Tag Archives: science fiction

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

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.

The Rest of the Big Three

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I’ve already mentioned Asimov, whose most important works I’ve read, excepting his Robot series. He published over 500 books in his lifetime, however, so I’ll never really be done Asimov. When I see a second-hand copy of an out-of-print story or essay collection, I’ll always pick it up. But what about the other two writers comprising the “Big Three of Science Fiction”?

I think I can equally say I’ve read Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s most important stuff. The entire Rama series (the original works as a stand-alone but the later sequels are also minor gems, I think), the entire Space Odyssey series (which is solid enough, but of course the original, 2001, is the only must-read), one of his most well-known stand-alones, Childhood’s End.

Missing from that list is The City and the Stars, The Fountains of Paradise, and I’d like to read his last published book, co-written with Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem. It started with Clarke’s outline but he got so sick that Pohl pretty much did all the heavy lifting himself. He finished a final draft, Clarke took a look and was happy with it, and died days later. So all three of those are on my list.

Robert A. Heinlein is possibly less prolific than Clarke, and certainly much less so than Asimov. But I have the most catching up to do with him. I’m definitely considering reading every single one of his novels, which is probably why I’m much further behind than the other two.

His work is generally broken into early-, middle-, and late-period Heinlein. Early Heinlein includes the Golden-Age short stories in Astounding and other magazines (a good chunk of which I’ve read), and his juvenile novels for Scribner (plus a few non-juveniles written under pen-names during the same period). I’ve read about half of the juveniles, leaving perhaps five or six to go. His last book of this period is Starship Troopers, and also the most influential, but there’s a lot of good stuff in this period and it’s worth reading almost all of it.

Middle-period Heinlein includes what are generally considered his greatest works: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land were both written during this period of the 1960s and early 1970s. I plan to read all of these (excepting possibly his fantasy novel, Glory Road), but having read his two most important works, Moon and Stranger, the ones I really need to read next are Farnham’s Freehold and Time Enough for Love.

After a period of ill health, Heinlein began writing again in the ’80s. These last few novels generally aren’t considered his best work, tending to meander and proselytize a bit on his political beliefs. That said, while his plotting was less tight, some of those flashes of brilliance that make Heinlein great still occurred, at least by some accounts.

I haven’t read any late Heinlein, but plan on reading at least The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and we’ll see where I go from there. Job: A Comedy of Justice was, apparently, flawed, but also important, so we’ll see.

I should note, though, there have been far more than three important SF writers the last 70 years. I’m familiar with Pohl but not Bester, Silverberg and Haldeman but not Niven or Ellison, Bujold but not LeGuin. There’s still a lot of catching up to do.

The Endpoint of All Future Technology

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Science fiction writer Karl Schroeder’s intriguing answer to the Fermi Paradox, which basically asks, the universe is so big, so where are all the aliens at?

“If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals.”

Read the rest at Karl Schroeder’s blog.

P.S. Back from Panama today, but this is still an auto-scheduled post from before I left.

Nebula Nominations Open

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I’m scheduling this post to auto-publish in my absence, as by the time you read this I’ll already be in Panama. Gonna go see the canal and have some Panaman tacos or something, I guess. Back on Monday, meanwhile, here’s a quick write-up I’ve done on this year’s SF (certainly not exhaustive), in light of the Nebula Award being open for nominations.

Frankenstein and Other First Novels

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I look forward to a package of fresh books this week, all review copies I have requested from one publishing house or another. Meanwhile, I’ve been finishing up the last of the books I originally brought south with me, and expect to polish the last of them off next week.

I’ve just now finished Frankenstein, and yes, it is a first novel and sometimes clunky, as iconic as the story has become, but the (arguable) problems with it derive less from Shelley herself than the style of writing of the time. With respect to Austen, romantic aka pre-Victorian literature is not known for being tightly-plotted.

The 160-page novel, if you cut out all the exposition on the Swiss countryside, unnecessary back story of irrelevant minor characters, and long, melodramatic monologues by Victor Frankenstein (who, by all accounts, never was a doctor at all), you might have a decent 30-page short story (or a short graphic novel).

The 19th-century style, particularly for the pre-Victorians, is to drag out narrative, then pile it on when it comes to surprise, suspense, and terror, sometimes to the point where character behaviour makes little sense. Frankenstein brings his monster to life and as soon as it twitches, what does he do but literally run out of his own house and not return until the confused life form has stumbled off into oblivion.

He doesn’t see the monster again for a year, though we are told to believe he has maintained a frenzied sense of dread that entire time. The first few months are spent bedridden and near death, of course, since that brief glimpse of his awakened creation apparently shut down his immune system.

This is rather over the top. How frail were people in those days? Every time something unfortunate or simply unseemly happens, our poor Victor either has a nervous break-down or faints away into a coma. Either way he awakes in bed, prison, or a sanitarium to find three months (at a minimum) have gone by.

It’s certainly a lot easier to simply tell the reader a scene was horrific beyond imagination rather than actually developing dramatic tension and earning one’s emotional pay-offs. Maybe Shelley should have written teen dramas for television.

(For an example of pre-Victorian done well, although it’s faux-pre-Victorian, Susanna Clarke’s 2004 debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, is pretty good once it gets going. At nearly 800 pages, though, its even less concise and to the point than the works it is inspired by.)

Going Nowhere

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Social reformers are probably as old as society itself. I’ve been reading Thomas More, who wrote his social satire, Utopia, early in the 16th century, only a few decades after Columbus’ famous voyage, and a few years after Amerigo Vespucci published on his travels to the New World.

Spinning off of these real-life current events, More imagined yet more hitherto unknown countries, especially the nation of Utopia. He used this imagined idyllic society to critique the Tudor England of his time. Later in his life he would lose his head after going head-to-head with Henry VIII over the tyrant’s break with the church.

(Swift’s satirical work more than two centuries later, Gulliver’s Travels, did much the same for his own contemporary politics, but was a bit more light-hearted, and had more to do with parliament and less with the monarchy.)

Today utopia is used as a general term referring to any fictional perfect society, and there has been somewhat of a literary tradition in imagining such societies, perhaps as lost tribes, alien races, or our own future. But just as important has been the literary tradition of dystopias, which have exactly the same purpose at heart.

Just as a utopian work contrasts the flaws in the writer’s society (if only implicitly) with an envisioned better one, the dystopian novel exaggerates the flaws and dangers in our society by imagining how much worse they might get. The most famous example would be Orwell’s 1984, imagining a totalitarian future England (and, in fact, the rest of the world is implied to be much the same). But there are many more.

Post-acopalyptic works could be considered a major sub-genre of the dystopian novel, and there have been no shortage of them since knowledge of nuclear weapons become public in 1945, though not every imagined apocalypse is a nuclear one, and not every dystopian novel takes place after armageddon. In many, the world changes no slowly no one notices, and this can be just as scary.

More derived the name Utopia from a Greek root meaning “nowhere”. He may simply have been winking at the reader that his supposed real-life discussion of a little-known country is entirely imaginary, or he may have been suggesting that a truly perfect society could never exist.

Recommended dystopian works (novels, comics, film, gaming): 1984, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Road; V for Vendetta; Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, The Road Warrior, Gattaca; The Mirror’s Edge.