2008 Hugo and Locus, 2007 Nebula – THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is a talented writer, and perhaps the literary establishment's greatest defender of genre fiction.  As a result of a few brilliant essays on the subject, serious-minded sf fans, like myself, have a lot of goodwill for the guy.  His Kavalier and Clay reimagined the creation of Superman by Jewish immigrants in the 1930s with a little bit of magical realism added in for good measure, and won him the Pullitzer Prize.  Thus, when Chabon returned with a novel with some mild speculative fiction elements (an alternate history), the sf awards took notice in a big way. It was a regular occurrence in the ‘70s, but this is the first award since the early ‘90s to get the Hugo, Nebula, and the Locus.

In the world of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the Roosevelt administration followed through with a plan (just briefly considered in our world) to resettle Jewish refugees from the Nazis in an Alaskan colony.  Israel, no longer the sole refuge, was destroyed in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which of course created more refugees.  The Jewish-Alaskan colony of Sitka is semi-automous, but is on the verge of reverting back to U.S. control as a conservative President plans to reassert authority (and possibly expel the Jews).  Like Dick in The Man in the High Castle, Chabon never clearly explains his alternate world.  The reader has to gather clues throughout the book (there are other tantalizing hints: JFK married to Marilyn Monroe?).

The background may be a speculative fiction alternate history, but the plot is pure noir.  Alchoholic homicide detective Meyer Landsman stumbles across the murder of one of his neighbors, an odd chess-obsessed drug addict.  Landsman and his half-Jewish, half-Tlingit partner Berko Shemets investigate, against the best wishes of the new police chief, who also happens to be Landsman's ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish.  The department has higher priorities than a drug addict's murder, as she is trying to close out all open cases in the few months before Reversion to the United States.  The investigation soon brings them into conflict with a Hassidic mafia, and eventually leads to a larger conspiracy that links the dead man with Landsman's recently deceased sister, Jerusalem, and the United States government.

Chabon is a fantastic writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed the novel.  My one complaint is that the plot is a bit byzantine and sometimes feels a little contrived.  There were moments when it felt more like James Bond than Sam Spade, what with the giant conspiracy and secret military training facilities.  The novel is at its best in the quieter moments between Landsman, Shemets and their families, or when its revealing little everyday facets of Chabon's intriguing alternate history.  The action set-pieces and the big mystery reveals felt more like distractions than thrilling plot-movers.  Also, I think the more you know about Jewish culture, the more fun you'll have with the novel.  I probably know a little bit more than the average goy, but I felt like I was still missing some subtle "easter eggs."

Grade: A-

2003 BSFA and Clarke – THE SEPARATION by Christopher Priest

Speaking of alternate histories, this one begins in 1999 in a world where Britain made a separate peace with Germany in 1941, preventing US entry into the war and pitting them against Japan, Mao, and the USSR in a series of economically crippling wars. The Jews have a refuge in Madagascar, and Nazi Germany faded away after its own grinding fight against the Russians. This is merely the setting for a framing story in which a popular historian collects documentation about twin brother Olympians from Britain and their role in forging this peace. So, we’re very much in the same territory as Priest’s The Prestige with historical mysteries, paired journals relating the story from different perspectives, and the pervading theme of doubling.

Also like The Prestige, this novel is a puzzle box. The reader gets to see the pieces and put them together themselves. Unlike The Prestige, however, there’s not much of a solution to the puzzle. It raises a lot of questions, and it comes up with some evocative scenes, but it doesn’t provide a lot of answers. The heart of the novel is the two brothers, Joe and Jack Sawyer, though both use the initials J. L., which causes a lot of bureaucratic confusion. Joe is a committed pacifist in “the Good War.” The very basis of his philosophy is challenged by the war, and the violence he sees while working as an ambulance driver during the blitz. Jack captains bombers for the RAF, and he sees the toll of the war on civilians…inflicts it in fact. They’re both in love with the same woman, they both admire and feel hated by the other, and they both have severe doubts about their roles in the war. I can’t say that I connected with either of these characters, but they were well drawn.

Winston Churchill and Deputy Fuhrer Rudolph Hess also both loom large in the book, both have their own doubles (and then some?) and both are quite interesting. Though I did quibble with some points, especially Joe’s push for peace having any chance of persuading Churchill, the research was meticulous. But, after Robinson’s opus, which is not just a historical novel, but a novel about history, the “alternate history” aspect of this novel seemed very thin. Priest’s prose is interesting. It’s incredibly pleasant to read, but it is on the dry and formal side. This is a bit of an issue in a novel written in several different voices. All come off the same, for the most part, especially in their interest in technical details, which, again, make for very readable, rich descriptions, but didn’t convince. That’s true of the novel as a whole as well – it drew me in, but as it became clearer we were headed somewhere ambiguous, I lost interest in the work.

Like Take Back Plenty, this is a novel that won the two big British sf awards but had very little impact in the United States (it’s not in print here). And again, the book is certainly worth checking out, but it’s exclusion from most of the US awards doesn’t strike me as a huge injustice. I liked The Prestige more.

Grade: B

2003 Locus – THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT by Kim Stanley Robinson

Why Europe? By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the area was a backwater compared to China and the Islamic world. The Europeans discovered America, and, by the eighteenth century, they were on the path to world domination. Why this happened is the fundamental question in world history, and one that I think should interest science fiction authors as they often deal with issues of discovery, expansion, and technological and scientific advancement. In this epic novel, Kim Stanley Robinson digs into the science fiction writer’s toolbox to examine this and other questions of world history.

Robinson uses alternate history to get at these big questions, and he does so in a way that I think no other science fiction writer has. Philip K. Dick and writers of historical fantasy or steampunk usually focus on aesthetics, capturing the mood of a era or shocking the reader with a sense of dislocation from a world like and unlike our own. How many times have we seen the old “Nazi flag flapping in a modern city” trick? Harry Turtledove is a bit more focused on the historical questions, but he still spends more time wargaming alternate Americas than historical inquiry. Robinson, however, wants to know what made the modern world, and he does it by subtracting Europe.

This is an ambitious work of massive scope. Robinson starts with the Black Death, which killed as much as half the population of Europe in our own world. Robinson has it explode in virulence and wipe out more than 99% of the population. Then, he follows the rest of the world for the next seven hundred years to see what happens. Who discovers America? The Chinese, but they arrive among the hunter-gatherer societies of California rather than near the wealthy societies of Mesoamerica, and they don’t have as many competitors as the Spanish, so Indians have more time to maneuver. The Iroqouis (Hodenosaunee) form a pan-American movement of resistance. The Enlightenment is centered in Samarkand; the industrial revolution in India (giving us a bit of well thought out steampunk, for once). Rather than a post-Inquisition Jewish diaspora spreading capital and knowledge, there is a Japanese diaspora prompted by a Chinese invasion. The Great War is a six-decade affair that pits industrialized China against industrialized Islam, killing a billion people. San Francisco is a Chinese city called Fangzhang centered north of the “Gold Gate.” In other words, many things follow the same path – the processes of exploration, scientific discovery, technological transformation, and international conflict make certain developments inevitable, but the shape of these changes is different enough to make things interesting. Similarly, the same natural disasters occur (Japan’s Ansei earthquakes and the great California flood, both in our 1850s-1860s, get special attention), but the contexts change.

As a history geek, I’d be happy to read a dry fictional history in this mode for 600+ pages, but Robinson also manages to give us a consistent set of characters through an ingenious device. We begin with Mongol Bold Bardash and African Kyu, who are both enslaved and shipped to China. When they die, they come to the Bardo from the Tibetan book of the dead, and then they are reincarnated into the next age as Bihari and Kokila in India. They, and a small group of other characters, form a jati; they are destined to meet in each life and influence each other, and Robinson helps us keep track by using the same letters in their names. K is brash and rebellious while B is humble and steadfast.

I can’t say that The Years of Rice and Salt always works as a character-centered novel; sometimes time passes too quickly, and it is hard to get attached to storylines when we change scenery every sixty pages or so (on average). I’d almost rather have 10 short novels set in this world than this set of vignettes. But, I did think it worked extremely well, and the last two chapters slow things down a bit and offer a nice capstone to the whole novel, as K and B become scholars who can look back on everything that’s happened before.
It’s probably not for everyone, but I adore this novel; it’s one of my favorites from the past decade. I love that a book can create interesting, centuries-spanning characters, build a really fascinating counterfactual world, and be so unabashedly intellectual. This isn’t just a historical novel, this is a novel about history, and I think science fiction is at its best when it works as social science, and tries to dig into the workings of the world.

Hominids, pshaw.

Grade: A

2011 Hugo Nominee: Novelette - "The Jaguar House, in Shadow" by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov's, July 2010)

I’m a sucker for Mesoamerican stuff, and I like the idea of mashing that intriguing material into speculative tales. It makes for a cool aesthetic at the very least. So, this was one of the more highly anticipated reads for me this year, but I’m not sure the story fulfilled its promise.

The plot is fairly simple, though its telling is more complicated. The Mexica Empire of an alternate reality Earth has become corrupted due to a despotic, demagogic figure called the Revered Speaker. The titular Jaguar House consists of elite Mexica special forces. One of these Jaguar Knights, a woman named Onalli, attempts a rescue mission for her friend Xochitl. That missions serves as a framing story for Onalli remembering her history with Xochitl and the corruption of the Jaguar House that jumps backward in time, first months, then years.

I don't see, in the end, what the backwards chronology brings to the story. I didn’t really learn enough about the characters or the world to be stunned by any of the revelations that come from slowly unveiling the backstory. I’m not sure that much is done with the setting either. Considering that the setting was my favorite part of the story, this was problematic. I learned more about it in the one sentence introduction from Asimov’s than from the rest of the story, though there was some strong material on the cultural relevance of sacrifice.

In other words, I had the same problem that I had with Paul Cornell’s story last year – this is part of a series of stories that I’m unfamiliar with, and I’m not convinced it works on its own. Maybe that suggests that I might enjoy a novel or short story collection set in this world, but I think Hugo-winning stories should stand as independent pieces.

Grade: B-

2011 Hugo Nominee: Graphic Story - Grandville Mon Amour, by Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse)

Lots of people have tried to “fix” the Graphic Story category by suggesting nominees, and this graphic novel, the second in a series, was one of the most touted, especially from British quarters. It is the first graphic story nominated that’s not from the “Big Two” (American publishers Marvel and DC, representing multimedia conglomerates Disney and Time Warner, respectively), nor based on a licensed sf property from another medium, nor Girl Genius or Schlock Mercenary. Breakthrough? I guess.

Grandville seems to be from the “kitchen sink” tradition of throwing together a lot of varied tropes and hoping that something original comes out. The setting is alternate history/steampunk: Britain lost the Napoleonic Wars, and is just coming out of a near-two-century French occupation. This has somehow led to a late Victorian/art nouveau aesthetic and lots of clunky steam-powered machiney…and blimps! The story is political thriller/Sherlock Holmes/noir. And, most of the characters are anthropomorphic animals in the style of a nineteenth-century French cartoonist. Sometimes I felt like Bryan Talbot was trying to say something with these odd juxtapositions. Most of the time, I got the feeling that he just thought they were cool.

Scotland Yard Detective and Sherlockian badger Archie LeBrock is on the case when his arch-enemy, a former British resistance fighter and all around psycho, escapes on the way to the gallows. Archie descends into a gritty underworld to discover his whereabouts and how he escaped, and on the way, he uncovers a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top! Don’t they always?

I did find this story rather predictable, and the character designs rather pointless. The art is interesting – there’s a lot of richness in the backgrounds, and the storytelling is fantastic. That said, there was an angularity to the character designs that I found a bit off-putting. And, overall, I think it either needs to be prettier to hammer home the cartoonish quality of the characters, or it needs to be uglier to fit the gritty style of the story. Instead, it sits somewhere awkwardly in between.

This is a fine, but somewhat clichéd story with interesting, but flawed art. I liked it better than some of the perennial nominees, but I don’t think it’s the cure to what ails this category.

Grade: B-

1996 Campbell and Philip K Dick, 1995 BSFA –THE TIME SHIPS by Stephen Baxter

This novel racked up lots of awards and even more nominations, and it heralded a new wave of hard sf writers consisting of mostly British authors, like Baxter. The novel was authorized by the H. G. Wells estate as a sequel to The Time Machine to celebrate that landmark work’s centennial.

It does pick up right where The Time Machine left off; in fact, I had to put the book down after the first couple of chapters, read The Time Machine, and then start over with The Time Ships. This was fine, since a) it’s pathetic that I hadn’t read The Time Machine earlier, and b) The Time Machine is a very short work, under a hundred pages. Anyway, the unnamed Time Traveler sets off on another trip almost immediately after the events of Wells novel. He moves hundreds of thousands of years into the future, but quickly finds that something is wrong, and he is now in a different future populated by super-smart Morlocks with astounding technology. Working from the multiple universes of quantum theory, Baxter posits that the Traveler’s jaunts through time take him into different histories. He takes a New Morlock companion named Nebogipfel and continues his travels through a wide array of pasts and futures, many of them references to H. G. Wells books (including an alternate World War II with giants tanks like his “Land Ironclads”).

It’s a wild ride and a very fast-paced read. Baxter managed to explain some very big ideas and complicated scientific concepts without ever losing me for a second. His prose is straightforward and unadorned, and thus unlikely to get a lot of notice, but I do think this kind of communication skill deserves more appreciation. I’ve read enough bad non-fiction science writing to know that understandable explanations aren’t as easy as they look.

Still, I’m not quite sure that this is a worthy successor to The Time Machine. Wells managed to use his adventure tale to comment on the growing class divide he saw in industrial Britain. Baxter doesn’t make the same sort of comment on contemporary society, though there is some discussion about human nature, war, etc., none of it that deep, specific or revaltory. Also, even though it’s narrated in first person (and over five times as long), we don’t learn all that much more about the protagonist, and the rest of the characters are even slighter. The focus is on Big Ideas and action, but at least it’s very fun. The Time Ships could have said a bit more and delved a bit deeper, but it is a very entertaining and worthwhile read.

Grade: B

1985 Locus Fantasy - JOB: A COMEDY OF JUSTICE by Robert Heinlein

For old time’s sake, we get one last spin with Robert Anson Heinlein – as a fantasy winner, surprisingly.

The novel begins with Alex Hergensheimer, a Christian activist from an alternate America run by fundamentalists and frequented by zeppelins, without airplanes or television. Hergensheimer walks on hot coals while on a tropical cruise, faints, and wakes up in an alternate universe that is no more technically advanced but much more freewheeling and immodest than his own. He falls in love with a young pagan stewardess named Margrethe, and the two soon find themselves in yet another world, more like our own. Every time they shift worlds, they tend to lose all of their money (or it becomes useless), so most of the novel is spent following Alex and Margrethe as they try to hitchhike back to Kansas through various worlds, washing dishes and waiting tables along the way. Alex suspects that there may be a divine reason for his universe-hopping, and it turns out he’s right. Eventually, we get Heinlein’s irreverent take on heaven and hell, Satan and God.

I’ve mentioned before that Heinlein’s later work tended to be a bit sex-obsessed; Job is no exception, though maybe it’s a bit more modest than the average late-Heinlein. We hear a lot about Alex’s sexual adventures, his lust for Margrethe and his other dalliances. Heinlein has fun taking a Christian fundamentalist through these sexual adventures, but it’s not like his internal conflicts are that complex. Overall, the atmosphere is very light. Very very light. And yet, I didn’t find it all that funny. I think Heinlein hoped to shock readers into a few laughs with his irreverence, but it’s all pretty tame by today’s standards. Actually, the religion material is relatively tame by Mark Twain’s standards – Heinlein’s just more prurient.

So, the jokes don’t work, and Heinlein’s descriptions of Alex’s dishwashing and various lusts get very tedious. Yeah, I didn’t really like this novel at all. I wanted to say one last good bye to the one of the masters of the genre, but I should have remembered that his later material just doesn’t work. Another dimension-hopping Locus fantasy nominee from this year, Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman, is a far better novel.

Grade: C-

1979 World Fantasy Award and Campbell - GLORIANA by Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock is a big name in sci/fantasy literary history. He was most well-known for his Elric series, which focused on an albino anti-hero satire of Conan the Barbarian. Lately, he’s more well-know for his alternate universe tales of airships and other mechanical oddities. These stories helped inspire the increasingly popular steampunk subgenre and authors from Alan Moore to Thomas Pynchon have paid homage to them.

Gloriana is another alternative universe tale, though there are no airships to be seen (a few clockwork devices manage to show up though). Instead, we get a different take on the reign of Elizabeth I in England, though here she is Gloriana of Albion. The biggest difference between this world and ours seems to be that the big monotheistic religions don’t exist – instead of God and Allah, people worship Roman and Norse gods. Instead of Henry VIII, sixteenth-century Albion was ruled by the brutal dictator Hern. His daughter, Gloriana, has restored peace to the burgeoning empire, but one of her advisors, Montfallcon, still uses spies to manipulate events. These spies include an especially devious rogue named Captain Quire, who soon develops his own agenda and eventually seduces the queen. All of these intrigues are made easier by the fact that the royal palace is the size of an entire town, and a hidden society manages to survive within the palaces walls.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a professional historian, so it’s probably not surprising that I enjoy historical fiction. This does extend to alternate history (another growing subgenre) as well. However, most alternate history serves to explore the machinery of fate, or the vagaries of cause and effect. If we change one event, how does that ripple outwards to alter the broader story? How much does one person matter in the scheme of things? Kim Stanley Robinson explores some of these questions in depth in The Years of Rice and Salt. Moorcock does not do the same here. Gloriana hues much more towards historical fantasy, a genre that I love on paper, but always feel disappointed by in practice. The alternate universe here exists solely for aesthetic reasons. It’s as if Moorcock wanted to tell a fairly standard Tudor tale (popular stuff for the last decade or so), but he didn’t want to have to worry about getting the historical details right. In this world, he can make up all the characters, create his own standards of morality and international politics, and generally play around as much as he likes. That’s all fine with me, but he loses much of the appeal to the alternate reality setting for me in the process.

Maybe “standard Tudor tale” is too harsh though. There are some intriguing allegories here. Furthermore, this is a well-written novel, and Moorcock manages to create a broad sense of Elizabethan language in the dialogue-heavy novel while still keeping the prose easy and fast-paced (basically, it’s Shakespeare light). There’s a lot to like here, but, in the end, I felt that the “truth” of our world’s Tudor England was more interesting than Moorcock’s fictional Albion.

Grade: B

1963 Hugo – THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE by Philip K. Dick

A lot of sci-fi fans think it’s criminal that Dick only won one Hugo, and I would agree that this is not his best novel. Dick is odd enough that I don’t expect him to win these awards though. It’s like Quentin Tarantino and the Oscars; I love every Tarantino film I’ve seen, but I don’t begrudge the Academy for picking films with wider appeal. My first Philip K. Dick work, by the way, was VALIS, one of his last. VALIS is the semi-autobiographical story of a drug addict who receives coded messages from God via a hidden satellite in space. That pretty much sums up Philip K. Dick for those unfamiliar with his work (it is a pretty good book though.)

Anyway, High Castle is an interesting work, and, while it’s no Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which I will get a chance to talk about as we go), I think it’s a worthy representation of Dick’s work. It presents an alternate history in which the Axis powers won World War II and eventually conquered a stubbornly isolationist United States. Japan and Nazi Germany split North America down the middle. The two surviving powers are now involved in their own Cold War, though the rocket-loving and ruthless Nazis seem to have a decided advantage and have made it all the way to Mars. The novel takes place in California, which is in the Japanese half.

It’s a rich setting, but I can’t say there’s a ton of plot. A well-drawn and diverse array of characters wander around and try to live their lives under a totalitarian occupying power. Lots of people consult the I Ching for advice. Everyone reads an alternate history novel about a world where the Allies won the war (but not quite our world) which leads to some thoughts on parallel universes. Then, the book just sort of peters out.

It is a very interesting read though, and worth a look if you’re interested in Philip K. Dick (though you should really start with Do Androids Dream? first, if that’s the case).

Grade: A-