Review - Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction

Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction
Edited by Jeff Prucher
2008 Hugo Winner for Best Related Non-Fiction

You might remember a few years ago where the OED was soliciting help from science fiction fans to help track the etymology of some terms that have an origin with science fiction. Consequently It isn't mentioned in the introductions to Brave New Worlds but I strongly suspect that this new dictionary of science fiction terms may have grown out of that earlier effort to trace some of these terms.

This dictionary is an interesting effort. Over the past century science fiction has generated a vast collection of jargon. Sometimes the jargon becomes so well integrated that it can be hard to remember that it is jargon. If you asked random people on the street what an "alternate universe" is the majority would be able to give you some kind of answer. Other terms like cyberpunk will be casually dropped by fans but have no meaning for the general public.

For that reason I don't think it's particularly helpful as a reference book even though science fiction fans are certain to find many fascinating facts in it. Unlike the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and it's Fantasy counterpart the dictionary isn't completely supplanted by the Internet. Searching for terms is more likely to find their use than an explanation of them. Authors who use unfamiliar terms are likely to explain them in the text or through context. The only place where you'd find a significant use for Brave New Words is if you weren't an SF fan and were conversing with SF fans about science fiction. In that case you're unlikely to even be aware of Brave New Words, let alone have a copy of it handy.

Taking the book from that perspective I referred to it as I read a few different message board and usenet threads that would have science fiction terms casually dropped into them. I was able to find much of the jargon used but I couldn't find things like "near-future" (it's an obvious construction but it has a specific meaning in science fiction) or the prefix "psi-" despite the presense of "psionics".

So I can't recommend it as a reference book but it does contain a lot of interesting etymological data for fans. Here's a good sampling of what I got from the dictionary. Who has the first recorded use of the following terms: sci-fi, sense of wonder, and deep space?

Robert Heinlein was the first person recorded to abbreviate science fiction as sci-fi and the first entry listed with sci-fi having negative connotations is 1974. That entry does make it clear that fans had already built up a dislike of the term.

That elusive sense of wonder that drives science fiction and fantasy was first mentioned by H. P. Lovecraft. I bet you thought he only created words like "squalmous".

The first reference to interstellar space as "deep space" goes to E. E. "Doc" Smith and that construction has leaked back into science.

In the end I liked Brave New Words. Despite the weaknesses in its format and design I appreciated the examination of the history of the words. Though I won't be pulling it off the shelf to check unfamiliar words going through it once is worth your effort.

Review - "Oceanic", "Taklamakan", and "The Very Pulse of the Machine"

Bob Eggleton
1999 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

I've started the process of collecting the World Fantasy Award winners but it will be a few more weeks before reviews start up. The first one is here and the next few week worth are in the mail. I'm hoping that once I'm over the hump of the first few that I'll be able to acquire most of the rest without too much trouble. Of course since the toughest books for me to get in hard cover from the Hugos and Nebulas were from the 1990's there could be trouble on the horizon.

Anyway, look for an overview of the awards and a listing shortly before I start the reviews.

All three of this week's stories are in The Year's Best Science Fiction: The Sixteenth Annual Collection along with Ted Chiang's Nebula winner "The Story of Your Life".

"Oceanic"
by Greg Egan
1999 Hugo Winner for Best Novella

I had a strongly mixed reaction to this story. Egan picks his theme and tells that story reasonably well and for that reason I think it's worth reading, on the other hand there's a few road bumps and stylistic choices that prevent me from getting too enthusiastic about it.

On a world where culture has been divided by those who spend their lives wandering the oceans and those who make their way on dry land a child has a religious encounter in the depths. He becomes a fervent follower of a fundamentalist religion with Christian overtones but as time passes the events of his life drive him further and further from that. That's the real story that Egan is telling but he ties it up with the unusual history of the planet and biochemistry.

At its core there's a decent story in "Oceanic" and as long as it sticks with people it's fine. I wouldn't call it brilliant but I've read much worse. The problem for me was when Egan veered into the world building and my reaction was "That doesn't make any sense!" In particular there is the protagonists first sexual encounter where after pages of being mysterious we find out that after sex they swap genitals with their partner. It's a bit of an odd ball thing to just throw in and it has absolutely zero impact on the story other than to pad things out for a couple of pages and have mysterious references to it in the story before this point. When I hit that part I thought that Egan was going to go into gender relationships or the impact of this on the religions of the planet since what he told us about them doesn't make any sense if they're all hermaphrodites. Instead he goes straight into a "And now because of my religion we must get married!" bit and when the protagonist's partner refuses they swap back and nothing more is said of it.

There's other developments that Egan has in the story that give the appearance of being part of the narrative and in the end don't do anything at all. It makes for frustration on the part of the reader. In general I'd give "Oceanic" a hesitant recommendation but I wouldn't suggest hunting it down.

"Taklamakan"
by Bruce Sterling
1999 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

A pair a cat burglars are recruited by the government to infiltrate a major project located in the remotest desert in China. They're anticipating a construction center for interstellar space craft or a new superweapon. When they sneak in the find a secret that is both far more shocking than anything they could have anticipated. I'm hesitant to describe the story more than that since the plot is dependent upon the slow reveal of the details.

This is a story for tech fetishists. I get the suspicion reading it that Sterling cared a lot more about the technology the characters use than the plot or the characters themselves. If you read the story brace yourself for lots of technology to be thrown out there. Fortunately Sterling doesn't spend the entire story on describing everything and how it works but he does spend a lot of time on it.

Despite that bit of criticism I wound up enjoying "Taklamakan" quite a bit. Sterling paces the reveals in the story very well as things get stranger and stranger. I never did get a proper feel for the characters beyond the archetypes of the brash young adventure seeker and the wise mentor but I wasn't bothered by that since the plot zips from one point to another only pausing to explain how awesome some bit of equipment they're carrying is. It's not a story for everyone; if you need strong characters then look elsewhere. Still I liked it.

"The Very Pulse of the Machine"
by Michael Swanwick
1999 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story

A few years ago I did quite a bit of research on the moon of Jupiter Io. Like its companion Galilean satellites Io is a fascinating place. Still it has not been a popular place for science fiction. We are, after all, more likely to settle on the more solid Ganymede or dive below the ice of Europa than try to build on a constantly shifting volcanic surface that builds up a massive electrical charge. So this gave me some extra appreciation for what Swanwick was doing in "The Very Pulse of the Machine".

One of the two members of the first mission to land on Io died when the rover they were traveling in crashed. The other is left to drag her body across miles of inhospitable terrain to get back to their lander. On the trip her dead companion's voice keeps trying to talk to her over the radio alternating between poetry fragments, textbook information on Io, and details of the chemistry of the surfaces she is crossing. She could be going mad or something could be trying to communicate with her.

The lone astronaut trying to cross inhospitable terrain is one of those science fiction staples that everyone seems to do at least once. Swanwick builds the surface of Io into a distinct threat. Besides that the survival is secondary to the voice on the radio. Those two factors give "The Very Pulse of the Machine" a different feeling and I wound up enjoying it.

The Most Disputed SF Definition of Them All...

I just got my copy of The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (look for a review in a few days) and I immediately jumped to the single most argued over definition in SF. Here it is:

hard science fiction, hard sf n. science fiction in which the technology or science portrayed in the story has been extrapolated from current scientific theories, especially in which the laws of nature (as understood at the time of writing) are not violated.

Hmm... I don't think that will stop any bickering over what hard SF is...

Review - Serenity

Serenity
2006 Hugo Winner for Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation
2005 Nebula Winner for Best Script

"Great news!" I said to my friends, "I got us tickets to the preview screening for Serenity!"

"What's Serenity?" one of them asked.

"The movie that continues Firefly!"

"Firefly?"

I lent them my box set of the series and the next week when I saw them the first words out of their mouth were, "Where's the rest of it?"

"That's it. There is no more. It was canceled after only a few episodes aired."

"We need to see more."

"Well fortunately there's a movie in development and I've got tickets to a very early screening..."

The movie was everything I wanted: a well made conclusion to the spectacular television series. Unfortunately it also made it clear just what a hard sell any high concept science fiction will be to a mass audience.

The crew of the interplanetary trading ship Serenity are just trying to get by doing whatever they can for money even if they have to bend the law a bit to do it. Among them are a brother and sister on the run from the authorities since she's been brainwashed to be their psychic assassin and is carrying a head full of secrets that could destroy the government. So they wind up trying to run from the amoral agent trying to capture her.

I'm not one of those people who give Josh Whedon a free pass on everything he does (I have seen Aliens: Resurection and there is no excuse for that), but the television series Firefly was one of the great cut short series of the past ten years. The blending of western motiffs and science fiction was hardly new even for media SF (see Outland) but it is rarely done as well. When it was cancelled after being bounced around the schedule more times than it actually aired it left behind many dangling plot threads and Serenity was designed to give some kind of conclusion to them.

Despite that the movie stands well on its own. It opens with a flash back to before the show began to fill in the back story and necessary exposition is handled quickly. While you'll get a lot more out of the movie if you've seen the teleivision series the film is not hostile to new viewers.

One aspect to the show and movie that I appreciated was the fact that nearly all of the cast are anti-heroes of some stripe. They're not upstanding citizens; at best some of them are less likely to sell out anyone they come across. It can make some viewers less likely to enjoy watching them but I found it make their reactions more interesting since it was tough to say which way things would go.

And that's one aspect to Serenity that I particularly enjoyed. The first time I watched it I had no idea how it would end. A pyrrich victory? The Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid ending? It was a brutal movie in that sense; who would walk away at the end was strongly in doubt.

If you are a nerd on the Internet who somehow hasn't watched Firefly and Serenity I strongly recommend it. It's lively, witty, clever, and exciting in a way that other science fiction franchises only wish they could be. There isn't an SF fan out there who I wouldn't recommend it to.

Review - Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars

I don't read a whole lot of webcomics. I used to back in the young days of the web when the idea that someone might draw a comic and put it on the web was a wild idea. Those early pioneers set patterns still seen today: the wanna-be epic where a humor strip loses humor for massive infodumps of bad story requiring understanding of years of confusing continuity, the fanbase pandering where in-jokes take over, the egotrips where self aggrandizement takes the place of actually making the comic, and more. There are acres of webcomics where the artistic quality of the first strip is as good as it ever gets no matter how terrible it is. And that doesn't even get into the massive piles of strips that are just outright terrible.

One of the very few I do read consistantly is Schlock Mercenary which I've been following for more than seven years. The ongoing story of mercenaries a thousand years into a space opera future manages to hold me for three key reasons and they all are in the writing: it's clearly told, well paced, and strip creator Howard Taylor makes a point of recognizing the ugly consequences of the details of his world. Taylor has just released his fourth print collection of strips entitled The Teraport Wars which cover nearly eighteen months of his daily strip.

There's a lot of stories in The Teraport Wars but its central one is a conflict between a fleet of altruists and dyson sphere building aliens who have manipulated interstellar civilization for over a hundred thousand years by torturing secrets out of anyone who used their interstellar transportation system with the mercenary cast stuck in the middle and just wanting to get paid.

This is the best value of any web comic strip collection I've ever seen.

Strike that: this is the second best value of any comic strip colection I've ever seen beaten only by those really impressive Fantagraphics collections and they only edge this out by being the complete works of various masters of the art form. First, The Teraport Wars is more than 210 pages of strips for twenty-five dollars. That's 493 daily strips. You'll pay only slightly less than that for half the content from most people. Second the production values are exceptional. It's printed on glossy paper in full color with a layout that flows smoothly and allows plenty of room for notes from the author and sketches.

And the content isn't bad either. Taylor moves quickly from story arc to story arc and there's a lot of big space opera action. The cast is a wondeful collection of barely functional sociopaths who have taken the saying "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent" to heart; they're not incompetent so they resort to violence much earlier.

One stumbling block is the art. In the beginning the art in Schlock Mercenary was... well... terrible. I've seen worse art in webcomics but not often. By the start of The Teraport Wars Taylor was on his way to developing his ability but things were still rough. By the end of the book you can see real development in the art (eventually he does drop the thick inking). Taylor aknowledges this; in fact the first collection of his strips actually follows The Teraport Wars for when they were originally published.

Webcomic collections can be a tough sell since who needs a print collection of what's being given away on the web? The Teraport Wars does deliver on that by being a wonderful presentation of the strips. if you haven't read Schlock Mercenary I'd say jump to the beginning of the current storyline where the band of thugs takes on a mission of mercy where everyone is in over their heads.

I Am Not Iron Man

Six months after its release I finally watched Iron Man. I didn't see it in theaters since the trailer made it pretty clear that I wouldn't like it and I wouldn't have even bothered with the DVD except that Rifftrax released a commentary for it. My initial impression from the trailer was dead on; Iron Man is exactly what I don't like in superhero movies.

The thing about superheroes is that they are completely ludicrous but have their own conventions and form which is followed. In short it's the implausible form of modern day deities beating the snot out of each other that forms the basis of superhero comics. Yet somehow superhero movies tend to forget that's what the "stories" exist for.

Looking at Iron Man we have exactly three short set pieces where there is superhero action and only the first of them is particularly satisfying. First we have the emergence of the superhero in a prototype form smacking around the terrorists who were holding him hostage. Despite the fact that this takes almost no effort there is a certain amount of catharsis to the sequence which lets it pay off.

Not so for the second time where the completed Iron Man goes back and with even less effort kills more of the same group of terrorists. This is clearly intended to stand in as the hero goes out and does good deeds to establish himself sequence but because it's a fight with no risk involved it doesn't really matter. I've already gotten my "Hell yeah! Take that terrorists!" moment out of the way in the first set piece and the second one feels pointless.

Finally at the very end of the movie it's time for a supervillain confrontation. Except Iron Man has already been disabled and the "fight" isn't much of one. The villain is never established as a real threat since he had to cheat even before he debuted. Iron Man is never established as a hero because we never saw him do anything heroic. So the final set peice lacks any weight at all.

Compare this to The Dark Knight where Batman and the Joker have repeated confrontations. Similarly in Spider-Man 2 there's a lot that happens specifically to establish what Spider-Man does (besides "whatever a spider can"). Iron Man is closer to Daredevil where we only see the superhero action a handful of times and none of them feel significant.

The reason this happens is obvious: action set peices are expensive. With a bit of effort and skill, however, this can be worked with. When the narrative form of a superhero movie can't even live up to your standard level of superhero comics then there is a real problem.

Review - Chronospace, "We Will Drink a Fish Together", and "The 43 Antarean Dynasties"

Bob Eggleton
1998 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

This was a funky set of stories to read. Not because of their content or any link between them but because they were a pain to get them. Chronospace is an expansion of Allen Steele's "...Where Angels Fear to Tread"; since the story has never been collected anywhere I had to get that book and rather than just read the section with the title of the short story I need to review the book as a whole since I can't be certain how it was expanded. "The 43 Antarean Dynasties" is not widely collected as well so I had to obtain a copy of Resnick's collection Travels With My Cats (which is a fine set of his short stories and I'd give it a solid recommendation with my only complaint being that there is no hard cover edition). Which meant that I had to get a third book for "We Will Drink a Fish Together".

I think next time I'll take up creating a simpler collection. Like Faberge eggs.

Chronospace
by Allen Steele
An expansion of "...Where Angels Fear to Tread", the 1998 Hugo Winner for Best Novella

I'm not going to give this book a full review since I read it for the Hugo winning short fiction it was based on. I'll fit as much complaining as possible into the next couple of paragraphs to make up for that.

In the future historians time travel to investigate the past and their time machines are mistaken for alien spacecraft by those who catch a glimpse of them. A team is selected for the most dangerous mission yet, a trip to the final voyage of the Hindenburg. Something changes, though, and the blimp does not explode leaving the time travelers stranded.

I had a lot of problems with this book structurally and factually. The book is divided into three sections with the middle third having the title of the original novella. The final third reads like a sequel to it rather than part of the same book and the first third contains little activity. The whole effect is a patchwork Frankenstein's monster of a novel where the reader is given extended exposition for events they read about twenty pages before. When a character needs to be reminded that they broke history a few hours before hand then there is something seriously wrong.

(Seriously, there is a conversation that goes something like this: "Oh my god, what happened to the world?! Why has everything changed?" "Well we screwed up history a few hours ago. I suspect that might have something to do with this." "Perhaps you're right...")

A real issue for me is that the story is built upon the discredited theory that the Hindenburg exploded due to sabotage. I can suspend my disbelief for time travel, FTL drives, and concepts that get discredited after the author writes the story but I want a story about history to get the basic history right. Sabotage is nice and dramatic but even in 1997 people recognized that it was the least likely of the possible causes. And somehow between now when we don't know and four hundred years from now they discover definitive proof of the sabotage, who did it, what methods they used, and what went wrong since it is common knowledge even before the time travellers go back to view things first hand. It appeared to me as I read the book that Steele read some of the popular conspiracy theories and took them as fact.

I need to stop here before I continue on to Steele's horrific handling of exposition, his head scratching characterization, the complications policing time travel being completely ignored, and how the ending actually appears to make the central conflict of the novel worse while everyone acts like it is resolved for the better. That's enough for me, though. This is a bad novel; the middle third is a bit more ambiguous and most of my problems come from the book ending sections so the novella may be better. After that mess I'm not putting in the effort to find out, though.

"We Will Drink a Fish Together"
by Bill Johnson
1998 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

Ah the quirky folk of small town Middle America. I don't know if you can rightly call them stock characters when they seem to be defined by the author randomly picking character quirks out of a list of zaniness but they do come up a lot in modern fiction. It takes a deft hand to take this theme and give it some depth.

The human body guard for an alien ambassador is called back to his small town home to bury a family friend. Assassination attempts have been made on the ambassador and the ambassador follows hoping to dodge the attackers. Naturally wackiness ensues as they deal with the quirky inhabitants of the small town.

Not a lot really happens in this story; it just drifts from encounter to encounter until it finally comes to an end. While Johnson avoids the pitfall of being patronizing regarding the small town inhabitants he doesn't really manage to make them more than simply quirky. I wasn't really engaged by any of them. I didn't find "We Will Drink a Fish Together" to be a bad story, Johnson tells it reasonably well, it just didn't thrill me.

"The 43 Antarean Dynasties"
by Mike Resnick
1998 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story

Empires rise and fall but their monuments remain to be gawked at by tourists. In "The 43 Antarean Dynasties" the monuments of past glories are alien ones; a vast civilization that has fallen into ruin after centuries of repeated invasions. A tour guide shows a few tourists these wonders and deals with their apathy.

Resnick says that the story was inspired by Egypt but it could have been about any country with archeological treasures standing next to crushing poverty. That might be the biggest problem with the story since the themes might be better explored with the present day Earth rather than disconnected with a "better than everything" alien civilization. Still Resnick does a fine job of making his points without being too heavy handed; tourists are tourists after all and they bear no more guilt for not reveling in a foreign culture than the members of that culture do for not appreciating theirs. The story is a bit light so I wouldn't say it's worth undergoing a monumental effort for but if you come across it then you won't feel worse for having read it.