What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  The important thing is the stories.

  The first time I read the book I was disappointed. I don’t think this was avoidable. After all the buildup and all the controversy, after the amazing success of the earlier books, I was expecting something that no book could possibly have fulfilled. “Visionary” proclaimed the cover, and even more provocatively, “We have seen the future!” Well, it wasn’t visionary and they certainly hadn’t seen the future. But we don’t condemn science fiction for not being prediction—and it’s just as well.

  The best thing here is Ian Watson’s “Universe on the Turn,” a darkly funny satire of a future Britain that has become a surveillance state where everyone is obsessed with watching a “reality” TV show about ordinary inane people trapped in a house together. Calling the show “Big Brother” is perhaps a little unsubtle, but the parallels between the claustrophobia of the show and the highly surveilled everyday lives is done with a light touch that recalls the author’s “The Very Slow Time Machine” and Whores of Babylon.

  Also brilliant, if implausible, is Bruce Sterling’s “Living Inside.” This reminds me of his “We See Things Differently” with its Islamic terrorists—but this time they steal planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, bringing down both towers. Don’t ask whether that could even happen—within days of the event people are questioning whether it was an inside government job. Sterling makes you think you’re getting one kind of story and then gives you another—the attack becomes the excuse for wars and loss of civil liberties across the world. Chilling and memorable, much like Distraction.

  Sterling’s president is kind of an absent figurehead, but in Sheckley’s “Primordial Follies” the U.S. presidency has become a dynasty of morons. I laughed, I always laugh at Sheckley’s tall tales, no matter how thin he stretches them. The Monsters and Other Science Fiction Tales collects some of his best.

  Jerry Pournelle is here with a story called “Free Enterprise” in which NASA pretty much abandons space to robots, the shuttle fleet is allowed to decay, and prizes are offered for the first private companies to meet various space goals. This has the usual Pournelle style and flair, but this is a very familiar subject for him—not dangerous, not visionary, not to mention so very much not what happened. I like him better in more upbeat romantic works like Exile and Glory.

  I was impressed with Doris Piserchia’s “The Residents of Kingston,” in which an ice storm in Canada paralyses the country and one small city in particular. Nothing happens, and that’s what’s good about it. No looting, no riots, and the lights come back on because everyone works together. There aren’t enough stories of cooperation and human kindness. This is a “Man against Nature” story in which man, though actually most of the characters are women, wins. We could do with more engineer heroes like Louise, out in the cold getting the power back, and domestic ones like Peggy making soup for the neighbours. I don’t know that it’s dangerous, it’s certainly an unusual kind of vision.

  James Gunn’s “Among the Beautiful Bright Children” is a solid science fiction story about technology—“cell phones” and the “Internet” changing the way people communicate, and even meet. The “children” of the Internet age chat online and even fall in love through the medium of text as it whizzes around the world, living more and more of their lives through the computer. Now this is visionary, and maybe even dangerous. (Gunn has a new collection out, Human Voices.)

  Other highlights include Cordwainer Smith, Octavia Butler (I like the way China’s becoming capitalist without liberalising, interesting), Michael Bishop, Mack Reynolds (with a utopian story of the fall of the Soviet Union in which it all just collapses like a house of cards in 1989) and Clifford Simak.

  Lowlights—well “Emerging Nation,” Bester’s story of a black president trying to force through a health care bill while the nation is engaged in a war in the Middle East that’s just a carbon copy of Vietnam. (Did they really think it could take so long for the US to become a first-world country?) Michael Coney’s story (“Susy Is Something Special”) of the complete economic collapse of Iceland and a worldwide depression—this isn’t visionary, this is just 1929 all over again. And I just couldn’t buy Algis Budrys’s “Living Alone in the Jungle”—all about a stolen election, way too much detail about the U.S. system and “hanging chads” and the Supreme Court—who cares about this stuff?

  On the whole this is a good collection. It’s not as good as the first one, but probably up there with the second. It’s unfortunate that the delays and the hype made it into something that no book could live up to. It’s also funny looking at all these stories by such different writers, all written at about the same time—they made such weird predictions about the future, while missing all the real developments that were about to happen. These futures, except maybe Gunn’s, are so tame compared to what really happened. And were people paying attention? The first of the experiments that gave us cold fusion and put the solar system in our grasp had already been done by 1982, guys! And what’s with so many people wishing away the Cold War? And why are these visions—with the honourable exception of Piserchia’s—so very bleak? Oh well. Definitely worth reading. I’m glad Elwood helped Ellison get it out—for a while there I was thinking the universe was conspiring to suppress it for some mysterious reason.

  April Fool! Yes, this is another April Fool jape. The truth is that Ellison never produced the much-hyped third volume. All authors and story titles are actually ones sold to Ellison for the volume. Elwood was a very prolific anthologist.

  APRIL 2, 2010

  104. Why do I re-read things I don’t like?

  P-L asked an interesting question:

  You seem to re-read quite a few books that you don’t actually like. (At least, I think this is not the first one you’ve mentioned.…) Can I ask why? There are so many, many books out there; it seems like it would be easier to find something new that you do like.

  There are several reasons why I might re-read a book I don’t like. The main reason is that I’m an hopeful kind of person. The second I think is habit. I started to read when I was very young, and I constantly encountered books that were too old for me. I was constantly being told that things were too old for me, and sometimes they were and sometimes they weren’t, but I early became familiar with the idea of getting more out of something on a re-read. In any case, if I didn’t enjoy something I’d plough my way through without even necessarily understanding it. I’d finish it with a sigh of relief.

  The supply of books at home was finite. There were quite a few books, but some of them were forbidden and I had to go to the trouble of stealing them, and then reading and replacing them unnoticed. The books I was allowed I read and re-read. I so deeply internalised this state of things that P-L’s “so many many books out there” still doesn’t feel normal—it feels delightful, it feels like putting one over on the universe. The existence of all those unread books feels like a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, like magic. It never quite feels like something I can rely on.

  But since the supply of books at home was finite, eventually I’d have re-read all the books I liked too often to read them again, and at regular intervals I’d try the ones I hadn’t liked to see if I’d grown into them in the interval. Sometimes, I would have. Lorna Doone and Ivanhoe were both books that I didn’t get and then I did. So was David Copperfield. But even the earlier times I read them, I got something out of them. I didn’t like them, no, but there were images that stayed with me, flashes, moments. I’d remember that moment and think that I was older and the whole book might be like that now. Maybe, I thought in the back of my mind, I’m old enough now. Maybe this time I will like it.

  Or, I might decide that I hadn’t been fair to a book other people like a lot. This is the case with Lord of Light. A lot of people think it’s a wonderful book. It was Potlatch’s Book of Honor this year. I have friends who think it’s one of the best books ever. I’m always inclined to give a book the benefit of the do
ubt and think it might have been me. And Lord of Light certainly has those flashes. If I can remember the flashes, I’m prepared to give something another go.

  My usual reason now for re-reading something I don’t like, or I like less, is because it’s part of a series and I’m re-reading all of it. I tend to read every word in order, not skip about the way I hear some people do, and if it’s the kind of series where everything counts, I don’t like to skip bits there either. This is how I read Teckla and Athyra frequently enough to have them grow on me. Sometimes I do normally skip a volume I don’t like but I’ll re-read it for completion when I’m planning to write about it. This is the case with Cetaganda.

  But all the time here I have been talking about books I don’t like or don’t get, books I almost like and feel I ought to like and might like if the world or the book or I were older, or just a little different. If I really hate a book, I’m never going to re-read it, and this was the case even when I was a little kid. Nothing would induce me to re-read The Sparrow or Xenocide or Grunts. Or, for that matter, A Laodician.

  APRIL 3, 2010

  105. Yakking about who’s civilised and who’s not: H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking

  Space Viking (1963) starts out looking like a story of vengeance among the neobarbarian remnants of a collapsed Galactic Empire, and then becomes a meditation on the benefits of civilisation and how that is distinct from technology. It contains a fundamentally flawed assumption about the way society works, but it’s a fast fun read. It isn’t my favourite Piper, but I’m fond of it and re-read it fairly often.

  One of the things Piper’s very good at is taking a historical situation and translating it to space. Here, as you’d expect, it’s the centuries after the fall of Rome, spread out across the stars. The obvious comparison is Asimov’s Foundation—and what a very different kind of book this is. Foundation is all about the centuries and society seen in stop-motion over time. Space Viking is one moment (about a decade) as time goes on heedless. Foundation is detached from time, seeing it from outside. Space Viking is immersed in it.

  Another thing Piper is good at is having the one competent man (and it is always a man) who changes the world. Lucas Trask leaves his homeworld of Gram prepared to risk everything to seek revenge on the lunatic who killed his bride at their wedding. On the way to revenge, almost by accident, he builds a star-spanning trade empire, becomes king of his own planet, and realises that he’s become absorbed in building civilisation and finds revenge an irritating distraction from that. Trask’s adventures completely change the history of six planets, and possibly more.

  In a neat bit of worldbuilding, the Swordworlds, where the Space Vikings come from, are named after famous swords—the first one was Excalibur. The ex-Empire planets are named after gods of ancient pantheons. This means the reader can immediately and easily tell them apart without a scorecard—if a planet’s Baldur, you know it’s an old Empire planet, if it’s Durendal it’s a swordworld. All of the science-fictional details make sense and fit together, the contragravity, the nuclear weapons, the wars on planets and in space. Time is given in multiples of hours, which is very authentic but which I find slightly irritating as it means constant mental arithmetic.

  The thing Piper gets wrong, and which you have to bite your lip and ignore in order to enjoy the book, is the idea that when you take people out of a society the old society can never recover. If this were true, there would be no Einstein, no Tolkien, no Beatles, because the boldest and best people had already abandoned Europe for America and once that had happened no more intelligent people could ever emerge. It’s true that if all the educated people leave a planet it will temporarily collapse, but if some leave and the schools are still there, which is what we see, in a generation it won’t matter, because genes don’t work that way. If you lose a thousand trained engineers out of a population of a billion, which is what Piper says, there’ll barely be a wobble. And the whole eugenics angle is even more distasteful.

  One of the things Piper’s interested in here is showing how civilised planets collapse, and how barbarous planets become civilised. There are two examples of the first, Gram and Marduk. Gram is feudal and is decivilising from the top down, as the leaders squabble and cheat the populace—timarchy decaying into oligarchy. Marduk suffers a classic democracy-collapses-into-tyranny modeled on the rise of Mussolini. Now, this is all in Plato (what do they teach them in these schools?) and it’s all very pat—too pat. When you can choose your examples from anywhere you like it starts to look like dice loading. Any writer’s doing this with any choices, but it works better if it doesn’t look like special pleading. If it wasn’t for the whole eugenics thing putting me on edge, I’d probably have let this Platonic cycle thing slide past without thinking too much about it.

  In any case, the story begins with a madman committing murder and ends with the same madman dead, and everything else, the rise and fall of civilisations and Trask’s journey back to being able to love, is what happens along the way. Like most Piper, this is a great book for teenagers. I gobbled it up uncritically when I was fourteen, and it did me no harm at all. My copy, with a horrible generic spaceship cover, was bought new for 85p.

  APRIL 11, 2010

  106. Feast or famine?

  In my post on re-reading books I dislike, I mentioned that I grew up with a finite supply of books that I’d re-read, and several people responded that on the contrary they grew up with an infinite supply of books they felt they could never get through.

  P-L says:

  I have my own neuroses about reading as a result. Because life is finite and literature is, for all intents and purposes, infinite, choosing a book feels to me like a zero-sum game. Because I decided on a whim to read The Magus this week, the whole queue was pushed one step farther back, and as a result there is one more book (or two short ones) that I’ll never get a chance to read.

  And Individ-ewe-al:

  I basically don’t reread, because when I was a kid I was always overwhelmed by how many new things there were out there, rather than afraid of running out of books. Nowadays I occasionally reread my absolute favourite books.

  And Atrus:

  I lived pretty close to not one but three public libraries, so the concept of a limited amount of available books was—and is—completely alien to me. Like p-l, my problem at most was one of too much choice and not enough direction.

  This is all very alien to me. Even though the world is full of books, I don’t want to read most of them. Even if you only count fiction, there’s a lot written in genres I don’t like, or written by authors I don’t enjoy. Also I read fast, and I read all the time. I don’t find libraries infinite—I mean I adore libraries, but I can read my way through everything I want to read in a couple of months. When I was twelve I read all the science fiction in Aberdare library in one summer: all of it, Anderson to Zelazny, in alphabetical order. These days it wouldn’t take as long, because I’d already have read most of it. And I’ve read everything by my favourite writers too, and they don’t write fast enough to keep me going. It never feels like a zero-sum game to me, it always feels as if there isn’t enough to read, and even if there is, as if tomorrow there might not be. I’ll admit I have a whole bookcase of unread books, and when I moved to Canada I had four boxes of them, labelled: “Misc Readpile,” “More Misc Readpile,” “The Further Adventures of Misc Readpile” and “Misc Readpile Goes West.” One or two of the books from those boxes may still be on my unread shelves.

  Even when I have plenty of books, and access to libraries, that doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to put my hand on the kind of thing I want to read this minute. Re-reading always gives me that. There’s a pleasure in reading something new, certainly, but there’s also pleasure in revisiting old friends. I think I’ve said before that I consider the first re-read of a book the completion of the reading experience, I don’t really know how I feel about a book until I come back to it. I feel that something worth reading only once is pretty much a wa
ste of time.

  My ideal relationship with a book is that I will read it and love it and re-read it regularly forever. Sometimes I will know ahead of time that I’ll love it, other times it’ll be a surprise. Some books that lie around for years waiting for me to get to them later became favourites. More often I’ll pick up something because it looks interesting and then immediately read all of that new-to-me author’s backlist as fast as I can find it. I don’t do this only with fiction, there are biographers and historians whose complete works I have gulped down this way.

  I think the real issue is psychological. The people I quoted at the beginning of the post feel as if reading is finite and they shouldn’t waste any time. I feel the complete opposite, that reading is infinite. Of course, some of this depends on reading speed—I read fast, and I read a lot. It’s a rare week I don’t get through at least a book every day, and some weeks a great deal more. If I’m stuck in bed it’s not unusual for me to read half a dozen books in a day. I know I’m not going to live forever, I know there are more books than I can ever read. But I know that in my head, the same way I know the speed of light is a limit. In my heart I know reading is forever and FTL is just around the corner.

  On the re-reading panel at Anticipation, I said a couple of things that Kate Nepveu described as “making lemonade out of very sour lemons.” The first was that I have some unread books that are the last book, or the last book I got hold of, by favourite authors who are dead. They’re never going to write anymore, and when I’ve read that book I’ve read everything. I’m saving these books for when I get diagnosed with a terminal illness. That way, when life does become inescapably finite, I’ll have new books by favourite authors to look forward to. The other thing is, that should I not be diagnosed with a terminal illness but instead get Alzheimers, I’ll forget writing my own books and be able to read them as if for the first time, as if someone else had written them. And that will be fun too!