1998 Clarke and 1997 BSFA – THE SPARROW by Mary Doria Russell

There’s an oft-heard cry among fans of science fiction novels – “when will mainstream literature accept us?” I think there’s a legitimate beef there, but I also think it’s interesting that the science fiction establishment is quick to reject a science fiction novel from an sf-outsider that *is* quickly accepted by much of the literary mainstream. This book, a first novel, is a good example – since its release it’s been a mainstay of “literature” shelves in bookstores and it’s made the circuit of mainstream book clubs. And, it’s quite good. Yet, it did not get as much attention from sf circles. Russell won a Hugo for best new writer, and she got the BSFA, but this novel didn’t receive a Hugo or Nebula nomination. Its biggest win was the Clarke, which already had a reputation for favoring mainstream writers since its first presentation to Margaret Atwood. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but sometimes I do feel like the lack of communication goes both ways.

The novel follows a Jesuit priest named Emilio Sandoz who returns from a church-sponsored first contact mission in disgrace in 2059. We then flash back to the discovery of the aliens in 2019 (who broadcast beautiful songs over radio waves from just a few light years away), and the assembly of Sandoz’s first contact team, which comes to include other priests, an elderly couple who are close friends of Sandoz, and a beautiful AI programmer with whom Sandoz is smitten, despite his vow of chastity. They travel in a retrofitted asteroid to the planet of Rakhat and meet the planet’s two sentient species, the pastoral Runa and the more sophisticated Jana’ata. Meanwhile, in “present day” sections we see Sandoz on trial, and we learn just how horribly wrong everything went on Rakhat.

The Sparrow’s sf credentials should not be in doubt. In fact, the proceedings feel pretty retro. The religious themes are clearly reminiscent of Blish’s A Case of Conscious, the first contact scenario and space travel have a few elements of Clarke, and the attention to the ethnographic detail of the aliens is straight out of LeGuin. Russell handles all of this elements with great skill, and overall, her prose is pleasant and readable. And she shines with her handling of the characters, especially Sandoz and the considerable development of his faith throughout the novel. I’m not a religious person, but I found the priest’s religious struggles moving and intellectually satisfying.

I’d say the novel’s one major flaw is in its pacing. The early chapters unfold very slowly, and it takes more than half of the novel to get Sandoz to Rakhat. Russell lays down some important character groundwork in these chapters, but she also treads some water. The final chapters unfold very quickly, and some very important events get only brief overviews during the trial.

SF fans might complain, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong, that this novel doesn’t really cover any new ground, but I don’t think every novel needs to have a Vingean “New Idea.” In fact, I’m beginning to think that obsession with Ideas is the central problem with modern sf. I prefer the sort of grounded character work presented here. Forever Peace has more flashes of brilliance, but this is a better novel, taken as a whole.

Grade: A-

1998 Hugo and Nebula – FOREVER PEACE by Joe Haldeman

1977’s Forever War won both the Hugo and Nebula and is one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time. I wasn’t sure it lived up to the hype, but I did like it, and it’s stayed with me since I read it. This novel is not a sequel to that earlier book – it takes place in an entirely different world; in keeping with the times, it’s much less space opera and much more cyberpunk – but it’s at its best when it evokes the same sense of war and world weariness that seems to have come from Haldeman’s experiences in the Vietnam War.

It’s 2043 and nanotechnology provides everyone in developed countries with all of their basic needs…though not always particularly well. Another common technology is mental ”jacking” which allows people to link their minds to others’ or to machines. The novel’s narrator, Julian Class, is an African-American man who uses his jack to remotely control a “soldierboy” fighting robot, deployed in an intractable war with most of the southern hemisphere (Julian spends most of his time fighting in Central America and Colombia). A linked group of rebels under the banner of “Ngumi” provide the ubiquitous enemy there, and they have also managed a nuclear attack on Atlanta (though there are suggestions that elements within the US government have worked to continue the war). Between missions, Julian is able to fly back to his home in Texas and observe the media coverage of the war, which most Americans follow like a sport. You could say that the Ngumi War is a kind of “War on Terror,” and Forever Peace shows excellent foresight on this front.

Piloting a soliderboy, and fighting the Ngumi terrorists, causes a great deal of mental stress, and Julian is especially tormented by the experience. He’s often on the verge of suicide. The first half of the novel allows us to see Julian in military actions, effectively portrays his own unhappiness, and establishes a richly drawn future America. In the second half, his older girlfriend Amelia Harding takes on a larger role as her own scientific research raises the stakes of ongoing war. The titular “forever peace” refers to a sort of pacifist revolution that Julian joins, as well as the possibility of death or even the end of the world, which Amelia’s research shows to be a real possibility. I found this second half much weaker. Actually, it’s flat-out bad. There are a lot of contrivances in how the bigger threats and possible resistance emerge; Julian knows exactly the right people to move the plot along. And, as the plot gets bigger and crazier, it simultaneously becomes a by-the-numbers thriller with some rather generic villains (a sexy fundamentalist-Christian super-assassin, in particular, is very over-the-top, and she takes over the novel in the last hundred pages).

The novel does fall down because of these second-half problems. It’s certainly no Forever War. It is very well-written though, and there’s an interesting trick with the narration, which occasionally switches to third person-omniscient rather suddenly (though I did think this kind of gave away the ending). More importantly, just like Forever War, it’s a very wise cautionary tale that relates closely to the world of today. Haldeman knows war, and he knows how to convey its horrors. Throw in an excellent first half and a host of interesting ideas, and I would recommend this novel, despite its weaknesses. Maybe quit around page 150…

Grade: B-

1997 Locus Fantasy – A GAME OF THRONES by George R. R. Martin

Ah, we come to the end of 1997, and we just happen to come upon a novel with a high profile televisions adaptation debuting on HBO over the weekend. Okay, I shuffled the schedule a little bit to get this in here, but not much!

George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series is one of the biggest sensations in fantasy from the past fifteen years not named Harry Potter. It certainly built up quite a cache within the geek community. At six or seven books, averaging about a thousand pages each, it’s not the longest high fantasy series of all time, but it’s up there. It certainly gives Martin room to stretch out and tell a very epic story, to the extent that this first volume feels like 800 pages of prologue.

Martin has created a relatively gritty world, where many of the fantasy elements, like dragons, mages, legendary warriors, and “children of the forest,” are pushed to the fringes. The novel’s little person, rather than coming from some separate race of dwarves or hobbits, is a human with a genetic condition. Most of the novel focuses on the political maneuverings of a few of the world’s noble families. We especially focus on the noble Starks from the north, and the scheming Lannisters. Eddard Stark is a close friend of the King, and becomes his Hand (sort of a Chief of Staff), while Cersei Lannister is the King’s wife. Eddard’s five legitimate children find themselves caught up in this contest, as do Cersei’s brothers, including Tyrion, the aforementioned little person. Meanwhile, Eddard’s bastard son Jon Snow takes a position on the northern Wall, a frontier beyond which mystical forces are perhaps marshalling for an invasion as a decades-long winter threatens to descend on the world. We also see Daenerys, the daughter of the previous domineering king, whom the Starks and Lannisters had overthrown. She marries into a grounp of Mongol-like nomads in an attempt to marshal an army to retake the throne for her family. Each chapter follows one of the eight or so main characters as the political situation slowly falls apart within and the threats grow from without.

Martin’s prose isn’t fancy, but it’s quite effective. He can establish a scene with rich details, or he can move things along at a quick pace when necessary. He’s created a very rich world with some compelling characters, and it’s easy to see why these books are so popular. However, I have to say that I didn’t quite love this novel as much as I wanted to, but I’m not sure it’s Martin’s fault. As I’ve been realizing since I read the Riddlemaster trilogy, High Fantasy doesn’t do much for me these days. I’m not going to say I’ve grown out of High Fantasy, because that sounds more judgmental than I mean to be. I guess I’d say that High Fantasy and I have grown apart. For instance, even though I admired the detailed character work that Martin does here, which really does the most to set this fantasy series apart from others, I didn’t like many of the characters. The Starks’ high fallutin’ nobility, their obsession with honor and loyalty, were all somewhat alienating. The only characters I related to on any level were Tyrion, Jon Snow, and maybe Eddard’s proto-feminist daughter Arya. All of them are as alienated from this society by conditions of their birth as I would feel. Martin deserves a lot of credit for creating these outsider characters to question the values of his medieval society – values which are too often unexamined in other fantasy works. But, that doesn’t change the fact that this novel made me spend a solid 500 or more pages with characters I didn’t find particularly interesting. I will say that there were some very captivating bits near the end where they began to delve deeper into the world’s mythology that I really enjoyed, and the final chapter contained a pretty great twist.

It’s an impressive book, and I’m looking forward to the HBO adaptation. I also want to read more…eventually. The next two volumes also won the Locus Fantasy award, in ’99 and ’01, but I think I may wait a while longer before I dig back in…

Grade: B

1997 Saturn – MEN IN BLACK

The Saturn is far from the most prestigious award that I’m covering, but I wanted to include it for the sake of variety in my movie reviews. It has also awarded some very strong films that outshined their more prestigious Hugo competitors in the long-run (Soylent Green over Sleeper, Terminator over 2010, 12 Monkeys over Babylon 5). So, the Saturn has recognized its fair share of strong sf movies. This is not one of them.

Men in Black is a big-budget science fiction action comedy special effects extravaganza. There’s also some sort of story and characters in there, but they’re mostly overwhelmed by a combination of slime jokes and cg goo aliens. The film, adapted from an obscure Marvel comic book whose existence I cannot verify, taps into the alien conspiracy craze that the super-popular X-Files had rekindled at this point while adding lots of elements from the aesthetics of Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton (Spielberg executive produced, though director Barry Sonnenfeld seems more indebted to Burton on this one). The men in black are mysterious well-dressed government agents who cover up alien encounters. Tommy Lee Jones plays an uber-professional man in black, basically by reprising his role from The Fugitive. Will Smith plays the headstrong new recruit in a set up that is only slightly incredibly generic. Rip Torn is the bossy boss. Linda Fiorentino is underused as the love interest. Tony Shaloub and others play weird aliens, just barely passing as humans. I think I’m listing the cast because there’s so little plot to recount. Aliens threaten to blow up the world, and the Jones/Smith team must stop them. The film undercuts itself by repeatedly reiterating that the plot may seem exciting, but this is really just a normal, boring day at the office for the men in black.

If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m not a fan of this movie. It’s quite popular among lots of sf fans, but it rubbed me the wrong way the first time I saw it, and it rubbed me the wrong way again this time. Jones could pull this roll off in his sleep (and, he may actually be sleeping through most of the movie – what are those sunglass hiding?), and Will Smith is his usual, sickeningly charismatic self. They’re the best things about this mostly stupid film. There’s a fair amount of childish gross-out humor, which is generally not my favorite, and the rest of the jokes depend on the idea that anyone at all unusual must be an alien.* “New Yorkers sure are weirdos, they must be aliens!” Har…har? I don’t want to seem oversensitive; a smarter script could probably make these things work. This is not a smart script.

So, yeah, not funny. Not even a good riff on the alien conspiracy idea. The best thing I can say about this film is that it’s very short and quite inoffensive…and yet, I am offended by its inoffensiveness. Sorry, I think I have an irrational hatred for this film. The fact that it won in a good year for sf-on-film over the likes of Gattaca, Contact, and The Fifth Element just makes me even more annoyed.

The sequel, by the way, makes this movie look like The Godfather II.

Grade: C-

*By the logic of the film, shouldn’t Rip Torn be an alien rather than a man in black?

1997 Nebula – THE MOON AND THE SUN by Vonda McIntyre

It’s been a while since Dreamsnake, but McIntyre becomes the sixth author to win a second Nebula for best novel (only LeGuin has more than two – she has four). This is a historical novel set in 1693 in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, but with one major sf element.

I’ve gone off on historical fantasy before (Gloriana, Dragon Waiting); in short, I love it in theory, but usually dislike it in practice. This novel represents one of my greatest pet peeves about historical fiction in general – characters with a modern mindset who condemn the prejudices of the past. That’s not to say that the prejudices of the past shouldn’t be depicted in historical fiction, but exempting a pet character from said prejudices damages believability and precludes subtlety. Here we have the beautiful, young Marie-Josephe de la Croix, who hates the racism and sexism she sees at court, is sensitive to the idea that an animal may be sentient, openly questions the Pope and King, corresponds with Newton and van Leeuwenhoek, falls in love with an atheist dwarf, and frees her Turkish slave. Her one limitation is a prudishness instilled in her at a convent, which she overcomes fairly quickly and easily. She has a thoroughly late-twentieth-century mind and thus sticks out in McIntyre’s seventeenth-century setting like a sore thumb. I much prefer to see the author let the attitudes of the past speak for themselves – show us the unfairness of sexism and racism, don’t invent an implausible character to tell us about them.

I never really got over this aspect of the novel, and it didn’t help that I was never that drawn into the plot. Marie-Josephe’s brother Yves, a Jesuit priest, discovers a twin-tailed sea monster that seems to be part manatee, part mermaid. He brings it to Versailles in the hopes that the Sun King can gain immortality by eating its flesh. Marie-Josephe befriends the creature and learns to communicate with it through song. Then we get several extended scenes where she pleads that others accept the “sea woman” as an equal and free her. Nobody listens because she’s a girl. It’s all so unfair! But, she manages to convince the right people, and we get a very unlikely happy ending out of the whole affair. We get some fairly typical courtly intrigue (hint: everyone is a bastard, and everyone is related), and some fairly dull descriptions along the way. There were amazing, “Renaissance Women” in reality (Suor Maria Celeste, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Anne Bradstreet), but no man or woman of the time was as perfect and forward thinking as Marie-Josephe. We’ll see a much better-executed version of this concept with Eliza in Stephenson’s Baroque cycle towards the end of the year.

There’s potential here. I liked Dreamsnake well enough, and McIntyre is a decent writer with some good ideas. The “sea woman” is the one really compelling part of the book. But, her approach to the historical material and overly-perfect protagonist just turned me off. It’s not terrible, but it was not for me.

Grade: C

1997 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – “Severed Dreams,” BABYLON 5

Back to B5 with its second, and final, Hugo win. I chronicled my B5 watching history last time: there’s no question that the long, intricately planned arcs are ground-breaking and influential. However, horrible production values marred the series’ first season. By season 3, the production values have improved quite a bit. It seems to be in the same range as a show like early Buffy (whose production values I have no problem ignoring). However, even in season 3, at the show’s creative peak, I’m still not entirely won over by the characters and plot.

In the last Hugo-winning episode, Babylon 5’s quest for peace was collapsing as the evil “Shadows” manipulated alien races into attacking each other. These problems continue, but the newest threat is from within. An alliance of Alfred Bester-inspired psi-cops, the Shadows, and an evil President have taken over Earth and declared martial law. Under Commander John Sheridan, Babylon 5 breaks with the new Earth government and becomes a beacon of resistance. A lot of fighting ensues, and the production team really does pull out all the stops to make the battles look relatively decent…and even better.

I’m still not entirely sold on this series though. I wish I knew more about the Shadows. I wish everything wasn’t framed as a titanic struggle between pure good and pure evil. I wish the characters weren’t cookie-cutter clichés. I wish JMS could dial back his love of melodrama and preaching from the soap box. I wish a lot of things. There’s so much to admire about this series, but there continue to be a lot of little things that bother me. I doubt I’ll be a convert in the end, but I really do appreciate the layered, continuity-heavy storytelling that the show represents.

Unlike last time, I don’t think this episode was up against extremely strong competition. DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” was a fun, nostalgic romp, but it was also very gimmicky. First Contact is also fun but flawed – more in the JJ Abrams school of Trek movies than the Nicholas Meyer school. If I were to pick an alternate winner, it might be a previous B5 episode called “Messages from Earth,” wherein we learn that the evil Earth government has found Shadow ships on Mars and Ganymede. It’s got a great archaeological mystery and an action sequence that may not be as elaborate as this episode’s but is more exciting (and less inevitably headed toward dues ex machine).

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