Jim Mann's Reviews and Comments

The Gormenghast Trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone) by Mervyn Peake

Jim Mann — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 03:37:00 +0000

I first read part of the Gormenghast when I was a teenager, in the early 1970. Fresh from Tolkien and Eddison, I was looking for more of the kind, and I was thus drawn to what promised to be another epic fantasy. But I ran into something very different, and at the time it was somewhat off putting. At the time I only made it through the first volume, Titus Groan. While fascinated by bits of the story and by some of the images (Lord Groan driven mad by the burning of his library and deciding that he was the death owl particularly struck me), overall I felt a bit let down. This wasn’t The Lord of the Rings or The Worm Ouroborus, which at the time defined fantasy for me. It took me a few years to get around to the second volume, and until now – 30 years or so later – to read the third book.

One thing that lead me back to Gormenghast was knowing that my own tastes have changed over the years. As a teenager, I read primarily for story and plot (and maybe character), but didn’t as much appreciate prose for its own sake, wit and humor (at least not anything subtler than Get Smart novelizations), and quirky characters. I had yet to spend much time with Dickens, who I grew to love in my twenties and thirties. I had yet to learn that sometimes one wants to deliberately slow down one’s reading, to better appreciate the texture of a work. But now, I think, I’ve learned those lessons, and so, still remembering parts of Gormenghast (far better than books I’d read far more recently and liked more than I remembered liking Peake’s work), I decided to re-read the series (or, in the case of the final volume to finally read it).

This time, I found the series – the first two books, at least – to be a marvel. Filled with beautiful prose, ripe with incredible imagery and memorable characters, it truly was a work to be savored. I read slowly, enjoying the sentences, thinking about the characters, appreciating the trip. It’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. Those who think that all prose should be “transparent,” that the models of writing are Hemingway or Heinlein, will not like this. Peake is for fans of Dickens (or, more recently, Mieville) and readers of poetry, who want complex prose that is noticeable for itself, not just for what it says.

The trilogy tells the story of the seventy-seventh Lord of Gormenghast, Titus Groan. Or rather Titus is the common character of the three volumes, and as the trilogy goes on more of it centers on him. But he is only a minor character in the first novel and one of several focal points in the second. The real focus of the first two books is Gormengast itself, the great, monstrously large castle, ruled for centuries by the Groans, a place of ritual where “change” is synonymous with “treason.” It is people by a strange, quirky, sometimes repellent, but occasionally likeable characters (and in fact some characters who start as simply quirky grow in our affection as we move through the novels).

Titus Groan start with the birth of Titus, but that’s not really the pivotal event of the series. Very early on, as Flay, the angular man servant of Lord Sepulchrave, Flay, whose knees click as he moves, enters the domain of his nemesis – Swelter the cook. One of Swelter’s kitchen boys, Steerpike, ambitious and without conscience, sneaks out, following Flay. Flay catches him, and locks him in a room, but Steerpike escapes across the roofs of Gormenghast. Everything that happens, all the dire events in violence that follow, flow either directly or indirectly from this event. It is Steerpike who sets in motion the events that result in the destruction of the library and the deaths of several people. It is Flay’s unease of Steerpike’s escape that causes him in irritation to strike out at Swelter, setting in motion another set of events that lead to violence and death. It is thus Steerpike, not Titus, that is the driving force behind the first two novels. Even Titus’s coming to prominence is a result of his setting himself up in response to and in opposition of Titus.

But although the novels revolve around Steerpike and Titus, there are many other memorable and often engaging or infuriating (or both) characters. Most prominent is Titus’s mother, the Lady Gertrude Groan. Early on, all she thinks of are the birds and the white cats that she loves and cares for. She asks that Titus be taken away from her at his birth and only brought back when he is five. Yet, when crisis strikes, her brain, after years of slumber, awakes, and she becomes one of the most potent forces imaginable, as she leads the search for Steerpike when he is uncovered as a murderer while also directing the castle’s response to a massive flood.

Dr. Prunsquallor starts out as a merely a strange, quirky doctor, but he is one of the characters you grown close to, both because Peake gives you glimpses of this thought but also his actions, whether it’s doing the best for his insufferable and dim sister Irma or his affection for Titus’s sister, Fuchsia (who herself is both the most engaging and most tragic character in the series).

And no one who reads the books can forget Lord Groan’s two sisters – the dim-witted Cora and Clarice. Living alone in a deserted part of the castle, the sulk, convinced that the power they deserve has gone to their sister in law. They are thus easy to manipulate, and Steerpike does so, convincing them to burn Sepulchrave’s library. They eventually go mad, and starve to death when Steerpike locks them away. Their insane ramblings, their way of talking to one another and those around them, are almost hypnotic and certainly aren’t easily forgotten.

Nominally, the first two books are the story of Titus coming of age – from birth, to triumph over Streerpike, to heading out on his own. But as one reads the books, Titus is secondary to Gormenghast itself. The great castle is so real. Peake rivals Tolkien in creating something that is so well imagined, so well described, that it feels like a real world (though of course it’s a world far smaller than Tolkien’s).

The third book of the trilogy – Titus Alone – is a strange beast. It is so different from the first two books in the series that in some ways it’s better to view the series as a duology, followed by a single book. For although it follows soon after the close of Gormenghast – which saw Titus setting off on his own – it is a very different kind of book. The first two books had a sense of realism. Gormenghast was so real, so present, that it grounded the book. As you read the first two books, you see, smell, and feel the world around you. The prose is rich and luscious, and I found myself re-reading paragraphs just to savor the description. Not so the third book. Gone is the realism of Gormenghast, replaced by several very strange locales. Titus, lost, pursued by a pair of men wearing strange helmets, enters a city, though we never get a feel for it, only for a few of its strange inhabitants. Moreover, the timeless nature of Gormenghast is replaced by the twentieth century – with cars, planes, and even flying surveillance devices. It’s Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka and The Prisoner, with touches of other twentieth century novelist thrown in.

The third book is a mildly interesting fantasy in its own right, yet it’s very much of a letdown after the power of the first two books. In the end, the Gormenghast trilogy really stands on the strength of the first two novels, which remain powerful, memorable novels. I normally try to stay away from judging a book based on where I wanted it to go rather than where the author took it, but I can’t help wishing that we’d have spent more time in Gormenghast, with Doctor Prune and the others, rather than following Titus into the strange world beyond its borders.

Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd

Jim Mann — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:59:00 +0000

A conventional digital computer uses bits – things that can have one of two values, conventionally 0 and 1 – to encode instructions and data. In physics terms, this is a classical concept – items have one of two exact values. But on the smallest scale, the universe is more complex than that, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics. The quantum mechanical equivalent of a bit – a qubit – is a superposition of 0 and 1; not until it is observed does it take one of those values. Until then, it can be considered as 0 and 1 at the same time. Likewise, while two bits can at one time have only one of four possible states – 00, 01, 10, 11 – two quibits are the superposition of all four. And so on, with the number of simultaneous states for quibits rapidly increasing with the number of bits.

Now image that a bit represents an instruction for a computer (in a real computer, it’s a byte or bytes, but the argument is still basically the same). Say 0 means “add 1 and 3” and 1 means “add 2 and 2.” A standard digital computer can do one or the other, depending upon whether that bit is 0 or 1. What does a quantum computer, using qubits instead of bits do? Both at once. Thus, a quantum computer – made up of even a relatively modest number of qubits – can perform an incredible number of instructions at once. To date, we’ve only managed to use up to 20 quibits, but we’ll increase this over time. The end result is that in the not to distant future (within 20 years, most likely), we’ll, for example, be able to factor very large numbers. Those who know cryptography know that this means that our current secure encryption schemes can then be cracked.

But this is only a starting point for exploring quantum computing. Seth Lloyd does a great job of looking at the many aspects of quantum computation in Programming the Universe. He starts with information theory, exploring how the second law of thermodynamics (that entropy increases) can also be viewed as involving information theory – entropy is really the hidden information of the system. On the most fundamental level, the universe is processing information. Moreover, as information shows, a quantum computer the size of the universe would be able to simulate the universe: the universe and a quantum computer are thus interchangeable, and the universe can be viewed as a quantum computer.

When this is first stated the typical reaction is “what does this mean, and what do we gain in our understanding by looking at things this way?” That was certainly my reaction. But this paradigm can yield some interesting breakthroughs in understanding. For example, quantum computing points toward a possible theory of quantum gravity – one that may do a better job of addressing this most fundamental problem of physics than string theory does (though we’re not there yet). Information theory and quantum computing also manages to address another very basic question: why is the universe we see around us so complex?

The universe at the time of the big bang was very simple. There were no complex structures. How did complexity come about? (I won’t try to define “complexity” here, though Lloyd addresses this in his book.) Some have used the “monkeys trying to type Shakespeare” analogy: a million monkeys, typing for long enough, will produce Shakespeare’s plays. But, as Lloyd points out, this doesn’t work. Even if a monkey typed the first act of Hamlet, chances are the next letter it types won’t be the first letter of act two. In a classical world, chances are that things will stay random. But, Lloyd note, information theory and the view of the universe as a computational machine addresses that. Picture instead the monkeys typing into a computer. What’s the chance that they will type the first ten million digits of pi? Very, very slim. But, what’s the chance they will type a simple computer program to generate pi. The program (pick your computer language) is much shorter than ten million characters. So the chance of the monkeys producing complexity (pi, e, fractals, etc.) in a computational universe is much greater than their doing so in where computation doesn’t happen. It’s a fascinating way to view the evolution of the universe.

This is a very good book – both well written and mind bending. It’s one of those science books that alters the way you look at and think about the universe. While I’ve read quite a few physics books over the years, this was my first on the topic of quantum computing, and it’s given me a new perspective –on what we might accomplish in computer science in the coming decades and, more importantly, on how the universe works. And I’m also ready to back and re-read several Greg Egan novels.

Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder

Jim Mann — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 01:07:00 +0000

Sun of Suns introduced the worlds of Virga, a huge (planet size) artificial structure, filled with air, worlds/nations (generally wheels or cylinders), and artificial suns (including the central sun of suns). The level of technology has been deliberately suppressed, as the creators had decided they wanted reality, not the virtual artificial nature that humans see over the rest of their universe (see some of Schroeder’s earlier novels). The result is a world where wooden ships and bicycles travel through “space” (an air-filled albeit gravity-less space in this case) between worlds and where weapons technology is, by and large, at about the level of the 18^th century. That is, it’s the perfect environment for an old fashioned swashbuckler. Or you can look at it as the modern equivalent of something out of Planet Stories, but in this case set in a world where the settings and the science are done right.

The first book told the story of how one group of people traveled to across their world, first to obtain a cache of treasure which contained one of the keys of candesce – a key to the sun of suns – and then traveled to the sun of suns itself to temporarily disable the technology suppression field that it generates. This enabled radio to work for a brief time, which enabled their home fleet to beat back a sneak attack. The story comes to a satisfying conclusion, but it also leaves several loose ends, including the fate of Venera Fanning, the wife of the expedition’s commander and a skillful leader (and at times a ruthless powerbroker) in her own right. Queen of Candesce picks up Venera’s story.

Venera lands on the ancient world of Spyre – the largest existing cylinder in Virga. It is made up of a mishmash of small nations – some as small as a modern office complex – all with complicated rules of interaction, many paranoid and turned inward, and all trying to keep anyone from leaving Spyre or even traveling without permission to less Spyre – the inner wheel/nations within the cylinder of greater Spyre. A group of preservationists – also eccentric and hostile to those outside the group – build railroads across Spyre, not for transportation but to literally preserve Spyre. Spyre is old and decaying, and some parts have broken loose and been flung off into space. The preservationists are trying to balance the rotation by moving heavy objects to the right location, even if it means they must pass through a sometimes hostile sovereign state. Schroeder has done a great job of creating a world that feels like something Jack Vance could have created at his peak. Spyre and the story of Venara’s treck across it is comparable to some of Vance’s most imaginative creation (though Schroeder’s style in describing it is his own).

The story starts with Venera falling to Spyre. She is found by Garth Diamandis, a self described aging gigolo. It follows her and Garth as she ascends from outcast to position of power – a position she needs if she is ever going to be able to go home and payback those who have wronged her and created the situation that presumably killed her husband (last heard of when his ship was destroyed with all hands in the previous book). Along the way, she encounters several strange societies and makes both allies and enemies; the latter includes the nation of Sacrus, who figures out who she is and what she is carrying (the Key of Candesce). The key, which can be used as a political weapon since who holds it also has power over the central sun, becomes a focal point in their struggle.

Eventually, she and Garth come to the last remains of the kingdom of Buridan: a solitary, decaying tower. Venera manages to use this as a way to power, masquerading as the heir to the lost nation and thereby giving her a seat on Spyre’s council. She brilliantly manipulates the council to accept her claim, even though many have their doubts, and alter uses this position in her back and forth with Sacrus.

But Venera’s journey is more than simply of an outcast coming to power. It’s also one of personal growth. As the book opens, she is not only cold blooded but sharply focused on her own ends. She needs to get home and take revenge; nothing else matters, and she’ll do anything and betray anyone to get their. But as the book progresses, she becomes more and more entwined with Garth around her, and picks up more and more obligations to the people she is leading. She finds that she can no longer simply abandon them to pursue her own ends.

Like Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce brings its main story – Venera’s power stuggle on Spyre and her rise to power there – to a satisfying conclusion. And like the previous book, it still leaves the next step – Venera’s return home – to the next volume. This is another fine novel by Schroeder. I only wish we didn’t have to wait another year for the next part.

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

Jim Mann — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 20:20:00 +0000

I love to read, and tend to read widely. While I read a lot of science fiction, I also read mysteries, historical fiction, some contemporary fiction, and a number of the classics, from Austen and Dickens through Joyce and Faulkner. So I really fell for Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, the first of his novels about Thursday Next, literary detective. “Literary detective” is meant literally here. Thursday lives in a world similar to ours but where books are a far more important part of ordinary life, and the literary detectives deal with crimes involving literature. In The Eyre Affair, this becomes even more literal when Jane Eyre is kidnapped out of the first edition of her novel and held for ransom. Thursday must rescue Jane and defeat the villain – which of course she does. Thursday returned in several more books – Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Wicked – in which we find our more about the world inside of books as Thursday must solve more literary crimes. All are good books, though the latter two seem to lose their way a bit; they’re fun, but not really up to the level of the first two books in the series (in part because the universe Fforde created was getting so complicated that it threatened to tie itself into a knots). First Among Sequels, the latest in the series, is a step up toward the level of the earlier books in the series – fun, witty, and exciting.

The book starts years after Something Rotten. Thursday is now in hear early fifties, married, and with children: one a genius, another apparently destined to invent the time machine and lead the ChronoGuard (though he’s showing no signs of doing anything other than being a lazy teenager who likes to sleep past noon and listen to heavy metal bands). SpecOps has been disbanded, and Thursday works for Acme Carpet, which is secretly a freelance SpecOps (paid for both by installing carpet and by Thursday's elicit cheese smuggling).

Thursday is still heavily involved in the book world, where the Council of Genres is having to deal with such pending crisis as the potential border war between the genres of Racy Novel, Feminism, and Ecclesiastical Literature. Racy Novel, having been declared a part of the “Axis of Unreadable,” claims to have developed a “dirty bomb,” which if exploded will hurtle obscene phrases into other novels. Meanwhile, “read rates” are going down across the board, causing another crisis of sorts, as more and more people stop reading and instead watch such popular reality TV shows as Samaritan Kidney Swap and Britian’s Funniest Chainsaw Mishaps.

To complicate things for Thursday, she winds up with first one apprentice, then two. Over the years, of course, Thursday’s adventures have been turned into books (with titles They Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, etc.). So of course, since all characters in books exist in the book world, so does the character of Thursday next. Thursday had been unhappy with how the first four books turned out – too full of sex and violence, so she had pushed for a different type of fifth book, and The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco had featured a kinder, gentler, very new-agey Thursday Next (and sales tanked). So Thursday is saddled first with Thursday5 (the kinder, gentler Thursday), then also with Thursday1-4, who is brash and obnoxious.

In the midst of all of this, Thursday is trying to figure out why read rates are dropping, who is trying to kill her, what the ghost of her Uncle Mycroft was trying to tell her, what strange conspiracy was underway in the book world, and why the Goliath Corporation was now acting nicely toward her. By book’s end, she must save all of English Literature from being destroyed and turned into bad reality TV. (If that were to happen in our world, the books would still be there; we could ignore the bad TV versions. Not so in Thursday’s world.) Along the way, we get plenty of amusing literary references and cameos (from the whole cast of Pride and Prejudice to Dr. Temperance Brennan) and some great jokes. Fforde is clearly widely read himself, and has a great fondness and appreciation for the classics. (If you haven’t read Fforde, take my word for it that all this seemingly overly complicated stuff does fit together (mostly) in amusing ways. Pick up The Eyre Affair and you’ll see what I mean.)

The whole thing comes to a pretty satisfying conclusion in the next to the last chapter, before that last chapter takes the couple of lose ends still left and sets up the next book. Fforde’s Web site indicates that the sequel is planned for 2009. I can’t wait!

Pushing Ice by Alistair Reynolds

Jim Mann — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:05:00 +0000

The last fifteen years or so have seen a resurgence in space opera. Moreover, space opera is not just prevalent but mush of what is being written is very good indeed. In fact, by most standards – ranging from breadth of ideas to complexity and inventivenss of the created universes to characterization to writing quality – modern space opera stands and head and shoulders above its ancestors of the 1930s and 1940s.

Numerous writers – Iain Banks, Vernor Vinge, Stephen Baxter, and others – have been major contributors to the new space opera. (I’d recommend Hartwell and Cramer’s The Space Opera Renaissance to anyone who wants a comprehensive overview.) But perhaps no one has done a better job of combining old fashioned sense of wonder with hard science and modern sensibilities, all within the scope of marvelous adventure stories, than Alastair Reynolds. Reynolds burst on the scene with Revelation Space, and followed that with three more novels in that universe. He also has produced a number of good short stories and a stand-alone novel. Pushing Ice is also a standalone novel, not related to the Revelation Space universe. Yet, like his earlier novels, it’s marvelously inventive.

The story starts in the relatively near future and first looks to be an adventure story set in the solar system. But, in a series of steps, Reynolds leaps further and further into the future, at each step unveiling more wonders. The Rockhopper is a ship of miners who push ice – that is, mine icy comets. As the novel starts, though, a spectacular event causes them to abandon the comet they are working on. Saturn’s moon Janus suddenly left its orbit and is in the processing of leaving the solar system. Rockhopper is the only ship in position for a flyby – mankind’s only chance to get a good look at whatever alien technology is driving Janus. At this point, the novel seems to be a B.D.O. (big dumb object) story, akin to Rendezvous with Rama. But that all changes when Rockhopper is caught in Janus’s wake, pulled along with it out of the solar system at a speed very close to that of light toward Spica, where astronomers, pointing their telescopes, have detected a massive artificial object in orbit. This, apparently, is Janus’s destination.

From here though, the novel continues to defy expectations. At every point when it seems it is going to settle down – whether as a B.D.O story or as the story of human’s rebuilding society on Janus – it changes gear, heading in a new direction and revealing new wonders. Reynolds deftly moves from one spectacular happening to the next, one-upping himself time after time.

The two major characters of the novel are Bella Lind and Svetlana Barseghian. Sometimes friends, often rivals, sometimes enemies. Bella is the captain of Rockhopper who makes the decision to stay with Janus, rather than making a risky attempt to escape its influence and remain in the solar system. Svetlana is an engineer who Bella overrules at several key instances; she thus blames Bella (with some justification) for their predicament. Both are stubborn to the point of mulishness and capable of holding grudges that last for decades. Both, though especially Svetlana, can be unlikable and frustrating – to the point that you want to grab them and shake them. Yet the tension between the two – mediated by Svetlana’s husband Parry Boyce – helps to center and ground the novel amidst all the spectacle of the universe around them. And every time I found myself thinking “nobody could possibly carry on a grudge for that long,” I just have to look at the news and remember that there are parts of the world where people still hold grudges over what happened centuries ago. (Or, closer to home, remember how some SF fans held grudges for decades over who was or was not excluded from the first Worldcon.)

This is a very enjoyable novel, a skillful mix of sense of wonder, adventure, and character, with a believable (if strange and wonderful) background. It comes to a satisfying conclusion (though Reynolds does leave room for a sequel, should he decide to write one). Reynolds continues to be a major force of the new space opera, and I hope to see much more from him.

The Wellstone by Wil McCarthy

Jim Mann — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 16:19:00 +0000

I group of teenage boys at summer camp, feeling that their parents are never going to treat them like adults and are always going to hold them down make a break for it. They escape the camp, traveling quite a long way. Some of the boys fight with one another; others make up often obscene songs they all sing to pass the time. They have interesting adventures and meet some interesting characters. Sounds like a boys adventure book? Well, in this case, summer camp is on a small artificial planetoid in the Kuiper belt. The kids feel put down because they see that their immortal parents will never clear out of the way. They escape in a spaceship made from a log cabin and powered by a solar sail. Along the way, they encounter a group of stowaways on a huge barge harvesting material to create compressed matter. And, oh yes, the leader of the group is the son of the king and queen of the solar system.

There is a lot to like in Wil McCarthy’s rich and imaginative novel The Wellstone, a sequel of sorts to his Collapsium. In the earlier novel, Bruno de Towaji, favorite and sometime lover of the Queen, had saved the solar system. This book is set several hundred years later, when the heir, Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui – sometimes brilliant, often bratty or obnoxious – has been sent to summer camp the Kuiper belt. There, he first leads an escape back to Earth – to Denver, one of earth’s cities that has a large population of children – to lead a riot. They are caught, but Bruno leads another escape, this time in a cobbled together space ship.

This is a novel filled with marvelous gadgets. “Faxes” act like both replicators and transporters. They can disassemble people, send the information anywhere at the speed of light, and reassemble them. They can repair what is wrong (which is why people are now immortal) and store backups. They can even make extra copies and then reassemble them and integrate their experiences of the copies so that the person has the memories and experiences of several versions of him/herself. I thought the latter was stretching it a bit, carrying the magic a bit too far, but it’s all great fun. Wellstone is the artificial material from which the fax gates can make other things. It is programmable matter, and thus matter programmers can turn it into other substances. Even smart teenagers – including several in our crew of camp escapees – can do so.

Most of the novel follows the small crew of boys – and one girl who tagged along with them as the travel from the Kuiper belt, toward a neutronium barge, which presumably will have fax gates back to earth. While there is some focus on the science fictional elements here, for much of the trip the focus is more on the dynamics of the situation, the hierarchies that develop, and how the various kids cope.

The main character – or at least the focal point character, and the one we most sympathize with – is Conrad Mursk. Conrad is a smart boy – at least in the subjects he likes – who has been sent to summer camp, like most of the other boys, for disciplinary reasons. While at times friends with Bascal, the boy prince, he, more than anyone, is both the voice of reason and the conscience of the crew (even though they – particularly Bascal – ignore him when they don’t like what he has to say). He is more staid, more restrained than the others, and more mature. He is also more likeable.

Bascal, on the other hand, while at times charming, is more often annoying than note. Convinced of the importance of his mission – to act as an example to help free the young people of the solar system – and of his right to rule, he is often callous and reckless. He uses people, often giving important positions to people simply for backing him (including the thuggish Ho, who acts as his enforcer for much of the novel). He’s believable in most ways, but not likeable.

While much of the book is quite good, there are aspects of it that I couldn’t believe or didn’t like. The biggest is something that he continues from Collapsium: the assertion that people really want a monarchy, that we are hard-wired to be happier when we have someone at the top taking responsibility. This is the case of the king and queen, and it is the case with Bascal. He at one point lectures Conrad on this topic, pointing out that he is likely to be right and be accepted because he was raised to be the eventual ruler. And in the end, everyone (including people who should not) except Conrad view him that way. But I don’t buy it. Some people perhaps want to live in a monarchy, but frankly history doesn’t back the sweeping generalization McCarthy makes for the book. Perhaps I’m particularly sensitive to this point because the other book I’m now reading is a long biography of Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson (and Adams, Madison, Franklin, etc.) certainly did not have some hereditary need for a monarch.

In a few places in the novel, he says that most people no longer exercise or even walk around. Several characters express astonishment that anyone would ever want to. Why bother when you can go through a fax and it can restore your body in tip-top shape? Again, I don’t buy this for most people. Sure, some people really don’t like to walk. But many people – me included – walk not only to try to keep somewhat fit but because we enjoy the activity. The good brisk walk is invigorating; it feels good. I can’t imagine people would give up such activities just because they no longer needed to do so to keep their bodies fit.

Beyond this, the novel’s biggest flaw is that McCarthy decided to use the first and last chapter as a framing story, set well in the future of the novel. The indication is that the future, in the aftermath of the novel’s true conclusion a chapter earlier, is not going to be what we might expect or hope. Clearly, he’s setting up another novel to explore this. But the frame isn’t needed for this, since what should have been the final chapter set up a sequel on its own. The frame is both a bit confusing as your read it, and is something you almost forget as you read the novel proper. It would have been a better novel without it.

Despite these misgivings, this was an enjoyable book. McCarthy’s future and the technology in it are fascinating, and the majority of the novel is well done. I note that there is a sequel, which I’ll have to look for.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

Jim Mann — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 01:33:00 +0000

I first read Stranger in a Strange Land sometime in the early 1970s. At that point, I’d read perhaps a dozen of Heinlein’s novels and several collections of short stories, and was finally getting around to what was often billed as his major novel. I was looking forward to it, because at the time Heinlein was one of my favorite writers (his best works still rank high on my list). I came away disappointed. While the first half of the book was good, the second half (after Mike leaves Jubal) seemed to spin out of control. It was a half good (or half bad) novel, and certainly not Heinlein’s best (or even one of his half dozen or so best).

I’ve re-read a lot of Heinlein over the years. I greatly enjoy and have reread multiple times Citizen of the Galaxy, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Double Star, The Star Beast, and a number of the short stories. I even re-read Time Enough for Love once; it’s a flawed, very overwritten novel, but there are several very good novellas buried in it. But I never re-read Stranger. But our local Barnes and Noble has an SF reading group, and Stranger is the novel for July, so I decided to re-read it. Besides, I thought, my tastes have changed a lot in 30+ years. I’ve read a lot of different kinds of things (ranging from more SF to Jane Austen to James Joyce to Leo Tolstoy), and I’ve like some things that I’ve reread far more than I liked them as a teenager, noticing more levels or appreciating that there is more to a book than an interesting plot.

Unfortunately, my opinion of Stranger hasn’t change. If anything, the second half bothered me more than it did all those years ago, and I think I can say more of why I didn’t like. I’m going to talk about that a bit here. This “review” really isn’t something that someone who hasn’t read the novel may relate too, since I presume some knowledge of the book on the part of the reader.

When I first read it, the point where I thought the novel went down hill was when Mike left Jubal. I felt that Jubal had kept things under control. That was part of it, but there is more to it than that. The big change actually happens about a chapter earlier. The Mike of the first half of the book is learning what it means to be human. He doesn’t understand much, and thus his views are an interesting glimpse at our customs from the outside. Mike in the second half has grown up, and now seems to understand everything. He is a less interesting character (and we actually see less of him), but more importantly his knowing everything makes the social commentary less pointed.

Moreover, the first part of the novel is structured around Mike’s coming to earth, his imprisonment, his escape, and the negotiations that essentially save him and establish his rights. There’s a lot of interesting story in the midst of the social commentary, and it’s only occasionally broken up by speeches by Jubal. The second half is drowned in the speech making. Everyone pontificates at great length. Nobody can have a simple conversation without it turning into a several-page-long lecture.

The novel as a whole but especially the second half is also a textbook example of one of Heinlein’s most annoying traits in some of his later books. The viewpoints of his main characters are right, by definition, no questions asked, and the events of the book are structured to show that they are right. Mike groks rightness and wrongness, and, by definition, he’s right. We aren’t supposed to question him, and neither are the other characters. He’s even right when he kills (transports into another dimension) a burglar in the church. After all, Mike knows he’s right so why should he, for example, simply transport the burglar, naked, outside (something he can do) rather than killing him? Mike doesn’t question it, and neither does anyone else. But of course, at this point everyone else – our main characters – have all learned Martian, and once you can think in Martian you know there is life after death, what’s right and what’s wrong, and so on. . Near the very end – before he discorporates – Mike murders (“discorporates,” to use his term) about 450 criminals. Again, since he is, by definition, right (and since he also knows that there is life after death), this is presented as being quite OK. Frankly, it made me more uncomfortable than most of the things Heinlein included to make his readers uncomfortable.

Mike’s superpowers are also too much. He can do anything. James Blish in his essay “Cathedrals in Space,” summed it up:

He can control his metabolism to the point where any outside observer can judge him to be dead; he can read minds; he is a telekinetic; he can throw objects (or people) permanently away into the fourth dimension by a pure effort of will, so easily that he uses the stunt often simply to undress; he practices astral projection as easily as he undresses, on one occasion leaving his body on the bottom of a swimming pool while he disposes of about thirty-five cops and almost as many heavily armored helicopters; he can heal his own wounds almost instantly; he can mentally analyze inanimate matter, well enough to know instantly that a corpse he has just encountered died by poisoning years ago; levitation, crepitation, intermittent claudication, you name it, he’s got it—and besides, he’s awfully good in bed.

Near the books end, it’s even noted that he could destroy the planet if he wanted to. It’s all too much, and we’re supposed to take it all as a given (or as a result of being able to think in Martian).

There are good things here. There is good social satire – both biting and at times funny. Some of the sidetracks and speeches are interesting in their own right. I’ve always enjoyed Jubal’s sidetrack on Rodin and representational art. But these good moments do not a good book make. I really wanted to like this book more this time than last. I really went into hoping that my broadened tastes would let me appreciate it. But, I’m sorry. I can’t. This is a flawed book, and in the end its flaws overwhelm it.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Jim Mann — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 23:53:00 +0000

One a panel at a convention a while back, Patrick Nielsen Hayden talked about the difference between “plot” and “story.” I won’t try to give his denition here – this was a while ago and I don’t remember all the details – but instead give my approximation. Plot is the structured storyline, leading to a definition end, and often having a form that English teachers like to draw in class. Story is all the incidents that happen. Some very good novels – Don Quixote comes to mind – have very little plot but lots of story. Patrick Rothfuss’s first novel, The Name of the Wind, is likewise full of story, but with little structured plot.

The story is told as a story within a story. Kvothe, pronounced like “quothe,” somewhat of a legendary character (perhaps a hero, perhaps not), has retired and is now living in hiding as an innkeeper. Only he and his servant Bast know who he is. But he’s tracked down by a traveling scribe who wants to know his story. Kvothe promises to tell him his story over several days. The Name of the Wind (subtitled The Kingkiller Chronicles: Day One) comprises the first day of Kvothe’s storytelling.

Kvothe starts the story with his childhood. As a young boy, he had been part of a wandering group of entertainers. He had a tutor who taught him, among other things, artificing (essentially magic). His father is a singer. One day, when Kvothe comes home from wandering in the woods, he finds that his whole troupe has been slaughtered. The Chandrian, a fairy folk, have killed everyone, apparently because a song his father had been writing told of them. This event becomes the driving motivation in Kvothe’s life.

The young Kvothe finds his way to the nearest large city, where, homeless, he lives by his wits (and petty theft). Yet his aim is to make his way to the university, to get access to the great library, and learn more about the Chandrian. Eventually, he makes his way there, and using courage, bravado, and some keen thinking not only passes the entrance interview but convinces the faculty to charge him a negative tuition for the first term.

He becomes a very good student, though he makes enemies of some of the faculty – and of one of the rich kids on campus. But behind everything is his desire to learn more about the Chandrian. And he does get one more shot before this volume ends.

Weaved throughout the story is his romantic attraction for the beautiful, smart, but flighty Denna (though at times she calls herself several variants of this). He first encountered her on his carriage trip as he headed for university, but he finds her again several times later, and their stories become intertwined. They become close – or as close as she will allow anyone to get to her. There is more here, perhaps, to be told in the next book.

Also weaved throughout the story of Kvothe’s life is music. He learned early to play the lute, and when his parents died, he taught himself to do amazing things with it. His love of music is perhaps the only thing in his life that drives him as much as his desire to learn more about the Chandrian. His ability as a player and his public performances also are important at key elements at major points in the novel.

One strength of The Name of the Wind is that the magic feels real. It’s consistent and it has a cost. There is a low of conservation of energy at work: to heat something up by sympathetic magic requires heat to be drawn from somewhere else. An unwary artificer who tries to draw too much heat from himself rather than an external heat source can cause his body temperature to drop, perhaps fatally. Kvothe makes a mistake early on, and it nearly kills him. Contrast this, say, with the Harry Potter universe, where magic is everywhere, and is used for the most trivial things (e.g., washing dishes) with no real drain on the practitioners. Moreover, in the Potter universe, magic doesn’t seem to have a consistent, defined basis. Rowling invents new things as her plots require them. This makes for an interesting, inventive universe, but one that doesn’t quite feel real. Rothfuss’s universe does feel real, and the magic seems to be bound by a set of rules (and is not overused).

Likewise, the non-magical parts of Rothfuss’s world are well constructed. The city and its underbelly where Kvothe lives on the street are very real, as is the university. At school, students don’t just study artificing, but basic subjects one would expect in school. (By contrast, one wonders how Harry Potter and friends ever learn basic arithmetic, geography, etc. – or even how the muggle world works – when all they ever study are potions, defense against the dark arts, etc.) [A side note: Don’t let my nit-picking about a few things in the Potter universe lead you to believe I don’t like Rowling’s books. I do; all are fun, and a couple are major fantasy novels. But they are not without their flaws.]

The characters – especially Kvothe, who we learn a lot about – are well drawn also, though both Kvothe and Bast still have mysteries behind them that we’ll need to wait for later books to resolve. Kvothe seems very human and very (at risk of overusing this word) real – something that’s very important in a fantasy novel, where we need grounding in reality if we are going to accept the fantastic.

After finishing this review, I looked for other reviews of the novel. I found a number of positive ones, but one I particularly liked was in Strange Horizons by Hannah Storm-Martin (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2007/06/the_name_of_the.shtml). She calls The Name of the Wind, the David Copperfield of fantasy. I thought that comparison summed up so much about the book that I borrow it here. There are many aspects about the plot, the characters, and even the style that are a bit Dickensian that I thought this a very apt observation. My earlier comment about “plot” vs. “story” also applies here. While some Dickens novels had plot, plot was often overwhelmed by story, and David Copperfield is a good example of that.

I look forward to the next installment, hoping that it can live up to the promise of the first.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Jim Mann — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 03:34:00 +0000

[For those who care: the final part of this review contains spoilers (which you can also take as warnings)]

For years, Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four boasted that it was the “World’s Greatest Comic.” And for a while, in the 1960s, the book lived up to that boast. Featuring complex (for comics, at least) plots, engaging characters (who didn’t like the Thing), interesting story lines, backstories that were carried on for many books (at a time when this was unusual), and an interesting science fictional universe, it was certainly the book I most looked forward to every month. And one of the high points of comics in the 1960s was Fantastic Four issues 48-50, which introduced the characters of the world-devouring Galactus and his herald, the Silver Surfer. It captured much of what was so enjoyable in the comic of the time. For at least several years after that, Fantastic Four remained at the top of the comics world, until sometime in the early to mid-1970s, when much of the Marvel Universe – other than their reborn X-Men – were getting a bit tired. But I still look back at the FF of the 1960s with great fondness.

I thus really wanted to like the first Fantastic Four film. I tried to not fall in the overly fan-boyish trap of complaining about how it differed from the comics – but damn it, the changes they made to the character of Dr. Doom were not for the better. Despite that, though, I really tried to like it. And I did like some parts. It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t very good. Still, hope springs eternal, and the trailer for the second film seemed to promise that it would be better than the first. And perhaps it was … but not by much.

My daughter and I went to see the film together, and both left wondering how a film that’s slightly under 90 minutes long can seem much longer. The answer, I think, is that so many different things are crammed into the film, often in haphazard fashion, that we know a lot has happened. We have the Surfer coming to earth. We have Reed and Sue’s wedding. And the Torch being infected with some cosmic radiation by his encounter with the Surfer in such a way that he exchanges powers with whatever other FF member he touches. And Dr. Doom’s attempts to steal the Surfer’s powers. We thus have the plots of three different Marvel comics storylines of the 1960s, plus more beside, all crammed together in a note very convincing manner.

The film does have one good sequence: when the quarter saves the people trapped on the collapsing London Eye, after the Surfer has visited London and caused a crater into which the Thames empties. It was quite a nice superhero action sequence, and it’s a pity the film couldn’t have had more like it. The movie also features a clever cameo by Stan Lee, this time playing himself, copying from a cameo he and Jack Kirby actually had in the original comic in which Reed and Sue were married.

As the film approaches its end, the Surfer is convinced to turn against Galactus by Sue Storm (a role given to Alicia in the original comic). At this point, I looked at my watch and saw that there was less than five minutes left. Good, I thought to myself. Despite everything, they really are going to be like the comic and end with Galactus’s arrival on Earth – a cliffhanger and lead-in to the next film. But, no. In the final five minutes, Galactus arrives. What a disappointment. Instead of the familiar super-advanced humanoid giant of the comics, we get something that looks like a cross between a cosmic storm and a planet. The Surfer the flies into Galactus, discharges his power, and destroys Galactus. This doesn’t make sense on so many levels. The Surfer had told Sue that he served to preserve his own planet. But if he had the power to destroy Galactus, why didn’t he do it many years earlier. It’s all very annoying, and all very much of a major let down.

Moreover, in the midst of all this running around and jumbled plots, we never get any real character development. Reed (played by Ioan Gruffudd, who did such a great job in Amazing Grace and the Hornblower series) is rather flat, though perhaps the best developed of the group. He’s certainly played by the best actor of the four. Sue Storm comes off as whiny and self-centered in the first half of the film (her fancy wedding more important to her than finding out why the world may be coming to an end). Johnny remains an egocentric kid; I had hoped he would have grown up more. And the Thing – one of Stan Lee’s best characters, and the reason why the Fantastic Four was so popular for so long – remains more of a joke than anything. Finally, Dr. Doom remains a puzzle. Julian McMahon is completely miscast for the role. If nothing else, Doom needs a deep, sonorous voice, something McMahon can’t manage.

In the end, it’s a movie of many parts, most of them so-so. The X-Men franchise proved that you can make a good superhero movie centered on a superhero team. But for that to happen with the Fantastic Four, they need better writers and directors.

Collapsium by Wil McCarthy

Jim Mann — Fri, 25 May 2007 23:49:00 +0000

Wil McCarthy’s Collapsium is a superscience novel combined with a nineteenth-century English novel, with heavy splashes of Dumas and a villain who would fit well in a James Bond film added as spice. Yet, all these disparate parts hold together rather well, amking for an enjoyable experience. It moves deftly between humor and excitement, between awe and terror. And the superscience is grounded in and extrapolated from today’s physics in believable ways. (And for those who don’t think the physics info dumps are detailed enough, McCarthy includes an appendix with more details.)

The novel opens several hundred years in the future – in the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol. Bruno de Towaji, genius-level physicist (on a par with the best creations of John Campbell, if a bit more eccentric and at times cranky), inventor of collapsium (essentially, a stable material made of tiny black holes), billionaire (as a result of invention), is living a solitary existence on a man-made planet, circling a man-made sun, in the Kuiper Belt, where he performs dangerous physics experiments with exotic matter. He, and everyone else, are virtual immortals; the “fax” machines that are used as transport and replicators (sort of like Star Trek transporters, but using nano-technology) can also restore the human body as it transports it. He is called back to the inner solar system twice to save the project of his rival, Marlon Sykes. Sykes is supervising the construction of a vast collapsium ring around the sun, one that can be used to speed telecommunications and faxing, since the speed of light is much higher inside the ring. But the ring is breaking up, falling into the sun, something that could destroy the sun. The second time it happens, it’s clear that sabotage is the cause, though not who did it. But in both cases, Bruno comes up with a solution, saving the solar system.

Several years later, when Bruno, back in the Kuiper Belt reactivates his fax machine, he find a copy of himself waiting in the fax buffer. The copy has been damaged – tortured for years – by Marlon Sykes, who has forced him to betray Bruno and reveal his weaknesses. Muddy, as the copy calls himself (he considers himself a damaged version of Bruno, hence the wordplay on Bruno/Brown), tells him that Marlon has destroyed the collapsium ring and the fax network. Marlon isn’t just a resentful and somewhat anti-social scientist; he’s a megalomaniac, set on destroying the sun as part of an experiment. His destruction of the fax network, moreover, has made it nearly impossible for anyone to stop him.

The second half of the novel follows Bruno and Muddy as they set about doing just that. Together they come up with scientific marvels, including an inertialess drive, based in part of actual recent scientific views of the nature of mass and inertia. Amidst these superscience marvels, we have swordfights (one with what is essentially a magic sword), battles with hordes of robots, a fight with a giant spider, incredible rescues and escapes, and much more. As I noted earlier, there is a good bit of swashbucking in the novel. It’s all great fun, exiting, funny, and occasionally even frightening.

It does have a few weaknesses. Bruno is the only character developed enough to feel like a real, rounded person. He is delightfully entertaining. He lacks social graces, and his contempt for fashion (he views much of what passes as important social etiquette as really fad), something I can sympathize with. Yet he is also brilliant and resourceful, and looked up to by most (which infuriated Marlon). Muddy, on the other hand, is so whiny that you feel light slapping him (as does Bruno). That’s understandable, given his experience with Marlon, but it also gets annoying after a while. The queen is interesting but underdeveloped, as are several other side characters. We see enough of them to make us want to see more, yet not enough to truly come to know them as well as we’d like. And Marlon …. After Marlon, in section three, is revealed to be a super-villain, Bruno muses that extreme sociopaths are good at hiding their true natures. Perhaps, but nevertheless from the reader’s point of view it’s rather abrupt. He turns from a scientist who is quite talented but feels he is underappreciated working in the shadow of Bruno to essentially Lex Luthor. This also results in a change in tone – or perhaps I should say a change in the level of realism of things – from the more realistic events of the first two sections to the swashbuckling third, as the somewhat comic novel of manners (and of course superscience) turns into a cross between James Bond and the Three Musketeers (don’t’ forget the superscience). Don’t get me wrong. The second half of the book is great fun, but the transition between parts 1 and 2 and part 3 is a bit abrupt.

I also don’t by the whole “Queendom of Sol” rationale, but that’s a philosophical disagreement. I don’t believe that most people are as hard-wired to want a hierarchy as the novel states (though to be fair, it does fit well with swashbuckling tone of the second half and with the more restrained comedy of manners of the first).

Overall, this is a good novel. McCarthy knows his physics and knows how to work it into an entertaining novel. I plan to read the sequel.

King Kong vs. Godzilla

Jim Mann — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:21:00 +0000

Of all the early Godzilla films (those before such 1970s flops as Godzilla vs. Megalon and Godzilla vs. Gigan), none is put down as often as King Kong vs. Godzilla. Yet for many years, this was the top grossing Godzilla film in Japan. To look at what causes this mismatch between what English-language film goers think of this film vs. how it is viewed in Japan, you have to look at the original Japanese film, which is unfortunately not available in the United States and doesn’t seem to be part of the big release of dual-film (Japanese original with English subtitles and American dubbed versions) that Sony is doing of many of the other early Godzilla films. One has to thus go to other sources to find it. (If anyone reading this wants to complain about piracy, my response is that, when Sony releases an official version, I’ll buy to replace my unofficial copy, the same way I did when the released the original Godzilla a few months back.)

The original, while not a great film by any means, is enjoyable and certainly a better film than the English-language version. It’s longer, spending much more time on the setup and a lot more on the parody of commercialism/advertising, which only partially comes through in the English version. More importantly, the original contains a marvelous Akira Ifukube soundtrack, which is mostly replaced in the English version (other than a few segments of the natives’ song) by the soundtrack from the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

For those note familiar with Ifukube, he is the Japanese Bernard Hermann or John Williams – the creator of big, memorable symphonic scores. For Ifukube, like Hermann or Williams, the soundtrack of a film is much like the score of an opera – something integral to the film, something memorable in itself, not just something almost unnoticed in the background used to set the mood. Among other things, Ifukube wrote all of the best Godzilla scores, from that of the original film to the score of the last film of the second series, Godzilla vs. Destroyah. In fact, I’d argue that there are no really good Godzilla films that don’t have Ifukube scores (though the reverse is not true, since he also scored several bad Godzilla films).

The movie itself is made up of two story lines that converge as the film goes on. The longer of the two involves a pharmaceutical company that is looking for a marketing ploy. They find it when a scientist not only brings back samples of new berry (source for a possible sleep-aid drug) from an island in the Solomons, but also word that the natives there worship some sort of monstrous god. This gives the firm’s marketing exec and idea: go to the island, film or capture the monster, and make that the center of his advertising campaign. Of course the god is the giant ape King Kong, who they bring back to Japan with no thought of the damage he’ll cause.

Meanwhile, Godzilla, who had been buried in the ice at the end of the second Godzilla film (Godzilla’s Counterattack, aka Gigantis the Fire Monster) emerges from an iceberg, heads for Japan, and immediately begins tearing up the countryside. The military, as usual, is unable to stop him, and Kong’s first encounter with him is a rousing defeat for Kong (who can’t stand up to Godzilla’s radioactive breath). But the authorities (and the pharmaceutical firm employees) decide that Kong may be their only hope against Godzilla, that as bad as Kong is, Godzilla is worse. They knock out Kong using the sleep-drug they brought back from the island, airlift him with balloons, and drop him on Godzilla. They fight, Kong wins, and swims back toward home. (The persistent story that Godzilla wins in the Japanese version is wrong.)

As I said, the movie is entertaining. The subplot is often amusing, and some of the action scenes are good. Several of the solo Godzilla sequences are quite good (the Godzilla suit used in this one is one of the better ones). And Ifukube’s score is one of his very best and most innovative (including even some jazzy sections that weren’t typical for him).

On the downside, the King Kong suite just looks wrong. I think this is one of the things that makes this movie the but of jokes. Had this suit been a bit better, the movie would have been better. Moreover, while some of the fight sequences are good, a few look too much like sumo wrestling (deliberate, I believe, to help entertain the kids they expected to attend this one).

One final note: this movie does have some nostalgic appeal for me. It’s the first movie I ever went to with my family. We all went to the drive-in to see it when it was released. (The next film in the series, the far better Mothra vs. Godzilla (aka Godzilla vs. the Thing) also has nostalgic appeal as it was the first film I ever attended on my own at a theatre, as well as the first film that I saw print ads for and thus was anticipating when it came out.)

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Jim Mann — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 19:28:00 +0000

As you can probably gather from a number of my SF reviews, I’m quite fond of the new space opera, ranging from that Vernor Vinge to the more edgy and extreme writers like Alistair Reynolds and Neil Asher (and many others in between). Peter Watts’s Blindsight sits on the spectrum near the later writers, it’s edgy (and often unlikable) characters and bizarre, sometimes nasty situations, at times reminiscent of parts of Reynolds or Asher, but with plenty of Strossian post-singularity perspective included, all combined in a way that seems fresh.

Several hundred years in the future, thousands of aliens objects gather around the earth, then burn in the atmosphere as they fall to earth. They seem to have been sent to survey the Earth, though it’s not clear by whom or for what. An old space probe, though, manages to pick up traces of a signal well beyond Pluto’s orbit. The spaceship Theseus is sent to investigate.

The ship is populated by a very strange cast of characters. The narrator, Siri, had half his brain removed as a child; he now is incapable of empathy, but can observe actions and understand motivations as well as predict what might happen next. The ship’s captain is a vampire, an offshoot of the human species that had been extinct since prehistoric times, but which has been revived. Vampire’s are more intelligent than humans, and have more acute mental perceptive abilities. The crew also includes a linguist who has had her brain surgically divided into separate “cores,” on which distinct individuals run, a biologist who has so many machine modifications that he’s more machine than human, and a professional soldier who is also a pacifist of sorts.

They find themselves in one of the most intriguing first contact situations ever. Far outside of the solar system, they are contacted by an alien vessel calling itself the Rorschach. It’s not clear though if the ship (which seems to be growing) is inhabited or whether the message they received was from an AI. And even as they try to investigate – under grueling radiation and intense magnetic fields, which interfere not only with perception but with cognition – but what they find doesn’t as much answer even their simplest questions but raise new ones.

The novel is an examination of the consciousness and intellect (and whether something can be “intelligent” but not self aware). It uses the modifications of the characters, the situations they are under, and the aliens they find to look at the various aspects of perception, cognition, and awareness. It doesn’t come to any easy answers – and some answers that it points toward are rather disquieting – but it raises a host of interesting questions. This is a very ambitious novel, one that really does try (and often succeeds) to break new ground.

Perhaps the weakest part of the novel is its characters. They are fascinating, but mostly interesting as examinations of extreme psychological states or glimpses at how the mind works. The only character who we see in much real depth is Siri, and even with him we felt hat we’re at a distance. We don’t really care much what happens to him or to any of the characters in the novel, even if we find what they are going through interesting in its own right. But perhaps there is no way around that in a novel of this sort.

Blindsight is on the Hugo ballot this year, and it is indeed a worthy book. Though in a year that featured three superb novels on the ballot – Eifelheim, Glasshouse, and Rainbows End (as well as the very entertaining His Majesty’s Dragon) — I don’t think it has much chance of winning (it will probably be fourth on my ballot). It was good enough though that I’m certainly going to look for more by Watts.

One minor quibble: the book includes an appendix that includes references to explain some of the science in the book. However, this appendix mixes sections on fictional science (the history/biology of Watts’s vampires) with sections of fact (many of the medical/psychological conditions explored in the book). The problem with doing this is that it causes the reader to question whether any of this is real. I don’t have much in-depth knowledge of psychology, and the only way I knew that the latter sections of the appendix were at least in part true is that I recognized a couple of the items he references in footnotes. But even so, I’m not sure if I should accept all that is listed in those sections of the appendix as true.

Escape from New York

Jim Mann — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 01:52:00 +0000

Many movies have nonsense plots. You know the type: the whole setup really doesn’t make much sense when you look closely at it. Silly things happen along the way. Characters do dumb things. But every now and then, a movie surpasses its own silly underpinnings. A combination of creativity, style, and just plain fun turn it from plain old nonsense to what I like to think of as inspired nonsense. And when I think of one movie that exemplifies what I mean by this, I think of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.

It’s 1998. Manhattan Island has been turned into a maximum security prison, where prisoners are dropped off and never allowed to leave, but instead form their own bizarre societies on the island. Air Force one, with the president aboard, crashes on the island. Worse, he is carrying a cassette tape with the information that will mean mankind’s salvation on it: the secret of controlled fusion. This all is nonsense on so many levels. The most valuable property on earth turned into a prison? One copy of the secret of fusion? (What? Did the president shoot the scientists and burn their notes?) Everything stored on a cassette tape of someone explaining the theory?

Yet, around this silliness, Carpenter has crafted an entertaining adventure film Kurt Russell stars as Snake Plissken, ex commando turned criminal, whose sentence will be commuted if he can rescue the president within 24 hours. (The secret of controlled fusion is only important if the president can present it while a major world summit is underway.) Plissken seems to be mythic character and in some reminded me of someone out of a Roger Zelazny novel. Everyone he runs into has hear of him and most recognize him (and usually say “I thought you were dead”). He is sent to Manhattan to find the president, and there encounters a host of strange characters and weird mini-societies, all living amidst the eerie stylistic landscape of a mostly abandoned and much damaged New York.

The president is being held captive by the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes), the chief criminal on the island who drives around in a big Cadillac with chandeliers on its hood. The great character actor Harry Dean Stanton plays “Brain,” a criminal scientist who not only knows how to manufacture gasoline (which he seems to do in the remains of the New York Public Library), but also has mapped the mines on the 69^th Street Bridge. The Duke plans to lead the exiles off of the island using the president (played in marvelously whiney fashion by Donald Pleasance) following Brain’s map. Ernest Borgnine plays Cabbie, a cab driver who befriends Plissken and who always seems to be in the right place at the right time.

I usually don’t like movies where, when you actually think about what’s going on, don’t make sense. But this is one of the exceptions. I don’t know what it is – the semi-mythic character of Plissken, the strangeness and creativity of the situations and societies he finds on the island, the interesting cast of characters (the Duke, Cabbie, Brain, and many others), the wonderful sets and cinematography, Carpenter’s simplistic but hypnotic score – but somehow this movie works. It’s probably all of these things, combining to form the inspired nonsense that I find to be so much fun. It’s rather like a comic book brought to life – bigger than life characters, straightforward, simplistic plot, emotions cranked way up, colorful things going on. In the end, what makes it work is that it’s fun.

The movie was made in 1981. Many years later, Carpenter made a sequel (Escape from LA) which really didn’t work the way the original did, perhaps because this time it wasn’t fresh. A remake is planned, and as much as I like the original, I have to ask why? The fact that this movie worked, when, if you just describe what it’s about, it clearly shouldn’t, seems to me like something that can’t be repeated and will probably be done badly (and worse, heavy handedly). I could be wrong (after all, I was convinced that nothing good could come of remaking a poor TV series like the original Battlestar Galactica). But the odds of the remake of Escape from New York being better than the original (or even worth watching) are low.

The Battle of Salamis by Barry Strauss

Jim Mann — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 23:23:00 +0000

The recent controversy over the movie 300 has inspired recent interest in the battle of Thermopylae, which some call the battle that saved Greece from the Persians. Thermopylae was certainly an important battle, both in the way it delayed Xerxes’s advancing army and in the way it inspired those who came after, but Greece – and with it, perhaps, Western Civilization – was saved by two important sea battles. The Greeks first held their own against the much larger Persian fleet at Artemisium (which occurred while the Spartans were facing the Persians at Thermopylae), then routed the Persian fleet, beating back the invasion, at Salamis.

Salamis is a small island, just off the coast from Athens, noted prior to the battle as the home of the great hero of the Trojan War, Ajax. The Athenians evacuated their people there as Xerxes marched down the Attic peninsula to sack Athens. They also gathered their fleet there, in the tight bays of the island. This was actually important strategically. The Greek triremes were heaver than those used by the Phoenicians and others in Xerxes’s navy, and thus were at an advantage where brute strength – specifically, ramming power – was more important than maneuverability. And it was in this area around Salamis, with a fleet that was still considerably outnumbered their adversaries, that the Greek’s won a navy battle as decisive as such later historical battles as Trafalgar.

Xerxes had entered Greece with much pomp – intending what today would probably be called shock and awe. His engineered created a pontoon bridge across the Hellespont, and he marched his massive army across. At the same time, his fleet – consisting of Phoenicians, Egyptians, and others under Persian rule – was made up of over 1000 triremes. His army, while delayed by the Spartan-led forces at Thermopylae, broke threw and marched into Attica, intent on destroying Athens (Athens “disloyalty” was the pretext for the war). His fleet, while much reduced by the battle of Artemisium, was still larger than the Greek fleet. His troops reached Athens, then burned it, while the Athenians watched from across the harbor at Salamis. Meanwhile, the Persian fleet gathered in Phaleron Bay, outside of Athens.

On Salamis, the Greek’s debated what to do. Many of the Greeks wanted to give up Athens as lost and move the fleet to the Corinthian isthmus and the army to the Peloponnesian peninsula. Though the Athenians had by far the largest contingent in the Greek fleet (about 180 of the 300 or so ships), the admiral of the fleet was Spartan, since the Athenians had agreed, as part of the political settlement that put together the alliance, to let the Spartans rule in war. Yet the real brains of the fleet was the Athenian Themistocles, who urged a naval battle at Salamis.

He lost the argument the day before the battle, and the Greeks were going to pull out. But Themistocles secretly sent his chief slave to the Persian camp, to report that the Greeks were going to flee under cover of darkness and thus escape the Persians. This caused the Persians to blockade Salamis, precipitating the battle.

The battle itself was chaotic – as perhaps all battles are – but the Greeks prevailed for a variety of reasons. One I mentioned earlier: their heavier ships were better in the confined spaces and wind conditions in the area of Salamis. But there were also several other factors – force multipliers, to use a term of military analysis that Strauss also uses. They were fighting for their homes and for freedom (freedom in this case meaning freedom of the Greek city states to decide their own destinies, not individual freedom, though the latter did factor in for the Athenians), while the Persians were fighting under orders from the Great King. This resulted in a mixture of fear (Xerxes could execute those who displeased him) combined with jockeying to impress the king. Moreover, in the Persian fleet, initiative was discouraged; amongst many of the Greeks, it was prized. Again, under the chaotic conditions of the battle, the Greeks combination of discipline, motive, and initiative saw them through.

One of the more interesting characters of the conflict was Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, a Greek city that was under the rule of Persia. (More Greeks may have fought on the Persian side during the war than the nominal Greek (Athenian/Spartan) side.) She was the only woman in the battle, at a time when woman were very much looked down upon. Yet she was also trusted by Xerxes and gave him sound advice (which was ignored) before the battle. During the battle, her ship came close to being rammed, but she turned and rammed one of her own allies – thus tricking the advancing Greek ship into believing that she must be on the Greek side. She survived, and the trick even fooled Xerxes, who thought she must have attacked a Greek ship and honored her as one of the few successful captains on the Persian side of the battle.

The Persians were so dismayed by the result of the battle that they essentially stopped using their navy. Fighting went on for a year, but the remaining Persian fleet huddled near the Anatolian coast. They were apparently convinced that the Greek’s – who did not pursue them immediately after Salamis – would not cross the Aegean to attack. They were wrong: the Greeks did cross in 479 BC, and the Persians beached their ships to fight on land – a fight they also then lost. The Greeks burned the beached ships.

Strauss sums up the Persians huge mistake – both before and after Salamis:

On top of everything else, Xerxes underestimated democracy. He understood neither its ferocity nor its ability to learn from its mistakes. The day after Salamis, Xerxes’ nightmare was pursuit to the Hellespont by a Greek fleet. A year later, he no longer considered that likely. Surely, he reasoned, if the Athenians had not sailed to Anatolia in their moment of triumph after Salamis, they would not do so in 479 BC, after proving unable to defend Attica from a second invasion. The autocrat had no conception of the power of a people in arms who had been provoked.

Strauss does a very good job of describing the lead-up to the battle, the battle itself, and its aftermath. He gives enough background for someone who only knows a bit of Greek history, but enough detail to make the story real and compelling. It’s a difficult balancing act, but he pulls it off. He deftly balances expert historical knowledge, attention to detail, and understanding of what the audience of a good popular history – one that’s intelligent but not made up of scholars in the area in question – need to know. This is a very good history, and highly recommended.

A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson

Jim Mann — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 18:49:00 +0000

Most histories of the Peloponnesian War follow the example of the first great historian of the war, Thucydides, and narrate the history in chronological fashion. Victor Davis Hanson takes a very different approach. He instead analyzes the war an aspect at a time, looking at various aspects of life, methods of warfare, culture, and so on, describing in detail how things worked. This was a war that ended the golden age of Greece and in many ways was a very modern war. It was not a war consisting of set battles of hoplites of limited duration. Instead, it lasted for a generation, spread out over all of Greece and into Asia Minor and Sicily, and featured attacks on civilians, piracy, and at times what today we’d call “terrorism” and “ethnic cleansing.” The end phase of the war was dominated by a major power’s getting bogged down far overseas, in a conflict that spent much of its blood and treasure and left it open to its final defeat.

When the war actually started and ended isn’t really clear cut. Historians, following Thucydides and Xenophon (who picked up where Thucydides, who ended his great history mid-sentence and with several years of warfare still to go, left off), pick the start as the Spartan invasion of Attica. However, tensions had been there for months, and the lead up to the war is as complex as the lead up to World War I. Several Spartan allies went to war with Athenian allies months before the Spartan invasion. Likewise, Xenophon – and most modern historians following his lead – mark the end of the war as the capitulation of Athens after their huge naval loss at Aegospatami and the subsequent Spartan siege of Athens. After all, the Long Walls were pulled down and the Athenians had to agree to Spartan terms (which included becoming an oligarchy). Thus, historians view the Athenians as losing he war. But some early Greek historians disagree. Athens rebounded a few years later, and some of historians view their subsequent rebound – including their regaining ascendancy over Sparta – as a continuation of the war (and they therefore viewed Athens as the winner).

The key event early in the war was the plague that ravaged Athens, killing a quarter to a third of its people. We don’t know what exactly this plague was, but we do know the affects it had. But many historians, while concentrating on how awful it was, ignore its long term effects. Hanson does a more precise analysis, looking at the effect not only of lost military personnel (noting several battles where 25-30 percent more hoplites or cavalry would have been decisive), but at the impact of the huge loss in non-combatants who supported the military and of long-term economic power. In the end, Athens quite likely would not have lost he war if not for the plague. This seems even more likely when you consider that Athens lost its greatest leader – Pericles – to the plague. Pericles wasn’t only a brilliant strategist, but he could do something nobody else was able to do: hold the various factions of the radical democracy of Athens in check, and get them to follow his lead. The plague had another effect, though, perhaps more insidious: the constant exposure to death in the city coarsened the population, making many of the horrid actions of later in the war more likely (though perhaps they’d have occurred anyway, given the duration of the war).

The war changed Greece profoundly. Prior to the war, warfare (at least amongst Greek city states, as opposed to against foreign invaders) was viewed as the action of a day, in which armies of hoplites faced on another on a field and slugged it out for a few hours. Civilians weren’t touched, the survivors went home, and it was over. War was decided based on physical strength and bravery, not strategy and technology. The Peloponnesian War changed this forever. Strategy and tactics became important, as did other types of fighting (ranging from naval to cavalry to guerilla war tactics). Moreover, it became darker and nastier, as civilians and captured prisoners were massacred.

Not all these changes were bad, of course. The Athenian naval strategy went hand in hand with their radical democracy. Hoplites were property owners. Spartan society provided the extreme case. It was extremely conservative; the hoplites came from the Spartiate class, who were supported by the helots – essentially serfs, who had few or no rights. Triremes, on the other hand, were rowed by a cross-class mix. Good rowers could come from any class, and they mingled together. The reactionary forces in Greece looked down at the navy, in part because of this democratization that it caused. Later in the war (and in the wars that followed it), as Sparta was forced to create a navy, Spartan society as a result became more democratic. Yet some, both during and after the war, looked back on the good old days when war was a simple, clean test of valor. Plato laments the changes in warfare (and even muses that the great naval victory over the Persians a generation before the Peloponnesian War was a bad thing, as it lead to such changes).

But as the war changed, many who were involved in it did not adjust what they were dong quickly enough. Even the Athenians fell into the trap of assuming that hoplites were the key element in ground combat. The Sicilian disaster that lead to the war’s end game came about in large part because the Sicilians had a huge cavalry force, which the Athenians, assuming that on land they could rely mostly on hoplites, were not prepared for.

Hanson looks at the war in a number of ways. He examines the operations of the war in detail, describing, for example, how hoplite battles actually worked (and what it would have been like from a hoplites point of view) and what it was like on a trireme, as well as the tactics and strategies involved. He examines how sieges worked – or in many cases didn’t work, since, as he points out, the Greeks, who could build great temples, were not very good at breaching city walls. One gets the feel for how uncomfortable it must have been to wear hoplite armor all day or how ghastly conditions in a ship could be – especially if you were in the lowest bank of rowers, where it was hot, it reeked of sweat, you got little fresh air, and you were below two other banks of rowers who from time to time simply relieved themselves as they rowed. He also works with specific examples, describing what happened in particular hoplite battles (for all the Greek’s admiration of this type of warfare, there were only a few), naval engagements, and sieges. He also then ties these to the bigger picture – the politics, the strategy, and the aftermath.

Hanson brings a very scientific approach to his history. For example, the war started with Sparta’s invasion of Attica (the countryside around Athens), where they destroyed crops, trees, etc. Hanson was curious as to how hard this really would be. He lives on a farm, so he went out with an axe and chopped down a tree, discovering for himself how hard this was to do. He also tried to do some burning, and again discovered that this was not as easy as is sometimes thought. He then analyzed what was plausible for the Spartan army to do, and concluded that they could not have devastated the land. In some ways, their attack was more psychological than anything. What the Spartans really wanted was a pitched battle; they wanted the Athenians to come out from behind the city walls and fight, as the Spartans were convinced they had the better army. They hoped that the farmers, penned inside the city for protection, would push the city to fight. It didn’t work out that way.

Hanson also examines the roles of several of the key figures in the war. Alcibiades, who starts out with Athens, defects to Sparta, then returns as an Athenian hero is perhaps one of the most fascinating characters in all of history. His career also gives an interesting insight into the way the Athenian democracy operated. He was a hero early in the war (and a force for change, as he was someone who understood that the war was changing). Yet he was also an advocate for Athens greatest mistake – the Sicilian campaign. The assembly made him one of three leaders of the expedition (as if the usual two leaders assigned wasn’t bad enough), but when he arrived in Sicily he got a recall notice: he was to return to Athens to stand trial for blasphemy and other charges. Knowing he’d be going to his death (the assembly had a bad habit of voting for the death penalty for generals – sometimes even victorious ones – who did something they didn’t like), he instead defected to Sparta and urged the Spartans to face the Athenians in Sicily. (Yet another reason for the Athenian loss; they were only days away from completing the siege of Syracuse when the Spartans arrived.) But later he returned to Athens and was again leading Athenian naval forces, this time to key victories in the war in the Aegean. At the war’s end, he was assassinated, but nobody is sure who did it, since at that point there were so many possibilities.

Brasidas was perhaps the greatest of the Spartan commanders. He broke with Spartan tradition by putting together an expeditionary force of Spartiates, allies, freed serfs, and helots (who he promised greater freedom to if they served well). He was an unconventional commander, who, unlike most Spartans, was comfortable with the unconventional tactics of the war. Moreover, his mixed army did much to bring about change in Spartan society, as it forced the Spartiates to acknowledge that the helots could be good soldiers (and of course the helots themselves learned the same lesson). The Spartan war efforts were hampered when he was killed in battle.

The latter point leads to an important development in warfare that did not occur during the Peloponnesian War: military commanders in Greece were expected to lead from the front. Infantry commanders, for example, typically were in the lead rank of the army’s right flank. This is something that sounds very egalitarian and fair on the surface: generals, who put men at risk, are expected to take risks with them and feel what they feel. But in the long run, it’s a bad policy. Great strategists – who can lead to breakthroughs and do more for the war effort by their strategic or tactical thinking – are killed in battle and that expertise lost to the military. Yet, throughout the war, the Greek’s lost key leaders who were killed in the forefront of battle.

In the end, the Peloponnesian War is a great example of the coarsening effect of war, the way even good people can do awful things. The Athenians, who produced incredible art and philosophy, also voted to slaughter everyone in a rebellious city. It was paradoxical that the same people who voted this way also then watched Euripides’s play – produced during the war – that condemned such behavior and looked at warfare through enemy eyes. They even gave prizes to these works. Yet war induces such paradoxical behavior. Moreover, if we want to compare the war to a modern war (always a tricky thing, since there are often as many differences as similarities), World War I is probably the best comparison. In both wars, the optimism of a generation was destroyed in a dirty, nasty war that wiped out much of a generation. The Greeks in 400 BC are left in a state comparable to the post-World War I generation in Europe, reduced, pessimistic, looking to the past and wondering how this had happened to them.

Hanson’s history, looking at the war from a different perspective, is a great addition to the available histories of the war. Highly recommended.

The Trojan War by Barry Strauss

Jim Mann — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 03:58:00 +0000

Everyone knows the story of the Trojan War. Classical literature was full of references to it, and the people of ancient Greece and Rome took for granted that it was an historical event. Modern historians for many years doubted it’s reality, until archeological finds showed that Troy did indeed exist and had been destroyed by war at about the time classical history had placed the Trojan War. So, eventually, historians concluded that the war did happen, though the questioned all the details of it.

Barry Strauss, a professor of history and classics, has taken a very interesting approach in re-examining the Trojan War. He basis his work on archeology and on a deep understanding of ancient history – but he also basis it on Homer. He essentially tells the story of the war by following Homer, taking Homer as someone who was passing along the basics of the actual story, and analyzing whether this was plausible, expanding on how it could have actually been, and placing it in the context of the history of the time. Noting that the names of famous men often survive better in history than many other details, he even uses the names as Homer uses them (pointing out that, even if the names aren’t correct, using them is as good as using any other). Even Homer’s inclusion of the Gods is worked in, as Strauss points out that this is how men of the bronze age viewed their world.

Strauss follows the course of the war, at each part analyzing the classical story and discussing if it could happen this way and supplying details of how things did work in that period. For example, the classical explanation of the war is Paris’s abduction of Helen (and incidentally his absconding with a large portion of the Spartan treasury). Today, many tend to assume that that couldn’t have been the reason. Countries go to war for bigger reasons, to gain territory or resources, for example. But in the bronze age, war and the reasons for war were often put into such personal terms, even if underneath other causes were also at work. Moreover, Paris’s act was a slap in the face to Menelaus, an act that would cause him to lose face and power if he did nothing.

Chapter by chapter, Strauss takes scenes from Homer (and occasionally from the greater Homeric cycle, though he considers the other sources less reliable than Homer) and analyzes them. How would the Greeks have actually stormed the shore? What was the Trojan army like, and why did they have so little naval power? (While a major trading power, Troy came from a tradition – they were allies with the Hittites – that looked toward land for empire and power; they weren’t a sea power. Strauss, to show that they weren’t alone in being this way, quotes one Middle Eastern ruler of bragging that some day he would extend his empire to the sea – something no Greek or Roman would have said, since they would not have considered the sea an edge to their empires.) Strauss examines everything from battle tactics to ethics, from equipment and technology to political organization and alliances.

A quote will give you a feel for his technique, as he describes the wounding of Menelaus:

Menelaus did not require surgery, but if he had, a Bronze Age practitioner had cutting tools made of obsidian or bronze as well as such bronze instruments as forceps, probes, spoon, razor, and saw. Opium was available to ease the pain. Linen bandages were known in Egypt, but the only bandage in Homer is a woolen sling doing double duty as a dressing. An unbandaged wound may have been a common sight in a Greek camp.

He also describes where Homer exaggerated or could not have been right. The war could not have lasted for ten years. There was no way, given the logistical ability of the period, that a war for that long could have been managed. But he also notes that in the Ancient Near East there was a common expression “nine times and then a tenth” which means “over and over until finally.” So “ten years” in this case can just mean that it was a long, strenuous war.

I’ve read The Iliad a number of times over the years, so this is a subject I’m very interested in. I found Strauss’s book an intriguing look at how it could have happened, a wonderful mix of both history and literary analysis (and, I suppose, fiction, given his technique). After this, I’m going to have to go back and re-read Homer (which translation? Perhaps at some point I’ll do a review of my views of the handful of translations I’ve read and which translators I think are best for which work) and maybe even Virgil (I did just pick up Fagles’s new translation of The Aeneid).

Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder

Jim Mann — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 01:54:00 +0000

Swashbucklers in space were common fare in the Planet Stories days. Swordfights and space pirates were standard parts of these romances. They were great fun, especially when created by such polished writers as Leigh Brackett, yet at their heart, they were a tad unsatisfying, since we had to really suspend our disbelief. Why would a space going civilization use swords. Why didn’t they all have technology at least as advanced as ours, and use radar to detect the pirates, and radio to call back home? We hid those questions away as we were reading, but they were there in the background nonetheless.

Karl Schroeder clearly looks back with some fondness at those older romances, but wanted to do one better – and he has. In his Virga series, of which Sun of Suns is the first book, we have wooden ships in space, pirates, space-going civilizations without radio or radar, Sargasso seas in space, icebergs in space, and great adventure – but with background that makes all of this, in context, makes sense.

Virga is a planet size balloon, filled with air, water, and floating rocks, with small fusion reactors as suns and the only gravity generated by rotation of artificial structures within. Ships can travel between the various civilizations, moving through the air-filled space between worlds, sometimes through charted areas, at other times through the outlying “winter,” – vast, uncharted, and often populated by pirates.

Hayden Griffin is a young boy when his parents are killed. They had been trying to create a new “sun” for their world, to free them from the domination of Slipstream, when Slipstream attacks. When Griffin is grown, he infiltrates the household of Admiral Chaison Fanning, who he believes led the attack that killed is parents. He plans to kill, but gradually learns that things are different from what he thought. Meanwhile, Chaison, pushed by his wife Venera, is leading a mission to the central sun of sun. Their armorer, who appears to have come from outside of Vega, has told them that she can create devices called “radars” that will enable them to stop an impending attack, but that the central sun broadcasts a signal that prevents radar from working. They must get to the central sun and disable this signal long enough to allow Slipstream to save itself.

The book is a great combination of adventure and discovery, of battles against pirates and slowly – both for the characters and the reader – uncovering both what and why Virga is and what the universe outside is like. It’s exciting and great fun, with good characters (who grow more interesting as the book goes on), thrilling scenes, and wonderful SF concepts. The world (or worlds) within Vega are brilliantly constructed; it’s an intricate and believable artificial world, and Schroeder’s explanations of why it is – and why it has its limitations –- work well.

The book is the first part of a longer series. It does come to a bit of a conclusion, so unlike some recent books that are part of something bigger, it doesn’t feel like it’s been simply cut at some arbitrary place. But it does leave a number of lose ands, and I’m very much looking forward to the next in the series. Schroeder himself is on a path that we’re sure to see one of is novels on the Hugo ballot in the next few years.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

Jim Mann — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 03:53:00 +0000

Like many people, the first science fiction that I read was the novels of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. I loved both, reading all of their major SF, some before I reached my teens. My favorite Verne novel then – and it remains a favorite now – was A Journey to the Center of the Earth. I loved followed professor Hardwigg (aka Lidenbrook – more on this below), Harry (Alex), and Hans as they descended into the crater of Mount Snaffles and made their way toward the earth’s core (a destination which, incidentally, they never reach). The book is full of wonders, dangers, and adventure, and remains full of sense of wonder and thrills despite its outdated science.

The story starts when Harry’s uncle, Professor Hardwigg, finds an old Icelandic manuscript. He opens it, and out falls an old paper, covered with runes, apparently code. After sometime, Harry and Hardwigg translate it. It’s several hundred years old, and from the Icelandic scientist/alchemist Erne Saknussemm. The note says that Saknussemm has traveled to the center of the earth and gives instructions for those who would follow. Hardwigg, dragging the reluctant Harry with him, is off to Iceland. The note has instructed them that crater of Sneffels, into the tunnel marked by the shadow of the peak Scartaris, in late June. From here on out, adventure follows marvel follows adventure.

The book is full of wonderful, memorable scenes. My textual memory is not great, and over time I often forget details of books. But, even though I hadn’t re-read this novel in 20 years, I remembered many of the key scenes clearly. Of course I remembered the descent into Sneffels. But I also remembered Harry getting lost, and only finding his uncle and Hans again by finding a “whispering galley,” which carried his voice miles away. And their breaking the wall to find the underground stream and save themselves dying of thirst. And the crossing of the underground ocean, including their seeing the sea monsters and the magnetic storm. And many other scenes which stuck in my memory over the years.

This is one of Verne’s very best novels. Verne himself is a better, more complex writer than he is often given credit for in some circles. He has often been badly served by his translators. The current translator, for example, not only tries to anglicize the characters by changing the name Lidenbrook to Hardwigg and Alex to Harry, but his phrasing is often clumsy (he several times refers to “optical delusion,” for example), his measurements switch randomly from metric to English, and so on. I say “he,” but that’s a guess, by the way; the translation I read was un-credited.

My paperback (Signet) also featured an insightful afterword by Michael Dirda, who spends some time talking about Verne as a novelist, his place in literary history, and this novel in particular. It somewhat makes up for the so-so translation, but I do hope to find a better translation some day. We got several new translations of The Mysterious Island a few years back. You’d think we could get at least one new one of A Journey to the Center of the Earth.

A few notes on the movie: I also re-watched the movie recently. Despite being a tad long – ten minutes or so could have been edited out of the first half-hour or so – it holds up very well. James Mason makes a very good Lidenbrook. (Strangely, the movie restores the original names, but moves the opening from Germany to Scotland.) The story is changed around a bit, but Verne’s basic ideas are still there, and several major events remain.

In the movie, the note from Saknussemm is found embedded in a piece of volcanic rock, though it provides the same instructions. Where the movie really diverges, though, is in setting up a human adversary to oppose the professor, Alex, and Hans (and his pet duck Gertrude) – the evil descendant of Arne Saknussemm. It also adds another character – the widow Goetaborg (whose husband was murdered by Count Saknussemm) – who joins the professor et. al. in the trip to the earth’s center (which, in the movie, they reach).

It’s a good movie – perhaps the best of the Verne adaptations.