Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Today I'm taking a look back at one of the classics of old science-fiction, Fahrenheit 451. I first read this book when I was fourteen years old as assigned reading for school. I thought it was pretty good, but I personally liked Ender's Game better between the two. Years later I was actually surprised to find out that I had gotten Bradbury's main thrust that so many people miss. What most people remember about this book is that it's about burning books. The title after all takes its name from the flash point of paper, the temperature at which paper would ignite from surrounding heat alone. (Apparently this isn't strictly true because chemistry, but that's a different debate entirely.) And the main character, Guy Montag, is one of the firemen now responsible for burning the prohibited books, which seem to be every book. While censorship is definitely part of the book, to say that Fahrenheit 451 is only about burning books misses another major argument.

The plot of Fahrenheit 451 follows Guy Montag as he begins to question his work and the society he's living in, especially after his wife Mildred overdoses on sleeping medication and doesn't remember why. Montag realizes that he's never had a conversation with his wife for years and that's partly because she spends almost all her waking hours in the television parlor, surrounded by three television walls, or with earbud radios in. Despite spending all of her time plugged into media Mildred can't even tell Guy what the plot of the stories she's been watching are, much less express an opinion on something beyond the media she consumes. Guy realizes that he is isolated from everyone and his life is devoid of meaning and begins to wonder if maybe he can find that missing meaning in books. So there is this large theme about trying to find meaning in life while society and the government encourages people not to think and just enjoy themselves.

There is a point where the character Captain Beatty makes an exposition dump/argument about how the world got to the point that they're burning books, and I'm on the fence about whether the argument doesn't hold any water or is even more valid today. Beatty states that the censorship of books began with an elimination of things that people found offensive, such as Little Black Sambo. Gradually more and more things were deemed offensive to people's sensibilities and so more and more things were censored, banned, or eliminated. Alongside this was the reduction in time available for people to actually enjoy media, leading to abridged editions, summaries, condensations, and eventually media becoming so superficial and bland as to be utterly meaningless. With society left with media that doesn't challenge them or make them uncomfortable, they can just spend all their time being happy and not stopping to think about something beyond themselves. A society of perpetual distraction.

On the one hand Bradbury, through Beatty and other characters, makes a valid point. Eliminating things that make us uncomfortable can be counter-productive because when we're made uncomfortable it can make us think about things in a new way or challenge preexisting ideas. But at the same time, there are legitimate reasons to be uncomfortable with the example of racial depictions of non-white people. For example, people should not be performing in blackface and you should feel uncomfortable even with historical examples because blackface was the creation and reinforcement of racial stereotypes of African-Americans as inferiors and a perpetuation of the dehumanization of African-Americans. The same goes for countless other racial and ethnic stereotypes which exist to create an image of inferiority and reinforce the idea that blacks, American Indians, Jews, or Anabaptists are somehow less than human and worthy of contempt and violence.

In an era where political correctness is derided as being overly sensitive, it's all too apparent we need it more than ever because of the overt racism espoused by public figures and endorsed by at least a chunk of the population. Especially when the people who deride political correctness and want to bring back the racial stereotypes are exactly the sort of people who would use racial caricatures to justify their mistreatment of other people. But I suppose those would be the sorts of people who wouldn't feel uncomfortable and wouldn't be challenged to think outside their preexisting worldviews. I guess my point is that there are good reasons to be uncomfortable with ideas like Sambo and while we shouldn't ban it, we shouldn't present it without having a conversation about it either.

And inevitably in our current era an examination of Fahrenheit 451 would not be complete without talking about the current state of media. If Bradbury's critique of media as superficial and intellectually unfulfilling was accurate in 1953, someone will inevitably say that it's more valid now. We have so much reality television, as well as programs that are aggregations of clips from other media that commentate on it. Not to mention the countless big-budget superhero, sci-fi, or action movies that get churned out in seemingly endless franchises by Hollywood. Where is the intellectually fulfilling media? people might ask. And with the saturation of media out there it can be hard to find it. But I think it's there. People are still producing documentaries about important topics. People are still writing or creating media that's meaningful beyond its entertainment value.

Besides which, people often forget that things that are considered ''great literature'' today were often derided in their own time. Dickens was dismissed as popular literature pandering to the common denominator. Moby Dick was panned by critics when it was first published (although how fair that was is a matter of debate). ''Great literature'' is always a matter of debate and what may be popular today may not survive to tomorrow, while what may be ignored today may remain relevant twenty or fifty years from now. And even what people think as ''great literature'' will vary from person to person. So to say that we're no longer creating things of value is far too premature.

Overall this book serves as a good jumping-off point for debates and it raises some very good questions with no easy answers. It's definitely worth taking a read and doing a little thinking on your own.

- Kalpar

The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin

Today, I'm looking at a classic sci-fi novel The Stepford Wives which has gotten two movie adaptations and has even entered the lexicon as a phrase in and of itself. The book really is more of a novella, clocking in at about 130 pages, but I think that the brevity really works to its strength rather than a weakness.

Because the book has become in many ways part of the cultural zeitgeist you're probably familiar with the generalities of the plotline. A new family moves to the neighborhood of Stepford and the mother, Joanna, notices that something is...off...about their neighbors. The women all seem friendly enough, but they spend all their time on housework and say they're far too busy to spend any time on social activities. Joanna manages to meet a handful of other women who are also recent transplants to Stepford and agree that something is weird about Stepford. And then one by one the members of the group start turning into Stepford wives themselves, their entire old personalities erased.

The book itself is a little vague about what happens to the women after they've been ''Stepford-ized''. It's implied they're replaced by robots, but I personally like the idea of them being brainwashed and reprogrammed better. Either way it's very creepy and the pacing works incredibly well to underscore that.

The book is, of course, about feminism and was published in 1972, putting it solidly within the era of Second Wave Feminism which, among other issues, included a drive by white women to escape the role of housewife that had been created by the post-war American economy. Women fought for opportunities outside the home and equality in the workplace. And yes, I'm grossly oversimplifying a critical movement in United States history, but that's how it's relevant to this work. As this book relates to feminism it's not even subtext, Joanna is a member of the National Organization of Women and is ready to march on the Stepford Men's Association because of their exclusion of women.

The sad thing is that this book, much like Handmaid's Tale, remains incredibly relevant. We are in the middle of a great political struggle in the United States and there are people who seriously suggest that women's natural place is as a wife and mother and women shouldn't work outside the home. Some people go so far as to argue that this is what's undermining ''western civilization'', completely ignoring the fact that women have had to work for most of history to support their families, and even if a woman chooses to take care of her home and children, that is valuable unpaid work that she provides. And yes, women do far more unpaid work than men. Unfortunately we're at a point where we still need feminist propaganda.

Looking at this as a book, as I said the brevity of the book I think actually works to its benefits. As Joanna gradually pieces together what's going on in Stepford, she realizes that time is running out for her and her husband may already have plans to replace her with a submissive, zombified version of herself. As you start physically running out of book, you know that Joanna is running out of time as well and you hope that she can get away and get help before she becomes Stepford's latest victim. It made for a very emotional reading experience.

Overall I'd definitely recommend reading this book. It's a short and easy read and while it's not subtle, it packs a huge emotional punch and remains frustratingly relevant.

- Kalpar

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

Today I'm looking at a classic sci-fi book, The Day of the Triffids, written in 1951 and later adapted into a B science-fiction movie, making this one of the old school classics. Since this came up on sale I thought I'd give it a try, expecting some silly B-movie nonsense. I am left with mixed feelings about this book because even for the level of quality I was expecting, it fell pretty short of the standard. Most of the book focused on the apocalypse but the triffids played less of a role than I expected in the book.

This book is written from the perspective of a survivor of a global apocalypse that has mostly wiped out civilization. The crisis begins when the earth passes through the tail of a comet, causing green fireworks to appear in the night sky, visible to all the earth. Because of its uniqueness, much of earth's population turns out to observe this event, only to discover the next morning that they have gone blind. Only a handful of people, who for a variety of reasons didn't see the effects of the comet's tail, survive with their vision intact.

Although bad enough, the crisis is even worse because of the escape of the triffids. The triffids are strange plant creatures that appeared many years before the comet occurred. The triffids are commercially valuable but come with several dangers. They are carnivorous plants, capable of walking, and possessing a deadly venom-filled stinger. If that wasn't bad enough the triffids breed like crazy and are capable of growing pretty much anywhere. It was hard enough to keep the triffids in line when civilization was still operating, but now the triffids are able to run unchecked and attack the surviving humans with impunity.

Despite the triffids being in the title of the book, they don't play as large of a role as I thought they might. They're a constant menace through the book but you get to the point where people treat them as a constant annoyance more than anything else. Just when it gets to the point where the number of triffids presents an actual danger to our characters, the book ends and they move to a triffid-free island. Most of the focus of the book is on trying to figure out what the heck happened and finding a way to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, as well as a love story between the main characters. The fact that the comet which blinded everyone is later blamed on man's hubris just further undermines the triffids as the main threat of the book. And I have to say, as an enemy, deadly garden pests that can be taken out with the proper application of a chainsaw leave something to be desired.

The ending was also rather abrupt. Our main characters spend a significant portion of time working to make a farm habitable, despite being constantly under siege by triffids. Within the last chapter the main characters discover that humans have established a secure base on the Isle of Wight, giving our main characters an opportunity to escape. However, we also discover that a feudal military dictatorship has established itself in southern England and they want to take over the main characters' farm. Within a space of about five pages the main characters learn about the feudal dictators, escape from the feudal dictators, and the book ends. It just...ends. It felt like Wyndham was trying to throw in one final drama before the book ended. It might make more sense if the book was serialized and Wyndham didn't know when it was going to end, but as the ending of a novel it leaves a lot to be desired.

Ultimately this is a B-movie book so the expectations aren't very high for this book. That being said, even for a B-movie level of a book, I felt like the writing left a lot to be desired. It would have been a lot better if the triffids ever felt like more than just a headache for the main characters, and if  the ending wasn't as abrupt as it was. But if you like old B-movie quality sci-fi you can't go wrong with this.

- Kalpar

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Today I'm looking at another of the classic sci-fi novels, Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. Although this book also gets put in with the true literature as well because there's a lot less space ships and more thinking about life and what it's all about. This book is definitely different and as a result I'm not 100% sure what to make of it, one way or the other. But personally I think it's a good different and worth checking out, even if I personally can't make heads or tails of it.

This book follows Billy Pilgrim, an American man who as a P.O.W. witnesses the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II. (Much like how Kurt Vonnegut himself witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden as a P.O.W. so it draws heavily on his own experiences during the war.) The plot is set off when Billy Pilgrim gets unstuck in time, and starts drifting randomly from one point of his life to the next, never knowing when or where he'll end up. The result is the book is told form Billy's perspective as he drifts through his memories. First back to the war, then to life after the war, then life before, and so on in that fashion. Billy's life is slowly unfolded for us over time and we put the mysteries of his life together.

Another major event in Billy's life is his kidnapping by the Tralfamadorians, an alien race that sees in four dimensions instead of three, which means they can see all of time at once, and look upon pleasant moments in the future or in the past as easily as we might look at a pleasant picture. Because Billy himself is unstuck in time, the Tralfamadorian understanding of time is extremely helpful for him to understand his predicament. As far as the Tralfamadorians are concerned, everything that will happen is happening now, and will always have happened. All of the universe is an inevitability, we are merely going through the motions. This helps Billy adapt because he knows he can't change the past or the future, he's travelling along a track that was laid well before.

This also means the Tralfamadorians have an interesting perspective on death. They find the act of death itself to be largely unimportant and when one of their species die they simply say ''So it goes.'' In fact, ''So it goes'' becomes a sort of mantra through the book, obsessively stated after any living thing be it plant, animal, bacteria, or human being dies. Because as far as the Tralfamadorians are concerned, at the moment of death it is certainly bad for the person in question, but they are doing quite fine at other periods in their life in the past. That person will always exist in the past and will continue existing in the past, so there's no sense in feeling upset that they're gone because a Tralfamadorian can always re-visit the times when that individual was alive. It's an interesting philosophical concept about time and death but I don't know if it works so well for humans who, of course, cannot see all of time at once.

There are a lot of things going on in this book, and I don't think I can process all of them quite adequately. In fact, I'm not sure I completely understand this book at all. But I thought it was very interesting and it at least made me think and get outside my usual comfort zone. I also thought it was very accessible and plenty of people would find it interesting. In some ways the book is so open-ended that you can take whatever you want from it and perhaps there is no one specific interpretation. Overall, I think this is a book worth checking out for yourself.

- Kalpar

The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

Today I'm looking at another mid-century pulp sci-fi classic, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. This is a collection of short stories written by Bradbury in the 1940's which all, or almost all, deal with Mars and human colonization of Mars. Bradbury added some material to help stitch the stories together into a cohesive whole so on the one hand it feels like a short story anthology, but on the other hand it feels like an overarching narrative as well which gives it a very unique flavor.

As much as I hate to say it, this book does feel pretty dated, in ways both large and small. First there's the presence of aliens, cities, and canals on Mars, which is pretty standard in a lot of the pulp sci-fi from this time period but it certainly designates it as from a time when we knew far less about Mars and the larger solar system than we do now. And then there are the smaller things, such as a novelist using a typewriter on Mars or the vaguely, casually sexist tone of some of the stories. Even though the books are set in the distant future of the 2030's and later, the technology and culture of the people on Mars definitely feels very 1940's America. Of course, there is no helping this because of the time it was written, but it does date the book considerably.

Those issues aside, this is a pretty good short story collection. There are a lot of these stories that made me feel something. Whether it was frustration, anger, sadness, or a wry chuckle a lot of these stories managed to evoke some sort of emotional response which I think indicates they're very well written. A lot of these stories also have a dramatically ironic twist at the end which made me think of a lot of Twilight Zone episodes. I almost suspect some episodes of that show may have been loosely based off of stories from this book because of certain similarities. And as readers of this blog already know, I am a huge, huge fan of The Twilight Zone so anything that's like The Twilight Zone where there's a twist at the end which I can usually guess, for whatever reason I enjoy it, even if I can predict the ending. In fact, sometimes that's some of the fun.

So I think if you, like me, have a fondness for the older, pulpy sci-fi and especially stories like The Twilight Zone I think you'd enjoy reading The Martian Chronicles. If that isn't what you like, you're probably not going to get a lot out of this book.

- Kalpar

Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov

Today I'm looking at Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov, which was his first full-length novel. While works like the Foundation short stories or the robot stories of I, Robot would later be collected in novel form, this was the first book written by Asimov as a full-length novel. That being said, it feels kind of rough around the edges which is a little odd considering I've known Asimov to write good short stories and to write good full-length novels so it may have been just an awkward transition between the mediums for him.

Pebble in the Sky, is actually the third book, chronologically, of the Empire series, set between the Robot stories and the Foundation stories of Asimov's greater literary universe. After doing some digging around I found that the Empire books, opposed to the Foundation or the Robot books, are separated by centuries and while they deal with the rise of the Trantor-dominated Galactic Empire, the three books don't necessarily connect one to the other. I may take a look at The Stars Like Dust and The Currents of Space because they sound like things I might be interested in reading and/or listening to. But I feel like this book is muddled more than anything else.

The biggest problem, I think, is that there are a lot of different plotlines going on at once and since the book isn't all that long in the first place, it feels like none of them get as well developed as they might have been. We begin with Joseph Schwartz, a retired tailor living in Chicago in 1949, out for a morning walk. Suddenly a mysterious atomic energy experiment attacks and flings Schwartz into the distant future where Earth is just one of hundreds of thousands of worlds in the Galactic Empire. Instead of being the capital of this mighty empire, or even revered as the cradle of humanity, Earth is reviled as a provincial backwater, the only inhabited planet polluted with high levels of radiation. Because resources on Earth are so scarce, the population is strictly controlled and once a person reaches sixty years of age they are euthanized, an issue of special concern for Schwartz since he is sixty-two.

If that had been the only plot in the book, a temporal fish-out-of-water situation, I think it might have been better than ''just okay''. Unfortunately Asimov starts cramming in a bunch of other plotlines and while they all end up tying together, it feels very disjointed. We have scientists working on a device that increases the synaptic connections in human beings, making them more intelligent. We have an archaeologist who thinks Earth may be the original home of humanity, opposed to the more commonly held belief that humanity evolved on separate worlds and was able to interbreed with the advent of interstellar flight. And we have a shadowy cloak and dagger conspiracy among the ministers of Earth's home government which ends up taking over the book. I think if Asimov had stuck with one or maybe two of these plots it would have been a lot better, but with four it kind of turns into a jumbled mess.

The only other complaint I could think to make is the book feels very much like it was written in the 1950's with the mores of the time period, but there's not really a lot we can do about that. It's okay, I just think it could have used a bit tighter focus.

- Kalpar

Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card

Today I'm finishing up the Ender Series with the ''final'' book, Children of the Mind. I put final in quotation marks there because at the end of this audio book Card said he had a final, definitely final for real this time, book planned to wrap up some plot threads that were left open at the end of the book. On the one hand I can understand Card's decision to leave them open, but on the other it feels like the series does need a little more closure.

I'm going to be honest, I didn't care for this book, although I found it fractionally more tolerable than Xenocide. Fractionally, mind you. I had heard some bad things about this book ahead of time so I didn't exactly have high expectations and after the experience of Xenocide I was expecting this to be a bit of a train wreck. Fortunately it's not a train wreck. I still didn't find it enjoyable, but I think it's because Card took the series into a highly philosophical, emotional, and ultimately literary perspective. Which is fine. There are plenty of people who like books like that. But that's just really not what I'm interested in. At least the way that Card wrote it anyhow.

Children of the Mind picks up where Xenocide left off, with the fleet armed with the MD Device still on its way to Lusitania and the threat of annihilation for not only the Hive Queen and the Pequeninos but Jane as well as Starways Congress plans to shut down the ansible network. Most of the work of the main characters is centered around this plot that finally gets a resolution to the satisfaction of everyone involved. Well, almost anyone. And if the book focused mostly around that it would be okay, but a lot of the book involves people getting involved in long talks about their relationships or feelings or what it means to be sentient, and arguing with each other on these topics. And I didn't find myself enjoying the heavy emotional stuff at all. I can't say whether it's Card's writing, the fact that I wasn't emotionally invested in most of the characters, or if I'm just a unsophisticated genre nerd who likes spaceship action but doesn't care about good character development if it hit him over the head with a brick. It could be a combination of those factors, or none of them entirely. It just feels like Children of Dune with lots of people sitting around talking, but instead of events I wish we could actually be seeing they're talking about philosophy, theology, history, and their emotions. It just felt to me like the ratio of action to contemplative navel-gazing was off.

This book also feels like it should be much older than it is. Children of the Mind was published in 1996, but it features a couple of planets that are dominated by national cultures. The world of Path has classical Chinese culture, the world of Divine Wind is Japanese, and Pacifica has Samoan and other Southern Pacific islander cultures (although we just see Samoan in the book). Except I feel like we're not really seeing the true cultures in these books, we're seeing more a theme-park, simplified, almost stereotyped version of complex cultures which have actually been horrifically stereotyped in other media. Now is it as bad as 1940's old-timey racism? Thankfully no. But it feels like an attempt to include diversity while not making an effort to really understand the cultures that you're trying to include. I'm probably overthinking this excessively, but it's another thing that kind of threw me off about this book.

And finally, Card tries to do some world-building in the book but I think it actually backfires because it doesn't make much sense. Although the last book finally got around the hurdle of FTL travel, the majority of humanity still does not, and has not had, access to it. This means that all interstellar travel has to go at relativistic speeds and experiences extreme time dilation. While the passengers may only experience a few weeks or months of travel time, the journey will actually take them decades. So this makes the logistics of interstellar travel fairly difficult and humanity's really only connected through the instantaneous communication of the Ansible. Except in the book Card states that Starways Congress, and I got the feeling this is done on a regular basis, will recruit government administrators from one planet and then transport them to another planet where they're needed. This just seems impractical or downright silly. It'll take government officials decades to get to the planets where they're needed, and by that point it'd be easier to train a local baby from birth to do the job you need them to do in thirty years anyway. Or there are large, interstellar corporations that are involved in finance on all the Hundred Worlds. But that doesn't make sense either because trade between the planets would also be a logistical nightmare. Entire markets could rise and fall in the time it takes to ship goods from one star system to another. In such a case, it would only make sense for each system to be self-sustaining and interstellar travel to be limited to the truly necessary.

 And I could almost understand some planets being monolithic cultures because they're effectively isolated, but Card describes some planets as cosmopolitan with entire communities of off-worlders. Which again, makes no sense. For everyone else, leaving your home planet to travel the stars is described as this horrible experience because with time dilation everyone you know and love will be old or dead by the time you get back and the whole planet will have changed. So I'd think people would be very reluctant to travel between planets except as absolutely necessary, but it feels like a fairly common affair. I appreciate Card's attempts at world-building but it just raises more questions than giving the world answers.

Ultimately I was disappointed in this book, but not as disappointed as I thought I would be. As I said, there seems to be a lot of people sitting around and talking about their feelings. If you like that sort of thing then this is probably a good book for you. But if you prefer something with slightly more of a pace, I think you can safely forego this book.

- Kalpar

Little Fuzzy, by H. Beam Piper

Today I'm looking at an old sci-fi book, Little Fuzzy, which as you might remember was the inspiration for a remake by John Scalzi called Fuzzy Nation which I reviewed some time ago. Of course there are some significant differences between the two books, if for no other reason than because Little Fuzzy was written in 1962 so everyone's still using tape and film to record things. (Old sci-fi gets weird like that.) Overall the plots are mostly the same, the Zarathustra Corporation is interested in extracting as many resources as possible from a planet it owns lock, stock, and barrel for insane profits. However the discovery of a previously unknown species of indigenous creatures by prospector Jack Holloway raises some uncomfortable questions. If the local fuzzies are in fact an intelligent species it means the planet cannot continue to be strip-mined and has to be placed under government control for the fuzzies' protection, something the Zarathustra Corporation is willing to go to great lengths to prevent.

I want to begin by saying that I actually enjoyed both books, even if they have their own approaches. The inevitable comparison for a reader is between this, the original source material, and the remake by Scalzi. Is there one that's superior? I honestly don't know if I can say one way or the other because they each have their own charm. Little Fuzzy is definitely dated in its way, but I'm sure in fifty or so years Fuzzy Nation will also be considered fairly dated. I think both books have their own strengths and weaknesses and it's a great example of how someone can take an original idea and reinterpret in a new way.

Little Fuzzy is more a novella and much shorter than Fuzzy Nation but it ends up creating a bigger universe than Fuzzy Nation. I say that because there are far more characters in Little Fuzzy than in Fuzzy Nation, even though it's the shorter work and so there's a lot less for different characters to do through the book which moves along pretty briskly opposed to Nation's gradual build. And I'm not sure which one I actually prefer. A smaller cast of characters makes the story more efficient and keeps the story moving without having to add a bunch of extra people. However, a much larger cast makes the story feel like it's taking place in an actual community instead of some neck of the woods with the same five people. I do kind of wish with the larger cast there was more time to develop them as characters and I can understand Scalzi's decision to merge characters his own reinterpretation.

Another thing that seemed very different to me was how accepting people were that the fuzzies were sentient in Little Fuzzy opposed to Fuzzy Nation. Jack Holloway kind of concludes they're sentient pretty early on in the book and most people think they are, including local law enforcement and most of the scientists. It's really only the Zarathustra corporate bigwigs who are trying to prove they're not sentient, and even then they seem not entirely convinced themselves because they want to keep their charter. In the case of Fuzzy Nation it seems like more people are hesitant to believe the fuzzies are sentient so it creates more conflict for the characters and fuzzies to overcome. So I feel like Little Fuzzy is a lighter and softer version of the story.

A concern that I do have is how Little Fuzzy is pro-colonial in its outlook. Most of the characters are benevolent towards the fuzzies and see them as little people who need protection and support from the humans. The fuzzies happily adopt metal tools given to them by humans, as well as accept food and in one case accept tobacco. I'm aware that I'm overthinking this extensively but it looks very much to me like a native population being made dependent on resources from a colonizing power. And at the end of the book, Zarathustra is actually opened further for colonization by humans rather than being made the exclusive realm of the fuzzies. People also start making plans to adopt fuzzies who feel almost more like pets than actual sentient beings and equals. It just feels very pro-colonialism and it may just be an effect of this being written in the sixties before a strong critique of colonialism had developed.

Concerns aside, I did enjoy this book. I think it and Fuzzy Nation are fairly equal at the end of the day and I recommend everybody go and read both. They each have things they do well, and are almost complimentary rather than one replacing the other.

- Kalpar

Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card

This week I'm taking a look at the sort-of sequel to Ender's Game which I reviewed quite some time ago when the movie came out. Speaker for the Dead is, in Card's own words, the book he actually meant to write and Ender's Game was meant sort of as a prologue. Card himself is aware of the irony that Ender's Game is by far the most widely read of his works and Speaker for the Dead is left playing second fiddle.

That being said, I think Speaker for the Dead is a great example of how science-fiction as a genre can be serious literature that talks about serious themes which seem to be relegated to''real'' literary fiction more often than not. This isn't to say that Ender's Game doesn't deal with serious topics as well, but I would say that Speaker for the Dead feels much more serious than its predecessor. An analogy I heard once was that Ender's Game is kind of like The Hobbit to the later three books which are more like The Lord of the Rings. They're all within the same universe and share characters, but there's a definite tonal shift between the two. I'm definitely sensing the tonal shift and I feel like Speaker for the Dead, and most likely its sequels Xenocide and Children of the Mind, are going to be more mature than Ender's Game.

Plot-wise the book is set some three thousand years after the events of Ender's Game and the Third Bugger War where humanity destroyed the buggers for good and humanity has scattered among a hundred colony worlds. Ender is remembered as the Xenocide, the worst monster in all of human history, while the most revered is possibly the first Speaker for the Dead who wrote The Hive Queen and the Hegemon which made humanity realize the barbarity of their extermination of the buggers and led them to repent the act. The irony that these were the same person is not lost on Ender Wiggin, who is only in his mid thirties thanks to the time-dilation of interstellar travel, wandering from world to world with his sister Valentine.

Events on the colony world Lusitania have drawn Ender's attention because humanity has made contact with another sentient species, referred to by humans as the piggies. Conscious of their collective sin of exterminating the buggers, humanity has tried to compensate in the other direction by making very limited contact with the piggies and keeping them safe from human contamination. However when one of the xenographers who has been studying the piggies turns up dead, apparently ritually murdered by the piggies, Ender fears humanity may let their more ruthless instincts get the better of them.

Further complicating this is the existence of Jane, a sentient AI created by the ansible network which links the disparate colonies with instantaneous communication. Jane is very aware that humanity has feared the emergence of an AI and has only revealed herself to Ender, the one individual who wouldn't immediately react with fear to her presence. Jane hopes that someday humanity might be ready for her to come out into the open, but she'll need Ender's help to get humanity to that point.

I have to say, despite the disparate plots going on at once, this book is really good. I was engaged throughout the book and although there are plenty of rough corners, I ended up enjoying it. As I said earlier, this is a great example of how science-fiction can talk about serious topics just as well as ''real'' literature. According to Card he just had the idea of someone telling the truth at a person's funeral, his idea for the Speaker for the Dead. He noticed that so often after someone passes on we tend to lie about the person, in the tradition of never speaking ill of the dead. So he thought it would be interesting, if perhaps painful, to tell the truth instead. From this idea has spawned a book that's about so much more than death and secrets and the lies that come with it. There's humanity, what it means to be human, compassion, empathy, and a whole host of other emotions which make this a really interesting book.

As I said, there are some rough edges around the book. One of the things I found really weird about the book was how dated it felt for a distant space future, especially since the book was written in the 1980's. The Brazilian colonists on Lusitania may strongly represent the Brazilians Card encountered during his missionary work there, but I've no way of knowing if they're indicative of Brazilians today or even thirty years ago. There's a major plot point that revolves around the fact one character can't marry another because then he'd have access to all the information she had because husband and wife are considered legally the same. Even for the eighties this feels outdated since it's well past Second Wave Feminism and much of the fights of First Wave Feminism in the early 1900's was to allow women to maintain a distinct legal identity from their husband. It just feels incredibly weird to me that this would be the case in the space future.

Overall I highly recommend this book, and I can say it is popular for a reason. If you've read Ender's Game but for whatever reason never got around to the sequels, I can say at least Speaker for the Dead is well worth the effort. If you haven't read Ender's Game, I would recommend starting there because it's a pretty short read and it will fill you in on a lot of details before you start Speaker for the Dead.

- Kalpar

Raiding the Stacks: A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Today I'm delving into another old book, in this case A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Originally published in serial form, like most novels at the time, and later collected in book format, A Princess of Mars is the first in the wildly popular series featuring the adventures of John Carter on the planet Mars, or as the inhabitants call it, Barsoom. In addition to the John Carter series, Burroughs was also creator of the Tarzan series and I can see where there might be some overlap between the two. Strong, muscular men who go around without shirts on, saving women and fighting bad guys. Although that's a whole sub-set of pulp adventure novels that used to be wildly popular if they weren't terribly nuanced.

The plot follows the adventures of the aforementioned John Carter who, while prospecting for gold in Arizona after the Civil War, stumbles into a cave to escape from Apaches. Carter finds himself unable to move and then collapses into sleep. Somehow he finds himself standing outside himself and is then transported to Mars, a dying planet where the inhabitants, the green and red races of Martians, are locked in endless battles over dwindling resources. Because Mars has much lower gravity than Earth, Carter finds himself able to kill Martians twice as big as him with his bare hands and able to jump thirty feet in the air. He quickly rises to prominence as a warrior among the Martians and meets and falls in love with Dejah Thoris, a Martian princess. Carter spends ten years living on Mars and then, just as mysteriously, ends up right back on Earth.

The book actually focuses more on Carter's early adventures, his arrival on Mars, integration into Martian society, and eventual rise to prominence. The story then abruptly glosses over nine years of his time on Mars before his return. Which is clever in a way because it left plenty of room for Burroughs to write sequels of Carter's adventures on Mars. The book does a pretty good job of introducing the reader to the world of Mars that Burroughs has created, leaving some room for expansion, if being basically a bunch of exposition lobbed at you.

I was actually able to pin this book down to the decade it was written because of the presence of radium in the book, which I thought was kind of neat. Specifically radium is the Applied Phlebotinum of choice for the book and is used for all sorts of things from weapons to airship engines. There was this really big fad in the 1910's to put radium in everything, including toothpaste, on the logic it was new and it glowed, therefore it must be good! Unfortunately a lot of people then died of cancer because of this rampant use of radium, but it does serve as a means to date the book.

So how does the story hold up compared to modern times? Not terribly well. There is a typical, subtle sort of racism in that John Carter, a powerful white man from Virginia, is a better warrior than anyone else on Mars and is the absolute best at everything. It definitely falls into Mighty Whitey territory. Also, as is typical of pulp adventures from this era there is a ridiculous amount of people who are naked all the time. Which is something I just don't understand. Clothes are useful! They have pockets which let you hold things! Like pocket watches! And there's a lot of fighting and killing and dying, as well as some old-fashioned sexism. It may have been progressive or scandalous when it came out, but it's pretty tame by today's standards.

Is it worth reading? If you like old-fashioned pulp adventures from the early twentieth century, then sure, go right ahead. As much as I like pulp, I have to say this isn't quite the sort of pulp I like. I've never really gone in for the heroic barbarian type so it makes sense for me to be less than enthused with the idea. But if you like you some techno-barbarians? Probably for you.

- Kalpar

Double Star, by Robert Heinlein

This week I'm taking a look at another Heinlein book, Double Star, which is one of his earlier books so it's fairly short and has less of the obnoxiousness people tend to notice in his later books. I say less of his obnoxiousness because there are still some problems but that comes more from a literary perspective rather than him shooting his mouth off on philosophy. I'm also wondering, as I'm finally looking back at Heinlein after years of having not picked up any of his books, if maybe I've grown out of them so to speak. I may want to go back and look at a couple of my favorites, but it may simply be a case of my tastes changing with time and what I thought was super interesting when I was in high school seems somewhat passe as I've grown older. It's hard to say.

The plot of Double Star is described very literally by TV Tropes as ''The Prisoner of Zenda in SPACE!'' Basically an important political figure has been kidnapped and there is an important event coming up where that individual absolutely must be in attendance. In Zenda it's a coronation, in Double Star it's an adoption into a Martian clan. Fortuitously another individual who looks remarkably like the kidnapped individual has been located and recruited to substitute for the kidnappee in the all-important political event. Shenanigans ensue. It's a pretty decent plot that's been used multiple times in literature and recycling it in space is a totally legitimate strategy so I don't really have any problem with that.

The biggest problem I've noticed about this book, and this goes throughout the book, is it suffers so much from telling instead of showing. Important things are told to us rather than being shown when they really, absolutely, should be shown. And I understand it. It makes for much easier writing. It's much easier to say the Martian adoption ceremony is super important and wonderful and full of symbolism rather than spending hours over your typewriter trying to come up with actual events to show how it's actually wonderful and full of symbolism. And there are some good showing passages in the novel, but it's almost entirely told from a telling perspective.

And I think that partly has to do with the nature of the book, which I have to keep in mind. This book was originally written as a serial in science-fiction pulp magazines and was later put into novel form. This was actually pretty standard for a lot of books written during the 40's and 50's and it influenced how sci-fi novels were written. You have a lot of decent-length chapters with interesting stuff going on to keep readers interested month after month in the story, but you don't want to let the story go on for too long before people start losing interest. And so I can understand how Heinlein and other authors, who are doing this for money and need to produce something within a certain time frame, may resort to telling instead of showing to make sure they meet deadlines. So I think I understand where it's coming from at least from a systemic standpoint.

However, at the same time I feel like it's still fair to judge literature, regardless of its form and origins, by certain yardsticks. Sure, literature is going to be one of those things that's highly subjective depending on people's personal tastes. A book might be the most exquisitely written thing in the world, but if it's got shirtless vampires brooding all over the place I'm probably still not going to like it. And if it has giant robot tanks? Well, I might tolerate certain stumblings as long as I get my robot tanks. But regardless, I think we can still look at things like characterization and showing versus telling to make judgements of books regardless of their content.

So where does Double Star fall? It's okay I guess. The plot's interesting and it comes with Heinlein's usual peccadillos that you can expect in a 1950's science fiction story. There's an author filibuster, but it's for interspecies tolerance which is something I think we can all get behind. The biggest weakness throughout this book though is its writing. Consistently there are things that should be shown but are rather told to us, something I'm beginning to realize in other space operas. It's okay, but I wouldn't go around calling it great literature. The ultimate irony is that this was Heinlein's first Hugo Award. So what the heck to I know?

- Kalpar

Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert

This week I'm taking a look at Children of Dune, the third in the Dune series and I think I can safely say that this is the book that's making me finally give up on the franchise. I swear, I can't count how many times I was about ready to fall asleep while listening to this book or was bored to tears. There are some exciting bits to this book when things actually happen and the universe is still deep and complex, but so much of the time is spent with people sitting around and talking. I just wanted to yell ''DO SOMETHING!!'' at the characters for well over ninety percent of the book that it's almost a surprise when they actually do. I've been warned by friends who have been down this path before that the books just get worse from here, so I think I've found my point to pull out.

Plot-wise Children of Dune actually has some great potential. Paul Muad'Dib Atreides at the end of the last book has disappeared into the desert, leaving his children Leto and Ghanima under the care of his sister Alia who is ruling as regent until Leto comes of age. And there are actually several main plots going on. First of all, the ecological transformation of Arrakis is proceeding at an accelerated pace to the point people can live without stillsuits and people actually drowned, a concept unheard of before. Normally this would be a good thing but apparently the great sand worms, the creatures that actually produce the melange spice necessary for all space travel and only found on Arrakis, are dying off because of the environmental changes. So, that's a pretty big deal, right?

Well on top of that you have corruption seeping through the empire as Alia becomes consumed with power and shows absolutely no signs of being willing to give up the regency and may be trying to supplant her nephew on the throne. And House Corrino, the former rulers of the empire, are involved in their own plot to assassinate Leto and Ghanima and take back command of the empire by force. There are a ton of things going on and yet all these potential plotlines are basically squandered in the book.

The reason for this is this book suffers so much from telling instead of showing it's not even funny. And this is a problem that Dune as a series has had. The first book it was kind of bad, but I felt like there were enough scenes that weren't people standing around talking or people having internal monologues that it managed to hold up pretty well. Especially with its rich backstory. Dune Messiah on the other hand, took a turn for far more introspection and navel-gazing which was frankly pretty darn annoying but I managed to soldier my way through it. With Children of Dune pretty much the entire plot is told to us rather than being shown. The characters spend large amounts of time talking about all the cool political machinations and ambitions going on, Alia's corruption, the changes to Arrakis, but we're never really shown them. Not to an extent I'd like, anyway. There are occasional scenes with action, but most of the time important things are discussed before and after they happen, but when they actually happen it's entirely off screen.

I can't say exactly how much of the book consists of people sitting in caves or other locations talking about things, including interminable statements on religion and politics, but it certainly feels like a good ninety percent of the book. A lot of the time it's two people, but sometimes to change it up it involves three people or just one person talking with themselves. Either way it's a bunch of people standing or sitting around and having conversations about far more interesting things going on. As I said earlier, it makes me want to shout ''DO SOMETHING!!'' and that's really not a good sign in a book.

And you know, I could almost forgive some of the craziness. Stuff like genetic memories, the weird anti-technology bent, and even Leto turning into a sand worm. (Yes. This is legitimate thing.) Like weird and crazy stuff I have seen and accepted before and I'm sure I will accept it again. But this book commits the greatest sin of all, being incredibly boring. With so many potential ideas it feels like a waste of time and effort and gives me no real reason to keep reading, or in this case listening to, the series at all. Honestly you're probably better off just reading the first book and keeping it at that.

- Kalpar

Dune Messiah, by Frank Herbert

This week I'm reviewing Dune Messiah which is the second in the incredibly expansive Dune series. At least the second in order of publication. Like many long-running series there are now prequels and sequels galore so it's kind of confusing. So in my own way I'm attacking it in the manner that I feel best. The thing that surprised me the most was this book was actually significantly shorter than Dune, coming in around the three hundred page mark, opposed to Dune's six hundred pages. The result is this story feels rather abbreviated, especially when it's taking place and expanding upon the fairly detailed world of the Dune series.

 Dune Messiah is set roughly twelve years after the end of Dune. Paul Atrides is on the throne as emperor of the galaxy and his Freman legions are conquering the galaxy under the banners of jihad. However already the top tiers of Freman society are becoming fat and complacent with the spoils of victory that conquest has brough them, and more worryingly the edges are beginning to fray around Paul's empire. Most importantly, though, there is a plot among the Spacer Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and Bene Tleilax to overthrow Paul and reestablish the old order. This book starts off promising with a lot of really good plot threads that could be interesting stories, but I felt like they were ultimately squandered within the book and not capitalized properly.

The biggest thing that I noticed, and it may just be because I was listening to it rather than listening, is this book spends a lot of time navel-gazing. Well, that's me putting it charitably. I could call it something else but we'll leave it at that for the post. There's a lot of pseudo-philosophy on religion and politics and prophecy and the interplay between those forces and how they affect everything, but the result is we don't really get to see how it's affecting the empire. We're told it's happening, but wTe don't really see it. That was kind of a problem with Dune as well, despite its verbosity, it spends a lot of time telling us about things rather than showing them to us. I'll admit it can be a challenge when you're doing world-building, but we spend a lot of time watching people sit around in meetings talking about or reminiscing about things that have happened rather than watching them actually do those things they're talking about. It just adds onto the feeling we're spending time contemplating our navels rather than determining the fate of a galaxy-spanning empire.

There also isn't a lot of dramatic tension in the book either, despite there being a plot to topple or otherwise eliminate Paul from a position of power. It's made explicit from the start of the book that Paul is capable of seeing the future, which makes acting against him directly difficult. The plotters therefore utilize other oracles, such as Guild Navigators, to provide a shield against Paul's visions. Basically Paul can't see other oracles in his own visions, or actions involving oracles. Except even with this blind spot Paul sees through their plots very easily and makes rapid moves to neutralize the threats while trying to figure out the best path to create the optimal future. There's just no real tension because we know Paul's going to get his way in the end, even if he himself dies. The use of historians analyzing the story as a framing device just really cuts down on the dramatic tension and makes it less interesting as a story.

Ultimately, the world of Dune is very rich and complex and interesting, and you could easily craft very interesting stories about the different powers within the universe and how they're interacting in their quest for dominance. To an extent Dune Messiah tries to do that, but I can't say it does it terribly well. Instead of being shown things happening, we're told things are happening instead. Instead of political intrigue and massive battles on distant worlds, we're told about these things second hand. The philosophizing doesn't really help and just adds to the fact that we're sort of sitting around passively with the characters while tons of action is occurring elsewhere. I'm hoping the series gets better, but I'll just have to see.

- Kalpar

3001: The Final Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke

This week we finish up the month with a review of the final book in the Space Odyssey quartet, 3001: The Final Odyssey. And I have to admit, there are some significant changes in the series from the very first book, written in the 1960's, and the very last book written thirty years later. Not only are there differences in technology, scientific knowledge, and cultural references, but the tone and style are changed significantly to the point they almost sound like they weren't written by the same author. And I'm definitely going to say 3001 almost doesn't fit into the series at all, if only because the monolith, so iconic and central to earlier plots, is reduced to the point of being an afterthought. It doesn't make this book bad, just very different from its siblings.

Our story begins as you probably guessed in the distant year of 3001, as humanity is cleaning up celebrations from the end of the third millennium and entering the fourth. A comet-mining expedition out beyond Neptune is informed there's a strange radar signature and they've been asked to go investigate. This mysterious object turns out to be Frank Poole, one of the two crewmen from the original Discovery expedition a thousand years ago. With a little medical treatment and a quick de-thaw Frank finds himself alive, but further from home than he could ever imagine. And certainly, considering the dates involved I was definitely reminded of Futurama, but it seems Clarke came up with the idea first so this may have been one of the inspirations for the tv show. Although the idea of people somehow surviving through a period of time to wake up in a world they don't recognize is a fairly old one with Rip van Winkle and Looking Backwards serving as just two examples.

I said that 3001 is different from its siblings, and I feel it's because in this story you get the biggest dose of ''Hey, it's the future! Check out all these crazy things people are doing, because it's the future! We've got velociraptor gardeners now!'' I mean, if I'm being completely honest there were elements of that as early as the very first book with its extensive descriptions of what ''routine'' space travel from Earth to the Moon might be like, but there's also the plot with the monoliths. In a strange way, I feel like as you go through the series the monoliths end up playing a smaller and smaller role and the fascination with what the space future could be like becomes a much bigger part.

I think I'm only noticing this because it was pointed out to me once what a big deal science-fiction as a genre sometimes makes of fairly mundane activities that wouldn't even be mentioned in other forms of literature. Things such as how people travel, how people eat, what they wear, how their cities are organized, it all becomes part of a writer's picture for what the future might look like according to their own interpretation and imagination. And there are plenty of books like that, some of which are entertaining because of how wrong they ended up being, but it's one of those things where once you notice it you can't stop noticing it. And to an extent I felt that with this novel, the majority of it was showing off Clarke's ideas for where technology and society could go in a thousand years and Frank Poole being amazed by all of it.

One of the main things that ostensibly ties this entire series together is the presence of the monoliths, the mysterious black slabs which act as a catalyst for the evolution of intelligent life, among other manifold and mysterious tasks at the bidding of their masters. But as I said before, in 3001 the monolith almost feels like an afterthought rather than a major part of the story. I'm not really worried about the story being left open-ended, with humanity's fate left uncertain to the future because that's been done elsewhere in other works and it's seen as a generally acceptable way to end a series. What does frustrate me is the fact that something which drove the plot in the very first novel, something which was an absolute mystery and chillingly answered the question are we alone in the universe, becomes little more than a footnote by the end of the series. It's an interesting idea and I personally wish Clarke had developed it more.

Overall I think I'd say this book was okay. It's neat to see some of Clarke's ideas for the future, such as space elevators, the giant orbital ring of shipyards around the earth, genetically modified animals as servants, and direct brain-to-computer interfaces, but I also get the feeling that by the 90's some of those ideas were hardly groundbreaking either and by 2016 they're practically old hat. I think this series as a whole is okay, but it definitely and unsurprisingly goes through quite a few shifts over the years as Clarke came back to it and expanded upon it.

- Kalpar

2061: Odyssey Three, by Arthur C. Clarke

We continue this week with the third of the Space Odyssey series, 2061: Odyssey Three. The selection of this year by Clarke is chosen to line up with the next return of Halley's Comet to the inner solar system, an event I hope I may be able to witness myself when I'm some seventy-odd years old. Of course, in this rapidly changing timeline from our own, humanity is in a position to launch a manned expedition to visit the surface of the comet. While we have managed to land robotic probes on a comet fairly recently, for right now the possibility of a manned mission remains unlikely. Although I may have the good fortune to be proven wrong in forty years.

I'm not sure if I have as much to say about this book opposed to the other two books. The monoliths and their mysterious creators, with their plan to foster intelligent life through the galaxy, are barely mentioned at all in this book. It's more a case of things happening in the same universe, but at an almost mundane level instead of the fantastic. There is, of course, the issue of Lucifer which I held off talking about because it was a massive spoiler in the last book, but I can't really talk about this book intelligently without mentioning it. So, of course:

 Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers! Skip the following paragraph to avoid!

At the end of 2010 the monolith or perhaps monoliths, it's a little vague because they may have the ability to warp time itself, altered the mass of Jupiter and forced it to implode, creating a small star and turning our solar system into a binary system. The new star is named Lucifer and its moons, especially Europa and perennial favorite Ganymede, become hospitable to life because of their new proximity to a star. Humanity is also given a brief message, stating they are welcome to populate as many worlds as they wish, except for Europa. Ostensibly this is part of the monoliths', or their creators', plans to foster intelligent life in the galaxy, with Europa being identified as another potential cradle of intelligent life. Humans are of course intrigued by this forbidden fruit, but for now all attempts to interact with the planet's surface have been mysteriously intercepted.

The book has two plots which run sort of simultaneously, although the second one ends up taking over the plot and forces the first one to wrap up pretty quickly. The first is the aforementioned manned mission to Halley's Comet, an event of incredible historic, scientific, and cultural interest. Included among these delegates is Heywood Floyd, now just over one hundred years old, one of the handful of men who first examined the monolith on the moon, and now practically the only survivor of the mission to recover Discovery from Jupiter. More importantly, it shows how far humanity has come in the development of space travel, now being able to take a pleasure cruise to a comet.

The second plot involves Dr. van der Berg, a geologist working on the newly founded colony on Ganymede. Van der Berg has been very interested in the mysterious cloud-shrouded Europa and a chance satellite image begins van der Berg on an investigation that reveals Europa may have far more interesting secrets to reveal. And while I won't reveal them here, let's just say I think it's hardly a coincidence that it's a Boer, Afrikaner geologist that happens to discover it. Ultimately this plot ends up taking over the second one and in its own way helps set up the final book in the series.

I'm sort of left with the feeling that Clarke had two ideas for books but couldn't quite flesh them out long enough so he melded them together to create one longer story. Once the excitement of landing on Halley's Comet is over, you kind of come to the realization, ''Oh yeah, it's basically a giant, dirty snowball.'' Which, you know, neat, and I'm sure there's tons of things to learn from it, but after the initial discovery it kind of wears off. I definitely feel that the second story, with the discovery of a massive secret on Europa and the intrigue that's involved could have used further development. We're introduced to shadowy organizations like Der Bund and Shaka, although in the case of Shaka I'm not really sure on whose side they're supposed to be on. But that definitely could have been expanded into its own book with a little bit more corporate intrigue, IN SPACE!! But instead it gets welded to the comet story. Neither of them are bad, it just feels a little awkward.

Overall it's not a bad book. I kind of like the two adventures in space and Clarke's ability to take the utterly fantastical and make it seem commonplace really comes to the fore here. There's almost none of the incredibly dramatic, flowery prose that came with the other books, which I personally don't care for and certainly didn't miss at all. By far this is probably the one that can stand on its own the most and reads as a pretty simple sci-fi adventure. Next week we conclude with 3001: The Final Odyssey.

- Kalpar

2010: Odyssey Two, by Arthur C. Clarke

We continue Space Odyssey month with the second installment of Arthur C. Clarke's series, 2010: Second Odyssey. I will say that these books are going to be a little bit different from the first one because they're written about fifteen to twenty years later than the first. As Clarke himself says, we hadn't even landed on the moon yet when 2001: A Space Odyssey went to print. By the time he began writing sequels in the eighties we had expanded much further into space with probes, but had also fallen back, making manned missions only into orbit. (Which, as of 2016, is the limit of our abilities. Although NASA has high hopes of sending someone to Mars in the future.)

From this point forward, Clarke makes use of the elements of the movie plot rather than the original novel. The chief difference between these is that the mysterious monolith sends a message to Jupiter rather than Saturn, but this is a fairly trivial change in the grand scheme of things. How Dave Bowman reacts to HAL's rebellion is a little different, but the end result is the same. The biggest thing I noticed most about 2010: Odyssey Two is that there are references to real-life events which had helped expand our knowledge of space, as well as shape science-fiction as a genre, which occurred after the 1960's. Specifically Clarke mentions the Galileo and Voyager missions which gave us far more information about Jupiter and revealed that the moons of Io, Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa were far more interesting than we could have imagined. Clarke also slips in a couple references to Alien and Star Wars, which definitely updates the book and as those movies are still science-fiction classics it certainly doesn't date the book. (References to the Soviet Union aside.)

Plot-wise the book picks up a few years after the ill-fated Discovery expedition to Jupiter, in which all the crew except Dave Bowman perish and Dave, after a cryptic final message, appears to vanish. The United States is eager to recover their lost ship, especially before the Soviets or Chinese can claim it as salvage, but the construction of Discovery II is still underway and it looks like the Americans won't be the first to reach Jupiter. More pressingly, Discovery's previously stable orbit is decaying and it is in very real danger of crashing into Io in the next few years, taking all its information with it. Somewhat reluctantly the Soviets and Americans join forces with the agreement to share all information and find out just what the heck happened out at Jupiter with the mysterious monolith.

The thing that I really liked about all of this is the book took on a far less flowery and dramatic tone than the previous novel. In 2001 Clarke tended to lapse into purple prose and speak about the great destinies involved and the unknown but inevitable fates that humanity was moving towards, almost to the point of being melodramatic. Which is fine, but I had a bit of a hard time taking him seriously sometimes. 2010, by contrast, takes a far more pedestrian tone, which is really cool. Characters have discussions about launching a mission to Jupiter like it's something that happens all the time. And if it happened in our lives it would almost certainly be a huge deal, but I find it absolutely amazing that people could talk about this like it was no big thing. That almost makes it more convincing science-fiction for me than all the alien intelligences and mysterious monoliths. At certain points Clarke sort of lapses into his flowery prose once again, but for the most part I just sort of enjoy how mundane it all is.

In this book, much like the previous one, conflict with HAL is fairly minor and Clarke decides to put much more focus on the monoliths and the forces behind them. There is some concern that HAL may rebel once again and human lives will be put in danger, but it's handled very easily. I mean, Clarke may be making a point that most conflict can be avoided if you handle it properly and it doesn't have to be resolved with force, but it's such a minor part of the overall story. It almost feels like it was shoe-horned in because Clarke had to tie up some loose ends so he could get back to talking about monoliths.

And, on some level, I don't find the monoliths terribly interesting. Once the main mystery of what is their purpose is explained, they become kind of boring. It's all part of some vague plan by ancient aliens to promote intelligent life throughout the galaxy because they were lonely. If we got to speak with these ancient aliens and get to understand them a little bit better they'd probably be a bit more interesting, but they're basically described as ineffable beyond that little bit I've already talked about and having vague and mysterious purposes. It's just hard to get interested in characters that aren't described terribly well.

Finally I personally felt like this book was sort of a middle in the series. There's a book that comes before it, and a book Clarke wants to write that comes afterwards, so he has to write something to connect the two. It's okay, but it's serving as a bridge at best. I'll see if my assessment is correct when I read the next book, but by the end I was left with a bit of a mediocre feeling about this one. Next week we jump forward to 2061: Odyssey Three.

- Kalpar

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke

Amazon, in their never-ending plot to get me to buy more books, some time ago offered a large number of Arthur C. Clarke e-books for the reasonable price of two dollars. Being a man willing to part with large amounts of money two dollars at a time, I ended up with a small collection of various Arthur C. Clarke books to read, him being the one of the three Greats of science-fiction whose work I've definitely read the least of. (I definitely spent far too many of my teenage years reading my mother's collection of Heinlein and Asimov which gave me some interesting insights to life.) So this month I'm reviewing the entirety of the Space Odyssey series which I've been told is a little easier to understand than the very famous film.

Warning to my Readers: As both the book and film 2001: A Space Odyssey have now been out for nearly fifty years, I no longer consider it necessary to avoid ''spoiling'' the story. Especially the more esoteric bits that aren't really explained in the movie. If you have not seen the movie by now, then go borrow it from the library or something, it's not my fault you can't be bothered to watch an old school science-fiction movie every now and then. 

This edition of the book begins with some rather lengthy introductory material from Clarke himself which goes into some of the details about the making of both the book and movie. According to Clarke,  he met with Stanley Kubrick in New York City and they began discussing ideas for a science-fiction movie. Building on a concept from a pre-existing short story of his, The Sentinel (Contained in Expedition to Earth), the duo began developing story ideas for a feature-length movie. 2001 is an odd case where instead of the book being written first and then later adapted to film, or the less common case of a film being created and then later novelized, both the film and book were created in tandem and released at roughly the same time, with Kubrick managing to finish the movie first. There are some slight differences, but they tell roughly the same story. Inevitably, having now gone through both I'm going to be doing a bit of comparison and contrast.

The main difference, though, is the amount of explanation that goes into the novel. The film of 2001: A Space Odyssey is famous for having incredibly little dialog and Kubrick relies heavily on visuals to tell the story. From the monkeys in the beginning of the movie and their encounter with the mysterious black Monolith, he transitions to the scenery porn of space travel in the then still-distant year 2001 and the discovery of a second monolith buried on the moon. There is the tense sequence of events on the ship Discovery as Dave Bowman fights against the incomprehensible mechanical malice of HAL 9000, and then the final bit which...just gets weird. Really, really weird. But the important thing is Kubrick used visuals to tell the story.

Quite simply, unless you're writing a graphic novel, which Clarke was not, you cannot communicate with visuals in a novel. You have to use words. And so while in the film Kubrick leaves a great many things unexplained and up to the viewer's own interpretation, in the novel Clarke goes in the opposite direction and explains perhaps a little bit too much. Intelligent viewers of 2001: A Space Odyssey probably concluded that the Monolith acted as a sort of catalyst for the evolution of our simian ancestors into human beings. Where it comes from, why it's there, what its purpose is, that's all left up to the imagination of the viewer in the film, but in the book Clarke goes into extreme detail.

The monoliths, all of them scattered through our solar system, are the result of a race of aliens experimenting with life and trying to push life towards intelligent forms and report on the success of such an experiment. At times Clarke's descriptions and explanations can be a little bit overwhelming and I find myself thinking less is actually more in this case. His descriptions certainly explain the end part of the movie which is famously the most incomprehensible part, but on the other hand it takes away part of the mystique and tries to make up for the visuals with purple prose which I felt didn't carry as well in text form.

One thing that I did notice was the conflict between the crew of Discovery and HAL 9000 is a much smaller part of the book compared to the movie. In the book it's sort of sandwiched between other parts of the story and happens fairly quickly. It's also heavily foreshadowed in the book and, having seen the movie before, it takes quite a lot of tension out of the situation. In the film, the conflict between the crew and HAL is central to the plot and forms an incredibly tense, nerve-wracking, and memorable story. Who doesn't get a chill at the phrase, ''I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.''? And once again, we get far less an explanation why HAL decides to murder the crew in Kubrick's rendition. Which leaves it to the audience's own twisted imagination or in the realm of perhaps the utterly incomprehensible. In the novel, however, it's sort of blandly explained that having been instructed to tell the crew the truth, but to lie to them as well, it creates stress in HAL's psyche that pushes him to murder the crew to remove the apparent conflict. Which, although concerning in its own right, isn't nearly as terrifying as a computer going wrong and not knowing why.

(I will also make the comment that Clarke's explanation of HAL's name totally not being a one letter substitution for IBM leads me to claim he doth protest too much. The fact that HAL supposedly stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer sounds far too much like a backronym to me. And there are certain other elements of evidence which lend credence to the IBM theory.)

If you find yourself a little bit confused and perhaps irritated by the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey then the novel will definitely help clear things up, although you may get a little tired by the amount of detail that Clarke goes into explaining things. And the book has definitely given me new appreciation for the film. I'd say the book is an important supplement, but I'm left with the feeling the film is possibly the stronger of the two. Next week we'll see how the series continues with 2010: Odyssey Two.

- Kalpar

Dune, by Frank Herbert

This week I'm taking a second look at what's widely considered to be a landmark book in the genre of science-fiction, Frank Herbert's Dune, a gigantic space opera that if nothing else is responsible for giving us the idea of spice as a tradeable commodity in the space future which has turned up in other sci-fi works. This is actually the first of an almost insane number of books and I'm planning on downloading more audiobooks in this series from the library when I get the chance, just to see what all the fuss is about.

As I said, this is actually a second look at the series for me because I originally read read Dune back in high school and I remember not really liking it terribly much. Taking a second look at it I'd say that the book has grown on me somewhat and I've got a better understanding of it, but I can still see where it has some serious problems. Dune has been occasionally described as the Lord of the Rings of space opera, and I can see the parallels between the two works. Both have insanely detailed universes with thousands of years of backstory and lore that are hinted at indirectly through the narrative but you never really learn specifically what those things are. For example, there's the Butlerian Jihad against thinking machines, which is mentioned in passing as ancient history in the remote past, but we never learn more than the barest details. (At least in this book, anyway.) There's also an extensive vocabulary, some of them words Herbert created, some of them not, which are included in a not always helpful glossary in print editions of the book. The result is Herbert creates a world, much like Middle Earth, that feels like it has considerable depth. You may not entirely understand what's going on and spend an inordinate time in appendices and apocrypha trying to sort through and understand details, but it's a world with as much depth and complexity as our own. If nothing else, Dune is a masterpiece in the exercise of world-building. Or more properly galaxy-building.

For those of you unfamiliar with the plot of Dune, the story focuses around Paul Atreides, heir to the Duchy of Atreides who's also the Chosen One. The actual term is kwizats haderach but it's just easier to say Chosen One. So the story focuses, at least partly on Paul becoming said Chosen One, which is okay but I think it's honestly the weaker of the plot lines. The other one is an economic and political drama focusing around the planet Arrakis where House Atreides is sent. Arrakis is a desert world and the only source of melange spice which extends human life and is extremely addictive, making it the most valuable resource in the universe. House Atreides stands to make a great amount of money from being the governors of Arrakis, however it is a trap by their old enemies, the Harkonnens, who plan to shatter their power and eliminate the Atreides. What ensues is a battle between Harkonnen and Atreides for control of Arrakis and, ultimately, the spice.

One of the biggest complaints I have about the book, and has been mentioned by other people who have read it, is that the book really doesn't allow suspense to exist in the book. For example: within the first three chapters of the book we know that House Atreides is going to Arrakis; we know that it's secretly a trap House Harkonnen has made with the help of the Emperor to crush House Atreides; we know that House Atreides knows that it's a trap by House Harkonnen and the Emperor to crush their power and are planning accordingly; we know that House Harkonnen knows that House Atreides knows that it's a trap and so has a secret traitor planted which who we're immediately told who it is and why they're betraying House Atreides. Seriously, that's all in the first three chapters, and it only gets worse as the book goes on and Paul starts being able to see the future. And of course every chapter starts with a quotation from a work about Paul's life afterwards so you know he's going to make it out okay, more or less. So it definitely removes any sense of suspense in the book and I can see where it would get difficult to read.

Another issue, leaving aside the insane amount of world-building and vocabulary-dumping, is that we're often given different characters' internal monologues, sometimes multiple characters during the same chapter. It's perfectly fine to tell stories from the perspectives of multiple characters and it's been done before and since, but in this case the shifts can be downright jarring and confusing at times because they happen with little warning. So much like Lord of the Rings, its writing is not necessarily the book's strongest suit and if it weren't for the amount of work Herbert had put into the book's universe it probably would have been mediocre at best.

As for the audio book in specific, the biggest problem I had was the narration. For whatever reason the people who created the version I listened to decided to get multiple voice actors to provide voices for characters in the novel. However, the voice actors are used fairly infrequently so the regular narrator has to take over for at least half the book, possibly more, and provide a variety of voices for the characters. I can even cite an example where in the space of one chapter they went from using just the narrator to using the voice actors to using the narrator again to using the voice actors again. And it had a weird side effect for me by providing two separate interpretations for one character. Specifically the voice actor they got for Baron Harkonnen had a very deep, manipulative, evil genius voice that makes you feel like he's a force to be reckoned with. However, the voice the narrator used makes Harkonnen come across as a bumbling old fool with delusions of power rather than the mastermind. It's...confusing to say the least and I really wonder why the creators of this audiobook decided to shell out for voice actors if they were only going to use them for only part of the book.

Overall, Dune is okay and while I can understand the fascination and adoration it receives, I wouldn't say it's fantastic. Herbert put an insane amount of work into building the universe of his story and making it feel like a real, breathing, living world. However the writing can be weak or confusing, the plotlines aren't as richly developed as they could be, and Herbert basically tells us what's going to happen before it happens so there's no real suspense to the story. If you like space operas there's probably stuff in here you'll enjoy, but I can see how it would have a limited appeal.

- Kalpar

Stranger in A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

I want to preface this review by going a little bit into my experience with Heinlein who I don't think I've really talked about on this blog terribly much. Way back in the 1960's and 1970's Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, became the famous ''Big Three'' of science-fiction literature. Which isn't to say they were the only authors writing at this time. Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, and Ray Bradbury were all writing stuff at the same time, the Big Three just happened to be the most famous. My mom, happening to be a sci-fi fan during this era, accumulated a small library of cheap science-fiction paperbacks including what's been described as an ''unhealthy'' amount of Heinlein books. Being a budding science-fiction fan myself, she handed me a copy of Tunnel in the Sky when I was in eighth grade and I spent a good part of my high school years reading a variety of Heinlein's works.

Anyone who's read several of Heinlein's books can tell you Heinlein gets....odd. His early works tend to be thrilling space adventures when a young man (and it's almost always a man) uses grit, ingenuity, and some extensive mathematics and engineering skills to conquer space problems for fun and profit. His later works get...weird. Creepy, lecherous old man weird. Let me put it like this: Asimov was kind of like your awesome grandpa who let you help him build robots in his garage and Clarke was like your cool uncle who let you help him build rockets and took you scuba diving. (Clarke really liked scuba diving.) Heinlein was your creepy uncle who lived on a farm somewhere out in the backwoods to get away from the ''gubment'', lived with a bunch of ''special lady friends'', obsessively carried an AR-15, and walked around stark naked when the weather would allow it. Individually these would be eccentricities, but together they make up a whole big barrel of crazy and it really started showing in his later books. The odd thing is I'm not sure Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1960, was after he went into his crazy old man phase but it's definitely got a lot of the hallmarks.

I will admit that I hadn't read (or in this case listened) to it, but I was always a little curious about Stranger in a Strange Land. Whenever I'd look at another of my mom's books they always seemed to have the phrase: ''by Robert Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land'', as if that was the only book of his worth noting. Starship Troopers occasionally got mention, but Stranger took unusual precedence. So, much like my decision to take a class on Nietzsche, I decided to look into it to see just what all the fuss was about. Unlike Nietzsche I have come to greatly regret my decision.

Our plot begins with a human child, Valentine Michael Smith, being born during the first manned expedition to Mars and very quickly becoming an orphan. Much to the surprise of the second expedition that comes some twenty years later, V.M. Smith has been taken in by the native Martians and raised as one of their own. So although Smith is biologically a human, he thinks like a Martian in a manner utter alien to all human understanding and devoid of the thousands of bits of emotional cues, social proprieties, and other bits of information that human beings accumulate through their lives and don't realize they know. Which makes human beings, and Earth itself, confusing and downright baffling for Smith. On top of this he happens to be heir to a fortune beyond comprehension, doubly so for Smith since Martians don't have stocks, corporations, or even money, and by a technical bit of human law the de jure sovereign of Mars. On its own these would be interesting plots that could be used for an entire book exploring all of the complexities of just one of these problems. Unfortunately two of the three are resolved by the halfway point of the book and Smith spends the rest of the book being Space Jesus. I wish I was kidding about that but no, he becomes Space Jesus. I don't even feel bad about spoiling the book in this review because while it may have been groundbreaking and scandalous in 1960, it's little more than bigoted pseudo-philosophical trash half a century later.

This book is filled, and I mean absolutely filled, with tedious and long-winded arguments about differing philosophies and in this case religion as well, some of which I've heard before in other places. Of course, Heinlein is almost famous for his author tracts which range from the vaguely fascist culture of violence and force espoused in Starship Troopers to the communist eugenic utopia depicted in Beyond this Horizon. But in Stranger in a Strange Land, especially the second half of the book, it feels like the book's just absolutely filled with author tracts. It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't just littered all over the book and filled with the same pop-philosophy garbage that makes sweeping generalizations about cultures and civilizations that can either be refuted with a bit of research or are so vague and general that they're difficult to refute because of their incompleteness. Heinlein even goes so far as to try and defend cannibalism, claiming every culture has practiced it at some point and claiming transubstantiation of bread and wine is the exact same thing as roasting someone and eating them. It's so broad an argument that it'd take forever to refute it in detail and utterly ridiculous in its conclusion.

The religion ones especially just go over the same tired points that have been iterated a thousand times elsewhere, and much better than they were here. There's the pointing out that with the plethora of religions in the world, many claiming to be the One True Religion, it certainly raises the possibility that none of them are right. Or maybe all of them. But it's done in such a high-handed and imperious manner that I found myself, a more or less atheist, wishing they'd just shut up about it already. And of course there's the pointing out that while the Bible contains some teachings of peace, it contains some fairly awful teachings as well. In this case the story of Lot, and his decision to offer his daughters up for a gang-rape instead of offering up his mysterious guests, is given as an example.

But the decision to criticize Lot for offering his daughters up for a gang-rape comes across as absolutely hypocritical considering the sheer amount of sexism that seems to pervade this book. Part of it is definitely a product of its times. The rampant casual sexism of the 1960's was one of many things that touched off Second Wave Feminism, after all, and rightly so. But I feel like this goes a step beyond  that. Heinlein goes to considerable lengths to argue that a woman's natural state is to be an object to be viewed with lust by men, and women should feel honored by the attention and enjoy such attention. This is utterly offensive to both sexes in a number of ways and I'll try to enumerate here but I'm sure this argument will be incomplete. First of all, people are not objects. This should go without saying but unfortunately even today there are people who appear to be somewhat confused on the subject. Every woman is a living, breathing, human being with her own wants, desires, fears, ambitions, and the thousand million things that make her a fully developed human being. To this day we are still fighting against this...assumption that women exist on this earth merely to be eye candy for men. This assumes that a woman's worth is entirely wrapped up in her physical appearance and everything that makes her more than just her tits and ass is utterly irrelevant.

If this was true for both sexes, and men exist only to be attractive eye-candy for women to lust at it wouldn't be slightly better. Equally demeaning and equally awful, but better by a tiny fraction. But oh no, instead Heinlein argues that women don't care about a man's physical appearance. (Something which I know is patently false from first-hand experience.) Women care about a man's inner being, his soul if you want to call it that. So go ahead, don't put any effort into your appearance. Be a giant blob for all we care. It's your soul that women really care about. The ridiculous double standard isn't even the worst part, it's just this assumption women have no value beyond being sex objects. I will admit that there are people who are exhibitionists and do get some measure of pleasure from being objects of desire, especially strangers, but I feel that's on a different level. First, it's their choice to put themselves on display in situations of their choosing, rather than constantly being on display all the time. Or all the time if they choose to be. The point is, they make a conscious decision. This leads to my second point that exhibitionists, at least I hope most of them, understand that this is not the normal state of affairs. To put it in BDSM terms, you don't force your kink on other people, you only share it with their consent. What Heinlein argues in this book is a woman's value is directly proportional to her sex appeal.

The absolute cherry on top of this ice cream sundae of rampant sexism was the statement, and I'm more or less quoting here: ''Nine times out of ten when a girl gets raped she's asking for it.'' Casually stated by a female character as if it were a matter of fact. At that point I seriously considered throwing my Kindle across the room, consequences of broken electronics be damned, because if there is one thing I cannot abide it is victim blaming. (Well, okay, Nazis certainly top my list of things I cannot abide, but victim blaming takes a very close second.) If I had a physical copy of this book I probably would have thrown it against the wall repeatedly and then began tearing it apart. As a bibliophile I do not like to see books defaced or damaged, but in one line this book earned all the wrath I could possibly bring to bear on it. Amazingly I had the presence of mind to keep pushing through and managed to finish it with much exasperation and eye rolling, but no further incident.

Beyond the sexism the book indulges in a variety of other forms of casual bigotry which, again, half a century ago may have been acceptable but are absolutely abhorrent by today's standards. The example of a Muslim character, Dr. Mahmoud, being nicknamed ''Stinky'' and eventually called that by everyone, including his wife strikes me as casual racism. I can't see why he'd be nicknamed that except out of some assumption that Arabs can't be bothered to bathe on a regular basis and I can't see someone, especially a highly educated linguist able to learn Martian, tolerating being called such a demeaning nickname. (Perhaps I am overreacting, but it certainly bothered me.) Furthermore there's a casual homophobic remark which establishes a firm heteronormativity within the book, dismissing homosexuals of both genders as poor deluded souls or aberrations that cannot truly understand happiness. Again, this was perfectly acceptable by the standards of fifty years ago, maybe even encouraged, but it's absolutely unacceptable by today's standards and, hopefully, the future's as well.

Finally, on at least a stylistic note, I cannot count how many times I noticed a character being a response with ''Eh?'' or ''Huh?''' or ''Hm?'' before answering the question they've just been asked. It got absolutely infuriating after a while, as if every character in the book was going deaf and needed things to be repeated. Yes, it probably makes for more realistic dialog and I know that I've done that myself in the past, but the sheer number of times it was repeated began to grate on my nerves after a while.

I do not know if Stranger in a Strange Land enjoys the prominent place it used to in the pantheon of science-fiction literature. At least among my group of friends Starship Troopers, even with its fascist leanings, is the more famous of Heinlein's books. If Stranger is still held in some vague sense of esteem, I will say that it definitely should not be in any respect. It's pop-philosophy attempts at pseudo-intellectualism fall far short of rigorous study and make typical sweeping generalizations Furthermore they feel like a never-ending parade of intellectual masturbation where we make absolutely no progress whatsoever and discover nothing that hasn't been talked about more competently somewhere else. In addition, the rampant and casual sexism, a step beyond what you might typically find in a Heinlein book, is so extreme as to be positively abhorrent and push the book into utterly intolerable ranges. To quote an old bibliophile saying, ''This is not a book to be set aside lightly; it is to be thrown with great force.''

- Kalpar