→ October 19, 2017
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The New York Trilogy.

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is a collection of three novellas that are just barely connected enough that I would call this one novel, although it certainly bends the boundaries of the form. Each part starts out as a detective story, but turns into something else entirely, exploring questions of identity and meaning, with the three protagonists devolving into madness as their “cases” go awry. The work appears on the Guardian‘s 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels ever written, which is the only reason I even knew of its existence.

The first novella, City of Glass, covers a writer named Daniel Quinn who works under a pseudonym, William Wilson, about a detective named Max Work. Quinn gets a strange call one night asking for the detective Paul Auster, and after dismissing the first call, receives another one a few nights later and decides to play along, pretending to be Auster and taking on the case, which involves protecting a young man, Peter Stillman, from his abusive father as the latter is about to be released from prison. Peter speaks in a unique, stilted fashion, the result of the abuse his father, who was gripped by a sort of religious mania, put him through. Quinn decides to take the job, following the father, also named Peter Stillman, from Grand Central Station on the day of his release to the flophouse where he settles, eventually forcing a meeting with the older man, while also tracking down Paul Auster, the writer (not a detective), who is working himself on an article on the narrator character of Don Quixote. Quinn assumes the identity of the Auster-detective and goes undercover to an absurd extent, such that the case gets away from him and he begins to lose his own sense of self.

Ghosts, the shortest of the three acts, covers a detective named Blue, who is hired by the unseen White to stake out a target named Black. Every character has a color for his/her name – sometimes just part of the name, sometimes that’s all we get – but Blue, like Quinn in the first story, veers off the path, as he finds that watching Black day in and day out seems increasingly pointless, and eventually he decides to try to stalk White and find out what the purpose of the assignment is. It doesn’t go well, as you might imagine.

The Locked Room has the most conventional narrative of the three stories, and works less like a detective story and more like a psychological study. The unnamed narrator finds out that his childhood friend Fanshawe, with whom he’s had no contact for a decade, has disappeared, asking his wife to contact the narrator if he doesn’t reappear within a certain length of time and to have the narrator look through his collected writings. Fanshawe’s unpublished works turn out to be critical masterpieces and become commercially successful enough to allow the narrator, who quickly falls for and marries Fanshawe’s wife, to walk away from his own life and become Fanshawe’s agent, of a sort, as the steward of his friend’s various works. Of course, Fanshawe isn’t dead, and the narrator can’t leave well enough alone, especially once rumors start that Fanshawe is just a fabrication, so he tries to track his friend down despite explicit instructions not to do so. The resolution of this ties the three stories together in an unexpected and (by design) incomplete fashion, which I would argue makes the three novellas together a single work of narrative fiction despite the incongruities between stories.

Postmodern with metafictional elements, The New York Trilogy plays with layers of reality to push the three protagonists through varying levels of internal and external rebellion, against their senses of self and against the perception that they lack free will in a universe that is forcing action upon them. Blue and the nameless narrator both try to find the scriptwriters directing their lives. Quinn, himself an author, is presented with an entirely new script, but becomes obsessed with its narrative to the point that he completely loses himself, as if he’s playing a role that consumes him. In all three stories, Auster gives us less-than-reliable narrators and causes to doubt whether the antagonists or their backstories are real. Even when he unites the three narratives in the last few pages of The Locked Room (with a few scattered hints before that), the truth remains ambiguous – it’s possible that the stories all share a character, or that a character from one story created one of the others. It’s a work that asks questions without answering them, but still manages to grab the reader with the detective-novel paradigm and determination (if not entirely hinged) of its lead characters. I’m a devoted fan of noir detective fiction; this might be more gris than noir, but it works well with its foundation.

Next up: I’m reviewing out of order, but I’m currently on Frederik Pohl’s Hugo & Nebula Award-winning novel Gateway.

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→ October 15, 2017
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The Uplift War.

I have a bit of a strange history with David Brin’s The Uplift War, the second of his two novels in this series to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel; I first got it late in 2015 as an ebook when it was on sale for $2, but when I tried to read it in January of 2016, I found I couldn’t get into it at all and bailed after about 35 pages. What I didn’t quite realize at the time was that I was horrendously sick – regular readers will remember that I had to push the top 100 prospects package back by a week that year, as I ran a fever of up to 103 for six days and ended up needing a powerful and risky antibiotic to knock out the infection. I read a few other books in that span, including The Caine Mutiny (never reviewed, but I did love it) and The Vorrh (which I later reviewed in tandem with its sequel), so I figured Brin’s book maybe just wasn’t for me.

I gave it another shot on my AFL trip this year and ended up flying through it, so clearly the problem was me (or my illness), not the book. It’s long and the story is somewhat involved, but despite Brin’s background as an astrophysicist and heavy use of his own jargon, the prose is surprisingly readable, with some help from an average chapter length of about six pages. There are certainly aspects of old-school sci-fi here that make the book feel dated, including an overreliance on things like intergalactic travel and a universe full of advanced races, but at its heart, The Uplift War is a clever and often exciting war story that works in an anti-war message by having the underdogs’ intelligence and flexible thinking carry the day.

Uplift is a core concept in this book and in the other five novels in the series (Startide Rising, the preceding novel, also won the Hugo and Locus plus the Nebula), where various races in the Five Galaxies are allowed to raise lower, “pre-sentient” species to a higher level of sapience and consciousness. In the chronology of the stories, humans have already done this with dolphins and chimpanzees, with the latter, dubbed “neo-chims,” playing a significant role in this novel. For advanced species, becoming patrons to client species is apparently a very big deal, although I didn’t quite grasp what tangible benefits accrue to the patrons.

The Uplift War takes place entirely on a remote planet, Garth, controlled by humans and neo-chims, which is then invaded by birdlike creatures called Gudru who act and speak in triplets, with control of the planet somehow very important to their long-term plans for galactic dominance or something like that. (It gets a little too Amazing Stories for my tastes with this stuff and the various alien races.) This leads to a complex web of subplots involving human, neo-chim, and Tymbrimi (another alien race) characters who have variously woven traps and schemes to trick the invaders into, among other things, hunting for a pre-sentient species known as Garthlings hiding in the hills of the planet. The Tymbrimi are apparently big practical jokers, and the long con forms a large part of two of the subplots in the novel, which generally follows the resisting forces with occasional diversions to the three Suzerains from the Gudru who are leading the effort to control the invaded planet.

The setup is long and assumes some foreknowledge of the Uplift universe, which probably didn’t help my fever-addled brain on my first attempt to read the book, but once the narrative shifts focuses to individual characters, who end up working mostly in pairs, the pace picks up substantially and the work itself starts to look more like a classic war novel. It’s not War and Peace, but you can see the influence that work had on Brin with the multi-threaded narrative, emphasis on political and psychological aspects to the fight, and the panoply of side characters who dart in and out of the text. I found much of the race-specific material on aliens and neo-chims to be tiresome and reminiscent of pulpy sci-fi from the 1950s and 1960s, and could have done without Brin’s use of some florid vocabulary (I would say I looked up at least fifty words here that either weren’t in the Kindle dictionary or showed up as “poetic/literary” or “archaic”), but got caught up in two of the stories in particular because he created interesting, three-dimensional characters and managed to build plenty of tension even when it was clear the characters would have survive at least until the end of the book.

Brin, as an astrophysicist, had to be aware of the absurdity of his intergalactic setting, but fares better with some of the futuristic technologies he puts on the ground in the book, especially in terms of sensors and “globes” that resemble RFID devices. He actually does much better in exploring the psychologies of his different races, especially where the Gudru’s lack of a sense of humor ends up costing them in the fight against resisting primates. If you can get past some of the silly trappings around the aliens and neo-chims – fortunately, we don’t get any neo-dolphin characters – there’s a surprisingly good story underneath.

Next up: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist who worked at Google in that role for several years.

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→ October 12, 2017
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A Case of Conscience.

James Blish’s novel A Case of Conscience won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1959, the fifth time the award had been given out, kicking off a run of books that are still considered classics today: Starship Troopers, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, and Way Station won the next five Hugos, and Dune won two years after that streak. It was a golden age of science fiction, particularly of sci-fi novels that tackled major philosophical themes; Blish’s novel, his only winner, remains one of the few novels to win the award that uses a science fiction plot to examine questions of religion and morality. It’s a curious work, a novella that was then doubled in length to turn it into a novel, and has some of the stitched-together quality you’d expect, but also gives the reader a fairly compelling central story that centers on a Jesuit priest’s crisis of conscience while also working in issues around colonialism, exploitation, and violent political movements.

Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is the story’s protagonist and moral center, one of a group of four humans on the planet Lithia, assigned the task of determining whether it is safe to open the planet for human contact. The rest of the crew comprises three scientists of varying views on religion and morality, including the rationalist/atheist Cleaver, a physicist who discovers that the planet is a potential source of raw material for the production of nuclear weapons. The Lithians, reptilian creatures who walk on two legs, live in a utopian society where their culture and language lack words for conflict, dissent, or crime … but they are also a completely secular society, without any concept of religion or God. Father Ruiz-Sanchez begins to suspect that the planet itself was created by Satan, as it is a near-perfect attack on core principles of Catholic theology, and argues that the planet should be “quarantined” from all contact with earth. The team is unable to agree on a recommendation, and Ruiz-Sanchez acknowledges that Cleaver is likely to get his wish in the end. The Lithians, unaware of any of this conversation, give Ruiz-Sanchez a parting gift as they leave: an embryo (in an egg) of a Lithian, in a special container designed to allow the fetus to survive the journey back to Earth. (Lithians do not raise their young as humans do, which is explained at length in the text.)

In part two, the Lithian embryo becomes the grown Egtverchi, a ten-foot tall saurian biped who experiences a whole new level of culture shock as he’s exposed to human civilization. Possessed of a tremendous capacity to learn, he quickly absorbs most human knowledge, and I think it’s fair to say he’s not terribly impressed by it. He becomes a pop phenomenon, getting his own reality TV show, and encouraging his viewers to act on their discontent with their jobs, their government, and so on. His following is large enough to lead to mayhem in the streets, all while work to convert Lithia into a giant lithium deuteride factory continues fifty light-years away. Father Ruiz-Sanchez, meanwhile, is charged with heresy, faces an audience with the Pope, and comes back at the UN’s request to deal with the situation Egtverchi has created.

The novel is brief, just over 200 pages, but packs a lot of ideas into its two sections. The first part, originally published on its own, is a sort of thought experiment: Blish appears to have been very familiar with Catholic teachings and created a civilization in the Lithians that would refute that doctrine, such as that a peaceful world would not be possible without God. Blish gives Ruiz-Sanchez this challenge, and forces him to confront it and try to convince at least one of his skeptical colleagues to agree to his plan to close off the planet from human contact. Without the second half, however, it’s fairly flat, devoid of any tension, and the potential risks from Ruiz-Sanchez’s scenario are far from evident. A Case of Conscience needs Egtverchi to bring the priest’s concerns to life, and he does so in stark, shocking ways, stirring up an angry populist mob in a storyline that seems to presage everything from Fight Club to the 2016 U.S. election.

Blish also opens the door to discussions about imperialism and exploitation of colonies with the setup of his novel, as humans have developed the technology to get to Lithia and have made numerous scientific discoveries that the Lithians, while an advanced society, have not. Lithia itself has very little iron, limiting their progress in some key aspects of physics or chemistry, adding to the sense that humans are the ‘superior’ race, which, in Cleaver’s mind, means there’s no problem with showing up on someone else’s planet and plundering it of resources, even if the cost is environmental destruction or other massive disruptions of the native species. The theme isn’t entirely fleshed out here because the second half of the novel takes place almost entirely on Earth, but the questions lay open in the text, and given that Blish wrote it in the 1950s while western countries still held nearly all of Africa and swaths of southern Asia as colonies, I imagine that was at least a model for him in devising the structure of his universe.

I won’t spoil the resolution of A Case for Conscience other than to say that I enjoyed its ambiguity; I think it’s a perfect way to get around the religious question involved in the conclusion without dismissing it entirely. Blish’s portrayal of Ruiz-Sanchez is thoughtful and respectful in a way that most science fiction authors’ words aren’t; many sci-fi novels ignore religion entirely or portray it as an artifact of the past, something sloughed off over time or destroyed by the progress of science. Such twists tend to miss the importance of religion to human culture (for better and worse) and how religion gives many people an answer to the meaning of life. Blish, whom the introduction to the version I read labels as an agnostic, deserves credit for creating a man of the cloth who is credible, well-drawn, and appropriately flawed.

Next up: David Brin’s The Uplift War, another Hugo winner.

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→ September 20, 2017
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The Store.

Thomas Stribling’s The Store appears to be one of the most obscure winners on the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction list; the only copy in the entire state of Delaware was at the University, and a friend in Boston reported that she could only find one copy in the area, with the other two books in this trilogy completely unavailable. You can buy it new, for $32 on Kindle or $40 in paperback, from the University of Alabama press, pricing that I interpret as an acknowledgment that if you’re looking for this book, you either really have to have it for school/work reasons, or you’re a completist trying to read the entire Pulitzer list. The cost may be the main reason the book is hard to find, but the text itself, while actually quite funny for its era and full of interesting, eccentric characters, is incredibly problematic in the pervasive racism and anti-Semitism, not just in the characters’ views but often in the descriptive prose itself. Language that may have been acceptable when Stribling wrote the book in 1931 or in the time of the book’s setting right after the Civil War is offensive today, even if you want to make a sort of park-adjustment for the context in which it was written. There are white characters in The Store who have what would have been seen as progressive views on race, but it’s hard to read it now without thinking of how backwards the rural south was for decades after the end of slavery.

The protagonist of the book is Colonel Miltiades Vaiden, who served in the Civil War but is left at odds and ends by the conclusion of the conflict, and eventually takes a job in a local general store in Florence, Alabama, with an eye towards eventually borrowing enough capital to open a store of his own. Vaiden runs afoul of his boss, who cheated Vaiden out of thousands of dollars about twenty years earlier, by refusing to short-change the black customers who come to the store, which is about as far as any white character gets in the book to an egalitarian view of the races. Eventually, the scrupulously honest Vaiden abandons his scruples when he finds a chance to get even with his former nemesis, stealing goods enough to cover his losses and then some, opening a store of his own and buying real estate, sparking a back-and-forth battle that claims at least one life and doesn’t end particularly well for anyone involved.

Along the way, Vaiden’s wife passes away – he’s really not that upset about this, as he’s constantly thinking about her as “his fat wife” – and he ends up trying to reunite with Drusilla, a woman who spurned him the night before their wedding many years before and whom he later courted and dumped for revenge. It’s not much of a romance, and when Vaiden does get married near the end of the book, it’s to Drusilla’s daughter, with this whole Electra-complex subtext that makes the result rather creepy to read.

The shame about the racism, the anti-Semitism, and the unromantic love story is that there’s a lot of dry humor and satire within the book; it’s a portrait of the postwar south, but not a nostalgic or favorable one. Stribling gives his black characters some actual depth, and the conversations they have with each other about how they don’t get the same treatment from the law that white suspects who commit the same or worse crimes do applies today just as it did a century-plus ago. Vaiden is by no means a hero; his principles shift according to his needs and circumstances, and it’s revealed over the course of the book that he committed a serious, violent crime of his own but escaped prosecution because he was white and the victim black. Economic injustice is everywhere in the story, including the fact that poor black farmers paid more for less when whites ran the only stores in town. (Vaiden seems to reflect the postwar, tacit racism, in contrast to the overt racism of many of his neighbors, as he treats his black and white tenants equally, and agrees to help one black farmer pay for artificial fertilizer to try to increase his yields.) The argument for Stribling here is that nothing about the story is unrealistic for its setting of 1870s; I’m sure the n-word was prevalent, and race relations were at least this bad in the backwoods of the south, but because the book was written in a time when blacks were still treated as inferior in every walk of life, the text is too soft on its subjects. It’s a quick read, but an uncomfortable one, to unclear benefit.

Next up: I’m most of the way through another Pulitzer winner, Margaret Ayer Barnes’ charming if dated Years of Grace.

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→ September 12, 2017
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Scarlet Sister Mary.

Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1929, an award that apparently engendered some controversy, as the jury’s chairperson recommended a different book (John Rathbone Oliver’s Victim and Victor) and resigned in protest when Peterkin won. The historical record on this is spotty, and it’s unclear if Burton resigned because he disagreed with the choice, because he was embarrassed after he’d made public statements indicating Oliver’s book was going to win, or for other reasons. Of course, history has had its say on both titles, as Oliver’s book is long out of print and Peterkin’s is barely in it; neither has achieved any sort of lasting critical or popular acclaim. In the case of Peterkin’s novel, I think it’s easy to see why, because the book is so horribly out of date in its portrayal of Gullah people – African-Americans in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia, descended from slaves, with a creole unique to the region – as written by a white woman.

Scarlet Sister Mary profiles the title character, a Gullah woman who marries a ne’er-do-well in her community after he gets her pregnant – in and of itself a scandal in their church – and then abandons her. Rather than settle for a life of solitude, Mary chooses “pleasure” over fidelity to an absent husband, bearing many more children – even as her eldest son abandons her too – and constantly fighting the scorn and opprobrium of her peers and elders, two of whom serve as surrogate parents, within their church-centered village. Mary’s faith is largely secondary within the story to her desire to be a member in good standing of the church, and Peterkin doesn’t condemn her for her sexual liberation; the minister and his haughty wife are unsympathetic characters whose piety is merely a cloak for their sense of superiority over Mary and others outside of the flock.

Peterkin tries to replicate the creole of the Gullah in the dialogue in the book, but coming from the pen of a white author, the language is painful to read because it seems so much like caricature – even if, at the time, the author intended for it to be faithful rather than mocking. The ultimate effect of this rendition makes the characters seem like yokels, not just uneducated but primitive, which I doubt was Peterkin’s goal but is hard to avoid through the lenses of a reader nearly 90 years after the book’s publication.

That broaches the main question around Scarlet Sister Mary: How on earth did this trifling, unimpressive book manage to win a prestigious literary prize that, at the time, was almost exclusively given to novels by and about white people? Was the book seen at the time as a sympathetic portrait of poor African-Americans? Or as a feminist work because of its depiction of a woman who lives independently and ignores societal mores about women’s roles and sexuality? Or was it that the panel didn’t like Oliver’s book, which depicts a priest defrocked because of his drinking – similar to Oliver’s own experiences as a priest who left the clergy because he was gay – and thus chose Peterkin’s book because it was handy?

If you didn’t already get that I don’t recommend wasting your time on Scarlet Sister Mary, the only adaptation the book seems to have received was a stage show in 1930 starring Ethel Barrymore in blackface. History has consigned Peterkin’s book to the dustbin and I’m not surprised.

Next up: Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise.

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→ September 3, 2017
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Everyone Brave is Forgiven.

Chris Cleave has written several global bestsellers, notably the 2008 novel Little Bee, but his 2016 book Everyone Brave is Forgiven was his first foray into historical fiction. This quick-moving novel of four young people caught up in World War II is heavy on both action and emotion, but the character development lags behind the pace of the text, and it can’t help but suffer in comparison to a contemporary novel that does so much more with the same setting.

The quartet of characters at the heart of the book are Mary, Tom, Alistair, and Hilda, although Hilda is secondary to the main trio and bizarre love triangle that occupies the first half of the book. Mary and Tom are a quick item, meeting by chance at the start of the war when the manor-born Mary signs up and runs into Tom at the war office. Alistair, Tom’s more worldly, witty roommate, meets Mary later and the attraction is instant and mutual – but she and Tom are already engaged by this point and Alistair is heading back off to war after his first stint ended in the evacuation at Dunkirk. Mary is beautiful, so of course Hilda, her best friend, must be ugly, in what I believe is the 4th or 5th law of popular fiction (I get the order wrong sometimes), and attempts to set Hilda up with Alistair go nowhere.

Cleave can really write – the pace is brisk but never skimps on evocative imagery, especially the scenes of Blitz-plagued London or the privations Alistair suffers while stationed in Malta. The section where Mary, Tom, and Mary’s little class of non-evacuated students are caught in a bombing is the most memorable passage in the book, especially in how Cleave communicates the characters’ confusion in the shock of the attack – everything was fine, and now it’s not. His rendition puts the reader in the fog right next to his characters, so you feel the disorientation and the revelations seem to come in reverse, as if time has rewound and played back at half-speed.

He adds to the sense of disorientation, however, through the way he reveals big twists, such as the death early in the book of a side character whom Alistair has just befriended. The nonchalant description of the death, in the final sentence of a chapter, feels manipulative, although Cleave uses the aftermath to explore more of Alistair’s character in the first real window the reader gets into his emotions. But the regular use of jarring reveals wears thin very quickly and gives the novel a pulpy feel that doesn’t marry well with the subject matter.

Alistair is easy the most interesting character of the four, as Tom is a blank page and Mary’s appeal must lie in her looks rather than anything about her personality. Cleave builds the characters and then puts them through the ringer, but they come out on the other side relatively unchanged, just older and short a limb or with a visible scar. This is the real disappointment of Everyone Brave is Forgiven: Cleave set a novel during the Blitz, put real thought and energy into depicting the city in ruins, and then had his characters drift through the setting without sufficient growth or development.

This book appeared just one year and one day after Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his own WWII novel, All the Light We Cannot See, one of the best contemporary works of fiction I’ve read. Doerr crafted a more complex, meticulous plot, and in the soldier Werne gave readers a memorable, thoroughly-developed character who faces real moral challenges, without falling into the sentiment that traps Cleave. Doerr doesn’t skimp on the narrative greed – his novel moved faster and worked with higher stakes than Cleave’s, but along the way we get much more insight into Werne, and even Marie-Laure, who bears a few marks of the stock character, is better developed than Mary or Hilda. I find it hard to judge the latter novel without considering Doerr’s work, given their settings and how close the release dates were, but even on its own Cleave’s book is more a well-written page-turner than a work of good literature.

Next up: Still reading T.S. Stribling’s The Store, which has managed to pile a dash of anti-Semitism on top of its pervasive racism.

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→ August 29, 2017
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The Wanderer.

Fritz Lieber won two Hugo Awards in the 1960s, first for his novella The Big Time and then for his novel The Wanderer, both of which I’ve read in the last two months. As with the early winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the early winners of the Hugo Award can be totally baffling, not least because of how incredibly dated much of the content seems. Many early Pulitzer winners are nonchalantly racist, and their stories are overly moralistic. Some of the early Hugo winners are great – the 8th, 9th, and 10th winners were Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man in the High Castle, and Way Station, respectively – but some reflect the genre’s utter genre-ishness, descending into the sort of campy sci-fi stories I associate with pulpy magazines like Astounding Stories of Super-Science, where the emphasis was frequently on the fictional science part of science fiction. The Wanderer, which won right after Way Station, is one of the worst winners I’ve read, in part because Lieber was so obsessed with the science aspects of his setup, but even more so because the characters and story are so utterly one-dimensional.

The Wanderer is an object, initially presumed to be a planet, that appears suddenly in Earth’s sky, tearing the moon apart and causing huge shifts in the earth’s tides, including massive flooding that kills hundreds of thousands of people. Lieber shifts abruptly across at least a half dozen different narrative streams, following individuals or groups of people as they react to the Wanderer’s appearance and the immediate threats its waters pose, especially a gang of UFO-watchers who band together and try to head for higher ground, running into numerous threats from both the new object and from violent cliches marauding the countryside.

It turns out that the Wanderer is a giant spaceship populated by highly evolved cats who can read minds, and who are fleeing across hyperspace from other galactic forces and it’s just all so incredibly silly. The felines abduct two astronauts who had been working on the moon and bring them aboard the ship, with one of them developing a sort of Stockholm-syndrome attachment to his captors. Everything that happens on the Wanderer is even more ridiculous than the worst plot elements that happen on earth – among other things, Lieber appears to think women exist only to provide men with partners for sex – and the brief comedy of the cats dies out quickly when Lieber tries to give the creatures anthropomorphic personas.

Some hard science fiction at least gets by on the strength of the science itself, but other than Lieber’s early discussion of hyperspace, using the hypothesis that is now known as “quantum graphity” as a starting point for explaining faster-than-light travel across the universe, The Wanderer gives us very little of the science to compensate for the lack of interesting characters. And the responses of those characters to the catastrophic events that follow the Wanderer’s appearance are similarly uninteresting – Lieber has them focused either on survival or on sex, but doesn’t exactly give us anything new to ponder here. Wikipedia cites freelance reviewer James Nicoll’s argument that this book won the Hugo thanks to “blatant and unabashed sucking up to SF fandom” within the text. I can’t argue with this, or Nicoll’s conclusion that this is a “terrible” book.

The Big Time isn’t any better, although it at least has the virtue of being in the public domain and thus free as an e-book. Imagine if Sartre’s No Exit were about competing forces traveling the spacetime continuum, fighting a temporal “Change War” across the history of the cosmos, and meeting up in this room that may exist outside of spacetime entirely. It’s about as thrilling as it sounds.

I’m still on the same two books I mentioned in the last two posts, but since I’m discussing Hugos, the next one I’ll read is James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, which won in 1959, the year after The Big Time took the prize.

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→ August 27, 2017
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Dreamsnake.

My omnibus post on all the new boardgames I saw at GenCon this year is up at Paste.

Vonda McIntyre won the sci-fi Triple Crown for her 1978 novel Dreamsnake, taking the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for best novel, yet the book appears not to have the legacy those honors might have indicated. I’d never heard of the book before starting to read the list of Hugo winners, and it was probably two years before I stumbled on it in any bookstore, new or used. Combining elements of fantasy novels and post-apocalyptic stories, Dreamsnake reads today like an advanced YA fantasy novel, maybe a little too mature for younger readers, but with timeless themes and an emphasis on the protagonist finding her identity.

Snake is a healer in what we later learn is Earth after a nuclear war has ravaged the globe and left large swaths of land uninhabitable. She plies her trade with three trained snakes whom she can use to produce medications through their venom, including one, a “dreamsnake” known as Grass, whose bite induces morphine-like effects in dying people and allows them to die without pain and to dream through their final hours. In the first chapter, however, Snake’s dreamsnake is killed by fearful peasants whose child she’s trying to save, starting her on a quest to go to Center, a feudal city hostile to healers, to try to obtain another dreamsnake. The journey brings Snake into contact with a young girl, Melissa, who becomes important in the resolution of the story, and has two men following them across the landscape, one out of love and one with unknown (but presumably sinister) intent.

The quest itself is unorthodox, and doesn’t end with the usual Kill the Big Foozle climax we expect from fantasy novels (and almost every fantasy RPG ever), which may be part of why the book doesn’t seem to have the following of some other acclaimed sci-fi/fantasy novels of the era. Snake is a fascinating protagonist, however, attuned to her own feelings and those of others, while the setting’s combination of lost civilization and scientific progress (genetic modification is common, for example, with no anti-GMO zealots in sight, probably because they’re dead) is a novel one. Melissa’s subplot is hackneyed – stuff like this exists, but it’s a familiar trope in fiction – and I expected her role in the conclusion to be more significant given the time spent on Snake’s relationship with her. The clarity of McIntyre’s prose breaks down in the final three chapters, when Snake approaches and enters the “broken dome” in search of a new dreamsnake, with more abstruse descriptions of both setting and action standing in contrast to the evocative writing of the first three-fourths of the book.

Dreamsnake also tackles a lot of themes that may have been out of the norm in the 1970s but would be unremarkable today – birth control and LGBT rights among them – that make it seem more like a young adult novel forty years later. I hesitate on that description because there is some sex in the book, nothing explicit but also enough that I wouldn’t let my daughter read this until she’s older. By the time she’s in high school, she’d be mature enough for the content, and the book does feature two strong female characters (although a male character does come and save the day at the end, alas).

Next up: I’m reading John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South and am also about 80% through the audiobook version of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. The latter is narrated by the same actor who played state attorney Rupert Bond on The Wire.

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→ July 30, 2017
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The Able McLaughlins.

Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (now Fiction) in 1926, the sixth time the award was handed out, part of a surprising run where four winners in five years were women authors (along with Edith Wharton’s wonderful The Age of Innocence, Willa Cather’s sentimental One of Ours, and Edna Ferber’s forgettable So Big). Why it won is probably a mystery lost to the sands of time, as it’s a trifle of a work, a slim slice of quaint Americana that pays tribute to homesteaders and the strength of family, without memorable characters or a particularly solid plot.

(I’m going to spoil much of the story here, because you’re probably never going to read this book, and if I don’t get into plot details this post will be just six words long.)

The McLaughlins are a hard-working family of Scottish immigrants in Iowa with some indefinite number of children, one of whom, Wully, takes a fancy to the neighbors’ daughter Christie. He goes off to fight for a second time in the Civil War, but when he returns, Christie won’t so much as give him the time of day … because, he finally discovers, she’s pregnant, having been raped by another neighbor (and maybe cousin of Wully’s) named Peter Keith. Wully runs Peter out of town under threat of death, marries Christie, and claims the child – born too soon to have been conceived legitimately – as his own. Minor scandals and controversies ensue and fade away, until eventually Peter returns, having gone to see Christie, leading into a multi-chapter search around the area for him or his corpse, although only Wully and a few others know the reason for his departure.

That’s not a whole lot to go on, especially when reading with the morals of the modern reader who will see this all for what it is. Rape victims still feel shame today, but the idea that a woman is responsible for her rape is at least less pervasive in society today, so Christie acting as if she’d done something wrong, and then everyone working to hide the truth, is an anachronism that makes the entire story hard to accept today – even if you know this was a widespread attitude in the time of the book’s setting or publication. Instead of even questioning the established order, Wilson wrote a book about forgiveness and Christian morality; how Wully’s mother is so disappointed in him when she believes the baby is his, how relieved she is when she finds out it’s not and that he was doing the Right Thing by marrying Christie anyway, how Wully and Christie end up forgiving her assailant when he comes to a bad end.

It was really a tiresome read, bearing none of the good qualities of classic American literature, not prose, not memorable characters, and certainly not story. I’m not surprised the book is hard to find – Delaware’s statewide library system didn’t have a copy, so I had to request it from the University of Delaware via an inter-library loan. The copy I got appeared to be a first or very early edition, and it was falling apart as I read it, perhaps an apt metaphor for the irrelevance of this kind of story ninety years after it was written.

Next up: I finished Anna Smaill’s dystopian novel The Chimes and am almost done with John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

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→ July 27, 2017
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The Last Days of Night.

Graham Moore won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 for his work on The Imitation Game, particularly impressive for a first-time screenwriter with just that and one novel under his belt at the time. His second novel, The Last Days of Night, came out last August and just appeared in paperback this spring, and is about as good a work of popular, contemporary fiction as I’ve come across.

Moore takes the term historical novel to a new extreme here, creating a coherent narrative around the War of Currents of the late 1800s – the public dispute over whether the nation’s power grid should run on direct current, favored by Thomas Edison, or alternating current, favored by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse – by relying on the historical record as much as possible for descriptions of characters, scenes, and even dialogue. This type of novel typically makes me uncomfortable because it potentially puts words and thoughts in the mouths of real-life personages, potentially coloring or distorting our impressions of them; Moore includes an appendix explaining source materials for many of the depictions in the book, even explaining the origins of some of the dialogue, and also delineating which events and timelines in the book are real and which he created or rearranged to fit the narrative. I’ve read “non-fiction” books that played faster and looser with the truth than Moore does here in his work of fiction.

The War of Currents was kind of a big deal, and a lot more public than you’d expect a scientific debate to be, largely because the two figures at the center of it, Edison and Westinghouse, were both famous and powerful at the time – Edison the revered inventor and showman, Westinghouse the successful businessman and an inventor in his own right, the two embroiled in a public dispute over whether DC or AC was the safer choice for the nation’s emerging electrical grid. (AC was the inarguably superior technology, and eventually won out, but not necessarily for the ‘right’ reasons.) Moore wraps this battle, including the bizarre entrance of one Harold Brown, inventor of the electric chair, into the debate, in the larger one over who really invented the incandescent light bulb, spicing things up a little bit with some fictional details like the firebombing of Tesla’s laboratory and a hostile takeover of Edison’s company.

Told from the perspective of Paul Cravath, a young attorney who handled Westinghouse’s side of the various lawsuits back and forth between him and Edison and later founded the Council on Foreign Relations, The Last Days of Night manages to turn what could have been dry history into a suspenseful, fast-paced novel (aided by lots of short chapters) populated by well-rounded characters. Edison’s depiction might be a little too on the nose, but Westinghouse, Cravath, and even the enigmatic Tesla – whose Serbian-accented English is recreated in clever fashion by Moore, who explains his technique in the appendix – come to life on the page in three dimensions even with the limitations of their roles. Moore relied largely on historical information to flesh out the characters, with the main exception of Agnes Huntington, Cravath’s wife, on whom there was very little documentation, leading Moore (or perhaps simply allowing him) to create her backstory and eventual romance with Cravath out of whole cloth. The trick allows Moore to give the book its one proper female character, since the War of Currents was fought entirely by men in domains – science and the law – that were closed to women until the last century.

I found the pace of Last Days a little frenetic, definitely aimed more at the popular end of the market than the literary end; events move quickly, as Moore compressed almost a decade into about two years, and the book has short chapters and tons of dialogue to keep up the velocity. That meant I tore through the book but found it a little balanced towards action over meaning; there was just less to ponder, especially after the book was over, but I also never wanted to put the book down because there are so few points where the pace slackens. That makes it a rarity for me – a book I could recommend to anyone who likes fiction, regardless of what sort of fiction you like.

Next up: Still playing catchup with reviews; I’ve finished Grazia Deledda’s After the Divorce ($2 on Kindle) and Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, and am now reading Anna Smaill’s weird, dystopian novel The Chimes.

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