science fiction – Page 2

Nebula Project: Rendezvous with Rama

The Nebula Project returns from hiatus with a guest panelist (K’s husband Bob, able to, among other things, provide a male perspective) and a discussion of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.

In the 22nd century, humans have spread out all over the Solar System, colonizing everywhere from Mercury to the moons of the gas giants. But in spite of their expansion, the fabled ‘space drive’ has still eluded scientists and many believe it’s not even possible to construct. All is thrown into question by the appearance of a strange object which enters the Solar System on a course to swing around the sun. The object is clearly artificial — the work of another race. The spaceship Endeavour is the only ship within range of its projected path and thus its crew is given the task of making contact with the object, now named “Rama”, and attempting to collect as much information as possible before its path goes too close to the sun for humans to follow. Though the collective governments of the various human settlements are excited by this unprecedented arrival, they are also quite nervous: is Rama a threat? The Endeavour crew will need to try and discover that as well.

J: I’d read some Arthur C. Clarke when I was a teenager. I thought Rendezvous with Rama would be easy to read and interesting. But.. not so much. My overall impression after having read it is that it would’ve made a far more interesting short story.

B: I could certainly see this being adapted to a short story form, although it would mean cutting some things out. And you could probably cut out things like the lengthy explanations of the politics of the situation, or some of the background technologies that could have just been left for granted. But I actually kind of appreciate having them there, even it means the story progresses at a glacial pace.

K: It definitely does progress at a glacial pace. But I actually did like that: I agree with J that the story could easily have been shortened, but it would have ended up a much different story in that case. It was clear that Clarke had given a lot of thought to what technologies might be found in this environment and why and he wanted to get across very clearly the issues that humans were going to encounter when attempting to understand a completely alien species with nothing but a single (very large) artifact from which to draw conclusions. So I felt like the pace was justified, and I didn’t find it too boring. Slow, but not boring. Though I also had a hard time shaking a feeling of forboding; it really really read in parts like a horror novel, and I couldn’t help but keep waiting for something inexplicably awful to happen.

J: If the characters had been.. actual characters, I wouldn’t have minded so much. I guess I’m just not into the ‘explore this strange thing’ as the main driving point of a novel.

B: The characters were fairly generic, I will give you that. They did not go far beyond the archetypes they were modeled after, other than little personal touches like the captain’s multiple families, that engineer guy’s religious background, and so forth. But expanding on K’s point, not only did Clarke go to great lengths to write about the challenges of exploring an alien environment, he also spent a lot of time on the background challenges as well — getting the approval of governments, getting funding, maintaining public support… I cannot think of many examples of stories that go that far into the depth of the situation. It comes at the expense of interesting characters, certainly, but if you can get past that, there is a lot there that is still interesting.

K: Yes, the characters were absolutely generic. Even though there were some passing efforts made at establishing a backstory for them, they didn’t add much, if anything, to the story. Things were just stated about them – such as the random existence of plural marriage – without explanation or context. I didn’t exactly want an infodump on the socioeconomic status of the Solar System, but if you’re going to bring up interesting social points, you shouldn’t just lob them out there and let them thunk on the ground without further attention. It was distracting. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out things about the various planetary/colonial societies when that was neither the focus nor the purpose of the book.

J: I was definitely hoping to see these wives of the captain. Why they married him, since he’s such a jerk about it, writing them generic letters. And that, yea, I think it’s _one_ mention of these other two guys who are together and have a wife/girlfriend back home. Instead the guy who seems to get the most attention and screentime is the guy who flies around.

B: Well, Jimmy (of course his name was Jimmy) was just about the only character who saw any actual action. Everyone else mostly climbed up and down stairs, looked through telescopes, or cut into things. (Alright, I’m oversimplifying a little — there was a lot of background activity — but almost none of it was anything I would call action.) Also, until the very end, he is the only one who actually discovered anything concrete about Rama. It was his trip that really provided the most clues, by a large margin, about what Rama was actually doing out in space.Getting back to the sociopolitical info-dump for a second though, I think that was Arthur C. Clarke, Futurist, seeping through into the story. I read a bunch of other essays of his with much of the same kind of thing — in the future, there will be fewer social restrictions, buildings will be way sturdier, people will stop wearing clothing, etc. As far as what goes on in the story, though, you can pretty much ignore all of it.

K: That is interesting. I’ve not really read a great deal of his writing, so I just had this to go on, and I found it very difficult to pin down his views from here. (On social issues, that is.) On the one hand, societies which allow a man to have more than one wife are typically regressive and patriarchal. But here we also have the suggestion that women can have more than one husband — though he then sort of negates that by suggesting the guys may have come up with the idea and that they’re also bi. (Progressive in and of itself, but it doesn’t speak toward the status of women.) So there was progressiveness, but it wasn’t pervasive in all aspects of life. Judging just from this book alone, I can’t say I’m impressed with his future thoughts on the place of women in society. Yes, they are there on the ship – there’s even more than one – but their authority is either low or outside the general command structure. And there appears to be only one female scientist on the big Alien Encounter Council they convene (though for a few minutes I thought there would be zero, so at least we avoided that scenario.)

J: Yup. And his wives are both at (separate) homes taking care of the kids. Just a very typical arrangement, especially for a ship captain. He just happens to have two of them. Along with women, the society or societies if you want to call all the other planets/colonies that seemed also very white American/European. Despite calling it Rama, which we can discuss by itself, I only saw like one or two character names that could’ve been Indian or Asian. Even though it would’ve been dead simple to throw in names from all over. And for character descriptions, I don’t think he ever bothered to specify what race people were. At least for the most part.. my memory may be iffy here.

B: This book certainly does not come off as a shining example of progressive thinking, but it’s definitely farther than it could have been. If it were rewritten now, the captain would probably have been a woman with multiple husbands, and there would have been a greater diversity of ethnicities, genders and ages. Then again, he leaves so much to the imagination as far as the characters go, they really could have been any ethnicity, if not for their names. (Come to think of it, Jimmy’s last name, according to my five minutes of internet research to refresh my memory, is “Pak” — so his ethnicity could be debatable.) On the other hand, we are talking about a book from almost 40 years ago, so the progressive movement wasn’t as far along as it is now, so I’ll give him at least some credit there.

K: I definitely read Jimmy as of Asian ancestry of some sort. Perhaps because of the last name, or maybe it was even stated, I’m not sure. In any case, I think it’s true that most of the characters have so little information provided that there’s no reason they had to be white, though one might get the impression Clarke imagined them to be so. But I don’t think there’s any real proof either way. He was definitely far more interested in the thought experiment of the aliens.

J: Clarke had been living in Sri Lanka for more than 10 years by that point. Which makes me think he could’ve done a better job of making things appear global. From what little I know/remember of his other work, he is big on aliens. And on aliens that are more advanced than us. And the way those machines were eating things, it’s very easy to visualize this as an anime.

B: I definitely agree there: this is a story about humanity exploring an alien landscape. The actual representatives of humanity in the story are generic and forgettable — you can basically replace any of them with someone else and not affect the story in any significant way, as long as their actions are the same. But it’s all about human curiosity and the drive to investigate and understand everything trumping all of the forces that hold us back, like fear of the unknown, or fear of investing resources into pure science with no guarantee of a practical return. Really, the explorers in the story got nothing actually useful out of Rama — they didn’t bring back any new technologies, didn’t gain any really useful scientific knowledge — but the overall feeling from the story was that the trip was worth taking anyway.

K: Didn’t gain any immediate insights or scientific knowledge. I think it’s important to keep in mind that they didn’t expect to make any big breakthroughs while they were there; they weren’t equipped for it or trained. They were just collecting samples and data. And they did collect quite a bit of that. Of course, the book ends with the setup for the sequel, so I don’t know whether or not we get to see there scentific progress based on the fact that scientists now -know- this space drive is possible; that three legged creatures are a viable evolutionary branch; that organic machines are a way to achieve long-term space flight etc. etc.

J: It was surprising to me that the.. I think it was a xenoanthropologist? He just decided in the middle of the exploration that there wasn’t going to be anything of interest and wandered off to do whatever he usually did. Teach grad students or whatever. It wasn’t worth his time to sit and watch the exploration recordings and talk to his colleagues! Dude, just because there doesn’t appear to be any living sentient creatures doesn’t mean there isn’t things to study once it was clear it wasn’t a natural object. But anyway, at least some of the people thought they should be investigating it as a potential threat. And we humans love to investigate potential threats. We’ll commit all sorts of resources to that. Especially if it’s a potential imminent threat, and Rama was moving pretty quick.

B: Or assume that it is a threat, and try to blow it up — the good old 1% doctrine. Anyway, yeah, I guess I wasn’t thinking through all of the potential scientific benefits of the investigation, including the not-to-be-underestimated boost in support for science when people see what it is capable of when it is allowed to advance. That kind of goes along with other things I remember from the essays I read — how, for example, many inventions and technologies people use in their everyday lives came directly from technologies developed by NASA for the space program. The implication in the story was that if humanity had not been as active in space as it had been, there was no way we could have made it to Rama.

K: Or even been able to get a very good look at it from afar.

K: I did find it interesting that he spent a good bit of time during the first portion of the book talking about near-space collisions with asteroids and kind of attempting to justify why they might be looking for objects like Rama. Because scientists do that all the time nowadays, don’t they? It’s always in the news that some comet might have hit Earth but its trajectory will take it past without any issue. Was that started up after this book? Was it started because of this book?

J: I wouldn’t be surprised if Clarke was behind that somehow, if not this book in particular. It’s nice to think we’ll have the capability of blowing stuff up if we need to. Which I don’t think we currently do at the moment. So we’re watching for stuff, but we can’t do anything about it except shout ‘Duck!’.

B: I actually think I may have read something about near-earth objects in one of those essays as well, or I may just be imagining it, but I also wouldn’t surprised at all if Clarke was influential in getting that program going, at least by drawing attention to the need to have it. And of course, if you listen to scientists, they will tell you it is not a question of *if* we will one day have to contend with an actual planet-killing asteroid headed our way, but when. Not that listening to scientists is fashionable these days. But that is one of the reasons stories like this are good to have — because it’s one thing to say, “Science says we should be doing this,” but it’s another to create an interesting narrative that actually gives reasons why.

K: I suspect if you talked to the average person about planet-killing asteroids, they’d have more to say about Bruce Willis or Elijah Woods than Arthur C. Clarke.

K: It’s always interesting to me what sorts of bees authors get in their bonnets. Clarke obviously had several here: objects approaching Earth; a realistic scenario for an alien encounter (ie, one without any actual aliens); the way in which humanity may respond to perceived threats. But he also visited another trope none too dear to my heart. Yes, I’m afraid Rendezvous with Rama saw the return of the Perky Space Boobs. What the hell is the fascination with this idea?

J: It’s mandatory for any science fiction novel that takes place partly in space or low gravity. Though curiously you never see it mentioned on coverage of actual space missions. ‘Bill, please tell us what the astronauts are wearing.’ ‘Who cares? Look how perky those boobs are!’

K: It’s ridiculous! First, I sincerely doubt the ‘lift’ would be all that noticeable, and in practical terms most women wear something to keep them in one spot anyway. Seems to me men are far more likely to have something unrestrained to float around. But that never seems to be mentioned.

B: I’m going to refrain from analyzing this one, except to say that personally, I don’t care if this trope lives or dies.

J: I’ll bring it back to the name Rama then. All the Roman and Greek Gods were used up, so they moved to Indian ones. But that’s a living religion. Unless it’s not in the future of this book? I just can’t see people saying ‘Hey, here’s this weird thing coming. We’re up to J on the rotation. Shall we go for Judas or Jesus?’

K: Well, yes. Who do you think named it Jupiter? It wasn’t the Pope! It was the Romans trying to honor their god. So I don’t find the use of Rama incongruous at all.

J: Well, Jupiter is a big planet, which is hanging around. This is more on the order of an asteroid or comet that wandered by. I just think it’d make more sense to me if it was named after someone more minor. Or if it was Hindus doing the naming.

B: Well, since Christianity only has the one god, you wouldn’t want to go naming it Jehovah unless you want the name to have world-ending implications, so the nearest equivalent would be to pick from the names of angels, which would have seemed appropriate enough. But I honestly can’t say I know enough about Indian religions to judge just how appropriate Rama is as a name. My traditional five minutes of internet research when I do not know something has not brought me any closer to figuring it out, so I’m going to have to defer to people who know more about it.

K: I don’t think we’re given any indication that Indian astronomers were not part of the international body that decided on how to start naming these things. Though the Roman names won out for most of the planets, we still use many of the Arabic names for stars; the Chinese and the Indians had their own traditional names for the planets and stars and other visible objects, many of which were, surprise, the names of gods. I just really don’t find it to be disrespectful or outlandish. Maybe a Hindu person would disagree, but I really cannot make that call.

J: So there is a movie planned, right? I guess I’d be interested in seeing it. Though I hope it’s not as dull as 2001! I think I might have to wait for the DVD though. In case it is very dull. I can do something else while I watch it.

K: It might be more impactful on a big screen. Or 3D IMAX. It seems like the kind of movie that would be improved by increasing the sense of size.

B: It definitely has all of the components needed for a good movie. I’m sure it’d get the Hollywood treatment — lots of CGI, romantic subplots, more perky zero-G boobage — but I’d probably still be willing to give it a chance.

Nebula Project: The Gods Themselves

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book The Gods Themselves. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things.

In the late 21st century, humans were contacted by beings from another universe. These beings provided what looked to be the answer to Earth’s energy problems: an endless source of power with only minimal side-effects. A consequence of this development was the near canonization of the man who happened to be there when the contact was made, and many scientists (more worthy, at least in their own minds) resent this. Thus there is much to be gained by someone who can discover and prove that the “electron pump” is not nearly as perfect as it’s been made out to be.

K: We’ve both just finished The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov, the next winner in our Nebula list. Considering Asimov’s relative fame, it’s about time he showed up in the list! As far as I can tell, this book is a stand-alone unrelated to any of the series he worked on. Its plot centers around something called the “Electron Pump”, which has been established recently on Earth as a pretty much limitless source of energy. The book is divided into three sections which all tell parts of the story but which are only pretty loosely tied to one another.

J: Yea, in a way it was like reading 3 short stories. Or maybe novelettes. Not sure how long they all were individually. It felt to me kind of like reading Connie Willis (only more boring), followed by James Tiptree, followed by hrm.. not really Samuel Delany, it wasn’t weird enough by half. In short, they were all quite different in tone, POV, plot, everything.

K: They were definitely longer than short stories. And I can’t really compare them to most of those authors, though I have to disagree with your assessment about their differences. Part 2 was definitely distinctly different, but parts 1 and 3 were very similar, even though they focused on different characters.

J: Oh, they were definitely fairly similar. But they didn’t fit the same pattern. Part 1 was ‘scientists blather on about something’. Part 3 was ‘living on the moon is weird’. It actually surprised me when they were on the moon. Was there any hint in part 1 that there were people living on the moon?

K: See, that’s not how I read part 1’s pattern. To me, part 1 was ‘academic infighting’. And part 3 was ‘academic infighting on the moon’. So they were the same, just the scenery was different. I can’t say as I had picked up in part 1 that there was a lunar colony, though, no.

J: Should we take this in sections and talk about part 1 first?

K: Let’s. So part 1 we have a young scientist who has managed to tick off Dr. Hallam, who has managed to accrue all of the credit for ‘inventing’ the “Electron Pump”. As a result he has enormous influence and can easily ruin careers. The young guy is understandably annoyed at this so decides he’s going to try and find a flaw in the Electron Pump and bring down Hallam.

J: If you say so. No, I mean, I followed the plot okay. It was just so dull. It was a lot of talking heads. Except once I think someone pulled an orange out of his pocket to eat it. And while it wasn’t quite ever ‘as you know, Bob’, it was darned close to that for most of the first few sections. And the only woman in the whole section was a ‘graduate student’. So, yay for being a graduate student. But she was only mentioned as someone’s date. And we never see her or anything. It briefly got interesting when they were talking to people on the other side of the pump, but I was quite ready to speed read my way through the rest of the book if it was going to go on like that. It seemed to be all idea and no substance.

K: I agree it was not interesting as presented. I thought the idea of the pump was interesting, and I had to read it a few times before I had that settled in my head, but the characters were indistinguishable from one another. Completely. Pete and Myron and Bill and Bob and whatever. In my head they were all nerds in white shirts with ties and pocket protectors. I was both annoyed and disappointed to see that Asimov’s imagination couldn’t stretch far enough to include any women among the scientists at all — I just skimmed through and couldn’t spot the graduate reference, but my feeling is she wasn’t a scientist at all but some kind of humanities student. But that’s it. The senator? A dude. The environmental activist? A dude.

J: I don’t think what she’s a graduate student in is ever stated or implied. So yea, I definitely wouldn’t give him any credit for making her a science student. He only gets points for not calling her a ‘coed’. And I had a hard time telling everyone apart too. Their characters were entirely defined by their relationship to this Pump idea. The scientific underpinnings of which I didn’t think about too hard. I trust Asimov to know his physics better than me. And if I wasn’t going to pick apart the science, then no reason to think about it too much. ;)

K: I suppose not. There’s plenty to pick apart otherwise. This whole section is meandering and unfocused; it seems to have two or three or even more primary purposes: One, to establish the history of the Electron Pump and how Dr. Hallam opportunistically came to power in scientific circles. Two, to float the possibility there may be soemthing wrong with the idea. Three, to engage in a confusing philosophical discussion of whether or not the entities in the para-Universe are smarter than humans or simply more technologically advanced. Four, to randomly talk about linguistic challenges. Five, to make you fall asleep. There were a lot of ideas packed in here which weren’t really given a chance to flourish — instead, they were all treated in the most cursory and boring way possible.

J: He did a good job on Five then! I have to say that Part 1, if it had been the entirety of the book, would’ve made me seriously question what the SFWA members were thinking when they nominated it, let alone voted it to win.

K: I’d have to agree with you there! Are you ready to move on to section 2?

J: Yup. Part 2 was just soooo much better. Not that it didn’t have things I take issue with. But at least it was interesting!

K: Part 2 was a big surprise for me, considering part 1. In part 2 we shift entirely to the para-universe and it suddenly starts feeling like a science fiction novel instead of something set in amongst present-day whiny scientists. There were definitely some issues I had with this section, but it fired the imagination in a way that neither part 1 nor part 3 did for me.

J: Yea, exactly. It was different. And that part of why it was different was it was doing interesting sex and gender stuff only helped make it interesting to me personally. As a bonus, I could like the characters.

K: I’m not sure if the characters were really three dimensional enough for me to like them, though I definitely was interested in them, and what they were going to do. I was also interested in their world, their species, and everything that was going on there. I liked the way Asimov tried to come up with a species that had three genders required for reproduction rather than just two; a lot of times authors will just throw the fact out there without actually explaining it. For me, that doesn’t work, because I have a difficult time imagining it. Here, we don’t have a lot of details, but enough to let you grasp the concept.

J: Not that I could adequately envision what they even looked like… Translucent blobs is the best I can come up with. I do take objection to which of the sexes he chose a male pronoun for and which the female. :P

K: That’s about what I came up with, though initially I had been confused by Asimov’s references to the ‘surface’ into thinking that they were living in water – hence my conflating them with jellyfish. By the end, it sounded more like they were living underground in some caves filled with air, but I still wasn’t positive. And, in fact, it didn’t really matter much. I think translucent, amorphus blob is enough.

K: And I also was annoyed by his assignment of genders. Even though he made up for it a little by having the ‘female’ be smart and brave, she was clearly depicted as being unusual; in fact the narrative makes a point of noting that the vast majority of “Emotionals”, as the females are called, are completely uninterested in anything useful beyond chattering and gossip.

J: And flirting/preening. I think the literal definition of female is the one who provides the egg. Which there didn’t seem to even be. Unless it was the Rational’s ‘seed’ that was the egg. In which case he should be the female. Either that or the incubator should’ve been the female. I don’t see how the catalyst or whatever she is would make her female. And yet.. that the two ‘males’ got together first and were flirting and whatnot was very appealing. So I would hate to have that go away by getting the pronouns more accurate.

K: Maybe, but I think here was very definitely a place where some new pronouns might have done some good. Since the assignment of ‘male’ and ‘female’ seemed otherwise arbitrary (Asimov does get points for giving the ‘Parental’ unit a male pronoun) and unrelated to our concepts of ‘male’ and ‘female’. Did he think he was being daring by having Dua, the female, essentially be the heroine of this section of the story? Would it have been different if Odeen, the intellectual male, had been an intellectual female instead, and Dua had been a male?

J: Definitely would’ve been different. Better, I dunno. There is at least one scene where Odeen’s telling her something about the para-universes and stuff and I’m thinking.. here we go again. Instead of ‘as you know, Bob’, it’s more of.. let me deliberately set someone up as the person who needs things explained to her. The role of the sidekick or lab assistant in many things. Like Robin in the 60’s Batman.

K: Yes, very convenient, that. But if you’re going to do an infodump of that nature, you really almost have to set it up that way, somehow. Because otherwise it’s just one char pontificating and all the others telling him/her to shut up, a la Brainy Smurf. I’m willing to cut a lot of slack for section 2, in spite of its defects, because I was really fascinated.

J: Yea. I was left very disappointed when we never hear about them again! Grr!

K: That was… pretty strange. It definitely contributed to the disconnected feeling between the three sections. I fully expected that after we got the backstory on the messages from the para-Universe we’d return to Earth where Lamont and that other guy were attempting to communicate with the aliens. But that’s not at all what we got.

J: Yea. We didn’t really get anything wrapped up at all. At least in my view. So in regards part 3, suddenly we’re back in our universe, but on the moon. And we get another girl! Who’s a tour guide. Sigh. Which means she gets to do a bunch of explaining about how people live on the moon. But then that gets flipped and Mr. Earthman gets to explain about the para-universes and stuff to her. And actually in this section, I do have things to say about the science. Or, at least about the science fiction.

K: Bra-less tour guide. Because everything’s more perky on the moon! And the moon people are naked, because uh, everything’s more perky on the moon? Rebelling against the (earth)man? It’s not really explained why to me. And don’t even get me started on her being named Selene. She even notes how lame it is to be named that in the text! So why do it?

J: Because the name is sex-ay. It’ll be interesting to see at what point in history we stop getting societies who like wandering around naked. Yea, no, just because your environment is pleasant doesn’t mean being naked is A) practical and B) something society is really dying to do given the first chance. As for her boobs, they are mentioned in nearly every, single, freaking scene. She brushes lint off one at some point! Why? Because… because she has boobs! Moon boobs!

K: And again, we have a girl who has been apparently bred to be magic somehow. But instead of lucky like in Ringworld, Selene’s superpower is intuition. But it’s a secret! So she has to stay a tour guide. ’cause some guy told her to. She couldn’t possibly become a scientist on her own and discover things.

J: Oh yea, that really ticked me off. And I made the same comparison to luck girl from Ringworld. Only now with the added bonus of intuition being a typically female trait already.

K: I was really puzzled by Dr. Neville, our lunar physicist. He was just so incredibly arrogant and snotty for no apparent reason. Egotistical with no justification, because he certainly wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. We’re given no reason at all to understand why Selene would listen to such a person, let alone sleep with him.

J: Yea. And then seemingly out of nowhere, we learn he wants to take the moon out into space.

K: I have to admit, I was pretty amused when the two Earth guys are all ‘yeah, so what?’

J: I can’t say as I was amused. I was boggling. Here I was trusting Asimov to have his science right and.. he didn’t foresee any problems to Earth with not having a moon suddenly? That’s sort of the whole plot to at least one series of books! Susan Beth Pfeffer’s books. And I’m pretty sure there’s a crappy sci-fi TV movie or miniseries with that as its focus too. Yea, no, I think we likes the moon right where it is. Preciousss.

K: Obviously there would be repercussions if the moon left, but in terms of what was being talked about here it was a moot point. In any case, I never felt that they really thought he was going to get to do it — they called his bluff, because really, he would never have been permitted to do it. By the Lunarites on the one hand, and frankly, by the Earth governments. We don’t really see much of government or the military in this book; there are vague references to some kind of crisis that killed 2/3rds of humanity, but we never find out what happened. Still, they surely exist and would step in if needed.

J: It was a world-wide war over who got tenure. Yea.. I dunno. I felt like this last part rambled more than the other ones. Did we need to see the gymnastics routine? No. Though I guess it’s better than people talking in offices.

K: I got the impression that, aside from the central section, which was very well structured and had development, that the beginning and the end just were kind of rambling onto whatever topic he thought might be interesting to discuss. The difficulty in speaking to a completely alien species? Sure. The effects of moon gravity on the human female form? Sure. The effects of gravity on sports and athletics? Sure. Jackassery in academia? Sure. But it was all very loosely tied together.

J: Yea. Which leaves me coming back to.. why did it win? But I guess we’ve had worse. Or at least books on par with it.

K: I dunno. I’d like to say it won for section 2, but who knows. People could have been really enthused by the idea of the energy pumps.

J: Or the boobs. Oh yea.. do you know why they couldn’t have sex? I couldn’t quite work it out. Was it because he’d be uncoordinated in low gravity or because her bones would break too easily under his superior Earth muscles?

K: I think it was a combination of both. That he would overcompensate because he was used to having sex in higher gravity and she would get broken. Plus he’s way older than her and all saggy, though that doesn’t seem to enter into it.

J: Now you’ve got me picturing the saggy, baggy elephant. :)

K: Hahaha.

J: I wish I could say something optimistic about our next one, but it’s Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Which just makes me fear some sort of mix between Ringworld and The Gods Themselves. But with any luck, nobody will be naked.

Nebula Project: A Time of Changes

When a man from Earth introduces prince-in-exile Kinnal Darival a telepathic drug from Kinnal’s own planet, he has a revolutionary epiphany. He takes the subversive and obscene step of writing his autobiography — in the first person, as part of a crusade to share this drug and this worldview with others.

What follows is a spoiler laden discussion of the book A Time of Changes. Beware if youâ€™re worried about such things.

J: I’d never heard of A Time of Changes before. And though Robert Silverberg is really prolific, I’d never read one of his novels before either. So I had no idea at all what to expect. Yet somehow I still managed to be disappointed.

K: I also went into this with what I must describe as complete ignorance of the author and the title. I had only just heard of him coincidentally a month or two prior to us coming to this book in the list. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to agree that this book was a disappointment on several levels.

J: I felt it was very similar to Left Hand of Darkness in a lot of ways, but with nothing at all in it to make it interesting. And a few things to actively dislike.

K: I’m again going to have to agree — the parallels to Left Hand sprang to mind almost immediately, with the surprising result of making Left Hand appear retrospectively way more progressive and daring than it felt at the time. There’s also a fairly unflattering (to A Time of Changes) comparison to Dune to be made here.

J: In what way? Other than being a colonized planet? And there really must be a term for that subgenre, but I don’t know it.

K: A colonized planet with a strange ‘native’ religion, people using drugs to achieve telepathy/communion with others, a person who comes in from the outside and begins imposing new ideas on the locals. It’s far more similar to Left Hand in plot shape, but I think the similarities to Dune are there.

J: I forgot about the drugs in Dune. And yea, again with the telepathy!! It’s like.. it’s not science fiction if someone’s not reading someone else’s mind.

K: That is getting pretty old. As are the long-lost/out of touch/vaguely medieval colonies from Earth. TIP: Just because you threw in a spaceman and set your story on a colony doesn’t make it seem like any less of a fantasy as compared to science fiction.

J: Agreed! Even the whole ‘can’t use I’ thing was sort of done in Babel-17, so there’s not much new here at all. But I do have to say that out of all the ones we’ve read so far, this one seems the most obviously dated to a time and place. Even moreso than Flowers for Algernon, which was pretty much set on contemporary Earth. Because it just screamed ’60s-70s drug culture’ and ‘let’s open our minds’ ‘let’s all love one another’.

K: It’s very dated. Very very dated. Though Silverberg admits in the preface that he discovered other languages already had constructs that avoided using the concept of ‘I’, it’s clear this was written very much from a position of western male privilege.

J: Oh, don’t even get me started on the gender stuff! I disliked the main character pretty quickly, right about the time he was all ‘I have a big penis’ and the backhanded insult he gave to himself about ‘women all over the place will attest I have no stamina’. I was ready to be sympathetic to him again when he was recounting his childhood, but that didn’t last long. And then it had utter fail right near the end with his bondsister. Spare me. She’s all pure and innocent and beautiful and youthful just because she never married or had a kid.

K: Well, of course. Because women aren’t actually people with interests and passions and thoughts of their own. They’re sperm receptacles. That was made completely clear when our main character Kinnal takes his telepathy drug with a woman — and instead of learning about her hopes and dreams and character, the only thing he learns about is her anatomy. Because apparently that’s all women can think about. Which means it makes complete sense that Silverberg rounds out our character by giving him the massive massive character flaw of premature ejaculation.

J: Like he wasn’t flawed enough by being a big old arrogant jerk! Which I have trouble thinking was entirely intentional. We never learned enough for me to be convinced there was anything particularly wrong with their society that ‘I’ was going to fix. Although the whole bondsister/bondbrother and drainer thing seems like a copout. If you’re going to keep yourself to yourself and not even have a self, well.. you need to do it all the way.

K: The whole society made very little sense to me, but I suspect most of the confusion resulted from Kinnal’s maunderings about how you can’t truly love anyone unless you love yourself. Which is incredibly trite and Oprah-ish to be the central point of any novel, let alone something which managed to win the Nebula Award. Especially when it’s not particularly well-explained how this so-called Covenant prevents people from loving themselves. Just because they don’t go around telling people their innermost thoughts? There were several parts where the philosophy was explained which I had to read over more than once and I still couldn’t follow some of the logic. Apparently, having a firm grasp of your inner self can lead you to make other people do things for you instead of standing on your own two feet? I swear that’s what it said at one point.

J: Some things I felt he hadn’t thought through very well. If you’re bonded to a bondsister and a bondbrother at or near birth, then it’s unlikely everyone’s going to be linked that way in a vast chain encompassing everyone. More likely you’ll get a closed loop of people about the same age, with maybe a few people lacking one or the other especially in geographically remote areas. And for all the main character says his relationships with his bondsister and brother are mutual, it just always feels one way.

K: Exactly. The bond-sibling thing was definitely not really thought through as well as it could have been — he mentions that high ranking children were often bonded to other high ranking children to try and create alliances. Okay, fine. But then to foster this ‘bond’, they all have to grow up together, so if they’re from far-flung locations, two of the bond-siblings have to come live with/near the other one. Okay, fine. Except -their- other bond-sibling presumably also needs to grow up near them, and that person’s other bond-sibling would need to grow up near them — even if eventually this turns into a closed chain, as you said, it really doesn’t make sense that suddenly the parent of child Y is responsible for some number n children where n>5 just due to all these bond-relationships.

J: Yea! And what happens if your bondsister and bondbrother both die, especially as children? Oh well, too bad for you.

K: Right. It really just didn’t make sense. Especially since Silverberg seems to go back and forth about how close the bond-siblings really are. Is there constraint between them or not? At times it’s suggested that these function as intimate friends and there is no such thing as self-baring between bond-siblings. But that’s clearly not true; the only set we see are incredibly formal with one another and for all they’re supposedly so close they keep secrets and completely flip out as a result of the ‘selfbaring’.

J: And it doesn’t seem to me he knows his bondsister any more than he knows his wife or that particular woman he was keeping on the side. But while I’m talking about her again, let me just say I’m sick of random suicides! Meant to like.. teach the main character something? Or something? Though it doesn’t seem to have worked in this case. He’s still ready to share some dope with whoever he can coerce into it.

K: Yes, he pretty much writes it off as a character weakness in her. He feels bad about it, but he seems pretty able to rationalize it in his head with ‘if only he’d known she was so fragile, he could have saved her’. Except, uh, you should have known that dude. You’ve known her for years and you were just inside her head.

J: Seriously. Maybe ‘I’ is exactly right. It was always only about him, and the drug isn’t so much about sharing with other people, it’s about making sure he shoves his worldview down everyone’s throat. Like, you think I’m only a younger son of a septarch, but I’ll make myself the most important person on the planet.

K: He definitely has that attitude. And not in a humble, messiah sort of way, even though it seems like he’s being cast in that role. Or rather, he’s making quite an effort to put himself in that role. But I’m sorry, dude, you can’t make yourself a martyr just because you think you’d be an awesome one.

J: *laugh* Yea. Exactly.

K: Getting back to things that didn’t seem particularly well thought out. I started to wonder very early on if this concept would work in a language which has a wider variety of personal pronouns. English has a very limited set, which is why people are constantly trying to invent new ones. But a language like Japanese, where I can think of 7 words for ‘I’ off the top of my head, all with their own nuances — how the heck would you even really translate this?

J: ‘One’ is a particularly interesting pronoun. I was reading a nonfiction book right after this and the author used ‘one’ and then in the same sentence used ‘my’ meaning.. yea, he was really the ‘one’ he was talking about. I wonder what languages it was translated into. I don’t know an easy way to check that. Wikipedia and ISFDB didn’t tell me, except that it seems to have been published in French. Mais le francais a ‘on’, alors c’est facil. In fact I think the French use ‘on’ more often than we use ‘one’, so maybe it didn’t even seem so weird.

K: It would probably have been more striking if Silverberg had omitted the whole ‘one’ business and gone with what showed up very briefly during Kinnal’s abortive visit to Glin — which is to speak without even mentioning yourself at all. Not even the copout ‘one’.

J: Yea, ‘one’ is definitely a copout. There are ways to use it where it isn’t a direct substitute for ‘I’, but mostly he didn’t do that.

K: Not at all. So in the end it didn’t really matter that they weren’t using one particular word, they were still referring to themselves directly.

J: It was actually jarring to me when they had no problem with ‘you’. It seemed to say.. hey, there’s a self, right there in front of me.

K: Yes! I noticed that too. More evidence of poor followthrough in the concept, or was it meant to be some kind of commentary on how an individual could acknowledge the existence of other people, just not themselves?

J: I don’t have faith it was meant like that. I feel like he thought ‘Let’s not use I’ and then stuck to that as he built up this society around it, without really thinking through the ‘we’ and ‘you’ at all.

K: I’m inclined to agree.

J: In the end, I think it’s a pretty forgettable book. And the title doesn’t help either. Unless I start thinking of it as the Menopause Book, I’m not going to remember it.

K: Ha ha ha. Yes, the title is pretty poor. There really didn’t seem to be much changing going on. No matter how many times we were told that Kinnal was shocked by the use of ‘I’ or was being a daring rebel, I never felt convinced he was any different than he always was. And in any case, I can feel the plot of this one already slipping into the plot of Left Hand, so little does it stand out in my mind on its own merits.

Nebula Project: The Sixties in Review

J: So from 1965 to 1970 is a short decade, but there was a tie in there, so it was actually 7 books. And the first thing I notice about them right off is that they’re all science fiction. Various kinds of sf, but not a single fantasy in there.

K: Mmm. Yes, you’re right. I hadn’t really thought about it, but they are all science fiction — that is, fiction based around some kind of scientific idea. With the possible exception of Dune, which takes place so far in the future that in spite of the fact that they have advanced technology, it’s almost a fantasy.

J: Well, to me the one that felt the most like fantasy was The Einstein Intersection. That was just bizarre.

K: Okay, that one was pretty weird also, and had very little obvious science in it. But the argument can definitely be made without much trouble that these were all science fiction.

J: I just had to look up if SFWA maybe started out as just science fiction. But while the name only had Science Fiction in it and not Fantasy, it does say on their site that it was understood to cover both. They just.. didn’t reflect that when they were handing out Nebulas to novels.

K: And I don’t know enough about what was published at that time to know if there was any fantasy coming out that I would find more deserving. Though it wouldn’t take much to be more deserving than one or two of these books.

J: World Fantasy Awards didn’t start until 1975, so there’s no easy way to find out that way. The Hugo Awards have some nominees in there that look like they might be fantasy. I couldn’t point to one and say for sure though. I don’t think it’s because fantasy was nonexistent. I don’t even know that it was really being written by a different set of writers. SF/F writers have always crossed from one to the other as a general rule. If not in their novels, then in their short fiction.

K: Then we’d have to examine the short fiction lists to see if the exclusion was complete, and that’s a bit beyond the scope of this project. I think we just have to take it as an interesting fact and see if the trend continues as we move forward.

J: Well, one obvious trend is towards male writers! We’ve only got Le Guin so far.

K: I can’t say I’m surprised, though. One expects it to be this bad in the 60s. What was more surprising was the relatively diverse casts of the books. Certainly nothing approaching realistic, but we had far more racial diversity than I would have predicted. And even a few female main characters.

J: Yea, that was really surprising to me every time I encountered it.

K: I have to say that’s why Ringworld stuck out like such a sore thumb. Not all of the plots treated their female characters very progressively, but I can’t think of another that actively disrespected them to such an extent.

J: Yea, it was horrible. And it didn’t do well on race either! Just treated Earth like one giant melting pot so Louis Wu isn’t really anything. I don’t know what people saw in that. I really don’t.

K: Well, I will say that Niven wasn’t the first person to speculate that increased contact between parts of the world would lead pretty much to a pale brown colored human race without too many defining ethnic characteristics.

J: It’s an idea that sunk into my head at an early age.. and I wonder it didn’t just get into other people’s heads and reused without them stopping to think about it much. One other trend I noticed, which did not surprise me was psi powers. Mostly telepathy, even seemingly randomly in Left Hand of Darkness. But also prescience. I expected it to such an extent that one passage in Flowers for Algernon actually confused me because I thought he was getting into someone else’s head. But instead it was just him dissociating as Charly. That book and Rite of Passage are the only ones lacking that as an element.

K: They are a common plot element, and I agree they seemed pretty randomly tacked on to Left Hand of Darkness, though perhaps there was some symbolic reason for them there I was just beyond attempting to fathom. Any thoughts on why that is? They’re certainly something I find intriguing to think about, and they can be used in a lot of different ways.

J: I don’t know.. maybe it’s like vampires. People are drawn to the idea and I guess there’s a lot of things to explore around them. I think they were particularly big in the 60s and 70s. Maybe all those drugs and meditation in the culture at the time? Cold War ESP experiments? Men staring at goats and the like. Not that they don’t pop up in places now, Twilight, Harry Potter, but it doesn’t seem quite so pervasive. Not in 5 out of every 7 sf/f books, surely.

K: Things do become cliched and played out after a while. Not that that’s stopped the vampire/werewolf crowd in any way. It would be interesting to see the prevalence of certain tropes over time. Like the social security name popularity index. Psi powers are the Madison of the 60s.

J: *snicker*

J: I think, despite the flaws I can see in it now, and how much I can see how it could be better and wish it were better, Left Hand of Darkness is still my favorite of the 7 of them. Followed by Rite of Passage. And the rest.. don’t even come close. Which one’s your favorite?

K: Hmm. Favorite, I think I’d have to say Rite of Passage barely manages to edge out Dune. I think we’re both in agreement over which one was the worst of the lot, so I’ll just come out and say it: Ringworld, by far.

J: Oh yes, no question. Which is good news for The Einstein Intersection.

K: Yeah, that would be second worst, though not by the sort of distance Ringworld managed to achieve. Now, moving on from the novels as a whole, who was your favorite character? Can you pick one?

J: Mmmm. Estraven from Left Hand or Mia from Rite of Passage. Depending on my mood, I think. I can swing either way.

K: I guess I shouldn’t find your choices surprising, but I do. I have a hard time picking out any of the characters from these books as ‘favorite’, but if I had to, I would probably land on Lady Jessica or Princess Irulan (who wasn’t even really a -character- in the first book).

J: Well, your choices don’t surprise me much. Why did mine surprise you?

K: Just… I don’t know. They’re obviously very much your type of character, Estraven moreso than Mia, though neither is a wildly uncharacteristic choice. Maybe it’s just that I disliked Left Hand so much, and mainly because I did not engage with the characters.

J: Well, Estraven’s definitely not an easy character to get to know. It’s all filtered through Genly, for one thing. There’s definitely a distancing there. Maybe it’s more that I found “him” intriguing. And at least “he” was intelligent! Unlike a lot of the characters in these books. Oi. (Or should I say Ai?)

K: He was certainly more intelligent than Genly – and perhaps Genly’s superiors, who dispatched such a fool on an important mission. Maybe they just didn’t have any other volunteers.

J: I bet I can guess your least favorite character! It probably would’ve been Genly, until we got to Louis Wu. :)

K: Ha. So is your guess Louis Wu?

J: Yes, with or without his Motley Crew.

K: Hmm. I guess in one way you’re right — he’s the character whose behavior and attitude I liked least, though Genly was definitely up there. But the crappiest character as a character was definitely Teela Brown. She was pointless and useless. If she had been omitted from the book it would have been far less offensive.

J: I had trouble even seeing her as an entity, I guess.

K: Exactly. So who would you pick as the worst character?

J: Louis Wu ticked me off and is fresh in my mind. But the most offensive one was that bad guy from Dune.

K: He was pretty bad, I agree, though he was obviously designed to be offensive.

J: I don’t think he was designed to be offensive in the way he was offensive to me. He was fat, which was a sign of.. depravity I guess. And he was.. I think supposed to be a gay pedophile or something. Which was also a reason you were supposed to dislike him.

K: Well… yes, it was obvious the gay thing was supposed to count against him, but pedophile is still nasty regardless of whether it’s little boys or little girls.

J: I didn’t get the impression they were little boys. Maybe 15-16? Or were they younger? Because if it was a teenage girls, that just wouldn’t get the point across that he was evil quite so well.

K: It’s been a while. In any case, it was obviously non-consensual.

J: I’m not saying it would’ve been /better/, but I do think he was using gay as a shortcut for ‘a guy you should detest’. But anyway.. which story do you think had the best, most interesting idea behind it? If science fiction is at least partly, if not entirely, about big ideas.

K: That’s a good question. And looking at all 7 of our books this time, I’d have to say the one that seems most original and interesting to me from that perspective would have to be Babel-17.

J: Me, I have to go with Left Hand of Darkness. That’s a world and a biology I want to know more about. That I could see myself writing fanfic in.

K: I’ll be interested to see how these first books stack up against the coming decade — next up is the 70s.

Skyfall by Catherine Asaro

From the back cover:
Skyfall goes back to the beginning, to the rebirth of Skolia, showing how a chance meeting on a backwater planet forges a vast interstellar empire. Eldrinson, a provincial ruler on a primitive planet, is plagued by inner demons. But when he meets Roca, a beautiful and mysterious woman from the stars, he whisks her away to his mountain retreat, inadvertently starting a great interstellar war, and birthing the next generation of rulers for the Skolian Empire.

Review:
Skyfall is technically the ninth book in Catherine Asaroâ€™s Saga of the Skolian Empire series, but is first if one is reading in internal chronological order. It works well as an entry point, though there were a few things that couldâ€™ve used a bit more explanationâ€”presumably this happens in the books that were actually published before this one.

Beautiful and golden (like, literally) Roca Skolia is a â€œRuby Psion,â€ an extremely rare and valued psion descended from similarly rare parents who currently rule the Skolian Imperialate. Because of her pedigree, she is expected to marry someone of the ruling assemblyâ€™s choosing and produce more Ruby Psions, the only people capable of controlling â€œthe Kyle web,â€ an instantaneous interstellar network that somehow protects Skolia. Rocaâ€™s been married twice before and her grown son, Kurj, has a lot of mental anguish about the death of his father, the abuse perpetrated by his stepfather, and the atrocities committed by another group of psions who relish the pain of others.

When Rocaâ€™s away on government business (sheâ€™s the foreign affairs councillor), Kurj calls an assembly vote to discuss going to war with the sadistic psions. She knows heâ€™ll try to stop her from casting her dissenting vote, so goes underground to try to make it back home in time without attracting his notice. Her route takes her to a remote, unspoiled world called Skyfall by â€œthe Alliedsâ€ (descendents of Earth) and Lyshriol by its natives. There, her plans are foiled by a treacherous snow storm, and while she waits for it to pass, she falls in love with Eldri, a passionate and epileptic bard with significant psionic gifts, and ends up pregnant just in time for Eldriâ€™s rival to lay siege to his castle.

It wouldnâ€™t be incorrect to label Skyfall as â€œa romance novel in space.â€ Certainly Rocaâ€™s relationship with Eldri, who believes sheâ€™s a gift from the sun gods and is otherwise baffled by the technology she sees as commonplace, is quite romantic, with the two of them drawn together pretty much instantly and conceiving easily when other Ruby Psion births have required much medical intervention to achieve. Rocaâ€™s position brings political factors into their relationship, however. It turns out that Lyshriol was once a Skolian colony, so when Kurj eventually comes looking for her and Rocaâ€™s family finds out she has actually married this â€œbarbarian,â€ it is ultimately Eldriâ€™s genes that convince them to accept him (after a barrage of tests during which Eldriâ€™s mental abilities and illness are evaluated).

There arenâ€™t a whole lot of sci-fi elements to the novel, though there are enough to give one a picture of how things work in the Skolian Empire and its relationships with other spacefaring people. Genetic manipulation seems quite normal, as are cybernetic implants, and I am totally envious of the language node Roca has, which enables her to process and gradually learn new languages. Kurj has turned himself into an intimidating metallic giant, but itâ€™s still not enough to shield him from his self-conflicting inner demons. In his case, Asaro effectively uses technology to show just how damaged he is, with some pretty fascinating results.

Suffice it to say, Iâ€™m looking forward to reading more in this series!