Visions of Paradise

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Quiz answers

Here are the answers to the quiz:

1 “No! I don’t want the mangosteen.” / The Windup Girl
2 After pursuing him a week (half my annual vacation from the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer), I caught up with Danny Boles on a blustery day in April at a high school in eastern Alabama. / Brittle Innings
3 Everybody falls and we all land somewhere. / Spin
4 Monkey never dies. / The Years of Rice and Salt
5 Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. / The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
6 Shadow had done three years in prison. / American Gods
7 The Hegemony consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below. / Hyperion
8 The shining rim of the planet Rodeo wheeled dizzily past the observation port of the orbital transfer station. / Falling Free
9 There was a razorstorm coming in. / Revelation Space
10 Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the Earth. / Perdito Street Station

Sunday, June 26, 2011

F&SF Quiz

Here are the first lines of famous f&sf novels of the past 25 years. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to name the novels.

1. “No! I don’t want the mangosteen.”

2. After pursuing him a week (half my annual vacation from the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer), I caught up with Danny Boles on a blustery day in April at a high school in eastern Alabama

3. Everybody falls and we all land somewhere.

4. Monkey never dies.

5. Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered.

6. Shadow had done three years in prison.

7. The Hegemony consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

8. The shining rim of the planet Rodeo wheeled dizzily past the observation port of the orbital transfer station.

9. There was a razorstorm coming in.

10. Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the Earth.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Snowball Effect

Most “hard science” sf stories extrapolate from a foundation in one of the “hard” sciences such as physics, chemistry biology, and computer technology (with all its AI ramifications). But occasionally a story extrapolates from a “softer” science.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s "A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions" was based on chaos theory. A story in Galaxy in March, 1969, called “Godel Numbers,” by J.W.Swanson, was based on prime numbers. Thomas M. Disch once had a story (whose title and location totally escape me) whose sfnal premise was based on probability.

Which brings me to a story I recently read by Katherine MacLean, entitled “The Snowball Effect.” It was originally published in Galaxy in September 1952, and reprinted in her collection The Diploid Effect and Other Flights of Fancy in 1962.

For most of its length, the story reads like a contemporary story of academia. The president of a small college is in the midst of a fiscal crisis and, in attempts to cut his budget, he insists that the head of the Sociology Department justify “what is sociology good for?” This sets off a chain of events in which the department head devises an experiment in institutional growth in which the two men find a small sewing club in an equally-small town and set up conditions by which the club’s membership will grow larger and larger until it reaches the saturation point and the club crumbles on its own unwieldy size.

The story is interesting, if less than major, but it shows absolutely no indication of being speculative in the sf sense until the very last scene, which is a combination of a Fredric Brown “shock ending” and the sudden realization by the reader that what actually happened in the story’s central experiment was much too speculative to be realistic fiction and thus passed over into the realm of pure science fiction. The ending was well-done, although honestly it was telegraphed a few pages earlier.

Not being particularly fond of the “hard” sciences, I enjoy reading an occasional sf story based on less common sciences such as mathematics (Clifton Fadiman’s Fantasia Mathematica being an entire anthology of such stories), probability, sociology, psychology, or even something as unlikely as philosophy. I look forward to finding more such stories in the future.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Books to Read

As usual, I have a large bunch of recent additions to my collection which I have not read yet. Half the fun is deciding which books to read next, so here are the choices awaiting me:

2010 Purchases Still Unread:
To The Stars / collection of 4 young adult novels by Heinlein
Miles in Love / collection of 2 novels and a novella by Lois McMaster Bujold
Warriors / collection edited by Gardner Dozois & George R. R . Martin
Captain Flandry / collection of novels and novellas by Poul Anderson
Cat Tales 2 / collection edited by George Scithers
Ananzi Boys / novel by Neil Gaiman
Virtual Light / novel by William Gibson
The Green Mile / novel by Stephen King
Young Flandry / collection of novels and novellas by Poul Anderson
Captain Blood / classic novel by Rafael Sabatini

2011 Purchases Still Unread:
Sir Dominick Flandry / collection of novels and novellas by Poul Anderson
Miles Errant / collection of 2 novels and a novella by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Great Book of Amber / 10 novels by Roger Zelazny
Dreamsongs Vol. 2 / collection by George R.R. Martin
House of Suns / novel by Alastair Reynolds
Empire / historical novel by Steven Saylor
Graveyard Book / novel by Neil Gaiman
Flandry’s Legacy / collection of novels and novellas by Poul Anderson
Embassytown / novel by China Miéville

Unread books obtain via Paperback Swap:
A Song for Arbonne / novel by Guy Gavriel Kay
Troubled Waters / shared world novel edited by C.J. Cherryh
Counting Up Counting Down / collection by Harry Turtledove
Chanur’s Homecoming / novel by C.J. Cherryh
Chanur’s Legacy / novel by C.J. Cherryh
Federation / collection by H. Beam Piper
Survival / novel by Julie Czerneda
Climb the Wind / novel by Pamela Sargent
Festival Moon / shared world novel edited by C.J. Cherryh (ed)
Fever Season / shared world novel edited by C.J. Cherryh (ed)
Prelude to Mars / collection of 2 novels and short fiction by Arthur C Clarke
Great Steamboat Race / novel by John Brunner
Venus of Dreams novel / by Pamela Sargent
N-Space / collection by Larry Niven
Venus of Shadows / novel by Pamela Sargent
Child of Venus / novel by Pamela Sargent

Saturday, June 11, 2011

The Windup Girl

There are several sub-genres of f&sf I do not enjoy, which I guess makes me similar to most other fans. Military science fiction. Urban fantasy. Near future dismal. However, there are some writers in each sub-genre who appeal to me in spite of their unfortunate choice of sub-genre. I read a David Weber “Honor Harrington” novella which was so good it has me wanting to read one of his novels. Charles de Lint is one of my favorite fantasy writers, even though he writes squarely in the middle of urban fantasy (in fact, to some extent he invented the sub-genre).

Near future dismal has not appealed to me since William Gibson popularized it in the early 80s with the ascent of cyberpunk. In fact, a large portion of American science fiction from the 1980s and 1990s bored me because it was obsessed with how dull and depressing the near-future could be. Thank heavens for the space opera revival in the pages of Interzone in the 1990s and writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter who breathed new life into the sf genre.

But there is still a large undercurrent of near future dismal being published. Ian McDonald has written several highly-acclaimed novels in that sub-genre, such as River of Gods, Brazyl and recently The Dervish House. I haven’t read any of them, but I’ve read several of his shorter pieces set in the India of River of Gods and, while they are very well-written, I still find them somewhat boring.

So along came Paolo Bacigalupi a few years ago with his own version of a dismal near future. The first story of his I read was “The Fluted Girl,” which was so good I put it on my best-of-the-decade list. But he followed it with less interesting stories such as “The People of Slag and Sand,” “The Calorie Man” and “The Yellow Card Man.” None of those stories particularly appealed to me.

Then in 2010 he released his first novel The Windup Girl, which not only received near-universal acclaim, but won the Nebula Award and tied for the Hugo Award with China Miéville’s excellent The City & The City. Around the same time I read his novelette “Pump Six,” title story of his first collection, and I found it very enjoyable. Still near future dismal, but his plotting and sense of wonder carried the story. His vision of a future Columbia University was worth the entire story.

So recently I decided to read The Windup Girl, and I have been very pleased with it. Its setting is dismal, but the characters are not the typical bunch of depressed, amoral losers. They are people who are dealing with their situation in the best way possible, aggressive rather than lethargic, overall moral , although that morality is often affected by their circumstances rather than traditional morality.

The novel is set in Thailand, one of the few Third World countries whose economy has survived in the face of the worldwide economic collapse, due partly to the petroleum economy’s failure. There are a handful of main characters, each representing a different aspect of that country’s populace:

• Anderson Lake is a white foreigner who represents AgriGen, an international which has filled in part of the corporate gap following the collapse of petroleum. He runs a factory which is producing spring-generated energy using giant megodonts, which are artificially-grown elephant-like creatures, until one of the megodonts goes rogue and destroys the factory;

• Emiko is a windup-girl, an artificially grown person designed to serve masters totally and unquestioningly, sort of geishas when in Japan, but in Thailand she becomes an abused prostitute.;

• Jaidee is the Tiger of Bangkok, an idealistic yet brutal enforcer of the White Shirts who works for the Environment Ministry keeping foreigners and other exploiters under control. However, his division is in deadly conflict with the Trade Ministry, whose only concern is bringing foreign trade into the country, and who consider Jaidee a major obstacle to their plans;

• Kanya is Jaidee’s dependable but dour assistant who keeps secrets which threaten to become a hindrance to his mission;

• Hock Seng is a yellow card man, a foreign national who lives in Thailand without being a citizen. He manages Anderson’s factory, but neither totally trusts the other, and each realizes the other has a private agenda unknown to him.

The first half of the novel mostly explores the lives of the main characters, and their interrelationships with each other and with other important characters: General Pracha, Jaidee’s superior at the Environment Ministry; Akkarat, the head of the trade ministry; Richard Carlyle, another foreigner who works undercover for Akkarat. But the novel really takes off when Trade decides to remove Jaidee’s influence and take control of the country themselves.

Even Even if you, like me, dislike near future dismal sf, The Windup Girl is a taut, well-plotted character-based novel which aroused my sense of wonder even in the most depressing setting. I can see why it won so many awards and, along with The City & The City, it was indeed the best sf novel of 2010.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

The Metallic Muse

I cannot recall having read any stories by Lloyd Biggle, Jr., although his name is certainly a familiar one. When I was in high school, he was one of the founding members of the SFWA, and he has a reputation for writing sf about music. So when I saw a copy of his 1972 collection The Metallic Muse available at Paperback Swap, I quickly claimed it.

The book contains 3 novelettes and 4 short stories originally published in IF, Fantastic, Galaxy (2 stories each) and F&SF (1 story). The opening story “Tunesmith” was, according to Biggle’s introduction, based on the supposition of commercials growing so important that television shows vanished entirely, and people watched exclusively commercials. The protagonist of the story is a songwriter who, because of the disappearance of any music other than in commercials, writes jingles for a living. But the commercials are not really the focus of the story. Its real concern is how much more difficult it is for a true artist to succeed in a world dominated by mediocre hacks. The story is fast-paced with characters painted as black-and-white with few subtleties, and the ending kind of takes a left turn into an almost completely different story. But its scenes about the protagonist artist becoming a cultish performer are worth the entire story.

Two other stories in The Metallic Muse have some relationship to music. “Spare the Rod’ is concerned with a robot which has replaced a violin teacher as its methods enable students to play near-flawless violin almost instantly. This is mostly a trick story showing how the violin teacher foils the robot.

“Orphan of the Void” is a meatier novelette concerned with the aftereffects of the government’s systematically stealing all the young children of a primitive race to put them up for adoption for the richer residents of Earth. The main character is Thomas Jefferson Sandler, one of those “space orphans” who becomes obsessed with finding his true home and his original parents. The role music plays in this story is a relatively minor one, as a song concerning the search for one’s true home sweeps the galaxy, sparking a drastic reaction by the government which has a major impact on Sandler’s search.

The longest story is the concluding novelette which is mostly a problem-solving story about an invasion of predatory “rugs” from Venus which eats people and seemingly has no weakness. Of course, the hero discovers a weakness after several failed attempts. It’s an interesting story, but not as good as when Biggle is writing about his beloved music. Overall, this book is light reading of the 1950s prozine type. A pleasant change of pace between more “serious” books.