→ February 19, 2017
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Arrival.

Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, another nominee for the Academy Award for Best Picture, is something of a rarity in movies these days: a major-studio film with a thoughtful, intelligent script that challenges the viewer with big philosophical questions while also satisfying everyone’s desire for a compelling plot. Based on a Nebula Award-winning short story by Ted Chiang called “Story of Your Life,” Arrival looks like a story about humanity’s first contact with an alien race, but in the end it’s truly about human happiness and how knowing the future might change your choices in the present. (It’s now available to rent/buy via amazon and iTunes.)

Amy Adams plays Louise Banks, a polyglot and linguistics professor who is summoned by the US Army when twelve alien spacecraft land around the globe, including in one remote spot in Montana where most of the movie takes place. Before that, we see a brief overview of Louise’s story outside of the alien visit, where she’s married, has a baby, but loses the child to a rare disease in adolescence. At the landing site, she meets physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and Colonel Weber (Forrest Whitaker, using a bizarre accent), and begins the process of trying to communicate with the aliens, dubbed “heptapods” because they have seven legs. They write in a pictograph-like script of circular images that deliver entire sentences in one symbol because the heptapods perceive time in a different way than humans do, and the center of the film revolves around the effort to establish for the two species to interact.

It’s an incredibly academic story at its heart; I joked on Twitter that this was the best film ever made about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is also the core subject of a book by Samuel Delany, Babel-17, currently sitting on my to-read shelf. Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer could have skipped over a lot of the details, but instead treated the topic seriously, consulting linguists, developing a consistent writing system for the heptapods, and spending a fair portion of the script on showing us Louise’s efforts. The script treats the viewers like intelligent adults, and that was probably my favorite aspect of the film.

Great science fiction stories should just be great stories, period, in different settings. Once the science part of the science fiction takes over too much (like Red Mars, the most egregious example of this I’ve ever read), the whole endeavor suffers. Arrival manages to strike a perfect balance between its two halves – there’s enough of the science-y stuff to satisfy genre fans, but this remains a fundamentally strong story about people. This is a story about Louise, and about how we choose to live our lives, including whether we’d do something different if we perceived time the way the heptapods do. In that sense, it’s smart, emotional, and very thought-provoking; I saw this movie three days ago and am still turning the ending over and over in my mind.

I’m floored that Amy Adams didn’t get an Oscar nomination for her performance here; I’d probably have given her a nod over Ruth Negga from Loving, but I haven’t seen three of the other nominees yet. (As great as Meryl Streep always is, I also wonder if she’s just an automatic nominee at this point in her career.) Renner doesn’t have a ton to do here, although I think he also infuses humanity into what could have been a stereotypical “brilliant but aloof scientist” role. Whitaker’s weird accent, best described as “drunk Bostonian,” was a terrible idea poorly executed, and his character is the most one-dimensional of all, serving as the “we’re running out of time!” guy in most of his scenes. It’s not quite a solo record from Adams, but it’s pretty close, enough that the film sinks or swims with her performance, and I think she nailed every aspect of it. (I was also mildly amused by their attempts to make her look a little frumpy, especially when she’s at the university. Needless to say, it didn’t take.)

I’m dancing around the film’s twist, although rather than one big reveal moment, Arrival gives it to you gradually to pick up over the course of the story. I thought it worked on two levels – as a surprise revelation, but also as a way to change the entire meaning of the film. Without that, the film is smart; with it, it’s clever. The story really stuck with me in a way that other great movies of 2016, including Moonlight, didn’t. Between that and Adams’ performance, I can at least see how it ended up with a Best Picture nomination, although I would put it behind at least three other films that also received nods in that category, as well as at least two films that didn’t get nominations.

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→ December 28, 2016
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Stranger in a Strange Land.

Continuing my roll through Hugo winners, I finally got around to Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land right before Christmas. It’s long been on my to-read list, but I figured I’d eventually find a copy in a used bookstore and waited until that happened to read it, even though I’ve read a few other Heinlein works (Double Star and Starship Troopers, both Hugo winners) and enjoyed them. Stranger is something else entirely, however – a deeply philosophical work, a new version of the Christ figure in literature, and a book with just a veneer of science fiction about it. Heinlein’s views on religion, morality, and human nature may not be yours or mine, but this novel gives you plenty to consider and reconsider on these subjects and more, simply because he sets off the correct bomb in the middle of the metaphorical town square.

That bomb is the person of Valentine Michael Smith, a man who was born on Mars and raised by Martians, an alien race, apparently much older than ours, that evolved quite differently from our own and possesses physical powers well beyond anything humans have acquired. When “Mike” returns to Earth with a second spacecraft, he’s suddenly the most sought-after person on our planet, with the government hiding him, multiple authorities trying to steal from him, and the media chasing him, and, eventually, one reporter and his nurse friend choosing to free him, sneaking him out of the hospital where he’s a de facto prisoner. Mike and the nurse end up at the estate of Jubal Harshaw, a polymath, hack author, and attorney who takes an immediate interest in Mike’s case and becomes his mentor and cicerone and protector all in one, negotiating for Mike’s freedom under the guise of the latter being the leader of humanity on Mars.

Mike ends up exploring human religion and philosophy, including the megachurch/cult of the Fosterites, and selects pieces of that he finds worthwhile in building his own Church of All Worlds, where members advance through various levels of enlightenment towards an inner circle, learning the Martian language and acquiring some of the same psychokinetic abilities Mike has. The Church of All Worlds becomes a counterculture haven, preaching free love and naturalism, eschewing modern capitalism, and living in a commune-like structure each time they set up shop in a new town. Their popularity threatens many existing forces, from the government to traditional religions, who whip up enmity towards its members and Mike in particular, leading to an entirely predictable ending that completes his Christ-like journey through the novel.

The novel’s title comes from one possible translation of a phrase in Exodus 2:22, “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.” Smith comes here as ignorant of human customs as a baby, and even has to learn to use his body properly in our higher gravity. He brings Martian concepts of dualism and an afterlife, of war, commerce, and, of course, of water, which is revered through the practice of “sharing water” with someone, after which you are “water brothers,” a sort of blood oath that bonds you to each other for life. He adopts some trivial aspects of human culture, at least temporarily, such as wearing clothes, but takes on a mystical role to those around him – first Jubal’s employees, then gradually more and more who take to his own message of free love, spiritual enlightenment, and … uh … being nice to everyone.

That’s where the book goes a bit off the rails for me, at least, although Heinlein is aiming for something very big here and probably gets as close to his goal as most authors could. Smith’s religion is cultlike too, and it’s not very clear what he’s preaching or promising – people see that he can move stuff with his mind, and he’s offering a sort of spiritual salvation without stigmatizing or forbidding sex the way the Catholic Church and many evangelical Protestant groups do, so of course they’re flocking to him. And there’s certainly something Christ-like in his messages of love, tolerance, and nonviolence, as well as his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of everyone around him. But Smith’s transition from ingenue to wiseman/Pied Piper is wildly abrupt and unexplained; in one chapter, he’s still confused by common human norms, and in the next, he and Jill, the nurse who got him out of the hospital, have run off to join a traveling carnival. (I read the version of the novel that was first published; Heinlein later restored material cut by his publishers in a separate edition that’s about 30% longer.)

Where Heinlein succeeds, however, is in crafting a sci-fi story that’s powered by the plot, not by the scientific details. None of the action in the book takes place on Mars; we meet Smith on earth, and for a time it’s unclear whether there’s anything different about him beyond his experience. He has psychokinetic powers learned from the Martians, and some very different ideas on death, but Heinlein uses that to drive the story – how would Earthborn humans respond to the appearance of a man with these abilities? It’s a twist on the Second Coming, but rather than playing it straight, Heinlein adds the interplanetary twist. There’s also an ancillary subplot, never fleshed out, about what the Martians might do to earth, having previously destroyed a nameless planet and civilization between Mars and Jupiter, but it feels unnecessary and unfinished, especially since the novel stands just fine on its own without that attempt to justify Mike’s return to earth.

Stranger in a Strange Land is a big novel of ideas – or perhaps a novel of big ideas – and whether it works may depend on your acceptance of some of the more mundane aspects of the philosophy Mike preaches to his followers. And it is preachy – there’s no question that Heinlein is advocating something here, which I thought caused the last of the novel’s five sections to drag until the last few pages. The real power in Heinlein’s concepts here, as voiced by Smith, is how absurd human conflicts, from war to prejudice, would appear to someone who fell in from the sky and wasn’t raised among the rest of us. If there’s a lasting message to take from this novel, that should be it.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention the one absolute nails-on-chalkboard line in the book, where one character (Jill?) says that nine times out of ten, a rape is at least partly the woman’s fault. I know it was written a half-century ago, but it’s absolutely cringeworthy, and knocked the book down a full grade for me.

Next up: I knocked out Thomas Hager’s non-fiction book The Alchemy of Air, about the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, and have just started Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction that year.

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→ December 19, 2016
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A Fire Upon the Deep.

Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep shared the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1993 with the vastly superior The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, a “tie” that beggars belief if you’ve read both books. Willis’s ranks among the best novels I’ve ever read, period, and comparing Vinge’s to it is unfair to the latter book, which is certainly ambitious and epic in scope and theme. Where A Fire Upon the Deep falls short of the greatest sci-fi novels I’ve read is in the stuff that makes a novel a good one: Vinge can’t give us compelling, well-drawn characters, despite his imagination and remarkable ability to create a complex, textured universe within his book.

Set millions of years into the future, A Fire Upon the Deep finds the Milky Way populated with numerous races, including humans, who can travel faster than light – but only if they’re in a zone sufficiently far from the galaxy’s center. These “zones of thought” affect everything from technological and philosophical progress to speed of travel, so a spaceship that moves from the Beyond down into the Slowness (nearer the black hole at our galaxy’s core) can go from traveling at several times the speed of light to a mere fraction thereof.

The story opens in confusing fashion, but after a hundred pages or so it becomes clear that the main plot thread revolves around an ‘ancient’ threat unleashed by the humans of a planet known as Straum, who appear to have found a dormant AI routine, implemented it, and opened Pandora’s Box on a “perversion” that attempts to take over huge swaths of the galaxy. One ship survived the apocalypse at Straum to jump to the Slowness, where the ship lands on an earthlike planet that, it turns out, is populated by a race of wolves, later called the Tines, who have the ability to think in groups: an ‘individual’ Tine is a pack of four to eight wolves who operate with one mind. The Tines attack the ship’s denizens, a family of four, killing the parents and taking the two kids as captives, one to each of the Tines’ two warring camps. These two plot strands are connected in a way that isn’t immediately obvious, spurring a cross-galaxy space chase, an exploration of predetermination, and a story of the intrusion of modern combat technology on a primitive society.

This is a space opera, with shifting timelines, multiple perspectives, intersections between several alien races, and even a pit stop that might as well be the book’s Mos Eisley, with no shortage of sci-fi wizardry. Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, which foresaw the era of wearable technology, was bogged down by his need to give us extraneous details, and A Fire Upon the Deep isn’t much different, especially when it comes to details of the operations of various spaceships – we don’t need any of this, and it brings everything to a crawl (like we’re stuck in the Slowness). Here, this problem is compounded by a plot that can only have one ending: there is no question that the people working to stop the ravenous “perversion,” known as the Blight, are going to win out in the end. The story would just end abruptly if there were any other resolution, and if I tell you one or more heroes will die in the effort, you can probably pick them out before the halfway point.

The other core problem here is that Vinge expends so much effort on crafting this brilliant, imaginative universe that the characters are all far too thinly drawn to create any emotional investment on the reader’s part. The kids are actually both kind of annoying, even though they’re orphans on a strange planet with no other humans around, and for almost the entire book each thinks the other is dead. If you can’t generate any empathy for those characters, you have a serious problem. Another character finds out her home planet has been basically blown up and her whole family annihilated; it’s a ho-hum moment that passes without any real emotion in the text or, obviously, off it.

I didn’t actually hate this book, although it may sound that way; I just wouldn’t recommend it that highly. It’s an achievement in scope and vision, but not as a work of cohesive fiction. I assumed that the Blight would lose the race, and that certain characters would survive, but I can’t say I particularly cared about any of the characters, and there was nothing specific to their individual story arcs beyond mere survival. The mark of great fiction, genre or otherwise, is more than mere plot; without strong characters or good prose, it’s just a story, and that’s all A Fire Upon the Deep was for me.

Next up: I’m halfway through another Hugo winner, Robert Heinlein’s classic Stranger in a Strange Land.

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→ September 23, 2016
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Way Station.

Clifford Simak’s Way Station was an early Hugo winner, a mixture of the soft science fiction with some more technical details than most of its contemporaries would include, but still focusing primarily on the core story and grand themes of cultural and racial understanding. It probably felt more progressive at the time that Simak published it, and today appears a product of its era (published in 1963) even if some of its themes of tolerance are timeless.

Way Station‘s protagonist is Enoch Wallace, a Civil War veteran who now operates an interstellar way station in the backwoods of Wisconsin, where alien races from across the galaxy pass through en route to other destinations outside of our solar system. Wallace is the only human aware of these other races’ existence, and he does not age while he’s inside the station, so he’s well over 100 years old at the time of the story even though he appears to be about 30. While this has elicited some gossip from his few neighbors, he’s reclusive and far enough away from any kind of town that he’s been able to exist merely on the fringes of civilization, instead spending much of his time reading science journals and occasionally communing with some of the aliens who pass through his station.

That alone would likely have made for a solid novel, a sort of slice of galactic life where Wallace meets a cast of eccentrics and tells a few tall tales to keep the neighbors from denouncing him as some spawn of Satan and burning down his house. (As it turns out, they couldn’t do so if they tried.) Simak instead creates a pair of crises – one from the human world, one from the alien – while also exploring what Wallace has had to give up to take on this life and responsibility, including the entirely fictional friends he’s created using a software tool given him by one of the travelers. (Apparently, when passing through an interstellar way station, it’s polite to bring a gift.) The world is teetering on the brink of catastrophic war in this novel as it was in Simak’s life, while the treaty that holds the galaxy’s various races in peaceful coexistence is also on the verge of breaking down, and one reason is something that happened on earth that Wallace finds himself forced to try to fix.

The narrative jumps around a bit, especially early in the book, which made it a slow title to grab my attention; it starts with a government agent, presumably CIA, who’s caught wind of Wallace’s strange existence and wants to investigate it further, whatever it might mean. Simak then shifts perspective to Wallace’s present and some of his past, mixing accounts of his quotidian duties as station manager with flashbacks to how he got the gig in the first place. These threads come together by mid-book as Simak crafts the twin-crisis plot that drives the finish – with one of the most obvious plot twists you’ll ever see – which ties up all of the various strands with a bit more hope for the future of our species than I can usually muster.

I think Simak was going for some pretty grand themes here, from racial tolerance to man’s alienation from the world, but gets a little sidetracked by some of the details, including the imaginary friends Wallace cooks up with the help of one of the gifts he’s received. The strongest part wasn’t the big stuff, but Wallace’s friendship with Ulysses, the alien who first appeared to Wallace and offered him the post as station master, a bridging of an impossible gap made possible through small gestures and handfuls of words. I found that kind of hope, that any two individuals can find some common ground or kinship, much easier to believe.

Next up: I’m nearly through Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz’s TV: The Book, where they incorrectly rank the top 100 shows in TV history.

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→ September 9, 2016
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Doomsday Book.

Connie Willis is one of the most decorated science fiction writers ever, with eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards, as well as induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Her 1998 novel To Say Nothing of the Dog, a Hugo winner, is one of my favorite sci-fi novels, a tight mash-up of a comedy of manners and a time travel story along with a send-up of a classic Brit Lit novel. That book was set in the same universe as her 1992 novel Doomsday Book, which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for best sci-fi novel, and explores much darker subject matter: how we respond to unthinkable disaster and human suffering.

Willis has crafted rules around her fictional time travel that manage to give it sufficient plausibility so that suspending your disbelief isn’t really an issue. Her time travelers are historians heading into the past for research purposes (usually), and do so under tightly controlled conditions. Heading into the past to alter history isn’t permitted by spacetime itself; anyone heading through to create such a paradox simply won’t be allowed to enter the “net” of time travel. And there’s “slippage” in time, the difference between when you arrive and when you were trying to arrive, which the researchers attribute to spacetime’s attempts to avoid even minor incidents like having you appear out of nowhere in the middle of a crowd of people who’d think you were an alien or a witch.

In Doomsday Book, a young woman in Oxford’s history department named Kivrin is heading back to 1320 England to examine village life of the time and as a prelude to a future research trip back to the Black Death, which began in England in 1348. Unfortunately, as soon as she steps through the net into the past, the main technician who organized the drop, Badri, falls horribly ill with a new strain of influenza, touching off an epidemic in modern-day Oxford … with Kivrin unfortunately falling sick as she arrives in the past. Something has gone wrong with the drop, but Badri is near death and unable to tell anyone why or to explain how they will retrieve Kivrin at the scheduled rendezvous time and place. Kivrin, meanwhile, ends up involved in a separate epidemic, as the plague arrives in the village where she’s staying, and since she’s been vaccinated she is the only person there with immunity to the disease. Her response, as the only person in her time and place who understands the nature of the plague, and the responses of those in the modern time are the real focus of the book, from those thinking first and foremost about the victims to those stuck in the mindset of adhering to policy or those unable to give up their own goals even when it puts others at grave risk.

Willis is an outstanding writer in every aspect of the term, from plot to pacing to character development, but two things particularly stand out in Doomsday Book. One is her ability to still weave humor into a story that is incredibly dark and full of tragedy, with many deaths of named characters in both timelines. William Gaddson, an undergraduate who is rather successful with the young ladies but whose overbearing mother thinks he’s a fragile, innocent boy who studies too hard, provides regular comic relief and even plays a real role in the plot. The American bell choir stuck inside the quarantine zone is almost absurd in its zeal to put on a show regardless of conditions. The assistant Finch’s obsession with “lavatory paper” is similar in its “oh my God is he still on about that” nature.

One of the first symptoms of this influenza strain is mental confusion, and Willis manages to impart that to the reader without actually confusing the reader about what’s happening. That is, when the character at the center of the action gets sick and begins to suffer the confusion, Willis gets that across in ways that don’t cause the reader to lose understanding of what’s happening. I found I realized some things weren’t making sense, so the character’s confusion was tangible, but I also could follow what was happening as an observer (since it’s written entirely in the third person) rather than just getting lost myself. That balance is a neat trick and takes a skilled writer to pull off.

Doomsday Book touches on some significant themes, notably some of the characters’ difficulty in reconciling their belief in God with the horrors of the epidemics before them and the deaths of friends and family members. Some fall to disbelief, others to superstition or belief that it’s God’s vengeance. Those who remain after the epidemics have ended, however, seem to all have come to some appreciation of the kindness and mercy of others, even those facing their own deaths, in the face of unimaginable fear and difficulty. Kivrin’s final encounter with a dying plague victim provides the most moving, insightful scene of the book, even though both characters see the situation from almost perfectly opposed perspectives.

As with To Say Nothing of the Dog and Willis’ shorter novel Bellwether, which I read in June and loved but never had time to review, I couldn’t put Doomsday Book down, reading its nearly 600 pages in just over a week. I’ll have to get to her most recent novel in the Oxford universe, the 2010 two-part novel Blackout/All Clear, which also swept the major awards and runs over 1,000 pages in total.

Next up: I read Philip José Farmer’s Hugo winner To Your Scattered Bodies Go this week and hated just about everything about it. I’m about to start Laurent Binet’s World War II novel HHhH today, which has to be better.

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→ July 11, 2016
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Ex Machina.

My thoughts on prospects in the 2016 Futures Game are up for Insiders.

Ex Machina is a quiet mindbender of a film featuring a smart script that explores questions of consciousness, free will, and the power of the machine without becoming hyperbolic or paranoid. It made a number of critical best-of-2015 lists but was largely shut out of the major Academy Awards, although one of its stars, Alicia Vikander, won Best Supporting Actress for her part in The Danish Girl and could easily have earned a nomination for this as well. (Is there a rule precluding one actor from earning two nominations in the same category in the same year for different films?) The movie features three outstanding performances and some otherworldly CG graphics that somehow never manage to overwhelm the rest of the film. The movie is free for Amazon Prime members and also available on iTunes.

Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson, son of Brendan “Mad-Eye Moody” Gleeson) is a young coder at a hugely successful search engine company called Blue Book, named for the journals of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and wins a contest to spend a week at the remote house of the company’s founder, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Nathan has been working on developing a robot with an AI good enough to pass the Turing test and has chosen Caleb to partake in the test as its human half. Caleb meets the robot, named Ava, who has a human face and shape but otherwise looks like a robot in a humanoid case. She can understand nuances in speech and read microexpressions, and early on it appears that she’s going to pass Caleb’s version of the test, although in an actual Turing test the human subject would be unaware whether he’s talking to a computer or a person. Eventually Ava, whom Nathan has confined to her little apartment within his compound, expresses her desire to escape, and Caleb agrees to help her.

The unfolding of this simple plot provides the film with strong narrative greed – I had a guess at what would happen and was only about half right – is largely secondary to the issues the script is trying to explore, even though it can’t answer any of them in full and doesn’t seem to try to do so. Is Ava alive? Is not, what is she, since she has consciousness, self-awareness, and what certainly appear to be emotions? Does she have free will if her cognitive processes are the results of code, not biology? Is it ethical to keep her confined as Nathan does – or unethical to let her out? Once Caleb has learned more details about Nathan’s experiment, then does he have any obligations in the matter?

One thing Ex Machina doesn’t do is delve into excessive paranoia about the machines taking us over. There’s a cautionary note inherent in the story, because it’s clear that Nathan’s robots would be indistuinguishable from people on sight, but director and writer Alex Garland, whose script got the film’s only non-technical Oscar nomination, lets the story create that concern in the mind of the viewer rather than laying it on thickly with the AI going bananas on screen.

The performances drive this film more than anything else. Vikander is superb in every way, communicating this perfect childlike innocence that provides a stark, useful contrast to her character’s intelligence. She’s beautiful, as the AI has to be for the plot to work properly, but in specific ways (especially her eyes) that accentuate her character’s otherness rather than making her strictly a fembot.

There are plenty of little flourishes that enhance the film overall without taking away from the main storyline. If you’ve seen it, you know how incredible the dance scene is – and how much the movie benefited from that one real moment of levity. Wittgenstein wrote about the mind-body problem of philosophy and his writings were forerunners to the school of functionalism, which defines states of mind by their purpose rather than the feelings that they comprise, so his work would clearly inform debates over what Ava actually is. “Enola Gay,” the OMD classic about the bombing of Hiroshima – another history-altering use of technology – plays early in the film while Caleb is first getting ready in his suite within Nathan’s house. (“Is mother proud of Little Boy today?” might have the genders flipped, but otherwise appears to apply to Nathan and Ava.) The code Caleb writes when he’s hacking into Nathan’s house security contains a great Easter egg (and that isn’t the only one in that scene). The score as a whole is superb, right down to the use of Savages’ “Husbands” over the closing credits. If I have one quibble, it’s with Caleb’s choice of how to check whether he is in fact a human – a plot twist I was wondering about, which would have made the film almost too much of a Philip K. Dick knockoff – doing so in a way that would likely have killed an actual person.

Then there’s the ending, which might be the only hiccup in the plot as a whole, but to be honest I don’t see how else the film could have ended given what came before. It’s not the comfortable ending you might have wanted, but Garland led the film to this point, and if it’s a little too pat, at least it’s not clean.

I don’t normally do a “next up” for films but I’ve already rented Anomalisa so I know that’ll be the next movie I watch.

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→ April 18, 2016
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The Forever War.

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, winner of the Nebula Award for best novel in 1975 and Hugo and Locus Awards in 1976, has the biggest disconnect between its value as a metaphorical take on a real-world event and its value as a straight work of fiction. While Haldeman manages to create a unique way of looking at the then-ongoing conflict in Vietnam, a war without apparent end, the story itself is dull and rote, enamored of its own technological descriptions of battles to the detriment of plot of character development.

The war in the book comes about because humanity has discovered “collapsars,” relativistic oddities in space (not that dissimilar to black holes) that allow for travel at speeds approaching that of light, leading to a brief period of exploration that hits a wall when one ship is attacked by an unknown alien species called the Taurans. The protagonist and narrator William Mandella is a physics student and conscript for one of the first strike forces asked to go out first to the fictional planet of Charon beyond Pluto (the book was written before the moon of Pluto given that name was discovered) and then to attack the Taurans in a suspected base on a hostile planet beyond one of the collapsars. Due to time dilation, Mandella and the other surviving soldiers have aged just two years but return to an earth vastly changed by several decades, a bombastic, unintentionally comic vision of an overpopulated planet under a one-world dictatorship that seized power in response to the Tauran threat. The novel then deals with Mandella’s difficulties handling the gaps in time between his returns to civilian life and the harsh reality of fighting an enemy for unknown reasons with no apparent goal or exit strategy.

Haldeman had served in Vietnam, and it’s only possible to read this book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel that serves to lampoon the military structure that sent American boys to die in a war without purpose while also displaying the effects the war had on the soldiers who survived. The war against the Taurans is a dull one, and Haldeman is not, here, much of a storyteller: the prose is dry and the descriptions technical, with lengthy explanations of futuristic weaponry and tactics that suck energy even out of the battle scenes, let alone the lengthy description of the soldiers’ training on the impossible world of Charon.

The sequence back on earth several decades after the soldiers have left reads like a short story inserted into a novel, bearing little resemblance to the story before or after, and on its own is just bad dystopian fiction by someone who read The Population Bomb. Haldeman drops in the usual food-shortage stuff along with the fear of authoritarian governments, but where he gets really bizarre is when he has “homosex” rising first as a natural consequence of the overpopulation and eventually something encouraged by government, becoming the new normal for humanity further into the future, with heterosexual urges treated as a mental illness. It seems to treat homosexuality as deviant and repulsive, using it as a tool to show the awful future of the human race.

Viewed as allegory, however, The Forever War seems to hit its mark. The war itself is as pointless as it gets: Humanity’s immediate response to the possible attack on one of our ships – which was somewhere else in the galaxy than our solar system – is all-out war, along with building up terrestrial defenses against an attack that isn’t threatened or even particularly likely. There is no attempt to communicate with the Taurans, or even any idea what they look like; soldiers are sent out to kill and destroy. The subsequent war becomes one of attrition, with battles waged over lifeless rocks that have no meaning to either side, and with neither side ever gaining anything like an advantage in the overall battle – with gauging advantage made especially difficult by the time dilation, so ships are sent off in one stage of the war and return in another entirely. (Haldeman obeys the laws of physics to the point of omitting faster-than-light communications.) Soldiers are given posthypnotic suggestions to make them want to kill the Taurans on sight, treating the aliens as enemies regardless of what actually happens on the field of battle.

One could make the historical argument that the Vietnam War was justified because the United States was trying to prevent a hostile dictatorship from taking over an entire country, subjecting millions of people to what turned out to be twenty-plus years of poverty and suppression. The U.S. justified it at the time by invoking the domino theory that each country that fell to communism further enabled the next revolution; perhaps showing the Soviet Union that funding additional insurgencies would cost them more because we were willing to spend to fight them. The war against the Taurans in The Forever War can’t even rise to those levels of reasoning, because the Taurans aren’t clearly threatening anyone; the metaphor works in the sense that neither the Taurans nor the Viet Cong were threatening “us,” so why were we trying so hard to kill them, putting our own men at risk by doing so? At best, the logic extended to protecting our ships if another should encounter the Taurans randomly beyond another collapsar, but without understanding what caused the first incident, even this – given the enormous expense involved – seems specious.

Books that seem to work strictly on that metaphorical or allegorical level generally leave me cold because of how much they miss, and The Forever War did just that, more than anything else because the characters are so one-dimensional. Mandella is intelligent but hardly wise or smart, and his return home after his first tour of duty – into the dystopian section of the book – is surprisingly emotionless. The closest thing the book has to another core character is his girlfriend Marygay, who has no personality to speak of, and of necessity disappears for a few chapters at a time. Without a compelling individual character at the heart of the book, the read becomes stolid and dull, even when we should be feeling the intensity of a battle scene. So for all its accolades – and the book’s cover has some very impressive quotes from other authors – The Forever War fell very short for me.

Next up: I’m currently reading Jeff Passan’s The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports.

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→ February 23, 2016
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The Three-Body Problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ December 29, 2015
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Hyperion.

I reviewed the boardgame Orleans for Paste this week, and my latest Insider post breaks down the Aroldis Chapman trade, including my disdain for the Yankees’ decision to trade for someone with an unresolved domestic assault accusation attached to him.

I decided last year to start working my way through the list of winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel (there are now 64 winners, and I’m through 27) because I’m obsessed with lists, but more importantly, because it seemed like a good way to find the kind of big, immersive, ambitious novels I enjoy most, works that stick with me long after they’re done. The Left Hand of Darkness was one such discovery; To Say Nothing of the Dog was another; Among Others totally blew me away. There are duds, like Red Mars, but I’ll take a couple of those along the way when some of the winners are as amazing as Dan Simmons’ 1989 novel Hyperion, winner of the Hugo in 1989.

Hyperion is one of the most remarkable sci-fi books I’ve ever read – a highly literate, ambitious novel with an unusual structure and a delightful habit of defying reader expectations at multiple turns. Modeled after Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and presaging the very similar structure used by David Mitchell in his nested novel Cloud Atlas, Hyperion follows seven pilgrims on a journey to the planet of the book’s title, where they go to meet the mysterious creature known as the Shrike, a trek from which most pilgrims do not return. The fate of their requests of the Shrike may connect to the fate of humanity, which has spread itself around the galaxy and spun off a splinter group of violent rebels called the Ousters as well as an independent entity powered by artificial intelligences that became sentient and seceded from man.

The meat of the novel is those pilgrims’ stories, each told in a different voice and different style (as in Mitchell’s novel), from the priest who reads from the diary of his friend who died on Hyperion to the private investigator whose story unfurls like a detective novel to the Consul whose paramour, Siri, is the original time traveler’s wife. Simmons infuses each of these characters, some of whom are, shall we say, less than entirely sympathetic, with depth and complexity, enough that any one of them could have carried an entire novel by him/herself. The story of the father who makes the journey with his infant daughter is just heartbreaking, and while Simmons probably pushes one sorrow button too many, his description of that father’s experience watching his daughter’s pain is stunning and never forced.

Simmons has also created, in one book, a literary universe the size and scope of that in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, one that Simmons revisited in three subsequent novels (about which I’ve gotten mixed reviews from all of you over the last ten days). His vision of a distant future is bleak in spots, but he hasn’t given up on humanity entirely, while his incorporation of unrealistic or impossible scientific advances (such as interstellar travel using “farcasters”) at least brings the veneer of realism – and many of these technologies are critical to the book’s stories. Simmons created a mind-boggling world, then put his characters through grueling life tests within it, showing us their reactions and their development in response to these trials.

However, Hyperion doesn’t deliver what I expected most from it: an ending. The journey is the story; the pilgrims do not reach the Shrike at the end of the book, and the resolutions of their various stories come in the sequel, Fall of Hyperion, which I understand departs from this book’s narrative technique. Simmons leaves so many questions unanswered, from Rachel’s fate to Hoyt’s real purpose to the Consul’s ability to achieve his goal, that even though Hyperion is an immensely satisfying work on its own, the ending felt too much like a cliffhanger to think of it as a completely self-contained work. “All Prologue” is fine and good up to a point, but giving us all back story and virtually no present works against the power of the book as a whole.

Next up: I’ve finished Michio Kaku’s Beyond Einstein, a 1995 book on the history of superstrings, and just started another Hugo winner, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls.

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→ December 22, 2015
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Double Star.

My latest Insider post covers Mike Leake’s contract with St. Louis. I don’t think I’ll be able to chat this week, but will get the word out if that changes.

I picked up Robert Heinlein’s short 1956 novel Double Star just before Thanksgiving when the e-book was on sale for $1.99, but it was already on my to-do list since it won Heinlein the first of his four Hugo Awards for Best Novel. While it wasn’t among his first novels, Double Star was only his third novel geared toward the adult audience rather than the juvenile readers of most of his early work, and presaged his turn around 1959’s Starship Troopers toward this sort of more serious literature.

Double Star is the fictional memoir of the actor Lawrence Smith, a.k.a. Lorenzo Smythe, who is coerced or tricked into a job – or perhaps he just took it because he was desperate, and concocted the reasons later – that involves serving as a stand-in for a major opposition politician in the solar system-wide government, a constitutional monarchy similar to that of the United Kingdom. The politician is indisposed for at least a few days, and Smythe needs to stand in for him at a major function on Mars, after which he’s to be paid and sent back to wherever he wants, but as you can easily predict, the job lasts longer than Smythe expects.

Although Heinlein’s milieu was science fiction, with Double Star taking place on Mars, the Moon, and various ships, the science aspects of the novel are almost irrelevant to the plot itself, and often serve as a distraction. The only meaningful addition from the sci-fi setting is the hostility between humans and Martians (described in the book as an intelligent if rather horrifying-looking species), which seems like a strong metaphor for ethnocentric policies in the racially and politically divided human world, such as the nascent civil rights movement in the United States at the time Heinlein was writing the book. Most of the other science fiction elements could go by the wayside without affecting the core story; some seem patently ridiculous now (Heinlein loved to depict settlement and/or native life on Venus) or incongruous (he was fine writing about travel as far as Pluto, but has characters doing tabulations by hand rather than on computers).

Instead, Double Star is a character study that happens to have a sci-fi backdrop. Smythe/Smith is a fatuous, egotistical actor of only modest success, down on his luck when he’s first approached about the job, yet playing the prima donna in all negotiations with his employers/captors. He’s the stereotypical method actor, inhabiting the part rather than just playing it, but also manages to grow somewhat even as he’s spending less and less time being himself. The fool we laugh at in the book’s first half becomes a modest hero in the second half, as he’s asked to do things that would stretch even the strongest personalities. With Heinlein often saying that readers shouldn’t look for metaphor or subtext in his work – I don’t buy that, but hey, it’s his writing – I do think his own argument for Double Star would have been built around the character first and the story second. Here’s a cleverly crafted individual, well-rounded, capable of growth, put in a situation that starts out as difficult and ends up nearly impossible.

It’s only about 140 pages, barely even novel-length, and since most of the sci-fi stuff feels tacked on or superfluous I’m not sure about this as Hugo-worthy, although I’d guess the competition at the time was mostly pulp anyway. I’m not terribly fit to judge the book in Heinlein’s canon, though, since I still have two more of his Hugo winners, the more widely acclaimed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land, left to read.

Next up: Almost done with Dan Simmons’ Hyperion.

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