2011 – READY PLAYER ONE by Ernest Cline

Yes, this review requires an '80s soundtrack.

Ernest Cline's first novel takes place in a dystopian future of economic and environmental collapse. Or, at least, that's somewhere in the background. Most of the novel takes place in a shared virtual environment called OASIS, which is basically an internet-encompassing MMORPG (or, to go to the sf roots, like Stephenson's Metaverse from Snow Crash). The creator of OASIS, James Halliday, became the richest man in the world, and, in his will, he left his vast fortune to whomever could solve a vast OASIS-spanning puzzle based on Halliday's own childhood obsessions. Since Morrow grew up in the '80s, what we get is a massive nostalgia trip that relies on '80s video games, tv, movies, music, and table-top RPGs.

Most of the book is a straightforward adventure revolving around the young orphan Wade Owen Watts and some of his friends as they try to beat an evil corporation to the prize. There is an interesting speculative idea here though - as millions of people obsessively consumed Halliday's favorite media, '80s pop culture has come to dominate the cultural landscape of 2044. People trade allusions to Star Wars, Indiana Jones, D&D, Pac-Man, Zork, and Ladyhawke (of all things) like past generations of classically-trained intellectuals bandied about Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Shakespeare. It's a really promising idea, but Cline doesn't do much with it. There's no real sense of how these pop fossils have been reinterpreted in a very different future world, except for a few imaginative uses of the virtual OASIS environment. Instead of investigating this idea, Cline seems more interested in going to great lengths to create a world where his favorite stuff is put on a pedestal by the rest of the world. Cline is most famous for his geek movie Fanboys, and it's very clear that there's a lot of him in Halliday and young Wade. With some of his other ideas (trailer park skyscrapers, the megalopolis of Columbus, Ohio) it's hard to figure out exactly what tone the author is shooting for.

That said, if you share a lot of Cline's taste (I'm a few years younger, but if you've been following the blog, you'll know that most of this is in my wheelhouse), you can get a lot of joy out of the steady stream of references. And, the book is fun. Not only does Cline relentlessly talk about '80s adventure films and games in this book, he also does a pretty good job of re-creating their feel. They were full of plucky underdogs - kids (Goonies and others), rebels (Star Wars), nerds (John Hughes and others), losers (Ghostbusters and others), etc - who took on adult criminals or their social betters or interstellar empires or supernatural monstrosities and somehow managed to win. This didn't quite come out in my own '80s review, but the films of that decade really were optimistic. Maybe it's a Reagan thing? I love the '80s adventure film formula, and so part of me really loved this book.

On the other hand, those '80s films could be kind of shallow. Subtext is not one of George Lucas's great strengths. Or Robert Zemckis's. Or Richard Donner's. Or even John Hughes's. I wouldn't mind seeing a few more fun '80s-style adventure movies (hello, Super 8!), but I wouldn't want every film to follow that formula. And it's not really a formula I look for in award-winning novel's. On top of that, Cline is a first time novelist, and I wouldn't say that his prose really shines here. Most of the time, it's...adequate. There are probably more awkward turns of phrase than sublime ones, but there aren't many examples of either. The writing is just there.

So, while this was a nice nostalgia trip, there's not much else to this book. If you're not a fan of '80s media, you might find it downright terrible. Me? I had fun, but I can't blame Hugo nominators for passing this one by.

Grade: B

2011 Not a Hugo Nominee: Novel – SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY by Gary Shteyngart

As I've discussed before, things often get uncomfortable when authors from the amorphous world of “literary fiction” crossover to the world of science fiction. You get elaborate excuses from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut about how their dystopias and time travel space epics ARE NOT science fiction, and the major awards promptly ignore and reject their work (unless it’s the first year of the Clarke). I can’t say things went all that differently with this novel by a young lit fic sensation – I don’t see it on any sf award nominee lists – but this does feel well grounded in the world of sf. In fact, this novel read a lot like Vinge’s Rainbow’s End (review coming soon), touching as it does on singularity and post-humans, social networking, physical books, and generational issues. But, it’s like awesomely way better.

Set in the post-literate near future, we follow the journal of Lenny Abramov, the almost-forty son of Jewish-Russian immigrants to New York who acquires clients for a company offering immortality treatments. Abramov is something of a throwback, he likes actual physical books, and he, like, reads every word of writers like Tolstoy and Chekhov. On a business trip in Italy, he falls in love with a boisterous-but-damaged girl in her early twenties named Eunice Park. We alternate that journal with emails and chats from Eunice, who thinks she could score a hotter guy, but Lenny seems so sincere and easy. They move in together in Manhattan, in an America in steep decline. Debts are heavy all around, people with low credit ratings are discriminated against, America is losing another foreign intervention in Venezuela, privatized National Guardsmen harass people on the streets, and the world has become shallow and obsessed with their rankings on social networks, which are displayed on apparati (basically smaller iPhones with more social networking features).

So, lots ofcyberpunk/dystopian material we’ve seen before, as I mentioned, but the differences are huge and all fall in Shteyngart’s favor. Most importantly, Lenny and Eunice are incredibly rich characters. They both can annoy, they both make bad choices, and their relationship is a trainwreck, but they also both feel real, and even young shallow Eunice has hidden depths of compassion. This deft touch with character is what sets some these literary types apart, and I do think it speaks to all that crossovers have to offer in an area where science fiction has been, traditionally, pretty weak.

Maybe I'm biased because Shteyngart clearly shares my anti-singularity, anti-post-human pessimism in another clear difference from most sf these days. For Vernor Vinge, the destruction of books and the alienation of the elder generation are birth pangs on the way to something bigger (man, I wish I'd gotten to my review of Rainbow's End before this), but Shteyngart focuses on the class issues and the unpredictability of technological advance. Of course, post-human technology will be the province of the super-rich for a long time, and of course there will be setbacks and unintended consequences. Shteyngart is clearly aware of the discussion of these issues within science fiction, and he makes some smart, incisive additions to the debate. That said, I’m not so convinced that the US will collapse into a corporate security state, but there’s plenty of echoes of our reality to keep things believable.

The one area where I felt the book did fail, and even admitted defeat to some extent, was in the portrayal of a post-literate world. Yes, people think books are smelly and gross, and no one seems to have the attention span to focus on longer pieces of text, but Shteyngart’s voice for Eunice is full of evocative language. He even has characters comment on this, calling her a “born writer.” There’s clear growth in her style throughout the book as well, and I couldn’t help but feel that this was part character development and part Shteyngart throwing in the towel on writing a solid portion of a novel in semi-literate txt speech.

Either way, I really enjoyed this novel. It has a lot to say about love, relationships, and mortality, and it says it all while presenting an insightful view of the future. It’s everything I want from science fiction; who cares if it’s written by someone not so immersed in the genre (has anyone not in the SFWA ever gotten a Nebula nomination?) Maybe we can set up some sort of lit fic/sff exchange program?

Grade: A-

2011 Not a Hugo Nominee: Novel – MOCKINGJAY by Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy is the latest in a line (starting with Harry Potter and detouring through Twilight) of Young Adult sensations that have crossed over to adult readers and grabbed massive sales as a result. It’s tempting to use this phenomenon as an excuse to make catty remarks about adult literacy (and maybe throw in a Fahrenheit 451 reference), but I actually really like Harry Potter, and I enjoyed this trilogy as well. I read it for a book club meeting that I never made it to, but I ended up hoping that this final volume would garner a Hugo nom.

The series takes place in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian Panem (shortened “Pan-America”). In this fascistic state, a central capitol dominates twelve poor, hard-laboring districts. In retribution for a past revolution, and to symbolize the capitol’s dominance, two children are drafted from each district every year to take part in a deadly reality show with only one survivor. Twenty-four kids fight to the death, while tv audiences cheer.

In Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen is a teenage girl in District 12 who developed survival skills after the death of her mother. She joins the Hunger Games to protect her sister and becomes outraged by what she witnesses in the capitol and in the games themselves. Collins doesn’t pull many punches in her portrayal of the fights, and this book is very dark and very violent, especially for YA fiction. There are some interesting sf ideas here besides the dystopian setting. We get high speed trains, hovercraft, and all sorts of high-tech weapons, including some genetically modified, weaponized organisms. There are obvious similarities to the Japanese novel/film/manga Battle Royale, but it does still feel pretty original, especially with the additions of the sequels.

I have to spoil something fairly obvious about the ending of this book to continue with the review, so stop here if you’re an absolutist about living spoiler-free.

So, yes, the existence of a trilogy should make this obvious, but Katniss survives the first book. In Mockingjay, the final volume of the trilogy, Katniss now finds herself the leader of a rebellion against the capitol. She, and other Hunger Games survivors, use their celebrity status as a weapon against the media-obsessed society of Panem. In an excellent, and very mature, twist, we see here that the revolution can be just as bad, just as manipulative, callous and violent, as the Capitol. It’s a great concept. It’s dark and pessimistic, and it’s a more nuanced version of the rebellious tendencies that often pop up in YA fiction.

The pacing of the trilogy as a whole does have some problems. I actually liked the first novel the best, because of its quick pace and self-contained structure. The final book spends a lot of time hammering on the flaws of the revolution, and speeds through the climax and denouement at the end. The middle volume, Catching Fire, I found especially weak – it mostly reiterates the first novel while laying some groundwork for the third, and it gets stuck in the obligatory love triangle. I like romantic subplots; I think they’re too rare in sf novels, but these books push hard for the lusty heights of Twilight, and I didn’t find that aspect convincing, or interesting, in any way.

There are also a few other clear signs that this is YA, despite the politics and slaughter. The world is very small-feeling. This novel sprawls over an America-spanning empire, but everyone seems to know each other. You get the feeling that the population has been reduced to the tens of thousands, which is hard to buy; it's a continent-spanning empire of one city and twelve small towns. The world-building could have used a bit more thought. The prose is solid, but it is constrained by the intended audience. There are some great cultural details though. I would recommend this series, which is darker, and more thrilling, than a lot of adult fiction out there. Also, as I mentioned in my Hugo prediction post, I think it's very interesting that WorldCon nominators passed this by just two years after nominating three YA novels.

Grade: B+

2011 Hugo Nominees: Dram. Pres., Short Form - “The Lost Thing,” written by Shaun Tan and “F*** Me, Ray Bradbury,” written by Rachel Bloom

Let’s begin with the sexually-charged paean to the ninety-year-old science fiction writer by a young parodist of Britney Spears…….

….it’s cute. And somewhat clever. That’s about all I have to say about it. It’s nothing particularly meaningful and important, and it’s not trying to be. I wouldn’t have nominated it for this award, and it certainly shouldn’t win, but I did chuckle the first time I saw it. I’m tempted to launch into a discussion of third-wave feminism, but that seems silly, and I’m saving my long-winded, over-analyzing tangent for the next nominee.

Shaun Tan’s “The Lost Thing” already won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, but I’m sure Tan would rather have this Hugo. It’s pretty clear that this category was designed for tv, but it is ideal for short films, and I’m surprised they haven’t done better here, especially with the profusion of animated short films in the past decade plus.

This sixteen-minute computer animated feature follows a narrator in a dystopic world. He finds a strange creature on the beach; it’s a ceramic-steampunky-tentacled-crab thingie that can’t really be categorized. He tries to find it a home, but no one really wants anything to do with it. The soulless bureaucratic world just wants to bury it.

The message of this film is a bit amorphous. Over the course of this blog, I’ve decided that there are two main types of dystopia: let’s call them social dystopias and cultural dystopias. Social dystopias look at what could go wrong with the societal issues we face: ecological limits, overpopulation, totalitarianism, economic divides, etc. Cultural dystopias look at worlds destroyed by reality tv or people not reading novels as much as they used to. Every dystopia is a little bit of both, but the origins tend to lie in one or the other. 1984 give us the culture of doublespeak, but it all springs from political trends that Orwell absorbed from his contemporary world. Meanwhile, Fahrenheit 451 (speaking of the oh-so-*bleep*able Mr. Bradbury) shows us a totalitarian world that springs from addiction to daytime soaps. I really prefer the former examination of societal issues than the complaints about cultural trends. I mean, I really hate those Real Housewife shows, but I don’t think they spell the end of civilization as we know it. And, once upon a time, people thought novels were low culture.

What’s my point? I don’t know. I guess I’m trying to say that the film’s condemnation of conformity, bureaucracy, and consumerism felt trite and pointless, as such things usually do to me. That’s not to say that I didn’t like it though. The designs are fantastic; the bland dystopia is wonderfully conveyed in the art direction, and we see all sorts of great, oddball creatures, especially the titular Thing. It is a very cute film, and I’m glad it was nominated. I hope more short films get nominated in the future, and I’m a little worried that this only made the cut because the previous Wondercon was held in its originating nation of Australia.

Grades: “Bleep Me, Ray Bradbury” B-

“The Lost Thing” A-

1996 Nebula – SLOW RIVER by Nicola Griffith

The world of Griffith’s Slow River reminded me a lot of some of the work of Paulo Bacigalupi. Its world is not entirely unlike ours, but corporations are more powerful, exploitation of the Third World has continued unabated, pollution is rampant, fossil fuels are rare, individual freedoms are circumscribed, and there’s an overall sense of decay. We see all of this in Windup Girl, although the focus on a water treatment plant also made me think of Bacigalupi’s great story, “Pump Six.” Slow River obviously predates these works by more than a decade, so I wonder if it was an influence on Bacigalupi.

Despite this very interesting take on the future, Griffith’s real focus here is on character. The novel unfolds in three different timelines, which all tell the story of a young woman named Lore. We get a brief biography that chronicles her youth in the very wealthy, but very troubled, van de Oest family, which has a monopoly on genomes crucial to the polluted, post-fossil fuel world economy. The central story tells of her separation from this family and her relationship with Spanner, who has many issues of her own; she's a small-time criminal and an an addict. In the first-person-narrated “present” storyline, Lore works undercover in a water treatment plant and experiences firsthand the plight of the working class. Griffith skillfully interweaves these stories so that they comment on and inform each other, and they give us a full picture of Lore, including some pretty dramatic low-points.

The writing is strong, and Lore is a very compelling character. The novel also has a lot to say about power dynamics – Lore is often manipulated and controlled by her parents, her siblings, and Spanner. A pair of kidnappers brutalize and control her. With Spanner, Lore finds herself victimizing others. The class dynamics in the water treatment facility mirror these relationships as Lore meets a workforce that also feels powerless. The novel’s multiple “rivers” symbolize these power dynamics in the inexorable driving of their currents. In other words, it’s a richly drawn novel that does have something to say. In some ways it’s actually quite similar to its big competitor of the year, The Diamond Age, which also uses its vision of the future to explore issues of class and power but focuses more on the technology and the world, while Slow River focuses on character. I like good, character driven work, but, in this case, The Diamond Age is so rich that I’d have to give the Hugo winner my vote for this year. But, it is nice to get two different entries out of the biggest sf awards that are both strong and share some thematic links.

Grade: B+

1993 Arthur C. Clarke – HE, SHE, AND IT by Marge Piercy

I’m surprised by how little I get to talk about robots on this blog.

This novel, like the first winner of the Clarke award, The Handmaid’s Tale, generally fell under most people’s “literary fiction” rubric – which meant that the other science fiction prizes ignored it. Regardless of both this fact and Piercy’s own efforts to distinguish herself from the genre, it does exemplify some of the trends of the era while making some classic sf observations.

The novel takes place in 2059. Global warming and pollution have ravaged the Earth (it’s like we’re back in the 70s!) making most of the planet’s surface unlivable. Corporations control a few domed livable spaces, there are a few utopian “free towns” with their own domes and socio-political structures, and then there are dystopian hellholes of rampant poverty like “the glop” that sprawls over most of the East Coast of North America. The central character, Shira Shipman, resigns from one of the corporate domes after a nasty divorce and retires to her home of Tivka, an idyllic little Jewish free-town in what was once Massachusetts. Once there, she learns that her grandmother Malkah has become involved in a project to construct a powerful and detailed humanoid robot (called a “cyborg” in the novel) known as Yod. Unfortunately, the creation of so humanoid a cyborg is illegal, and it also draws the interest of corporate saboteurs from Shira’s former employers. When Yod develops romantic feelings for Shira, things get even more complicated.

It’s a very nice character piece that creates a very rich environment for Shira. She has troubled or complicated relationships with her mother, ex-husband, ex-lover, her ex-lover’s father, her mother’s lover, and her son, and all of these come into play in interesting and believable ways as the novel goes on. Piercy gives us intermittent chapters narrated by Malkah that tell the story of a golem in Prague circa 1600 AD, and this story is a nice contretemps to Yod’s while being quite good in itself. The emotional world of the novel feels very real. I would say there’s a bit of romance wish-fulfillment in Yod – a strong, heroic, dependable, and devoted man who loves Shira and will always love her without wavering. Considering how often typically male fantasies have dominated sf, I don’t think I have any right to complain, especially since Piercy shows an acute awareness of this aspect of the novel.

It’s a good novel, but I’m not sure it’s as good a science fiction novel. I’m not trying to draw arbitrary genre lines here, but I do think the novel is good at examining its characters and not nearly as good at examining sf concepts. The people have texture and complexity; the ideas not as much. While the rapid environmental deterioration seems exaggerated and Piercy avoids the technological details of the simulated computer environments into which characters can readily slip, all of these aspects of the world are still richly realized. Honestly, I’d rather avoid the Stephenson-style explanation of virtual environments if it’s not a major plot point. But, I’m still left with the question of what this dystopian world does other than provide convenient challenges for the characters.

A larger problem in the same vain is with Yod himself. The question of whether a sentient robot has rights is one of the sf classics, from Capek’s invention of the concept to Asimov's stories in the 1940s to Star Trek’s Data in the years just before this novel came out. This novel doesn’t add to this debate – Piercy’s position seems to be “of course Yod is sentient because I say so and any of my characters who question his rights are stupid jerks.” That’s fine, I guess. She’s not doing a remake of an Asimov story; she’s telling Shira’s story. Still, I expected Piercy to have more to say about gender, especially considering the title. This is considered a work of feminist science fiction, but other than early depictions of the corporate world’s dismissal of Shira’s talents and rights as a mother, it’s much more about the politics of sex. There’s a lot of discussion of who’s had sex with whom and why, but not much of an examination of what that all means in this speculative world. There are even some references to Yod’s feminine aspects that seem somewhat reductive – being sensitive and wanting to be held are feminine aspects attributed to Malkah’s programming while we can blame Yod’s propensity for callous violence on his male builder, Avram. There’s not much discussion of how these roles are culturally constructed or how Yod’s existence changes our understanding of them.

In summation, it’s a strong tale with some of the finest character work you’ll find in sf, and I would recommend it. I just couldn’t escape the feeling that it could have been so much more.

Grade: B+

1990 Clarke and Campbell – THE CHILD GARDEN by Geoff Ryman

In The Child Garden, Ryman brings a welcome quirkiness to the usually bleak genre of the post-apocalyptic dystopia. The novel has a dreamlike quality, and it’s heavy on metaphor. I hate to sound like a literary lightweight, buy I do generally prefer a more narrative-oriented approach; ambiguity can get old for me. But, this novel was effective nonetheless.

In the future, humanity discovers a cure for cancer and spreads it through viruses that prevent the disease among all people. Unfortunately, they later realize that they have shortened everyone’s lives by half or more as an unintended consequence, so that few people live past the age of 35. This is the sort of irony that Ryman builds the entire novel around.

Viruses are the great technology of Ryman’s future world. Viruses have been designed to convey different skills, information, and even opinions, and they propagate through the population, so that babies can be infected with a high school education. At adulthood (10 years), people’s personalities are integrated into a Consensus group mind, which rules their Communist society. Due to the side effects like the above mentioned shortened lifespan, and also apparently due to global warming, most technology has broken down. At the beginning of the novel, London is without electricity and messages are conveyed via runners.

In this world, we meet Milena, a girl who has a resistance to the viruses. She doesn’t have the knowledge or instant-learning skills of the others, but she is better equipped to learn things that are not part of the standard battery of virus-conveyed material. She also better appreciates things that are novel and different. She meets a musically talented, genetically engineered polar bear woman named Rolfa and begins to work on a massive artistic project – a holographic opera based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Society seems both fearful and hopeful of the new ideas that Milena plans to provide.

The book fails quite spectacularly as a dystopia. To do a humorous dystopia right, I think a writer would have to lean on wry satire, but Ryman prefers sincerity and quirk. In fact, it seems at times that he’s just thrown all of the quirkiness he can think of against the wall to see what sticks – some of it works, but far from all of it. The novel seems to contradict itself at a fundamental level: the horror of this society is that everyone knows and thinks the same things due to the viruses, and we’re often told how conformist this future world is. But, the characters are all so wildly idiosyncratic that we never see that conformity. The dullest character is Milena, even though she is the one resistant to the viruses.

So, as biting social satire, The Child Garden doesn’t cut it. But I still enjoyed it quite a bit. It is fun and, at times, quite beautiful. Ryman is a skilled writer, and there are wonderful, lyrical passages describing childhood , art, love, and death. Ryman repeatedly refers to the work as a comedy, in the dramatic sense, and the transcendent and hope-filled finale was quite poetic as well.

Grade: B+

2010 Hugo, Campbell, and BSFA, 2009 Nebula Winner: THE WINDUP GIRL by Paulo Bacigalupi

My Hugo votes are in (the deadline is this weekend), and we're in the homestretch of our coverage!

In early 2008, high oil prices led to food riots in more than a dozen countries around the world. Paulo Bacigalupi's first novel, The Windup Girl, focuses on these sorts of connections between food and energy within the framework of globalization. In this future dystopia, the world has suffered a "calorie crisis" in which both fossil fuels and food sources have been exhausted by over-consumption, climate change, and genetically modified organisms gone wild. Electricity is a luxury. So is fruit. The automobile is virtually extinct. People depend on genetically modified animals such as mammoth-like "megadonts" to do much of their work. And, there are myriad new killer diseases that can ravage a population.

Bacigalupi sets the action in Thailand, a nation that has survived the worst destructions of the contraction caused by the calorie crisis with some nationalist and sometimes isolationist policies. Yet, it's still vulnerable to the big agribusiness/bioengineering firms of the West, the Calorie Companies. Bacigalupi writes in third person, but he alternately focuses on four interconnected storylines: Anderson Lake is an American "Calorie man" (or economic hit-man) whose duty is to gain access to Thailand's seed bank. Lake's employee, Hock Seng is an ethnic Chinese refugee from Malaysia who has lost everything and will do anything to regain success as a business man. Jaidee and his assistant Kanya work in the Ministry of Environment and try to protect Thailand from foreign business interests and their own government's corruption. Finally, Emiko is a "windup girl" from Japan. She has been genetically modified to serve as a sex slave, and she is hated and horribly abused for her differences. All of the characters face a series of dramatic crises that eventually explode with major geopolitical implications.

The Windup Girl is the heir to Stand on Zanzibar. Bacigalupi takes a set of contemporary problems and an understanding of global politics and projects forward a worse case scenario for a dystopian future. It's a chilling vision, but also a fairly grounded one. That's not to say it's a likely future (most alternative energy sources are inexplicably missing), but much of it is plausible, and thus it has a lot to say about the world we live in.

The characters are very complex - they all do terrible things, and they're all obsessed with their own success or survival. Yet, they also all got moments of compassion and redemption. There was some talk recently on the social science blog Crooked Timber as to whether Bacigalupi's Asian characters fall into stereotypes, and I'll admit to having a similar reaction early in the novel. Hock Seng, especially, seemed like a duplicitous schemer right out of a yellow peril story from a hundred years ago. As the novel continues, though, I do think that Bacigalupi presents some very complex motives and personalities for the characters that pushed them beyond stereotype. It's the kind of book where I didn't necessarily *like* any of the characters, but I had moments of sympathy and understanding with all of them.

Bacigalupi is also a great writer, though there seemed to be more lyrical moments in the first half than the second. Overall, I likes the beginning of the book more than the end. It's such an unremittingly bleak picture that it did begin to drag me down. It eventually begins to feel like more of an anti-GMO, anti-neocolonialism screed than a novel with rich characters and insight into the human condition - the characters still shine, but they also get ground under heel to the point that they almost fade to the background. But, that's true for most of the great dystopian novels.

Despite the bleakness, I can understand why this novel has received the praise and awards that it has. It's a cautionary tale with rich prose that exposes the moral conundrums of global warming, peak oil, overpopulation, and genetic engineering through fascinating characters. The Windup Girl is a pretty clear contender for the best science fiction novel of 2009.

Grade: A-

2010 Hugo (and Nebula) nominee, novelette: "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" by Eugie Foster (Interzone 2/09)

The novelette category covers stories from 7500 to 17500 words. It seems odd to me to have an intermediate short fiction category, but what do I know?

This story (I’m not going to repeat that title, even with the benefit of cut and paste), depicts a world where people wear special masks every day that confer different roles and personalities to them through some unspecified technology. One day you may be a lover, another you’re shopping, and another you’re a sacrificial victim of people’s tortuous need for blood and gore. Then you wake up again healed from your awful wounds, and you take on another role. There are clear channels for everyone’s passions, and no one has to think too hard. We get a few “days in the life” of our narrator, then we watch as he begins to question this harsh and rigid world. There are strict taboos involving the masks, and secret police to enforce them, which make this questioning more challenging and dangerous.

On one level, it’s formulaic dystopia. We see someone move through a world that is horrific to us, but natural to them. Said character learns there is another way and rebels. Then we get the typical ambiguous ending. The technology of the masks add a new flavor to the proceedings, but it’s not that new. Clearly, it’s a metaphor, but I can’t say for what. If it’s a satire of modern society and the “masks” we all wear in social settings, it’s not one that I related to. I can’t help but think that Foster was shooting for “alien but familiar” but really just came out with “alien.” It is delightfully alien though, and very well-written.

This story was also available as a free audio, this time via the Escape Pod podcast. I think this has become my favorite format for short fiction. I have to read the rest the old-fashioned way though.

Grade: B

1976 Saturn - LOGAN'S RUN

A ‘70s science fiction film, and it’s a dystopia? What are the chances? Logan’s Run has some potential, and there’s actually a very solid bit in the middle that realizes that potential and manages to be quite decent. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is a big old mess.

The film takes place an unspecified period of time in the future. Due to pollution and overpopulation (sound familiar?), humanity has withdrawn to domed cities where population is strictly controlled. People are created in test tubes and rapidly aged to adulthood. When they reach thirty, their time is up, and they are to report to a mass execution, which is staged as an elaborate carnival that offers the hope (a false one, as it soon becomes apparent) of reincarnation. Some residents of the settlement decide to make a run for it rather than offer themselves up for execution, and there is a brutal police force (known as “sandmen”) who hunt down and execute “runners.” The titular Logan 5 (Michael York) is one of these sandmen, and he begins to suspect that the runners have a secret organization. The supercomputer that runs the dome agrees and sends Logan undercover as a runner to ferret out the secret sanctuary that hides the society’s escapees.

During their brief lives, people are pretty hedonistic; they merely dial up a sexual partner when they’re in the mood, and more permanent relationships are unheard of. Logan dials up a girl named Jessica 6, who seems to be associated with the runner conspiracy, but he soon begins to fall in love with her. Jenny Agutter plays Jessica 6, and, as far as I’m concerned, she steals the show. She completely outshines the late Farah Fawcett Majors, who gets big billing for a bit part. As part of his undercover operation, Logan goes on the run with Jessica, but they’re soon running for real, and they eventually make it beyond the dome, where they meet their first old person, a crazy cat man played by Peter Ustinov. And that’s just the first half of the movie.

There’s obviously a lot going on here, but at the same time, it’s all rather shallow. The society of the dome isn’t all that believable, and everyone is pretty vapid. I guess that’s the point, but I didn’t find it all that entertaining watching attractive but dumb people wander about aimlessly in shimmery pastel robes, make out and do drugs. The special effects and music during the dome sequences are truly terrible (the dome is represented in establishing shots by a cheap model that makes most model train sets look like they were built by WETA; the music, by the usually great composer Jerry Goldsmith, is bad, assonant synthesizer beeping noises). I know I should cut a 70s film some slack on effects, but his film came out just months before Star Wars and cost about as much money to make. There is really no excuse.

Once Logan and Jessica get out, the production values seem to go up, but the plot grinds to a halt. Still, these scenes were the strongest part of the film ; we finally learn a bit about this world’s history and the characters actually get to act like real people for half an hour. I’m afraid to say that I found the rest of the proceedings almost unwatchable.

Grade: C+

1976 Hugo, Campbell, and Locus, 1975 Nebula - THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is probably the most highly regarded military sf novel. It begins a lot like Starship Troopers. A young man from Earth, William Mandella, is drafted to fight an alien menace. He goes off to boot camp, which is highly dangerous, and, as in Heinlein’s novel, includes powered armor. Then, he and his unit deploy to a distant planet to fight the strange aliens.

There are a couple of twists after this opening sequence that do differentiate the novel from Heinlein’s, however. First of all, it’s pretty clear that not all is as it seems. Rather than the simplistic aggressive force that Heinlein’s “bugs” represented, Haldeman’s aliens are more complex and mysterious. In fact, it’s not entirely clear why Earth is at war with them. And, rather than the heroic patriotism of the space marines, Mandella and his fellow soldiers are miserable, occasionally cowardly, fight amongst themselves, and regret killing. In other words, it’s an anti-war military sf novel. It’s not surprising that this novel was written in the wake of the Vietnam War, or that Haldeman served in Vietnam.

From what I’d heard of this novel, I thought the anti-war message was really the novel’s focus. It’s actually subtler than I expected, and there are times when this does read like a typical military adventure story. The main twist and the real focus of the plot is the fact that Earth’s fighting forces are subject to relativity. As established by Albert Einstein, if you travel near the speed of light, time moves much more slowly to you relative to the stationary position you left. Thus, when the infantry deploys to their first alien planet (aided by shortcuts through space called “stargates”), the mission takes several months for them, but twenty years pass on Earth. As a result, a lot of the novel involves Mandella and his fellow soldiers adjusting to massive changes in society every time they make it back from a mission.

The first mission begins in 1997 (The Forever War may be the champion of bad futurism, placing interstellar travel and power-armored space infantry just years away from his mid-70s vantage point). Then we get the standard-70s dystopia in 2007: overpopulation, starvation, pollution, etc. From there, we learn of big changes in world governance, population, and, most dramatically, human sexuality, as the centuries fly quickly by.

I’m not a fan of military sf, so the long training and combat scenes, which make up more than half of the novel, could be a bit of a slog, and I’m not quite sure that this book lived up to the hype. But it was an enjoyable read with some entertaining ideas thrown around.

Grade: A-

1974/1975 Saturn - ROLLERBALL

The Saturn Awards skipped 1974, and their third annual ceremony combined films from ’74 and ’75. The winner was Rollerball, which is an odd mishmash of sports film and dystopian science fiction. The main plot is pure sports film; James Caan plays an aging superstar in the violent sport of rollerball. He has fame, a nice house, and women (provided for him by his corporate sponsors), but his life is beginning to feel a bit hollow, and he’s feeling pressure to retire.

Rollerball the sport is basically a hyper-violent version of Roller Derby. Players skate around a circular track and try to put a ball in a goal. Along the way they beat the crap out of each other. One of the film’s biggest issues is that we’re told this sport is ridiculously violent (apparently nine players once died in one game), but it actually looks significantly less violent than the NHL or NFL, though people tend to get run over by motocycles a lot.

The science fiction element comes from the background. It’s 2018, and the world is no longer dominated by nation-states but by evil, soul-destroying corporations. The corporations sponsor Rollerball to distract a bloodthirsty public from their own manipulations. So, we have here yet another ‘70s dystopia.

It’s not a particularly nuanced or complex one. I just happened to read a Michael Chabon essay recently in which he called Rollerball "the first movie depiction of a future not merely ruled but styled by evil corporations." There may be some truth to that, but, in the end, the film certainly doesn’t poise the difficult questions that A Clockwork Orange does, and it’s really not even as insightful as Soylent Green. This is more a montage of dystopian tropes in a sports film. The society doesn't really feel that well thought through - why would a corporate run state look so much like a socialist state? Condemning violence in the media is about as thoughtful and challenging as condemning television. It’s too facile. As a result, I was disappointed, and frankly, more than a little bored, watching this film.

James Caan gives a nice performance though.

Grade: C-

1974 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation - SLEEPER

The WorldCon voters were really into comedies in the mid-70s apparently. Sleeper is a Woody Allen film (writer, director and star, as is often the case with his films), and it is from the earlier slapstick era of his career. He clearly wants to be Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, and there are long sequences of physical comedy.

Allen plays health-food store owner and jazz afficianado (there’s a wonderfully inappropriate ragtime soundtrack throughout the film) Miles Monroe. Miles goes to the hospital in the 1970s for treatment of an ulcer and wakes up two-hundred years later in a dystopian future. Society is ruled by a totalitarian “Supreme Leader,” everyone has robot butlers, and people who disagree with the are brainwashed. Oh, and people just spend a few seconds in the “orgasmatron” rather than having sex.

Allen is revived by revolutionaries and then forced into hiding. He eventually disguises himself as Diane Keaton’s butler, and when she discovers him, he exhorts her to join him in rebellion.

The film is funny, though some of the slapstick material gets a bit tired (Allen is not Chaplin or Keaton). As science fiction, there’s nothing too original here (there is a parody of HAL9000), but it’s certainly amusing.

Grade: B

1972 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Ah, no better way to celebrate New Year's than with a bit of the old ultra-violence.

Kubrick directed three of the first four films to win Hugos, and three of his films in a row have racked up wins.

This is shocking and disturbing film. The first third follows a mod gang as they fight, rob, rape, and murder their way through a dystopian future. Kubrick doesn’t shy away from showing us some fairly extreme sexual violence (the film was rated X in the US and banned in Britain for decades). The film is narrated by one of the thugs, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), who is bloodthirsty and nihilistic. Alex is arrested and sentenced to a long prison sentence. He eventually signs up for a Pavlovian experiment that will make him averse to violence. He is forced to watch hours of ultraviolence while he’s given drugs to make him ill.

It’s a bit hard to sympathize with Alex, which I’d say is the biggest stumbling block of the film (though certainly an intentional and well-executed one). Alex's awfulness provides the viewer with an interesting ethical dilemma. Is it right to basically neuter Alex with aversion therapy? Is Alex good if he only behaves because he has to? These are interesting and challenging questions.

The film’s biggest achievement is probably visual, which is not surprising for a Kubrick film. There are some amazing shots, and Kubrick creates a vibrant stylized world. It does look a bit like a futuristic vision from the sixties (which it basically is) – everything is colorful, sexualized, and very mod. But it is a compelling and believable vision.

A Clockwork Orange is not for the weak-stomached, but it’s certainly a filmmaking achievement. I do like that the WorldCon voters were willing to opt for something like this.

Grade: A-

1959 Hugo – A CASE OF CONSCIENCE by James Blish

Blish’s A Case of Conscience centers around a botanist and Jesuit priest from Peru named Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez. In 2049, he is part of an expedition to study and evaluate the first intelligence extraterrestrial life discovered by Earth, the Lithians. The Lithians live in harmony with their world and each other, and, most upsetting to Father Ruiz-Sanchez, they have no spirituality of any sort.

The book has two very disparate halves (I assume they were published separately in an anthology magazine). The first deals with Father Ruiz-Sanchez’s spiritual crisis and the rather extreme theological conclusions that he comes to regarding the Lithians. At the end of the first half, in what would have been a fantastic cliffhanger, one of the Lithians gives Ruiz-Sanchez his son to raise as an ambassador to Earth.

The second half follows the effects that this young Lithian has on Blish’s future Earth. Most of Earth has moved into concrete bunkers out of fear of nuclear armageddon (the Arms Race, we’re told, had turned into a Shelter Race). With Earth now united, only the elite live on the surface. The Lithian, raised on Earth in a matter of less than a year, decides that Earth’s inequalities are intolerable and leads a revolution. In this half, Ruiz-Sanchez moves to the sidelines.

There are a lot of interesting ideas here, and exploring how a man of faith (and a very orthodox Catholic faith at that) would deal with an alien life form is especially original and exciting. Unfortunately, this thread gets lost for most of the second half. Maybe Blish was setting up a dramatic clash – the Father judges against a utopian society because it clashes with his faith; the young Lithian judges against a dystopian society with a rational evaluation. That doesn’t seem to be Blish’s intention though, as he seems much more sympathetic to the Jesuit than the alien. I’m not really sure about Blish’s intentions. The pacing is odd as well – the first half is quiet and thoughtful, then the book gets dragged down in a long party (that is, I suppose, there to show how decadent and divided Earth has become), and then it rushes to a dramatic conclusion far too quickly.

Father Ruiz-Sanchez is probably the most fascinating character I’ve encountered in one of these novels thus far, and overall the novel has some very nice ideas. In the end, however, these ideas don’t quite shine through some murky plot development and herky-jerky pacing.

Grade: B

1954 Retro Hugo – FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury

The third and final retro winner (so far) is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Hugo skipped 1954 after its first award in ’53, but came back to fill in the gap in 2004. This is also another book that I read over a decade ago.

This is the classic anti-censorship book, and the first real example on this list of the impact science fiction can have on society. So, it’s a bit unfortunate that I have some problems with this classic piece of American literature.

My main problem is that it’s not nearly so much about censorship as it is a polemic against mass culture. Farhenheit 451 is, of course, the temperature at which books burn. There are mass book burnings represented and condemned here. But, really, the main issue is not a repressive government or overly-constrictive social mores; the main issue is that everyone watches too much television and relies too much on appliances (and pharmaceuticals) to get them through their boring days. It's important to remember that the novel was written as a new consumer culture was emerging - the same culture that led to the kitchen and tv-centric view of the '50s that most of us still have. In Bradbury's view, a byproduct of this new consumer culture was a dangerous anti-intellectualism. The narrator’s wife especially (a soap opera-addicted housewife) seems like a judgmental and simplistic caricature.

I hate anti-intellectual trends in America society as much as the next academic, but I’m also fond of the old boob tube, and I find the whole "idiot box" viewpoint presented here to be a bit reductive and premature. There was a real debate in the ‘50s about the value of mass culture and a strengthening of the separation between high culture (classical music, literary fiction, some films) and low culture (popular music, genre fiction, television, most other films), with a few items caught in between (where does Jackson Pollock fit? Andy Warhol? Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea is a bit too maudlin and sentimental to be serious literature, right?). I personally think that a lot of cultural critics were a bit too black-and-white with this divide, and there’s obviously an elitist tinge to this whole idea. I think it undermines Bradbury’s message that he ends up echoing much of this elitist argument. The basic message isn’t just “stop censorship!” It’s really “stop censorship of books by smashing all televisions,” which really verges on hypocrisy as far as I’m concerned.

Sure, you can still find people who rail against television as the root of all evil (though not as much), and yes, too much television probably does not make for a healthy, well-informed society. But, I think it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination (especially with hindsight) to see that tv has potential to be more than just an “idiot box.” Bradbury couldn’t see that television might educate and inform, deliver news to a broader population, create art, etc. It’s always disheartening to see this kind of failure of imagination in a writer of speculative fiction.

By the way, I think two other books nominated for the ’54 retro-Hugo are worth a mention. Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel is a futuristic mystery teaming a robo-phobic cop with a robot detective. It’s my favorite Asimov book and a somewhat underrated science fiction classic. In Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End demonic-looking aliens visit the earth in preparation for the evolution of humanity into higher beings, and Clarke examines human reactions to the visitation in the context of the Cold War. At the end of the day, Bradbury’s anti-censorship message is probably more important (even if it does get bogged down in elitist cultural critiques), so it’s probably for the best that it won. But, for my money, these other two are far better books and definitely worth a look.

Grade: B+