2012 Nebula Winner: 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Alright, I want to try to catch up a little bit this year, including posting my review of this book that I read...um....two years ago. Don't expect regular posts or anything, but I do want to keep my streaks in the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus SF novel awards going.

So, 2312 is pretty typical work from Kim Stanley Robinson, who is a favorite of mine. There's very strong world-building, as we once again get the Accelerando and its colonized solar system with lots of inventive terraforming (see Galileo's Dream and Blue Mars for other examples). There are some interesting ideas about social and political developments, clearly based on Robinson's clear understanding of history and social science. And your mileage with plot and character and prose may vary.

I found this novel especially uneven on the latter three counts. Robinson is a hard sf writer who really seems to put some energy into his style, and here he tries a little experimentation. It's appreciated but not entirely successful, and it stands out awkwardly next to some rather lengthy passages of technical writing focusing on the aforementioned world-building. Similarly, the characters can feel a little flat. Robinson's usual trick is to give his characters universal traits like love and ambition while also placing them in very specific historical and cultural contexts, and I think he's generally better at the latter than most of his peers. Here, the characters have immense longevity and the ability to change aspects of their appearance and identity fairly freely. At times, this is all realized wonderfully, and the best portion of the novel involves a gender fluid romantic arc with the main character Swan. Often, however, the characters just feel distant and cold - there's a lot of telling but not much showing, for instance, about how much Swan was inspired by a deceased character named Alex, whose death drives much of the plot.

Speaking of the plot, this is where the novel fails to realize its potential. It's basically a mystery, as Swan wanders the solar system investigating a series of dramatic terrorist attacks, but the investigations mostly feel engineered to show off the various exotic settlements, including a massive train city that circles Mercury between its light and dark sides - a device Robinson has used before, but he really goes into depth here. The setting is driving the story, not the characters.

2312 was more ambitious and literary than most of its competitors in 2012 (what I would have called a very off year, looking at the nominees), and I liked it quite a bit, but its flaws are evident enough that I'm not particularly bothered that it got beat by the fairly silly Redshirts for the Hugo and Locus.

Grade: B+

1949 – THE HUMANOIDS by Jack Williamson

In the 1943 story “With Folded Hands,” Jack Williamson first created the humanoids, sleek black robots whose “Prime Directive” is “to Serve and Obey, and guard men from harm” (it would’ve been great if this bit of gendered language had saved women from humanoid intervention, but that’s asking a lot from a 1940s story).  As the story unfolds, we see that the robots take their Directive a little too seriously, and they create a totalitarian state which carefully monitors everyone’s behavior and drugs or lobotomizes people who refuse to properly avoid potential harm. It’s a dark take on the trade-offs between security and freedom, and a relatively early take (maybe the first?) on what has become a well-worn technophobic trope. “With Folded Hands” may be Williamson’s signature work – it’s probably his most anthologized.

Rather than an expansion or reimagining of the novella, Williamson revisited the concept with a full-on novel-length sequel, The Humanoids, serialized in three parts in John Campbell’s Astounding in 1949. In the process he adds lots of new concepts and themes and comes up with a work that rapidly flits between ideas and never really finds a center.

We learn that the Humanoids were created over ten thousand years in the future, after humanity has spread across the stars and created scores of different planetary cultures (this background isn’t very apparent in the original story, though in both we do learn that the robots were created after a devastating war on the planet Wing IV). The planet Starmont is in a sort of cold war with the totalitarian Triplanet Powers. In his finest speculative moment, Williamson comments on the burgeoning Cold War by warning that “threatened with the inevitable fruit of its own exported know-how, the democratic republic was already sacrificing democracy as it armed itself desperately.” The technology in question is rhodomagnetics, which is like magnetism, but works on interstellar distances and allows Williamson to break Einsteinian laws of physics whenever necessary.

Our protagonist is Dr. Clay Forester*, the world’s foremost expert on rhodomagnetics. At the beginning of the novel, a group of powerful psychics, including a young girl who can teleport vast distances named Jane Carter, contact Forester and warn him that the humanoids are coming. Forester is skeptical of psychic phenomena and wary that these strangers know so much of his research. When the humanoids do land, Forester does little; they are around to help after all, and they promise to remove the threat of the Triplanet Alliance. Then, they begin forbidding science (which could be used to make weapons) and drugging people who are hostile or depressed, including Forester’s neglected wife. Forester’s only hope to defeat the humanoids is to turn to the team of psychics and attempt to unlock the powers within his own mind.

*Yes, for the entire novel I imagined him looking like this:

Yep, it’s psychics versus robots! And it gets weirder from there. I’m not sure if it’s just the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink nature of Golden Age sf (John Campbell’s fingerprints are all over this story – he was a big fan of “unleashing the psychic powers of the human mind” stories), or maybe it’s a case of a serialized story going off the tracks due to lack of planning, but this is a real mess. The pacing is bizarre, as Williamson zips by the key moments (like the humanoid takeover of Starmont society); characters disappear (the entire psychic team mostly fades away after an elaborate introduction – wherefore art thou, Graystone the Great?); and plotlines are foreshadowed without paying off (there are lots of hints about the mysterious origin of Forester’s friend Ironsmith, but he’s really just a robot-loving, wife-stealing jerk). The ending is also a bit of a mess – there’s some intentional ambiguity, but there also seems to be some confusion about the political message.

However, despite this messiness, I really enjoyed this book. It juggles interesting concepts and has some big sf set-piece moments. Overall, the book has a real “anything goes” Big Idea attitude that is both its greatest virtue and failure.

Grade: B+  

2009 Saturn Fantasy – WATCHMEN

Before Before Watchmen, there was....Watchmen!

Amazingly, this is the first review of an adaptation of a work I’ve previously reviewed. Many of the award-winning novels here have been adapted into films, including a fair number of Hugo and Saturn nominees, and many of the films have come from acclaimed sf&f novels, but this is the first time the twain have met. It’s fitting then that it’s a work that’s status as an adaptation has always been the main story.

As I said, Watchmen is the consensus pick for greatest superhero comic of all time. That alone made its adaptation controversial, and it took over a decade and a few lawsuits to get this film made. Then, writer Alan Moore asked to have his name removed from the film, more due to previous wrongs than this film in particular, but still. Finally, there’s the fact that the sprawling multimedia multigenerational superhero epic that pushed the boundaries of sequential art as a medium doesn’t particular lend itself to the feature film format… Well, add it all up, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

It’s not quite that, though I wouldn’t call it a rousing success either. It received mixed critical reviews and disappointing box office revenues. Is it any good? I’d say it depends on what you’re looking for. It you love the graphic novel and you want to see Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's vision realized with first class special effects, you’re in luck! If you’ve never read the book, I imagine this won’t make much sense. If you’re looking for a movie that can stand on its own as a solid piece of filmmaking, I don’t think this qualifies.

The first problem is that it’s just too damn literal as a remake. For all the hubbub about whether the film would do service to the classic graphic novel – it does, to a fault. Director Zack Snyder made a name for himself with a very literal adaptation of Frank Miller’s Battle of Thermopylae graphic novel, 300, and he brings the same ethic to this work, directly borrowing almost all of his visuals from Dave Gibbons’ panels and almost all of his dialogue from Alan Moore’s word balloons. The mid-1980s setting, contemporary when the book originally came out, must have been fairly alienating for a lot of the young people who’d make up the majority of the potential audience for a superhero blockbuster. I’m not saying that I want to replace fifth term Nixon with third term Dubya and the USSR with China or Al Qaeda, but the book is very much of its time; the film is not. More importantly, the book is paced brilliantly as a twelve part monthly series, not as a three hour film, but that’s the pacing that Snyder ends up with by default. The film does manage to convey some of the rich history of the comics, but it never builds any momentum. The film’s pacing would better fit a tv mini-series.

The second problem is the acting. Jackie Earle Haley is fantastic as Rorschach, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is perfect as the Comedian. It’s all downhill from there. Patrick Wilson and Malin Ackerman are likable performers, and they do fine as Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, though they don’t seem as damaged as the characters in the comic. Billy Crudup isn’t particularly convincing as Dr. Manhattan, and Matthew Goode is just plain terrible as Adrian Veidt. Those two characters play a crucial role in the story, and the actors’ wooden performances really damage the climax. Watchmen is a character-driven story, and this mixed bag of acting undermines it in some significant ways.

It’s not all bad though. By sticking so closely to the original story, Snyder doesn’t lose any of Moore’s fascinating world-building, and the opening credits that track four decades of superhero history are a highpoint (though "the opening credits are a highpoint" really isn't a great sign). Most of the visuals are very well-realized. A direct translation of Gibbons's panels may not have been  the best choice, but that doesn’t make it easy, and I think Snyder has accomplished something very interesting here. Again, as a supplement to the book, it’s not bad at all. But that’s pretty faint praise for such an ambitious sf film.

Grade: C+

2007 BSFA – BRASYL by Ian McDonald

McDonald returns to the same formula he used in River of Gods (and later in The Dervish House) and places interesting speculative concepts in the context of a developing country. I think I’ve already made it clear that I’m a fan of this formula: it forces sf writers to confront issues of historical and cultural context that I’ve complained can be absent from the genre. A book like Rainbow’s End isn’t really that different from McDonald’s work, but McDonald’s settings give his novels a liveliness that is absent from Vinge’s familiar SoCal. That said, whenever an author employs a formula like this, they have to be wary of using it as a gimmick. In Brasyl, McDonald is a lot closer to falling into that trap than in his other works.

McDonald tracks three different stories throughout the novel. One takes place in roughly the present day (2006) and involves a reality show producer in Rio de Janeiro named Marcelina Hoffman. Reality programming is a weird phenomenon that feels like something out of sf satire from the ‘70s, so it fits in rather well. Hoffman is the purveyor of the especially dangerous, edgy and salacious type of reality show, and as she works to get a show on the air that would humiliate a geriatric footballer, she begins to notice that someone with her likeness is sabotaging her. In 2032, we meet a young cyberpunk named Edson, who works out of the favelas (slums) of Sao Paulo, and trades different identities to commit petty crimes. He falls in love with quantum computing anime girl and also notices a weird doubling that throws his life into chaos. Finally, we swashbuckle into the early-eighteenth-century Amazon with a Jesuit priest named Luis Quinn and a French scientist named Robert Falcon. Quinn is on a mission to find another missionary who has gone Kurtz with some of the Indians upriver, and he encounters an Amazonian plant that seems to allow people to see into other realities. The stories do eventually interconnect (via some quantum theories that McDonald seems to be found of) into a vast conspiracy that hints at something every bit as vast and epic as River of Gods.

It’s a fun story, and, if you’ve read my Stephenson reviews, you know I’m a sucker for the cyberpunk meets history angle. In fact, this does feel at times like a Stephenson knock off – a blend of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle – but a really good one. McDonald even shares Stephenson’s frenetic and irreverent prose style. If you’re a Stephenson fan who’s looking for more, go read this novel right away.
Still, because it felt a little derivative (albeit, of something daringly original…this book still feels very different from 99% of the sf out there), and because I never quite engaged with the characters (I’m just never going to be able to sympathize with a reality show producer, no matter how well-drawn she is as a character), I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as River of Gods.

Most importantly, I feel like the setting is wasted a little bit. Brazil has taken knocks in the past for not living up to its vast resources and geopolitical advantages; McDonald often quotes the saying that “Brazil is the country of the future and always will be.” So, as a failed “country of the future” there should be a lot to say about the country’s future. We never get much of a sense of that. There are vivid details of the beautiful settings from Rio’s dramatic hills to the big cities’ gang-controlled slums (the great film City of God is referenced heavily) to the majesty of the Amazon. It’s all there, as is capoeira, and samba, and football. But, you could still rewrite it into the US without any significant alterations to the plot. It all feels a bit like window-dressing. I guess I wanted something epic on a world politics level in the same way that River of Gods was.

I feel like I’m doing the thing again where I spend my whole review complaining about a book I really liked. There’s a ton of fun action here, the setting is cool, and there’s some high-level existentialist quantum-physical sf stuff before it’s all said and done. I enjoyed this book a lot, and it’s my clear favorite of the three books I read published in 2006 (the others being Rainbow’s End and Nova Swing). It’s just overshadowed by some of the other landmark novels of the decade, including McDonald’s own.

Grade: B+

2005 Arthur C. Clarke and Locus Fantasy – IRON COUNCIL by China Miéville

I’m going to warn readers in advance that this review might dance the edge of spoilers. I’m not going to say much that you can’t get from reading the front and back cover, but Mieville writes this novel as if everything is a giant mystery.  The entire first part involves a group of characters searching for a mysterious someone.  Who is it?  Mieville won’t say!  It’s mysterious.  And then, you finally discover that it’s…Judah Low, a new character.  There’s a similar tease and reveal with the “Iron Council.” I think these sorts of mysteries for mystery’s sake are good examples of what’s annoyed me about Mieville’s earlier works.  That said, as a whole, I liked this novel much better than the two previous novels set on the Weird world of Bas-Lag.

As I said, a group of adventurers from New Crobuzon are off in the wilderness looking for Judah Low. Among them is Judah’s lover Cutter, who exhibits some of the greatest character depth I’ve seen from Mieville so far. There’s not much more to him than his obsession with Judah, but Mieville handles that with a defter touch than I’ve seen in the previous works.  Judah, in turn, is looking for the Iron Council, a revolutionary collective of former rail workers who stole the entire railroad (it’s sort of a stretch, but a fun one, and this is Bas-Lag we’re talking about). Judah can create magical golems, and he was one of the heroes of the revolution that created the Iron Council, which is narrated in the novel’s driving, exciting centerpiece. Judah left the Iron Council to connect with protest movements in New Crobuzon, but he now wants to return. Meanwhile, we also get the story of a brewing revolution in the city itself that parallels some of the history of the Paris Commune. We follow one of the revolutionaries named Ori, who has to navigate some conflicting motives from some of the movements’ leaders. Disenchanted with an ongoing war with the Tesh, and sick of the city government’s brutal oppression, the people rise up, and look to the fabled Iron Council’s return as their best hope of victory.

This is the first time that the story of a Bas-Lag novel felt big enough to match the majesty of the setting and epic enough to befit the significant page-length. Mieville is no longer dancing around the themes he cares about with obfuscated mutant bug metaphors; he’s a Marxist, and this book is about revolution.  It can be heavy-handed at times, and I’m not sure I’d agree with all of Mieville’s politics, but it really does feel like THE story he’s been trying to tell. The word “history” echoes through the book, replete with all of the teleological connotations of Mieville’s beliefs – is it the inexorable expansion of industrial capitalism, represented by the octopus-like tentacles of rail, or is it the march to a workers’ utopia? Mieville uses these question as a backdrop that, most importantly, heightens the character drama, something that I felt was missing from The Scar and Perdido Street Station.

That’s not to say that this novel solves all of the problems of its predecessors.  I’m not positive that Cutter and Jonah and their laconic love story, are that much richer than Bellis or Isaac.  Maybe they just felt that way to me because I enjoyed the plot more. And, I did not connect to Ori, who did feel as passive and immaterial as the characters of the earlier books. The worst offender is Drogon, a susurrating vaquero.  He has magical powers based on whispers, which is pretty cool, and his ranch-hand get-up adds to the vaguely western feel of portions of the book, but he doesn’t contribute much else.  He arrives, makes a big splash with his power and aesthetic, and then disappears until he has a role to play at the end. It seems that Mieville has to force every bit of weirdness into Bas-Lag that he can; no need to develop the ideas into a coherent world/plot/character.  I’m starting to suspect that I preferred The City & The City because the clarity and focus of the central concept forced Mieville to develop things a bit more, and maybe the same can be said about this book as well. The Revolution at the book’s core gives it a stronger structure and message than the bug hunt of Perdido Street Station or the vague unfinished quest of The Scar.  I’m certainly not one to complain about a new twist on fantasy, but I have to declare Bas-Lag a slight disappointment.  There’s a lot of new, but still not as much of the depth I’m looking for in fantasy world-building.

Grade: B+

2011 Not a Hugo Nominee - MONSTERS

Monsters didn’t get much of a theatrical release, but it did garner some strong reviews and comparisons to other recent “indie” sci-fi movies like Moon, and especially District 9. Like the latter movie, Monsters maps an alien encounter onto familiar political issues. Because of solid character work, I found it a lot more engaging than District 9, or the other big cinéma-vérité-monster-movie Cloverfield.

Mexico has been infected with alien lifeforms that can poison organisms on Earth and grow into giant monsters. The US has attempted to contain the creatures in Mexico, fencing off a giant “infected zone” in northern Mexico and conduction air raids throughout the country, making it into an alien warzone. Samantha (Whitney Able) is the daughter of a big-time newspaper magnate, and she has somehow washed up in Central Mexico. Her father charges a photographer named Kaulder (Scott McNairy) with getting her back to the safety of the United States. He’s unenthusiastic, though he does have the hots for Samantha; he also botches the transport, which forces them to take a dangerous path through the infected zone.

Most of the film consists of understated interactions between Kaulder and Samantha, but these scenes work really well. Writer/director Gareth Edwards* does great work with the dialogue, and the acting from the two unknown leads is quite good. They don’t fall into instantaneous Hollywood love, but they are drawn to each other, and into danger, by a mutual dislike of the lives they’re living. The film is focused entirely on these two characters, and their relationship, and it works. We’re not stuck with the yuppie douchebags of Cloverfield or the human walking disaster that is Wickus in Dictrict 9, but the characters aren’t perfect either. Edwards also makes great use of his Latin American locations, and he frames his characters in some really beautiful shots, though the geography is screwy (where exactly is that tropical Mayan temple on the US border? I’d love to visit it). The people of war torn Mexico also get a voice in several small roles that round off the world quite nicely and subtly.

The monsters don’t do much. They help to set the scene, that’s for certain, and I actually like the way they’re used as background material for almost the entire movie. You know that they have to make some climactic appearance though, and the scene where they do feels tacked on and unnecessary. Also, while I give the movie credit for being subtler (and far less misanthropic) than District 9, I’m not sure that the metaphor does come through clearly. Does the monstrous alien infection represent the drug wars that are ripping though northern Mexico and threatening to spill into the United States? I think so, though the movie doesn’t seem to have much to say about them other than they’re really bad. Maybe we’re supposed to focus on the callous way the American military operates across the border? Maybe. This movie should be all about the border, the line that shapes the two nations’ relationship and the lives of the people that live along it – it’s the characters main objective, but not much else is said about it. Also, a Mexican character with a bigger role sure would have been nice.

Still, it’s solid, character-driven filmmaking. It was quite good at being what it was, even if it could have done more with its sf metaphor. I'm not too sorry to see the nominators skip it, but it might have been a nice addition to the field if, say, we'd waited to nominate the complete Deathly Hallows next year.

Grade: B+

*maybe I should mention that this is a British production, but, I’ve never met an American named Gareth so maybe it’s obvious

2000 Nebula – DARWIN’S RADIO by Greg Bear

Greg Bear becomes the second author to win two novel Nebulas without having won any novel Hugos. Samuel Delaney was the first, and he makes a lot of sense. He was the New Waviest of the New Wave, who won at a point when Hugo was still handing statuettes to old schoolers like Heinlein. I think Bear’s success demonstrates how the Nebulas have changed. They’ve moved from rewarding “writers’ writers” of edgy sf and begun to favor character-based works that are light on the sf. In the ‘90s at least, I think they’re so focused on expanding the definition of science fiction, that they haven’t always been recognizing the best works. Of course, the big science fiction successes of the ‘90s (neither of which make an appearance on my masterlist of award winners for this blog) are The X-Files and the works of Michael Crichton, and, as in Robert Sawyer’s Terminal Experiment, that’s the model we’re working with here.

Darwin’s Radio has a fantastic pair of opening sequences. Anthropologist Mitch Rafelson discovers an unusual pair of mummified Neanderthals amidst a thrilling climb in the Alps. Evolutionary biologist Kaye Lang investigates a mass grave in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Both of these discoveries (whose simultaneity is only extremely contrived) connect to an emerging epidemic of a miscarriage-causing virus called SHEVA. Mitch and Kaye both come to the conclusion that this virus, which has emerged from non-coding remnants of ancient viruses locked in our DNA*, is actually prompting a rapid evolution in the human genome. Then the government chases them.

I had two major problems with this novel. First of all, it’s a novel about scientific ethics that is entirely without an ethical center. Mitch hates that he has to respect Native American interests under NAGPRA when dealing with ancient remains. Kay’s instincts tell her that her baby will be okay, so she shouldn't submit to the epidemic-fearing CDC, who are portrayed as tyrants for trying to halt the spread of what looks like a deadly virus. The day after pill is….something. Patenting parts of the genome is right, unless it’s wrong? Bear seems confused about those last two. At the end of the day, the novel is not about creating a reasonable ethical framework to deal with a novel problem (which could have been exciting to read about), it uses ethics to create artificial conflict. The final arbiter of right and wrong comes down to Bear’s protagonists: if they believe it, it’s probably right. If the smarmy, interfering government antagonists believe it, it’s wrong.

An even bigger problem is that I just didn’t enjoy the novel. It moved slowly and focused on the characters’ miserable lives. I went to the novel’s Wikipedia article to double-check the spellings of the characters names, and I found a fairly detailed summary that manages to go on for three paragraphs without mentioning any characters. That’s kind of telling. It’s not that Bear doesn’t spend time on the characters; as in Benford’s Timescape or Sawyer’s Terminal Experiment, most of the novel is spent on detailing their tawdry lives and petty politics. But, if the Wikipedia author is anything like me, she didn’t care about or like the characters, so I don’t blame her for skipping them and sticking with describing the book’s fake science.

The most interesting part of this novel for me was the question of what would emerge from this evolutionary infection. Turns out that I have to read another book called Darwin’s Children to get into that. After this one, I’m not gonna, especially since the last few pages were rather discouraging on that front. Communication by scent? Didn’t our ancestors drop that trait several millions of years ago?

My ‘90s recap is up next, and I predict that I’m going to say mean things about the state of the Nebula awards in this decade.

*These remnants really do exist; the rest of the science in the novel felt like pure bs. Bear needlessly complicates evolutionary theory to a ridiculous degree. You’d think genes as a networked intelligence might be an interesting concept. Here, unfortunately, it is not.

Grade: D+

1997 Hugo and Locus – BLUE MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson

Blue Mars wraps up Robinson’s monumental Mars trilogy, which tries to bring scientific and sociological realism to the colonization and terraforming of Mars. By this volume, we’ve entered the twenty-second century. Multiple revolutions have rocked Mars, and the surviving members of the original colonists, plus the succeeding generations of Martians, focus on forging new economic and political systems for the rapidly growing population and the changing climate of the red planet.

Again, Robinson spends a lot of time on these economic and political questions. Usually, he demonstrates an awareness of socio-economic complexities, but there are a few more straw man moments here and some rather embarrassing moments where characters inspire unanimous awe by espousing Robinson’s utopian views. Yes, his Martian society works a little too perfectly, and there are echoes of Pacific Edge throughout the trilogy. I do like that Robinson will go out on a limb with these issues though – constructing an entire Martian Constitution or imagining the future theoretical frameworks that guide various academic disciplines. For instance, he creates a whole new meta-theory of history here – it’s mostly just a modification of Marxist historiography, and it doesn’t really work for me, but I admire the guts and imagination it took for Robinson to posit it. He does the same thing with physics and neurology as well.

Alongside the academic theorizing, Robinson continues to offer detailed descriptions of Martian landscapes and a focus on character development, usually in tandem. The changes in Mars are dramatic and beautifully evoked by Robinson, as in wonderful passages where characters explore their memories while looking out on an icy Martian sea. I especially like the ways that Robinson draws on the work of Aldo Leopold to examine the aesthetics of “wild” nature and the human place therein.

And the characters have mellowed, a lot. Red Mars is probably a more dramatic and exciting entry in the series, but, boy, are the main characters horrible people. By the end of Blue Mars, I’d come to sympathize with all of the survivors, even the manipulative and melodramatic Maya. At the novel’s beginning, the “red” Ann Clayborne threatens most of Martian society with an obnoxious stubbornness, but the later sections following her were some of my favorite in the entire series. In one chapter, she spends time with new Martian fauna and the geneticist that designs them. In another, she takes a trip to Uranus with a fourth-generation Martian girl. She’s the one who least wants Mars to change, and Robinson’s rendering of her coming to terms with the terraforming can be quite moving.

From skimming a few online reviews, it seems that the consensus is that this is the worst of the trilogy, but I think it was actually my favorite of the three excellent books, mainly due to the characters’ mellowing. Plot-wise, it is perhaps an anti-climax. The most dramatic events take place in the early chapters, and the novel winds down with the musings of the aging First Hundred colonists as they accept their losses, contemplate senescence and death, and relate to the vastly different generations of the Martian-born. Honestly, if you’re a fan of tight plotting and the three act structure, avoid Kim Stanley Robinson like the plague. I love his prose, and I don’t mind the long descriptive passages and the time he spends on various ruminations. Even I’ll admit that this volume could have used a little trimming though.

I’m interested to see how much I see the influence of this widely-read trilogy in coming novels. I know one idea in the particular volume has been picked up by other writers. Robinson describes a period of the rapid settlement of the solar system, and he dubs it the “Accelerando,” which was later picked up by Charles Stross. I also hadn’t realized that the future of Galileo’s Dream may well have been in the same universe as the Mars trilogy (there are a few strong hints, including a fictional mathematician that appears in both). The Mars trilogy may not be for everyone, but I do think every sf fan should give Red Mars a shot. Robinson’s detailed world-building and rich prose are hard to match.

Grade: A

1994 Nebula – MOVING MARS by Greg Bear

What was it about Mars and science fiction in the early nineties? On top of this work and Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, Ben Bova also had a novel about Martian settlement, titled, simply, Mars. Maybe there was a sense that we were only a generation or so away from a manned mission to the red planet….which we still seem to be. This novel really isn’t about Mars though, which is one of its problems.

The novel is narrated by Casseia Majumdar, a woman raised on Mars in the twenty-second century. In fact, we soon learn that the novel is an autobiography of sorts. A group of independent corporate entities called BMs run various portions of Mars, but different factions make efforts to create a united government by alliance or coercion. The novel begins with Casseia as a college student, rebelling against one of these efforts, but she eventually works her way into a united government. The biggest issue for Mars is independence from Earth, which is populous, technologically advanced, rich, and powerful. Artificial intelligences called "thinkers" are common there, as is nanotechnology, and most humans have enhanced themselves with these technologies. Casseia works to prevent Earth from overwhelming Mars, and she is close to a brilliant young man named Charles Franklin, who makes breakthroughs that could help achieve this goal.

This is my second encounter with Greg Bear – I’ve also read the novella version of Blood Music – and it seems that his strength lies in imagining new technologies and considering their implications. That’s science fiction at its most basic. He does a great job with it for most of this novel…with one big exception. Unfortunately, that exception becomes the crux of the book, and everything else in the novel really exists to serve this one idea. Without giving anything away (though the title is a big hint), I’ll say that the deck is stacked in both interplanetary politics and interpersonal relationships so that this new super-technology will be used, despite some of its more terrifying implications. In the end, this is no longer a story about Mars, or even about Casseia, though she’s always at the center of things, it’s about this new tech. Worse still, the technology opens up some very interesting doors, but Bear wants to tell the story of its utilization, and is more or less willing to stop there. I’m a lot more interested in how this technology will be used fifty or a hundred years after the novel’s end.

That said, the novel has a lot going for it. Casseia is a strong female character with complex emotions. She’s that rare character in science fiction – she’s smart and likable, but she makes mistakes, and she has weaknesses. She’s not an anti-hero or a Mary Sue; she feels like an actual human being, and that’s nice to see. The scenes on Earth and the depiction of its technologically driven youth culture are also quite well-rendered, as are scenes of fossil-hunting for Martian

life.

But, the depiction of Mars itself fell flat, especially in comparison to Robinson’s work, and it was in the lead-up to the increasingly inexorable climax that the novel lost much of its appeal.

Grade: B-

1993 Nebula and 1992 BSFA – RED MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson

Many fans and critics hailed Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian trilogy as a modern sf masterpiece in the 1990s. You don’t hear as much about the books these days, it seems, but this novel, at least, does an excellent job at straddling the worlds of hard science and humanities, as I think the best science fiction always should. It was beat in the Hugos by two very good novels - I think 1993 might have been the strongest class of Hugo nominees ever – but it certainly left a mark on the sf of the era.

The novel follows a joint US-Russian effort to colonize Mars in the year 2026. Two decades later, this looks like a bad bit of futurism from the get-go: we probably won’t be getting to Mars in fifteen years, let alone colonizing it, and the Russians would be a lot less likely to be equal participants with the US than, say, the Chinese or the EU. It is important to remember that Robinson was writing in the wake of the Cold War. Beyond those issues, the novel is extremely well-researched and thought out. One of the novel’s greatest strengths is in Robinson’s mastery of details, as he concocts systems and scenarios for crew selection, psychological evaluation, the journey itself, early settlement-building, and terraforming. Robinson has a solid grasp on several fields of science and on human history, and he uses them all to create a convincing world here.

It is this thorough knowledge of history’s workings that has always most impressed me about Robinson. He’s able to weave in interesting multicultural details (we get some brilliant scenarios like whirling dervishes caravanning through Martian deserts), while also depicting the broader sweep of history. Robinson convincingly portrays Mars as a frontier with demonstrable economic and psychological consequences in the context of a Malthusian Earth.

In this volume, Robinson presents the original group of colonists, one-hundred in total, with special focus on a select few – American hero John Boone, and the less-heroic American leader Frank Chalmers; the emotional Russian leader Maya Toitovna, and her more-stable counterpart Nadia Chernyshevski; the mysterious biologist Hiroki Ai; and much of the novel’s politics center around the pro-terraforming “green” Sax Russell, and the “red” Ann Clayborne who wants to preserve the pre-human Martian environment. Through them, Robinson presents a very fascinating question in a balanced and challenging way. I’m still not sure what side I fall on. Robinson also gets to question contemporary politics and economics through the radical Arkady Bogdanov, who pushes for the Martian colonists to found a new type of society, outside the limitations of the capitalist/communist spectrum.

Thousands of immigrants, representing a broad array of Earth cultures, follow the First Hundred. Political tensions and radical ideas lead to a rather spectacular revolution that turns the work into a more sophisticated version of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Much of the drama comes from the characters’ debates about Mars’ destiny, but also from their petty personal clashes, especially a rivalry between Boone and Chalmers that recalls the central love triangle/political debate in Pacific Edge. As in that novel, I can understand how these characters might annoy some readers, but it also feels very real to me, especially among the competitive egos of academia (where I have spent some time). Yes, really smart people are often socially awkward and competitive to the point of pettiness. The violent clashes that eventually result from these rivalries may push the drama too far, but, again, they are certainly not beyond the realm of plausibility.

Robinson does much to recognize science fiction history as well, naming cities and installations after Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Charles Sheffield, and Arthur C. Clarke, among others. If politics and literary allusion bore you, there’s a lot of cutting edge science concerning space travel and colonization, Martian geology, biology, and terraforming. There are Martian blimps and space elevators.

The writing is first rate as well – Robinson is one of those rare authors who can totally engross a reader (or, at least, this reader) with his depictions of landscapes, characters and technologies. I think Robinson is very much the heir to Clarke, though he tends to focus more on character development. That said, Robinson writes a lot of poetry and (sometimes awkwardly) inserts it into his novels - It’s not his strongest suit. He avoids doing this explicitly here, though there are some lyrical prose passages that don’t entirely work, especially in the italicized chapter introductions.

Red Mars is one of the best science fiction novels I’ve read – it’s an epic work that delivers everything I’m looking for in a piece of sf. I read this novel in college, but I never actually got around to reading the two sequels, and I’m anxious to see if they follow the usual trend of diminishing returns in sf series.

Grade: A

1992 Hugo and Locus – BARRAYAR by Lois McMaster Bujold

For only the second time in Hugo history, an author wins back-to-back in the novel category. And, as with last time (Ender’s), it’s for books in the same series. This is a prequel of sorts to The Vor Game, and it fills in some important gaps in the chronology (as I mentioned before, I’m reading the Vorkosigan books in internal chronological order, and I’m not sure they’d make as much sense in publication order).

The main focus this time is the birth of Miles, and his mother, Cordelia, is the central character. She’s recently moved to the semi-feudal planet of Barrayar from the more democratic and higher tech Beta Colony, and she’s married Count Aral Vorkosigan, who is serving as Regent for the 4-year-old emperor. Most of the novel centers around her interactions with the complicated and often bloody politics of the planet. There are duels, political rivalries, and the threat of civil war. A lot of time is also given over to relationships within the Vorkosigan household, especially three of the family bodyguards. It’s very character-centered. In fact, it would translate very easily to a fantasy setting (with its romance, court intrigues, and loyal retainers), except for some of the material dealing with Miles’ troubled birth.

Bujold’s prose is strong with some very nice moments, and Cordelia is a very likable character. The plot can go a little over-the-top – there’s a daring raid near the end that really should not have gone as well as it did, for instance – and the characters can be a tad too wonderful and loving, but it’s a fun experience. And, the crazy action and ultra-perfect characters are dialed down a bit from The Vor Game.

It also deals with slightly deeper themes than The Vor Game. Miles’ disability slid into the background in that action novel, but here, the question of whether the damaged fetus should even be brought into the world is foregrounded. The prejudices in Barrayaran society depicted here lead to very interesting conflicts that clearly overshadow Miles' life to come. And, Bujold’s portrayal of Cordelia as a dedicated mother felt real in some very unreal circumstances. Honestly, the character work was so strong that I didn’t even need the action sequences that dominate the novel’s third act.

Grade: B+

1991 Clarke and 1990 BSFA – TAKE BACK PLENTY by Colin Greenland

Science Fiction, like rock and roll, seems to flow back and forth effortlessly across the Pond. There’s a strong transatlantic tradition that goes back to the golden age (and before) which has always seen Brits like Clarke on equal footing with Yanks like Heinlein in either nation. So, it’s a bit odd to see a book perform in the awards like Take Back Plenty, which won both of the British sf awards I’m covering, and got completely ignored by all the American awards, not even receiving so much as a nomination. Odder still, I’d never heard of this novel.

It’s a space opera, though largely confined to the solar system, that follows a space hauler named Tabitha Jute and her sentient ship the Alice Liddell (whom we haven’t seen referenced since Riverworld). In this future, humans received space technology from a mysterious group of aliens called the Capellans, who retain a monopoly of sorts over trade and tech in the solar system. They take humans to the canals of Mars and to the outer solar system (in this world, fantastic visions of the planets seem to have some truth to them). There are several other weird aliens running around though, from floating space babies to the annoying little Perks to the forbidden Frasques. Jute gets caught up in some inter-species maneuvering when she takes a job from a con-man named Marco and his sapient parrot. Along the way, there are space battles, spectacular crashes, and a visit to the titular Plenty, which is an anarchic space station.

So, it’s space adventure, almost swashbuckling. The tone is fairly light and the pacing breathless. Maybe a little too breathless. The world is the main attraction here, and it’s very dense. Between the rapidly-developing plot and the barrage of alien races, the reader doesn’t have much of an opportunity to find their bearings. The novel does pause at times to give us Tabitha’s back story through a series of tales she relates to her ship’s computer, though even these are dense with new characters, species, ships, and places. Greenland’s developed a very detailed world, and it’s not entirely necessary to know all of the details. You can admire the complexity without understanding every facet. Still, it’s not the most accessible sci-fi book I’ve ever read.

In the end, Take Back Plenty is a well-written, fun book, and I can see why the British science fiction community embraced it. I can also see why it’s reputation isn’t as good in the United States – I’m not even sure it’s a cultural difference so much as a the right book hitting at the right time. This is a novel that I can easily see some sf fans loving and others not so much, depending on how willing they are to go along for the ride. Apparently, in 1990, British readers were; American readers not so much. I have to admit that I had some trouble myself. There were characters, moments, and ideas that I loved, but I’m not all that crazy about the novel as a whole. I’d still suggest that science fiction fans give it a shot though.

Also worth noting, we really are in an era of well-portrayed female protagonists after that ugly '80s drought. Tabitha is very strong and likable, and there will be others to come in the next few weeks.

Grade: B

2010 Hugo nominee, novel: JULIAN COMSTOCK: A STORY OF 22ND-CENTURY AMERICA by Robert Charles Wilson

Last, but not (quite) least for the 2010 Hugo nominees, we have the novel Julian Comstock, by Robert Charles Wilson. I’m inclined the group Wilson in with the likes of Sawyer, Stross, Scalzi as a successful sf author from the period I’d missed out on. This novel covers a lot of the same ground as The Windup Girl, but in very different way.

Like Bacigalupi, Wilson depicts a 22^nd century future in which oil supplies are exhausted with a resulting collapse of technology. There are also rampant plagues and a population collapse that has resulted from the lack of energy, disease, and infertility brought on by chemical pollution. In the wake of this collapse, reactionary political forces have taken over North America: landowners have become aristocrats, while many laborers are slaves (called indentured servants, but it is an inherited class). Christianity has become an official religion that censors scientific knowledge and enforces morality.

The narrator, Adam Hazzard, tells the story of his close friend, the titular Julian Comstock, an aristocrat and the nephew of the evil President of the United States, who killed Julian’s father. When both are young men, they are conscripted in a war against the European Union in Labrador. They are very successful, and Julian especially rises to fame through his military exploits. Meanwhile, Adam works to become a writer of adventure books and falls in love with a rebellious young woman.

Adam is an odd sort of unreliable narrator – we don’t have any reason to suspect that he’s intentionally dishonest, but he’s one of the most naïve characters I’ve ever read. As a lower class country boy from a religious background, he seems completely unaware of much of what’s going on around him. Sometimes this makes for some humorous situations, but usually it was a bit too precious. It’s also difficult to believe that a character who sees as much as Adam, who finds himself (while still very young) in the highest echelons on military, political, and artistic circles, would be so thick. I wasn’t a huge fan of the prose, which was generally very plain with the occasional Victorian affectation, and I’m not sure if this is Wilson’s voice or Hazzard’s – if the latter, it is at least more impressive. The contrivances of the plot, which puts these young men at the top of American society, also feel Victorian, and again, I’m sure this is intentional on some level, but does that make it any less annoying?

Overall, this heavy leaning on American Victoriana is the novel’s biggest fault. It feels like Wilson’s been reading some Twain and some books on the American Civil War, and he wants to tell a futuristic story in this mode. I didn’t buy the turning back that we see here – the society of Windup Girl felt a lot more like our future than Wilson’s arbitrarily resetting culture, technology, and science back to 1900. There are also some cheap political shots here that took me out of the narrative. I think my politics are pretty close to Wilson’s, and I agree with most of his critiques of the contemporary US, but I still winced, for instance, when one character explains that America’s European attackers “hate us for our freedoms.” I’d prefer a bit more subtlety in my political satire.

There is plenty to enjoy here, especially if you're looking for a post-apocalyptic novel that's a little different, and much less grim. It’s a fast-paced and easy read, and the narrator is quite likable, despite his cloying naivete. It really does capture the feeling of a boys’ adventure novel, which is certainly the intention, but I’m not sure it worked for me. Mostly, I think it suffers in comparison to the better written and more compelling work by Bacigalupi.

Next week I'll wrap up my 2010 Hugo coverage by revealing my votes and making some predictions...

Grade: B-

2010 Hugo, Locus Fantasy, WFA, Clarke, 2009 BSFA Winner: THE CITY & THE CITY by China Miéville

One of the central stories of the twentieth century is the drawing (and redrawing) of borders. As empires rose and fell over the course of the first two world wars (the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, the British, the Soviet, etc.) borders kept changing, countries were partitioned, and we got immigration debates, ethnic cleansing, and global terrorism as a result. So, it’s an immensely important issue, but one that sf has not delved into often.

China Miéville’s The City & The City is all about the fictions and realities of borders, which are always arbitrary on some level. The Eastern European (maybe Balkan?) cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma not only border each other, they share the same space and are almost everywhere entagled. Therefore, just walking or driving down the street, citizens must always watch not to violate the border by seeing into the other city or even accidentally stepping into it. The novel is full of rich cultural details that explain how much the border defines the everyday lives of the people in this “divided city;” Miéville highlights the fact that borders are human constructions by creating a situation in which people must constantly construct one. Anyone who does violate this border falls into the grasp of a secret police force that bridges the cities called Breach. I would’ve liked a little more history as to how this came about, but I see why Mieville avoided the question (what would be believable?). Still, it would be nice to hear more about how these cities existed on the contentious borders of the Ottoman Empire or the Warsaw Pact.

The actual plot unfolds as a noir mystery. Tyador Borlú is a police detective in Besźel who is to solve the death of a young woman with ties to Ul Qoma. As the mystery unfolds, it raises all sorts of questions about the border, the cities’ twinned histories, and Breach. These genre conventions keep the novel moving at a brisk pace and they make it imminently readable. They also provide some of the novel’s few problems. It is, by necessity, somewhat formulaic, and parts of this novel will feel very familiar if you know the genre at all (it’s very reminiscent of Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union, either through direct inspiration or the shared inspirations). It’s very well done here, though, and the result makes for an engaging read that still leaves a lot to think about. I also personally prefer this concrete murder mystery approach to the dreamlike version of a similar idea in Valente’s Palimpsest. This was a fantastic novel, and it’s easy to see why it’s won so many sf awards this season.

Grade: A-

1967 Hugo Winner – THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS by Robert Heinlein

The fifth and final novel by Robert Heinlein to win a Hugo (and the third in eight years) reenacts the American Revolution on a lunar colony. This is another novel that I read, and loved, when I was a teenager.

It’s the late 21^st century and the moon is home to several million people, most of them descendants of criminals sentenced to the penal colony there. The inhabitants call themselves Loonies, and they’re beginning to get fed up with taking orders from Earth. The colony is managed by a supercomputer called HOLMES, and the novel centers around a technician named Mannie who discovers that the computer has become self-aware. Instead of bumping everyone off like HAL-9000, HOLMES (who Manny soon renames “Mycroft,” or just “Mike” after Sherlock Holmes’ brother) has a sense of humor and likes to play childish pranks on the Loonies.

Before long, Mycroft is holding meetings with lunar dissidents and hatching a plan to rebel against the Earth, which is taking too much of the moon’s food production. An anarchist professor named Bernardo de La Paz (really more of a libertarian, but Heinlein prefers the term Rational Anarchist) discusses political philosophy with Mycroft and becomes a mouthpiece for Heinlein’s personal politics in the process. The moon begins to use its infrastructure to launch some devastating attacks on the Earth, and soon, the dissidents have their independence and are charged with forging a new society.

In a lot of ways, this novel is an extension of Farmer in the Sky. That novel gave us a heroic story of frontier settlement; this novel gives us a frontier society that has grown up and is ready to strike out on its own. Turner’s frontier thesis of American history is still very much in effect in Heinlein’s writing, but we’ve moved to the “American Revolution” phase. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is much concerned with Heinlein’s libertarian politics, which he apparently felt the need to spell out after the accusations of fascism that accompanied Starship Troopers. He also manages to work in some of his pet ideas about unorthodox sexual relationships and open partnerships with a concept of polyandry he calls “line marriage.”

There’s a lot about Heinlein’s politics that I don’t really agree with, and this novel is almost nothing but Heinlein’s politics. Yet, this is by far my favorite Heinlein novel and probably my favorite Hugo winner thus far. The political discussions are at least well-informed and interesting, the Lunar society created by Heinlein is fascinating, and the sentient computer Mycroft Holmes is incredibly fun and lovable. Heinlein’s writing is, as always, clear and direct but also amiable and energetic. He’s the closest thing to a 20^th century science fiction Mark Twain this side of Kurt Vonnegut.

In the 70s and 80s, Heinlein’s novels get a bit more sex-obsessed (sometimes in disturbing ways), and there’s a lot of navel-gazing as his later novels focused on tying together is older novels into a multiverse. But, if you have any interest in science fiction and have somehow missed out on Heinlein, you need to give Stranger or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress a chance.

This novel came in second in the Nebula voting after the dual winners in 1966, while Flowers for Algernon and Babel-17 came in second and third in the Hugo voting. It’s the first time the awards diverge at all, and I’ve got to give the edge to the WorldCon Hugo voters on this one.

Grade: A