Category Archives: Fiction

Book Review: Vortex

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When I read Spin back in 2005, I was awoken to a whole new world of what science fiction could do. This guy, Robert Charles Wilson, a veteran by any standard yet new to me, balanced the grandly cosmic and the tragically human with a subtlety that’s almost sublime. But when I read his follow-up to the story of the Spin and the Hypothetical beings behind it, I felt like he lost that balance.

While Spin proposed one of the great SF scenarios, the sort of “Big Idea” that would make any Golden Age or contemporary hard science fiction writer proud, Wilson quickly made it clear that it was those insignificant, ant-like humans whose story he was really interested in telling. In Axis, it seems, he was suddenly more interested in exploring that Big Idea. But the characters didn’t grab me and without them as an anchor, I didn’t feel the need to find out the truth about the Hypotheticals.

But he pulled me back in with Vortex. Suddenly I cared about the characters again, the returning cast as well as the new ones. Coincident with, if not because of that, he got me interested in the central mystery of the Hypotheticals themselves. These are the inscrutable beings who set up the Spin, a local distortion in time with the effect of taking humanity to the death throes of its own Sun within a single generation. By the end of Vortex, we get to find out why, and the answer is, to me, appropriate and satisfying.

The story follows a dual narrative in alternating chapters. In the immediate aftermath of the Spin, vagrancy and mental illness are still way up, while a world tries to cope with being thrown epochs into the future, surviving the overwhelming energy of their own expanded Sun only at the mercy of an inscrutable and possibly indifferent alien technology.

Sandra is one of these overworked mental health professionals, Officer Bose is one good cop in a deeply crooked system, and Orrin Mather is the recently remanded ward of the state neither of them can quite figure out.

It’s in Orrin Mather’s notebooks that we find the second narrative, but, paradoxically, it tells the story of two people who will live nearly 10, 000 years in the future. Turk Findley we last saw at the close of the previous book: taken up bodily into a Hypothetical technology called a temporal arch. His new friend, Treya, was born in the era he finds himself expelled into. Together they are under the custody of an emotionally- and mentally-linked political collective called Vox, which hopes to meet and, perhaps, become one with the Hypotheticals. For the two of them, alone amongst the enforced consensus of Vox, there is doubt as to whether this is a desirable outcome.

Whether Mather, a mentally-challenged, barely literate young man, could have written the stories found in these notebooks himself is dubious. But the possibility that they are true is far less likely (if not to the reader).

I wasn’t sure if I would read the final book in this trilogy after being let down by the second. But I’m glad I did. If you’ve already read Axis and were thinking of skipping Vortex, you should reconsider.

If you’ve read Spin only, that’s a tougher call. Wilson himself has said that Spin is a stand-alone novel that happens to have two sequels. You can’t really skip the middle novel and jump to the end, as the latter two are more of a package deal. So the question is, is it worth reading Axis, which is good, but not great, in order to set up Vortex?

The story of the characters from Spin is over by novel’s end, but the mystery of the Hypotheticals remains. If you want resolution to the Big Idea plot points, keep reading. If you were more interested in the human side of things, you can reasonably stop with Spin. Wilson’s Hugo-winner is an exceptional novel taken on its own. But the series as a whole has its merits, as well.

(Tor, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review

Book Review: Earthbound

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As series go, the trilogy comprised of Joe Haldeman’s Marsbound, Starbound, and Earthbound novels is a bit of an oddity. On the one hand, each book has been a direct sequel of the previous, picking up the narrative right where it was left off. Carmen Dula also remains the protagonist and narrator throughout the books. On the other hand, the plots of each novel, while hardly self-contained, could hardly be more different.

Read the rest of my review at Revolution Science Fiction.

Book Review: A Bridge of Years

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It’s hard to write a time-travel story without it turning into a metaphor for something. The past and the future are too pregnant with meaning; too tied into what we are. The immutability of the past doesn’t prevent us from obsessing over it. The uncertainty of the future doesn’t discourage us from trying to fix it securely. We, perhaps alone amongst the animals, live and breathe time.

Read the rest of my review at AESciFi.

Book Review: Triggers

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A couple of years ago, one of Robert J. Sawyer’s novels was turned into a prime-time television series, in the vein of 24. For fans of the science fiction writer who missed it, this may come as a surprise. Sawyer novels are interesting, perhaps even epic, but what they are not is action-packed. And indeed, the change of genre was a conscious one in the hopes of attracting a mainstream television audience.

But it got the writer thinking. Maybe he could write a thriller novel, something that might appeal to the sort of audience his series had brought to his fiction. He came up with an idea: what if an experiment gone awry suddenly caused a random group of strangers to become psychically-linked to each other, able to access memories not their own? And what if one of those people was the president of the United States, on the eve of a major military operation, resulting in an unprecedented breach of national security?

It sounds sufficiently thrilling to be worth a shot, and Sawyer must have thought so, too, since it was only a short time later that Triggers was born.

Dan Brown wrote a couple of techno-thrillers, which were heavy on the thriller and frequently inaccurate on the technical details. Still, they were readable, if not thought-provoking. Sawyer, coming at the problem from the other side, must have had a different sort of struggle. Trying to keep the frenetic pacing required while exploring the kind of philosophical quandaries that keep SF readers and writers so addicted to the genre must have been quite a balancing act.

If I were to treat this as a straight thriller, there were probably some spots after the first third or so of the novel where I might have said “we don’t need this scene”, “that’s slowing us down too much”, “we need another disaster right about here to ramp up the immediate tension again”.

But it’s not a straight thriller, and we do need those scenes, and the novel does maintain its tension, just not of the same kind as in a pure thriller. Sometimes it’s an emotional tension, and sometimes it’s the anticipation of nascent intellectual discovery. Sawyer develops his characters more, allows them (and the reader along with them) to sit and think about things a lot more, and fills in a lot more (fascinating) technical background on the scientific underpinnings than a thriller writer would.

This should come as no surprise. After all, a number of Sawyer novels one might point to involve little more than smart people sitting around and talking, and you can’t expect him to forgo this sort of material entirely. Calculating God, for example, is a book-length conversation between a dying paleontologist and a visiting extraterrestrial. There is some action in there, but not the violent sort one finds in the genre of espionage and assassins.

The ending of Triggers, too, is of a very classic SF sort. It’s one previously employed by a couple of past SFWA Grandmasters, whom I will decline to name, rather than give anything away. And it’s also very in line with themes of consciousness explored by Sawyer over much of his career. I’m reminded of one of his early hits, The Terminal Experiment, along with his recent WWW trilogy.

But just because I’ve been sitting here explicating where Triggers differs from your standard thriller, don’t get the impression that I’m arguing against that label. I just think SF fans should know this Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell award-winner hasn’t gone over to the dark side. There’s still plenty of food for thought here, nestled between gun-fights and explosions.

(Ace, 2012)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review

Book Review: The Chronoliths

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Robert Charles Wilson is fast becoming the guy I pull out when I want to stealth-gift SF to my non-genre friends. It used to be Margaret Atwood or Michael Chabon, but it’s nice to be able to point to someone firmly in the genre as an example of some of the finest writing being done today, period.

Read the rest of my review at AESciFi.

Book Review: Starman Jones

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Baen Books has been releasing new editions of Robert A. Heinlein works for over a decade, at a steadily increasing pace. So far this has included about half of the famed Heinlein juveniles, originally written for Scribner between 1947 and 1958. The latest from Baen is Starman Jones, first published in 1953.

Like other RAH reprints from Baen, Starman Jones includes an introduction from William H. Patterson, Jr. putting the novel in the context of the time and with respect to Heinlein’s other works. I already knew from Patterson’s biography of the grandmaster that Heinlein was consciously influenced by Horatio Alger, a nineteenth-century writer of adventure stories for boys.

Like Alger, Heinlein strove to provide moral training for the young people (especially young men) of his generation. The recurring moral theme of Heinlein’s juveniles (and many of his later adult novels as well) includes such prescriptions as “hard work pays off,” “honesty is the best policy,” and “study hard,” amongst others. By all accounts, Heinlein truly lived and espoused these values, and such universal lessons lend these books greater staying power than some of his more overtly political works.

One thing I didn’t realize, however, was that Heinlein had taken the basic plot for Starman Jones from a real-life event. If you wish to avoid all spoilers, you’ll want to skip over this next (quoted) paragraph, and Patterson’s introduction, as well. In Heinlein’s own words (as quoted by Patterson from the Heinlein Archive at UC Santa Cruz):

“This book was written without an outline from a situation in the early nineteenth century. Two American teenagers took off in a sail boat, were picked up by a China clipper, were gone two years — and returned to Boston with one of them in command.”

Heinlein took that same basic situation and turned it into space opera. At the novel’s opening, our hero, Max Jones (his precise age isn’t given but he seems to be in his late teens) is a farm boy, working the land hard each day to provide for himself and his widowed, but irresponsible step-mother. When she comes home with a new husband, known by everyone in town as a drunk and a lout, announcing that they’ve sold the farm, Max decides his filial duties are over. He leaves the farm with not much more than the clothes on his back and a vague plan of getting into space.

Ultimately, Max finds a friend in the older and wiser Sam, a roguish character with a penchant for bending the rules, but a good heart, and the two of them scam their way onto a starship. Through a series of unlikely but plausibly-written events, Max manages to rise higher and higher in the chain of command. When disaster strikes, his talents turn out to be crucial to saving the ship, its passengers, and his fellow crew members.

Heinlein’s earliest novels did read very much like early “boys adventure stories,” with two-dimensional characters and pulp-novel situations. Books like Rocket Ship Galileo and Space Cadets weren’t bad, mind you. But they weren’t great. By the time he was writing Farmer in the Sky and Starman Jones, however, Heinlein was in the groove.

RAH didn’t apologize for a certain degree of formula in these stories, an update of Alger’s from a century earlier: a young man from a modest background, through the virtues of hard work, a bit of luck, and (uniquely, in Starman Jones) perhaps taking some liberties with the truth to get his foot in the door, eventually proves his mettle and resourcefulness and saves the day. Hey, it’s a good formula.

I haven’t read any of Horatio Alger’s books, but other comparisons spring to mind. A young lad on ship, starting at the bottom rung, eventually saving the day — sounds like Treasure Island, albeit without the treasure. In fact, Max Jones bears more than a passing resemblance to the young Jim Hawkins, each having lost a father, each finding a friend and role model in someone of dubious morals, Sam Anderson being Heinlein’s stand-in for Long John Silver.

Yet, though less obvious than the Robert Louis Stephenson comparison, I found myself thinking more frequently of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn during Max’s interstellar adventures. Max Jones is, like most of Heinlein’s scrupulously honest young protagonists, very much more of a straight-arrow than the uncivilized Huck ever was, but he still finds it necessary to lie in order to get a fair shot. For the protagonist of a Heinlein juvenile to profit by something like falsifying shipboard documents is unusual enough to be worth mentioning, and reminds me more than a little of Huck, who had little need for civilization or rules but had little trouble determining right from wrong.

Mark Twain had something to say in his book about the difference between morality and law, particularly with respect to slavery and discrimination; Robert Heinlein had a similar bone to pick as well. The SF Grandmaster’s targets were the unions who, he thought, sought to trample the downtrodden, and make the rich richer. Standing in for them in this novel is an exclusive hereditary guild system, making it almost impossible to get into space if you don’t know the right people. (This is a major plot point in the story, forcing Jones’ hand in the deception.) It seems to me that Heinlein, politically very different in many ways, sought the same sort of social equality and freedom that Twain had, some 70 years earlier.

And it’s these universal themes that make him still so readable. True, the technological aspects haven’t aged well. On the one hand Heinlein describes precision, supersonic bullet trains that never touch the ground. On the other hand, ship’s crew perform calculations by hand and feed the answers into antique computers for interstellar jumps.

Yet I’ll wager that most modern readers will suspend their disbelief on these points. The well-realized characters and smooth plotting represent this writer at his best. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about most of the ideas in this novel; it’s just a solid adventure tale (with a subtle moral undercurrent) that’s as fun to read today as it was 60 years ago. But with no larger goal than that in mind, Heinlein wrote a classic.

(Baen Books, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review

Book Review: Man Plus

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Frederik Pohl is nothing if not versatile. A contemporary of Asimov and Clarke, he too started publishing during the pulp explosion of the late 1930s at Amazing Stories and John W. Campbell’s Astounding. Unlike Asimov and some other Golden Age authors, however, he didn’t slow down or stop his output with the New Wave of the ’60s and ’70s, but joined in enthusiastically. Thirty years after his first published story, he contributed to the highly influential New Wave anthology, Dangerous Visions. Decades later still, he joined the blogosphere. The Way the Future Blogs won the 90-year-old Pohl a Hugo in 2010.

It’s the New Wave that’s relevant here. The 1970s, if you ask me, provided a particular embarassment of riches for SF fans. 1972, for example, saw the publication of two of my all-time favourite Robert Silverberg novels, Dying Inside and The Book of Skulls, both nominated for (but not winning) the Hugo and Nebula the following year. The Nebula Awards for works published in 1975 included more than 20 novel nominations: particularly impressive non-winners include Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, and The Mote in God’s Eye from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. And 1976 saw the publication of Man Plus, a novel which would bring Frederik Pohl a Hugo nomination and a Nebula win.

Man Plus is not a book that would have been written even 15 or 20 years earlier. Though a one-sentence summary of the plot, “Man colonizes Mars,” might make it seem right at home amongst the Heinlein juveniles, Pohl’s novel is very different from the shiny, optimistic rocket-ship adventures of the 1950s. Earlier colonial science fiction stories generally featured capable, morally upstanding young men (very occasionally women), infinitely adaptable to both the familiar and unfamiliar challenges of planetary frontier life. The heroes’ romantic relationships, where they exist, are a source of stability rather than conflict. The inevitable casualties of pioneer living are not long-dwelled-upon and rarely tragic.

But Pohl’s protagonist, Roger Torraway, the not-entirely-willing “Man Plus” of the title, does not feel like a hero. His relationship with his wife is endlessly complicated. The impetus behind the Mars project comes not from a unified and progressive planetary government, but the desperate administration of just one country in a politically-unstable world. And the sacrifices asked of Roger are not superficial, nor does Pohl gloss over them. In fact, it becomes clear early in the novel that this is not really a story about establishing the first colony on Mars, it’s a story about what it is to be human, more a riff on Frankenstein than Red Planet or Farmer in the Sky.

Through a series of operations, Roger literally loses his humanity piece by piece. Ultimately his organic self is reduced to heart, lungs, and brain, while his limbs, skin, eyes, and other parts are all replaced by machine components, or, if “redundant”, simply removed and forgotten. Simultaneously, he must learn to see the world through software-mediated crystalline eyes, capture radiative energy through massive bat-wings, and balance atop powerful, mechanical legs.

And time is short. The president of the United States regularly drops in to appeal to Roger’s patriotism, reminding him that the future of the “Free World” depends on his mission. The planet, on the verge of environmental collapse, simultaneously seems to be moving towards total nuclear war, as governments fight over scarce resources.

The 1970s energy crisis no doubt provided one real-life inspiration to the author, the ongoing Cold War may have been another. But Pohl’s near-future tale manages to still resonate decades later by mostly avoiding obvious dating. He makes no reference to the Soviet Union, instead the main antagonists to the future US-led alliance are the fictional Pan Asians. A lot of Mao’s China (contemporary to the writing of the novel) can be read into this imagined world power, but the connection is mostly implicit.

The environmental crisis — a combination of pollution, implied climate change, and shortage of resources — is also familiar to today’s reader. Again, Pohl drops only hints to the specific circumstances that led the world to such a point. It is thanks to his decision to focus on the general that this vision of the future doesn’t pile up anachronisms for a contemporary reader. With the possible exception of over-large supercomputers, there’s little plot-wise to explicitly tie this novel to a particular decade. Pohl’s then future, both scientifically and politically, could still be our future.

Thematically, on the other hand, Man Plus is very much a novel of 1970s science fiction. Imperfect, complicated characters. Moral ambiguity. No guarantee of an unqualified happy ending. While Mary Shelley’s monster was Victor Frankenstein’s antagonist and victim, Roger Torraway — as the monster — is a tragic and flawed hero. While Shelley’s Romantic-era theme warned against scientific hubris, Pohl describes a struggle against apathy and ignorance.

In common, the monsters of each novel must reconcile themselves to what and who they’ve become. Roger Torraway has the added benefit of a defining life mission (ensuring the human race will go on), but as he feels less connected to his species, he begins to question whether he has any stake in their survival. His friends and colleagues, the ones doing this to him, ask themselves whether the end justifies the means — though they still feel driven to rage against an extinction level “dying of the light”.

The questions first raised in this novel 35 years ago remain intriguing today. For those who haven’t yet read it, the 2011 trade paperback edition of Man Plus from Tor-Forge (under their Orb Books imprint) is a rediscovered treasure. And while the text has stood the test of time, the new cover design by Gregory Manchess is a nicely modern update over the original. Frederik Pohl has written SF for over 70 years and managed to remain relevant throughout. This isn’t the only gem of his worth revisiting, but it’s not at all a bad place to start.

(Orb Books, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review

The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes

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I’m sure you’ve all watched Guy Ritchie’s second Sherlock Holmes movie. Where can you get your detective fix, now? I can help you with that.

In keeping both with his to-the-point writing style and the cultural expectations of the time, Conan Doyle did not much expound on Sherlock’s early life or psychology, and the detective himself rarely spoke of such things. The potential for interpretation is broad. . . .

While Robert Downey, Jr. portrays somewhat of a wise-cracking action hero, Sherlock‘s title character (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is both intensely intelligent and coldly indifferent to the human element in his puzzles. . . . “I can’t be the only one that gets bored.”

Read about several of the most interesting film, television, and book properties to re-imagine the great detective recently in my article, The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes.

Book Review: The Green Hills of Earth & The Menace from Earth

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The stories of Green Hills have that special just-can’t-wait-for-the-future sheen that science fictional works of the ’40s and ’50s tended to have. Luna City, colonies on Mars and Venus, a new class of adventurers and fortune-seekers rocketing to the outer planets to establish new outposts and write their own tickets. There’s opportunity for the taking, if you just have brains and gumption enough to get it!

Read my complete review on Revolution Science Fiction.

Sweating to Books on Tape*

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A few years ago when I was living alone in China, my job gave me a significant amount of free time. I taught either one or two classes per day (biology and pre-calculus), had no official office hours — I was able to make it to the gym most weekdays (morning or afternoon depending on my schedule) and had all my evenings free save Tuesday nights when I ran a sort of phys ed program until about 5:30 or 6:00.

What I didn’t have were friends. That may be part of the reason I started listening to audio podcasts. Craving the human voice (in English, rather). I listened to Escape Pod and enjoyed it quite a lot, though I stopped being able to keep up after a few months back in Canada, particularly once I was working a genuine full-time teaching job.

I do like audio fiction, and it’s particularly ideal for short stories, which I am also fond of. Not everybody is, even avid readers. Or at least, it doesn’t occur to a large segment of the reading population to pick up an anthology or collection. This is a shame, really.

Certainly there’s a place for novels and short works, both, but there are a number of advantages to short fiction, including the ability to read it in one sitting, the chance to get a number of neat and unique ideas in a single book instead of focusing on just one, the ability to see a basic narrative idea stripped bare and not buried in an overwritten novel (it’s harder to overwrite a short story and still get it published).

All of which is to tell you I was thinking of a short story I “read” some time ago (I realize I heard the audio version only), and tracked it down, and if you’re interested, perhaps you’ll give it a listen. It’s called “Usurpers”, it’s hosted on Escape Pod, and it’s about a stubborn runner in the future who refuses any sorts of bodily enhancements, but still dares to compete against modified humans. He’s kind of a jerk but the story makes an important (and legitimate) point about “grit”. It’s more important than you think. For anyone who strives for greatness, physically, intellectually, artistically. . . .

*The title is a reference to a Family Guy cut-away gag.