Book notes, part 2

 Back in June I decided to take some time off from writing in this blog.  I was still working my old job, which demanded a lot of hours, and I was not feeling inspired to keep up with much.  However, as I kept reading, I made some notes about the books.  They aren’t much, some are just impressions, but this includes some books that I would have liked to have explored more fully in posts.  I thought that I would post a collection of these here and maybe this will inspire me to go back and write more about them.

Note: I ended up with more than I thought for some of these so I decided to split them up.  Here are 4 more of them.

Artemis by Andy Weir

Andy Weir loves smart ass narrators.  The protagonist/narrator of Artemis shares a lot of personality traits with Mark Watney, the protagonist of Weir’s debut novel The Martian.  Like Watney, Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is foul-mouthed, resourceful, and ridiculously competent.  Jazz makes a living on Artemis, the first city built on the Moon, as a porter and sometimes-smuggler.  She gets drawn into a larger scheme of industrial sabotage that ends up endangering the whole city.  

Despite having a larger cast of characters who all seem to love Jazz, this novel has less heart than The Martian and Jazz’s antics are less endearing.  Whereas Watney struggled for his survival against tremendous odds, he did it through no fault of his own, so the more grating aspects of his personality were more forgivable, seemed more in keeping with the tone of the novel and the stakes of the narrative.  Artemis doesn’t have the same heart.  In some ways, Weir raises the stakes by putting the entire city in danger instead of one lone man, but this also abstracts it.  Rather than thinking of this as Jazz’s success in saving the city, it is hard to forget that she is also the one who brought the underlying dangers to a head.  It is true that there were some criminal elements that would likely have brought about a similar end, but then it would have been someone else’s fault.  Just because it could have been someone else’s fault doesn’t mean that Jazz is any less to blame.  

Weir does balance out the thriller narrative with the same kind of hard science detail that made The Martian successful.  He also creates an interestingly layered city in Artemis.  Perhaps the most interesting parts of the novel are those in which Jazz describes the living conditions and the ultra-capitalist founding of the city.  The populace is also deeply stratified and Jazz is constantly aware of the socio-economic realities that make a city on the Moon possible, namely tourist dollars, exploitation of natural resources, and exploitation of immigrant labor.  

I liked the book overall but look forward to the Weir novel that has a more down to Earth narrator.

Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders

This collection of short stories and one novella by George Saunders is pretty typical fare for those familiar with his work.  Usually the stories involve some sort of speculative of soft sci-fi premise, people with some sort of physical deformity, or some kind of mental deficiency.  He recombines a lot of elements that can, at times, be very defeatist.  About halfway through this book I thought it might be getting a little too down for me, which was an odd feeling for me because there was a time in my life when this would have fired a lot of synapses for me.

But I got to Bounty, the novella at the end of the novel and it turned around a bit.  The story is about enslavement of “flaweds,” people with physical mutations, in a post-collapse America.  This story is about the escape of one of these flaweds, his search for his sister, and his eventual journey to join an armed rebellion.  The content of the story didn’t differ so much from many of Saunders’ other works but the overall approach was different enough and struck just enough of a hopeful chord that it turned me around on the book.

The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

I have gotten more interested in reading books about writing in the last few years.  I read a number of these back when I was taking creative writing classes in college (undergrad years) but had strayed from it since then.  Dillard’s book is short and ponderous.  She uses observations and personal stories to write about the experience of writing.  There are some powerful moments in the the book and I found portions of this to be very inspiring.  One of the things that stuck out to me is the way that she builds writing into daily life and also the way that she views this life as one of artistry that is removed form experience.  For Dillard, the writer is someone who is separate from the romanticized image of a worldly person experiencing all of life, but is actually a person who spends a lot of time alone in a room imagining these experiences.  

The best piece of advice that I took from this book is to put everything into the current project.  She advises against holding back for the next project or for some later date.  Use it up, I am paraphrasing, and the next project will take care of itself.

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders

Not a bad book.  There is a lot of really creative world-building in this novel about human life adapting to a new planet.  Anders sets the novel in the late stages of an Earth settlement on January.  The people of two cities, Xiosphant and Argela, survive in very different ways, according to the customs of the city and the Earthly heritage of the occupants.  But things are on the decline as the environment deteriorates around them.  One of the central characters makes contact with an alien intelligence, and rebellion starts breaking out everywhere.

There is a lot of adventure in this and the descriptions are lush.  This book might edge a little closer to fantasy than I normally care for, but it was a good read.  

Two novels about Mars

Back when I was in college, I experienced an aspect of reading that I think is common for English majors.  That is, while taking multiple courses it becomes necessary to keep up reading multiple books at the same time.  I think a lot of English majors, like me, were probably also reading novels for themselves outside of their coursework.  From time to time this would lead to tandem reading of novels that seem to speak to each other in interesting ways.  It is a neat way to find parallels between literature that, on the face, may seem to have little in common.  It is also a great place to begin asking questions about the works and challenging accepted readings of them. 
This intersection occurred for me recently when I happened to find myself reading both The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and The Martian by Andy Weir at about the same time.  See, I have a whole bookshelf packed with novels I want to get to, both books that are new to me and ones I want to reread.  I also have a backlog of ebooks in my phone that I read as chance happens.  I had read The Martian Chronicles years ago and wanted to revisit it and had The Martian in my phone waiting for me.  What strikes me about this tandem reading is how different these books are in approach and style.  Bradbury's Mars bears little similarity to the actual planet.  Instead, he uses Mars as a way to explore human interaction and the human urge to explore, colonize, and conquer.  Earthlings in The Martian Chronicles don't come off very good.  Bradbury creates a microcosm of Earth on Mars in which he can poke at different aspects of humanity.  There is a broad disregard for native Martian life and culture and many of humanities worst traits are immediately rebuilt in what some in the book see as a second chance to recreate a new social structure.  Bradbury's view of Mars and humanity veers from sentimental to apocalyptic and back.  It is a book that seems to want to ask questions about human nature and what we will be like when we reach past our own planet.  The answer keeps coming back that we are just going to keep being the same.
The outlook in The Martian is pretty different.  The majority of this book is narrated as Mark Watney's journal.  Watney is stranded on Mars, having been left behind as the rest of the crew of the Ares mission leave under emergency circumstances.  The captain and crew believe that Watney is dead after being speared by a broken communications antenna.  The rest of the novel details Watney's attempts to stay alive on Mars without support and NASA's attempts to get him supplies and/or rescue him.  This novel works to highlight what is best in humanity.  A mission of exploration becomes an opportunity to showcase human ingenuity and self-sacrifice.  Weir's naturalistic presentation seems more grounded in contemporary science.
These books demonstrate the different modes of sci-fi.  It doesn't really matter that Bradbury's Mars is so fantastic and unrealistic because he, ultimately, works to write about human attitudes toward science and each other more than about realistic space travel.  And even if Weir's novel seems truer to what we know about space exploration, it is equally speculative and hopeful in forwarding this scientific project.  These two books, like a lot of sci-fi, end up being more about the people and the ideas that they find important.  Bradbury warns about human nature and the way that even well-intentioned projects can lead to disaster while Weir presents a modern castaway romance that cheerleads supposedly dispassionate science. 

The War of Two Worlds

The second novel in this Poul Anderson book, The War of Two Worlds, plays much like the first one, Planet of No Return.  Space travel is normal and the major conflicts arise between humans and aliens.
The War of Two Worlds is, as the title would suggest, something of a take on H.G. Wells' classic novel War of the Worlds, but the conflict between humans and Martians is twisted a bit.  In Anderson's novel the conflict between Earth and Mars is sparked by a false flag operation by shape-shifting aliens from Sirius.  The aliens, exiled from their own planet, pit Earth and Mars against one another so that they can swoop in and mop up both weakened parties.  The novel is good pulp and imaginative for what it is.  It even seems to forecast some elements that The Expanse picks up regarding these different, alien political factions.

This book got me thinking about a different topic altogether, however, that is now a staple in science fiction: the identity of Martians.
From novels like Anderson's and Wells' to Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, and more, Martians have always been an alien species that are generally humanoid and have identifiable, if not down right sympathetic, motives.  Martians want a home or conquest, or have some other need that must be met. 

More and more, however, the Martians are us.  Martians are humans.  Going back to Kim Stanley Robinson's 1992 Red Mars, those who inhabit the red planet are not aliens from a separate evolutionary line, they are humans who have either traveled there or were born there.  Beyond Ronbinson's Mars trilogy, this holds true for Andy Weir's The Martian, the humans from various regions in The Expanse, and I'm sure dozens of other examples.
Robinson and James S.A. Corey create humans with different body shapes to show their origins but they are all humans.  This move is significant, I think, because it reflects a different ethos regarding our place in the universe.  The actual aliens, the ones who truly come from beyond, are not recognizable by their motivations or body shape, they are truly alien. 
In The Expanse, the aliens represented by the protomolecule have their own powers and motivations that are beyond the characters' ability to understand.  I have drawn the parallel between The Expanse and Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past before, and I think that it holds here as well.  The aliens in Liu's trilogy are equally foreign and are nearly abstract in their differences from humans.
This tendency shows both the unity and the divisions within humanity.