The Expanse, pt. 1: Leviathan Wakes

James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes is a big book that is a part of a big series.  The scope of the novel is equally big.  There is a lot about this author (a pseudonym for two authors working together) and the series (that is currently being adapted into the series The Expanse by Amazon) that merit attention, but I am just interested in this novel so far.
It must have been a few years ago when I started dedicating a lot more time to reading and writing about sci-fi that I started seeing these books.  Initially, I thought that this was an old series because there were so many of them.  Each of the book covers features similar cover art and the same lettering style.  It looks a lot like a reissue of a recovered series.
But this novel, the first in the series was just published in 2011 and the books have been coming out nearly every year with the total up to 8 and a new novella just announced.  So, I had missed the boat a bit until now.
The book opens with a prologue that narrates a terrifying scene of a woman trapped in a storage locker aboard the spaceship Scopuli after it had been forcibly boarded by a hostile raiding party.  Julie, the woman trapped in the locker, will become the center of a shaggy-dog detective narrative around which the sci-fi narrative is wrapped.
The novel's two main characters, Holden and Miller (a disgraced naval officer and disgraced police detective, respectively), carry two separate narrative strands that eventually merge as the case of the missing girl evolves from a wandering daughter case to massive, interplanetary political upheaval.
The exact details of the plot dissolve into the background as the story unfolds.  There is an ancient alien virus, tribal conflict between humans of different colonial origins, and futuristic hardware.  The world built in the novel is one that is familiar to fans of contemporary sci-fi.  That is, a world that is similar to our own in its lived-in qualities.  This is not the glossy world of Star Trek where everything is military-grade and state of the art.  The ships and gear range from the bleeding edge of technology to patched-together, aging industrial haulers.
There is a lot going on in this novel, too much to cover here, but I will say that this was an enjoyable read.  Corey's matter-of-fact description of inter-faction conflict is reminiscent of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  In the world of this novel, colonialism travels into space along with humanity as people living in space stations in the and outside of the asteroid belt, on Mars, the Moon, and back on Earth compete for resources and jockey for political power.  The descriptions of the bodies of human that are born and live in different gravities echoes the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, who so frequently muses on the effects that deep space will have on human evolution.
When my recently pared-down sci-fi book group decided to read this novel, I went and bought a box set of the first three novels.  I look forward to continuing this series and seeing what the authors can do with the world they have created.  I am a little torn about whether I want to begin watching the series just yet.  I may hold out until I get further into the books.

Foundation, Part 2: Re-reading Foundation

I meant to sit down and write this post after I finished reading the novel about a week and a half ago but I got caught up in some other writing projects and this fell to the wayside.  What this means is that I meant to give a more in-depth summary and analysis of Asimov's classic Foundation but what you are going to get is more nebulous.  I still have some notes from what I was going to write before, so I am going to work from that.
This may get sloppy and I know that I am going to miss some of the details.  I am okay with that.
This was my third reading of this novel.  The first time I read Foundation was in graduate school when I was working on the encyclopedic novel.  This novel is not encyclopedic, but it does contain thematic elements of the encyclopedia.  This is something that drops out of other novels (as I have written elsewhere) but is pretty heavy in the first one.
The second time I read this novel was with my sci-fi reading group.  We would alternate between reading classic sci-fi and newer novels.  Foundation filled the bill for a classic sci-fi novel that many in the group wanted to read, so we took it up.  I don't remember much about that conversation now, but I probably spent some time talking about the Encyclopedia Galactica.
This third time I am taking it up is with a view toward reading the entire series.
Foundation opens with a couple of really fascinating premises: the science of psychohistory and the aforementioned Encyclopedia Galactica.  I have written about the encyclopedia elsewhere, so I want to focus on psychohistory here.  This science blends sociology, group psychology, and statistical analysis into a science that may be used to predict future events.  The idea is that a properly trained psychohistorian can take a set of data about a current culture and its broad trends and use this to judge the likely outcome of certain events.  Hari Seldon is the most gifted practitioner of psychohistory and he uses it to predict long-scale historical events, including the eventual downfall of the current galactic empire, the dark ages that will follow the fall, and the eventual rise of the second empire.

The science of psychohistory is interesting because it seeks to quantify human action on a macro-scale.  Asimov explains away individual action by relying on probability and using civilization-wide sample sizes to make predictions.  This means the psychohistory relies on the broadest of trends, making individual contributions much too small to be a factor.
In order to show actions on this broad scale, the narrative must make leaps into the future.  This is not an uncommon device in sci-fi, but it takes special care to pull it off.  The author must keep certain thematics steady enough draw along plot and must be careful to re-establish context after each jump forward in time.  Each jump requires new characters as well.  This means that there are a lot of balls to keep in the air at once to pull it off.
Asimov does this with varying success.  The idea of psychohistory and following the plotting of civilization is compelling enough to draw readers along, even as they may have difficulty keeping characters and events straight.  Hari himself remains a constant throughout the narrative despite dying early on in the timeline.  He does this by preparing holograms of himself that are designed to appear at specific times in the future to help guide civilization along its proper course.  Seldon realizes that he must simultaneously nudge civilization in the right direction while also keeping it ignorant of his plan.  This is an unresolved problem of the whole scheme because people begin anticipating these emergences of new information, these "nudges" from Seldon.  Asimov never gets deep enough into the mechanics of psychohistory to deal with this kind of anticipation.  There must be a profound faith in Seldon's prescience for this to be carried off at all.  And this seems to be at odds with the tenets of psychohistory itself.

Ultimately, this is a really enjoyable book.  It is compelling and there is a lot going on.  Asimov is always a big idea author and I am generally ready to forgive the small details that don't always add up.  I tend to think that his characters are generally weak, but again, his are novels of ideas and not character studies so it is easy to set this to the side and enjoy the novel as thought-experiment.

Foundation, Part 1: An Introduction

I first read Isaac Asimov's classic novel Foundation while in graduate school working on my doctoral dissertation.  I was interested in the way that Asimov uses the encyclopedia as a focal point at the beginning of the novel.  As I have noted elsewhere, this is a point that drops out of the series fairly quickly.  At the time, I read the first couple of novels  before posting interest.  Later on, I read Foundation with my sci-fi group.  I don't remember the conversation about this one but I probably brought up encyclopedism and the Enlightenment a bunch.
Just recently, I decided to take a run at the whole series.  I have accumulated all of the books over the last few months and this is my attempt to read all of them and to write about them here.  I don't expect to enjoy all of the books, but I do hope to find the good in them.  Asimov is a writer who I think is great with ideas and plotting but terrible with character.
I don't have any particular aim in reading these books this time, so we'll see how this goes.
Be on the lookout for subsequent installments in this series.

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time blends some familiar sci-fi elements such as a generation ship, anxiety of deep space travel and suspension pods, and the search for a new home planet after Earth is rendered inhospitable with some new and surprising direction.  The novel alternates between two narrative strands: the first line details the crew aboard generation ship Gilgamesh travel through interstellar space, scouring planets that had been scouted and seeded by their more advanced ancestors.  The second line follows the development of super-intelligent spiders on one of these planets.  This planet had been "seeded" with a nanovirus that was meant to speed evolution in monkeys that would help to make the planet more hospitable when humans eventually returned to the planet.  The monkeys all died in transit and the nanovirus infected spiders instead.

The super-intelligent spiders angle took a while to grow on me because Tchaikovsky endeavors to tell the story from the spiders' point of view, which can be a little dicey.  However, he does grow into the task a bit more as the story progresses and he moves beyond the initial evolutionary stages and shows a spider population with increasing alien technology.

Aboard the Gilgamesh, the Key Crew members transition in and out of suspension, essentially manipulating time and extending their own lifespans to counteract the difficulties of space travel.  The crew members use suspension and lengths of time to gain advantage over one another.  Essentially, the last one to go into suspension and the first one to awaken have the advantage because they can then control when the others emerge from their sleep.

Toward the end of the novel, one of the primary characters comes to learn that he has been in suspension for much longer than the others and that a lot has been going on.  As the Gilgamesh approaches its goal planet, we learn that key crew members have had children and there have been many successive generations born on the ship.  These generations revert to an almost tribal way of living and the captain of the ship uses suspension to appear once per generation and to create a myth of himself.

There are other surprises in the novel that it is worth checking out first hand, particularly the final confrontation between the Gilgamesh and the spiders on the green planet.

When I began this post a week or so ago, I found myself getting bogged down in plot and detail.  I edited some of that out before finishing.

Who Fears Death

*I wrote this post a few months back after reading this novel with my sci-fi book club.  I haven't really read it over since then.

Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor’s novel, Who Fears Death, reminds me of a few other books that I have read in my life, and it puts the author in good company.  It reminded me of China Achebe’s matter-of-fact narrative style, particularly in the way that Okorafor describes violence and pain as things that are normal, natural, and to be expected in life.  This treatment actually underscores the impact that violence has on those involved: both on the perpetrator and the victim in different dimensions.  This book also reminds me of Ngugi wa Thi’ongo’s work Wizard of the Crow.  Magic exists in a realistic landscape, but not the magic of wizards and witches.  This is real magic made from human experience and connections to nature.  In this light, it also reminds of of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  But for as much as Okorafor’s novel reminds me of these others, hers is something apart and is uniquely her own.

I read this novel in the context of a science fiction reading group that I host in Cleveland and I think that the context led me to expect a different book. I had been wanting to read this novel for some time, and suggesting it to the group seemed like a good way to make the time for it.  I had been hearing about this novel as a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic novel.  I didn’t find it worked as well with that expectation.  My group tended to agree; they seemed to like it, but not as a sci-fi novel.   There is a sci-fi element, I would add for the sake of full disclosure.  The characters use some futuristic technology that resemble GPS systems and smart phones, but these are outclassed by Onyesonwu’s intuition and magic.  Mostly, the use of technology is glossed over in a society that uses older technology.  There is one passage that sticks out to me and seems to be the main connection to the post-apocalypse:

The Lost Papers go into detail about how the Okeke, during their centuries festering in the darkness, were mad scientists.  The Lost Papers discuss how they invented the old technologies like computers, capture stations, and portables.  They invented ways to duplicate themselves and keep themselves young until they died.  They made food grow on dead land, they cured all diseases.  In the darkness, the amazing Okeke brimmed with wild creativity.

Onyesonwu later thinks of the Okeke as “a sad miserable unthinking lot,” for the embarrassment that they feel about their own past.  This hint of lost technology does fit in with a lot of modern sci-fi that speculates on a world that turns its back on the high technological past in order to regain something human about itself.  But this is also theme that Asimov dealt with, along with many other authors.  

What I like about the novel is that it presents magic as a hard-earned skill.  I tend not to enjoy more traditional fantasy, but I wouldn’t lump this book into that genre, either.  To me, this book picks up on the best traditions it draws from.  The sci-fi/post-apocalyptic tones are there but they are minor.  What they add to the novel is a fresh conflict between modernity and tradition, between the mythic and the realistic.  Characterization is strong and the revenge plot works well to drive the narrative.

Frank Herbert

I am amazed that I had not read this book sooner.  I suppose it is because I was always aware of the story, had seen the movie and the TV mini-series, and it seemed so familiar that I had never felt the need to actually sit down and read it.  

The story is about what I had thought it would be, which is to say that I had thought my memory of it was spotty and that there were things that I didn’t really know about the narrative, but I discovered that this is actually pretty close to the reality of the book.  For all of Herbert’s creativity and for the massive scope of the novel, there are a lot of holes in it.  I have inklings of the connections between the Houses and why they mimic feudal systems and I have a sense of the political intrigue backing it up, but Herbert does not like to explicitly state much of what is going on.

The narrative itself jumps in time and place without a lot of exposition, which makes the book seem jumpy.  More than once I had to backtrack to a previous section or page, only to realize that the narrative had completely shifted focus, or had jumped forward by 10 of more years in time. 

Beyond the narrative, I found the novel to be more interesting in the ideas that Herbert develops.  One that stands out is the competition Herbert sets up between new and old weapons technology.  At first, the reliance on knives for hand-to-hand combat seems an odd choice in a highly technologically developed world.  But over the course of the novel, the reader finds out that knives must be used to counteract the use of personal energy shields that deflect more advanced weaponry.  Because the energy shields block certain levels of force, the effective knife fighter is not the fastest, but the one who can modulate speed and angles to actually penetrate the shield.  The slower, more subtle energy of a blade can move under the threshold of blocked energy.

The interaction between characters that Herbert creates also helps to develop the narrative where exposition does not.  I had always assumed that Paul Atreides would be a heroic figure in the novel, based upon the David Lynch movie I had seen.  However, Paul is a more conflicted character.  He is something of an embattled figure on Arrakis.  The novel develops his quasi-magical/religious background more than the movie does and it throws a lot more of a pall across the character.  While Paul is always brooding, he is more dangerous in the novel.  Less is revealed about his true motivations and the narrative seems to distrust Paul’s adopted mantle of Muad’dib a lot more than the movie does.  Paul’s place in the middle of the struggle involving House Atreides, House Harkonnen and the Fremen of planet Arrakis is more that of an instigator than the champion of the people I had assumed it to be.

A final point that I had not expected was Herbert’s use of Jewish and Islamic religion in the work.  The novel relies heavily on Abrahamic mysticism, which should not be surprising given Paul’s role as the Prophet. But the nature of prophecy differs from the presented in a more religious context.  

There is a lot more going on in this novel than I care to address at the moment.  I wanted to get some of this down because it has been about three months since I finished the book and I wanted to capture some of my thoughts before they became too hazy.  Don’t be too harsh about those mistakes that I have made.  I wrote this without the book in front of me and with no other preparation than having thought about it for a while.  

I have some of the follow-up Dune books in my to-read pile, so expect to see more on Frank Herbert some time in the future.

The Three-Body Problem

I learned about Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy only recently in the sci-fi book club that I help run at the BottleHouse in Cleveland.  To be honest, I didn't know anything about either this author or about Chinese sci-fi before picking up this book.  Although I have been trying to expand my boundaries in this genre, most of my readings still tend to be pretty American, if not pretty white and male.  That may be a topic I can return to later because I want to focus on this first.  Just today I finished The Dark Forest, the second novel in this series, translated into English.  The first book, The Three-Body Problem, begins in Soviet China during the cultural revolution.  The characters in the novel struggle with the oppressive political constraints placed on them from the Communist party while trying to develop their state technology and stay current with the west.  The scientist characters of the novel must constantly temper the direction of their progress to fit with the dominant political ideology.  This is a powerful observation because our conception of an objective science is so pervasive in the United States but we ignore the fact that it is deeply political and politicized, similarly to the way that it is presented in the novel.  While scientific developments in the west are rarely  overtly compared to the tenets of dialectical materialism or some other meta-narrative, scientific avenues are subject to political bias and are subject to falling into and out of mainstream fashion.  There is an illusion of science as a monolith separate from culture that a lot of good science fiction tries to dispel.
In the first novel, scientists in China are able to make contact with a civilization in a nearby solar system.  When the characters learn that the inhabitants of this planet intend on using their superior technology to block further scientific progress on Earth so that they can colonize it, the narrative turns into a mediation on the strategy to overcome the aliens.  This strategy is a part of a long game, though, as the people of Earth learn that it will take the Trisolarans (as they are called) 450 years to reach Earth.
The second novel opens at the close of the modern era at a time when secret strategists are about to hibernate to become "reinforcements" for future generations.  I was worried that this would devolve into a weird time travel narrative, but Liu maintains his focus and reawakens several main characters from the first novel to continue their missions.  They learn, however, that the people of Earth have made some great strides in their technology within the limits still available to them. They have grown confident in their ability to defeat the Trisolarans based on the speed of their ships and the size of the fleets that have been able to build.
While I admit that there are parts of this trilogy-so-far that seem a bit trite or predictable in the world of sci-fi the novels do offer some genuine surprises in their inventiveness.  The first-contact narrative does not go according to the old tropes and there are some interesting turns in the second novel.  It gets bleak at times, but this is part of the enjoyment.  As I mentioned at the top, I just finished the second novel in the trilogy, and I am completely uncertain where the final one will go.  These books have surprised me and they turn on the expected sci-fi tropes.