All in all, while Vast and Cool and
Unsympathetic was not as active as many other science fiction blogs
in 2011, I'm quite pleased with how things have turned out and hope
to increase my output in 2012. I hope you've enjoyed reading it, and
will continue coming back here in the year to come. I wanted to start
this year off on a positive note by thanking some people who have
helped this blog in one way or another. Some names have been
truncated to protect the innocent:
My friends JT, Kevin, Dave, Peter,
Lecester, Cheryl, and Catherine.
The good people at Pyr Books for using
not one but two quotes from (separate) things I've written as back
cover blurbs on one of their books.. Hell of a cool surprise to run
into at Barnes and Noble.
My beloved Unattainable Bar Chick, for
her unfailing friendliness, kindness, waitressing and bartending
professionalism, willingness to laugh at my stupid jokes, and Velma
Dinkley/Lisa Loeb-esque hotness. You were always far nicer to me than
you had to be, and were the brightest spot of my week whenever we
spoke. I always knew that I would never tell you how I felt about
you, but you made me wish I could have. Thank you, and best of luck
with everything
And, of course, everyone who takes the
time to read Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic. I tend to be pretty
useless trying to express myself with spoken words when I'm
face-to-face with people unless it's with people I already know well,
so being able to do so through writing online is very precious to me,
and so is knowing that someone is actually reading it.
Thank you all. I'm going to make 2012
Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic's best year yet.
Christmas is nearly upon us, so I've decided to cross-post my traditional yearly post on The Star Wars Holiday Specialfrom my other blog, Pointless Side Quest. Please to enjoy, for a certain value of "enjoy."
It's the Christmas season once again. To celebrate, this is the time of year when this blog make a foray beyond the world of video games into the larger world of holiday entertainment. Sadly, there is a dark side to Christmas. I'm not talking about the weather, or the parents rending each other apart like rabid beasts at Toys R Us, or the built-up resentment that can explode at family gatherings, or those horrific modernized versions of Christmas carols that every place of business in the state of Illinois is apparently required by law to defile my eardrums with for the entire month of December. No, I speak of something much worse...
The Star Wars Holiday Special has appeared on American television once, in 1978, and oozed into various foreign markets to make similarly brief appearances over the next few years. It has never been rebroadcast in the US and has never been released on home video in any format. George Lucas, who would probably release a boxed set of the prequel trilogy with an added bonus DVD containing 90 minutes of footage from the parking lot security cameras of Skywalker Ranch and call it the "Star Wars Ultimate Edition" if he thought anyone would buy it, disavows it and has refused to make it available.
Scorned by legitimate society, it exists only in the form of unauthorized copies made from VCR recordings of the original. Like so many other blasphemous tomes of daemonic horror bearing unspeakable eldritch knowledge never meant for the eyes of Man- Friedrich von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon, Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy Trilogy- it circulates covertly in the dark corners of the world (I think that's an entirely fair description of most file-sharing networks) where students of the grotesque and unnatural risk their very sanity to seek it out.
It was in 2006 that I acquired a copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special, complete with the original 1978 commercials. It should have been a fine year:
Neal Asher, David Drake, and Stephen Baxter all had multiple new books
rolling off the presses. Ace Combat Zero came out for the PlayStation 2,
and the release of the PlayStation 3 paved the way for me to actually
buy one three years later. Iron Maiden, Evergrey, In Flames, Norther,
Strapping Young Lad, Tool, Motorhead, Blind Guardian, and Týr released
new albums. Instead, there would be only the taste of ashes.
Now, one thing I share with several of my friends is the ability to enjoy crap. From 1950's skiffy schlock, to watching a near-comatose Richard Burton mumble his way through the uncut version of The Exorcist II, to Sylvester Stallone's arm wrestling epic Over the Top, to the climactic scene of The Satanic Rites of Dracula where Christopher Lee is killed by running into a small shrubbery, to Oscar-winning actor George Kennedy and a bunch of stupid teenagers trapped on a boat where they are picked off one by one by an evil hybrid cat/rat/godawful puppet in The Uninvited, to a seemingly endless horde of Godfrey Ho "ninja" "movies" created by buying the rights to various Asian films, redubbing them, splicing them together with new footage of white guys in brightly colored and sometimes rhinestone-studded pajamas running around and doing flips in what appears to a small municipal park, and feebly attempting to tie them together and pretend that the resulting Frankensteinian abomination was a coherent story, we've seen it all. We take that sort of thing in stride.
I want you to have that context in mind when I say that my first two attempts to watch this had to be aborted within the first half hour because the guys I was watching it with couldn't stand it any longer.
The plot, such as it is, is that Chewbacca is returning to his home and family on the Wookie homeworld of Kashyyyk to celebrate "Life Day," one of those vague holidays characters in kids' fantasy shows would celebrate when it was snowing and they wanted to do something festively nonsectarian. But the system is in the grip of an Imperial blockade fleet commanded by recycled movie footage of Darth Vader, and... Well, basically, there's a string of largely unrelated, godawful variety showesque events set in something that resembles the Star Wars universe featuring various C-list celebrities until things finally shudder to a halt what seems like several geological epochs later.
It's got all of the heroes from the
movie making their return, plus James Earl Jones as the voice of Darth Vader. The only major actors from Star Wars not present- unless one also counts David Prowse, who appears only in the form of reused movie footage, or Carrie Fisher, whose soul appears to have departed her body and wandered off for much of her screen time- are Alec Guinness as Ben Kenobi and Peter Cushing as Tarkin, whose characters were saved from appearances here by the sweet, merciful embrace of death.(Which makes it suddenly seem very suspicious that Kenobi and Tarkin both met their ends because they conspicuously chose not to protect themselves from imminent danger, and either possessed supernatural powers that included the ability to sense horrible, cataclysmic events or hung out with people who did.) What could possibly have gone wrong?
There are some things the human mind cannot explain, only try to describe. Some of the thrilling spectacles we're treated to include:
Over ten minutes of Chewbacca's family screaming at each in Wookie, sans subtiitles! This is what the show leads off with. Little-known fact: Lucas actually wanted the first 20 minutes of the original Star Wars to focus on R2-D2 making random beep-bloop noises while doing routine maintenance on the Tantive IV's cafeteria vending machines, but was forced to start the movie with an exciting space battle instead when the studio said that his original cut of the film was too long.
Chewbacca's elderly father Itchy groaning in ecstasy while watching virtual reality porn! You have no idea how badly I wish I was making that up. NO idea.
Ever wondered what an elderly Wookie
having an orgasm looks like? Of course not, but now you know anyway.
Reused footage from the movie!
Reused footage from the movie tinted bright green, so that a shot of the Millennium Falcon approaching Yavin can double as a shot of a bright green Millennium Falcon approaching Kashyyyk! Alternately, if you're a die-hard Star Wars fan desperately trying to escape from the implications of this monstrosity actually being a canonical part of the Star Wars universe, it could be interpreted to mean that the entire special is actually taking place inside the Matrix. In which case it's arguably a better Matrix film than Matrix Revolutions.
Several minutes of Chewbacca's repulsive son Lumpy watching miniature holographic acrobats! That's right, Chewbacca's immediate kin consists of two guys named "Itchy" and "Lumpy." Presumably, the name "Chewbacca" is a human-pronounceable approximation of the Wookie word for "Scabby" or "Oozing."
Lumpy! I've already mentioned his role in the Special's events, but the very existence of this... this thing appalls me so much that it warrants its own entry. With the possible exception of that loathsome, soulless homunculus wrought in obscene parody of a human child from Son of the Mask (the CGI baby, not Jamie Kennedy), nothing has ever filled with such instinctive horror. JEFFERSON STARSHIP!
Harvey Korman in a dress! And in two other separate parts, as an amorous Tatooine cantina patron and a cyborg instructional video announcer (a cyborg who announces in an instructional video, that is, not an announcer in an instructional video about cyborgs) who appears to be suffering from some sort of degenerative motor neuron disorder. Not since Peter Sellers in Dr. Stranglove has there been such a multi-role tour de force!
The musical stylings of Bea Arthur! This is actually the closest we get to a high point.
Harvey Korman trying to get into Bea Arthur's pants!Though anyone hoping for some actual on-screen Hedley-on-Maude action will be disappointed, sadly.
An animated segment featuring the most repellently butt-ugly animation in human history!It does have the first-ever appearance of Boba Fett, which some people may be interested in. Frankly, I've always considered Fett one of the most overrated characters in fiction. It's a damning indictment of how low our society's standards of masculinity have fallen when possessing some basic tracking abilities, dressing like the Rocketeer, flying around in a big metal shoe, and being killed by a blind man is enough of a résumé to be declared Biggest Badass Ever.
One odd thing is that the cartoon, like a number of other segments, is actually introduced as something being watched by Lumpy. Which implies that this segment depicts events that are fictional not only to us but to the characters, and that the cartoon itself actually exists within the Star Wars universe.
Which, I just realized, means that Jefferson Starship does, too.
A brief appearance by an incredibly bored-looking Harrison Ford, who doesn't even try to conceal his utter contempt for the proceedings!
Mark Hamill wearing more makeup than Queen Amidala, Bozo the Clown, and Dick Clark combined! Usually I'd be reluctant to say something nasty about this, since it's probably to conceal the injuries Hamill had suffered in a car crash the previous year, but The Star Wars Holiday Special exists on a plane where human concepts of morality and decency are not merely absent, but meaningless. If you gaze into the bellowing unsubtitled Wookie abyss, the bellowing unsubtitled Wookie abyss gazes also into you.
Carrie Fisher singing a festive Life Day carol set to the tune of the classic Star Wars theme while clearly stoned out of her mind! But you don't have to take my word for it:
She's no Bea Arthur, I'll tell you that much.
Eventually, Chewbacca makes it home for the holidays with his repellent family. To the best of my recollection, no one learns a valuable lesson about The True Meaning of Life Day, if in fact it has one.
I really can't do justice to how teeth-gratingly bad it is. I have no strong personal stake in Star Wars. I liked the original movies and a few of the tie-in books, but I've never had the strong emotional attachment to Star Wars that some people do. I didn't like the prequel trilogy but never had the sort of "I have sworn a Sicilian blood oath of vengeance upon George Lucas' and his entire family line because he murdered my family, burned down my village, and deflowered my house pets" response that is often seen on the Internet. The idea of crap with the name Star Wars on it is not some sort of personal affront to me. Given that sitting through this made me want to gouge out my own eyes and just run through the streets of Chicago gibbering like a lunatic until my heart and/or lungs burst, I can only imagine how devoted Star Wars fans feel about it.
In addition to this blog, I'm also a regular contributor at several other sites, mostly video game-related. If that's also a topic you're interested in, or if for some reason you just want more of my unwieldy-mountain-of-clauses approach to writing, check out:
Gaming site where I'm on the staff. More constrained than the above in many ways, since I'm mostly expected to offer actual legitimate commentary or information, but I make do. Past articles include:
Where's Your God Now, Mario?: Religious Censorship in Games- A look back at the strict yet bizarrely inconsistent golden age of Nintendo of America's Standards and Practices, when naming a spell “Holy” or showing a cross on a coffin was forbidden due to fears that any religious imagery or references could cause offense or controversy, and yet a Gameboy game that climaxes in deicide was approved for release.
So, have a look if anything like that interests you. I strongly endorse Robot Geek and Kuribo's Shoes in general; they're both great sites. More stuff actually written for this blog coming soon.
Out of the Waters is the second
novel in David Drake's “Books of the Elements” fantasy series,
following The Legions of Fire. I recommend reading the first
book before this one, though Out of the Waters is a self-contained
story and stands up well on its own.
Like its predecessor, Out of the
Waters centers on the city of Carce, the capital of a sprawling
empire. Gaius Alphenus Saxa, a wealthy aristocrat, has been newly
appointed as the governor of Lusitania, one of the provinces of
Carce's vast empire, and is financing a lavish public spectacle to
celebrate. The performance is going as planned when a shocking sight
appears in the theater- images of a great city defended by strange
flying ships, being attacked by a monstrous many-limbed creature from
the sea that grows larger and larger as it advances on the city.
As the rest of the crowd continues to
watch, enraptured, Saxa's son Varus has a prophetic vision. He
realizes that they are witnessing a scene from the distant past, the
destruction of ancient Atlantis by the mythical beast known as the
Typhon- a vast, monstrous being that will soon return to lay waste to
the entire world. His stepmother Hedia, a woman who fears almost
nothing, is transfixed with terror at the sight of strange men made
out of glass walking the battlements of the siege city- the same
creatures she has seen in a series of recent nightmares. And his
younger sister Alphena, watching the cataclysmic scene of
destruction, doesn't see the monstrous Typhon at all- she sees a man.
Saxa and the crowd are delighted,
thinking it must be some amazing feat of stagecraft, but Varus,
Alphena, Hedia, and Varus' friend Corylus - have already witnessed
too much to confuse the vision with some sort of stage trickery.
Together, the five have already saved Carce from a doom foreseen in
one of Varus' visions, and now they must find a way to do so again.
There are many dangers in their path and many mysteries to unravel-
the reason for Atlantis' terrible fate, the origins and nature of the
Typhon itself, and how they can possibly stop something that crushed
a civilization even more advanced than Carce, and said in myth to be
so terrible that only Zeus himself was able to stop it.
I really liked Out of the Waters.
The book follows a similar structure as The Legions of Fire,
splitting up the heroes early on and sending them on separate
journeys that eventually converge again, and like its predecessor
this format works quite well. The plot is exciting and interesting,
especially as the true nature and origins of the Typhon are revealed,
and Drake does a really good job of actually making a grotesque,
world-destroying monstrosity the heart of a very emotionally engaging
story.
The different strands of the plot are
written such that each of the four main viewpoint characters has a
very distinctive voice, and Drake is very effective in using this to
bring them to life. Varus' sister Alphena gets to take a more active
role in the story this time, and it was interesting to see her grow
as a person compared to who she was at the start of the first book.
The setting is unusual for this sort of
fantasy in that Carce, its empire, and its culture are quite
explicitly Rome in all but name- aside from “Carce,” even names
are kept the same. In addition to making Carce feel very different
from a more typical fantasy setting, Drake's attention to historical
detail frequently makes Carce seem much more foreign to a modern
reader than many imaginary worlds, even during mundane events. There
are aspects of it that you'll get more out of if you already have
some knowledge of the period, but the book explains things well
enough that its not a requirement to understand what's going on. The
Typhon is inspired by an interesting mixture of Classical and
American Indian (Cherokee, more specifically) mythology, and Drake's
combination and interpretation of them result in something that is
both horrifying and poignant.
Many aspects of the book- lost
Atlantis, the Typhon, some of the places the characters journey to-
put me in mind of early American fantasy and “weird fiction”
authors like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, or (to some
extent) H.P. Lovecraft, not so much in their specifics but in the way
they evoke the the sense of the cosmos as something frighteningly
vast, in both space and time. This contributes to the overall tone of
the book, which (like most of Drake's fantasy, now that I think about
it) is probably best described as a high fantasy story set in a
sword-and-sorcery universe. The world is indifferent to humanity and
its fate, magic and the supernatural tend to be frightening,
disturbing things, human life is frequently very cheap, and there's
no sign of any sort of higher power watching over mankind, but the
protagonists are nevertheless heroic figures who will undergo
whatever it takes to protect the world.
I highly recommend Out of the Waters
for fans of fantasy, and especially for fans of Drake's previous
work.
SF Signal had a Mind Meld feature a little while back that asked participants what
science fiction or fantasy book they would like to experience reading
for the first time again. I don't really have an answer to that. I
often get a lot of my enjoyment from a book when I'm not actually
reading it- when events or characters or ideas from it are just
rolling around in after my head I've finished it, or while its still
in progress but not actually in my hands; the experience of actually
reading the book, while still very important, is often less central
to me than it is to many people. Don't ask me why.
It
did, however, get me thinking about which books made the biggest
impression on me upon reading them for the first time, which is
something I'm better equipped to answer.
The
Night Face by Poul Anderson
This
is part of Anderson' vast Technic Civilization future history- which
I knew nothing of at the time, but it stood fine on its own. Human
interstellar civilization is starting to dig itself out of the ashes
after a long period of chaos and barbarism, and several human worlds
that have made it back to the stars mount a joint expedition to
another human world that has been completely isolated for thousands of years.
This
wasn't quite the first Poul Anderson book I read, but it was close,
and it was the first one to really show me some of the qualities that
would make Poul Anderson my favorite science fiction author. Much of
Anderson's work is pervaded by a sense of melancholy and an
ultimately tragic view of life that exists alongside an
energetic sense of discovery, adventure, and heroism, and The Night
Face has both.
The
part I always remember most is at the very, very end. One sentence,
three words, and rereading it still rips my heart out just like the
first time.
Side note: The book was originally published under the name Let the
Spacemen Beware!, presumably because the publisher thought that
the book's dangerously high levels of awesomeness needed to be
counterbalanced by giving it the most generic name for a science
fiction story ever conceived by man.
The
Golden Age by John C. Wright
Science
fiction based in post-singularity or "post-scarcity" sorts
of settings generally don't do much for me unless it's unusually
well-done, but despite this Wright's Golden Age trilogy -The Golden
Age, The Phoenix Exultant, and The Golden Transcendence- are among
my favorite books.
The
first book in the series quickly demonstrates much of the reason for
that. From the very beginning the the sheer density of ideas and
imagination was stunning, with ideas that could provide the basis for
a complete story or even a novel by themselves sometimes appearing on
literally every page. And yet I never felt overloaded, overwhelmed,
or confused- Wright does a masterful job of it immediately throwing
the reader into a radically changed world and making it
comprehensible.
Rolling
Hot by David Drake
One
of Drake's Hammer's slammers military science fiction stories, first
published on its own in 1989 and now included in the collection The Tank Lords. This is the big one for me.
I
picked up an old copy of Rolling Hot in a used bookstore in my late
teens. I knew of Drake, slightly, but I hadn't read any of his work.
I was interested in military science fiction and had heard good
things about him, so I picked this book put more or less at random.
Like Drake's other Hammer stories, it's about a group of mercenaries
in the future, heavily influenced by Drake's own military experience.
The characters are members of an armored cavalry unit hired to fight
on one side of a planet's civil war, plus a a young war correspondent
who finds himself dragooned into accompanying them; To the best of my
recollection, the cause of the war and the nature and motivations of
the two sides fighting it are never mentioned.
It
was probably the most emotionally grueling experience I've ever had
with a book, or with a work of fiction in any medium. I read it
quickly, entranced. I can't really describe what finishing that book
was like; it was psychologically numbing and overwhelming at the same
time. I felt like someone had driven hooks into my gut and torn my
insides out, while part of me felt it happen and part of me just
impartially watched it through a window.
The
book has some heartbreakingly sad moments, but it wasn't just that. Ironically,
much of Rolling Hot's tremendous emotional effect on me was for much
the same reason some people have accused Drake of glorifying violence
or writing military "porn": The book is written with the
understanding that people trapped in awful situations frequently
don't have the luxury of consciously feeling the emotions that might
be appropriate to the situation if they want to remain at least
somewhat functional, and the way it is written thrusts the reader
inside that mindset.
If someone doesn't understand what the
conspicuously flat affect with which Drake often describes violence
and death actually signifies (and/or has some sort of preexisting
antipathy towards soldiers or warfare as subject matter or military
science fiction as a genre), I suppose it can seem like callousness
or indifference. But when I first heard that some people interpreted
him that way I was utterly baffled by how anyone could think that, when the sense of pain and horror that suffuses much of Drake's work seemed so immediately palpable and obvious.
I've had other books affect me emotionally, but Rolling Hot was a book that had a more directly personal emotional relevance. Despite being based on a situation far
removed from my own life- armored warfare being fairly uncommon in
late 20th-century Illinois- Rolling Hot spoke to me in a way that nothing else
I had encountered did, though I didn't really understand why at the time. I quickly began buying all the David Drake books I could find, and he's among my all-time favorites today.
The Moon Maze Game is the most recent collaboration by authors Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. It is the fourth book in their Dream Park series (preceded by Dream Park, The Barsoom Project, and The California Voodoo Game) and part of the same future history as some of their other collaborative works, but it's a self-contained story and stands fine on its own whether you've read the previous books or not.
In the year 2085, humanity has spread into the solar system and now has a thriving permanent settlement on the moon. After losing his job as the bodyguard to a wealthy Belgian heiress, security professional Scotty Griffin receives a new job offer from an unexpected source: the King of the Republic of Kikaya, an African nation born from the ashes of the former Democratic Republic of Zimbabwe. The King wants to hire a bodyguard for his son and heir, Ali, for a trip to the moon.
Griffin is a former Lunar resident himself, but a near-fatal accident on the Lunar surface that left him near death and pinned down with his face towards the sky while he waited hours for rescue caused him to develop a crippling fear of the open starry sky. It left him unable to do his job and eventually drove him back to earth entirely, breaking up his marriage. He isn't keen to go back, even if the new job doesn't require him to leave the safety of the colony's domes, but he needs work and he hates the thought of letting his fears rule him forever.
Ali's destination is the first virtual-reality live-action role-playing event ever held on the moon, which he plans to participate in. Overseeing the event is Kendra Griffin, Scotty's estranged wife and one of the leaders of the colony's emerging society. Live-action role-playing utilizing a combination of holography and real physical items and sets is a popular form of entertainment on earth, attracting thousands of players in the games themselves and millions of viewers watching the most exciting games from home. A full-scale state-of-the-art gaming event requires considerable infrastructure, and so this historic event- which will be broadcast to hundreds of millions of viewers on Earth- represents a potential milestone in the development of the lunar colonies, showcasing their development before the entire world's eyes, spurring greater economic development, and bringing the day when the moon treats with the independent nations of earth as an equal closer. If it goes well.
The game is itself set on a fantasy version of the moon, populated with creatures inspired by the stories of H.G. Wells and brought to life by a labyrinthine, multi-story dome built for the occasion. But Ali's presence draws the moon into terrestrial politics when two lunar residents with a family connection to Kikaya and ties to opponents of the existing monarchy hire a gang of professional kidnappers and smuggle them onto the moon, hoping to abduct Ali and use him as a political bargaining chip.. The game has barely begun when they seize control of the game dome and take Griffin, Ali, and the rest of the players as hostages. The prisoners begin a desperate escape attempt, but even if they escape, the players are still trapped with a group of ruthless professional criminals in a sealed dome until rescuers can arrive and figure out how to force their way in without blowing the dome open to the void of space in the process.
There is something working in their favor, however: The dome's numerous holographic and mechanical effects still work, and the dome's computers are still running the game. Griffin is the only prisoner accustomed to real fights, but the gamers know far more about how to deal with and take advantage of the dome's capabilities than their captors do, and the gamers have no shortage of ingenuity...
I quite enjoyed The Moon Maze Game. The plot is interesting, very well-paced, and keeps things exciting without seeming rushed or overstuffed. The lunar colony setting is not particularly new or noteworthy in itself, but it's used very well, with things like the dangers of the airless environment, the challenges of carrying out a covert criminal operation in a cramped, crowded, airtight population center, and the effects of low gravity all used to good effect. It's primarily an action-adventure story rather than a speculative one (though the two mesh interestingly, as discussed below) but it's still very much a science fiction story- the lunar environment is so integral to events throughout that the book could not transplanted to a more mundane terrestrial setting and continue to make sense
The action in the book is very well-done, and the authors make extensive use of the possibilities of lunar gravity. Barnes' background in the martial arts brings a lot to the story, especially when working in combination with the lunar setting. Low gravity doesn't just mean you can jump high- a fight becomes a radically different proposition when trying to shift your stance the way you would on Earth can throw you off your feet, or when your weight isn't rooting you to the ground firmly enough for you to turn your body in place to throw a proper punch, or when it's possible to turn somersaults with a grown man clinging to your back. It was rather cool to read a book where many of the science fictional aspects were not about futuristic technology (much as I love that sort of thing), but rather about the natural human body in motion in an alien environment.
I like the characters quite a bit. The various gamers who find them selves trapped in the dome with Ali and Scotty Griffin are likable people, and the authors do a good job of making them important participants in events through their courage and ingenuity without ignoring the fact that, unlike Griffin, they don't have training or experience preparing them for a real-world life-or-death struggle and would have no chance in a straightforward confrontation with professional killers.
I also enjoyed the portrayal of Xavier, the renowned Game Master chosen to create and oversee the adventure to be featured for the moon's historic first game. Xavier is an unlikable jerk- he's smug, arrogant, spiteful, overly self-involved, and was planning to covertly abuse his position as Game Master to harass and embarrass two participants in the game he has a decades-long grudge against until the arrival of the kidnappers interrupts him, at which point he is initially more angered by the interruption of his work than the threat to human lives. But he's not a caricature of an unlikable jerk- using all of his ingenuity and what limited access he still has to the systems inside the gaming dome, he does everything in his power to help the gamers survive and escape, his own hated enemies included. He's a prick, not a monster, and his role in the story benefits from that.
Probably most of all, I liked the portrayal of the relationship between Scotty and Kendra Griffin, which spurns the common "angry, bickering estranged couple forced by circumstances to work together" cliches. Instead, both Griffins come across as deeply hurt but reasonable people who understand that the breakdown of their marriage was the result of an unfortunate set of circumstances- a woman who had dedicated her life to the moon and would never be happy living anywhere else and a man suddenly rendered unable to continue living there at all- and have the maturity to accept that instead of taking their pain out on each other. That was refreshing.
I recommend The Moon Maze Game for science fiction fans. It's not the sort of mind-blowing speculative work most commonly associated with Larry Niven, but it's a very solid action-adventure story and well worth reading.
This intrigues me: Angry Robot Books is starting a new project called "Worldbuilder" that actively encourages fans to create their own derivative works based on the universe of one of their upcoming books, Empire State by Adam Christopher. Once it's up and running, fans of the book will be able to upload their own creations to the official Worldbuilder website under a Creative Commons license. There are also plans for published anthologies based on this material.
The most similar project I can think of is the community of fans that has arisen around Eric Flint's1632 and its sequels, which emerged out of fan discussions on the Baen Books message boards and has subsequently given rise to a regularly published online collection of new fan-contributed stories from Baen, the Grantville Gazette, as well as several paperback compilations. The Gazettes are overseen by Flint himself and are, if I'm not mistaken, actually considered a canonical part of the 1632 universe. The Worldbuilder project looks like it's going to be somewhat looser- anyone can contribute their fan works to the site, whereas fan-written 1632 stories have to go through a review and approval process and get Flint's imprimatur before appearing in the Gazette- but it would be interesting to see if some of the Worldbuilder material becomes "official."
I would definitely like to see something like this take off. I've seen some very cool examples of storytelling and worldbuilding created through group efforts at somewhat in this vein,* so it's good to see another publisher and published author trying to tap into it. *(E.g.the SCP Foundation or Project LONG STAIR. Or the Cthulhu Mythos, for that matter.)
The book being used, Empire State, seems like a good choice for this sort of thing, since it's apparently a sort of noir superhero story set in a fantasy version of 1920s New York. Established superhero-based settings like the Marvel Universe are comprised of characters and locations created by a number of different authors, and I think the nature of superheroes as characters makes it easier to have multiple characters written by multiple authors, each possessing abilities and having experiences that wouldn't be possible in our world and have possible implications about how the fictional world works, without stepping on each other's toes too much. So Angry Robot is kicking off this project with something especially well-suited to it, which is good.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this goes.
Gateways is a collection of stories by a number of different authors, published in honor of Frederik Pohl's seventy-year career as a science fiction author and editor.
Pohl is a special author to me. One of the science fiction novels that really made an impression on me as a kid was Pohl's The World at the End of Time, published in 1990. I was exposed to it by sheer chance- my father would often pick up a few books for me when he was out of town on business, he knew I liked science fiction, and on one of his trips it was the most science fictiony-looking book at the airport kiosk on the day he was flying home.
I was blown away by it. It had interstellar space colonization, several human civilizations separated by thousands of years of history, godlike plasma-based beings living in stars that waged war with each other on an unimaginable scale, entire solar systems accelerated to relativistic speeds, trillions of years of the universe's evolution... startling stuff when you're in elementary school and just starting to delve into science fiction. A few years later, I discovered Pohl's classic Gateway, which became one of my favorite books. So I owe Frederik Pohl quite a bit.
Gateways collects over a dozen stories by various science fiction authors, including three novellas by David Brin, Frank M. Robinson, and Cory Doctorow. There are some reprints, but most of the stories are original to this anthology. Each contributor also provides a short remembrance of Pohl after their story, and several other authors who don't have story here, such as Robert Sawyer and Robert Silverberg, share their memories as well. It also contains forward by Elizabeth Anne Hull, the book's editor and Frederik Pohl's wife of nearly three decades.
Stories of note for me included:
Von Neumann's Bug by Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein- Story about a suburban man on present-day Earth who starts experiencing strange events after a tiny, unmanned interstellar explorer crash-lands on present-day earth and takes up residence in his garage while it repairs itself. Very fun and good-natured, and one of my favorites here.
Sleeping Dogs by Joe Haldeman- A former soldier returns to a planet where he fought decades ago in a war he has no memory of, thanks to the memory alteration procedure done to the troops after the campaign was over. with what little he now knows about the planet and the war. Equipped with a drug that can help restore his lost memories if he can expose himself to enough stimuli associated with his forgotten past, he tries to retrace his steps to find out who he was and what he did almost 30 years ago. Very effective and chilling, and Haldeman also does a great job of evoking the setting of the story in a short space.
Gates (Variations) by Larry Niven- The shortest story in the collection, but it still captures the combination of scientifically grounded SF and off-kilter weirdness that I like so much about Niven.
Tales from the Spaceship Geoffrey by James Gunn- Part of an upcoming novel Transcendental. A diverse group of aliens on a journey through space together pass the time by relating their pasts. Gives us an interesting look at several different alien species through the stories included here, and definitely piqued my interest in the novel. I was particularly liked the section narrated by a member of an alien race called the Dorians, which takes the common science fiction trope of a violent, militaristic, ruthlessly aggressive and predatory alien species (think Larry Niven's Kzinti for one of the archetypal examples) and puts an even more disturbing spin on it that grew more chilling the more I thought about it- what if they aren't naturally like that at all?
Virtually, A Cat by Jodie Lynn Nye- Fun, cute story about a man driven to despair while stuck on a two-year interstellar journey without his beloved cats, and the solution one of his crewmates devises to help him. I liked this one a lot; it probably helps that I'm a cat lover, but you don't need to be to enjoy this one.
A Preliminary Assessment of the Drake Equation, Being an Excerpt from the Memories of Star Captain Y.T. Lee By Vernor Vinge- Story about the exploration of the newly discovered planet, in a universe where humanity has developed faster-than-light-travel and found many earthlike worlds across the galaxy but has yet to find evidence of any extraterrestrial life more complex than bacteria. Very nicely combines a cheerful, light-hearted exploration story with some weightier concepts.
Shoresteading by David Brin- Near-future story set on the receding shores of China, after a rise in the sea level caused by global warming has left much of what used to be coastal China underwater. Starts off a bit weak, but it picks up and is dealing with some fairly interesting ideas by the end.
Contributions by authors such as Harry Harrison, Neil Gaiman, Greg Bear, Gene Wolfe, Gregory Benford, and Mike Resnick are also included.
The collection has its hits and misses, but the only story I actively disliked was “The First-Born” by Brian W. Aldiss. It's a dull, unpleasant, pointless journey to nowhere with a repulsively trivializing (seemingly bordering on outright apologism for the perpetrator) portrayal of childhood sexual abuse thrown in for good measure. There's the germ of several potentially interesting subjects for stories here- the possible effects of an alien environment on developing fetuses during an attempt to colonize Mars, a poorly funded and poorly planned colony's struggle to maintain itself, the psychological strains experienced by the colonists in such an environment- but nothing interesting happens with them here. Ugh.
All in all, though, I found Gateways quite enjoyable and would happily recommend it to fans of Frederik Pohl. More generally, I'd also recommend it to other science fiction fans interested in new short fiction, especially if you'd like to read some stories on that are mostly on the more upbeat side of the spectrum.
Britt hits on a good point when he remarks that a typical science fiction book simply has more things competing with the characters for attention than a more conventional story- a character who might seem perfectly acceptable in isolation may seem lackluster when placed alongside ideas that are much more interesting than he is. In a somewhat similar vein I would add another factor, the inescapable scarcity of resources that go into a book's creation.
Time is finite, energy is finite, and the number of words in a book is finite. Provided with equal amounts of these resources, “serious” fiction can put more into its characters because it generally does not place a significant focus on subject matter other than the characters; the plot and setting are mostly or entirely there to further characterization or theme, rather than as things meant to be interesting in themselves. Character-focused fiction is usually also free from the need to explain the nature of its setting or the laws that govern it.
Often, science fiction simply does not have the resources to spare. Take a book I reviewed here a while ago, Incandescence by Greg Egan. Not a character piece, to put it mildly. Its length is modest, 256 pages in the Night Shade Books copy that I own. Now, there are probably ways it could be tweaked to make the characterization somewhat better while staying at that length and without any damage to the book's specifically science fictiony virtues. But probably not by much, because our hypothetical Incandescence 2.0 also still needs to cover, with same amount of detail and clarity of explanation:
A galaxy-wide multi-species civilization. Ways in which uploaded personalities originating from biological species with radically different physiologies, psychologies, sensory organs, etc. interact comfortably in shared virtual environments. A mysterious, isolationist second civilization in the galactic core. The workings of a galaxy-wide communications network that is limited to light-speed transmissions and carries not only messages but entire machine intelligences. Panspermia. The physics of space close to black holes. The physics of space close to black holes. The biology and society of an alien species. The invention of the scientific method by a member of that species, and the gradual process of discovery through experimentation. The consequences of living in an environment where the effects of relativity are significant enough to be noticeable in day-to-day life.
And so on. And then there's the actual plot that still needs to fit, too.
Some writers are better than others at creating strong characters while still giving attention to plot, setting, and ideas. But there are still trade-offs to be made and different authors will tend to be more effective at some ratios of these elements than others.
Obviously, better characterization is better than worse, all else being equal. Some of my favorite science fiction stories are strongly character-based. But- as Britt alludes to- much of the criticism leveled at science fiction on this matter is built on the assumption, often the explicit assumption, that the emotions and personalities of the characters is what fiction is really about, or at least what it ought to be about. It's not surprising that this would be so; in people, being strongly socially and emotionally attuned is a much higher-status trait than the sort of attributes that often draw people to science fiction, and it makes sense that the status of science fiction would correspond to that of the sort of personality it brings to mind.
Which is why, ultimately, my answer to the question “Does SFF Marginalize Characters?” is, “Frequently, yes. So what?” One of the things I love most about science fiction is precisely that it treats things like science, technology, and carefully thinking about how systems work and how they might be affected by change as actually interesting, instead of being bound by the sort of assumptions that privilege one facet of the human mind above all others as the one stories should be about.
The Quantum Thief is the debut novel of science fiction author Hannu Rajaniemi. You can visit his website here.
The central character of the story is Jean le Flambeur, a legendary thief with a career that spanned centuries of time and the breadth of the solar system. Now, however, he is only another inmate in the Dilemma Prison, a virtual jail in the outer solar system where the uploaded personalities of criminals are kept for “rehabiliation” by the Sobornost, the posthuman collective of uploaded minds that is the greatest power in the solar system. His imprisonment comes to an unexpected end when he is rescued by a woman named Mieli. Mieli is no altruist, however- she and her masters have a job that requires the solar system's greatest thief. Le Flambeur agrees, feeling he owes her a debt of honor for his rescue. More importantly, the physical body he now inhabits after his release from the Dilemma Prison back into the world of flesh and blood is subject to Mieli's direct control.
But it's not just an object that Mieli needs le Flambeur to find. Much of le Flambeur's own centuries-long memory is missing. Le Flambeur's past self apparently had secrets so important that even his own memory was not secure enough, and so he hid them away in external storage external storage or locked up somewhere beyond awareness in his own mind and released only in response to particular stimuli to give his future self clues about where to find the rest of himself.
The trail left by his fragmentary memories takes them to the Oubliette, a city of (comparatively) baseline humans perpetually crawling across the surface of Mars to keep ahead of the swarms of hostile, replicating, ever-evolving machines descended from malfunctioning terraforming machinery that now dominates much of the planet. The Oubliette is a place where privacy is almost absolute, and through the electronic network that links everyone in the city each citizen can control how much other people are able to see, hear, or even remember them. Le Flambeur remembers that he once lived here, and that the place is important to him- and if there were a place where he'd secretly hide memories away, this is it.
Meanwhile, a young detective in the Oubliette named Isidore Beautrelet is helping to investigate recent murders and acts of “gogol piracy”- forcible uploading of minds. He works in cooperation with a person known only as the Gentleman, one of the tzaddikim- mysterious vigilantes who have sworn to protect the city from outside threats. His successes bringing to the attention of wealthy Oubliette citizen Christian Unruh, who has a seemingly inexplicable mystery he wants solved. This mystery will bring Isidore and le Flambeur into collision with each other, and with the truth about le Flambeur.
The Quantum Thief is an excellent book that simultaneously works very well as a character-based story, an adventure, and a novel of ideas. The central plot is interesting throughout, especially as it builds up steam approaching the climax.
Jean le Flambeur is very enjoyable as the main viewpoint character. Much of the story is told by him in the first person, and fortunately he's a fun character to follow around. The other major character's were also engaging; I was particularly fond of the Gentleman, Isidore's mysterious masked partner and mentor. (Especially once I decided that, in my head, the Gentleman would be played by The Question.) Rajaniemi does a very good job of creating characters that are clearly recognizable “types”- the roguish gentleman-thief, the mysterious woman with a painful secret, the earnest young detective and his older, more hard-nosed partner- but remain interesting, emotionally engaging individuals instead of being stock cliches.
The Oubliette is a fascinating setting with some intriguing elements. Each person is mentally linked to a citywide network that lets them exchange information and memories, while shrouded in protective encryption called gevulot that allows them to control what information about them can be accessed by others. Since everyone's mind is linked directly to the network, even the extent to which other people can see or hear you in real time, or- if a person consents through a “gevulot contract,” transmitted from mind to mind- remember you after the fact can be filtered this way. In addition to its importance to the main mystery plot, it creates an interesting situation in which people's basic psychology remains unchanged from our own but technology has radically changed fundamental aspects of social life. The hints given about the rest of the solar system are interesting as well, though are they fairly vague for the most part.
The book is very idea-heavy and set in a future where technology and society have changed radically. The technology to upload, download, or edit human minds is ubiquitous, nanotechnology and other advanced technologies have risen to almost magical levels, advanced post-humans have risen to godlike heights of power and intellect, and even the comparatively unchanged humans in places like the Oubliette, who retain a fundamentally human psychology and lives that are at least somewhat recognizable, are profoundly different from 21st-century humanity in all sorts of ways. Within this world, Rajaniemi quickly throws the reader in the deep end and mostly expects him to swim on his own. New concepts and terms come quickly and aren't always explained right away, or in depth, though as things progress it gets easier to keep up and infer things from context.
I like this sort of approach when it's done well (as it is here), since it makes it possible to put a lot of speculative technologies, setting information, and the like into the story, and can create a sort of puzzle for the reader to solve as he starts to gain enough context to understand things that were previously confusing or obscure. But it's not for everyone, and in comments I've seen from people who didn't like the book this is almost always the reason. If you do enjoy that sort of approach, though, The Quantum Thief does it very well.
I would definitely recommend The Quantum Thief for science fiction fans, especially those interested in very idea-focused SF and subjects like transhumanism. It's a somewhat iffier proposition if you're not a fan of the sort of dense take-no-prisoners worldbuilding I described above, but if that's not an absolute deal-breaker for you the story and characters are strong enough that I think the book is still worth a try. It's definitely a strong debut, and I look forward to seeing what Hannu Rajaniemi does next.
