→ July 1, 2018
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Annihilation.

Paramount made some curious decisions earlier this year with the release of the film Annihiliation (amazon • iTunes), loosely based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name (which I have not read yet), including an off-period release date in the U.S. and the sale of the film directly to Netflix for most of the world (other than the U.S., Canada, and China). Marketing of the film wasn’t great either; I saw the trailer before its theatrical run, and the trailer doesn’t represent the film well at all, overselling the horror elements and underselling the story. The result is that the movie didn’t fare that well at the box office despite positive reviews, undercut somewhat by Paramount’s machinations and I think the failure to push this film as a smart sci-fi flick that overcomes some modest flaws with a big finish.

The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) in medical isolation, being interrogated by a British scientist (Benedict Wong) about what happened to her on a mission that went wrong and from which she is the only survivor. She’s somewhat vague on details, after which we flash back to before the mission and see that she’s a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School and that her husband, a special forces Sergeant (Oscar Isaac), has been missing for a year and is presumed dead. He shows up at the house one day, but is totally vacant and almost immediately begins hemorrhaging, which eventually leads to Lena volunteering to lead a mission of five women soldiers and researchers into a mysterious, growing region called the Shimmer, into which the military has sent many missions but from which only Lena’s husband has ever returned. The women find a seemingly impossible environment where animals and plants are swapping DNA, with increasingly horrifying results the longer the team stays within its boundaries.

Annihilation has two main conceits in its story: the ongoing mystery of what the Shimmer is and what it’s doing, and the fact that previous teams have all disappeared and are likely dead, a Lovecraftian mystery trending towards horror since we know from the start that Lena is the only survivor. (The Wikipedia entry on the movie notes the script’s similarity to a Lovecraft short story, “The Colour of Space.”) The former is revealed gradually at first, but proceeds in fits and starts in accordance with discoveries the team makes and with Lena’s examinations of blood and other cells under her microscope. The latter builds as the story progresses and the team moves through the Shimmer with increasing disorientation; they encounter animals that loosely resemble familiar creatures but that have evolved at impossible speeds. Eventually Lena reaches the lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer and discovers something more of the nature of the anomaly in a gorgeous special-effects sequence right before her final battle to escape.

The script does waste too much time on irrelevant details outside of the mission, including Lena’s affair with a colleague while her husband is missing, a subplot that is neither germane to the main story nor resolved in any satisfactory manner during the film. And while screenwriter/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) tries to give the team members some identities as individuals, none but Lena comes across as much more than a redshirt, not even ostensible team leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), so none of their losses is particularly tangible to the viewer. One team member cracks under the stress after the first death and another attack, which is foreshadowed in earlier dialogue but really not well explained by her character at all. Lena’s decision not to reveal to other team members that her husband was on an earlier mission is played up as a major issue, but without justifying why that’s a big deal or why the team member who cracks is so angry about the omission.

There are two scenes of gore in Annihiliation, more than enough to earn its R rating but not so much that I’d call this a straight horror film. There’s more of an intellectual undercurrent to the script than the trailer gave it credit for having; the way the Shimmer evolves, and then affects the members of the team, poses real questions about what it means to be human or even conscious, ones the film doesn’t try to answer even as characters directly ask what the Shimmer “wants.” Maybe it was just too hard to market on its own merits, but Annihilation is intense and smart enough to deserve to find an audience now that it’s more widely available.

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→ June 15, 2018
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Crosstalk.

I adore the prose of Connie Willis, the brilliant and prolific American novelist whose Oxford time-travel stories include some of my favorite sci-fi novels, including To Say Nothing of the Dog, Doomsday Book, and the diptych Blackout and All Clear, which as a group won three Hugos, two Nebulas, and two Locus awards. She has, however, written other speculative fiction outside of the Oxford universe (which began with “Fire Watch,” a short story that also won the Hugo-Nebula parlay), including the light novel Bellwether and, most recently, the 2016 novel Crosstalk, which builds an entire comedy of errors on a single technological twist while also prodding questions about just how much we really want to connect to other people.

Bridget “Briddey” Flanigan is the very lucky protagonist, a rising employee of mobile phone manufacturer CommSpan who happens to be engaged to the extremely desirable bachelor and top executive Trent, who then convinces her to get an EED, a neural implant that is supposed to allow two people with a strong emotional connection to feel each other’s emotions even more potently. Her fiancé is in a terrible rush to have the procedure done, and Briddey agrees to it even though her family members warn her not to do so, as does the eccentric programmer C.B., who works at CommSpan in a dungeon-like basement office. When she has the implant, however, she finds that she’s suddenly telepathic, and the first voice she hears isn’t Trent’s, leading to a series of misadventures around trying to stay afloat amidst the deluge of voices in her head, to avoid letting Trent know what’s going on, and, hardest of all, to keep anything private from her unbelievably intrusive family.

Figuring out how Crosstalk would end was the least of its pleasures – it’s obvious she’s going to end up with someone other than Trent, and I thought it was obvious what side character was pulling many of the strings throughout the book – but, as with so many Willis novels, the fun is in the journey. She has a classic comic novelist’s knack of creating side characters who are exaggerated just to the edge of realistic, like Briddey’s sisters, both of whom classify anything as an emergency, one of whom is referring to her awful dating choices while the other is convinced that her daughter Maeve is into everything from Disney princesses to online terrorism. (She’s mostly just watching zombie movies.) They’ll exasperate you as they exasperate Briddey – and I often wondered why she even talks to her great-aunt, who seems to have less respect than anyone for Briddey’s privacy – but they’re all just slightly embellished versions of people you probably know in your own life, and watching her evasive maneuvers provides a good chunk of the book’s humor.

Willis can craft a clever mystery as well, and in all of her novels she tends to reveal the secrets of the main plot very gradually, which works extremely well in the time travel stories, but a bit less so here because she has characters who know the truth deliberately holding it back from Briddey. The EED doesn’t make everyone telepathic, or even close, so why does Briddey become so after the surgery? Why does she hear that one other character first, even though that person hasn’t had an EED? Once the specific character trait in question is revealed, it’s easy to figure out who’s pulling many of the strings and to walk all the way back to the first chapter to understand certain characters’ motivations, but I also left with the sense that Briddey herself had a right to know what was happening to her. Several people who profess to care about her don’t share what they know, and she’s left worse off until they come clean. That’s not a factor in the Oxford novels, where something generally goes wrong with the time travel mechanism and no one, not even the Professor running the program, can figure out why.

The time-travel novels and even the much lighter Bellwether all sucked me completely into their worlds, because Willis writes so well – like P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis with a dash of Jane Austen thrown in – and because she creates so many three-dimensional characters in all of her books. Crosstalk is a half-grade down for me, because of the issue with characters not telling Briddey what they know, and because the moral and philosophical questions Willis seems to explore here don’t feel very fresh even two years after the book’s publication. We’re all online too much if we’re online at all. We’re replacing personal connections with digital ones, at apparent risk to our emotional well-being. Willis takes that to its logical extreme, that two people who are glued to their devices decide to make their romantic relationship a direct, digital one instead. It was probably a risk Willis knew she was taking while writing the book, but reality has raced forward to the point where the book seems like a debate we might have had three years ago, replaced today by so many more social media worries and changes to how we all communicate with each other (or fail to do so) instead. It’s worth reading, because Willis is such a fun writer, but I would rate it at the bottom of the novels I’ve read from her so far.

Next up: Still reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.

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→ March 30, 2018
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

I’m a bit late to the Star Wars party, but I finally watched The Last Jedi (now available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes) on Thursday evening, which I believe makes me the last person in the United States to see this movie. I have seen The Force Awakens and would agree with what I think is the consensus that this movie is better than that one was; if TFA was the greatest hits album, TLJ is the album after that where the band tries to recapture the sound of its best output, and intermittently succeeds.

I imagine most of you have seen this already, so here’s a briefer than usual plot summary. The movie picks up right at the end of TFA; Kylo Ren is still Mad in Space, Rey is still with Luke Skywalker on the island planet, Finn is still boring, Leia still kicks ass, and the Rebels are still lucky to exist given the firepower and numbers the First Order brings to the fight. After a Pyrhhic victory to open the film, the Rebels find themselves chased even through lightspeed travel, which we’re told is impossible (the tracking through lightspeed, not the lightspeed part, which is actually impossible), and must thus find a way to disable the First Order’s tracking capability so they can escape to a safe hiding spot to regroup. Meanwhile, Rey wants to grow up to be a Jedi and find out who her parents were, and Poe Dameron still has problems with authority and is a poor judge of what constitutes acceptable losses in battle.

The women absolutely carry this film, and I don’t think that’s entirely by design. Daisy Ridley stole the first film in this trilogy as Rey, apparently to the surprise of the studio, and she remains a riveting, central figure in this film. Kelly Marie Tran debuts as Rose, another character like Rey – it’s hard to imagine these films without them – and just underscores the point that casting more women even in roles that studios would historically have handed to men adds something, rather than just avoiding negative PR. Creating female characters who are tough and resourceful, who can fight but who also think well on their feet, isn’t any harder than creating male characters who are or do these things, and it’s no less credible. If anything, The Last Jedi gives Rose short shrift by dropping her into the film without much character development, but it’s possible she’ll play a larger role in the next installment, too. Carrie Fisher’s final turn as Leia may come across as even more powerful because we lost her before the movie was even released, but the increased role the writers of these last two films gave her character has also helped put them above The Phantom Menace trilogy. Laura Dern also appears as Admiral Hodor … er, Holdo, another Resistance leader who takes over when Leia ends up in a coma, and while Holdo’s plan is kind of terrible, Dern, a generally tremendous actress in any role, does a superb job of threading the needle between stern by-the-book authority to contrast with Poe and presenting herself as a thoughtful, strong leader willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Rebels alive.

This was also the funniest Star Wars movie by a wide margin, with some dopey physical comedy (that still made me laugh because inside I am just a 12-year-old boy who laughs when people in movies fall down), a good bit more sarcasm than I’m used to from these films, and an utterly brilliant nod to the now ancient Star Wars parody short “Hardware Wars.” Johnson is absolutely playing with viewers’ expectations throughout the film, and where TFA gave viewers the answers they wanted, The Last Jedi goes in the other direction, setting up an obvious answer and then responding to it with sarcasm or a twist. Given the reverence afforded to this saga, a little nose-tweaking here is warranted and does help avoid the self-seriousness that permeated both TFA and especially The Phantom Menace.

The Force Awakens was a perfectly cromulent film – entertaining, but nothing new beyond the special effects. We got our cantina scene, our flying through narrow passages battle scene, our light saber fights, Jedi mind tricks, a Kessel Run joke, and too many other allusions to the original trilogy. It worked, but it felt too much like a nostalgia play, and perhaps a plea to forget the intervening trilogy of films. The Last Jedi is less derivative of the series, but now we’re devolving into this pattern of “let’s put the heroes in extreme jeopardy, kill off a bunch of redshirts, and save the characters with names” over and over in the films, and that becomes a bit tiresome. It invokes adrenaline fatigue and tends to come at the expense of story and/or character development. There’s a real lost opportunity here when Rey is with Luke Skywalker and, in theory, learning about the Jedi religion and traditions; the biggest revelation she gets about her character comes not from Luke, but from Kylo “my parents didn’t love me enough” Ren.

And that’s the other aspect of both of these new films I haven’t really bought. I’m all for changing up the archetype of a villain in space epics, but “goth kid” isn’t all that compelling, and Driver’s mopey delivery comes across as depressed, not depraved. This script does a better job than its predecessor in explaining Ren’s backstory, and how the son of Han and Leia could become the most dangerous person in the known universe, so I’m holding out hope we’ll get more of his character development in the third film. This film was replete with plots and subplots and probably more named characters than it could really handle in 150 or so minutes, but there were still arcs that could have used more exploration.

They also could have cut Finn’s story substantially to make room for further depth in the narratives around Rey or Kylo. I know Finn is a popular character and John Boyega is likable, but I don’t think he has any charisma at all in this role – certainly not next to Oscar Isaak’s Poe, who is drawn with some very sharp lines but that at least let Isaak tear up the proverbial fucking dance floor. I’m still unclear on what Finn’s role in the greater story arc of these two new movies is, and the side plot where he and Rose go off to the gambling planet to find a master codebreaker (master … breaker?), played in fine scene-chewing fashion by Benicio del Toro, is the weakest part of the film by 12 parsecs.

This movie looks incredible, as you’d expect given the studios behind it and the money invested in it, but Rian Johnson has also clearly given consideration to how he can use things like color or establishing shots to contribute to the feel of the story. There’s a lot of red in the film, including Supreme Leader Snoke’s henchpersons and the tracks left in the salt on the rebels’ disused hiding planet. (I know we’re supposed to think ‘blood,’ but it kept making me think of Australia’s Simpson Desert, where iron oxide in the sand turns the entire landscape a deep red.) There’s also a lot of moving water in the film, including some stunning waterfall shots, designed to give you the sense of descent and to feel several characters fighting the current, especially Rey as she resists the dark aspects of the Force within her and the pull of Kylo’s own darkness. Such small, subtle additions to a script that often feels bombastic and certainly doesn’t shy away from huge battle sequences or grand gestures by its characters may be lost on viewers caught up in the extensive plot, but they do help set the tone and, I think, establish a more complex worldview than any of the preceding films offered.

At 153 minutes, The Last Jedi is probably both too long and too short; Johnson had enough thematic material to go three-plus hours, but the repetitive nature of some of the plot details wore on me by the end, and there really isn’t much doubt who’s going to live to see the end of the film and who’s not, so the question becomes “how will Johnson write them out of trouble this time,” rather than the more intense question of “who’s going to survive?” Unfortunately, Johnson isn’t involved in the as-yet untitled Episode IX, which will be written and directed by JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio, which I don’t interpret as a positive sign given some of their recent projects (The Cloverfield Paradox, Batman vs. Superman) and the wealth of material bequeathed upon them by The Last Jedi. With principal photography set to begin in just four months, it’s probably vain to hope that they’ll get another voice in the room to help give these arcs the resolution they might deserve.

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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
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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
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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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→ February 6, 2018
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Downbelow Station.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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