Category: nebula project

Nebula Project: Rite of Passage

In this 1968 winner, Mia Havero is a 12-year old girl living on ship carved into an asteroid, part of the remnants of the human race who escaped Earth prior to its destruction. In just two years, she faces the Trial, which all children living on the ship must go through.

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Rite of Passage. Beware if you’re worried about such things.

In this 1968 winner, Mia Havero is a 12-year old girl living on ship carved into an asteroid, part of the remnants of the human race who escaped Earth prior to its destruction. In just two years, she faces the Trial, which all children living on the ship must go through. And many don’t live through. We follow her adventures growing up on the ship, losing and making friends, and training to help her survive the Trial. When she and a group of other 14 year olds are dropped off on a colonized planet, they face not only the elements, treacherous terrain, and wild animals, but the unknown colonists as well.

J: So, I was quite surprised to see this book on the list of Nebula award-winning novels! I’d read it in college and kind of thought it was one of those obscure little gems you find that hardly anyone else has heard of.

K: Well, obscure is right, at least from my perspective. But that doesn’t always mean very much when you’re not as familiar with parts of the genre. So I had never read this or even heard of it.

J: I couldn’t even tell you how I found it in the first place. It might’ve been one of those books referenced in old(ish) critical essays I was reading at the time. Or possibly by subject headings. From the, now-primitive, college library computer catalog. I had fun with that!

K: If I had heard of it I probably would have picked it up, solely for the novelty of a teenage girl protaganist.

J: Yea. To be honest, though I remembered I really, really liked it. I didn’t remember much. Just, obviously there was a rite of passage, and it took place in a generation ship. I was really surprised at the YA-ness of it on re-reading.

K: Yes, if this was published now it would instantly be plopped in the YA area, maybe with a head-chopped off girl on the cover, which would pretty much guarantee that at the very least hardly any adult males would read it.

J: And it would be a really hard sell to win the Nebula because of it.

K: Ghettoized as YA for girls.

J: Though I bet it would’ve sold really well, especially in the wake of The Hunger Games. Although then perhaps been compared unfavorably with it.

K: I haven’t read the Hunger Games books, but I know enough about them that they did spring to mind as a comparison point. And I can see why it might not compare favorably with a more recent book. It was very… mmm. It wasn’t _dated_ exactly, but it didn’t have the same feel as modern fiction.

J: Not to get off on a tangent — but you haven’t read The Hunger Games?! But I’ll tell you something I noticed that may have been why it felt dated? She explained. Everything. The details of going out on the surface of the ship. The details of constructing a log cabin. The details of soccer. Everything. Indiscriminately.

K: That’s true. There was no expectation that the audience would be familiar enough with these things to just imagine them without all this additional explanation. Though I have to say, the log cabin scene — he didn’t /quite/ plagiarize Laura Ingalls Wilder, but it was a damn close call.

J: I just started reading the Little House books for our other Triple Take reading, so I can definitely see that. On the one hand, it was neat she was treating ‘mundane’ things with equal weight as ‘oooh spacey things’, as you would do if you were living it. They’re all normal to you. But on the other hand, it can get dull and a bit.. ‘why are you telling me this?’ The details of soccer and of log cabin building, to /such/ a degree, were just not necessary.

K: Yeah, it was an odd choice. I can’t say I -minded- especially, but I also didn’t read those sections with as much attention as I probably could have.

J: You know I don’t mind those sorts of details when it’s.. for a purpose. Like if they were actually going to /use/ that cabin. I don’t think you’ve read him, but Steven Gould’s books are really big on planning and doing these sorts of things with lengthy descriptions. Sort of like reading Robinson Crusoe, from what I remember of Robinson Crusoe. If there’s an ulterior plan. ‘I am doing this to survive and improve my life’ sort of thing.

J: Oh, or Clan of the Cave Bear, which we talked about RL earlier.

J: Or even Little House for that matter!

K: Yeah. Exactly. The purpose of the details wasn’t at all clear to me. It didn’t illuminate the society any to tell us the rules of soccer, though it did tell me something that it was called soccer.

J: Oh, odd. I kind of thought he was Russian. Wikipedia says American and that his real name is actually Alexis. Which would’ve been interesting, because I see that as a female name. And his wife’s name is Cory, which I read the opposite way. So maybe he just didn’t think twice about calling it soccer. They do all seem to be speaking English. Though at least he showed a language shift on one colony.

K: Yeah, it is entirely possible that that wasn’t actually a considered choice in any way. Which would be disappointing.

J: Yes. Because he did seem to be trying to be global, at least in some ways. Though the main character.. what’s her name? I am so bad at character names unless they’re particularly memorable… is said to have Spanish and some other ancestry I don’t now remember. Italian? Indian? And her tutor has enough African ancestry to have a South African name.

J: Havero! Have Arrow. Mia was it?

J: See, he gave me a mnemonic and eventually I remembered. Which is actually an interesting parallel with The Hunger Games, which you unaccountably have not read.

K: The names were relatively diverse, yes. More diverse than I would have predicted, given the time period it was written. But like so many authors, even though he gave some thought to a) diversity of names, and b) a rough gender balance among the children, he fell down completely on part c) gender balance among the adult population.

J: Hrrrm. Yes, we see mostly men. And I did notice her survival trainer guy was male. And I was a little puzzled by the gender split when they were building the cabin.

J: They were about 13 when they did the cabin, right? So the boys wouldn’t have been taller than the girls, on average. It would’ve made more sense to me to assign tasks based on individuals. The stronger, the more physically fit, or just whoever showed aptitude after cutting down their first tree.

K: I was having trouble figuring out if the society was supposed to be egalitarian or not. On the argument for, they haven’t turned the women into baby making machines and they seem to have as much autonomy as men to go and do stuff. No one tells Mia she’s out of line for wanting to train for her desired job. Girls and boys appear to endure the exact same trial with no accomodations made for gender.

K: On the argument against, they distributed the cabin work by gender. And we see zero women in positions of authority. Toward the end, they even refer to the ‘men’ on the council. The only adult women we see are flaky (Mia’s mom, that woman who got pregnant) or rigid and annoying (That woman down in the engineering section.)

J: True. Rather like Harry Potter. Only moreso, since we don’t even see female teachers and nurses. Do you think he was concentrating so much on making the kids equal that he just wasn’t thinking whenever he needed to pull in an adult? He defaulted to male and didn’t undefault himself?

K: Probably. You know how annoyed I get though when people start defaulting to male all over the place. It only looks worse when they’ve gone to the trouble to make a female main character. It’s like they’re so busy congratulating themselves for being forward thinking and different that it completely falls apart everywhere else.

J: (I just had a moment of grave disappointment. I thought I had found and bought the sequel to this. But.. there is no sequel? What I have is a collection of short stories. A further disappointment is I thought this supposed sequel might’ve been cowritten with his wife and fixed some of the gender imbalance. Sigh. I’ll just have to imagine my own sequel, I guess.)

K: The collection of short stories contains several stories set in the same universe. And Mia and Jimmy show up very briefly in one. It’s not entirely a sequel.

J: Okay. That lessens the disappointment somewhat. :)

K: Did you read the intro by the way?

J: I did not read the intro.

K: He goes on a bit in there about how he decided deliberately to make the main character a girl. To be different.

J: Well, I can see that! Is that why he won the Nebula? A girl character was so shocking, new, and brilliant? The first since Podkayne of Mars?

K: Ha! You should definitely read the intro before you return the book. As it turns out, after he sold the original story, it was delayed for publication because of Podkayne running in the same magazine. And then he was afraid people would think he’d copied.

J: *snerk!* I thought Podkayne was older. Okay. I will read it.

J: So it was a short story first? Maybe the soccer and log cabin stuff was padding then. :P

K: Yeah. I’m not entirely sure what was the story and where the join came in but I suspect it may have been just the epilogue and a bit of the trial that was the original story.

K: He mentioned about needing to add additional information about ‘why they reacted as they did’ which I assume he means being the vote at the end.

J: Ah. I found it rather odd that they’d assume the next generation would react any differently.

K: Well, it has been typical of our society anyway to become more inclusive and accepting over time. I just was reading an article about it earlier, noting that all those anti gay marriage laws that were passed a few years ago were propelled in for the most part by people aged 50+. Which makes it much more difficult for the younger generation, who more generally favors legalizing same sex marriage, to actually implement it.

K: http://www.slate.com/id/2297897/

J: Yes, but he made a big point of saying how stagnant they are. How their art and their novels are mostly nonexistent and suck when they do exist.

K: Yeah. There were a lot of points being made, some of them contradictory in nature. That the people on the ships, the so called guardians of human knowledge, were so busy trying to preserve themselves and everything that they’d lost their essential humanness which is to change and grow. And a symptom was the complete loss of real creativity. But the colonists didn’t really seem to be doing much better, so it wasn’t like we were supposed to feel for them!

K: What bothered me the most was, I was totally unclear at the end – were just the colonists subjected to the punishment or was it the whole planet? Because they never did bother to find out if those aliens were sentient or not.

J: Yet Jimmy showed creativity when he wrote his ethics paper. So I don’t see what’s so special about art that all other forms of creativity aren’t also suffering. Are they improving their technology or aren’t they? I wasn’t too clear on that.

J: Good question. I don’t think they cared too much about the aliens, just as a ‘slavery is bad’ meme while at the same time not considering them human enough to count for anything.

K: I was pretty puzzled at the whole cultural stagnation thing myself. I can understand the point which was trying to be made, I just find it unlikely that the human imagination could be so very easily stifled as all that.

K: But part of what I think he was trying to say was, if you don’t feel any urgency, you don’t get things done. The people on the Ships lived for a really long time, so long that they didn’t really feel any urgency to accomplish much of anything.

J: You’d think they could’ve realized that and built-in counters to it. Like a rite of passage for 50 year olds. Create something awesome or die!!

K: Oh, but the adults would never have approved of that. It’s only the people who aren’t allowed to vote who can get so easily screwed over.

J: Heh.

K: I wasn’t sure if the whole clothing business was due to a lack of imagination (or maybe a male lapse) on the part of the author, or if it was deliberate, another sign of the Ships deteriorating creativity.

J: What clothing business?

K: When Mia is down on the planet for her trial, she sees some girls wearing dresses and apparently has never seen such things before, because she identifies them as something out of her experience. Which I find very odd, because even if the Ship has a small population, the names indicate it’s a /diverse/ population, or was to begin with. And fashion between cultures is very diverse. I find it hard to believe that no one on the ships ever wears a dress or dress-like item (sari? toga? sarong? kilt?).

K: This is a problem you see often in books, where one culture or group of people is given shorthand by having them always wear the exact same clothing every time they’re encountered. But it just reminds me of a cartoon, like Scooby-Doo, where they’re always drawn the same. It’s not realistic!

J: Ah. Okay. I guess I hadn’t considered it that deeply. I took it as ‘we don’t need to wear clothes because we’re in the perfect environment, but we do because it’s custom, sometimes, or something’. And so they wear what you might typically see an astronaut wearing. Shorts and a tshirt. Which probably makes more sense in zero gravity than other clothes. BUt of course they’re not in zero gravity. And they have wild parts of the ship where more clothes would be nice!

K: Right. That’s what we would wear all the time probably. Because frankly, I don’t enjoy picking out clothes. But I know that a lot of people do enjoy it and find it an expression of their personality. And we even see Mia going ‘shopping’ with her friend Helen, so they do give thought to looking nice and fashionable in their clothing. Which makes me think there must be trends and styles — I’m inclined here to blame Panshin for just not thinking it through all the way.

J: No art means no Teefury and Woot shirts!

K: Tim Gunn weeps.

J: The one thing I did remember about this book that I didn’t remember was _from_ this book (and I suspect a similar idea may appear in Asimov’s work somewhere as well) is Mia’s chosen profession of synthesist. It sounded so perfect. I wanted to be one when I grew up.

K: It was a very interesting profession. And so was ordinologist, which is described around the same time. But what baffled and annoyed me was the bizarre slam against librarians which came out at the same time. Because an ordinologist’s job /is/ library and information science, no two ways about it. Except Mia (and Panshin?) makes a point of saying it’s way beyond the librarian.

J: I can’t find a bio of him that lists any profession other than writer. I thought it’d be interesting if he was a librarian or anything that might shed light on that view of things. But probably he just had the typical picture of librarians. They can find things. But no thought given to /why/ they can find things, because they put them in a findable spot in the first place.

K: I don’t know. I find it hard to believe he could describe the profession so accurately without knowing what he was doing. I’m just not sure why he felt the need to give it another name altogether.

J: Libraries are girly. Ordinology is hard manly science.

J: I have one burning, burning question that I must ask you!

K: Shoot!

J: Why was the tiger purple?

K: It was purple? Good lord, I didn’t even notice.

J: It was totally purple!! Go ahead and look. I’ll wait. :)

K: Yep, it was purple. Reading the description, I get the impression they’re calling it ‘tiger’ but it’s just a word they may be using for any dangerous animal. It doesn’t even seem particularly cat-like.

J: It made me mistrust it was a ‘tiger’ as I knew it. It had a wedge-shaped head or face and that didn’t sound right for a tiger either, but other than that, it didn’t have much description.

K: Yeah. I have no idea what it’s actually meant to be, if anything.

J: And yet, in contrast, the planets seem exactly like Earth. These colonies have not been there long enough to be growing Earth trees all over the freaking place. There is not a thing described as /un/Earthlike, except for the aliens and the gravity.

K: True again. I wonder if this is something that we sort of ran into in some of the other books — the climate and composition of those planets wasn’t actually important to the point Panshin was trying to make, so he just took the easy way out and didn’t devote much time to thinking about them.

J: Ah to be a writer in the 60s, when you didn’t have to think about everything, just your central point. :)

K: Convenient that! But we’re almost out of the 60s now.

J: I was just noticing that myself! 70s, here we come!

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Nebula Project: The Einstein Intersection

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book The Einstein Intersection. Beware if you’re worried about such things.

In the far distant future, Earth is no longer the domain of the human race. But a new people have arrived to live upon the surface of the planet, a people who adopt a humanoid form and human-like reproduction in order to take advantage of the environment. Lo Lobey is a member of this race, bereaved after the death of one he loves. He embarks on a journey which he hopes will end with her return from the dead.

J: So. Um. I guess my first question is: What?

K: A great question. I have no answer. In fact, I have no idea. Experimental? Surreal? Just plain weird? None of those quite describe this book.

J: I just don’t know if I missed something or what. Well, no, I know I missed /something/.

K: Apparently, judging by Neil Gaiman’s introduction.

J: Oh, I didn’t read that. Since it wasn’t in my copy.

K: He wrote a lot of stuff about misconceptions — that science fiction always had to be about science, or outer space. And about what he felt this book brought to the table.

J: Uh.. confusion? :)

J: Can I say what I think it said and you can tell me if you think I’m right?

K: Shoot.

J: So it’s post-apocalyptic, yea? And radiation has caused these mutations. And that’s all well and good and understandable. And some of them are ‘different’, which you’d think means some of them have psi powers. And they’re the next stage in human evolution. Or whatever. And this one dude is killing other different people for, er, some reason. And then at the end, we learn it’s all just an illusion created by the computers. They’re all avatars? Or.. not. I don’t even know.

K: Mmm. That’s not how I read it. It’s post-human, though it’s not clear to me if the humans are all dead or if they simply left and didn’t come back. At some point some kind of alien creatures (and here’s where it gets really vague) settled on Earth and took humanoid form to adapt to the environment. But they kind of sucked at it, and as a result there’s tons of mutations and bad outcomes when they try to reproduce sexually. Meantime, on the other end of the outcome scale, there’s some people who are weird, but what that means and whether it’s good or bad we do not discover. It just is.

J: And did Neil Gaiman’s introduction lead you to that? I didn’t get that idea at all.

K: Hm. I can’t say if it did or not. I certainly did not get any of your ideas about an illusion created by computers. We’re explicitly told that the computer is creating illusions for the rejected beings in the kage at Branning, but I didn’t get the implication that we were supposed to think it was happening everywhere.

J: Okay. I just reread all the dialogue in the last two chapters or so and now I get that interpretation. Or explanation. They’re incorporeal aliens who’ve taken form on Earth.

J: I just took the ‘not human’ to mean not human any longer, not alien. So, I think it could’ve been clearer. Was it clearer to people reading it in the 60s? Was there some background or context I was lacking? But you got it..

K: Well, I was definitely thinking that they might be a new evolution on Earth, other creatures who had developed intelligence after humans. That was my first impression, especially when Lobey is describing himself, because he sounded very ape-like. But there were a lot of references to how they ‘came’ to the planet, so I had to give that up.

J: So is the title of the book “The Einstein Intersection”, apart from making a great Doctor Who episode title, supposed to be like.. energy and matter intersecting?

K: The introduction -did- explain that. Sort of. The publisher foisted that title on the book. So I suspect that it means absolutely nothing at all.

K: It was meant to be called “A Fabulous, Formless Darkness”

J: Ah, well, clearly /that/ is not a science fiction title. That doesn’t sell books!

K: Einstein is mentioned briefly at the end of the book, so that’s probably why they felt they could drag him into the title.

J: I guess “Ringo Starr vs Billy the Kid” would kind of be lacking something.

K: Hahahaha.

K: I guess since you bring them up, let’s talk about the random Beatles references. Seriously. What. The. Heck. Pop culture references in any work tends to date it (see: almost any bleeding edge teen chick lit from the past 10 years), but in here it was just -weird-.

J: I Googled the Beatles to get more exact dates in my head of when they were big. I mean.. isn’t it a little like throwing in a.. well, I’m bad at music.. what was big 5-10 years ago? Something from American Idol?

J: Like, all of civilization is /dead/, but at least the new alien inhabitants know who Lady Gaga was.

K: Exactly. That’s exactly what it’s like. I mean, yes, as it turns out, the Beatles are (probably) a bit more iconic than Lada Gaga will turn out to be, but back in the 80s looking at all the pop girl singers, would you have been able to pick out Madonna as the one with staying power? Doubtful.

K: It’s incredibly random. And even more random to focus in on Ringo. Because, of course, as someone born after the Beatles broke up, the main story I know about them is John and Yoko and that’s pretty much it.

J: Everything I know about the Beatles I learned from Quantum Leap.

J: There were some other references I didn’t get at all. Like, one guy who I guess is Billy the Kid’s nemesis or something. Orpheus I’m vaguely aware of. And then a couple other names..

K: The knowledge that lasted seemed incredibly random and also strangely specific. Like, Ringo. Elvis. 45s?! Seriously? Records and -something to play them on- will survive the fall of civilization.

K: They’ve barely even survived the rise of computers!

J: Iscariot. King Minos. If that former is Judas.. was Green Eye supposed to be Jesus? What the heck?

K: No, no. Spider was saying he was the traitor who betrayed Green-Eye. Comparing himself to Judas. I don’t think the metaphor was meant to go any further than that.

J: It is odd he knows what 45s are, but doesn’t know the word ‘town’.

J: I think the characterization of Lobey felt uneven. There were things he said in the narration that sounded to me like the author being clever, not the character being in character.

K: The whole civilization felt uneven to me. Were they primitive goat-herders or were they advanced beings who could randomly visit Saturn? Maybe it’s possible that they could be both, but I didn’t feel we had enough information for those two very opposite situations to make sense.

J: Well, I /think/, given the alien creatures thing, that they could just leave their body behind and zip off to another planet. Become some sort of creature there and hang out for awhile. Then come back if they wanted.

K: Maybe. But that doesn’t really explain the seeming complete lack of technology shown in the beginning juxtaposed with what we hear about later, aka these geneticists (doctors) coming to the villages to examine the genomes of the inhabitants. There was nothing to suggest any sort of real schooling or higher education among these people, so where did such people come from?

K: I felt like again, very similar to Babel-17, Delany had all sorts of grand ideas for this world, but he didn’t bother to explain or explore any of them. So they felt like dangling threads or random tacked on bits that made little sense.

J: Yea.

K: I felt the story was somewhat herky-jerky as well. We start off with a village scene, and we have barely enough time to get our bearings with the village and the monsters near the village when suddenly we plunge into a cattle drive and a western motif.

J: Yea. As I was about to say: My experience of reading it was very odd. Just as I thought I had a handle on who Lobey was, we meet Le Whatszirname, who is a responsible adult and the same age. And I started to see Lobey very differently. My mind kept trying to check out during that whole, long dragged-out bullfight scene. Then we go on a dragon drive for a long time. And then it just got weird and confusing for me when they hit the city.

K: It was very… yes, first of all, I didn’t know what to think about Lobey. As we experience things from his perspective, he did seem to legitimately come off as a young, unsettled, barely-adult young man. But as we learn more about his world and people it seems clear that at his age he’s already considered sexually mature for many years (and indeed we find he has at least one kid, possibly more) so theoretically is already an ‘adult’ in his village. So he’s incredibly -immature- compared to them, apparently.

J: Right. Although part of it was also that people around him know things and refuse to tell him!

K: Even when they do explain things to him, though, it doesn’t always improve our understanding.

K: At least not mine.

J: True.

J: But take the fact he thought.. wait, let me actually find the name. Le Dorik. He thought Le Dorik was a girl. Like.. nobody told him? And he didn’t figure it out? He seems to have a stubbornness in his ignorance. La la la, don’t tell me and I won’t think it and I’ll go be happy with my goats.

K: I was rather baffled by his confusion regarding Le Dorik. Shades of The Crying Game, I guess, but even worse — because he apparently had a kid with this herm, but was so disconnected he didn’t even notice Le Dorik was not just into guys. And also Friza, the love of his life, had a kid with someone not him. Even if that was part of their culture, you think he’d want to know who the dad was.

J: They said they did paternity tests! So why did he not know that other kid was his or not his? And they had orgies! Someone sexually inexperienced might miss the hermaprhodite bit, but someone participating in orgies regularly? Presumably /with/ hermaphrodites present. Like. Dude.

K: I was confused by the whole herm thing. Apparently they have their own honorific of ‘Le’, meaning they’re common enough to be considered a normal gender and not exactly an aberration. Except they do seem to be considered an aberration based on comments at the beginning and how Friza was offended by someone suggesting she be ‘Le’.

K: (May I also say, every time I read the name Friza, all I could think of was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieza)

J: Heheh.

J: Well, the disconnect there is probably because the aliens that they are are normally ‘multisexed’ is I think the word the computer used. And humans are mostly two sexes. So to pretend to be human, they need to disavow that third sex as much as possible.

K: I didn’t quite get why they were pretending to be human. Sure, adopt a form that can exist on Earth. But if I buy a new house and move in I don’t take over the old owner’s -life-.

K: It’s really very odd. On the one hand, this novel is incredibly confusing, with lots of open-ended statements and symbolism and feeling very literary. On the other, it was a heavy-handed mishmash of mythology (minotaur, much?) which was mostly a retelling of Orpheus and Euridice, and the author was so worried the reader would miss it that he has numerous characters actually -tell- Lobey ‘You’re Orpheus, dude!’

J: *snerk*

J: And what’s with all the quotes? Is it supposed to be showing a cross-section of human history and literature that these aliens are drawing on? Or are they just there to pad the word count?

K: I have no idea. Let me quote what Gaiman said about them.

K: “The Einstein Intersection is a brilliant book, self-consciously suspicious of its own brilliance, framing its chapters with quotes from authors ranging from Sade to Yeats (are these the owners of the house into which the squatters have moved?) and with extracts from the author’s own notebooks kept while writing the book and wandering the Greek Islands.”

J: That was one of my questions. If those were real author notes or notes of a fictitious author.

K: If we assume Gaiman had correct information, they would seem to be Delany’s own notes. Which, frankly, are far more impressive than the text itself — a black American in his early 20s wandering around Europe and meeting people and speaking random languages.

J: Why’s that impressive? Isn’t bumming around Europe something you’re supposed to do at that age?

K: I guess, but it seemed impressive to me! To do it by yourself, and to apparently know enough of Greek and French to get by in both of them.

J: Well, I didn’t do it, so I guess I shouldn’t discount a certain bravery in it.

J: I take objection to Neil Gaiman calling this novel brilliant. I don’t believe it is. Taking random bits of this and that and slapping it into a novel is not brilliant. Like with Babel-17, only worse, I felt this novel had a lack of control and a lack of coherence.

J: Focus. That was the other word I was looking for. It needed more focus.

J: Then throwing in the author notes, also not brilliant. It may be an interesting study to literary critics, psychologists and other academics. It might even be interesting to readers, as witnessed by blogs that talk about the writing process. But I don’t think it helps the novel any to be in there. I think it hurts it.

J: You don’t want to see the man behind the curtain. You don’t want to see the wires. You don’t want to see all the chaos backstage while the actors are performing.

K: I certainly wouldn’t call the execution brilliant. Maybe the basic idea is brilliant and that’s what everyone’s reacting to. But for me, it wasn’t developed enough for me to judge the brilliance one way or another. It’s like a sketch. But a sketch of the Mona Lisa isn’t the Mona Lisa yet.

K: It’s just a potential.

K: I wouldn’t categorically say that including the author’s notes is a bad idea. I’m not sure much was added -here- with them, because their inclusion was too haphazard and not methodical.

J: I was going to look at the other nominated works and be all ‘Why did that other one not win?!’, but all of them are ones I haven’t even heard of, so I can’t say that. Although The Eskimo Invasion is an intriguing title.

K: Ha! I did the same thing.

J: Looks like Lord of Light won the Hugo. So I’m betting that one was more coherent.

K: There were a lot of very strong images in the book. I was especially caught by the description of the dragon captured by the carnivorous flowers. But they weren’t coherent enough as a whole.

J: I don’t even remember any dragon and carnivorous flowers, so. Not that strong of an image to me.

K: Heh.

J: I know we haven’t read many yet, but this book is the worst one so far.

K: It was very arty.

K: The sort of book that wins awards.

K: Which, frankly, is not a compliment.

K: I would definitely agree with it being worst so far. But even though it was not great as a story itself, do you think it had any influence on future books? I’m not actually really widely read in sci-fi, so nothing springs to my mind. I feel like Babel-17 may have influenced ideas more than this.

J: The only thing that springs to mind is Star Trek. TOS loved energy beings. But that’s contemporary with this novel, so it’d be tricky to say which came first, or if they were both drawing inspiration from the same source.

J: In general, no, I don’t see any lasting impact from this. Not like the previous winners.

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Nebula Project: Flowers for Algernon

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Flowers for Algernon. Beware if you’re worried about such things.

Tying with Babel-17 for the Nebula in 1966, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes tells the story of Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 70 who works in a bakery, and how his life changes when he undergoes a procedure to increase his intelligence. He learns to look at his former life differently, even as he tries to fit in with the people around him as his intelligence catches up to theirs and even surpasses it.

J: I think I may’ve read the novella (was it a novella?) version of this in high school. And only a couple of years ago, I read the novel. So here I was reading it again! But while I remembered the generalities, I didn’t remember the specifics. So it wasn’t too bad reading it again.

K: I also found I had a very poor memory of the story. The vast majority of it seemed new, even though I remembered the basic plot structure. I could have sworn I’d read the novel version, but honestly I have no idea given how little of it I apparently retained. I guess that’s understandable given that it must have been 20 years ago, but I was a bit surprised.

J: Yea, that idea occurred to me briefly too. That maybe I’d missed something before.

K: I do remember reading it very quickly last time. I’m not sure why. I think the subject matter — someone gaining intelligence only to have it ripped away from him — made me uncomfortable at the time. And as a parent of a multiply disabled child I have to say it made me even more uncomfortable now.

J: I can’t really remember my first reaction to the concept, since it was high school. But I know I wasn’t a fan of the idea. And this reading, I wasn’t reading for enjoyment at all. I was reading it to find fault with it. Mainly in his portrayal of Charlie to start with.

K: I can’t say I was reading to find fault; I was more reading to get through. But I was definitely looking to see if the portrayal felt well-researched and not exploitative in some way. I can’t say my conclusions are definitive in either way. I read that Keyes based Charlie on intellectually disabled children that he had worked with, but somehow what came through to me on the page felt very much like an outsider’s view of mental retardation. What someone -thinks- it must be like. Not necessarily what it really is like.

J: Yea. It kind of made me want to read something(s) actually written by someone of Charlie’s ability. There must be a collection like that out there somewhere, right? Maybe? It’s really easy to fall back on spelling, grammar, punctuation as a ‘gimmick’ to demonstrate it. Like how the movie is called Charly with a backwards r, even though he spells his own name correctly in the book. Same thing with Hagrid, actually. In the movie, it’s made out like he can’t write properly. Nice and visual for a movie, I suppose, but..

K: Yeah. But the backwards letters suggests different disabilities to me than what they were going for in the book. So even though the book is told from Charlie’s point of view, I was suspicious of his point of view at the beginning. It didn’t feel entirely authentic to me. Even though I have no real information upon which to base that opinion.

J: Right. One thing I started to take objection to was that they kept referring to him as like a child. And that just didn’t sound right to me. In one aspect, perhaps, but mostly, no, he’s not like a child, he’s an adult. And although Charlie’s really good at saying the ‘old’ him was a person, he never said he was an adult. He went along with the child analogy.

K: You’re right. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I do wonder about the whole ‘eternal child’ stereotype. In one sense, I suppose, yes, perhaps it’s true that he hadn’t developed emotionally or intellectually the qualities one associates with an adult. But he was an adult physically, working with adults, living with adults.

J: I was about to take objection to his lack of sexual maturity too, but then he’s got some childhood abuse stuff going on there to explain that. Which is a theme I could very well do without.

K: I don’t know. Maybe because I’m looking at this now from a parent’s perspective, but that whole subplot was the most authentic and genuine part of the book for me.

K: Not the whole sexual repression business, but the abuse and the way his family fell apart because of his disability.

J: I’m not saying it was unbelievable, especially at the time he would’ve been a child. Um.. 1940s? It’s just a theme I’m not a fan of in books.

K: I can see that. But while child abuse in general is kind of a popular theme, I think these particular circumstances are not always portrayed very accurately. Keyes did a good job there. The way his mom swung from the extreme of desperately trying to help him no matter what the cost to the other extreme of blaming him for not trying and taking out her frustrations on him — those are feelings I’m very familiar with, unfortunately. Especially with the complete lack o support and services a family at that time would have had. Even today it’s not really a whole lot better. The number of marriages that break down due to a very sick or disabled kid is incredible.

J: I don’t know how personal you want to get, but I think you and Bob are incredible at that. When something new comes up, you find a way to make things work.

J: In Charlie’s situation, from what limited knowledge of PKU I have, Charlie would’ve only been getting worse as a child, rather than improving.

K: Yes, I wanted to talk about that. I was surprised when they mentioned a specific reason for his retardation. My first thought, of course, was better not eat any aspartame.

K: The irony being that PKU can be controlled with diet and people with it can live a normal life if it’s caught when they’re born in an infant screening.

J: It is surprising he named it. And then did some weird pseudo-science handwavey explanation of the procedure. Why not leave it vague if you weren’t going to get very specific?

J: Or maybe the scientific/medical explanation was more explicit than I thought and it only seemed like it wasn’t to me. I know it involved implanting new brain tissue (from where?!) and enzymes, I think…?

K: No, the description of the procedure was oddly specific and vague at the same time. I wasn’t at all clear where the new brain tissue was coming from. But in the manner of speculative fiction, in some ways it almost sounded like stem cells if you took out some of the obviously dated technology.

K: And of course the ‘flaw’ that Charlie discovered really ought to have been that since he didn’t change his diet at all, even his brain transplant should have been damaged directly by his same condition!

J: Heh. Yea.

J: Here’s the quote. “But first, we remove the damaged portions of the brain and permit the implanted brain tissue which has been chemically revitalized to produce brain proteins at a supernormal rate.” And I think that’s pretty much it for explanations!

K: Yeah. It sounds like a transplant to me. But still there’s no clear source for the transplanted tissue. I suspect that the technobabble wasn’t really meant to be the point, hence the hand-wavyness of the idea here. On the other hand, PKU is real, it really causes retardation, and it really can occur in mice. So we have some really specific, accurate information and some hardly believable randomness.

J: Yea. Though given that description, as vague as it is, of the brain surgery, they were awfully blithe about ‘oh, no danger, not really!’

J: They all seemed certain the surgery itself would go just fine. No complications whatsoever. Because it worked on mice.

K: Yeah. I don’t think much of these scientists. They seemed to be operating without any kind of real oversight even though they were experimenting on a human.

J: Yea. That would’ve been more believable if they were actually at that institution he visited. All sorts of experiments went on in those places up until fairly recently, unfortunately.

K: Yeah. Though the brief glimpse we saw of it, the people there all seemed rather more sincere and altruistic than the group at the University.

J: I wondered why Charlie didn’t have any friends who were peers. He went to school for years, but never made friends with any of his classmates?

K: That was very strange. Certainly people greeted him when he went back to visit the school. He really didn’t seem to have any community at all — when we see him go out with those guys from the bakery, I didn’t get the impression that this was a regular thing.

J: Yea. Did we even see where he was living? I think he was living at the bakery or with the owner? Maybe?

K: No, it sounded like he was living in a boarding house or some kind of cheap apartment. He didn’t have to move after he got fired from the bakery.

J: So do you think it sounded like a genuine genius when he reached that level? Or like an outsider’s view of it?

K: He certainly sounded like someone’s perception of a genius. A little too geniussy, though. Picking up languages in a week, learning neuroscience in… a week. Composing piano concertos in… a week. There may well be people who are that polymathic but it strained credulity quite a lot.

J: And yet seemed perfectly able to remain intelligible in his progress report entries. Even though he made whatshername.. Alice feel like an idiot just by talking to her.

K: Except I didn’t quite see why, from the part of their conversation we saw.

J: Other than because she’s a girl?

K: There were some girl issues, but I’m not sure that was it. Keyes seemed to want to equate genius with taking no pleasure in normal things, but somehow living on a higher plane. Charlie felt like he was above all those common people talking about their common philosophies and topics in the cafeteria. It was kind of annoying — like, by being smart, you -couldn’t- be interested in normal stuff anymore. Which is complete nonsense.

J: And that all academics are so deep in their speciality that they can’t converse on tangents related to it.

K: It was a very stereotypical view of a genius disconnected from the real world. And a pretty cynical view of academia.

J: I agree.

K: And then the girl issue. I did have to keep reminding myself we were in Mad Men era, but I still wasn’t really thrilled by the female characters. Not that any of the supporting male characters were much better, but they at least seemed to have personal agendas.

J: The girls really bothered me. Especially as we do see the example of Babel-17 which won /in the same year/. And that was so much better on that front.

K: It really was. Even though Rydra has a lot of issues, they weren’t a -lack- of motivation and agency. Here we have Fay, who pretty much exists to drink and have sex with, and Alice, who pretty much exists to angst over, pick up his room, and have sex with. Rose, his mother, is portrayed as almost pathological for her completely natural (if ultimately abusive) reaction to Charlie’s retardation — and in the end, we see that she’s also lost her mind and ability to function, just like Charlie.

J: And again, like Dune, we have.. mother, sister, lover, lover. Plus added to that, it’s teacher, some nurses. When we have a chance to see some actual women scientists, maybe, they’re all busy jumping on chairs and screaming because a mouse is loose.

K: I didn’t even notice any women in that scene. Heh.

J: You didn’t? It was pretty obvious. Hrrm. Are there differences in our copies?

K: No, no, I probably didn’t read it very closely. But let me look

J: “..until a woman at the table screamed, knocking her chair backwards as she leaped to her feet.” “Some of the women (non-experimentalists?) tried to stand on the unstable folding chairs while others, trying to help corner Algernon, knocked them over.” “Seconds later, half a dozen women came screaming out of the powder room, skirts clutched frantically around their legs.”

K: Yeah, I just found that section. I really didn’t read the whole escape scene very closely. I remember feeling I was skimming it when I read it, but I couldn’t tell you why I did.

J: He made that paranthentical after I had been wondering what the heck scientists were doing being freaked about a mouse. And I see that the second quote may have meant some of the women where trying to corner him, ineffectually. No excuse for that bathroom bit though!

J: You know, I skimmed it too. I just must’ve started my skim later than you did.

J: I had to actively go back and reread ‘wait, why’s he in the bathroom?’. I remember that. And then I wasn’t paying attention to the last bit of that section either.

J: So, no, not a skim for me. I just spaced out.

K: I remember thinking, when I got to the end of it, I never saw him pick up the mouse even though I know he had Algernon in his pocket or something. But I didn’t go back and look at it again.

J: Then I was busy wondering how he got a mouse on a plane!

K: I did read the part before the escape, because it describes again the whole theory of what they were doing.

K: Ha. You can still do that NOW. No surprise he could do it in the 60s.

J: Do you think he knew it was going to be a movie at this point? Did he add the scene for its movie comedic potential?

K: I don’t know. We’d probably have to compare the original with the novel version.

J: Do you want me to borrow the movie? I sort of want to see it and I sort of don’t.

K: I don’t have any particular interest in the movie.

J: Nice how this book gets shelved in our ‘classics’ and is also labeled ‘fiction’ by the publisher. No, nope sci-fi here, move along please.

K: Yeah. I wouldn’t have pegged this as science fiction, though I can see the argument for that classification. But in the ‘you know it when you see it’ category, I can see why this book is so popular as a school assignment.

K: Otherwise, I’m not sure how this book holds up. Obviously the actual problem described (PKU) has been ‘solved’ in some sense, because there is infant screening for it and a diet which can mitigate most of the damage.

J: While there are still people researching how to make people smarter. Still, in today’s climate, they’d be facing so much scrutiny that I don’t think this experiment would ever get off the ground. At least outside of mice.

K: This particular experiment, no. But they are doing a lot of work with stem cells to heal brain injury. Which might help with my daughter’s disabilities at some point. But brain transplant is definitely not happening any time soon.

J: I just envision a lot of pushback them doing it on adults who, at least with Charly, only seem to have a low IQ. He doesn’t suffer from the seizures that Wikipedia (a good source!) says is fairly common for PKU.

K: Yes, I can see that. But if you’re trying to heal a brain injury rather than ‘cure retardation’ you have a much wider source of subjects. And it also sounds a lot less controversial.

J: Very true.

J: I just realized I spelled it Charly. Dangit. Is it just the English major I once, momentarily, was that makes me see the whole thing as a metaphor for children growing up to surpass their parents? In this case, the scientists as well as the actual parents.

K: Nope. Because I read that Keyes was basing it a bit on being the English speaking/well-educated child of immigrants.

K: So good catch.

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Nebula Project: Babel-17

The Alliance has been the target of a series of mysterious and troubling attacks. The military has managed to capture some chatter from the attackers, but they’ve been unable to break the code.

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Babel-17. Beware if you’re worried about such things.

The Alliance has been the target of a series of mysterious and troubling attacks. The military has managed to capture some chatter from the attackers, but they’ve been unable to break the code. Former analyst Rydra Wong is asked to help, though she left the service some time ago to pursue a new career as a poet. Wong brings her own unique talents to bear on the “code” and soon discovers it’s not a code at all — it’s a new and unknown language so special it can literally speed up the thoughts of anyone who uses it for thinking. But is there more to it than that?

K: So where to begin on this one. I really had no clue what this book was about before I started reading it; I’d never even heard of it before we looked at the Nebula list.

J: And I.. apparently I read it only about 2 years ago and had no memory of finishing it! I was certain I’d started it and stopped.

K: I guess an obvious point to start with is the protagonist, Rydra Wong. I was surprised to find a female Asian protagonist. In fact, the whole cast was relatively diverse in a way I didn’t expect. I found it extremely unlikely that it would even occur to a white male writer in the 60s to include so many cultures, so I wasn’t surprised when I looked and found Delany was not white after all. And after that I sort of remembered that maybe I knew that already.

J: Even knowing Delany is both black and gay, it’s still surprising. Not so much that he wrote it. (Though even that is surprising given the year.) But that it got published and it won! Okay, tied, but still. Not only is she female and Asian and not entirely straight, but she also has a disability.. or more specifically, she’s not neurotypical.

K: Yes, let’s talk about that. I will tell you that the mention of Rydra being “autistic” at the beginning of the book made me want to throw the book across the room. Because clearly it was a ridiculous statement any way you look at it. Rydra is described as being so good at reading the body-language of people that she can appear telepathic, which is exactly the OPPOSITE of autistic.

J: Actually.. I just read something yesterday. A blog post written by a woman who’s autistic, who says that’s exactly what she does. And the comments from other autistic adults said some of the same things. That they’re not good with faces, so they look for other cues.

J: May be a bit lengthy for you to read now, but here’s the link. http://www.journeyswithautism.com/2011/04/15/an-open-letter-to-robert-macneil/

J: That is the impression I had though, when I was reading. That it didn’t seem like he’d gotten the autistic thing right at all. And some hokey psychiatric treatment hand-wavey thing was going on. But now, thinking about it, having read that link.. well, maybe it’s not so wrong as I thought.

K: Well, I think it’s been hammered home enough recently that autism is a spectrum. And it has perhaps not been hammered home enough recently that autism in girls tends to be different than in boys. But all the same I still don’t think he got it right — especially as -when he was writing the book- it certainly wouldn’t have meshed with any definition of autism.

J: Yea. For most of the book, it doesn’t even seem like she’s very different. I mean, if you just accept she’s telepathic, explanations aside, then it’s fine. Maybe this was just at the cusp of telepathic and other psi powers being really big in sf/f though. But for me, now, it’s like.. just say she’s telepathic. Heck, you don’t even have to say it, I’ll pick up on it and go with it. Rather like ‘oh, that thing is floating, it’s probably some form of antigravity’.

K: It was odd, because the impression I came away with after it was mentioned once was that the therapist seems to think that he cured her of whatever issues she had. That she came to him ‘autistic’ and he fixed it. Which if anything, no, he just taught her coping mechanisms, which is how most therapy for autism works nowadays. So at least in that sense the book was very forward thinking.

J: I did get the sense of a cure too. And yea, exactly. Didn’t really ‘cure’ her as much as he might think he did.

K: This is another post from the same blog which seems to contradict the more recent one. An evolving opinion? Perhaps. http://www.journeyswithautism.com/2008/12/25/autism-and-empathy/

J: Could be. The blogger is probably working through a lot of her own thoughts on it and just doing it in a public space. I don’t know much about autism at all. More than the average person? Except it’s so prevalent now that the ‘average’ person probably knows someone close to them who’s on the spectrum, and as far as I know, I don’t.. so.

K: I know a family with a 5 year old daughter who has Asperger’s. Their difficulties have more mirrored the typical idea of autism, where she has difficulty with less concrete things like feelings and correctly interpreting social cues.

K: There were other issues with Rydra, though. The question I was trying to answer through the whole book is if she was a Mary Sue. And in the end I lean heavily toward hell yes. The notes I have about her are as follows: way too hot, way too young, way too talented, way too influential.

J: Hrm. I didn’t think of her that way. But I definitely can’t argue against it. Maybe that’s why I didn’t really connect with her as a character. I mean, I did better than with Dune, a bit, but still..

K: She was just too much for me. The first scene where she’s just sitting there and the military guy comes in and instantly falls for her really put me on edge. Then it all just kept coming. She’s a super famous poet. But she’s also an expert linguist who used to work for the government. And she’s also a ship captain! Who also used to be married to some famous people! And she’s telepathic! And awesome!

J: Oh yea, that falling in love thing was ridiculous!!

J: As for the other characters, you may guess I was most intrigued by the navigators. And the ghosts could’ve been more interesting if they’d really developed as individuals, but we only know them as Eye, Ear, Nose. And at one point, I don’t know if it was a mistake in the edition or what.. but I think Eye and Ear got mixed up.

K: I was intrigued more by the -idea- of these triple marriages rather than the execution of the one we saw on screen. Mostly because the one we saw on screen was more evidence of Rydra’s superiority: not only does she know these two guys she has only just met so well that she knows exactly what they need, she can pick their perfect woman out without even talking to her. Augh. Now, stepping away from the annoying specifics, the idea itself was very interesting. All the moreso because it seems to be not well accepted by the public at large. So how did it come about? Weren’t there politicians going about declaiming that if you legalize marriage for THREE people, suddenly people will be marrying cats and dogs and myna birds? Is it just Delany sneaking in gay marriage without having to call it that and having the plausible deniability of another gendered person involved?

K: Even though it’s never stated that 3 men or 3 women couldn’t marry, we just only see examples of MMF (2) and Rydra mentioning she’d prefer FFM if she did it again.

J: Did they call it marriage? I finished it a couple weeks ago, so I don’t remember. And why was it so necessary for navigators? We never learn that at all.

K: I don’t remember if they used the word marriage in particular, but I know they referred to the participants as husbands and wives, so it was certainly heavily implied.

K: And no, we never did learn why it was necessary. In fact, the whole setting was pretty sketchily developed, which I think is definitely why I had a hard time connecting to the story. For me, it’s almost always the details of the setting that grabs me in any sf/f story (and to some extent in any story). And the details here were frustratingly few and far between. You have the impression of an interesting and complex world, but he just doesn’t bother to spend any time on it.

J: I don’t consider groupings like that to be easier to get away with than having gay characters. It’s certainly harder in the real world! And in fiction, the only other example I can think of is Vonda McIntyre’s Starfarers series. In there, there’s three people, but only because they’re recently widowed.

K: Even after the book ended I didn’t understand why the “Invaders” were invading.

J: That’s true. I wasn’t sure quite how far they’d gone or how long they’d travelled once they got into space. Certainly the navigator who couldn’t speak English was picking it up really quick. Some sort of sleep learning involved there, right? Not that the guys seemed to make an effort to learn Swahili.

J: Do you think he was trying to do too many things at once? Cram too many ideas into one book? That he sort of fell down in some key areas?

K: I had trouble with the passage of time, too. The first part of the book takes place very fast. Rydra meets the general, visits her therapist, finds an entire crew of people and a spaceship and takes off for space in less than a 24h time span.

K: I don’t know if that’s how I’d describe it. I think he was trying to do one thing very specifically: talk about how languages influence the way you think. And he built up the setting exactly as much as he needed to to get to the discussion he wanted to have.

K: But what that leaves is a weak structure upon which to rest this philosophizing.

J: The first part of the book was the hardest for me. And I think that was because it was a lot of .. person explains thing to other person. They even dragged that Customs Agent around so they’d have someone to explain things to. A stand-in for the ignorant reader.

K: I almost always enjoy the ‘collecting the team’ part of any book or movie more than the eventual caper, so I enjoyed the first part the best. (Though even there we couldn’t escape Rydra’s superawesomeness. In just one night she changed the life of the Customs Agent just by hanging out with him!)

J: Except that he could’ve done that whole language thing without throwing in the triple relationship, without throwing in ghosts, and revived dead people, without throwing in those weird ‘kids crew the ship and need a nanny’ bit. Those are all things that could’ve been explored on their own!

K: Exactly! If the book had been longer, he would have had space to answer all of the questions and ideas he threw out there. But in spite of its win for best novel, this wasn’t really a novel length work.

J: The Hugo has that problem too. Fluctuating definitions of ‘novel’. And in general I like the collecting the team part too. That makes Sailormoon pretty awesome, right? Takes nearly the whole first season/series to get them all. :)

J: Fushigi Yuugi takes awhile too, now that I think about it. Anime rocks.

K: I was especially confused by the platoon of kids, and I wish that had been done better. When it was first mentioned, I imagined a troop of 10-12 year-olds: old enough to have some training, but young enough to still be very small and agile. Midshipmen. But whenever the ‘kids’ were mentioned they all seemed to be about 17 — and yet -behaving- and being -treated- like they were 12. Which was just crazy, because we know Rydra herself was working for the government at 19, one of the navigators is stated to be 19, and Rydra’s still only about 25..

J: Yea. That was definitely weird. Especially in that they just expected at least one of them to have marbles. Were marbles still even in fashion in the 60s? Certainly not something you’d take to college with you for a game on the quad!

K: Yeah, it was very weird. And seemingly pointless, because there was no reason they had to be 17 at all. They were just throwaway characters.

J: Yea.

J: There was interesting stuff in this book, it was just kind of hard to get into and also hard to.. pull it all together.

J: One thing that tripped me up was ‘aluminium’ which is when I realized I was reading a British version. You would’ve thought the single quotes would’ve clued me in, but I just thought of it as.. quaint and old-fashioned. And for some reason single quotes are harder for me to read. I just have this instinctual reaction of ‘ugh, this is dense and not going to be an easy read’.

K: Hm. I don’t usually notice them at all.

J: I think you may’ve read more British stuff when you were younger. But in the original British typesetting? I dunno..

J: And it’s hypocritical of me because when I type, I tend to type single quotes!

J: Though mostly around single words and phrases, like I just did with aluminium.

K: I dunno either. It may have to do with the fact that I read in sentences and paragraphs and I don’t see the individual words as such. The punctuation doesn’t stand out when I read, it just blends in with the sense of things.

J: So you aren’t thrown when a quotation mark is accidentally left off? That really trips me up.

K: Not usually, no. My mind inserts it.

K: Yeah. There was a lot of random information presented about the setting, but little explanation of any of it. It seemed to me like Delany wanted to focus on his idea of “Babel 17”, some sort of super language which literally made you faster just by thinking in it. It’s a bit unfortunate, but his description of the battle scene, all I could picture was The Matrix. Because it was exactly like that.

J: *snicker* I did find the conversation where she’s trying to teach him the concept of ‘I’ and ‘you’ to be quite trippy. I kind of kept expecting him to get it wrong, or for some copyeditor somewhere to have screwed it up. So I kept looking for faults in it and flipping it around. But I didn’t find any errors. It was mind-bending though.

J: By him I mean Delany.

K: It was. I did find that section pretty hard to read, and I imagine that was the point.

K: I found the discussion about language dictating how your mind works to be a fascinating one. It made a lot of sense to me. Languages don’t translate 1:1 and a lot of concepts are represented very differently between cultures and languages.

J: I feel like there was another book with a language as like a computer virus and reprogramming humans. But.. maybe it was just discussion of this book I’m thinking of. It’s true though, as some languages have different colors. And that’s trippy to think about too. That I can look at a rainbow and say.. yea, it’s got 6 colors. 7 if you sneak in Indigo. But someone raised in another language would look at it and go ‘I see 5’, or ‘I see 10’.

J: And as it says in this book. (At least I think it did?) What /is/ it like to think of all nouns as having a ‘gender’?

J: As some stage, I think a lot of us see cats as female and dogs as male. But if you’re French, cats are male. At least the /word/ cat is male.

K: The example that came to my mind was colors. Specifically ‘aoi’ in Japanese, which is really quite difficult to translate into English without a context.

K: So I was really open to the idea that it might be possible to have a language which is so compact and efficient that your thought processes while thinking in that language would actually be faster than in a less well-designed language.

J: The Binars in TNG come to mind as an example of that.

K: Except again, I think that’s exactly the opposite. Binary is the -simplest- language. Two characters only. But it’s hardly the most efficient way of representing every concept. In fact, it takes an insane amount of 1s and 0s to represent anything complex.

J: Huh. You’re right. I guess in that case it’s the delivery method is faster.

K: Only if, like a computer, you can understand and keep track of the exact amount of 1s and 0s that were said to you.

K: In the end I was confused. Rydra gives the example of the aliens who can represent an entire power plant schematic in just 9 words. Then she starts talking about Babel 17 as being the same as fortran. Does not compute.

J: The more efficient the language gets, the more words it gets, yea? So like Chinese is very compact as a written language compared to English. But the characters are more complex to differentiate them from other characters. And you have to spend years learning them. Well, and Chinese would be even more compact as a written language if it wasn’t still relying on sound.

J: Oh, but that reminds me of something a bit tangential. People who think in Chinese can do math better because of the language. And I’m not sure I can explain this quite right… well, no, I can’t explain it at all. I’d have to Google.

K: Exactly. German has some very complex concepts you can express in one word, because those words are really huge! I couldn’t figure out which way Delany was trying to go: was he saying the language was compact because you could express things with very few words? Or was the language powerful because it was very simple, like binary? He seemed to say both at different times, so it was unclear in the end.

K: Apparently it was also magic and could brainwash you.

J: By being a subpersonality in your own brain.

J: Here’s a link that explains it. Basically in Chinese (and probably some other languages), eleven and twelve and things like twenty.. make more mathematic sense as words. I mean, think of 80 in French! That’s like 4-20. Confusing! Eight-ten makes more sense. http://larrycheng.com/2009/10/07/how-language-and-math-intersect-chinese-v-english/

K: That does make sense.

K: Let’s wrap this one up, then. Does the book hold up? What are its merits and demerits?

J: And more importantly, how does it make you /feel/?

K: For me, it holds up very well, mostly because Delany is incredibly vague about everything relating to the setting. It only starts to show its age when he gets more specific. The references to algol and Fortran, for instance, are not exactly current. And there was one passing mention of punch cards. Doh.

J: I think that not a lot of people would read this for pleasure, for a purely enjoyable, fun read. Some of it is a little dated, moreso than Dune, though not too much. Where I think most of its value lays now is in people reading it for ideas, or for historical purposes. As in, ‘It’s the book that first did this.’ or ‘It’s the book with that in it.’

J: For example, if you read enough articles, essays, blog posts, or attend enough panels about linguistics in science fiction. Babel-17 will keep getting mentioned. And eventually you feel.. I should read this thing.

K: In a lot of ways it was ahead of its time. Alternate sexualities, a female non-white protagonist who doesn’t have to justify herself simply for -being- female and non-white. But I think the story itself was too bare-bones to remain in the popular consciousness. Plus, no movies!

K: Yeah. So it’s clearly of interest, but relatively niche.

J: It would make a weird movie. I don’t think it would work without being remixed or mashed up.

J: Like toss in some of Delany’s characters/plots/ideas in other books. Then it might work. A hot Asian chick kicking butt? Hollywood loves that.

K: I’m surprised it hasn’t been optioned just for that.

J: They would totally change the navigation team to two women and one man though. And show at least one sex scene.

K: Go all the way! Three women! Hottt.

J: And Rydra has to jump in for some reason.

K: bow chicka bow wow

K: So there was a lot to like about this book, but in the end, I would have liked it better if it had been longer and the setting provided with as much attention as Delany devoted to making Rydra superwoman.

J: Yea. There are secondary characters I would’ve liked to know more about.

K: And many things mentioned in passing which could have stood more screentime. Like the Invaders, whose motivations and goals are left completely hazy.

J: Now that I’ve read it twice and discussed it with you, maybe this time I’ll remember I’ve read it.

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Nebula Project: Dune

Winner of the very first Nebula Award for best novel, Dune is the story of a battle for one very important planet in an empire of the far off future. Arrakis, the desert planet in question, is the only known source of a vital pharmaceutical known as spice.

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book Dune. Beware if you’re worried about such things.

Winner of the very first Nebula Award for best novel, Dune is the story of a battle for one very important planet in an empire of the far off future. Arrakis, the desert planet in question, is the only known source of a vital pharmaceutical known as spice. Previously under the control of House Harkonnen, the Emperor has recently reassigned responsibility for the planet to House Atreides. Wary of this supposed promotion and with much caution, the Duke and his family move to their new home. But in spite of many precautions and plans, however, the duke’s son Paul and his mother Jessica find themselves betrayed. Will Paul be able to fulfill his destiny? And if he can, will his destiny lead the empire to a path of destruction?

J: So one of my first impressions was that Paul was a really plain, dumb, normal, boring, and therefore jarring name.

K: Ha! I hadn’t really thought about it, but you’re absolutely right. In a book full of Gurneys and Thufirs and Stilgars, the two arguably main characters – Paul and Jessica – have incredibly “regular” names. Do you think that was on purpose?

J: Maybe.. I mean, eventually Paul stopped bothering me. Maybe I got used to it? Or maybe as he got older.. it ‘fit’ better. Or maybe because he acquired other names and titles. Jessica bothered me less, maybe because I know fewer Jessicas, or because it was more than one syllable. Or because it ended in A. But I did notice it being different from other names.

J: Paul is just a bit like… the all-powerful wizard, Tim.

K: Yeah. Though it may have been intended to show his kidness in the beginning. Just little Paul who thinks his lot in life is to be a mere Duke when actually, no, he has an even Bigger Destiny.

J: Even though I grew up with a Paul or two in school, I don’t think of kids when I think Paul. Not like.. Kevin. But anyway, yea, I can see how it might’ve been a plain name to contrast with everything he was going to do and be.

K: Considering the pretty overt religious themes in the book, choosing a biblical name was almost certainly on purpose. There are some parallels between this Paul and St. Paul, but that may be overreaching.

J: Oh.. well, I picked up on the religions, obviously. There’s a whole bit in the appendix. But I didn’t link it to some biblical allegory or anything like that. I didn’t even do that to the extent that I do it with Ender Wiggin. (Which is less than that other OSC series, or Narnia.)

J: What I mean is.. I saw the religion /within/ the book and the world. I didn’t link it at all to the world outside of the book. I mean, that the author was trying to convey something about religion. I’ll think less of it if he was!

K: Religious themes doesn’t necessarily mean allegory. I don’t believe this story was an attempt to metaphorically examine something in specific. But religion permeates the entire setting, and some of the views on religion (okay, pretty much ALL of the views on religion) here are intensely cynical.

K: It’s like, Herbert took the statement ‘religion is the opiate of the masses’ and ran with it. We have here an entire society that’s pretty much been crippled by a religious edict against ‘machines that replicate the human mind’ — making, apparently, most advanced computers illegal, and leading pretty much directly to their dependence on this one single crop for their entire empire to function.

K: The Bene Gesserit meanwhile go around seeding myths and legends on almost every world in the hopes that these legends will take root and eventually the populace can be manipulated by having these prophecies ‘come true’ some time in the future.

J: Well, the religious bits neither interested me nor bothered me. They were just sort of there. I had problems with the book on three fronts. Four if you count that I have this aversion to deserts.

K: On the other hand, I’m usually very interested when a religion is introduced in a book, and I like to see its structure and how it operates. So for me, on that front, the book was very successful. What were your problems?

J: Well, first the point of view. I’ve found I really hate third person omniscient when it’s jumping into different people’s heads. It feels like it’s treading a fine line between badly executed third person limited.

J: Like when the author does a POV shift in the middle of a scene. No, no, bad! Only in this case, he’s using it all correctly.. I just don’t like it. I don’t find it as easy to read or as engaging.

J: Which leads in to another issue I had, which is that I don’t feel attached to any of the characters. Like, at all. I can’t even believe they love people when they say they love people or even cry about it. I’m like.. yea, do you? They’re so good at being wary of everyone and lying to everyone at the same time, that I can’t trust them.

K: I don’t know that you’re really meant to. Even though we can get inside everyone’s head through the narrative, I think part of the point is that everyone’s motives are still a bit obscure. You can’t really root for anyone in this story, though Paul is probably less evil than the side he’s fighting against.

K: Part of the disconnect, I think, comes from so many things happening off camera that we’re just told about later. I was thinking about this myself — I mean, we see Chani and Paul meet, and see them start to become closer, but then we leap forward in time and it’s an accomplished fact. We miss out on a whole important section of their relationship and just have to believe that it happened. Mostly because Herbert really wasn’t very interested in that part.

J: We never see their son! At all.

K: Nope. Which completely blunts the emotional impact of what happened. But Herbert was never going to explore it anyway — we hardly even see people reacting to the deaths that happened on camera, like Duke Leto.

J: But the offcamera thing bugged me early on too in that we’re shown this whole scene with the reverend mother and the hand thing. And then, boom, next scene, we’re being told stuff that happened in that scene and I’m like.. what, when? Why didn’t you show it to us then? Grr.

K: There’s a lot of telling in this book.

J: For the first part of the story, I noticed that there was a lot of.. each scene was ‘Someone alone in a room ruminates on something. Someone else comes in.’

J: It was, room, room, room. Then they go to another PLANET and.. we don’t even get to see the ship. They’re just.. in another room.

K: Yeah, that was strange. I was honestly surprised – I read this book not too many years ago, and I had honestly forgotten that it actually starts on Calaban rather than Arrakis. They were there and packing and I was surprised. I couldn’t remember any travel. And ha ha, that’s because we didn’t see it.

J: It wasn’t until they got in a ship and encountered a worm that we finally had some interesting action going on.

J: I just had this overall impression of a person standing in a room! Like, not even /doing/ anything in particular. Just standing there. Thinking.

J: Speaking of travel, didn’t they all say.. you get addicted to the spice and you can’t leave the planet? What was that about? Because then the Baron does. And people offplanet are using the spice, some of them constantly..

K: The Baron isn’t said to be addicted to the spice. But I think what was meant to be said was it’s much easier to remain on planet as an addict, but for certain people (like the Guild navigators) as long as you have an adequate supply you should be all right. That was the impression I got anyway.

K: If you can’t afford it, you better stay where you are.

J: Hrm.

K: So I wanted to talk about the women in the book.

J: Sure.

K: The women in the book are sort of impressive and disappointing at the same time. Jessica, for instance, is a powerful fighter and highly trained. She has her own agenda and she’s able to make things happen for herself. But for all that, she, and pretty much all the remaining named female characters, are completely defined by their relationship to a man. Which was annoying.

K: I do think the book passes the Bechdel test, but only on the strength of that conversation between Mapes and Jessica about the crysknife at the beginning of the book. So it’s a questionable pass.

J: I was surprised to find women in the book, honestly. And women /doing/ things, and affecting things. Even effecting things. But yea, I did question it by the end that we have Paul’s mother, Paul’s woman, Paul’s sister.

J: Even the quotes at the start of things by Irulan. She’s still Paul’s.

K: Exactly.

K: And we also have this revisiting of a theme that for some reason is a big favorite in science fiction and fantasy: A group of women has a power, a really awesome power, and they wield it to their own advantage to make sure they have a voice in the affairs of their world/universe. But somehow their power is incomplete, weak, because no men share the power. And then, ta da, a man appears who can use the power, but even BETTER than them.

J: Gah. Now you’ve made me more annoyed with the book. :)

K: Well, to be fair, though Herbert is very much on board with this aggravating theme, I think he redeems himself a little with some very strange and random implications toward the end of the book.

J: I did wonder at the term ‘witches’, and yea, I can see how people (men) would use that term. But I really hate that it’s a term without a good male counterpart. If a bunch of men were manipulating things behind the scenes, what’re they going to be called? Not witches.

K: Yeah. And we never really meet many women who aren’t Bene Gesserit trained in one way or another, so we can’t see how they act – except at that awkward dinner party at the start of the book, which was problematic on its own.

K: Anyway, to return to my previous point about the Kwisatz Haderach business,
Paul at one point says that he can see the ‘male’ and the ‘female’ paths to vision are pretty much polar opposites. And we later learn that Count Fenring, who is a genetic-eunuch, whatever that means, was a failed attempt to create the Kwisatz Haderach. So it sort of implies that Paul is sort of straddling the male/female line, because a normal male wouldn’t be able to get at the female side of the visions in much the same way as the women can’t access the men’s.

J: That rubbish about giving and taking?

K: Yes, setting aside the stereotypicality of the giving and taking business.

J: I felt the book ended abruptly. Maybe because it was right at the bottom of the page. Does it really end with the line about concubines and wives?

J: Of all the women, I find his sister the most interesting. Even though she has the precocious little girl thing going on to the extreme.

K: Alia is interesting. I think part of your issue with the book ending so abruptly is that it really -does- end pretty abruptly. Dune is a series of 6 books, of which I’ve read the first three. And those three tell a pretty complete story. I’m not sure Dune by itself is complete.

J: If he’s supposed to be straddling this male/female line, why isn’t he more feminine? It better not be because he cried once or twice!

K: That I don’t know. But he does behave in ways that are somewhat non-male. He spends almost the entire book angsting about whether or not he’s going to start a holy war by accident. Which is odd when you get down to it, because why doesn’t he want that?

J: Good question.

K: Paul does what he does, but I never had the impression he was enjoying himself. He was resigned.

J: I guess I don’t find that odd in some types of stories. The Chosen One or even the King’s Heir.. they rarely get to do what they want. They’re martyrs, even if they don’t die.

K: I guess that’s true.

K: So that’s not odd, though I did find his -restraint- odd. He wanted to achieve goals X, Y, Z and nothing more. Period.

J: Yea, I mean, if I could see the future.. I think I’d be aiming towards the future that let me be happiest. Even if that means running away with all my women and kids.

K: I -think- he was aiming toward the future where Arrakis has free water. So I suppose in that sense, sending all of the Fremen off into space to battle would have been bad for that vision.

K: Anyway, that sort of ties in to the two main issues I found with the book. The first was the incredible stupidity of the Harkonnens over the Fremen. I think that was a huge failure. Herbert tries to make them into these wily and worthy, if completely depraved, adversaries, and yet even at the end the Baron is still claiming there are only like a dozen Fremen so how could they be a problem?!

K: Yet meanwhile, the Atreides not only knew about the Fremen and their potential, this was something they knew and planned for -before even arriving on Arrakis-.

J: I thought it was just bias coming into play, really. Oh, these desert-dwellers aren’t a threat. Oh, there couldn’t possibly be that many of them, it’s a freaking desert after all. What would they drink? What would they eat? That the Atreides saw anything was probably because the Duke was desperate at that point? I dunno.

K: To some extent I agree, but we see later that Duke Leto has correctly surmised the source of the Sardaukar’s abilities, and the Baron has to be led to it later on. So I was dissatisfied with their relative abilities. He wasn’t nearly clever enough to have had the results he did.

J: I can’t argue that.

K: My other issue was, as it has been in other books, the technology. Now, part of this is probably due to the age of the book — when Herbert wrote this, the integrated circuit was still new and computers were large and fairly primitive. So that we don’t see a lot of innovative technology here isn’t a surprise. But what is a surprise is he seemed to think there could be a spacefaring empire -without- powerful computers. Seriously? Even his invention of Mentats can’t really cover this gap.

J: Well, we don’t really see the ships. At least in this book. So maybe he could /say/ no computers, but then fell down on the job of actually showing it.

J: I think the last thing I had a problem with was I /still/ don’t understand this whole sandworm life cycle thing. The appendix in the back just made me more confused!

K: That’s atually covered extensively in the later books. Very extensively. I think the information here is adequate enough for this story.

J: Maybe it was adequate if I understood it. But I don’t.

J: It’s the pre-spice blowouts I’m not understanding the most, I think. But you don’t need to try to explain. I just want to say that I don’t think the explanation within the book was adequate. And the appendix just made things worse.

K: That’s fine. We can disagree. :)

J: The book did make me think of Star Wars and Beetlejuice, btw. Like I knew sandworms and desert planets weren’t unique to them, but did they have their source in Dune or is it not unique to Dune either?

K: That I don’t know.

K: So the last thing to look at is how well the book has held up over time. Overall, I think it holds up pretty well. The manner of writing is a bit dated — I think we’d see a lot more action if it were written today. But because he avoided technology so much (and because it takes place in such a distant future) the technology itself doesn’t seem overly dated, beyond the ‘atomics’. I did wonder, though, if the 1960s audience would have found the use of Arabic/Islamic words to be exotic. Would they have immediately conjured up real world information when read? Certainly to a modern reader these words are no longer mysterious.

J: Yea, I think the book itself doesn’t seem too dated. I probably couldn’t have guessed with much accuracy what decade it was written in. He did seem to use jihad like he expected people to know what it meant.. trying to think what the other words were..

J: Though it looks like jihad made it into the glossary.

J: Oh, hajj. Also in the glossary.

J: Then again, so did baklava. Which all kind of annoys me, since I can’t tell which words he made up or is using in a new way and which are just.. words.

K: Shaitan, I know Ramadan is mentioned at least once. Fedaykin has arabic origins.

K: Zensunni is clearly a melding of two words.

J: Something Bedwine, which may or may not have meant to refer to bedouins?

K: At one point he mentions Sharia, though the reference is a bit weird.

K: Yeah, I thought that about Bedwine, too.

K: So, that was one point I wasn’t sure about. But I’m not sure how much it matters in the end, except that it does give the words that are real more meaning.

J: I just thought to look up gom jabbar. Wondering if that was based in anything real and that reminded me… why was she testing to see if he was human? I thought there was this whole human-animal caste thing going on, or genetic thing. But then it seems to just be.. dropped? Is that gone into more in later books?

K: Hmm. I haven’t read the whole series, but it does come up again in relation to Alia, then later on in respect to some other stuff. But in terms of the Bene Gesserit and their views of the universe, there’s definitely a great deal left unsaid in this book. I believe that it ends up dropped here because after we see the test, Paul then spends the rest of the book amongst people who aren’t involved in that political world in the least.

K: In terms of Dune, I believe it’s supposed to say something about Paul, that he doesn’t operate purely on animal instinct, but on a higher plane.

K: Which is what ‘human’ means, presumably.

J: Well, so overall it wasn’t what I was expecting and wasn’t as boring as I was expecting. But I don’t know that I’m inclined to read more Dune books. I do want to watch it though.

K: I enjoyed it, and may well end up rereading Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. I don’t know if it’ll prompt me to finish reading the original series, or look into the more recently published extensions of the series.

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