2014 Locus SF: ABADDON'S GATE by James S. A. Corey

The third novel of what was originally supposed to be The Expanse Trilogy (at least, that's how I understand it) didn't do as much to advance the story as much as I had hoped. This entry was the first (and last, so far) novel in the series to win a major award, and I get the sense that it is beloved by Expanse fans, but I wasn't too fond of it, and I struggled somewhat to get through it because it feels a bit like it's spinning its wheels, but also because of one character that I found particularly annoying.

The extraterrestrial encounters of the first two books have escalated to create a mysterious object in the outer solar system. The crew of the Rocinante, a ship that was central to the first two books, find themselves drawn towards this mystery alongside the competing powers of the solar system (the Earth, Mars, and Outer colonies)  and competition between these powers again leads to conflict. Meanwhile, we get some new POV characters for the Game of Thrones-style 3rd-person limited narration: a gruff officer from the outer colonies put in an awkward position by his Earthly birth named Bull, a lesbian Christian missionary named Anna, and Melba...ugh, Melba.

This series has always been pretty pulpy, and that continues here. The pulp elements help make all of the books fun, propulsive reads. But, Melba takes the pulp to a whole other level, one that carried past suspension of disbelief for me. She's a vicious augmented fighter motivated by a psychopathic need for revenge who develops an intricate plot to destroy the man she blames for the destruction of her wealthy family. In other words, she's completely over-the-top, and both her actions and the success she achieves in her aims are pretty ridiculous. To make this all the more frustrating, her crazy arc drives and dominates this book that is ostensibly about humanity's contact with the remnants of an intergalactic empire. That last bit is the story I want to read, especially with these fun characters and Corey's fast-paced style and storytelling that are both accessible and imaginative. But, most of the book involves humans fighting each other while being manipulated by this master-plotter vengeance heiress.

This is it for me and the Expanse for now, that I won't rule out picking up another entry down the line some time. It's a series that I'm obviously ambivalent about: its biggest virtue - pulpy, exciting plotting, is also often its biggest downfall.

Grade: C+

2012: CALIBAN'S WAR by James S. A. Corey

The second book in the Expanse series has much in common with the first. For one, it carries on many of the best qualities of Leviathan Wakes - it is an exceptionally fast-paced page-turner with some compelling characters and ideas. It is also, at times, perhaps a little too much like that book in plot and themes.

I don't want to get too deep into the plot because my general spoiler-avoidance policy applies to the series as well as this book. Basically, there are tense relations between Earth and Mars that come to a head with an attack on Ganymede - an attack that is also connected to some of the evil corporate hijinks from the previous novel. The attack involves a power-suited Martian space marine named Bobbie Draper (is this a Mad Men reference?). In the midst of the attack, a botanist named Praxidlike Meng discovers that his young daughter has been kidnapped by evil scientists. And there's an Earth diplomat named Avasarala who is beginning to realize that there are some nefarious goings-on within the UN government. Eventually, all of these characters will come together with the surviving heroes of the first book to investigate the attack and the kidnapping, and to get involved in some naval-style space warfare.

So, yes, exciting and fast-paced. But, it is also a bit of a replay of the first novel. A character is obsessively looking for a missing girl. An evil corporation is experimenting with alien life. All of the characters will come together for a couple of action set-pieces. And Something Big will happen at the end that Changes Everything. The biggest problem with the replay here is that it means putting off dealing with the previous book's Something Big for basically this entire novel. I was really looking forward to dealing with that here.

The new characters add some diversity (in race and gender, but also in their more general point of view), but they do bring up one other complaint: everyone in these books is hyper-competent. This is a standard problem with thrillers and genre fiction, but Avasarala makes it especially clear here. We're constantly told that her political skills let her read incredibly subtle clues and game out scenarios dozens of moves ahead. As someone who pays attention to politics, I would not say incredible empathy and foresight are skills that many politicians possess to some preternatural degree. Then again, at no point do this books really make a claim of gritty realism, so maybe I shouldn't pick at that particular nit.

Despite some negatives, the Expanse remains a very enjoyable series, and, as easy reads, these books are ideal for my return to novel reading after my fairly long break.

Grade: B

2011: LEVIATHAN WAKES by James S. A. Corey

The Locus SF  award in 2014 decided to torment me and give best novel to the third book of a series - Abaddon's Gate of The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey (a pen name of writing team Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). So, I have to go back and read books one and two - luckily I had already read the first book, Leviathan Wakes.

The Corey duo are closely associated with George R. R. Martin (Franck is his assistant), and part of the point of The Expanse seems to be to take the formula that made Song of Ice and Fire so huge and apply it to hard sf. The result is a sprawling story that blends politics and traditional genre tropes with chapters that give 3rd person-limited points-of-view on a discreet set of characters. Though, when I say "genre tropes," I should add that there's plenty of noir detective and horror to go with the hard sf setting. And unlike Martin's dense and ambitious work, Leviathan Wakes is heavy on action and light on theme or even world-building.

The two main characters are Jim Holden, the captain of a freighter working beyond the asteroid belt, and Detective Miller, a cop on the asteroid colony of Ceres. The latter gets the aforementioned noir bits, while Holden gets to run around through some action scenes. It turns out that both of them are tangled up in the same case, which involves extra-terrestial life (which leads to the horror elements) and an inter-planetary conspiracy to start a war across the solar system.

If it sounds incredibly pulpy, it is. But, the authors do manage to put some thought into the colonies and conspiracies and even the characters. It's not high-art, but it's not trash either; instead it threads the needle like an unusually smart summer blockbuster. It's a very entertaining read that zips by, even at nearly 600 pages.

I haven't seen the SyFy series yet, but I am intrigued.

Grade: B+

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+

1956 - THE STARS MY DESTINATION by Alfred Bester

Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man won the first Hugo, so reading this novel, usually considered his masterpiece, feels a bit like circling back to this blog's beginning. Many authors look up to Bester as the father of a darker branch of science fiction - his characters are morally ambiguous and his plots darker than his golden age forebearers', and he's sometimes seen as a sort of proto-cyberpunk figure as a result (Gibson's rather fond of him). This novel certainly brings the dark and morally ambiguous.

In the 25th century, humanity has colonized the solar system, and a war has broken out between the inner planets and the outer colonies. Also, people have learned to teleport across vast distances with the power of their minds. This "jaunting" can't cross space, but it has revolutionized human society and spawned a new puritanical sequestering of women as it's become much easier for amourous types to sneak around. Also, there are a few telepaths. And the heirs of corporations rule as a corrupt aristocracy. Oh yeah, and there's a primal substance that can cause cosmic explosions! Also, wacky space circus! So, yes, as with The Demolished Man, Bester piles on the science fiction concepts, and the novel seems more interested in rolling out ideas than giving us a linear plot. Before this blog, I'd read novels from the '40s and '50s before, but they were generally by Bradbury, Asimov and Heinlein...I'm beginning to sense that those three are rare Golden Age writers in their ability to remain focused and give the readers something approaching a traditional three act structure.

Loosely borrowing its plot from The Count of Monte Cristo the novel centers on Gullivar (Gully) Foyle, a soldier who spends a nerve-racking 167 days on a failing spaceship called the Nomad constantly on the verge of running out of oxygen. He is elated when a ship called the Vorga arrives, but then devastated when it leaves him stranded. He is then rescued by the "Scientific People," inhabitants of the Sargasso asteroid who have turned into a tribal people (my favorite creation in the book - I was sorry to see that they got so little attention). The Scientific People cover Gully's face with tattoos before he escapes and makes his way back to Earth, where he dedicates himself to destroying the Vorga. He attacks and rapes a telepathic teleportation instructor, attempts to assassinate the head of the corporation that owns the Vorga, Presteign of Presteign, runs afoul of a radioactive detective named Saul Dagenham, escapes from a darkened, underground anti-teleportation super-prison, disguises himself as a circus entertainer, and falls in love with Presteign's blind and callous daughter. Meanwhile, the war rages on, everyone looks for the cosmic McGuffin of PyrE, and the novel ends with a series of revelations and a psychedelic jaunt through time and space (that includes some innovative typographical games).

This novel is jam-packed, and, as with The Humanoids, this is both a strength and weakness. Many of these ideas are fascinating and writing the above actually endeared the novel to me more than reading it all. In execution, it can feel like a jumbled patchwork, and the characters get pushed aside in favor of weirdness. Gully himself is intriguing. I guess he's supposed to be twisted by his time on the Nomad, or by the other manipulations in his life, and that's supposed to explain his occasional bouts of violence. It's still hard to get over the rape in the first third of the novel. I guess it's brave for Bester to have his protagonist be so brutal - again, a testament to his noir roots - but Gully never gains the complexity or depth to justify the incident's inclusion. It feels like provocation for provocation's sake. Presteign, Dagenham and Gully's other nemeses feel like generic "men in suits" who speak in exposition. The women are especially atrocious. The whole identity of the victim of Gully's attack, telesender Robin Wednesbury, is wrapped up in her victimhood, Gully's cellmate Jisbella McQueen is an over-the-top femme fatale, and the main love interest in part naive waif/part femme fatale. I didn't care about any of them, probably Gully least of all, and reading the novel became a game waiting for the next wacky idea to keep my interest. At least I never had to wait too long.  

If I sound disappointed in this book (and I'm sure I do), it's very much a product of my expectations. It's easy to see why this is a classic, and, as with The Demolished Man or The Humanoids, I had a good time. But, as with those books, this novel did not seem to be capable of transcending its genre. It's pulpy goodness, but it's not classic literature, and it could be. It should be!

By the way, I believe this novel would have been eligible for the Hugos in 1957, the strange year when the Hugos couldn't be bothered to have a novel category. I'm pretty sure this would have been nominated, and it probably would have won, though I think I'd still favor Asimov's The Naked Sun.

Grade: B+

2009 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – WALL-E

Normally, I’d cover this category in the first week of covering a year, but this is actually my last “catch-up” review (at least, unless I start tackling short fiction Hugo winners somewhere down the line), and I wanted to end on a high note. And it doesn’t get much higher than this.

I adore this movie; that’s about the only way to describe my reaction to it. It’s my favorite Pixar film, and that’s saying a lot. It’s a masterpiece of animation, of science fiction, just of film in general. It takes place in the 28th century, on an Earth so polluted that it has become inhospitable to life. Robots have been given the task of collecting the mountains of trash that litter (pun!) the planet and condense and stack them, but most of the robots (called “Wall-E” units) have worn out, except for one resourceful little guy who replaces his own worn out parts. He manages to find some pleasure in his dreary work, collecting little pieces that amuse him to decorate a little lair. He also loves “Hello Dolly!” One day, a more advanced, feminine robot shows up to look for plant life, and Wall-E falls in love. When they do discover a sprout, a spaceship picks them up, and they end up running around on a space cruiseship amidst a decadent consumer culture of the surviving humans as they try to trigger a recolonization and renewed clean-up of Earth.

The robots all have limited speech, yet they get most of the screentime, so the film is short on dialog, and yet it moves briskly and manages to entertain and keep forward momentum. I haven’t seen physical storytelling this funny, effective and powerful outside of Charlie Chaplin. And, Wall-E does a great job balancing a bleak vision of future Earth, right out of those ‘70s eco-dystopias, with the beauty in the trash. Nothing hits my aesthetic sweet-spot quite like a sense of wonder, hope or love in the midst of ruin and despair, and few movies hit that sweet-spot as perfectly as this. It’s also a rich sf film full of references to the sf canon: 2001, Star Wars, and, hey, Sigourney Weaver even makes an appearance. There are lots of cool rockets and robots to boot. I can’t say that the film asks probing speculative questions about robot emotions – Wall-E and EVE are in love; deal with it.

The film isn’t particularly nuanced or detailed in the environmental questions it raises either. There’s a satire of consumerism with the brand Buy N’ Large (fronted by the almost-always welcome Fred Willard), but it’s pretty broad. Also, of all the environmental problems we face, burying ourselves in trash really isn’t one of them – landfills may be an eyesore that no one wants in their backyard, but there is ample space for our trash. But, mountains of trash and yellow noxious sky serve as a strong enough metaphor. People may have found the critiques here heavy-handed, but, considering the state of climate change legislation in the US, maybe people do need to be smacked in the head with broad metaphors. Again and again. And then some more. And the film, for all of the dirty, trashy, hopeless world it depicts, still gives us that sprout, and still has its bloated consumerist humans stand up for hope in the end. And I love it for that.

Grade: A

2003 Philip K. Dick Award – ALTERED CARBON by Richard Morgan

It’s several hundred years from now and widespread technology allows people to record and transfer their brains onto “cortical stacks” that can be switched between bodies or transmitted interstellar distances.  Takeshi Kovacs is a badass mercenary from a colonized planet called Harlan’s World with special training that has made him into an “envoy” skilled at kicking ass in any body. After he and his girl are hunted down and killed, he wakes up on Earth. He’s been put into a new “sleeve,” or body, by an incredibly old and rich man (called a "Methuselah") named Laurens Bancroft to investigate the apparent suicide of his previous sleeve. As Kovacs delves into seedy, hypocritical Earth society in Bay City (formerly San Francisco) he meets rough characters, multiple dames, hookers with hearts of gold, femmes fatale, crooked cops, less-crooked cops, and pretty much every other hardboiled cliché you can imagine. Working with a female cop, who has an interest in his current sleeve, named Ortega, he uncovers a massive criminal conspiracy.

As an sf fan, I’m very familiar with the battle to get decent respect for genre fiction. There are certain critics in certain venues that aren’t going to give many speculative works a chance, and I do resent that a bit. However, there are works that just grab you by the lapels, knee you in the privates, and yell “I am genre trash! Whatever you do, DO NOT take me seriously.” I’m not saying that Morgan’s book fits that bill…but there are certainly times that it does. It’s a fascinating mixture of old and new. Morgan plays some interesting game with the “altered carbon” technology that allows people to resurrect their minds and switch bodies. He covers a lot of the bases – multiple copies, virtual worlds, and some fairly depraved applications. He’s thought out the implications of his ideas, and scattered the book with hints of a rich futuristic culture (not to mention tantalizing bits about alien ruins on Mars that are never really explored).

And, Morgan’s grafted it all onto a very traditional tough-guy private eye crime story. The book is thick with tropes, and it’s hard to say whether Morgan is playing with them or just leaning on them. I usually felt the latter. Frankly, I could’ve done without many of them, especially the gruesome torture, casual violence, over-sexualized women, and the running updates on Takeshi’s current level of tumescence. Even when Morgan is discussing new tech, it still feels a bit familiar. There are as many familiar cyberpunk tropes as there are noir tropes.

I never quite got a handle on Kovacs.  We’re continually told he’s an amoral killing machine, and he does rack up quite a body count, but they’re all really awful people, and he spends a lot of time helping the helpless and fighting for justice.  I guess this is another noir trope, but it did feel like the characters have very wobbly moralities that seem to fit the needs of the plot at the time more than anything else. There are also some basic existential issues that are barely touched on. Is a copy of your mind surviving the same as your mind surviving? Doesn’t seem like it. We’re told that Catholics resist resleeving because they believe the soul dies with the original body. I would’ve liked a little more discussion in this direction.

So, that’s a lot of complaining, but, I was entertained most of the time. There are some fun characters, interesting mysteries, intriguing speculative concepts, and exciting action scenes. The hardboiled format is oft-imitated because it works, and this is a perfectly fine entry in the genre. It’s the same mix of interesting ideas and super-violence that I complained about/begrudgingly endorsed in the two Verhoeven films I covered.

Grade: B

2011 Hugo Nominee: Novella - "Troika" by Alastair Reynolds

Speaking of old-fashioned, Reynolds’ novella takes us to one of the most classic of sf tropes: the Big Dumb Object. In this case, we have a mission of later-twenty-first-century neo-Soviets going to examine a massive satellite complex they call the Matroyshka (named after the nesting dolls because it’s composed of a series of shells). Most of the story is told in flashbacks by an escapee from a mental institution as we learn that the members of the expedition have not fared well upon their return to Earth. There are a few interesting twists along the way, including a nice one that serves as the source of the title. The biggest twist, however, doesn’t really seem to serve any narrative purpose other than to give the story something shocking for its last ten pages.

Alastair Reynolds is at the vanguard of space opera and hard sf today, and I have a review of one of his works coming up when we resume our march through awards history in the fall (did I just use the royal we?). I’m not sure if this is the best introduction to his work though. Whereas many of our stories this year have done new ideas in a clean, retro-style; this feels like an old cliché dressed up in a more contemporary, Big Ideas style. I find that combination less appealing myself. It’s not that there was anything I actively disliked about this story; it’s quite decent. It just didn’t really capture my imagination (and it didn’t come close to drawing an emotional reaction from me) like a good sf story should.

Grade: B-

2011 Hugo Nominee: Novella - "The Sultan of the Clouds" by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov's, September 2010)

We’re back to our theme from the novelette nominees. This is a rather old-fashioned story with a simple plot and plenty of exposition to help us get our bearings. A few centuries in the future, humans have colonized much of the solar system, and a group of oligarchs control much of the colonized territory. Our narrator, David Tinkerman, is the assistant of a specialist on the terraforming of Mars named Leah Hamakawa. He’s also helplessly in love with her. Leah is invited by the young sultan of Venus for a visit, and we spend most of the story in floating cities that bob on the immense air pressure of the second planet in a temperate layer of the upper atmosphere.

It’s a cool concept for a world, and Landis makes sure to lay out the workings and history clearly (he even sets up an info dump as the narrator reading a history text on his trip to Venus). It’s a very simple story though, especially for its length. We get the physical world building and a little cultural world building with Venus’s marital practices, we get to see the sultan and a plot he’s hatched, and then there are some sky pirates. The end. We spend enough time with the narrator that this should be something of a character piece, but Tinkerman is pretty generic and Hamakawa is basically a non-entity. We’re told she’s something of a mystery, and we never really get past that. What exactly is Tinkerman’s attraction?

Some science fiction devolves into a delivery mechanism for ideas, and that’s definitely what’s happened here. Reading about Landis’s Venus is really thrilling, the rest is unnecessary trimming.

Grade: B-

2011 Not-a-Hugo Nominee: Dram. Pres., Short Form CAPRICA

Caprica was a fascinating show. Its ideas and themes were fascinating, how it presented them was fascinating, and its utter failure was perhaps most fascinating of all.

Let me start out by saying: I like Caprica. I wasn’t always sure that I did, but, in the final analysis, I liked it a great deal. Here’s the shocker: I liked it better than Battlestar Gallactica, and I’m more likely to revisit it in the future.

Caprica takes place some seventy years before the Battlestar reboot, and it tracks the creation of the robotic cylons. The series follows three families connected by terrorism. Daniel Greystone (Eric Stoltz) runs the massive corporation that makes highly popular virtual reality goggles. His daughter Zoe (Alessandra Torressni) is a genius who designs an artificial copy of herself. His wife, Amanda (Paula Macolmson), gets into some zany hijinks over the course of the series. The Adama family are immigrants to Caprica from Tauron. Joseph (Esai Morales) tries to assimilate while his brother Sam remains involves in Tauron crime family activities. Joseph has a son named William, a name that should be familiar to BSG fans. Zoe, and Joseph’s wife and daughter Tamara, are killed in a terrorist attack on a shuttle orchestrated by monotheists. Clarice Willow (Polly Walker) is the local monotheistic mastermind; she’s part of a large polygamous family. Zoe was a devotee of Clarice, and her surviving friend, Lacy (Magda Aponowicz), ends up getting drawn into Clarice’s plans as well.

That was probably hard to follow if you haven't seen the show - basically, it's an exploration of robotics and VR in a society riven with decadence and religious conflict. It’s also sprawling family drama with a meandering plot. It doesn’t have the clear-cut character and plot hooks of BSG, where humankind is running for its life and most of the characters are obsessed, crazy, and/or take-no-prisoners badasses. Caprica is more complex, which is why I liked it better, and probably why it failed. On top of that, you have BSG fatigue (that last half season was weird), and the overall change from an action show to a highly speculative family drama. Prequelitis shouldn’t really be a factor – we know so little about the start of the cylon war that there’s plenty of surprises possible, and the character you’re least likely to think can die actually does. Still, the show has so many strikes against it, it’s failure seems like a foregone conclusion in hindsight.

Not to mention the fact that the show is far from perfect. The first half can move extremely slowly, while the second half (with cancellation looming) zooms at an insane pace. The plots, as I mentioned, seem to wander around randomly. Amanda’s story is especially indicative of this – she’s with Daniel, then she’s not, then she is again. She hates Zoe, she loves Zoe, she has to expose Zoe, she has to save Zoe. She’s suicidal. She’s dead? She’s an undercover agent? Paula Macolmson is a trooper through it all, but the character really is a trainwreck. There’s a similar stop and start/back and forth with Joseph Adama and the avatar of his dead daughter Tamara. And, they can’t seem to decide if Daniel is pure evil or misguided and overconfident.

So, it does go off the rails on occasion, but the show has a lot to offer. The VR culture is interesting and compelling, and this may be the finest realization of cyberpunk themes on television ever. The show also does much more to establish the twelve colonies setting in one season than BSG did in four. One of my biggest complaints about BSG is that it never felt like a coherent universe. The twelve colonies on Caprica are still a bit too similar to our own Earth, but at least we get some more details about the different ethnicities and their traditions. The look of the show is fantastic as well.

Recommended episodes:

“Pilot” – The show is heavily serialized, so you have to start at the beginning. I also think that this is where the show went wrong with the audience, who were expecting something different. If you go in with an open mind, I think the show’s potential is clearer. Grade: A-

“There is Another Sky” – My favorite episode of the series explores the virtual version of Caprica City for some cyberpunk action. Grade: A

“Dirtearters” – An exploration of Tauron history through Sam and Joseph’s childhoods. This episode really offers that grounded exploration of ethnicity that I found lacking in BSG, which was more likely to bring up characters ethnicities out of the blue to serve melodramatic one-off plots late in later seasons. Grade: B+

“Here There Be Dragons”/“Apotheosis” – The premature conclusion of the series does its best to tie up loose ends and bridge the gap with BSG. It works surprisingly well, and the ending montage is especially effective. Grade: B+

Overall series grade: B

2011 Hugo Nominee: Novelette - "Plus or Minus" by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov's, December 2010)

This story follows the crew of a grungy 22nd-century asteroid-mining ship ironically called the Shining Legend. We spend about half the story meeting the crew, especially the point-of-view character, a teenage girl named Mariska Volochkova. In the second half, something goes wrong with over a hundred days left in their trawl through the solar system, and the crew has to come up with a way to conserve oxygen.

The “technical problem in space” is a classic hard sf plotline. So much so that I get a little nostalgic whenever I read a story in this mode (come to think of it, “For Want of a Nail” qualifies as well). There are some new things here – most of the crew are clones genetically engineered for space travel, and everyone can link their thoughts, or “mindfeed” (I’m assuming through some sort of wireless implants).

Still, the technical details are all pretty boilerplate, so the story’s success or failure rests on characters and atmosphere. Luckily, both are pretty darn good. Mariska is solid enough, and her relationship with her boss, mother, and flirtatious coworker all worked for me. And, the ending worked quite well to boot. A very solid story that's familiar in a good way.

Grade: B+

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

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

2010 Hugo nominee, Dramatic Pres., Long Form: Avatar, Screenplay and Directed by James Cameron (Twentieth Century Fox)

Avatar is James Cameron's box-office-record-shattering, 3D special effects extravaganza. A crippled ex-marine named Jake (Sam Worthington) volunteers to work in a sort of virtual reality-controlled alien body to negotiate with the natives of the large moon Pandora. Jake works for an evil Earth corporation that wants to mine a rare mineral with a stupid name, and they have come into conflict with the natives, called Na'vi, as a result. Jake must eventually choose sides in this fight.

I already wrote an apologia of sorts for Avatar back in Oscar season, but it does feel like any positive review of the film these days has to be defensive. Honestly, I don't think the film will win the Hugo; I get the sense that the conventional wisdom on the film has shifted from "it's an awesome game-changer" to "it's an overrated, derivative, and stupid spectacle." I think a backlash was inevitable when a movie with some glaring flaws was that successful ($2.5 billion+ worldwide, and still growing). I, however, still like it quite a bit, and after watching it again for this review, I even think it holds up on the small screen in 2D, though the experience was certainly diminished.

Let me start with those glaring flaws. I've seen the film called everything from anti-American to racist. I don't have a lot of time for these political arguments, though I do think the "the white guy saves the day, yet again" issue does have some traction. I think there are strong narrative reasons to have a POV character, especially in a film about aliens, so I don't mind nearly as much as I mind, say, Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, or Glory (I usually call this the "Zwick effect" after the director of the latter two examples). I also think that while the Na'vi are obvious analogues for earthbound indigenous peoples, especially Native Americans, you can't think of them as more than analogues. The Na'vi may comment on the historical treatment of Native Americans, but you shouldn't see them in any way as realistic depictions of Native Americans themselves. You could get into a whole debate about portraying Native Americans as "children of nature," and the implications, both good and bad, of that stereotype. But the Na'vi are literally linked into nature in a way that Native Americans never were. The analogies do break down eventually.

And yes, Avatar is also derivative. It's Dances with Smurfs + Disney's Pocahontas + Ferngully x LeGuin's "The Word for World is Forest." Yes, and Star Trek=Wagon Train + Horatio Hornblower x Forbidden Planet. And Star Wars=The Searchers + Hidden Fortress x Buck Rogers. And so on. Of course, lots of science fiction classics are re-imaginings of historical events or classic stories in a new context. Cameron at least combines his influences in some interesting ways.

And there are more complaints. The plot is predictable? Well, yes, but at least it makes sense, which is apparently asking a lot of a blockbuster film in the age of Michael Bay's Transformer movies. The dialogue is flat? Check. The characters are static archetypes? I'm afraid so; that's the film's greatest weakness as far as I'm concerned...

Okay, it's not perfect!

It is, however, visually stunning and wonderfully imaginative. It's thrilling, and the world-building is meticulous. And, while there are a lot of fantastic elements, there's also a solid grounding in science from richly-conceived ecosystems to astronomical details. There's a blend here of planetary romance, hard sf, and computer age ideas that I think is really fascinating. Plus, it's all in service of a story that does relate (albeit, perhaps too simplistically) to issues of environment, neo-colonialism, and indigenous rights. It builds a new world that illuminates our own, and it uses groundbreaking special effects not just for cheap thrills, but to further engross us in that world. This film is pure, classic science fiction on a scale that I don't think we see that often.

Grade: A-

2010 Hugo nominee (and Nebula winner), short story: "Spar" by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09)

Now, this is a short story. Rather than give a little hint of a broader world or tell a cute vignette, this novel takes an unusual (and provocative) situation and uses it to briefly explore ideas of alien otherness, sexuality, and psychology.

The story is not for the easily offended. There are graphic (though mostly evocative rather than descriptive) depictions of sex. In fact, that’s pretty much the entire story.

There’s so little plot here, I’m afraid to spoil it. Let’s just say it involves the interactions of a female narrator and a very non-humanoid alien, whose ship she is trapped on after an accident. We get hints of what has happened, and we get a sense of how the narrator mourns and how lost she is. Taken straight, it’s an original depiction of alien interactions and the psychology of a desperate situation, but I think the story also has deeper things to say about sex and relationships. It actually makes some of the same points as Palimpsest, though I things it's sharper for being shorter.

Overall, the story is more than the sum of its small word count, something that’s rare and special in short fiction.

Available at Clarkesworld in both print and audio.

Grade: A-

2010 Not-a-Hugo Nominee GALILEO'S DREAM by Kim Stanley Robinson

My third and final not-a-nominee entry. Galileo’s Dream is an ambitious work from one of sf’s most prominent (and, I’d say, best) writers, so I expected to see it on the nomination list. When it didn’t appear, I wondered if it’s late US release date (December 29th!) had hindered it in some way. For all I know, that could be the case, and it may even be eligible again next year. However, while I liked the book, now that I’ve read it, I’m not quite so miffed to see it absent from the nominee list.

Robinson’s main focus is on writing a biographical novel of Galileo Galilei, the seventeenth century scientist who made a host of discoveries that reinforced the idea that the earth revolved around the sun and paved the way for Isaac Newton a few decades later. Galileo emphasized mathematics and empiricism, and thus also influenced the modern practice of science. And, he made some of the first important observations with a telescope, discovering Jupiter’s largest moons among other celestial objects. When Galileo published his observations, he faced persecution by the Catholic Church, which had committed itself to a geocentric view of the universe that put the Earth at the center of everything (ironically, this was the result of a thirteenth century bout of rationalism in the Church that had Thomas Aquinas synchronizing Greek thinkers like Ptolemy and Aristotle with the Bible, and Aquinas was also persecuted and recanted, but that’s a whole tangent that Robinson doesn’t really get into).

So, about 3/5ths of the novel covers Galileo’s life, which is suitably operatic: he has an abusive mother, he suffers bouts of debilitating (mental?) illness, he fathers three illegitimate children with the same woman, his two daughters end up in a convent and suffer from their own illnesses, he’s caught up in court intrigues, he makes the aforementioned scientific discoveries, and he has a dramatic trial that includes forged evidence and startling testimony. There’s lots of material to work with, and though these biographical portions started out slow, I eventually came to prefer them to the science fiction portions.

So, yes, the other 2/5ths of the novel involve Galileo being plucked out of time by 31st century colonists of Jupiter’s moons. He’s pulled forward by competing factions who are involved in scientific disputes and want to alter Galileo’s destiny for their own purposes. Early on, these sections were very intriguing, and it’s fun to watch Galileo learn about Einstein (though he takes things in a little too easily). But it all gets a bit fuzzy as the story goes on, and we begin to get vague, pseudo-sciencey talk about “entanglement.” Robinson is usually known as a hard sf kind of guy, but, paradoxically, a hard sf version of time travel inevitably takes you to some sort of probabilistic, quantum mechanics-heavy view of the universe. The uncertainty principle is good science, but it’s not very satisfying from a narrative point of view: “ah, yes, you’re the Galileo who died young – or not – or both. Oh well, who cares?” This story just gets more bizarre and more pointless as it goes on, and I found some of the future discoveries about Jupiter to be just plain silly.

There are other weird decisions in the book as well. The future debates all involve the relationship between science and religion, and what it means for human history. But, it’s never explained all that well, and that entire narrative thread feels unfinished. There’s also a first-person narrator, but he generally refers to himself in the third person and drops completely out of the novel for hundreds of pages at a time. Again, I was left wondering what the point was.

There’s a lot to like here. Robinson’s writing and ideas are characteristically strong, and the Galileo material is generally compelling. But, the novel never quite comes together. It’s very unclear and uncertain, which may have been the goal…but it makes for a difficult and unrewarding read.

Grade: B-

2010 Hugo nominee, short story: "The Moment" by Lawrence M. Schoen (Footprints)

This is a very short story, and, honestly, I don’t have much to say about it. I like the image that Schoen creates here. The story takes place at what is presumably Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon. We get a series of vignettes across a cosmological timescale, most of which are long strings of nonsense words and ideas describing various exotic alien species (your typical broccoli-people, “proto-godlings,” etc.). There are also little bits of irony and satire about cosmic bureaucracy. There’s some sort of inspiring message about human courage at the end, but it rang a bit hollow for me and didn’t make a whole lot of sense in context.

It’s hard for me not to read this story in the context of the recent discussions of the cancellation of the Constellation project (NASA's attempt to return to the moon), especially since there’s some satire of audits and cost evaluations. It seems that Schoen is saying “damn the costs, it’s the fraking moon!” (though again, that’s me bringing to the table specific debates that probably hadn’t even happened yet when he wrote this story). It’s a nice sentiment, and one that I’m inclined towards, and yet…

I admire what Schoen did here, but I didn’t particularly like it.

Can be read for free here.

Grade: C-

1980 Locus - TITAN by John Varley

Varley’s Titan is a nice capstone to the ‘70s because...well…because it rips off half the books and films of the past decade.

In the twenty-first century, a ship from Earth called the Ringmaster is exploring Saturn’s moons. The ship has a seven person crew – three men and four women (two of whom are incestuous female clones – we get a lot of details on the characters’ sex lives from the first few pages on). They discover a floating object that’s too perfect to be natural, and it attacks them suddenly when they approach. They awaken in underground isolation tanks but wake up, manage to reconnect (well, most of them), and begin to explore the strange world inside the satellite. They meet centaurs, angels, and flying gas bags while dealing with the strange psychological side effects of their captivity. Most of the novel focuses on the female captain, Cirocco Jones, and we get an exciting final act wherein she undertakes a harrowing quest to find the satellite's creator.

Titan can be a bit slow-going at times, but it also has some very exciting bits, and it really does pick up near the end. It’s well-written, and the characters are interesting enough. The real problem here is that it’s a bit of a pastiche of recent sf ideas. This becomes especially obvious when you’ve been plowing through these books in chronological order. The horny astronaut characters are straight out of Heinlein. The strange alien object in our solar system reminded me of Rama. It’s shaped like a small Ringworld. The characters have to explore after waking up in an alien environment as in Riverworld. Eventually, Varley starts to tip his hat by explicitly referencing his influences – we’re told that Ringmaster looks like the Discovery from 2001, The Wizard of Oz features prominently (and even gets a couple of musical shout-outs), and even Dune and the Death Star (from that one movie) are mentioned by name.

I get that Varley is having a conversation with his influences, but it took me out of the novel every time. And there’s just not enough original and exciting material here to hold the homages together – in the end, it just feels derivative. Maybe the sequels are better? I’d definitely take Fountains of Paradise over this one.

Grade: B-

1980 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, 1979 Saturn – ALIEN

Science fiction movies made a giant leap in the late 70s, and it seems that every year from ’77 to the early nineties produces at least one incontrovertible classic. Alien, Ridley Scott’s blending of space travel and horror, is about as incontrovertible as it gets.

The world of Alien is basically the opposite of Star Trek’s. Our heroes are deep space prospectors – blue collar miners who work for a giant, amoral corporation. There is no faster-than-light travel, and instead, the crew of the ship Nostromo goes into stasis for the long journeys they must undertake in the hopes of a decent profit. They are awakened by a strange transmission and dispatched by the corporation to investigate. They land and find a large alien spaceship, its giant crewmen apparently violently killed. There are other odd signs, and eventually a parasitic organism latches onto the face one of the miners. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid spoilers for this film, I won’t say much more. Suffice it to say, we get one of the most shocking scenes in film history, and before long, the crew of the Nostromo find themselves being knocked off one by one while the titular being chases them around the ship, slasher-movie style.

There are some fantastic performances here – this was, of course, a breakout role for Sigourney Weaver, but Ian Holm, John Hurt, and Tom Skerritt are also fantastic, as is Homicide’s Yaphet Kotto. The real appeal of this film, however, is the mood. The sets are wonderfully gritty and run-down, and the scenes exploring the crashed alien ship, designed by H. R. Giger, are awe-inspiring. For the first hour, this may be the greatest science fiction film ever made. From there, at least for me, the film loses a lot of its appeal. I’m not a big fan of the slasher formula, and Scott stretches the tension well beyond the breaking point. If you are a horror fan though, as well as a science fiction fan, and you have somehow missed this film, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll love it.

Grade: A

1980 Hugo, 1979 Nebula - THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke’s second Hugo and Nebula winning novel focuses on the building of a space elevator on the semi-fictional island-nation of Taprobane (a stand in for Clarke’s adopted home of Sri Lanka). The idea, for those unfamiliar with the concept of a space elevator, is that if you could string some sort of line between Earth and a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, you could avoid the high-energy costs of rockets and simply ship things into space with a quick elevator trip up the wire. It’s technically feasible with more advanced materials than we currently possess, but would be a monumental undertaking.

Clarke sets this massive engineering project in the 22^nd century (the novel spans several decades from conception to near completion). Most of the novel follows engineer Vannevar Morgan and a diplomat living in Taprobane named Rajasinghe. The early novel deals with their attempts to negotiate for some prime mountaintop real estate with a Buddhist monastery; the later novel deals with a harrowing construction accident on the space elevator. Along the way, Clarke also makes time for historical scenes with a 5^th century king who built a fine garden complex near the proposed construction site. There’s also a section on an alien probe that arrives in the solar system (somewhat Rama-like) in the 22^nd century. In other words, the construction project is really just a canvas on which Clarke can throw cool engineering ideas, a fast-paced action sequence, and various thoughts on religion, alien intelligence, family, and history.

I’m a bit divided on whether this is a complete mess or just brilliantly eclectic. The main plot appears, disappears, and then reemerges before shifting into something completely different. Clarke juggles several subplots, and drops more than a few. And, not every idea here feels fully-developed. For instance, Clarke throws out a theory that only mammals would develop religion due to their family structure. He never entirely explains this hypothesis, but from what I gathered, it seemed far too simplistic, both biologically and psychologically.

Still, it hardly seems to matter when the proceedings manage to remain consistently fun and thought-provoking at a level that few science fiction novels can match. Though not as good as Rendevous with Rama, this was one of my favorite novels so far. I’m sorry that there are no more Clarke novels on the agenda.

Grade: A-