→ November 11, 2019
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The Calculating Stars.

Mary Robinette Kowal won the trifecta of sci-fi literary awards this year for her novel The Calculating Stars, taking home the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus prizes for the year’s best novel. (The Hugo’s list of nominees included six titles, five written by women, which I think is a record.) The book seems destined to hit the screen somewhere, given its popularity, themes of feminism/misogyny, racism, and climate change. It’s also utterly awful, a bit of trite juvenilia, easily one of the worst Hugo winners I’ve read, with silly plotting, stock characters, and prose befitting a first-time author. How this book won any of those awards, let alone all three, is totally beyond me, because, while I finished it since it’s an easy read, it is treacly nonsense.

Elma is the protagonist, and as the novel opens, she’s on a hillside north of DC with her husband, where they’ve flown in a private plane to get away for a little sexytime, only to have their reverie interrupted by a massive explosion somewhere to the south. After their initial fears that the Soviets have launched a nuclear missile appear to be unfounded, they realize it was a massive meteorite strike into the ocean, which they learn shortly afterwards has vaporized the mid-Atlantic coast, killing millions, and will eventually lead to runaway global warming because of all of the water vapor the impact sent into the atmosphere.

Elma and her husband Nat both work in aerospace, she as a computer (a term that used to refer to people, not machines), he as an engineer, and both are immediately involved in the international effort to race into space to try to get off this planet before it boils. Elma is also an experienced pilot, having worked as a WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, although I’m sure Kowal intended the wordplay around calling Elma, a somewhat observant Jew, a WASP) during World War II, and she seethes when she realizes that NACA (the actual predecessor of NASA) is only considering men as astronauts, even though colonizing the moon or Mars or anywhere else would obviously require women. (Actually, it only requires women; you can send the male contribution to reproduction to space in a test tube.) The bulk of the book covers her quest to become an astronaut, to change hearts and minds, to fight a little garden-variety racism, and to overcome her anxiety disorder enough to get a seat on the rocket.

There’s so much wrong with The Calculating Stars, but nothing is worse than how incredibly obvious the whole book is. Of course Elma is going to be an astronaut. Of course she’s going to fight racism and win. Of course everything she does is going to work out, because this is a children’s book – well, it would be, were it not for the frequent and very awkwardly written sex scenes, although even those are written as they might be in a young adult novel. Elma is ridiculously perfect as a person; the calculations she can do in her head defy credibility, and if there are people who can do what she does there couldn’t be more than ten in the United States. (Her obsession with prime numbers, however, is completely credible, and one of the only things about her character to which I related.) She nearly always has the right words, the right responses, and when she doesn’t, Nate does. It makes Kowal’s hamhanded attempts at cliffhangers fall totally flat, because they always work out within a few paragraphs in some ordinary fashion.

The science also feels incredibly dicey to me. Kowal refers to colonizing Venus, which scientists already suspect was inhospitable to life by this time period, as Rupert Wildt theorized that the surface temperature of Venus was above the boiling point of water due to all of the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. She later creates a sort of cold fusion mechanism in a chapter heading, where “a catalyst” allows rockets to combine atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere into O2, releasing substantial quantities of energy for free. Even throwing those small points aside, Kowal has 1950s science building and successfully launching an orbiting space station and planning a lunar colony several years before the MOSFET transistor, without which modern computing would not exist, was even invented. It’s a fantasy, and it detracts from the realism Kowal is trying to infuse in the cli-fi aspects of her story.

If I had to speculate on why this book won the big three awards, I’d guess it’s because the novel is, indeed, a climate change story. The climate isn’t changing because of man in The Calculating Stars, but it’s changing, and because the meteorite in the novel hit water and not land, it has probably pushed the climate past the point of no return. Kowal simply accepts that as a given, and then uses it to give us Republicans in Congress denying the accuracy of climate models, or average citizens asking why the government is spending money on long-term projects instead of helping people who need it today. It’s so thinly veiled you can see right through it, and even though I’m obviously on the side of the world’s scientists who say that climate change is real, I found Kowal’s approach graceless and infantile, including how easily some of the climate change deniers in the book suddenly drop their opposition. I don’t see the present GOP changing its tune on climate change quite so easily.

That’s without even getting into how weak the characters are; most are more memorable for their names than anything about their personalities. Elma and Nathaniel are themselves just too good; he’s certainly a dream husband for the era, progressive and willing to stand up for what he thinks is right. People are flawed, even the best people, and protagonists like these two don’t really appear in adult novels, not in 2019, certainly not in novels that deserve consideration for major awards.

It’d be hard to be worse than the second Hugo winner, They’d Rather Be Right, which isn’t really even a proper novel, but The Calculating Stars comes close. After the Broken Earth trilogy won the last three Hugos – and while I had issues with those novels, especially the third, they are way better written and more intelligently plotted than this novel – Kowal’s book is a huge letdown. I need to read some of the other nominees because there is no way there wasn’t at least one sci-fi novel better than this one in 2019.

Next up: B. Catling’s The Cloven, the conclusion to his Vorrh trilogy.

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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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→ August 25, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/25/18.

I had one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week, scouting notes on Tampa wunderkind Wander Franco and some Yankees & Rangers prospects, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the gladiator-themed deckbuilding game Carthage for Paste this week. That’s the last of my pre-Gen Con reviews; I believe everything I review the rest of the year will either be from games I got/saw at Gen Con or that were released afterwards.

I’m about due for a fresh edition of my free email newsletter, to which you may wish to subscribe if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

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→ July 22, 2018
→ By

The Stone Sky.

N.K. Jemisin became the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and I believe the first woman of color to win it, when she took the prestigious (but generally white-dominated) prize home for her 2015 novel The Fifth Season, the opener of the Broken Earth trilogy. The story continued with The Obelisk Gate, which also took home the Hugo, and finished with last summer’s The Stone Sky, which is one of six nominees for this year’s Hugo and won Jemisin her first Nebula Award earlier this year. Continuing the saga of Essun and her daughter Nassun, two ‘orogenes’ who can control seismic movements in an earth subject to massive tectonic upheavals that cause lengthy climate disasters, The Stone Sky explains the origins of the post-apocalyptic setting and combines the parallel narratives – Essun’s, Nassun’s, and the nameless narrator of Essun’s sections, who is identified near the end of this book – into one story that answers all of the questions from the first two books. Wrapping up a series of this magnitude is difficult, and Jemisin, who has authored many other books, including series, seems to wobble as she tries to conclude this one. (UPDATE: This novel also won the Hugo, making Jemisin the first author to win the prize for all three books in a trilogy, and the first to win three straight Hugos for Best Novel.)

In the Broken Earth trilogy, humanity is in dire straits, as relatively unpredictable “Seasons” occur that produce catastrophic weather conditions that make survival extremely difficult, driving most humans, especially those near the Rifting (which I sense is by the equator), underground for the duration. If they don’t have food stores to survive, then they die. Somehow, enough humans have survived that the race persists, including some humans with the strange power of orogeny, allowing them to move the earth’s plates enough to try to stop some of those catastrophes from occurring. They also can draw on the power of the planet for combat, defensive or offensive, and there’s some overlap between the orogenes and people with a power the book refers to as magic, of even more obscure origin. And then there are the stone eaters, humanoid creatures who do as their name implies, can move through rock, and are effectively immortal.

Essun and Nassun are mother and daughter, but have been apart since the very beginning of The First Season, when Nassun’s father killed her little brother because he showed signs of orogeny and then absconded with her, leaving Essun to come home and find her son’s body with her family gone. Essun is part of a new ‘comm,’ which is trying to reach a distant haven before the imminent Season arrives, but is also still hoping to find her daughter, and in this book, she becomes aware that Nassun is doing things with her own nascent orogenic powers, driving Essun, herself one of the most powerful orogenes on the planet, to try to stop her daughter from wreaking unimaginable destruction on the world.

Nassun, meanwhile, has now lost her brother and father, and is separated from her mother, leaving her only with her Guardian, Schaffa, who acts as a father figure but also has ambiguous responsibilities beyond protecting his young charge. When his life is threatened, Nassun sets off on a quixotic mission that might save him but bring about an eschatological crisis from which humanity and the planet would never recover.
Although the series’ post-apocalyptic setting appears in the first novel to be the result of unchecked climate change, the cause of the Seasons turns out to be more fantastical than that, and any indictment of man’s reckless misuse of the planet and its environment is strictly metaphorical. The stronger metaphor, played out in parallel with Essun and Nassun, is one of man’s relationship with ‘Mother’ Earth, and the changes in the nature of that relationship over the course of the lives of both mother and child. Nassun needs her mother, but resents her absence (feeling abandoned, although that’s not fair to Essun). Essun is torn between her responsibilities to her comm – which is what’s keeping her alive – and her responsibilities to her daughter. Nassun eventually takes a course of action that reflects her youth and the poor judgment of humans whose brains have not yet fully developed, and it takes a heroic effort from Essun to try to stop her. The parallel with the man/Earth relationship here – there’s a hint of Gaia theory underneath the novel – is not perfect, but similar ideas, like man taking the environment for granted, using it up and discarding it when finished, appear in both the literal and figurative aspects of the novel.

The problem with The Stone Sky and the trilogy as a whole is the resolution of the main storyline, which seems to require Jemisin to create some new magic to complete it. The first book conceived a world that, while strange and often vague, felt self-contained: You didn’t know all of the rules of the environment, but you could trust that the author knew them and worked within their limits. By this third book, however, it seemed like Jemisin had expanded her own rule set to get to the finish line, including the transport method – like a hyperloop train through the earth – that is essential to get everyone in the right place for the slam-bang finish, and I found my suspension of disbelief starting to fall apart. Between that and some plodding prose – Jemisin is clearly brilliant and creative, but I found her style sluggish to read – I finished this book because I felt an obligation to it, but wouldn’t say I enjoyed it to the end.

Next up: still reading John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents.

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→ March 22, 2018
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Speaker for the Dead.

My annual post predicting breakout players for the upcoming season is up for Insiders.

I read – more precisely, listened to – Orson Scott Card’s Hugo-winning novel Ender’s Game back in 2006, before this blog existed, and somehow have only referred to it once in all of the posts on science fiction I’ve had on the site since then. I thought it was fine, certainly entertaining, with an ending that felt tacked-on (because it was), a good young adult sci-fi novel that followed a fairly typical storyline of “outcast kid saves humanity” but that ended somewhere unsupported by the story that came before. I just read the book’s sequel, Speaker for the Dead, which won the Hugo the following year and takes that tacked-on ending and blows it up into a full-length novel in its own right. It holds together much better than its predecessor, and this time around Card manages to create a few more well-rounded characters, but Ender has become a little bit insufferable, Card’s admirable philosophy comes across in ham-handed style, and if anything this book feels even more like it’s written for a teenaged audience.

Ender, born Andrew Wiggin, has become the Speaker for the Dead after defeating the “buggers” in a war that he learned never needed to take place at all. He now travels through portions of space inhabited by humans delivering funeral orations that attempt to sum up each deceased person’s life in full, rather than, say, delivering the sort of encomia we expect when someone dies but that fail to do the subject justice. Because of the relativistic effects of faster-than-light travel, however, he arrives at planets years or even decades after his services have been requested, which allows much of the action of Speaker for the Dead to take place in his absence.

In this book, humanity has encountered another sentient species, called “piggies” due to their porcine facial appearance, on the Portuguese Catholic-controlled planet of Lusitania. The human scientists on the planet observe the piggies, more formally called pequeninos, and operate under fairly strict rules on non-interference, including avoiding exposing the piggies to any human technology so they don’t accelerate the latter species’ evolution in any artificial way. A plague wiped out much of the earliest human settlement, and Novinha, the daughter of the two scientists who found a cure but still died of the disease, calls for Ender to Speak for the scientist who raised her but was killed by the piggies in some sort of religious ritual after he discovered the secret of the plague’s place in the planet’s ecosystem. By the time Ender arrives, however, twenty more years have passed, Novinha’s former lover (the dead scientist’s son) has also died in a similar ritual, while her son and her former lover’s daughter have fallen in love while also studying the piggies. Ender walks into this quagmire just as the all-powerful “Congress” prepares to sanction the humans on Lusitania for illegally sharing technology with the piggies.

Speaker for the Dead swept the big three sci-fi awards (Hugo, Nebula, Locus) in 1987, beating out, among others, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and William Gibson’s Count Zero (the sequel to Neuromancer; my only review of a Gibson novel is of the third book in the trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive), which I can only assume from this vantage point was in response to its popularity. Card is offering a sort of pop philosophy in this book about tolerance and understanding – at odds with his longstanding opposition to gay rights – of other cultures and religious traditions, one that is admirable even if he does beat you over the head with that particular hammer. Ender was a regular if precocious kid in the first novel, going through the same kind of boarding-school experience that would later show up in Harry Potter and the Magicians series, but here he’s like a new Dalai Lama with a bit of an ego. (I suppose when multiple planets know your name and you’ve founded a new religion, you probably get a bit of a big head about it all.)

The big advantage of this book compared to Ender’s Game is that Card seems to have learned how to create compelling characters, even complex, difficult ones. Novinha is fascinating, even if there was a note about her that sounded off key to me, but one that involves something everyone has a hard time understanding – why women stay in abusive relationships. The kid scientists all have distinct personalities as well, even if they don’t get the page time of the adults, and there’s at least an attempt to distinguish the various named pequenino characters even though they cycle in and out of the story rather quickly.

There’s some graphic violence in this book – the ritual mentioned above would never make it to a theater if someone filmed this story – that is truly at odds with the overall tone. Card writes like he’s talking to a teenager, and as if his characters are all stuck in teenage modes of expression. Nicknaming the alien species “buggers” and “piggies” comes across as puerile. He also has a simple idea of atonement or redemption, one that I don’t think fits with the events that come before those moments, as if doing the right thing today wipes out all the wrong things you did before. I wish life worked that way, but it doesn’t.

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→ March 21, 2018
→ By

Forever Peace.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Joe Haldeman’s Hugo-winning novel The Forever War, which described the history of a soldier involved in a war that takes place across several millennia due to the relativistic events of time travel. The science aspects of the story worked fairly well, but his depiction of the declining society on earth seemed homophobic and beyond mere dystopian thinking. Haldeman won the Hugo a second time (and the Nebula) for his 1997 novel Forever Peace, which isn’t a sequel or even truly connected to the first book other than in name, and takes an entirely different tack on the question of what causes wars and who really stands to benefit from them.

In Forever Peace, scientists have built the largest ever supercollider out within the moons of Jupiter, but it turns out that there’s a hitch in the system – if the experiment is allowed to proceed to its conclusion, it will result in the end of the universe, much as real-world opponents of the Large Hadron Collider claimed would happen once that came on line. (We are, at the moment, still here.) This would seem like a fairly straightforward story – the folks who discover what’s amiss in the collider have to convince the authorities to stop it – but in Forever Peace they are opposed by a fundamentalist Christian group, the Hammer of God, that has infiltrated the top levels of government, the military, and academia. Known colloquially as “Enders,” they *want* the end of the world to occur for religious reasons.

The main character, Julian Class, is a soldier who never sees the battlefield, working from a central command center and controlling ‘soldierboy’ mech units hundreds of miles away in what seems like a fairly clear precursor to Avatar’s main conceit. (I haven’t seen the latter movie, so I’m somewhat guessing here.) That disconnection between the actor and the violence s/he causes is a core idea in the book, and also foreshadows our increasingly indirect methods of waging war, like drone attacks in the Middle East that allow us to kill enemies real and imagined without risk to any American lives. When Julian has to take a life, it has a stronger, more profound effect on him than anything he says he’s experienced before, even when piloting the ‘soldierboy’ through Third-World villages and destroying property and crops.

There are also new Neuromancer-esque technologies where people can jack in to a shared network, which can connect your mind to others on the network at the same time, and which, of course, also becomes an interrogation technique. The protagonists discover a way to reprogram people via this technology to convince them of the utter futility of war or violence, by jacking them in with a group of other people for about two weeks, whether of their own free will or under coercion. Accessing the network in this way requires surgery to implant the jack, an operation that is sometimes unsuccessful and leaves the patients permanently offline, occasionally leaving them with brain damage as well. The operations are semi-legal, and Americans cross the border to Mexico to undergo them.

Haldeman’s writing is impersonal by design; none of his characters here or in the preceding book feel terribly real or fleshed-out, and many of his side characters are just props. Doomsday cults are real, of course, but the Enders depicted in this book feel so sharp-edged that I couldn’t take them seriously – it’s satirical, obviously, but the internal inconsistency of these characters, from the top government officials in the cult to the assassin trying to chase down Julian and his girlfriend, Blaze, so they can’t stop the collider, made them feel like cartoon villains.

As with the first novel, Forever Peace left me wondering what exactly the point was. Yes, war is bad, I got that, thanks. Removing the actor from the effects of his actions is also bad. Understanding other people, regardless of background, should reduce conflicts, yep, got that. There’s nothing here you wouldn’t find in a decent YA novel, and the latter character would almost certainly have better female characters than Haldeman could ever create. I know he’s built quite a following for his novels, and certainly his military experience means that his battle scenes are better written than most of what you’ll find elsewhere in sci-fi, but after these two books, Haldeman hasn’t convinced me he has anything interesting to say in his fiction.

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→ March 11, 2018
→ By

They’d Rather Be Right.

Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s They’d Rather Be Right won the second Hugo Award for Best Novel and is widely regarded today as the worst of all of the 66 winners of that prize. It was later reissued with two related short stories appended to the beginning of it and sold as The Forever Machine, which is the version I read, and the main story is not improved any but the inclusion of those two extra bits. I couldn’t get over what a shame this entire book was, because there’s a germ of an idea at the heart of it that is actually quite relevant today – what might artificial intelligence do for us, and how it might be able to change civilization if we’re willing to let it.

Two professors, with the help of a natural telepath named Joey, build a ‘cybernetic machine’ they name Bossy, which operates quite a bit like today’s backpropagation AI programs do, but with the unstated condition that, in the world of this novel, P is actually equal to NP and thus all problems that can be verified quickly can be solved in polynomial time. Bossy can answer anything and somehow can reverse aging and make people immortal. The media gets stirred up against Bossy at first, so the professors have to dismantle it, take it into hiding, and rebuild it in a flophouse in San Francisco, eventually gaining the help of a local industrialist who controls major media outlets and enlisting some help from the military to protect it. When their first patient reverse-ages about 30 years and starts talking like a Buddhist who’s achieved nirvana, the uproar threatens to engulf the project and potentially end it.

There’s a decent premise in there, and the title comes from a funny exchange about whether people would give up their most cherished beliefs and preconceived notions in exchange for a life of immortality, wisdom, and peace. One of the inventors of Bossy says that given that choice, most people would reject what Bossy was offering, saying “they’d rather be right” than gain everything there possibly is to gain. But my word is the execution here terrible. The three main inventors, all men, are paper-thin and boring; even Joey’s telepathy is just a crutch, not really important to Bossy’s development, but a way for him to control other people the way Second Foundation experts in Isaac Asimov’s series use mentalics. The woman who becomes Bossy’s first success story, Mabel, is the hackneyed hooker with a heart of gold, and about as interesting as paste even before her transformation – and she’s worse afterwards.

It’s also never really clear why the public rages against Bossy early in the book and then clamors for it later. Yes, public opinion often goes against new technologies or scientific progress if a large portion of the population doesn’t understand it – GMOs are the best modern example – but that’s not well set up here at all. If someone invents a Forever Machine, what fool wouldn’t take it? Even if I told you that it wouldn’t extend your lifespan, but would remove any effects of aging and protect you against cancer and autoimmune diseases and more, and also gave you greater intelligence and inner peace, you’re still saying no? People spend billions of dollars on useless supplements to try to get a little healthier. If someone invents Bossy, they’ll need an army to keep people away from it.

I’ve got a few more Hugo winners to review here that I’ve already read, and right now I have just four left: C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen; Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky; and the second and third novels in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Vinge’s book I’ll read soon enough – it’s just long, but I do find his books interesting, even if they move a little slow. But those Mars books … given how awful Red Mars is, and yes, it’s a more painful read than even this dreck, I’m in no rush to read them just for the sake of finishing a list.

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→ February 26, 2018
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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.

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→ February 18, 2018
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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.

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→ February 13, 2018
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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.

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