→ February 26, 2018
→ By

Barrayar.

My latest post for Insiders covers draft prospects Brady Singer and Jackson Kowar, plus notes on some other players at Florida and Miami.

I came into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vor novels out of order, starting with The Vor Game, then Mirror Dance, and just now getting to the second book in the series and the one that introduces the star character of Miles Vorkosigan, Barrayar. Miles starts the novel as an embryo and ends it as a troublemaking toddler, so he’s not a central character, but the story of how he ended up with the bone disorder that came to dictate much of the path of his life – along with his friendship with the Emperor – is at the heart of this quick, enjoyable novel.

The protagonist here is Miles’s mother, Lady Cordelia (Naismith) Vorkosigan, herself a soldier of sorts from Beta Colony, now married to Lord Aral Vorkosigan, her former enemy in battle, and living on the planet Barrayar. Aral has become regent on the death of the old Emperor, with the successor Georg still in single digits. A coup attempt ensues, driving the couple into exile, but leaving the still undeveloped fetus that will become Miles growing in a “uterine replicator” in the capital city, under guard, when they’re forced into hiding. The main thrust of the book revolves around Cordelia’s flight and daredevil attempt to infiltrate the city to grab the replicator and rescue the fetus whom Aral’s father has already promised to reject as his grandson.

This was the first of three Vor novels to win the Hugo – McMaster Bujold also won for a fantasy novel, Paladin of Souls, that didn’t grab me like these books have – and the only one that doesn’t have the rascal Miles at its heart. Without him to cause confusion and delay (and eventually save the day), the book is a lot less funny, and instead gives us the very serious Cordelia as its hero, with Aral present and supportive, but unusually willing for a Barrayaran husband to respect the wishes and opinions of his wife. Instead, it’s a straight adventure/rescue novel with a feminist bent – granted, that’s also quite unusual in the sci-fi world, but now that I’ve read all but 5 of the Hugo winners (and at least one by every author to win it), I feel confident in asserting that the winning books authored by women are both better overall and include better, more fully-realized female or non-male characters. It’s not even close.

Cordelia doesn’t get a lot of time to completely grow as a character in this brief book, which is quite a bit shorter than the other two Vor novels I’ve read, but she’s well-rounded from the start: Strong, assertive, self-doubting, acutely conscious of her outside status, completely dedicated to her family, struggling with fealty to her husband’s position in society and desire to have him safe at home. Reading this first would have probably given me more insight into her cameos in later novels; she’s obviously a critical influence on Miles’ development, but here we see exactly what she had to do to rescue him and to what lengths she was willing to go.

The book also introduced a number of characters who appear later in the series, although there’s one book before this one, Shards of Honor, that includes the battle where Aral and Cordelia meet, where I assume some of the other characters (Illyan, Kothari) also appear. I’ll probably start there now that I’ve read the winners in the series and go forward in chronological order. If you’re interested in reading just one or two of these books, though, I’d recommend something with Miles in it, because he’s much more fun than his parents.

Next up: I just finished the second Hugo winner, The Forever Machine, which lived up to its reputation as the worst novel to win the award.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 18, 2018
→ By

Startide Rising.

My reaction to the Padres’ absurd deal with Eric Hosmer is up for Insiders.

David Brin’s Startide Rising is the second book in his Uplift universe, where sentient species across the galaxy (and beyond, I think) have used genetic engineering to bring “client” species to sentience themselves, in exchange for a period of indentured servitude to the patron class lasting something on the order of 100,000 years. Humans in this universe have themselves uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins but done so outside of the established order, granting their clients equal status in a shorter period of time, which has upset some of the most powerful patron races who prefer the status quo. It won Brin the first of his two Hugo Awards for Best Novel, along with The Uplift War (which I read in October), the third book in the series; this book also won the Locus and Nebula awards. It’s just not as good as the latter novel, by which point Brin seems to have improved his storycraft and his character development. And it’s really held back by the whole thing with dolphins flying spaceships.

The action of Startide Rising all takes place on one planet, Kithrup, that has no native sentient species, and is mostly covered by water. (We learn later in the book that an earlier sentient species was granted residency here to live out its senescent years, but is presumed extinct.) A dolphin-piloted vessel, the Streaker, has landed here, with a crew of all three Earth species, to hide out from galactic forces chasing it in the wake of its discovery of an enormous ghost fleet of spaceships that herald the discovery of a previously unknown, long-extinct race that may have been the fabled Progenitors of many or all current sentient species, including humans. While a fierce battle is waged overhead, the Streaker‘s crew must repair their damaged ship and await rescue or plot a dangerous escape, while some members fight internally over the best route and others explore the relatively unscathed planet.

Whereas the multi-threaded plot of the longer Uplift War involved multiple, three-dimensional characters, and created some believable tension in both action sequences and in the slower-burning intrigues, Startide Rising employs a too-large cast of disposable heroes, none of whom is interesting and some of whom verge on the ridiculous. (Among them: Charles Dart, the neo-chimp scientist whose ruthless commitment to research makes him a Spock-like caricature; and the dolphin whose name I forget who spends most of the novel sexually harassing a human crew member, which I think Brin intended to be humorous.) The novel’s very short chapters and constant shifts in perspective don’t help the narrative build any momentum, and the discovery in Kithrup’s oceans that eventually becomes a key part of the resolution is just not well written or explained.

But the bigger problem I had is the dolphins … which are still sea creatures, last time I checked. Brin jumps through all kinds of hoops to explain their presence, and I can at least suspend my disbelief in their evolution to intelligent, self-aware creatures. But they’re dolphins flying spaceships. I can accept a lot of things in science fiction, but I read this book with Tommy Shaw’s line from the Styx episode of Behind the Music stuck in my head. Shaw said he “just couldn’t write songs about robots.” Yeah, well, I just can’t get on board with dolphins – 12-13 feet long, 350 or so pounds, and, you know, without arms or legs – flying spaceships. Normally I’d say reading any series in order is an asset, but if you’re interesting in Brin at all, just skip to The Uplift War, which is better in every way and doesn’t include any dolphin characters at all.

Next up: Joe Haldeman’s Forever Peace.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 13, 2018
→ By

The Snow Queen.

Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen won the Hugo and Locus Awards for best novel in 1981, a book that is now the first in a series of four novels set on the world of Tiamat, where people are split into two races (“clans”), Summers and Winters, and travel to and from this planet from elsewhere in the universe is interrupted for long periods by the path of Tiamat’s sun around a nearby black hole. This self-contained novel focuses less on the Queen herself than on the two cousins, Moon and Sparks, whose destinies are intertwined with that of the Queen and the impending change in power from Winter to Summer.

Arienhrod is the reigning Snow Queen, but her reign will end with the coming shift to Summers and the close of the portal to the rest of colonized space provided by the black hole (which Vinge treats as a sort of wormhole). To try to preserve her power, she implants various women in the kingdom with embryonic clones, one of which will survive to become Moon. Moon and Sparks are cousins and lovers from childhood, both of whom strive to become “sibyls,” mystics who can tap into an unknown source of universal knowledge by entering a trance state when asked, but only Moon is able to do so, creating the first crack in the relationship between the two. Their paths eventually diverge, where Moon ends up off-world and appears to be permanently separated from Sparks and the rest of Tiamat, while Sparks rises quickly to a position as Arienhrod’s lover and consigliere, known as “Starbuck,” putting him on a collision course with Moon when the latter returns to Tiamat (itself named for the Babylonian sea goddess) and discovers the truth behind the planet’s source of immortality serum.

Based both on the folktale later made into a fable by Hans Christian Anderson fable and on Robert Graves’ book-length essay The White Goddess, The Snow Queen works better on a metaphorical-fabulist level than as a work of straight narrative, as neither Moon nor Sparks feels like a fully realized character, and Arienhrod, whatever she may have been prior to the events of this book, is just a narcissistic villain. The immortality serum is harvested from a sort of sea creature called a mer, and there are obvious parallels there to man’s quest for petroleum, for animal rights, and even for the way in which we dehumanize other races or religions to suit our own purposes. Moon herself is a clear nature versus nurture metaphor, one that I think is more relevant today as we learn more about how our genes determine our personalities as well as our appearances; she’s constantly confused for Arienhrod, but frequently must choose between using the power that confers and doing the ‘right’ thing for the people of Tiamat, even those who would otherwise do her harm.

The other strength of The Snow Queen is the fact that it has female characters at its center, even if they’re not all fully fleshed out; Moon is the real protagonist, a complex character fighting her own nature and ultimately handed the responsibility for the fate of an entire planet. Sparks is less three-dimensional, and unquestionably the weaker of the two cousins, pursuing power for its own sake and surrendering to an easier life that only requires that he ignore the moral questions around his choices. The society Vinge has created isn’t strictly matriarchal, but is egalitarian enough that she can populate it with strong women without lengthy explanation … which, for a sci-fi novel written in the late 1970s, was remarkable in and of itself. (She was the fourth woman to win the Hugo for Best Novel, and hers was just the fifth win for a woman author in the 28 awards to that date.)

Where The Snow Queen lacks something is in the story itself, which felt disconnected in several ways, and never really left me in any doubt about what would happen to Arienhrod at the end of the book. The event that puts Moon on a spacecraft heading off Tiamat and through the portal is a bit of a ridiculous coincidence, given how important that event and her newfound colleagues become in the later stages of the book. There’s a subplot around a female police officer who becomes commander on Tiamat for dubious reasons, creating a professional and personal journey that would have benefited from some expansion but that felt a little under-told because it was inherently secondary to the Moon-Sparks-Arienhrod plot thread. It moves, as Vinge’s writing is crisp enough to keep the story flowing, but I was never gripped or wrapped up in what might happen to the cousins.

Next up: I’ve just begin Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar, the second book in the Vorkogisan Saga and the first of her four Hugo-winning novels.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 6, 2018
→ By

Downbelow Station.

I have a new board game review up at Paste, covering Majesty: For the Realm, the latest game from Splendor designer Marc Andre.

C.J. Cherryh was one of the last Hugo-winning authors I hadn’t read – it was just her and the two authors of The Forever Machine, widely considered the worst novel to win that award – before I cracked Downbelow Station, her 1981 book that opened her ongoing Company Wars series. I believe there’s an interesting story somewhere buried in this novel, but the atrocious writing and generic characterization just ruined the work, making it one of the most difficult novels in this series for me to finish.

Set in the years 2352-53, after an entity known as The Company has set up a network of space stations in various solar systems beyond our own, mostly orbiting planets without intelligent life. The action in the book takes place entirely on the planet Pell, both on the planet’s surface, known as Downbelow, and its space station, known by Pell’s native species, the hisa, as Upabove. The stations beyond Pell are in revolt against the Company, and Pell embarks on a futile course of neutrality between the new federation, called simply Union, and the Company, aided by a group of merchanter ships called the Fleet. The War itself has been ongoing for some time before the book opens, although we get very little of its history, other than the arrival of several ships packed with refugees on Pell, where they’re put in Q (for quarantine) and kind of left to fend for themselves because the station can’t handle this volume of new residents.

Pell is run by the Konstantin family, including Angelo, his invalid (but very alert) wife Alicia, and their sons Damon and Emilio, all of whom are opposed by the Lukas family, led by Jon, who has run operations on Downbelow for some indeterminate period. Jon Lukas is Alicia’s brother, but plots to work with Union to save his own skin in exchange for control of Pell. Meanwhile, a soldier from the Fleet ship Norway, Josh Talley, shows up on Pell and demands the treatment known as Adjustment, which wipes a person’s memory and is usually used as punishment for severe crimes. Norway itself is captained by Mallory Signy, the closest thing this book has to an interesting character, and one of the only women of any consequence within it – perhaps because Cherryh took a dim view of the pace of progress in equal rights back in the 1980s. The intrigues between the Konstantins and Lukas’ team of mutineers, the Company and the Union, the Fleet among itself and against Pell, the Fleet against Union, Talley against who-knows-who, and then the Union commander Azov against the Fleet leader Mazian except Mazian doesn’t know he’s being played.

It was never clear to me what the point of any of this was – what larger story or theme Cherryh might be trying to express here. The characters could not be less interesting; everyone is either unequivocally good or bad, with the possible exception of Signy. The hisa themselves are impossibly kind and sweet beings, less technologically advanced than humans but capable of similar levels of cognition; because they’re all so good, however, there’s no distinguishing between any of the hisa (or “Downers,” as some of the humans call them) who play significant roles in the plot. And you can easily figure out which humans are bad by how they treat the hisa – Lukas and his myrmidons treat them like something akin to slaves, less-than-human laborers whose inability to understand hate or violence just makes them inferior. The Konstantins treat the hisa with empathy and kindness, and the hisa reciprocate – mild spoiler, that relationship becomes very important near the end of the book – so you know the Konstantins are the good guys.

The other major problem with Downbelow Station is Cherryh’s leaden prose; for a book that had a fair amount of dialogue and action, it moves incredibly slowly, in part because Cherryh writes in a stilted, clipped style that often dispenses with critical parts of speech or lapses into the internal vernacular of the book without warning or any kind of explanation. The space station around Pell is apparently the size of a small city, and has a secondary network of tunnels used by the hisa who work on the station, but the descriptions thereof are so lacking that even after completing the book, I don’t have a good picture of how it looked or how the structure might have been organized.

Cherryh won the Hugo for another novel in the series, Cyteen, about another station in her universe where embryos are grown in a lab and ‘manufactured’ to be soldiers capable of undertaking specialized operations. I can only hope her writing improved by the time she wrote that book.

Next up: I’m reading David Brin’s Startide Rising, which won the Hugo two years after Downbelow Station.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ January 12, 2018
→ By

Andersonville.

Andersonville was the nickname given to a Confederate prison in Georgia that held roughly 45,000 Union prisoners in an enclosure that had no shelter from the elements, no supply of clean water, and was designed to hold a fraction of that number. Nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died at Andersonville, mostly of scurvy, diarrhea, dysentery, starvation, and exposure. So of course there’s a monument on the site … dedicated to the prison’s commander.

Mackinlay Kantor spent nearly two decades researching the prison, reading first- and second-hand accounts of life there, before publishing his book Andersonville, which won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (I think it’s the second-longest winner, behind The Executioner’s Song.) The novel opens with the construction of the prison, or the animal pen that posed as a prison, and ends at the conclusion of the Civil War, with prisoners freed, slaves emancipated, and Wirz arrested. Kantor’s attention to detail and attempts to accurately portray real people as characters in his book is a marvel, and a great example for anyone looking to write historical fiction around real events and personas. It’s also a slog to read, far too detailed both in the horrors of life in the prison and on the back stories of the fictional Union soldiers Kantor created, to the point where yet another death from scorbutic diarrhea loses its impact on the reader.

Kantor frames the book with the narrative of a local family, the Claffeys, who live very close to the prison, and whose family friend comes to stay with them while working at the prison’s makeshift hospital. The Claffeys are ridiculously idealized white southerners, the mythical kind slave owner who treats the human beings he owned as if they were voluntary employees working for housing and food. It does put Ira Claffey, the father, in direct contrast to the evils of the prison, as does the fact that he has lost three sons to the war and yet does not share the antipathy towards Union soldiers that Wirz and his boss, General John Winder (also a real person), did.

Interspersed with the Claffey story are two threads revolving around the prison itself, one from the perspective of the prisoners themselves, one from the perspective of Wirz, who comes across as somewhat helpless to ameliorate conditions at Andersonville but also has no compassion for the starving, suffering men in his charge. The stories of the prisoners appear to be here to give names and faces to the individuals; humans have an easier time understanding the suffering of one person than the suffering of thousands, so perhaps fleshing out their histories increases the reader’s appreciation of the human tragedy of the prison. Some of these back stories are interesting on their own, but very few have any bearing on the main plot around the prison beyond pointing out the utter pointlessness of war, and the irony that men who survived threats before the war and then avoided death on the battlefield would waste away in a prison or, in one case, die because one of the prison guards got trigger-happy.

The scenes in the prison vary in their potency and ability to stir the reader’s interest, with the subplot, apparently based on real events, of the prisoners policing themselves when a gang called the Raiders start to rule the camp through violence and intimidation. The Regulators, as the good guys called themselves, restored a semblance of order in the chaos of the prison, and the story Kantor crafted around the group coming together and defeating the Raiders is the best subplot in the book for the way he draws the characters themselves and how the Regulators form themselves into a functioning team. (Wikipedia has an article on the Raiders that gives more credit to Wirz in encouraging the Regulators than Kantor does.)

Although books of this length and level of detail still appear today, Andersonville feels dated even if we give him a pass for the portrayal of the slaveowner or the casual racism within the book. It’s bloated with the back stories of the prisoners, and there isn’t a through line to connect those stories, Wirz, and the Claffeys beyond the existence of the prison. The story ends because the war ends. Maybe that was Kantor’s point – that there’s no closure or resolution. Some men survived, many didn’t, and there isn’t a good reason for any of it.

As I mentioned on Instagram yesterday, this completes my reading of all 90 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction winners.

Next up: Roger Zelazny’s Hugo-winning novel This Immortal.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ January 1, 2018
→ By

The Obelisk Gate.

N.K. Jemisin won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel for her 2015 book The Fifth Season, the first novel in the Broken Earth trilogy, set well into the future, on an Earth that is plagued by massive tectonic shifts that result in lengthy Seasons where nearly all life on the surface is extinguished and humans must huddle underground to wait the Season out. (You might call this “cli-fi,” although it’s not clear that this kind of climate change is caused by humans … at least, not through two books.) The sequel, The Obelisk Gate, won the Hugo Award again this year, but while it follows the first in chronology and setting, it has a thoroughly different tenor than the first book did.

Where The Fifth Season followed three distinct storylines set apart in time, The Obelisk Gate focuses on just two simultaneous threads: Essen’s life in the underground commune (“comm”) Tarima, which finds itself under threat from within and without; and her daughter Nassun’s journey with Essun’s husband south toward a comm where the father, Jija, hopes his daughter will be “cured” of her gift of orogeny – a sort of magical, innate ability to alter the very molecules of one’s environment, including starting tectonic shifts and communicating with the orbiting obelisks of unknown origin. A massive Season is imminent, likely caused by Essun’s former lover Alabaster, who created the Rift that provoked this season but is now himself turning to stone as a result. Essun wants to find her daughter, but as an orogene in a world where such people are often killed (even by their Guardians) when a Season approaches, she’s also driven toward self-preservation. Nassun, meanwhile, is barely scratching the surface of her own powers, but when she and Jija arrive at the southern comm, she meets the former Guardian Schaffa, who recognizes her limitless potential and begins to train her even as Jija believes she’s going to be made ‘normal.’

The twin but parallel plot strands make The Obelisk Gate a much more straightforward read than its predecessor, in which time seemed deliberately obscured from the reader and the relationship between the three subplots far from clear. That conceit ended up working in the book’s favor, increasing the tension (and perhaps baiting the reader’s impatience), so that The Obelisk Gate feels like a book in the same universe by a different author – not better or worse, just different, more conventional, and thus more dependent on the nature of the two primary characters.

So where Jemisin has created a grim, realistic, almost tangible setting for these books that elevated The Fifth Season, here in the middle book of the series, her weaker characterization becomes more of a problem. Essun and Nassun are both good people, with credible emotional reactions to setbacks and obstacles, but neither is particularly interesting or compelling; you root for these characters because they represent hope, for themselves and humanity, not out of any direct empathy for or interest in either of them. Some of the secondary characters have that interest, such as the complex motivations that drive Schaffa or the bizarre nature of the stone-eaters Alabaster and Hoa, but the two main women lack the texture or depth to carry the book.

Instead, the story itself has to do all of the lifting, and it’s mostly up to the task, although there’s still some Middle Book Syndrome as Jemisin gets further into her world-building and explains more of what’s happening in the book’s present. The nature of the Obelisks is at least partly explained, and she sets up what I assume will be the narrative of the third book, The Stone Sky, how Essun and Nassun will interact with the Obelisks to save the world (or at least parts of it). It’s compelling enough to keep me reading, but I thought this was a step down in ambition and in characterization from the first book.

Next up: I’ve finally begun MacKinlay Cantor’s Andersonville, winner of the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ November 1, 2017
→ By

In This Our Life.

Every decision, right or wrong, must be reached alone, and enacted in complete loneliness.

Ellen Glasgow won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1941 for her novel In This Our Life, which was adapted into a 1942 film starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland that altered key plot points while causing controversy by keeping the novel’s portrayal of racial discrimination in the South. The novel is depressing as hell, really, as nobody ever really gets what s/he wants out of life within its pages, despite the fact that the two generations follow entirely different paths in search of an elusive happiness.

The novel centers not on the two sisters played by Davis and de Havilland, but on their father, Asa Timberlake, who is married to a possibly-hypochondriac woman, Lavinia, in a totally loveless marriage to which he feels honor-bound because of her illness and their modest financial condition. He’s in love with a widow, Kate, whom he’s known for decades, and who keeps two dogs of which he’s also very fond, as Lavinia never permitted him to have a dog in the house. His two daughters, strangely named Roy and Stanley, are polar opposites to each other, Roy the practical, mature older sister, married to a young doctor named Peter, while Stanley is spoiled, immature, and demanding, using her looks to try to get whatever she wants, even if what she wants belongs to Roy. Stanley is due to marry Craig as the book opens, but ends up running off with Peter, setting in motion a series of calamities that ruin almost every life involved, including Asa’s.

The racial discrimination story is secondary to the novel’s plot, but by far the most interesting aspect of the book today, given the change in social mores around divorce and infidelity since the novel’s publication. Parry is an ambitious young black man, the son of one of the Timberlakes’ servants, who wants to become a lawyer and is hopeful that Lavinia’s cousin William Fitzroy will help finance his education. Parry works occasionally as a driver for the families, but when Stanley, driving drunk, hits a family and kills a young girl, she and her mother conspire to frame Parry for the crime – something which Asa can’t abide, which triggers the one real inflection point in the story, where he’s forced to consider taking an action against his family for what seems to be the first time in his life.

Glasgow’s prose around Parry and his family is dated, but the ideas are still relevant – social and economic discrimination, differential treatment by law enforcement, the understanding that opportunities for black youths would be limited in a still-segregated south. The racism of the whites in the book, especially Lavinia and William, is less overt than even in contemporary Pulitzer winners, but no less insidious for its talk of keeping black people “in their place,” and discouraging Parry from aiming at a profession because, in reality, the idea of an educated black man scares them. This subplot stays in the background of most of the book, but it’s far more interesting than watching the machinations of the pampered, entitled Stanley, and the way everyone – including her uncle William, with whom there are intimations of inappropriate attentions (or worse) – bows to her wishes. She damages everything she touches and has the audacity to put on a “why me?” act, which directs all the reader’s sympathy to Roy, who at least has some complexity to her character and shows growth through the series of crises precipitated by her husband’s betrayal.

Apropos of nothing else, I enjoyed this quote, which Roy says to her father about Craig:

I mean, he notices. He can see the color in the sky, and he knows that the change from baseball to football isn’t the only way to tell when it is autumn. Some men don’t know any more than that about seasons.

I’ve got just two Pulitzer winners left to read – James Cozzens’ Guard of Honor and Mackinley Kantor’s Andersonville.

Next up: Angela Carter’s Wise Children, which appears on the Guardian list of the 100 best novels ever written.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ October 30, 2017
→ By

The Westing Game.

A mystery novel aimed at kids, Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game is perfectly charming even for (much) older readers. I tackled it to vet it for my daughter (who then said she wasn’t interested, but I bet she’ll come back to it at some point), finding myself caught up in how the author packed such a clever, intricate plot in a short novel. It won the Newbery Medal for the year’s best work of children’s literature; I think it’s only the fifth winner I’ve read in its entirety (along with The Giver, A Wrinkle in Time, The Graveyard Book, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH). Although it takes a temporary turn towards the dark in the middle, I’ll spoil it just a little bit to say that Raskin wraps up the entire story very nicely, and shows the reader just how many clues were right there the entire time for the characters and the audience alike.

The start of the book is a bit of a slow burn, but once you get about a third of the way into it, the pace picks up dramatically, once the long setup is done. Samuel Westing, a reclusive millionaire and owner of Westing Paper Products, dies right at the beginning of the book, and has set up an elaborate scheme for his sixteen “heirs” – most of whom are unrelated to him and surprised they’re even mentioned – to compete in teams of two for the prize of the inheritance. Many of the heirs have unspoken connections to Westing or his family; some are in the apartment building where the story takes place, Sunset Towers, under false names. Each team gets a set of five one-word clues and must try to follow the oblique instructions in Westing’s will to identify which of the heirs killed Westing and thus win the prize.

The star of the story is the youngest heir, “Turtle” Wexler, a mischievous, astute thirteen-year-old girl who will kick the shins of anyone who pulls her hair braid, and who plays second billing to her older sister Angela within the family. Turtle and a judge, J.J. Ford, an African-American woman who is open about her connection to Westing, do the bulk of the real investigating, Turtle to win (and also to make money in the stock market), Ford for the thrill of the hunt. The narrative jumps around to other pairs as well, which I think helps to obfuscate the actual answer to the mystery by giving the reader too many ideas about the various clues, enough to send me in the wrong direction for about half of the book. There’s no other character as magnetic as Turtle, who seemed to me to be a direct ancestor of another of my favorite child protagonists, Flavia de Luce.

The real gift of this book is how Raskin has her characters playing with words, thinking about their meanings, the order, even messing with pronunciations or misspellings, all to try to decipher the clues. It’s a subtle encouragement to the reader to do the same – to expand one’s thinking about how we use words, and how tiny shifts can alter the meanings of anything we say or write, including, to pick one relevant example, the irregular will of an eccentric millionaire.

There’s one scene that might be disturbing for younger readers, although it’s eventually resolved in a way that should satisfy everybody. The remainder plays out as a fairly straight mystery novel, with a structure that certainly recalled Agatha Christie’s ‘bigger’ novels, where she uses a larger cast of suspects and moves the narrative around frequently with shorter chapters. The Westing Game feels in spots like a mystery for adults that was slimmed down – not dumbed down, just made shorter – for younger readers, given how quickly the narrative jumps, often with one character noticing something or coming to a conclusion right before the switch. It works, and might keep younger readers more engaged, although given how many mysteries I’ve read for adults I did get the occasional sense of watching a video with too many jump cuts.

Next up: I’m halfway through Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, her second novel, written before the Neapolitan quartet that begins with My Brilliant Friend.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 29, 2017
→ By

Gateway.

Frederik Pohl’s 1977 novel Gateway won the sci-fi awards triple crown the following year (Hugo, Nebula, and Locus) and was even loosely adapted into a computer game in 1992 – but it’s kind of lousy as a work of science fiction. Pohl ignores much science that was known or understood at the time, and other elements have become even more ridiculous over the last few decades, and he handwaves a lot of stuff away by filing it all under the mysterious technology of a lost alien civilization. If you can suspend your disbelief of all of this nonsense, though, he’s actually telling a pretty good war story that delves into issues of PTSD and survivor’s guilt while also looking into the risks that desperate people might willingly take to win the equivalent of a lottery prize.

Set at some unknown date in the not terribly distant future, Gateway follows the story of a successful explorer named Robinette Broadhead (variously referred to as Bob, Robbie, etc. depending on who’s talking) who left a dead-end life on earth as a food ‘miner’ to go to the asteroid known as Gateway. Within this story, humans have discovered the artifacts of a vanished alien race, known as the Heechees, who left tunnels on Venus and built a space station by hollowing out a large asteroid, from which they appear to have launched intergalactic exploratory missions. Humans have now occupied Gateway, which is run by a supranational corporation, and send willing explorers out on missions on the ships that they found docked in Gateway. Each ship’s destination is preprogrammed – changing it blows up the ship – and the destinations vary widely, with some ships returning with valuable weapons or tools, some returning with nothing, and some never returning at all or returning with the crew dead of starvation or worse.

We meet Robinette as he’s talking to Sigfrid, an artificial intelligence psychotherapist (everything is automated!), and it becomes apparent that whatever happened on his last mission has left him with guilt about something – even though he came back to a significant reward. The narrative alternates between short chapters of his conversations with Sigfrid and longer flashbacks detailing his tenure on Gateway, including the months where he stalled rather than jump on an outbound ship. Those passages cover a common theme in dystopian sci-fi, where characters with no hope for adequate employment, money, or food end up taking on enormous risks for a shot at a life-altering payout. It’s more powerful than the conversations with Sigfrid, which read like an unintentional parody of Freudian psychoanalysis and become overbearing, like we’re getting a commentary track on the main story. Pohl has crafted a small set of characters, centered on Robinette, who face long odds with a high risk of a very unpleasant death and still choose to board these ships because it’s their one chance at a decent life. (Pohl even has characters yearning for “Full Medical,” which sounds a lot like really good health insurance.) The explorations that matter in this book aren’t the ones on the Heechee ships, but of how these characters respond to this extreme scenario, with evidence of the risks and rewards arriving daily.

The science-y stuff here is really silly. Einstein showed that nothing can exceed the speed of light, and anything with mass would see that mass increase without bound as it approached the speed of light. Pohl has humans living in tunnels on Venus, even though scientists had known for at least ten years that the climate of that planet was totally inhospitable to our sort of life. The infrastructure of Gateway itself would have worked better if Pohl had tried to explain it less – the point isn’t how it works, but what such an environment does to the characters. Of all of the sideshows in the book, the idea that space tourists would come to Gateway, which has no apparent attraction for visitors beyond its existence, rang the most true – it’s about bragging rights, or signaling one’s wealth, both universal values that would still be in full force in Pohl’s bleak vision of our future.

The conclusion, where Pohl reveals just what happened on Robinette’s last mission, is very clever even if (I think) it also plays fast and loose with the science, where Robinette made a choice that made him the sole survivor without him realizing that that’s what the outcome would be – and now he carries the emotional scars from it. You can draw easy parallels to the wartime experiences of soldiers who’ve had to make decisions that cost fellow fights their lives, or who managed to escape a situation that killed many of their comrades, which gives Gateway a war-novel feel without the war. Even the missions themselves could work as allegories for the kinds of sorties Air Force pilots might have been asked to make in mid-century wars, or excursions on land into enemy territory with high rewards but high risk of capture or death. If you can get past the silly science, there’s quite a good story underneath here.

Next up: I’m just about done with J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ October 24, 2017
→ By

Years of Grace.

I’m deep in the forgotten winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – mostly titles that won while the award was still called the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, as it was until 1948. At least a dozen winners from that period are either out of print or only available for an exorbitant cost (likely intended only for sale to academic readers and libraries). T.S. Stribling’s The Store was one of the latter, but the dated, racist language in the book more than explained why it’s almost completely forgotten today. Margaret Ayer Barnes’ 1931 winner Years of Grace, also only available at a ridiculous price ($42 on amazon as I write this), differs greatly from some of the other ephemeral winners of its era, in that it’s actually a fine book that holds up adequately despite the 80-plus years since its publication. The moral compass of the protagonist (and, I presume, the author) seems old-fashioned, but the same is true of novels from the Regency and Victorian eras of England, and no one seems to mind those. Instead, Years of Grace, seen through today’s lens, reads as a contemporary look at the changing roles of women in American middle- and upper-class society at a time when their rights were starting to expand.

The plot here is a bit by-the-numbers, salvaged by the rich development of the main character, Jane Ward. The three sections of Years of Grace cover three distinct periods of her life: her teenage years, where she has a girlish crush on a young French artist, but their plans to marry are scotched by their parents; the early part of her marriage, where she nearly consummates an affair with her best friend’s wayward husband; and when her children are grown and similar extracurricular activities complicate their lives and Jane’s as well. Jane evolves over the course of the novel, from innocent and somewhat flighty teenager to a young mother feeling hemmed in by her solid but unexciting marriage to her later years, where she takes the role of her own parents but lacks the same power over her children. The parallels in situations are too on the nose, and the transition from her teenage years to her ennui in marriage is rather abrupt – it’s never clear whether the problem is Jane playing “what if” in her mind or if she just married a really boring man.

The real flaw in Years of Grace, however, is that there’s so much talking and not a lot of doing. In the third section, when there’s a scandal among Jane’s children (a plot device that also appears in another Pulitzer winner, Ellen Glasgow’s In This Our Life), it’s shocking not because of what the characters involved have done, but because the book has been so sedate up until that point. Jane’s brief dalliance with Andre while they were still teenagers feels like nothing to us today, and would feel the same to her children if they knew. The mores of her generation and those of the the next generation are worlds apart, and she can’t make the adjustment – that, in and of itself, is enough to fill a novel. Barnes’ heroine makes difficult choices, but because she pulls up short, her subsequent regrets seem overly dramatic:

“When you love people, you’ve got to be decent. You want to be decent. You want to be good. Just plain good – the way you were taught to be when you were a little child. Love’s the greatest safeguard in life against evil. I won’t do anything, Jimmy, if I can possibly help it, that will keep me from looking anyone I love in the eye.”

Barnes’ prose is the novel’s other strength beyond Jane’s characterization, as the book flows quickly despite a relative paucity of action. Perhaps writing ten or twenty years later would have allowed to her to do more with the character – to have her put her marriage into real danger, or to go further in the mental what-if gymnastics that bother her throughout her married life. Perhaps some of the more dismal entries in the early years of the Pulitzer Prize have made me go soft, but I actually didn’t mind Years of Grace even with those flaws. It’s a quaint read, but a well-written one, with a main character you will like even if you don’t agree with her choices or feelings.

Aside: There’s very little about the book available online, but it makes an incongruous appearance on a Real Simple list of 50 books recommended by modern authors. It didn’t even merit a full review in the New York Times when it was first published, appearing as the first review in a two-page collection of shorter writeups.

Next up: I’m reading Ellen Glasgow’s In This Our Life, which I mentioned above.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,