alzheimer's and is having trouble reconnecting with his family and trouble with writing. He's regularly dealing with academics who were his rivals while learning the basic life skills in the information age. A student at the high school attempts to use him but has trouble bridging the exceptionally vast generation gap. His ex-wife is sympathetic but wants him to believe she is dead. And so on. The novel is packed to the rim with fascinating characters and Vinge manages to use them well.

The terrorist plot in theory is the guiding force behind the book but it seems downplayed and understated compared to the character development that is occurring. Since it is also a bit of an overdone plot I didn't mind that at all.

The only real misstep I think he makes is that he gets a bit heavy handed with his metaphors at certain points. In particular the shredding of all of the books to record them. Even in an age where data is vastly more important than physical it's a stretch to think that they would choose to destroy millions of dollars worth of property for the sake of recording it digitally. One copy of the data should be sufficient and there's easier and less destructive ways to get it, but Vinge is attempting to make a point about the values of the new society.

It's a minor thing in a great novel and the whole thing is a satisfying read. If Vinge wrote a sequel I would probably be interested in reading it but my feeling is that he wrote what was worth telling about his setting and anything else would be redundant. Rainbows End is a tight, well built book in a way that simply isn't done very often with world building novels these days.

As an interesting aside this is the first book to win two Hugo awards. Vinge won a Hugo for an early version of the first few chapters as "Fast Times at Fairmont High". It took him five years to finish up the book and the results were worth it.

Review - "Enemy Mine", "Sandkings", "The Way of Cross and Dragon"

Michael Whelan
1980 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

This is a bit of a funky year. First off, Michael Whelan begins his dominance of the artist category. Get used to seeing his name up there, he wins again in ten of the next twelve years.

Second, this is the first year where an author has won multiple Hugo awards in the short fiction categories. Other authors have won multiple awards in a year but they have been spread out.

Third, two of the three stories below have had adaptations made. One a feature film and the other as the pilot episode for the revival of The Outer Limits.

"Enemy Mine"
by Barry B. Longyear
1980 Hugo Winner for Best Novella
1979 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

Two pilots on conflicting sides of an interstellar war crash onto a hostile world and have to learn to live with each other to survive. It's a simple enough formula but Longyear manages to tell the story pretty well. Unfortunately he also takes a lot of shortcuts for the sake of his story that significantly reduce its impact.

The parts that work are the story of survival. Two people from very foreign cultures gradually learning to live with each other is an interesting story. What didn't work for me was the fact that the human was the only one changed by the experience. The alien who crashed with him doesn't learn about humanity, the flow of changes and re-examination is only one way. In addition when a child is born it ages in a matter of months to the equivalent of an eight year old human so that the world can be explained to him.

This makes the story come across as rather heavy handed ("Oh how foolish humanity is when explained to a child or a person from a perfect culture!") and in the end I see it as a fine effort but not quite good enough.

"Sandkings"
by George R. R. Martin
1980 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette
1979 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

This isn't a deep story; the characters a paper thin caricatures that you've seen before. This isn't an unpredictable story; it follows the standards of horror fiction very closely. What this story has is a very good telling of those common elements.

A man who enjoys exotic pets purchases colonies of "sandkinds". Hive mind insects that build elaborate castles and wage war against each other. He starves them and makes them battle against other creatures for his entertainment but eventually they get lose and madness ensues.

Despite following a standard pattern Martin still somehow manages to make each turn in the story surprising. He ratchets up the horror regularly and somehow always finds another worse level to go to. This is not a story to read if you have any kind of fear of insects.

So I wouldn't read this story looking for a brilliant insight into the human condition but it is chilling in the best possible way and I enjoyed it.

"The Way of Cross and Dragon"
by George R. R. Martin
1980 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story

In the distant future the Catholic church has adopted new ways to deal with alien species and interstellar travel. A new heresy has sprung up on a planet where they have sainted Judas Iscariot and an inquisitor travels to that world to confront the heresy. The new Bible created features an immortal Judas being slandered as the betrayer and spending eternity attempting to atone for sins he committed between the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Once on the world the inquistor confronts the head of the new religion and is very surprised by what he finds.

And I can guarentee that the reader will as well. As I read the story I thought I knew where it was going and then in one sudden sharp line Martin overturned everything. And then just when I thought I knew the new direction of the story he manages it again. It's almost like he was trying to make up for the predictability of the general plot of "Sandkings" by piling on the plot twists here.

The story on the whole works very well giving real thought to how large organized religions would react to interstellar travel and some real thought on what religion means to people. The story as a whole is spectacular and worth seeking out.

Review - Spin

Spin
by Robert Charles Wilson
2006 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

So much of science fiction revolves around mysteries. Books open with strange mysterious happenings and as the characters deal with them the reasons behind the weird event/alien artifact/unusual phenomena are (usually) revealed. This is a staple of science fiction in the style of John Campbell and the basic formula has persisted for more than sixty years. The problem usually is that the solution isn't half as interesting as the problem and readers can feel let down.

Spin isn't one of those instances.

In fact I can say it has the most interesting "solution" to a cosmic problem that I've ever seen. It's a concept that not only wraps the central mystery in the novel up in a nice little bow it also blows my mind with the possibilities where it could go from the ending.

One night the stars go away. The sun still hangs in the sky but the rest of the stars are simply gone. Thanks to satellites falling back to the ground it is found that time is passing on earth is passing hundreds of millions times faster than it is in the rest of the universe. An alien artifact has enclosed the world and it shields us from star light being blue shifted to a gamma ray burst and keeps the illusion of a normal day going. Anything that goes to high up is safely put back into the universe's normal time frame. Within just a few years of time within this barrier the sun will expand to initially render the earth uninhabitable and finally engulf the planet. If the barrier stays in place it will be the world's last generation.

Dealing with this are a family of industrialists in the style of the Rockefellers. The patriarch pins his hopes on his brilliant son to develop a solution while his daughter spirals out of control mirroring the rest of society which is dealing with the emotional impact of the effect. The story is told through the viewpoint of a family friend who grows up with the children and becomes one of the last doctors.

The book digs into every aspect of the time distortion that a reader may want as humanity struggles against it. Each option tried is more clever than the last and this is what Wilson does well in Spin. Every time you think he can't get more daring with his concepts he finds a new direction to go in. It makes Spin a gripping book.

Where he falls short is in the human drama. The human beings are much less interesting than the things that are going on around them. The family melodrama wears thin after a while and far too much of the book is dedicated to it. Do these characters seem familiar to you? Dominating father, son attempting to live up to him, daughter rebelling against her father and family, crusading doctor. There's little more to the characters than those broad descriptions I provided and they play out their story almost by rote.

And compounding that problem is Wilson's prose is dry as a desert. The sense of wonder that Spin contains is derived more from its big ideas than poetic descriptions. It's not atrocious writing, it just isn't particularly inspiring.

In the end I'd give Spin a hesitant recommendation. If you like the Campbellian science fiction where bold scientists work hard to deal with a phenomena then you'll definitely like Spin since it's one of the best examples of that particular branch of science fiction. If you prefer a deep search of the human condition then you probably will walk away more annoyed than happy with the novel. And if you fall somewhere between those two poles (as I do) then I suspect you'll enjoy the book with similar reservations.

Review - "The Persistence of Vision", "Hunter's Moon", and "Casandra"

Vincent DiFate
1979 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

"The Persistence of Vision"
by John Varley
1979 Hugo Winner for Best Novella
1978 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

While hitchhiking and walking cross country a man comes across a unique community of blind/deaf people and is so taken by their lifestyle he lives among them for a while. They have built a community and culture based on intimacy. Their lack of senses seems to put them in touch with something else beyond what normal men can sense.

Varley creates an interesting insular culture built around taking advantage of the remaining senses. There isn't a lot of story here (the transformation of the man who encountered the community is rather choppily handled) but the community presented is fascinating. I would recommend "The Persistence of Vision" as a pretty good except I have a problem with Varley.

I have read exactly three things by Varley and all three have prominently featured adults having sex with children and these have been presented as positive relationships. In "The Persistence of Vision" it's a thirteen year old girl throwing herself at a forty-seven year old man (which also annoys me with "sexually open culture means young, hot women throw themselves at repressed older men" theme that also is so common). Once is an odd quirk of a strange culture, twice is kind of weird, and at three times I'm suspecting that I'm seeing the author's fetishes on display. I've seen a lot of fetishes dropped into books by authors and typically it ranges from annoying to creepy. Sometimes going from one to the other like Heinlein's spanking obsession. Varley's starts out creepy and just gets worse and it has put me off ever wanting to read anything by him again.

"Hunter's Moon"
by Poul Anderson
1979 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

Anderson returns to the awards once more with this story that feels like a weaker version of his previously winning "The Sharing of Flesh". On an alien planet human anthropologists are attempting to understand why two sentient alien species are at war. One group, a flighty collective of poets and dreamers, is being preyed upon by feral stone age hunters who think that the fliers are responsible for their low birth rates. Two of the anthropologists use a weak form of telepathy to understand the two species and in their empathy with them gain insight into their strained marriage.

If this story was any more heavy handed it would have to be made from neutronium. It starts with pages of clumsy exposition and then follows that up with some particularly ham-handed parallels. And the whole this is extremely predictable; I could tell you where the story was going from page three. Top that off with one of the most bland couples as the protagonists and this is a story to avoid.

"Cassandra"
by C. J. Cherryh
1979 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story

A young woman sees the world overlaid with images of death and destruction. She lives each day seeing death in the faces of those around her until one day she finds someone who appears normal. Cherryh's take on precognition is interesting and I found the story enjoyable even though I knew where it was headed (the story's title is a bit of a clue). She captures the complications in dealing with those visions wel. This is a concept that I think I would have enjoyed seeing expanded on in a longer work but the tiny image she paints with it is worth reading.

Review - Blade Runner

Blade Runner
1983 Hugo Winner for Best Dramatic Presentation

There's three films that I think have defined the look of every science fiction film that has followed: Star Wars, Alien (which borrowed a lot of set design from Star Wars but find me an alien monster not inspired by H. R. Geiger now), and Blade Runner. Blade Runner itself borrowed a lot of visual techniques from film noir and placed them in the context of a sharp, grimy near future.

In the distant year 2012 Decker is a retired blade runner, a hunter of rogue replicants. Replicants are androids which are physically superior to humans in every way except that they have a built-in life span of four years. Replicants have been banned on earth and so when some of them do turn up on earth the blade runners hunt them down using psychological tests to identify them. A group of replicants comes back to earth to find their creator lead by a high end military unit and when they kill one of Decker's old friends he feels obligated to come out of retirement to hunt them down.

The movie wanders very far from it's source material, Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The fact that the title has changed helps mitigate some of the sting of that and the fact that director Ridley Scott built a pretty good science fiction film out of the adaptation process helps forgive more. It does bother me that most editions of Dick's book since the movie have the title Blade Runner but I can't blame the movie for being successful.

As mentioned the film is visually stunning in a way that still images can't convey. Scott took advantage of some old techniques and played up the contrast between light and shadows in the film and they constantly shift. On top of that he works with a very dynamic camera that moves through the sets in a way that makes them feel more lived in.

Blade Runner presents some core science fiction concepts rarely put on screen and for that alone it is worthy of praise. The androids are seeking meaning in their short lives and trying to be human. They're not simple movie monsters lurking and killing off the humans; they're sympathetic.

I do have some problems with the pacing since the film seems to switch gears so often that it can leave you dizzy. The hunt for androids in the population tends to fade to the background as the replicants tend to just come out and fight. Decker spends quite a while doing things that don't really connect directly to his investigation. Still Blade Runner has what I find to be one of the greatest climaxes in film history (not just science fiction films) so the choppiness of the scenes leading to it can be excused.

I can't end this review without mentioning the three different cuts of the movie. Obviously the Hugo was handed out for the original theatrical cut which is my current preference. Scott's director's cut was released in the early 90's removes a voice over narration and adds in some shots to give the film a "twist ending". Finally there is a new cut of the movie released in the past few months which I have not seen yet (it's in the mail so I'll comment on it when I see it). While I don't want to give out spoilers for the end of the movie I am not particularly happy with the twist added since it requires that the majority of the people in the early part of the film be lying solely for the purpose of fooling the audience. There's no need for the conspiracy gymnastics they would have to run through to allow the ending to work since a much more direct and simple option is available. So it's a twist that only exists to screw with the viewer's head and doesn't make sense in the context of the film. The other changes in the director's cut are fine to me but that one puts the rest of the film in a bad light.

Blade Runner is an exceptional movie. Well made on every level and well worth the attention it has received over the years. If you haven't seen it then now is the time to get a copy of it with the original version being widely available again.

Review - "Stardance", "Eyes of Amber", "Jeffty is Five"

Rick Sternbach
1978 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

I don't know what it was but 1978 might have been the best single year for Hugo award winning short fiction. I'd call two of them excellent and the other one very good

"Stardance"
by Spider Robinson and Jeanne Robinson
1978 Hugo Winner for Best Novella
1977 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

You might recall that I didn't like Robinson's earlier "By Any Other Name" but my problem with that story wasn't the writing or the characters; it was the fact that my suspension of disbelief was snapped so hard that it walked with a limp afterward. "Stardance" is different (perhaps due to the influence of his wife who is credited as co-author) and while I found its overall story a bit predictable the telling couldn't be better.

There is a woman who wants to be a dancer. She's brilliant with choreography, poetic with her own motions, but doesn't have the figure for a modern dance company. On her own she's perfect but with others she can't do it. So she is locked out of her dream but attempts to pursue it on her own with a professional camera man. Eventually she gets access to an orbital facility and trades her body for the opportunity to dance in zero gravity. The effect of working without gravity is destroying her but her dances are inspiring the world. She has one last great dance to perform but the stress of doing it may kill her.

The Robinsons have built a powerful, moving story on this framework. The characters for the most part are richly detailed and fascinating. Even though I knew quickly how it would progress (the story opens with hints of the ending) the narrative pulled me along. I could not recommend this story more highly.

"Eyes of Amber"
by Joan Vinge
1978 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

An alien civilization has been found in our own solar system and humanity has sent a space probe to them. The probe lands on Titan and falls into the hands of a psuedo-medieval bandit who is seeking revenge on her family. While her plans take shape the human monitors on Earth separated by the time lag for their signal debate what to do about it.

"Eyes of Amber" raises a lot of difficult questions and offers no solutions. Is it right for humanity to impose its values on another civilization? What about when it's our views on murder? And how much does the promotion of science in popular culture matter? How far should it go? The characters make their decisions but they aren't made easily. It does give the story a bit of an anticlimactic feeling since the tension mostly comes from the human drama which makes the resolution come across as a bit flat. Still I enjoyed the effect of the story as a whole.

"Jeffty is Five"
by Harlan Ellison
1978 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story
1977 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

Remember the Harlan Ellison who wrote clever and interesting stuff like "'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"? The one that got consumed by the pretentious, droning Ellison? Well by 1978 the New Wave was gone and people stopped equating "densely overwritten and meaningless" with "good". So the old Ellison came back with the very good "Jeffty is Five".

In a suburban neighborhood live Jeffty who is, as the title states, five years old. Jeffty has always been five since the narrator of the story was five years old himself. It appears to simply be a situation like Peter Pan until the narrator finds out that not only is Jeffty five, everything that was important to him when he was five also exists around Jeffty. Radio dramas continued, movies in that style still turned up, and so on.

As a result Ellison's story is deeply embedded in nostalgia and that isn't a bad thing. He indulges it while at the same time recognizing the problems with it. It makes the whole thing feel more like something Ray Bradbury would write rather than the angry ranting that Ellison commonly dipped into. Perhaps that was a sign of Ellison growing up.

One More Chilling Note About Hominids...

While writing that review of Hominids I remembered something. Here's the shortlist for the novels up for the 2008 Hugo award:

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
The Last Colony by John Scalzi
Halting State by Charles Stross

He somehow made it onto the ballot again.

Review - Hominids

Hominids
by Robert J. Sawyer
2003 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

The reason that I missed a few days of posting wasn't because I had moved and didn't have Internet access until they wired up the house. I had touched this book again and it hospitalized me.

This is it: the bottom of the barrel, as low as things can get, the worst novel to ever be awarded a Hugo. I found They'd Rather Be Right's pro-Scientology message disturbing but at least the book was written to the average standards of quality for science fiction in the 1950's. There is no such excuse for Hominids. It reads like a bad fanfic.

Robert J. Sawyer used to promote himself as Canada's only full time science fiction author (he wasn't really but why let facts stand in the way of self-aggrandizement). The 2003 Worldcon where this... thing that passes itself off as a book was selected for the Hugo award was held at Torcon in Toronto. So congratulations Canadians, your nationalism has committed the single biggest atrocity in the history of science fiction awards.

I had considered doing a full week of just how terrible Hominids is. It's that bad. I could have torn it apart page by page, posting passages of people spouting random facts like a child copying a sentence from an encyclopedia for a report one day and detailing the non-characters another. My move has put me behind schedule though so you only get this one day of review. I have a lot of pent up hostility toward Hominids so it's going to be a doozy. Thanks to Robert J. Sawyer I now know what a human optic nerve looks like. This is due to my eyes rolling so much as I read this birdcage lining masquerading as novel that I could see my own brain shriveling in horror.

In Hominids a Neanderthal from a parallel world where Cro-Magnons died out is transported to our world due to an accident involving computers. Once here he provides unsubtle and unclever comments on how bad modern day man is which are presented as "deep". Meanwhile on his own world his partner is put on trial for his murder despite the fact that it's incredibly simple to demonstrate that he didn't.

Sawyer peppers the book with facts about Neanderthals that often makes it read like a third grader's science paper. Particularly awful is the fact that his technologically advanced Neanderthal society is directly built around then current theories about Neanderthal behavior. Think about that for a second. Let's turn that around for us. Could you extrapolate anything like modern western society from knowledge of society and culture at the time of the Norman invasion? You might be able to draw simple parallels (there's white men in charge!) but hardly anything else and that's starting from a thousand years ago with a fairly complete understanding of the society. Sawyer attempts to connect societal structures from hunter/gatherers 100,000 years ago to a technological society a hundred years more advanced than us. It's a hundred times more stupid than thinking you could start from William the Conquerer and drop that society right into the modern UK.

And the foolishness keeps on coming. Neanderthals don't have internal combustion engines as they are good little guardians of the earth, but the book explicitly states that they use plastic sheets as writing materials (presumably so they don't hurt trees). Plastic means that they extract oil and refine it. If they refine it then they have to make kerosene and gasoline. So what are they doing with the combustibles since they aren't burning them?

The book is jam packed with contradictions like that. If you can't find a major logical problem on each page then you must be looking at one of the blank ones that are occasionally between chapters. There's the fact that an AI that learn English in four hours and could pass a Turing Test doesn't prove that the Neanderthal isn't from our present-day earth. And did you know that since Neanderthals cannot pronounce the long "e" sound due to their mouth structure neither can their computers. Or how about the fact that it is explained that a quantum computer would use copies itself in parallel universes but it ran out of parallel earths ("Divide by Infinity Minus One Error: Abort, Retry, Fail?")? Or that one of the human characters suddenly has a 1930's telephone connection that requires operator assistance to place a call so that he can have dramatic dialog?

The really bad stuff comes from things where Sawyer decided to just have Neanderthals do things differently from humans just so they would be different with little consideration of the complications of engineering, design, culture, or usability involved. They pull studs rather than push buttons; imagine trying to work a keyboard by pulling stops rather than pressing keys to see why this doesn't work. Neanderthal clothing is fastened at the shoulders; stick two towels together with a little bit of masking tape so that one hangs over each side of your body and they are fastened at your shoulders and then gently pull one down to see why clothing isn't made this way. And a special annoyance for cooks reading the book is that they use lasers to grill their food; despite what George Forman tells you a grill is not defined by the fact that it leaves lines on food when it cooks it.

So the world building is about as bad as it gets but Sawyer is not content to just be sloppy. The characters are also a problem. Or should I say the lack of character. Everyone in this book could have been replaced with a cardboard cut out and it would have made no difference. Particularly horrifying is the educated, mature college professor who gets raped at the beginning of the novel (Rape! TM, the lazy way of giving a female character a tragic background since 1612). She doesn't report it since she thinks that she wouldn't be believed. An over forty year old woman. In modern day Canada. On a college campus. And apparently she thinks she has the reputation as the town slut, that quick and simple techniques for handling the crime don't exist and certainly wouldn't be available in the location where rapes are most likely to occur, or is living in a place where women aren't trusted when they report rapes. Instead she freezes her attacker's sperm sample. You'd think that this would be an important plot point but the only thing that happens because of the rape is that she doesn't like men.

And she's the most defined character.

Despite the lowest common denominator prose and the large print and margins on the page it took me a long time to get through this one. Mainly because I had to stop every two paragraphs to walk across the room and pick up the book again. My body reflexively hurled anything that moronic thing away from me for fear of being contaminated by it. I'm not even joking on this one; I repeatedly tossed this book away as I recoiled from the horror of it.

I can honestly say I'd rather read They'd Rather Be Right again than this tripe. This is as bad as it gets. I have heard that Sawyer's Nebula win was similarly due to politicking and is an equally terrible novel. I'm dreading reaching that one.

Review - "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", "By Any Other Name", "The Bicentennial Man", and "Tricentennial"

Rick Sternbach
1977 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"
by James Tiptree Jr.
Tied 1977 Hugo Winner for Best Novella
1976 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

Three astronauts on the first trip around the sun emerge from behind it only to find they cannot contact Earth. They do pick up a strange transmission from a nearby source that claims to be a human space craft and that they have traveled through time. Eventually the astronauts meet the people on that craft and find that they have some vast differences.

The story is very deeply mired in the sexual politics of the 1970's but it has a real gut punch of an ending. Initially Tiptree plays up the astronauts being macho men who can't believe that women would be allowed into space but instead of going to the obvious and well worn place with those interactions (i.e. the women wind up being better than the men) things become more complicated. It's not a standard feminist screed though it might appear that way at first glance.

I did have some trouble suspending disbelief in the society Tiptree presents since I'm dubious that a culture of dilettantes could even maintain what they have. Still I think the whole effect of the story worked in the end.

"By Any Other Name"
by Spider Robinson
Tied 1977 Hugo Winner for Best Novella

It starts with a great concept: what if civilization was not destroyed by nuclear war, environmental disaster, or even a deadly plague but instead was irreparably damaged by greatly enhancing humanity's sense of smell. Unfortunately the concept isn't really explored well.

Everyone's sense of smell is enhanced to the point that it is ten times greater than a canine's and because people can't stand the smell of the world hysteria ensues. Decades later a small group of survivors in the wilderness are trying to rebuild while fighting a war with psychic gaseous beings who we could only detect once our sense of smell got better. Their leader wants revenge on the person who caused the problem and he sends his son into New York City to kill him.

I love the hook but Robinson only used it for color in a handful of scenes. It seems as though he didn't realize the implications of such a greatly enhanced sense, the complications with the wind, the fact that smells would carry for miles with that level of sensitivity.

It also doesn't help that he seems to confuse "natural" with "good". The "unnatural" smells are what drive humans crazy though it doesn't stop the new group from making paper or using a mimeograph, both processes that would make things stink for miles around them. If it was sensory overload that was the problem then this might have been more understandable since the typical city or even household would contain a bewildering array of smells but Robinson makes it explicitly "natural".

There's a lot that could have been done with characters who have such a distinct viewpoint and so perhaps some of my problem is that I see so much wasted potential. The story is reasonably crafted, my problem is just that the poor depiction of scents, something that every human being already deals with every day, snapped my suspension of disbelief badly.

"The Bicentennial Man"
by Isaac Asimov
1977 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette
1976 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

Isaac Asimov's best known story is also, in my opinion, his best. It's sappy and maudlin but it also cuts to the core of his robot stories and defines one of the common themes of science fiction perfectly. Simply put it is the story of a robot that wants to be human and in generations of observing people he gradually works toward his goal.

It's telling that Asimov's robot starts with sentience, one of the main points of being human, and works backward to smaller and smaller steps. His journey begins when it is found that he can create unique art, then he attempts to take on the social conventions of man before moving on to biological functions.

The human characters are simple but they're typically only on stage for just long enough to react to the robot before shuffling off again to allow the narrative to advance a few more years. So though they're all one note there is only one character really important to the tale and and by his nature he has to start as an innocent.

I don't think I would be able to take this kind of story in large doses but the sentimental tone got to me. "The Bicentennial Man" is story worthy of the attention it has received over the years (though the movie isn't).

"Tricentennial"
by Joe Haldeman
1977 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story

There isn't a deep story here but I think Haldeman's atmosphere makes up for it. In it a space colony plans to send a vessel to a nearby star where a signal was detected. For political reasons it's disguised as a trip to a small, dark, dwarf companion star to the sun which is composed of antimatter. Naturally complications ensue.

Haldeman tells the story in tiny vignettes. It's a style I have found annoying sometimes in the past but I think it was effective here because he uses it to gloss over some big events. The reader is told that they occurred and can infer some reasons why they occurred. "Tricentennial" is a common story wonderfully told.

Review - A Deepness in the Sky

A Deepness in the Sky
by Vernor Vinge
2000 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

Vinge's first Hugo winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep took his knowledge of network technology and painted a whole universe with it. Everything down to the aliens were reflections of certain basic technological problems. A Deepness in the Sky is a sequel of sorts but this time it lacks the strong central theme. The result is an interesting space opera but not one that feels as impressive as its prequel.

Deepness takes place thousands of years before Fire at a point where humanity is expanding from Earth on slower than light ships. They've yet to cross the boundary into to zone toward the edge of the galaxy where magical technologies become possible since once it has been found it starts an inevitable migration out to the edge. Pham Nuwen, one of the protagonists from Fire, rebuilt the divergent, distant colony worlds into one civilization with trade and conquest but was betrayed by his lover at the moment of his declaration of an interstellar empire. He went into hiding for millennia thanks to relativistic travel and longevity treatments and now his descendants have sought him out to make reparations and gain his assistance on a trip to a star where there's a sign of a non-human civilization.

The star is called OnOff since it flares to brightness for a few decades every few centuries before gradually dimming again. A strange species has built a culture around surviving these cycles, rebuilding themselves from almost nothing and then hibernating deep below the surface as their world freezes over again.

Shortly after arriving the traders encounter another interstellar human civilization, this one fascist. A battle ensues which devastates both fleets leaving them incapable of interstellar flight but the traders completely without leadership. The senior officer they have left is a young man on his first voyage whose family owned a share of the fleet. The fascists still have weapons and so an uneasy peace is built with them on top with both trying to last long enough to uplift the alien civilization to a state where it could help them. As the decades pass rebellions occur, war threatens the planet below, technology threatens to turn the traders into monomaniacal slaves, and in the background Pham plots a slow revenge on all sides and using the new technologies to build an empire that will last.

I can't help but notice that I need a lot more room to explain a Vinge plot; it doesn't feel like that when you're reading it but one of the interesting things about many of his books are when he puts together so many high concept ideas and sees how they interact. That may be Deepness's single biggest weakness since it doesn't feel like it has a particular guiding theme. You have three conflicting cultures influencing each other, nanotechnology and distributed processing, and human interaction as a filtering process. It feels like Vinge threw every interesting idea he could get his hands on in the book and it makes the whole thing feel unfocused.

There is a lot in the book about perpetuating culture across great distances and if I had to pick out a single biggest concept. The aliens have to try to retain their culture in the face of destruction every few decades, Pham wants to create a common culture that links humanity despite decades of distance between them, and the two co-existing human cultures try to keep their way of life in the face of a radically different culture and distance.

Once more Vinge's aliens are much more interesting than the humans. The species of OnOff is presented in human terms but at the same time feeling slightly off. The intention is that the sequences featuring them are a loose translation. At the same time the humans are fairly shallow. The fascists are your standard evil manipulators while the traders are clearly the good guys. Their leaders is the idealist put in a bad situation and they are complete with a naive young girl who is being taken advantage of.

One thing that Vinge throws into the novel that I have to single out for notice is the concept of "Focus", a technique the fascists use to initiate a permanent state of monomania on a person so that they can use them as living processors. The obsessions make the victims effective and fragile at the same time in their areas of expertise while reducing the victim to a de facto slave. Their world view becomes microscopically tight and Vinge delves into the psychology of such a mania in a way that is very interesting. In a way it's a method of keeping those characters two dimensional but at the same time turning the humans to aliens.

A nice thing about Deepness is that it is not necessary to read Fire to enjoy it. While knowing about the zones of thought and transcendent technology casts OnOff in a different light there isn't any heavy handed foreshadowing or even playing around with sequences that would make sense only in context of the series. Deepness can stand completely on its own.

The lack of a strong focus makes A Deepness in the Sky the weakest of Vinge's Hugo winners but that doesn't make it a bad book by any stretch. It's a very entertaining space opera with a lot of fascinating concepts thrown about which makes me recommend it. I just happen to enjoy many of Vinge's other works better.

Remembering Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke has passed away. I've been fairly harsh on his Hugo winning novels and story so now I offer you a novel and a story that I think are his best.

(Unfortunately my copy of the movie 2010 hasn't arrived yet or I would post an image from the film of his only film cameo. That image is from the back of The Fountains of Paradise.)

The novel is easy: 2001. Written at the same time as he was working with Stanley Kubrick on the movie Clarke's vision of humanity's encounter with aliens far superior to us stands on its own. The wonderful ideas that would have made bad exposition in the film are gently slipped into the novel to make it a richer experience. I know that Clarke fans generally prefer Rama or Fountains of Paradise which I personally didn't care for; perhaps that makes 2001 the Clarke book for people who didn't care for his other books.

The story is "The Nine Billion Names of God" where he merges the mystical and the scientific into one tight, stunning story. The technology is out of date but the concepts are not. It also has one of the greatest final lines in science fiction.

Review - To Say Nothing of the Dog

To Say Nothing of the Dog
by Connie Willis
1999 Hugo Winner for Best Novel

To Say Nothing of the Dog is set in the same world as Willis's previous winner Doomsday Book and shares some characters but Dog is a better novel than Doomsday Book for one very important reason: it's more entertaining.

In my younger days I went through that period of "If it's trying to be fun then it must stink." I took seriousness and bleakness as a sign of quality. It's a valley anyone who is developing critical skills has to pass through. Back then I would have loved the dreariness of Doomsday Book's conclusion while been turned off by the cheerful playfulness of To Say Nothing About the Dog.

The title of To Say Nothing of the Dog comes from Jerome K. Jerome's humorous Victorian novel Three Men in a Boat and Willis's time travelers this time land themselves in a boat trip on the Thames and a Victorian comedy of manners. Willis's time travel is deterministic; if a time traveler could affect history then their arrival is either moved in time and space enough that they don't or the time machine simply fails to work. Paradoxes should not be possible in Willis's world.

This book revolves around the reopening of Coventry Cathedral which is being rebuilt exactly as it was originally for the hundredth anniversary of its destruction in the blitz. The entire history department at Oxford are working themselves to collapse to be ready for it since a large portion of their funding is dependent on pleasing the rich matron who is responsible for the reconstruction. The overbearing matron has been making their lives miserable in the search for the Bishop's Bird Stump, a piece of art from the cathedral which transformed one of her ancestors life and which has been missing for a hundred years.

In the exhaustion of repeated trips to the past to gather information one member of the history department removes something vital from the late nineteenth century. That should be impossible and as a consequence the paradox runs the risk of disrupting the universe. The task of replacing it is given to a man who's area of expertise is World War 2 and the time machine lands him a long way from the manor which he needs to get to. And so the fate of the universe comes down to a boat trip on the Thames, a young man who falls for every pretty face, a confused history professor, a butler who did it, an extinct species, and a shallow pampered girl. To say nothing of the dog.

The story shares a lot in common with Doomsday Book. The time traveler, for example, continually makes faux pas in dealing with the Victorian household but this time around its excused since the trip was an emergency rush and he had little knowledge of the era. Unfortunately Willis does keep her bad habit of dancing around plot points that were immediately obvious the reader for hundreds of pages. Also Willis spends a lot of time explaining the mechanics of time travel in her world which just isn't that interesting.

But that didn't bother me that much since the book is a comic one. It's not the deep rich plot that's good about it, it's the awkward situations that people keep getting caught by. Quirky characters dance in and out of the story at just the right moments to cause trouble. Most of the them exist as comedic foils so they're not very deep but they are memorable.

And that's what the book is going to come down to. Think that Willis has an inspired zaniness in the comedy used in her other books then To Say Nothing of the Dog is going to be perfect form for you. On the other hand if you find that kind of craziness annoying then you're not going to enjoy it. There's no sense of doom, just about everyone gets a happy ending, and quite a few people get kittens. It's a fun book and as a result one I recommend.