2014 Nebula Winner: ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is the kind of active and well-liked leader in the science fiction community to whom the SFWA often seems to award Nebulas. I've hinted in the past that this seeming emphasis on the writer over the work hasn't always led to the strongest winners, in my opinion, but things worked out well with this choice. Annihilation is a strong and intriguing work of speculative fiction with literary ambitions - in other words, just what I'm looking for in these winners.

The novel is written as a journal of an expedition into a mysterious place called Area X that has a strange ecology and dramatic effects on the minds of any humans who enter it. The biologist of the twelfth expedition narrates, and we never learn her name or the names of the other expedition members (a psychologist, a surveyor, and an anthropologist). Things, of course, go wrong immediately, The results are pretty trippy with a heavy focus on how perception shapes behavior. VanderMeer can accomplish a lot, for instance, with the simple fact that expedition members can't agree on whether to call an artifact they find a "tunnel" or a "tower." I haven't always been a fan of very surrealist sf, but it works well here, as the images offer some great surprises and puzzles that stimulated my imagination, Interspersed with these events are flashbacks to the biologists pre-expedition life that build a very convincing character - she is surprisingly well-rounded despite remaining unnamed.

It's short and fast-paced, and I actually thought the length perfect. For a book that is abstract in many ways and doesn't seem interested in explaining many of its mysteries, spending any longer in this world might have gotten a little tiring. But, it ends on a very strong note. However, this is the first volume in The Southern Reach trilogy (all published in 2014 in an interesting strategy), so I guess there is more to be said about Area X and the efforts to explore it. I'm reluctant to dive into the other books not despite my enjoyment of this one but because that enjoyment was so predicated on its length and mystery. If anyone out there is reading and wants to recommend books two and three, I'd love to hear from them though.

Grade: A-

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

2006 Saturn SF – CHILDREN OF MEN

I discussed the ‘70s filmic obsession with environmental collapse and dystopia at length.  It kind of feels like it’s due for a comeback.  The Green Revolution made things look a lot better, but we’re still headed towards 10 billion people and we’re increasingly butting up against the limits of water, soil, and energy.  Children of Men is a great way to bring it back, as Alfonso Cuaron’s adaptation of a PD James’ novel is the finest entry in the genre yet made.

It’s 2027, and, for some unknown reason, no children have been born since 2009. In the meantime, the world has fallen apart due to warfare and terrorism. Britain is relatively stable, but immigrants have flooded in from the world’s warzones, and a fascist government has created brutal immigrant camps. Large numbers of refugees sit in cages on the streets with armed guards. As in Soylent Green, there are advertisements for commercial suicide-assistance (“Quietus: You Decide When”). Like all great sf, the film really is a commentary on our own world of terrorism and intolerance. The film opens with a bombing and then takes us on a tour of a dilapidated London with our point-of-view character, Theo Faron (Clive Owen).

Theo is contacted by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) to help escort a young refugee woman named Kee safely out of England. Things go wrong, and, when Theo learns that Kee is nine-months pregnant, he must try to protect her himself.

He doesn’t make a lot of films, but I think Cuaron might be the finest working director. He takes what could be a standard, depressing dystopia and brings it to life in a way that makes it impossible to look away. He works in several long tracking shots that put the viewer in this world.  Without cuts to distance the viewer, it feels like POV work.  You’re there, looking over Clive Owen’s shoulder. These shots are made all the more impressive by the fact that they tend to take place during action scenes or large crowd scenes.  There’s a near five minute shot filmed from inside a car as it’s ambushed and attacked by a group of thugs.  It’s technically amazing and completely gripping.

On top of all of this, the film is quite beautiful. The color palette is bleak and gorgeous at the same time, and Cuaron finds all sorts of odd juxtapositions. Theo’s cousin works for a government program attempting to save the world’s great artworks, and Cuaron stages a surreal dinner scene in front of Picasso’s Guernica. These flashes of bleak beauty suit the film’s message, which is hopeful, despite the horrors depicted.

This movie is just plain brilliant.  The only thing I can say against it, is that it’s so good, so real and dark, that it can be damn hard to watch. It ends with an extended battle in a refugee camp, and by the time it's over, I’m usually emotionally worn out.

Grade: A

2011 Hugo Nominee: Short Story - "Amaryllis" by Carrie Vaughn (Lightspeed, June 2010)

I'm still on a work project in Kentucky, but I have an okay wireless connection, so let's see if we can get through some short short story reviews this week.

First up: Carrie Vaughn's story takes us to a world after environmental collapse in which reproduction and resource harvesting are both carefully managed. The narrator, Marie, captains a fishing boat called the Amaryllis and lives communally with her crew. A young member of the crew named Nina would like to have a baby, but the discrimination the crew faces due to Marie's own origins means that they're unlikely to ever get such permission. It's a solid depiction of a future recovering from plausible ecological scarcity, sort of a pricklier Pacific Edge, though it doesn't offer much unique other than the fishing boat setting. That depiction of labor is nicely rendered though, and the character relationships are sweet. There wasn't really much here to grab me though. This story is thoroughly pleasant, and I mean that as a compliment...but "pleasant" isn't necessarily enough to win a Hugo.

Grade: B-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grade: A

1990 Campbell – PACIFIC EDGE by Kim Stanley Robinson

I'm going to have a lot of chances to talk about Robinson as we go forward, but he is one of the reasons that I'm doing this project, and I want to mention his first award-winning novel, especially since it represents that rarest of sf genres: the utopia. Pacific Edge is the third in Robinson’s Three Californias trilogy, in which he presents three possible futures for the LA basin. The Wild Shore depicts a post-apocalyptic subsistence society, The Gold Coast shows us a highway-obsessed cyberpunk world, and Pacific Edge examines an ecologically-oriented society.

In 2065, America has splintered and ecological crisis has fostered new pro-environment attitudes and an emphasis on local control and democracy – basically the precepts of social ecology which guide the Green Party, an important force in the novel. The reason that utopias are fairly rare (and good utopia novels even rarer) is that it’s difficult to set up the conflict necessary to drive a narrative. Pacific Edge, for this reason, does feel a bit relaxed. The narrative turns on a love triangle between the protagonist Kevin Claiborne, his friend Alfredo Blair, and a woman named Ramona Sanchez. Kevin spends his days reshaping the very un-ecofriendly geography of Orange County to fit the values of the new bike-riding, wind-powered utopian society. He eventually gets into a political conflict with Alfredo over real estate development… okay, the stakes aren’t too high here, but it does work as a personal story, and it does add a tinge of drama to a novel that is mostly about describing a better way of living.

I love Robinson because he really focuses on the intersections of history, ecology, and geography – topics that are close to my own heart and at the center of my work. Those concerns do add something to the Three Californias, which would otherwise threaten to be a bit generic. Pacific Edge is the most laid-back and slowest of the three, but it’s also the most original concept. Don’t expect a roller-coaster ride, but it’s a well-written, character-oriented novel that does depict a really admirable world well. Robinson also plays some games with intertextuality in the novels, as they bleed over into each other through storytelling. It’s not Robinson’s best work, but they’re worth checking out if you do like his work and are interested in these genres.

Grade: B

1973 Saturn Award – SOYLENT GREEN

Soylent Green is a lot like a Twilight Zone episode. It has an odd, sci-fi setting and revolves around a twist ending (what I call the punchline ending). It also has a lot of the same problems that I complained about when I covered the Twilight Zone: the characters are a little flat, the concept is stretched very thin to fill the time, and your enjoyment probably depends a whole lot on how surprised you are by the revelation at the film’s end. Unfortunately, Soylent Green has one of those shock endings that have entered popular culture. If you’ve heard of Soylent Green, I’m sure you know how it ends, but I’ll avoid the spoilers just in case.

The film takes place in 2022. Like a lot of visions of the near future that we’ve seen recently in the course of these readings and viewings, it’s over-crowded and polluted, and the government is corrupt and uncaring. The Greenhouse effect has run wild, so it’s always hot, people are starving, and an odd fuzz (representing air pollution) hangs over all of the film’s outdoor scenes. When people protest the horrible conditions of their world, riot police scoop them up with bulldozers. It’s not unlike the world presented by LeGuin at the beginning of The Lathe of Heaven, but there’s no magical dreaming to escape it.

Charlton Heston plays the lead role: a hard-boiled cop who is investigating the murder of a big food magnate. Along the way, he discovers a disturbing secret.

The film is brief, and there’s not much there beyond that shock ending. The film sort of meanders along; the world-building scenes are somewhat interesting, the investigatory scenes not so much. Even the climactic chase and shoot-out drags. There are also some big-time 70s clichés at work here: the tough-as-nails cop, the beautiful half-naked women who exist solely as sex objects, etc.

There are two sequences that I did find very effective: the opening scene that uses real photographs to suggest the declension of society and rapid population growth, and a really powerful euthanasia scene towards the film’s end. These two bits alone almost make the film worth watching, and if you don’t know the final twist, I’d definitely check this out.

By the way, the film includes some great performances by some film legends in supporting roles. Joseph Cotton (of Citizen Kane fame) has a smaller role, and character actor Edward G. Robinson is fantastic Heston’s mentor in his 101^st and last role (he died shortly after filming ended).

Grade: B+

1966 Hugo (tie) and 1965 Nebula – DUNE by Frank Herbert

Dune is one of the most famous Hugo winners, and it certainly warrants its status as a sci-fi classic. Herbert’s masterpiece is an epic – it’s the longest Hugo winner so far and more than double the length of the average winner to this point.

Dune describes a far-future, interstellar human empire in which most everyone depends on a chemical called spice that can only be obtained from a dangerous desert planet called Arrakis. There are a handful of feudal “major houses” that vie for power under the Emperor. The evil Harkonnens lure the noble House Atreides into a trap, giving them the valuable planet of Arrakis then betraying and attacking them. The heir to the House of Atreides is a teenager named Paul, prophesied to be a messiah by pretty much every interest group in the universe, and the story follows his rise to power, quest for revenge, and realization of his religious role on the inhospitable planet.

In a lot of ways, other than the occasional mention of space travel, this might sound like a fantasy novel plot. And, Dune does often garner comparison to Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. There are limitations to this analogy, but the book does work for exactly the same reasons that Tolkein’s epic cycle does – this is a fully realized world. Herbert creates a detailed universe with its own internal logic and its own rich, detailed, and often weird, cultural practices. Furthermore, what makes this novel really revolutionary is that Herbert throws ecology in the mix. He’s the first author to really put thought into how his world’s natural settings would work, what keeps them in balance, what would throw them out of balance, etc. This is a big departure from the easy terraforming of Ganymede that Heinlein depicted.

If I had to find a flaw in the novel (and I have an advanced degree in nitpicking after several years of graduate school) it’s that the characters can be a little flat. The characters fall easily into “good” and “evil” camps, and most of the novel is taken up with dialog-heavy scenes in which the good characters act terribly brave, noble and wise. Meanwhile, the evil characters spend all of their time plotting, cheating, and molesting young boys. There’s not much complexity there, and it did get a little tiring about halfway through.

Still, despite some clichéd characters and some slightly familiar fantasy tropes, Dune is an ultimately compelling and exciting read because of the thought and detail Herbert put in to building his world. There are wonderful appendices on Dune’s religion and ecology, as well as a glossary of terms, that all demonstrate the thought and care that make the work so completely engrossing.

At the same time, I have to admit that I’d be very reluctant to read any more of this franchise. I hadn’t read Dune or any of its sequels before this project, and I’m very satisfied checking the core book off my list of must-reads. This is the first franchise-spawning book that I’ve encountered (there will be more!), but, at least in this case, I feel pretty satiated with this one novel.

Grade: A