What Makes This Book So Great (5 page)

The other Earths of Heinlein’s Juveniles aren’t much better, as I remember. In
Citizen of the Galaxy
(1957), there’s no slavery actually on Earth, but Earth is decadent, corrupt, controlled by corporations and full of people living on the profits of offworld slavery. Ugh.

In
Farmer in the Sky
(1950), a family emigrates to Ganymede to struggle with terraforming. Before they leave we see a little of Earth—food rationing, counting points, not wanting to waste the last scrape on a butter paper. This Earth is overpopulated and starving, even if it still has accordions and Boy Scouts.

Tunnel in the Sky
(1955) is one of my favourites. Kids get to go on school trips through matter transmitters to other planets, and they can almost cure cancer, so far so good. But this Earth is overpopulated and repressive too. The Chinese are shipping out their population, and not very kindly. Food is being brought in from other planets, so nobody is starving, yet, but the smart characters are heading out for the stars as soon as they get the chance. How long will the colonies feed an Earth that loses schoolchildren for months in unexplored alien jungles?

In
Red Planet
(1949) and
Between Planets
(1951), Earth is a pretty fair stand-in for George III’s England, repressive, aggressive and useless, with the plucky colonists of Mars and Venus as the fledgling US. In
The Rolling Stones
(1952), nobody even considers visiting Earth in their tour of the solar system.

Time for the Stars
(1956) has one of the worst imaginable future Earths. It’s so overcrowded that you have to have a license to have children, and if you have more than three you pay extra tax and get a big enough apartment allocated. Also, women wear hats all the time, even indoors and at the table.… Just horrible. It doesn’t seem all that much nicer when the hero gets home three generations later in time to marry his great-great-niece, but at least it’s more colourful.

It’s funny how it’s overpopulation and political unpleasantness that cause the problems, never ecological disaster. Maybe that wasn’t on the horizon at all in the fifties and early sixties? I suppose every age has its own disaster story. It’s nice how little they worry about nuclear war too, except in
Space Cadet
(1968), which is all nuclear threat, Venusians and pancakes. (They don’t make them like that anymore. Come to think it’s probably just as well.)

Have Space Suit, Will Travel
(1958) has an Earth just like the US of the 1950s, with soap competitions and soda jerks. Yet it’s almost bad enough for the benevolent aliens to condemn it, and us.

In
The Star Beast
(1954), children can divorce their parents and live in government hostels, bureaucrats rule the world, and everyone is kowtowing to aliens. It’s not all that bad, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

No individual one of these would be particularly noticeable, especially as they’re just background, but sitting here adding them up doesn’t make a pretty picture. What’s with all these dystopias? How is it that we don’t see them that way? Is it really that the message is all about “Earth sucks, better get into space fast”? And if so, is that really a sensible message to be giving young people? Did Heinlein really mean it? And did we really buy into it?

AUGUST 14, 2008

10.
Happiness, Meaning and Significance: Karl Schroeder’s
Lady of Mazes

Karl Schroeder’s
Lady of Mazes
is one of the best pure SF novels of recent years. I read it in 2005 when it came out and was surprised it got so little attention. It seemed to me to be one of those books everyone would be talking about. I’ve just read it for the second time, and it holds up as well as ever. What a good book!

Livia Kodaly lives in Teven, a coronal (ringworld) where tech locks limit nanotech and inscape (perceptible virtual reality) to various consensual manifolds of reality. You can be right next to someone who sees you as a tree and you don’t see at all, you can duck out of a conversation and replace yourself with an anima who you can later reabsorb to review what you both said, you carry around with you a Society of chosen friends and relations who may or may not be connected to the real people they represent at any given moment. This is complicated and fascinating enough, but Schroeder sets it up only to destroy it and show us how Livia copes with that destruction and with the wider world outside Teven where she travels to understand what has attacked them and find help for her people.

Lady of Mazes
is rigorous hard SF, but the questions it raises are philosophical rather than technical. The problem with writing about post-humanity and people whose experience is very far from ours is the difficuty of identification. This can sometimes be a problem for me with Egan and Stross. Schroeder avoids the potential pitfalls, in any case for readers who are prepared to pay close attention even at the beginning when everything is unfamiliar.
Lady of Mazes
has a very high new-cool-stuff-per-page density, but without ever losing sight of the perceptions of its point-of-view characters. It has worldbuilding and ideas casually mentioned that most writers would mine for a trilogy, and it has one of the best descriptions of suffering chagrin I have ever read.

Set in the same universe as Schroeder’s earlier
Ventus, Lady of Mazes
also explores some of the same themes. Schroeder seems generally interested in what gives life purpose and agency in post-scarcity societies. Schroeder, like John Barnes, seems to think that many people would retreat into unreality. Schroeder appreciates that people tend to become very baroque when given the opportunity. In
Lady of Mazes
we see new art forms, new ways of living, angst over relationships and other hallmarks of humanity. The illusions they embrace are the illusions of meaning and significance. They are happy and fulfilled within their ultimately meaningless experience. Schroeder doesn’t have any answers, but he’s great on fascinating questions. Does it matter if what you do matters as long as you think it matters? What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural? And if a Chinese Room started to attack your home, how would you fight against it?

On this re-read I am more impressed than ever with Schroeder’s breadth of vision and clever construction. I also had a great time hanging out again with Livia and her world. The shadow of the post-humans and half-understood technology may hang over them, they may live in very odd worlds, but these characters are recognisably people, and people one can care about.

AUGUST 20, 2008

11.
The Weirdest Book in the World

For a long time I thought the weirdest book in the world was Robert Sheckley’s
Mindswap,
in which a retiring college professor does a holiday mind swap with a colleague on Mars, only to find when he gets there that the colleague doesn’t exist and his own body back on Earth has disappeared. Things get weirder from there on, and don’t stop being weird by the end of the book. Then I discovered R. A. Lafferty and thought nobody could ever be weirder.

In 1995, Lafferty lost his title. Robert Reed wrote
An Exaltation of Larks,
which really did seem to be the weirdest book in the world, making Sheckley and Lafferty seem positively normal in comparison. Robert Reed is an absolutely brilliant writer. I think he may well be the greatest living writer of short SF, edging out Ted Chiang by a nose. Stories like “A Plague of Life” and “Veritas” are why I buy SF magazines. Gardner Dozois has said he could publish a
Best Robert Reed of the Year
collection every year. He’s phenomenally wonderful, up to about 10,000 words. After that it’s as if you can hear him thinking, “Oh. Better throw in something else now. Something new.” Sometimes this works really well, as in
Sister Alice
and
Marrow,
where the recomplications just make the books better. Other times, as in
Down the Bright Way,
you find yourself thinking at the recomplications, “You know, this might have been enough for any normal person?” Then there’s
An Exaltation of Larks,
which is brilliantly written, fascinating, and essentially becomes a new genre every 10,000 words. It starts off on a college campus with weird things happening, and whenever you think you have some idea what’s going on, you just don’t. There’s a section where the characters are alien turtles floating in space. It has been, for more than a decade, the indisputable weirdest book in the house.

But I may have just read something that beats it for sheer unadulterated oddity.

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) was an American “women’s writer” of the early twentieth century. Her novels are odd romances set in an era after divorce but before divorce was acceptable, after automobiles but before air-conditioning and penicillin. To someone used to Victorian novels and modern ones, they have a fascinating level of morality—in one of them, someone lusts in his heart and is falsely accused of murder and, eventually exculpated, he dies of TB caught in prison. Rich people have interesting trouble passing through eyes of needles. Adultery is a perpetual problem. Love is not enough, and neither is money.

I read half a dozen of Norris’s books from the library, just for fun. (I do this sometimes.) The last one I randomly picked off the shelf was
Through a Glass Darkly,
which is science fiction and, you guessed it, my new contender for the weirdest book in the world.

There’s a utopian world which is an alternate America that didn’t fight the Spanish–American war and which has always made peace ever since. It’s socialist to the point of having free food for everyone, and in a way that clearly grows out of Norris’s experience of having lived through the Depression writing cheerful books about rich people’s love troubles. This alternate world also happens to be Heaven, or one of the Heavens—there are at least seven, as everyone knows. People are born and die there, but people also arrive there from our world when they have died here in a particularly good way. Our hero, a young trainee doctor, turns up there after having died heroically in the battle of Midway. He is shown around in a typical mainstream-writer-writes-utopia visitor way, having how everything works explained to him.

He then sets out to practice as a doctor, his training being miraculously complete. (Don’t ask.) He falls in love with a married woman and angsts about this at great length. Then he falls in love with and gets engaged to her daughter. The daughter finds out about the mother and allows herself to be swept away in a flood (where she’s rescuing some kids) and drowns, and is reborn in our world. There she grows up in New York and becomes a nurse, is seduced and marries someone else to give her baby a name. In the end she realises she loves the someone else after all.

That’s it. Two-thirds of the book takes place in the ideal otherworld, and one third in our world. There’s no frame closure.

If you have contenders for books weirder than this, do let me know.

SEPTEMBER 9, 2008

12.
The Poetry of Deep Time: Arthur C. Clarke’s
Against the Fall of Night

I’ve been meaning to re-read some Clarke in a memorial kind of way ever since he died earlier this year. What I picked up immediately was the short story collection
Of Time and Stars,
the first thing of his I ever read, which holds up wonderfully. Looking along the shelf this afternoon I found myself wanting new vintage Clarke, and failing that, which I’m not going to get, one that wasn’t utterly familiar. There comes a time with authors one really likes and re-reads a whole lot when the books that were the least favourites become the favourites, because they’re the ones you can still actually read.

Against the Fall of Night
(1953) was the first far-future SF I ever read. My memories of it were hazy—I remembered the far-future city Diaspar, the only city on the desert Earth, and the way it had stood for countless millions of years looking only inward. I couldn’t have told you a thing about the plot and characters, and on re-reading it, yeah, they’re there, I suppose, but they’re not what’s important.

There isn’t much lyrical SF, and it’s something more often associated with Zelazny than Clarke. In the story about SF, Clarke was the nuts-and-bolts engineer with a vision. Yet here we don’t see any nuts and bolts, we’re into Clarke’s-law sufficiently advanced technology. What makes the book memorable and notable is the beauty of the words and the imagery that clothes the ideas.

Man has been beaten back from the universe and confined himself to Earth. Not everybody was writing in those terms even in 1953—this is where Heinlein looks like an enlightened feminist. But never mind. I didn’t notice it when I was twelve. There is one female character, but it might as well be all “he” for all that it matters. For the purposes of this story the spirit of humanity, the only important character, is called Man, and he, and is to be considered male. The actual notable characters are two asexual teenage boys and a middle-aged asexual male librarian. Forget it. It’s shooting fish in a barrel. It’s probably part of the genetic engineering they’ve done so they don’t want to leave the city. Gender barely exists, sex isn’t an issue, passion isn’t an issue. Cope. Billions of years have passed, the oceans have dried up, nobody leaves Diaspar and Alvin is the first child to be born in the city for seven thousand years.

It’s an amazing span of time, between now and then, and Clarke really makes you feel it. You feel how old Diaspar is, with its forgotten connections to lost cities and its buried robotic levels. Nobody knows how the computers work, or the moving walkways. They’re decadent, in a mild passionless way. Then you learn of the dried-up oceans, the fallen moon, the endless desert, the great span of history out among the stars before the city existed. This really does feel like the end of time, not only to the people who live there but to the reader as well.