What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  When I read literary fiction, I take the story as real on the surface first, and worry about metaphors and representation later, if at all. It’s possible that I may not be getting as much as I can from literary fiction by this method, in the same way that the people who want the zombies and dragons to be metaphorical aren’t getting as much as they could. But it’s interesting that it’s precisely those SF books that best lend themselves to metaphorical readings that gain credibility with academia—it’s Dick who has a Library of America edition, not Sturgeon or Heinlein. It’s Kelly Link who’s getting that mainstream review, not Elizabeth Bear.

  And then there are people like my aunt. She’s one of the canonical people I lent SF to and she tried but could never get into it. When I was first published she worked her way through The King’s Peace, and eventually managed to see past the metaphorical. “It’s just like Greek myths or the Bible!” she said brightly. That was all the context she had. I fell over laughing, but this really was her first step to acquiring the reading habits we take for granted.

  I once got into an argument on a Trollope mailing list with people who like footnotes. (I hate all footnotes not written by the author.) The people I was arguing with maintained that they needed footnotes to understand the story, because Trollope wrote expecting his readers to know what a hansom cab was and to understand his jokes about decimalization. I argued that they’d either figure it out from context or they didn’t need to. After a while I realised—and said—that I was reading Trollope as SF, assuming that the text was building the world in my head. They quite sensibly pointed out that SF does it on purpose, but I don’t think any of us enjoyed Trollope any more or any less, except that I continue to seek out Victorian novels in editions without footnotes.

  Having a world unfold in one’s head is the fundamental SF experience. It’s a lot of what I read for. Delany has a long passage about how your brain expands while reading the sentence “The red sun is high, the blue low”—how it fills in doubled purple shadows on the planet of a binary star. I think it goes beyond that, beyond the physical into the delight of reading about people who come from other societies and have different expectations.

  Because SF can’t take the world for granted, it’s had to develop techniques for doing it. There’s the simple infodump, which Neal Stephenson has raised to an art form in its own right. There are lots of forms of what I call incluing, scattering pieces of information seamlessly through the text to add up to a big picture. The reader has to remember them and connect them together. This is one of the things some people complain about as “too much hard work” and which I think is a high form of fun. SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting. We talk about worldbuilding as something the writer does, but it’s also something the reader does, building the world from the clues. When you read that the clocks were striking thirteen, you think at first that something is terribly wrong before you work out that this is a world with twenty-four-hour time—and something terribly wrong. Orwell economically sends a double signal with that.

  Because there’s a lot of information to get across and you don’t want to stop the story more than you can help, we have techniques for doing it. We have signals for what you can take for granted, we have signals for what’s important. We’re used to seeing people’s names and placenames and product-names as information. We know what needs to be explained and what doesn’t. In exactly the same way as Trollope didn’t explain that a hansom cab was a horse-drawn vehicle for hire on the streets of London that would take you about the city but not out into the countryside, and Byatt doesn’t explain that the Northern Line is an underground railroad running north–south through London and dug in the early twentieth century, SF characters casually hail pedicabs and ornithopters and tip when they get out.

  People have been writing science fiction for more than a century, and we’ve had more than eighty years of people writing science fiction and knowing what they were doing. The techniques of writing and reading it have developed in that time. Old things sometimes look very clunky, as if they’re inventing the wheel—because they are. Modern SF assumes. It doesn’t say “The red sun is high, the blue low because it was a binary system.” So there’s a double problem. People who read SF sometimes write SF that doesn’t have enough surface to skitter over. Someone who doesn’t have the skill set can’t learn the skill set by reading it. And conversely, people who don’t read SF and write it write horribly old-fashioned clunky re-inventing-the-wheel stuff, because they don’t know what needs explanation. They explain both too much and not enough, and end up with something that’s just teeth-grindingly annoying for an SF reader to read.

  There are however plenty of things out there, and still being written, that are good starter-sets for acquiring the SF reading skill set. Harry Potter has been one for a lot of people.

  FEBRUARY 10, 2010

  96. Incredibly readable: Robert A. Heinlein’s The Door into Summer

  The Door into Summer (1957) is one of the most readable books in the world. Whatever that elusive “I Want to Read It” thing is, this book oozes it. Is it because Dan, the first-person engineer narrator, keeps up such a cheery rattle, it just carries you along? Is it because the future is such a sunny one, though wrong in every detail? Is it the joy of watching Heinlein’s worldbuilding and neat time travel dovetailing? I think it’s the combination of all of these things and the sheer force of storytelling. Heinlein’s prose isn’t beautiful like Le Guin’s, but it’s always crisp and descriptive and somehow confidential. He draws you inside the world—it’s as if he lifts a corner and invites you and you’re thrilled to slip through.

  The Door into Summer is short, but it isn’t a juvenile; it was written for the adult market and has an adult protagonist, and that makes it unusual. When Heinlein was at his peak, he mostly wrote short stories for adults and novels for kids. There’s only really this, and Double Star (which gets my vote for his best novel) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress before you get to his late-period novels. This was written in 1957 and it’s set in 1970 and 2000. You’ll notice that those dates when it’s set were in the future when the book was written and they’re in the past now. 1970 was in the past even when I first read the book in 1978. As predictions go, I’d say this scores a straight zero. None of the things predicted happened, with two exceptions—LA getting rid of smog, and the word “kink” developing a dirty meaning. The failed predictions show up more than usual because it’s such a near future, and Earth, and because our narrator, Daniel Boone Davis, is an engineer and a designer of robots. There’s a lot of talk about robot design and it’s all charmingly wrong. But what the book is about is time travel, with neat paradox resolution. It also features a creepy love story that didn’t seem so creepy to me when I was a teenager.

  But none of this matters, none of this is why you want to read this book if you haven’t or read it again if you have—you want to read it because it’s got a wonderful voice and because reading it is an immensely satisfying experience. It starts like this:

  One winter shortly before the Six Weeks War, my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. I doubt if it is there any longer, as it was near the edge of the blast area of the Manhattan near-miss, and those old frame buildings burn like tissue paper. Even if it is still standing it wouldn’t be a desirable rental because of the fall-out, but we liked it then, Pete and I. The lack of plumbing made the rent low and what had been the dining-room had a good north light for my drafting board. The drawback was that the place had eleven doors to the outside.

  If that doesn’t make you want to read the next paragraph, go and find something else to read.

  From here on, the general assumption you’ve read the book or don’t mind mild spoilers, but I’ll try to avoid the kind of spoilers that make things less fun.

  Dan�
�s thirty years old in 1970, and he’s a robot designer who has been swindled out of control of his robot-designing company by his ex–best friend and his ex-fiancée, so he goes on a bender and decides to take the “long sleep,” When the Sleeper Wakes kind of hibernation for thirty years, taking his cat with him. (Dan has read that book, and not just when the insurance companies started giving out free copies.) Then he sobers up and decides it’s running away and he won’t do it, only to be forced into it by the same evil ex-fiancée. When he wakes in 2000 he’s indigent—the insurance company went bust—but gets by and learns to like the place. Then he discovers there is time travel, and goes back to 1970 to sort out the unfinished business he had there, rescue his cat and then head back to the future.

  This is a future that never happened. It’s also very cheerful, despite the limited nuclear war sometime in the sixties which the US won. But it’s not the future Heinlein usually wrote about—it isn’t the future of the juveniles with colonized planets and a dystopic Earth, nor the Howard Families future with overcrowding and longevity, nor is it in the Past Through Tomorrow “Future History.” There’s mention of shuttles to the moon, but this book isn’t gung ho space colonies, this is Earth, and an Earth, and a US, doing very well for itself. Progress is real. Things are getting better. And the robots Dan invents are household robots aimed at making daily life better. I do think this is appealing, and I do think it’s more unusual in 2010 than it was in 1957. This is a very bouncy future.

  But we have had that time now, and it does get everything wrong. There wasn’t any Six Weeks War and limited nuclear exchange. Denver never became capital of the US. And on the smaller things—this is Dan, back in 1970 complaining about the things he’s got used to in 2000 that haven’t been invented yet:

  I wish that those precious esthetes who sneer at progress and prattle about the superior virtues of the past could have been with me—dishes that let food get chilled, shirts that had to be laundered, bathroom mirrors that steamed up when you needed them, runny noses, dirt underfoot and dirt in your lungs.

  Yes, well, 2010 and where’s my … but they are still going to the public library to look things up on paper and using typewriters and cloth diapers. Cloth diapers put on a baby by a robot worked by vaccuum tubes and transistors is an image that sums up the kind of ways SF gets things wrong even better than a flying car.

  The robots are precisely and specifically wrong. All the things Heinlein assumes will be easy turn out to be almost impossible, and all the things he thinks will be impossible turn out to be easy. Computer memory—not a problem. Robots that could wash dishes or change a baby? Oh dear. We sort of have robots that wash dishes—what else are dishwashers?—but they’re not doing it standing over the sink, and putting the dishes away in the cupboard is impossible. The drafting robot would have been lovely in 1957, now I can’t help thinking that I have better drafting programs included for free in my operating system just in case I happen to need one. There’s enough detail about Dan designing robots and seeing things where a robot would help to be notably and charmingly wrong. Transistors! Tubes! Heinlein sometimes managed to handwave computers in a way that let you fill in your concept (Citizen of the Galaxy) but there’s just way too much detail here. You can roll your eyes at it, but it doesn’t stop the story working. It makes it almost like steampunk, yay clunky 1950s robots. (And it isn’t totally wrong. The original Hired Girl is basically a Roomba.) Anyway, wouldn’t it be nice to have the family robot that does all the household cleaning and stuff and costs the same as a car?

  Far more of an obstacle to enjoying the book is the creepy romance. When I was a teenager I entirely missed the fact that it was creepy. Dan’s ex–best friend Miles has a stepdaughter called Ricky, who is eleven in 1970. Dan’s been her pseudo-uncle for years, since she was a small child. While back in 1970, Dan at thirty-one—so he’s twenty years older than she is—visits her at camp. He has privileged information, some of which he hasn’t shared with the reader. He tells this eleven-year-old girl that when she’s twenty-one she should put herself into cold sleep until 2000, whereupon he will only be ten years older than her (having cold slept again himself) and he’ll marry her. When I was fourteen I was fine with this, and it took me a long time to actually think about it. Imagine an eleven-year-old girl and a thirty-year-old uncle she has a crush on. Now imagine living through the next ten years as that girl growing up, never seeing him, knowing he’s waiting for you to be twenty-one, knowing you’re then going to marry him after a twenty-year sleep. Imagine being twenty-one and lying down to cold sleep and giving them the instruction to wake you only if he shows up. It’s not beyond what people do, but it’s creepy and twisted and I can’t believe I ever thought it was sort of romantic or that Heinlein in 1957 bought into this “made for each other” stuff so much as to be comfortable with writing this. It was a different world. And it’s a very small part of a fast-moving book. And we see it from Dan’s self-centred point of view, so imagining how Tiptree might have written Ricky growing up is always an option. But it’s still sick.

  This is a short, fast and deeply enjoyable read. If I read it for the first time now, I think I’d still get caught up in the readability. I might have been more squicked by the romance if I didn’t already know it was coming. It’s hard to detach nostalgia for previous reads from present enjoyment, but I really didn’t want to put it down.

  FEBRUARY 23, 2010

  97. Nasty, but brilliant: John Barnes’s Kaleidoscope Century

  Kaleidoscope Century (1995) is one of the most unpleasant books I’ve ever read, I can hardly believe I’ve read it again. All the same it’s a major work and very nearly a masterpiece. A man lives through the twenty-first century. Every fifteen years he gets ten years younger and forgets almost everything about the preceding fifteen years. He doesn’t know what he’s done, who he’s been, both his memories and the notes on his computer are fragmentary and contradictory. He wakes up this one time on Mars, with few possessions, but dragging an awful lot of baggage of the other kind. He isn’t a nice person, and he has done terrible things, for which he is intermittently and weirdly repentant. He thinks through what he can remember and dredge together of the century, then he goes looking for his old partner-in-crime. And then it gets weird.

  This is the most unsuitable book for children in the history of the universe. I think it’s quite appropriate that there be books for grown-ups, and that this be one of them. It’s odd only in that it’s the sequel to Orbital Resonance, which is pretty much a YA.

  It seems as if Barnes sat down in 1990 when writing Orbital Resonance and worked out in detail everything that happened from that day onwards for a hundred years, and then didn’t change anything in the future history even when time changed it. This means that when he wrote Kaleidoscope Century in 1995 it was already alternate history—never mind Heinlein’s 1957 giving us an out-of-date 1970 and 2000. This is weird, and while I don’t think it hurts Kaleidoscope Century much—there are possible reasons for it—it is a real problem for me once the series gets to The Sky So Big and Black. The details sound like real science-fictional future history, but they are uniformly unpleasant—and far more unpleasant than anything that has actually happened in the 19 years since. This is a really detailed and well-thought-out future, with a good understanding of the way changing tech changes possibilities, but it seems to have been thought out by someone who always looks on the black side and doesn’t have any faith in humanity. Having said that, horrible as Barnes’s century is, even when made deliberately worse by the characters, it can’t hold a candle to the twentieth century for real horror.

  Barnes is always immensely readable. That’s a problem here, actually. Joshua Ali Quare is an unreliable narrator, he’s also a horrible person. There’s more rape and murder in this book than in everything else on the bookcase put together—and it’s rape and murder seen from the point of view of someone for whom they’re fun. Yet most of the time Quare is written to be kind of endearing, ju
st getting along, but getting along includes a lot of making the world a worse place in big and small ways. He starts riots. He assassinates people. He rapes—or as he puts it “serbs”—women and girls. He’s a mercenary. And at other times he rescues a little street girl and brings her up as his daughter, works quietly as a rigger on a space elevator, or as a prospector on Mars. He justifies himself to himself and to his best friend and to the reader. He’s too much of a monster, or not enough of one. You spend a lot of time in his head when reading the book, and his head is a nasty place to be.

  Now actual spoilers: The plot doesn’t quite work. Closed timelike curve me whatever handwaves you like, if you’re dead you stop going through. And I’m not sure the book needs it anyway, it would have been perfectly good with the 15 years and losing memory thing without the endless repetition. And if they have ships that can do that, can skip bits of it, then it doesn’t make emotional sense, and really in the end emotional sense is all you can hope for.

  But despite making no sense, rape, murder, and a very unpleasant future, it’s still an excellently written and vastly ambitious book, with a scope both science-fictional and literary. That’s what ultimately makes it a good book, though I do not like it. It has such a vast reach that it doesn’t actually matter that it exceeds its grasp, or that it seems to be Hell rather than Heaven that it’s reaching for.

  FEBRUARY 22, 2010

  98. Growing up in a space dystopia: John Barnes’s Orbital Resonance

  Orbital Resonance (1991) is one of my favourite John Barnes novels, and I re-read it to take the taste of Kaleidoscope Century out of my brain. This didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped. On the one hand, Orbital Resonance could be a Heinlein juvenile—it’s about kids growing up on a captured asteroid looping between Earth and Mars, about teenagers finding out they’ve been manipulated and taking control of their own destiny. On the other hand this really stood out: