→ May 4, 2021
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The Martian.

So, I haven’t actually seen the movie The Martian, because I told myself I really wanted to read the book first, and 2015 was one of my in-between years when I didn’t see all the Oscar nominees. (I did see Spotlight, all five animated nominees, Ex Machina, and The Force Awakens, and nothing else from that year until we watched What Happened, Miss Simone? last year during the lockdown.) And then … I never read the book, until a few weeks ago, when I got the book on sale as an e-book, and I actually read the book. I suppose now I should see the movie, because the book, while flawed, is pretty good.

The book, which came out in 2011, is a perfect exemplar of hard science fiction: Author Andy Weir spends a significant portion of the text getting the science right, but it is mostly in service of the greater story. Mark Watney is one of the astronauts on a manned mission to Mars, and a series of accidents on the surface, spurred by a massive dust storm, has Watney left on the surface, presumed dead, while the ship takes off without him. Of course, he’s very alive, and has to find a way to survive until the next manned mission arrives – and get himself to that site – or, possibly, communicate with NASA to let them know he’s still alive. Eventually (mild spoiler), NASA figures it out, and they arrange a rescue mission that captivates the world.

There’s a lot of technical detail in The Martian, especially for a novel aimed at a popular audience, enough to give me some bad Red Mars memories, but Weir manages to keep those details from bogging down the text too much by putting all of those specifications in Watney’s voice. The narrative settles quickly into a rhythm where Watney conceives a plan, goes through the details (for the reader), and then executes it. Some plans work, some don’t, and in the latter case we do the whole thing over again. It only works, though, because Watney is a smart-ass, with plenty of the smart and, especially once he starts communicating with others, plenty of the ass, too.

What works a little less well, however, is the way that Weir throws one obstacle after another in Watney’s way, which might work in some contexts but here does become repetitive, in a “not again” sense – just when it appears that he’s on a path that might lead him to a rescue, even though you know even that will still be arduous and difficult, Weir pulls the threadbare rug out from under his main character. Later in the book, after Watney has reestablished a bare minimum of communication with NASA, which helps the text tremendously – there is no actual dialogue involving the book’s protagonist until that point, since he is, obviously, alone on a whole planet – Weir cuts it off. It’s not that the rescue thus becomes more difficult and unlikely; it’s that the text benefited so much from having Watney involved in even limited dialogue with another human.

In the end, though, it works, because Weir has created a great lead character in Watney, and that carries the story – not the technical details, as accurate as they may be. (There’s a bit of a Terraforming Mars vibe, here, although that game was directly inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.) Watney is a wiseass, and the wit helps balance out the dry (pun intended) details for the long stretches where it’s just him, alone, trying to figure out how to survive long enough to get to the next step, and maybe keep himself alive until the next planned manned mission arrives on Mars. I don’t think The Martian is for everyone, but if you can hang with the technical stuff, there’s a smart, occasionally fun Robinson Crusoe-in-space story here that I enjoyed quite a bit.

Next up: I’m reading an advance copy of Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, which comes out on May 18th.

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→ June 17, 2020
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Cyteen.

I started C.J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning novel Cyteen back in February, which feels like a decade ago, but stopped after 190 pages because it was so slow and I was wrapped up in finishing the top 100 prospects package for The Athletic. I returned to it in late May and did indeed finish it the day before the draft last week, because I’m very stubborn, and it bothered me that I had just three Hugo winners left to read. (I now have two, the last two books in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which in turn inspired the game Terraforming Mars.)

Cyteen is not very good, just as Downbelow Station, a novel set in the same universe as Cyteen that is Cherryh’s other Hugo winner, was not very good. They’re emblematic of what science fiction used to represent – books that were so heavy on the fictional science that they paid little attention to the aspects that make a novel good: plot, prose, and characters. Cyteen has a plot, sort of, although it’s paper-thin for a novel of more than 650 pages. The prose is leaden enough that you could use it at the dentist’s office to protect your chest during X-rays. The characters are at least moderately interesting, although I found it hard to get to them through the byzantine renderings of story and scene in the book.

Cyteen is set on a planet and two space stations of that name, serving as the capital of the Union, which has itself declared independence from the Alliance … none of which is necessary to know to read this book. The intrigue here is all internal to Cyteen politics, as the wise, Machiavellian leader Ari Emory, who runs the cloning-research station Reseune and serves on Union’s executive council, is murdered early in the book, after which some of her adherents initiate a program she’d designed to raise a clone of her to take over where she’d left off. The bulk of the novel follows her clone, also named Ari, and sets her in opposition to two groups: her ‘uncles’ Denys and Giraud, who are both powerful figures in the Reseune hierarchy and would benefit from Ari’s return to power; and the Warricks, Jordan and his clone/son Justin, as well as Justin’s clone and companion Grant, who were implicated in the first Ari’s death and remain untrusted rivals as the second Ari grows up and gains authority.

That’s about enough story for a novel of half Cyteen‘s length, but Cherryh stretches this out to a needless degree, incorporating all manner of side plots or irrelevant details that make this an utter slog to read. The discussions of young Ari’s puberty felt made me feel like I was invading a fictional character’s privacy, and it’s discomfiting to see a young girl’s moods reduced to a function of her hormone changes. The details of the cloning program are not interesting in the least, nor are those of the Alliance-Union conflict or the internal intrigues of Cyteen and Reseune politics. It just doesn’t work: making readers feel interested in the details of politics of fictional entities requires a lot of effort, at the macro level and the micro level of individual characters, and Cherryh just doesn’t do it.

The character of Ari is by the far the most compelling, although it’s more for what she represents than who she is. Ari is genetically identical to her predecessor, and her guardians attempt to mimic as many conditions of her predecessor’s upbringing as possible, as if by creating a perfect facsimile of the original’s nature and nurture they will thus develop a perfect facsimile of the original person. Of course, it’s never quite possible to replicate the ‘nurture’ half of the equation, and Ari deux is still a person with free will and agency, eventually pushing back against the bounds of her strict environment. It’s also a meditation of sorts on predestination, whether the second Ari can escape the destiny that’s been assigned to her by her genes and her makers.

The Hugo Awards have recently faced and defeated an attempted coup by a small number of white, male, pathetic authors who claimed that their works were being unjustly overlooked in the voting in favor of works with more progressive themes. My interpretation is that these authors, whose leaders include an open white supremacist, want a return to the earlier era of the Hugos and sci-fi in general, where setting took precedence over story or character – greater reliance on the science part of science-fiction or heavier use of fantasy elements in fantasy. Cyteen is heavy on the science, both hard sciences and soft, and that might be why it won the award in 1989, but I don’t think it would get nearly the same reception, critical or commercial, today. Cherryh is still writing and I presume she still has an audience, since I always see new books of hers whenever I’m browsing in bookstores, but this type of science fiction is best relegated to the dustbin of history.

Next up: I’m about to start Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

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→ April 3, 2019
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Childhood’s End.

My daughter has five ‘cycles’ in her English & Language Arts class this year, with a choice of four books in each cycle, usually tied together by a common theme in their subjects. We got the list last August, and I was pleased to see Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, a book many of you had recommended but which I’d never read, on the list for her final cycle, coming up next month. I’d previously read three of his novels – 2001, Rendezvous with Rama, and The Fountains of Paradise, the latter two of them Hugo winners – but never this one, which I think many readers consider his strongest work.

It is … fine, I guess. It’s got an interesting conceit, certainly asks you to open your mind to some giant philosophical questions, and is heavy on the science. Like his two Hugo-winning novels, however, it’s written in such a detached way that there are no interesting characters and thus no compelling individual storylines. You read because you want to see how Clarke wraps up the big picture, but in my case, I never felt any emotional connection to anything or anyone in the book itself, not even when the entire human race is threatened with extinction.

Earth is visited in Childhood’s End by a highly advanced extraterrestrial race known only as the Overlords, who appear over Earth’s major cities, make contact via voice, and proceed to tidy things up for humanity, putting an end to war, famine, and disease around the world, acting as benevolent dictators with just a brief show of force to make their power clear. Their intent, however, is far less so, and under this Pax Overlordia human progress slows, both in the sciences, where the Overlords put a stop to all research into space exploration, and in the arts, where prosperity and lack of want quell the urge to create. One human manages to sneak aboard an Overlord ship bound back for their home planet, after a ‘séance’ that reveals the star system in question, but while he’s gone the true purpose of the Overlords’ visit and de facto occupation of Earth becomes apparent.

Clarke was something of a futurist, and major themes associated with that school appear in each of the book’s three connected yet clearly discrete sections, which function as novellas bound by setting rather than a single narrative whole. He was a staunch atheist who opposed both organized religion and the tenets of religious faith, incorporating the death of religiosity into this novel as he did in Fountains of Paradise. With the question of gods thus dispensed, he asks readers to consider what other meaning humanity might find in a universe without intrinsic purpose, using that as a loose segue to a middle section where he dances around the question of art – why we create it, and whether our urge to do so is a byproduct of the lives we live, ones with agony and ecstasy, with doubt and uncertainty. It’s a wonderful question, but Clarke abandons it before getting far enough to even create an interesting discussion within the novel itself, focusing instead on the closest thing the novel has to an overarching theme, which ties into the resolution of the main story.

I think after reading four novels I have a good sense of my own opinion of Clarke. He was absolutely brilliant, and able to bring complex ideas into his writing without making it inaccessible to most readers, but he had little to no interest in character development, and his prose was parched. This is the sort of novel I loved when I was a kid, because I could get caught up in the setting and the science. I enjoyed genre fiction at the time for its genre, and cared less about the quality of the fiction. I can’t read that way any more, and Childhood’s End struck me as childish, not in the quality of Clarke’s content, but in its aims. I ask more of a novel of ideas than Clarke is able to deliver.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Bill Lascher’s Eve of a Hundred Nights, the true story of his grandparents’ courtship and work as journalists in the Far East in the years before and during World War II.

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→ October 22, 2018
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A Deepness in the Sky.

Vernor Vinge has won three Hugo Awards for Best Novel, including A Fire Upon the Deep, the first book in his so-called “Zones of Thought” series, as well as the cyberpunk-lite Rainbow’s End, but in both cases Vinge focused more on the hows of the science in his science fiction than on the story or characters. The third winner was his longest, A Deepness in the Sky, the second book in the Zones of Thought series but taking place hundreds of years before the preceding book, and despite its length and Vinge’s usual prolixity, for once he gives the reader a plot with some teeth and a few truly intriguing, three-dimensional characters. At a girthy 775 pages, it’s not for everyone and perhaps not worth the time investment, but compared at least to the other two Vinge novels I’ve read, it was the best and most enjoyable read.

The long and often confusing setup to the A Deepness in the Sky boils down to two storylines. Two human forces have both reached a new star system, with the star referred to as OnOff for its bizarre cycle of going dark every hundred years* or so, and with one planet occupied by a sentient non-human race known colloquially as Spiders. One force is the Qeng Ho band of interstellar traders, who also appear in A Fire Upon the Deep, while the other are the Emergents, a belligerent group unafraid to use violence or coercion and, as becomes clear a bit later in the book, willing to use humans as high-tech slaves by reprogramming their minds to Focus on specific tasks. The two sides agree to work together and almost immediately betray each other, with the Emergents coming out on top, leaving just a handful of Qeng Ho characters, including the mysterious old man Pham Trinli, the younger leader Ezr Vinh, and the precocious young Qiwi Lin Lisolet, who grows from annoying child to central character over the course of the novel, to try to free their side from the Emergents’ grip.

* Vinge is too clever by half with his way of telling time in the book, referring to everything in terms of seconds, so thus using Ksec (kiloseconds) or Msec (megaseconds) rather than weeks, months, or years. It may have some veneer of accuracy, since our definition of a year is tied specifically to this planet, but it is annoying as hell to read, and it’s not as if Vinge adheres to this idea of planet-independent language throughout the book.

Meanwhile, on the planet in question, the Spiders themselves are growing into a high-tech civilization, led by the eccentric polymath Sherkaner Underhill, who develops technologies that allow his specific country to survive the Dark years when their sun goes dim and the planet experiences a deadly deep freeze. Unaware that they’re being observed by aliens, Underhill and his colleagues are also pushing a cultural change that threatens the ‘natural’ order of things, defended by a right-wing religious group called the Kindred. The Emergents view the Spiders as a culture to be exploited, even more so when the Spiders discover a mineral that contains anti-gravity properties, while the remnants of the Qeng Ho hope to save themselves and the Spiders from that and the massacres that would precede the Emergents’ invasion.

Vinge’s specialty has always been his ability to conceive futuristic technologies and incorporate them thoroughly into his plots – although, again, that can work to the detriment of the story – and that’s especially true here of the “localizers,” a sort of smartdust tech that Pham Trinli trades to the Emergents, with an ulterior motive, and that allows the Emergent leader Tomas Nau to create a police state aboard their ships as they orbit the Spiders’ planet. These nanodevices, some floating and some embedded on people or objects, allow Nau and his sadistic enforcer Ritser Brughel to monitor everyone under their command and even to sense changes in mood or sentiment, including whether someone is lying to them. While slightly farfetched, the technology allows Vinge to ratchet up the tension within the story by creating a razor-thin margin for Trinli and Vinh to overthrow their leaders. The Focus technology is probably even less realistic, but introduces an advanced sort of slavery, one where the enslaved become obsessed with their specific task, losing their free will and their emotional selves but allowing the Emergents to solve bigger problems faster and thus push their civilization forward, creating philosophical conflicts within the story about the morality of such practices (although for the reader it’s hardly much of a debate).

There’s still no reason for Vinge to drone on as long as he does in A Deepness in the Sky, with maybe 500 pages of real story in a 775-page book, bloated again by descriptions of future tech and irrelevant asides, along with some subplots that just aren’t very interesting (Ezr’s attempts to save his former lover Trixia Bonsol from Focus are particularly weak). Vinge also isn’t great at creating female characters; the most prominent woman in the story, Qiwi, starts as a child, is manipulated by Nau into a not-really-consensual relationship, and only regains true agency in the last few pages of the book. It’s a sort of hard science fiction that has fallen somewhat out of favor today, with good reason, as we have more diverse voices writing in the space and an increased awareness that better prose and character development can work in genre fiction. If you’re looking to pick up a Vinge novel, this would be my pick of the three I’ve read, but I think sci-fi still has much more to offer than A Deepness in the Sky provides.

Next up: Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke.

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→ May 31, 2017
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Babel-17.

My second first-round projection (“mock”) for this year’s draft is up for Insiders.

Samuel Delany wrote his short novel Babel-17, a smart, profound philosophical work, when he was just 23 years old, an astounding achievement for a work that would be impressive for an author of any age. The prose is a bit abstruse and the story a little meandering, but this is a novel of ideas, or rather one very big idea, that the language we speak can ultimately shape the way we think, a concept known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. (If any of this sounds familiar, it’s also the core idea behind the 2016 movie Arrival.)

According to The Linguist List, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that “an individual’s thoughts and actions are determined by the language or languages that individual speaks.” The words and concepts of a language thus define not just what you say, but what you think and do. That simple version of the hypothesis, also called “linguistic relativism,” is generally accepted to be true, although there’s naturally disagreement on its extent, and there are stronger variations of the theorem (found in that link above) that are more controversial.

Delany builds an entire story around Sapir-Whorf, using an alien language called Babel-17 that humans and their allies have tried for years but failed to fully decipher, but that the other side in an ongoing, intergalactic war have weaponized to create turncoats within the allies’ forces. The protagonist, the poet and starship captain Rydra Wong, finds herself recruited by the Allies to crack what they suspect to be a code, only for her to discover that it’s an actual language that can re-program someone’s brain. This leads her on a series of missions into the war zone while coping with the likelihood that one of her own crew members is trying to sabotage the ship and potentially kill her.

For a novel that’s ostensibly set in a war, there’s very little fighting in Babel-17, which spends more time describing the consequences of war (like mass starvation) than the details of battle. Delany was enamored with his ideas about language, and managed to combine those with a compelling, three-dimensional protagonist – perhaps a too perfect one, as Rydra is brilliant, empathetic, and apparently beautiful, although the last point is only mentioned but never a factor in the story. The plot itself is a little muddled, and Delany’s prose struck me as Joyceian in spots, so for a book of under 200 pages it took me more time than I’d expect to get through it … which isn’t a criticism per se, more an observation given how quickly I read in general, and a reflection of how philosophical this novel is.

Delany does struggle to get the story to a reasonable, fulfilling conclusion, but I think that’s more feature than bug because the open question of the book, can language determine who we are and how we act, is not conducive to a plot deep enough for a novel. (Arrival got away with it, I think, because it was based on a short story, and a movie can work with a much shorter or thinner plot than a full-length novel can.) I never found myself wrapped up in the war plot. Delany gets more mileage out of the saboteur thread, although that conclusion wasn’t terribly satisfying on its own, only in the context of the broader question about language and thought. While I imagine linguists might object to his metaphor here, using Babel-17 as a brainwashing tool (and thus weaponizing Sapir-Whord), it takes a difficult and I think controversial topic in linguistics and puts it into a story in a way that an adept reader would understand the hypothesis and be left with plenty to chew on after finishing. That’s the great achievement of this book.

Jo Walton, whose book Among Others is one of my favorite novels of any genre, also weighed in on the wonders of Babel-17.

Next up: Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool. It’s good to see Sully again.

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→ April 23, 2017
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Spin.

Smart Baseball is out on Tuesday! You can still preorder it here.

Robert Charles Wilson’s ambitious novel Spin, winner of the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novel, combines some hard science fiction with some highly speculative work in both cosmology and nanotechnology as it follows three characters after the cataclysmic event that gives the book its title. It’s a bold novel of ideas that struggles a little in its midsection but comes through with a rousing, clever finish that also gives a bleak story a hopeful if uncertain resolution.

The Spin of the title is the name humanity gives a temporal bubble that an unknown, external entity (later dubbed the “Hypotheticals”) has placed around the Earth, causing time inside the bubble to move more slowly than it does outside. Where one year passes on Earth inside the Spin, a hundred million years pass outside of it, which means that after thirty to fifty years inside the Spin, the region of the solar system where the Earth exists would become uninhabitable as the Sun begins the expansion that precedes its death.

The story itself starts with twelve-year-old Tyler Dupree and his two friends, Diane and Jason Lawton, from the night the Spin first appears, obscuring the stars and knocking out satellite communications worldwide. Jason is the scientific genius of the trio; Diane, his sensitive twin sister who turns to religion; and Tyler, the narrator and balancing figure, a bit of a Nick Newland for his bland presence in the story, whose love for Diane is unrequited and whose friendship with Jason feels professional even before, later in life, he becomes Jason’s personal physician.

The narrative jumps around in time, with vignettes from a distant future where Tyler is going through a process we later learn is a massive physical adjustment to a sort of drug regimen brought to earth by a human who has returned to Earth from Mars. It’s one of Wilson’s most clever gambits in the book – Jason and others at his father’s think tank/quasi-governmental organization Perihelion decide to create life on Mars by terraforming and seeding it from afar and then sending people. This takes advantage of the time discrepancy, so the hundreds of millions of years required by evolution take just a few years of Earth time. And it turns out that Life on Mars advances even beyond what life on earth has, with a life-extension treatment that upends the lives of the few on Earth who try it. His return to Earth sparks a second, even more extensive space program that holds the key to humanity surviving the imminent death of its home planet and solar system.

Spin is saved from itself by Tyler and the twins, as the story, while entertaining for its speculative aspects, could not support a 450-page novel by itself. They’re only moderately well-developed, but are at least developed enough to feel real (unlike the twins’ parents, who are straight out of central casting – the hard-driving, materialistic, unloving father, and his miserable alcoholic wife); the twins have a yin/yang dichotomy between them, the hardcore rationalist against the emotion-driven sentimentalist, but Wilson has them behave in ways that transcend two-dimensional stereotypes. Jason’s tortured relationship with his father could make up its own book, and felt more authentic than Tyler’s cold pining for Diane over years when he doesn’t see or hear from her.

The speculative science involved in the second space effort and the resolution of the Spin story reminded me a bit of Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds, a non-fiction science book that delves into the idea of the multiverse and whether, for example, wormholes might exist or someone (or something) might travel through a black hole into another universe. In the science world, this might be called “bunkrapt,” but it is fantastic fodder for hard science fiction, and gives Wilson an improbable but internally consistent resolution to the story. There was a point around 2/3 of the way through Spin where I felt like the narrative had slowed down and I was probably going to end up giving it a negative review, but the truly clever endings to the various plotlines make the book a success.

Next up: Another Hugo winner, Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.

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→ February 23, 2016
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The Three-Body Problem.

ESPN has published an index to all my 2016 prospect content.

Liu Cixin’s 2006 novel The Three-Body Problem was translated into English in 2014 and promptly won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Liu the first Asian writer to win the award. He’s won a slew of Galaxy Awards in China for his fiction, but in an interview after he won the Hugo he said he was just writing for “beer money.” That seems a bit disingenuous, as even the afterword to The Three-Body Problem reveals more of his motivation and his enormous imagination, but even so, he’s coming at science fiction from an entirely different angle than any author I’ve read before.

Liu’s novel is the first of a trilogy that presents a largely realistic, hard-science fiction look at the classic sci-fi story of first contact. The book’s title (in Chinese it’s santi, which just means “three body”) refers to a famous problem in classical mechanics. Given the beginning positions, masses, and velocities of two bodies (such as a planet and its moon), determining their motions is simple. When the same problem is extended to three bodies – such as the Earth, its moon, and the Sun – it becomes extremely difficult to solve, and the solution, first identified in 1912 by Karl Sundman, converges so slowly that it’s useless. (The same is true for any n-body problem where n > 2, with that solution coming in a 1991 paper by Wand Qiudong.)

The problem and its lack of a practical solution figures heavily in the novel, although the reason isn’t immediately clear. What is clear, however, is that something very weird is going on, causing scientists to commit suicide without apparent explanation, and it’s connected in some fashion with the secret research facility on Radar Peak and with an intense massive multiplayer game called Three-Body. A nanomaterials researcher, Wang Miao, becomes involved in the global mystery when he starts seeing an ominous countdown first in photographs he takes and then in his own eyes, eventually working with the government to try infiltrate the apparent conspiracy to undermine both science and global security. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the conspiracy involves the alien race heading for Earth, and the handful of characters who populate Liu’s book have differing feelings on the visitors, even though they won’t arrive for another four centuries.

Liu insists in that afterword that he doesn’t write to make any points, so his works are not political or metaphorical, even though I think it would be easy to read The Three-Body Problem as a work of political allegory, considering the results of life under authoritarianism on individuals’ loyalties to themselves versus to the state. But even without that subtext, the novel still offers plenty of room for analysis because, whether or not he intended it, Liu is exploring the way people might react to this kind of species-altering event, and the varying ways in which people might lose hope in humanity’s ability to fix its own problems. (He makes many references to environmental catastrophes, some real, some not, but despite the book’s infusion of real science, he also includes a maddening, unscientific claim about a GMO crop-caused catastrophe too.) What might cause someone to turn his/her back on the entire human race? To betray us to an unknown species that might intend to do us harm? Some of these conjectures border on the absurd – the rise of a global movement dedicated to the destruction of humanity seems a bit worse than your average doomsday cult – but their existence gives Liu an extreme against which he can set the characters who don’t quite embrace that nihilistic view.

Hard science fiction, in my reading experience, tends to be dry and obsessed with its own navel, so busy telling you about all the cool science – real or speculative – that the prose and plot suffer. Liu’s work is the best blend of quality fiction and hard science, of which there’s a lot, from the three-body problem to quantum entanglement to some crazy stuff about the sun as a radio-wave amplifier and the unfolding of a proton. His explanations are a little abstruse, but having read a bit about these topics recently I was able to follow his text, and he doesn’t dwell long enough on any of the hard-science stuff to derail the plot. I actually had a harder time keeping the characters straight – referring to the wisecracking policeman Da Shi by two different names did not help – than I did staying with the science.

Where Liu falls short as an author is in character development – even beyond my own difficulty with the names. The various leads, including the nanotechnologist Wang and the retired scientist Ye Wenjie, have remarkably little personalities of their own; they become different characters when pressed into action or facing a crisis, but retain none of those traits after those sequences end. Not only does The Three-Body Problem lack a hero or heroine, but it lacks any central character who’s of interest for his or her own sake, rather than as functions within the larger program of the book.

The Three-Body Problem ends with a partial conclusion – the mysteries within the book are solved, but the alien race still won’t arrive for over four hundred years, leaving humanity to decide how to prepare and respond, but with a handicap to their efforts that I assume will hang over much of the sequel, The Dark Forest. It’s certainly readable enough on its own, although you won’t get the satisfaction of a complete ending; the final book of the trilogy, Death’s End, will appear in English this August, when The Dark Forest comes out in paperback.

Next up: I’ve still got two sections left in Rabbit at Rest. Rabbit Angstrom has to be one of my least favorite protagonists in the history of literature.

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→ October 27, 2015
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Hominids.

Robert Sawyer’s name might be more familiar to those of you who watched the short-lived ABC series Flash Forward, based on his novel of the same name, but his one Hugo Award for Best Novel came four years after that book with Hominids, the first book in a trilogy that posits a parallel universe where Neanderthals won the evolutionary battle over Cro-Magnons and have since become the dominant species on their version of Earth.

The two parallel Earths are joined briefly during a quantum computing experiment gone awry in the Neanderthals’ universe, opening a portal that rather rudely deposits Neanderthal physicist Ponder Boddit in our world, smack in the middle of an underground heavy-water tank at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s real, located in the Creighton nickel mine a bit north of Lake Huron, and the director of the neutrino-detection experiment just won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics earlier this month. Sawyer grounds everything in the Homo sapiens world in reality, using real place and brand names, although some of them (Palm Pilot? Handspring?) already sound comically out of date.

Boddit’s appearance in our world and sudden, unexplained disappearance in his creates two separate storylines: one here, focusing on the mystery of his arrival and the very short-term impact on him from a substantial shock to the system; and one there, where his coworker and sort of life-partner (sexual orientation in Sawyer’s Neanderthal world is fluid) Adikor Huld finds himself accused of murder because he was the only one present when Boddit left the building. The latter story ends up the more interesting one despite what would appear to be a simpler premise, as Sawyer uses it to explore both the Neanderthals’ culture and the individual personalities of several characters, primarily Adikor himself. Boddit’s adventure on our side – which, it is clear from the beginning, can only end properly with the opening of a new portal and his return to “his” earth – feels rushed and somewhat rote, as if Sawyer had a sort of checklist of things he wanted to cover and felt compelled to hit them all.

For example, Sawyer has made the Neanderthals a nontheistic and nonreligious society, primarily to set up a scene where he attacks the Catholicism of the main female character, Mary Vaughn, who develops feelings for him during the few days they spend together; it feels forced, and a bit unlikely that the entire culture of Neanderthals would be without religion even before it had a scientific explanation for the existence of the universe or of consciousness. Mary’s character herself is also problematic – her first appearance on the pages is as a rape victim, which serves no purpose within the novel as a whole except possibly to make her more open to seeing Boddit as a fellow human because he is, in our terms, more of a “gentleman.”

Sawyer’s Neanderthals fall too much into the “noble savage” cliché, as their universe has no war, pollution, poverty, or even crime, with a global population of just over 150 million and all citizens equipped from birth with a Companion, an electronic device implanted in the wrist that measures vital signs and records locations, movements, and actions for later storage. It’s a crime-prevention device, a walking encyclopedia, and a near-complete abrogation of individual privacy in the Neanderthals’ Marxist society. It’s also terribly convenient because it allows Boddit to communicate with the people who find him on our side of the portal within a matter of hours, as the Companion can “learn” English and translate for him. (Granted, without that, the book would be a very frustrating read and probably quite boring.)

The two plots are so thin, in fact, that Hominids feels more like an extended prologue for another story than like a standalone novel. While Sawyer’s explanations of quantum mechanics and the existence of this second, parallel universe are quite clever and mostly grounded in real science, once he gets Boddit here, not a whole lot happens either in terms of action on the pages or exploration of the many ramifications of such a discovery, both scientific and anthropological.

Oh, by the way: Not that anyone should take my predictions seriously, but I’ll say Mets in 5.

Next up: Graham Greene’s first novel, The Man Within.

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→ September 8, 2015
→ By

Red Mars.

I have a scouting blog up with notes from three games I saw last week, covering Jeff Hoffman, Gleyber Torres, Matt Strahm, Spencer Adams, and Brad Markey.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy won a Nebula Award for the first book (Red Mars), Hugo Awards for the second (Green Mars) and third (Blue Mars), and Locus Awards for the second and third, as well as a passel of other awards and nominations. I just finished Red Mars, the dense 570-page opener, on Friday, and I can’t fathom why it won the Nebula or has spawned a cult following that appears to be leading toward a scripted series on Spike TV.

The Mars trilogy covers the first human attempt to colonize Mars, with a mission leaving Earth in 2026 (heh) with 100 colonizers chosen largely for their scientific and engineering skills. The goal is merely to establish a permanent settlement that may open the door for further research and potential economic activity like heavy-metal mining, but as conditions on Earth deteriorate due to war, pollution, and overpopulation, emigration to Mars becomes a reality and accelerates beyond the point that the red planet can handle it – especially since Mars is freezing and its thin atmosphere comprises mostly carbon dioxide. This in turn exacerbates the initial philosophical divide among the “first hundred” of whether humans should attempt to terraform Mars and make it suitable for long-term human settlement, or if humans have any responsibility to maintain the planet’s environment and, if present, any ecosystem that might exist at a microscopic level.

Red Mars is hard science fiction, very heavy on the technical aspects of its subject, with painstaking attempts to keep it as scientifically accurate as it can be. That means the book is about as dry as the Martian equator, as Robinson devotes paragraphs and even pages to details that contribute nothing to the plot and only serve to show that the author has indeed done his research. I can understand the desire to convince the reader that something like the space elevator transportation system is feasible, for example, but the point of including it in a work of fiction should be to show its effect on the characters within the story, not merely to say, “hey, cool, a space elevator!”

Robinson seems so caught up in demonstrating the technologies required for the mission and his mastery of their specifics that he spends very little time developing the book’s central characters, roughly a dozen of the first hundred who play significant roles in the novel’s multistranded story arc. Two of the most significant ones are dead before the book even ends, as are a few characters of less importance, and while many dramatic works benefit from the uncertainty around characters’ fates, Red Mars isn’t one of them. There’s no sense of impending jeopardy to raise tensions, and when the novel ends with a lengthy journey where several of the first hundred escape from Terran forces, I never doubted that they’d succeed in reaching their destination. And, most damning of all, I didn’t really care if they didn’t, so long as Robinson didn’t bore me to death first with details of how their little rovers worked or more about that bizarre flood that, even with all his descriptive text, I still could not for the life of me manage to picture in my head.

So my question to those of you who’ve braved this series is whether it’s worth it to continue, as I’ve been reading past Hugo winners, which would include both of the next two books in the series. My instinct is no, that the issue was Robinson’s writing style, and that seems unlikely to improve from book to book, at least not enough for me to plod through another 1200 pages.

Next up: I just finished A Bell for Adano, a wonderful satirical war novel by John Hersey (author of the famed New Yorker piece Hiroshima) and have begun Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.

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→ July 13, 2015
→ By

Ringworld.

My Futures Game recap is up for Insiders.

I read six books on my vacation – fortunately, my wife and I both subscribe to John Waters’ philosophy on lovers and books – including four of my favorite authors/series (Poirot, Nero Wolfe, Flavia de Luce, and a standalone P.G. Wodehouse novel), as well as two new authors, including Larry Niven’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel Ringworld. Like Arthur Clarke’s similarly-acclaimed Rendezvous with Rama, Ringworld is a work of hard science fiction, in this case playing off a popular concept in physics and speculative science (the Dyson Sphere) and turning it into a lengthy adventure story involving the discovery of a distant world. It’s also surprisingly dull for a story that has as much action as Ringworld does, perhaps because most of the plot elements are so hackneyed.

Set in a distant future where man has explored a wider corner of the galaxy, encountering at least three alien races, the story has four explorers setting off on a mission to reach the structure of the story’s title, an artificial planet of sorts shaped like a ring around a distant sun. The crew is assembled by a two-headed creature called a puppeteer, who has deliberately selected three specific members – two humans, and one giant feline creature called a kzinti – for this mission, itself a response to the discovery that the Milky Way’s core is going to break down in a massive chain reaction in about 20,000 years. The puppeteers have already begun a massive migration, but it becomes clear that they want to see if copying Ringworld would accommodate them in another system.

Niven has explicitly said that he modeled the world after the Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical structure built around a star capable of capturing all of that star’s energy to supply the needs of the species that built it. Dyson recognized that per capita energy usage rises as a civilization becomes more technologically advanced – how many devices are you charging at the moment? – and conceived this structure as a totally crazy, speculative solution as well as a theoretical maximum on the energy available to that civilization, given that solar energy would dwarf any energy from nonrenewable sources. Niven has the unfortunate tendency to give the reader too much of the physics, generally in awkward dialogue between these impossibly-educated crew members, which doesn’t do much to help keep the story moving. Where Niven has to deviate from known or even hypothetical physics – the familiar “hyperdrive” of most science fiction gets stretched even further than normal – he spares us the details, which works much better because you’re only reading this book if you’re already willing to suspend your disbelief in things like travel at or faster than the speed of light. (Niven actually has an amusing bit of handwaving about this that I won’t spoil.)

Science fiction that relies this heavily on the science portion for seizing and maintaining reader interest worked for me when I was a teenager, but now it leaves me cold; I want fiction that tells me a story, preferably one that examines some fundamental aspects of human nature. (Granted, that’s tricky with a kzinti who might eat his shipmates or a puppeteer who rolls into a ball when scared as part of the crew.) Niven could have used his plot device as a way to consider the eventuality that we will fill the planet, or reach a point where we can’t increase our per capita energy consumption, but he blows right past that to get his quartet on Ringworld, where they find … well, not very much. And what they find is bizarre, often inexplicable, and impossible to picture with Niven’s rather stolid prose.

Ringworld isn’t a slow or arduous read, however – the writing isn’t complex, the sentences are pretty short, and most chapters function as self-contained stories. It may have been more praiseworthy in its day, but given some of the recent Hugo winners that have put storycraft over the sci-fi or fantasy elements, it feels very dated.

Next up: I just finished Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle and started Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours on the flight back from Humid City this morning.

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