Tag Archives: science fiction

Getting Through Asimov

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Isaac Asimov published nearly 500 books in his lifetime. An oft repeated (but incorrect) claim is that Asimov has published at least one book for every category of the Dewey Decimal system. In reality he missed one, the 100 category, philosophy and psychology. Still, it’s an impressive body of work.

I have no intention of devoting that much reading time to a single author, but I’ve been hitting his major works over the last several years. His Empire series, his Foundation series (the original trilogy, but not the later books of the ’80s), two of his most critically successful novels, The Gods Themselves and, just yesterday, I read The End of Eternity (pretty good, an epic tale of time travel).

The only real “must-read” left on my Asimov list is his Robots stories (on which the film I, Robot, starring Will Smith was based). This is a bit funny, because years before I’d actually read anything by him, back in high school, I did know the name Isaac Asimov, and the one thing I knew about him is that he had written some science fiction wherein he laid out the “Three Laws of Robotics”:

1) A robot may not harm a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.

2) A robot must obey human beings, unless this would conflict with the first law.

3) A robot must protect itself, so long as this does not come in conflict with the first two laws.

That’s from memory. I’m sure just about everyone has heard of those before, even previous to the Will Smith movie. Part of the delay in reading the works in question that I’ve been trying to make sure I got the right collection. It’s not as easy as a book series; I don’t want a “best of” collection that randomly picks robot stories. I’m looking to get the complete set of stories in publication order, and it’s not always clear on product descriptions what collections include which stories. I did get the I, Robot collection to start, and will read it when I’m back in Canada.

That’s not to say I’ll be “done” with Asimov after that. But when it comes to the classics, including sci-fi classics, I try to hit the most important stuff first. I may eventually read everything Heinlein’s written, for example, but when I decided to check him out for the first time, I started with Stranger in a Strange Land, then Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I didn’t stop there, but if I hadn’t happened to like him, I would at least have wanted to see what the fuss was about with those particular novels.

Book Review: Among Others

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When Morwena arrives in England, she is nearly broken. Her twin sister is dead while she depends on a second-hand cane to walk. She has escaped her mad mother, who is also a witch, only to throw herself on the mercy of a father she has never known, in a place that will never be home. She misses Wales, with its fairies and secret paths, even after the nightmare she experienced there. In short order her father’s three sisters pack her off to a snooty English boarding school where she is outcast for having a limp, liking to read, and being Welsh. And here begins her journey to cope with what she’s lost, and slowly put the pieces of her life back together.

Mor tells her story via near-daily diary entries, over the course of most of a school year, with occasional flashbacks. We only slowly learn the details of what happened before the novel’s opening. Initially, we know that Mor and her sister, also Mor, managed to foil their mother’s dark plans but only at the cost of one of their lives. As the survivor, our Mor has the more difficult task: to continue on, to keep on living. She knows Tolkien would understand. Remember the “Scouring of the Shire”? He obviously knew about what comes after the final battle, about coping with life after saving the world, with surviving but losing everything else.

Among Others is very firmly rooted to a particular place and time – England (and Wales), in the autumn of 1979 – and to read this book is to be transported there. In fact, the book’s sense of reality is so strong that it’s difficult to figure out whether the magic and fairies Mor takes for granted are to be read as really existing or if Walton is employing the device of the unreliable narrator. Truthfully, Walton’s (presumably) accurate rendering of post-industrial Wales is one of factory pollution and semi-urban blight, and her portrait of the ’70s era British private school system is just about the least magical place you can imagine.

And since her conception of magic is something that is completely immeasurable (it may not work at all, or the thing you wanted to happen may occur, but you can never be sure if the magic caused it or it would have happened anyway), there’s a lot of ambiguity as to whether we’re actually reading a fantasy story or a very sad tale about a girl who imagines fairies and mistakenly believes that dropping a flower into a pool releases a spell that will change the world. I don’t usually like the meaning of a story to be so open to interpretation, but that’s entirely personal preference.

The real draw of the novel is Mor’s compelling voice. Ultimate, this is a coming-of-age story for a type of person many of us may relate to. While other girls at school worry about make-up and the boy of the week, Mor hangs out at libraries and bookshops, avidly reading all the science fiction and fantasy she can get her hands on. Books are her haven. Being an outsider seems inevitable, but little by little, Mor discovers that there is a place in the world for people like her, that like-minded people do exist.

Depending on how you read it, the totems and protection magic she uses to ward off her mother’s long tendrils may represent the power of books to serve as a shelter against an emotionally unstable childhood (and particularly an abusive parent). The ability to see fairies may represent either the sense of wonder that some of us lose, or the voracious curiosity that some of us allow to atrophy.

Walton’s knowledge and love of SF comes through in every page, and I suspect that Le Guin, Silverberg, and Heinlein also served as life-preservers during her own teen years. Mor’s regular musings on what she is reading make this book both a story about surviving life as a teen and a loving testament to the written works that make this possible.

I had some nitpicks. I thought the story started to drag a bit during the last third or so, when I found myself asking, “but is anything going to actually happen?” Plotwise, the pacing was slow, and the conclusion was somewhat anti-climactic. But when it comes down to it, this was one of the more readable books I’ve read in some time. I found I could pick it up and immediately fall into Mor’s world, even if I could only spare 10 minutes at a time. And the last line is absolutely brill. This is a book for anyone whose best friends have ever been fictional characters.

(Tor, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2011) The Green Man Review

Among Other Things

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The very next morning from that previous post, I did indeed find Jo Walton’s novel waiting. I probably shouldn’t have let myself crack it open, because I’m already more than halfway done, and meanwhile I’ve left off other books I’ve been struggling to finish for awhile. Sometimes books can be hard work to get through and still be worth the effort, but there’s a heck of a lot to be said for something which is simply and only a pleasure and a joy to read, as Among Others is.

Think of Dan Brown. Most of the literati I know turn up their nose at The Da Vinci Code, but even if there isn’t much depth, writing a truly effective thriller like that, the consummate page-turner, requires a certain degree of technical skill that you don’t see that often. After all, even those “serious writers” would surely make their work as readable as possible (we’ll leave out the intentionally obfuscatory post-modernists and poets and essayists). Brown does one thing — suspense and climactic build-up — really well, and while his writing isn’t as smart as, say Ludlum’s, he still chose the write genre to let his light shine.

Just to clarify, Among Others is neither a thriller, nor is it shallow. It draws the reader in more via investment in the characters than a mile-a-minute plot. But it’s very readable, just the same. Definitely one of the best works of fiction I’ve read this year.

Cory Doctorow on Non-Traditional Publishing

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Cory Doctorow is someone who’s thought a lot about whether the traditional ways we do things in publishing are the only way. But he doesn’t just pontificate about it, he puts his money where his mouth is, experimenting with his own paycheque. If he succeeds, he has proof of concept of a new sort of marketplace. If he fails, it’s back to the drawing board.

For his Little Brother follow-up, For the Win, Doctorow decided to use a Creative Commons License. Digital copies are available as a free download at his Web Site, under multiple formats. Under the terms of the license, anyone can do pretty much whatever they want to with the text, and then re-release it, as long as they aren’t charging money for it. In this way, fan-made releases under every kind of format, for every kind of device, including, most recently, this audio version podcast, are available to everyone. And, if you enjoy it, just send a little donation Mr. Doctorow’s way. No obligation, though.

Doctorow’s even more recent release, the collection, With a Little Help, also comes with free digital downloads (again with a “pay what you want” policy), but he’s also trying to cut out the middleman for his physical editions, utilizing print on demand, and acting as his own publicist and agent and publisher. He describes this whole ongoing experiment at his Publisher’s Weekly blog, here.

I loved Little Brother, so I think I’ll be checking out that podcast. I’ll try to think of a fair payment to give him in return.

Science Fiction as Real Literature

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I have a number of reviews on the backburner, but one of the things I’m reading in-between is The Secret History of Science Fiction, an anthology with an agenda. The basic premise, as explained in that link, is that if Thomas Pynchon’s critically-acclaimed novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, had won the Nebula, rather than the much pulpier Rendezvous with Rama, maybe science fiction would have earned some degree of respectability. The person who originally put this argument forward was Jonathan Lethem, a writer known both in literary and sci-fi circles, and his short essay is reproduced here.

I got a little annoyed with Margaret Atwood a few years back when she stated that her excellent novel, Oryx and Crake, was not science fiction. I took that to mean that she felt she was too good to write that speculative stuff. It’s a great novel with important societal themes, but it is unquestionably science fiction. The decision to categorize books in a certain way is usually simply about marketing, and not determined by the author. But it can give the false impression that real literature is one category while science fiction is another.

In reality, quality writing, character-driven narratives, and social relevance can all be found both in and out of science fiction. Science fiction isn’t about style or substance, the only real requirements are that it asks some kind of speculative question and the universe follows rational laws.

Great examples of highly literary science fiction include some of Atwood’s works, another Canadian writer, Robert Charles Wilson’s works (particularly Spin), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s brilliant work, The Wind-Up Girl.

What about something like Slaughterhouse-Five, or Charles Yu’s debut novel, How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe (which I reviewed here), or even Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is as likely as not to be found in the literary or “chick lit” section? If you click that review link, you’ll see I argued that Yu’s novel, at least, is not science fiction.

Is that because the book is a little too post-modern, a little too emotionally immediate for science fiction? How else could a book about time-travel not be sci-fi? I must think that mature themes don’t fit into the genre, which must be limited to juvenile adventure fantasies geared towards 12-year-old boys. Well, no. I don’t consider it science fiction because the book is very self-referential, contains aspects of self-parody, and its narrative follows more of an emotional logic than existing within a consistent, objective universe.

In this case, the work is more meta-fiction or modern allegory than anything else. The metaphor of the narrative takes precedence over the logical details of that same narrative. That’s not a knock, it’s just the kind of book it is, more akin to the style of someone like Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist) than the tighter plots normally found in both general and genre fiction.

The point is, there’s no tier-based system as far as quality goes. You’ll find hack work in every section of the book store. If you know someone who is, or are yourself under the impression that science fiction (or mystery, or fantasy, or historical fiction, etc.) is hack work exclusively, you should consider taking a look at a couple of the books mentioned above (or any number of other great sci-fi works, Flowers for Algernon is rightly on many school reading lists).

Perception is everything. I’ve been stealth gifting non-SF friends with top-tier speculative works for years. (The key is in finding the right edition, without the pulpy covers some of the mass market paperbacks have.) If you’re a lover of literature, and you want to read the best that’s out there, you can’t limit yourself to one genre, even the genre of general or literary fiction. The best writers doing their best work are not found exclusively in any one category.

Science Fiction to the Rescue in WWII

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I reviewed the new Heinlein biography recently, which I quite enjoyed. It’s the first of a planned two-volume project, so I am also eagerly anticipating the second, particularly since by the end of part one, only Heinlein’s first couple of books had been mentioned (along with a few notable shorts).

This volume was surprisingly interesting given that the majority of it covered Heinlein’s life prior to his full-time writing career. After all, the reason anyone would want to read a bio of a famous author is because they’re interested in his work, but it turns out he was also an interesting man before he became an interesting author. Of course, he also lived in interesting times, and having now read several histories and biographies taking place in the first half of the twentieth century, I find I just can’t get enough of it. So much happened in the century of my birth.

One rather surprising tidbit came after the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated US entry into World War Two. Heinlein, though he had been forced to give up his first career as a naval officer due to pulmonary tuberculosis, tried absolutely everything to get enlisted again for the war. It seems the Japanese attack had an incredible galvanizing effect on US citizenry such that patriotic, able-bodied men (and women) were volunteering left and right, to the point that officers in charge of enlistment couldn’t keep up.

Though still medically unfit to serve, Heinlein was able to use a former officer contact to get in as a civilian engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. His navy contact also requested that Heinlein, working with pulp giant, editor John W. Campbell, try to recruit — no joke — more science fiction writers to come do war work. In fact, in those early days of the new genre of science fiction, many of the writers did indeed have scientific or engineering training. Heinlein ended up bringing in a young Isaac Asimov (a recently minted chemistry PhD), and L. Sprague de Camp to work in the same research facility out of the yard as he.

Heinlein also ended up doing some minor engineering work that, unbeknownst to him, was related to the still top-secret development of radar technology. Across the pond, English SF giant, Arthur C. Clarke, was also working more directly on radar applications.

Pretty cool. When the world was in jeopardy, the allies called on their best genre writers to save the day. SF enthusiasts often claim their favourite authors can see into the future. When the Allies needed help, however, these writers were brought in to help create the future. Along with the bomb, radar was the top-secret, brand-new Allied technology of WWII. Future Nobel-winning scientists gave their best for the war effort, alongside future Hugo-winning sci-fi writers. Who’d have thought?