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.

Mailer's endless epistolary

Just a moment ago, I was about to take a picture of the cover of the book I finished reading a couple of days ago.  I thought about angling back to get a sense of the size of this thing before deciding it just wasn't worth it.  The novel that I just finished is Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost.  This is a giant novel about the CIA and spies, the Kennedys and Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, and a bunch of uninteresting personal relationships.  There are long epistolary sections that detail a love triangle involving the principal character, his mentor, and his mentor's wife.
Most of the action is mediated through either letters or through transcripts of dialogue that is caught  between other characters.  This creates a narrative distance from the events of the novel that makes it difficult to engage with the actual story.  Much of the novel depends on the reader's interest in JFK and the imagined romance that Mailer creates for him with a stewardess.  The novel does what movies like some biopics do, which is to intimate a secret, insider knowledge of a historical figure by inventing parts of his life.  This book does not pretend to represent historical accuracy, so the intrigue seems empty and more prurient than actually intriguing.
As I sit here thinking about this, the novel reminds me of Don DeLillo's Libra, which covers some of the same territory but delves into Lee Harvey Oswald's life instead.  DeLillo uses a more immediate form of story telling to investigate Oswald's guilt and intentions, which ends up being a lot more interesting.
The biggest thing missing from this very large book is a return to the inciting incident.  The novel opens with the main character married to his lover and mourning the loss of his mentor, the eponymous Harlot.  Living in Harlot's family mansion, the main character is questioned by a fellow CIA operative who has broken into the home in the middle of the night ahead of a larger team of investigators.  This sets of his story about his past and growing up in the CIA.  The story never comes back around to how the characters got together, or how they came to live in Harlot's home.  The end of the novel, after 1,200 pages, notes that the story is to be continued.  Presumably, some of these strands will be continued as well.  The drive to finish this novel does not extend to reading another monster, so I guess I will never know what became of Harlot's buddies.

Samuel Beckett in 2019

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about the kind of writing that I wanted to do in 2019.  I was also thinking about the kind of reading that I wanted to do.  Without getting too deep into, I had decided that I wanted to do more of both of these things.  I thought that trying to write something about each book that I read would give me some direction in the year.  My writing tends to get a little scattered when I don't have anything specific going on and I haven't had anything specific going on for a while now.

When I set out on this plan, I was in the middle of a few different books (I still am in the middle of most of them), one of these being Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies.  

This novel is the second in a trilogy, also containing Molloy and The Unnamable, and I have all three collected in one book that I bought so long ago I can't place where or when.  

The book itself is a hard go.  In this novel and in Molloy, Beckett compresses and blends ideas.  He does not use conventional paragraph breaks or other narrative cues to denote shifts in focalization or even from exposition to dialogue to inner-monologue.  This technique helps to undercut the actual narrative so that the story itself is flattened; even the unusual events that the characters embark on become unremarkable and nearly indistinguishable from everyday life.  The characters, like those in much of his drama, seem to lose track of what they are doing and seem immune to emotional response.  The result is not so much boredom, or even ennui, but resignation.  

The effect that this all has, on me at least, is resignation.  I cannot name more than a few plot points because they are flooded with mundane details.  There are poetic and beautiful moments, but they are beaten down.  The two novels that I read are almost a study in entropy: while there are spikes in action and affect, the valleys of the ordinary are so flat and so long that the spikes are averaged out to almost nothing.

I knew when I set out to read this that it wouldn't necessarily be an enjoyable set of novels to read.  I may eventually return to complete the trilogy, but as of now I am going to leave The Unnamable for another time.

On reading big books.

I have loved reading long novels ever since I was a kid.  Stephen King's The Stand is the first one that I ever read that was over 1,000 pages and I remember the conflicting joys of finishing it.  The book was such a trek to accomplish that I was at once proud of having gotten through it and a little sad at it being over.  This was also one of the first books that I spent a lot of time thinking about after I had finished it.  I haven't ever made my way back to re-read it, but I still might.
My later reading habits also followed this pattern.  I enjoyed the implicit challenge of a thick book.  They were almost daring me not to finish them, to pack them in after a few hundred pages.  And there have been a lot of times when, after a few weeks of reading, I realized that my bookmark was still in the first third or quarter of its thickness and was tempted to let them go.  But most times I kept going and there is generally reward in the experience beyond just the narrative itself.  Long books are journeys (he writes, tritely), and they do require a certain perspective to approach them.  One of my favorite critics, Northrop Frye, writes that reading is actually a two-part act; there is first the act of reading and then the thought about what one has read.  Some long books extend this and force us to rethink attitudes toward the book as we go.  The Stand challenged me because there were parts that I disliked and found boring.  The same was true when I read The Lord of the Rings books and ran across pages of elvish song.  There is a certain amount of boredom and drudgery that accompanies reading many large books that is a part of the pleasure of reading them because it becomes possible to inhabit the book in that time.  I can assign whole tracts of my life to the time I was reading one book or another.  The first time I read Infinite Jest, it took me nearly a year to get through it, but I always remember that I picked it up the summer after I completed my MA and moved back to Ohio and spent a good chunk of the time I was in Daytona grading AP lit exams for the first time reading it.  Likewise, the first time I attempted to read Gravity's Rainbow was when I was n undergrad and a professor happened to mention it.  I bought a copy at a second hand store that defeated me that first time.  I read Pynchon's Slow Learner collection instead because it was more digestible.
Long novels leave room for imperfection that is important to the make up of the narrative.  They seem to become less controlled as they go, which puts the reader back into the position of renegotiating their relationship to the narrative.   I like this, too, because the difficulty of a text, whether it be due to length or imperfections in the novel, is engaging.  Most long novels are necessarily complex and these complexities can reveal contradiction in a perceived world that make it more real.  Many of these novels leave loose threads or may lack resolution, but this makes them all the more reflective of our own lives.  We live each day in a mire of incomplete narrative threads.

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.

Heinlein's moral universe

All of my familiarity with Robert Heinlein's work comes from the last few years.  I have often heard the name and the associations with it, but I did not really have any first-hand knowledge until I came across a copy of Farnham's Freehold (1964) in a small, secondhand bookstore in Cleveland.  The book is Land of the Lost-ish and somewhat entertaining for what it is, but is presents some troubling elements.  The eponymous Farnham is a strong man figure who out-wits and out-matches all those around him, even winning the hand of his ineffectual son's girlfriend as a replacement for his own wife.  There are some standard atomic war fears with a touch of time travel technology thrown in.  Simply, Farnham is transported to a distant future in which a non-white race has risen to power and whites are enslaved.  However, all of those in power are inept and are prejudiced against science, which Farnham uses to his own advantage to gain prominence despite his alien status.

What is more interesting about the book is the way that it interacts with Heinlein's other work.  

The second novel I read by Robert Heinlein is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), which is a vastly superior novel.  In this book, Heinlein describes a settled moon whose inhabitants share a neocolonial relationship with those still on Earth.  The people living on the Moon are exploited to provide a better standard of living for others and have little say in their own fate.  The protagonist, with the help of an advanced computer, develops a de-centralized network of revolutionaries to free the Moon from the imperialist hold of the Earth.  Whereas Farnham was positioned as a powerful outsider who gains insider status through his novelty and sheer force of will, the protagonist in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress gains power through his anonymity.  He is unsuspecting and only partially in control of his own fate (his computer friend does much of the actual planning and organizational work).  In some ways, Heinlein has flipped the source of power from the strong man to the loose network, or, from the single source of power to the collective.  This latter rendering of power was at odds with my expectations of Heinlein; it seemed out of line with the paternalistic, quasi-authoritarian that I had read about.

Most recently, I read Starship Troopers (1959) with my sci-fi book club and was equally torn over where he actually stands.  Having seen the Paul Verhoeven adaptation of the novel, I was uniquely positioned to understand that this is a novel about guys in space fighting bugs.  Actually, the movie does pick up on some other aspects of the novel that I am not really interested in commenting on at the moment aside from the Michael Ironsides character (I think he plays Sgt. Zim.  I am writing this whole thing from memory, so bear with me on this).  Throughout most of the novel, Rico is a seemingly reluctant soldier who excels in the infantry.  His motivations for joining the armed services is nominally to gain citizenship but are actually more murky.    Rico spends most of the novel in school or in training and it becomes very clear that, in this world at least, that discipline and corporal punishment have replaced touchy-feely liberal values to create a better, more ordered world.  In a class called History and Moral Philosophy, Rico and his classmates learn about the days when social workers would try to understand the reasons people commit crimes, which led to roving gangs and a world on the edge of breakdown.  Their instructor reassures them that floggings have really taught thugs their place and everyone is better off.  The nature of citizenship and the right to franchise are also discussed.  Rico's instructor informs the class that it is right that only those who have served in the armed forces should gain full citizenship and the right to vote because they are the only ones capable of putting the needs of the nation above the needs of the individual.  

This last bit is where I lose the thread, again.  Restricted right to the vote and full citizenship seem more in line with the paternalistic Heinlein but his reverence for community-mindedness (not nationalistic, but more communal, as described in the novel) turns the corner back to the Heinlein I recognized in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  

This is a post without an end, an analysis without a conclusion.  I partially think that Heinlein is all of these things, that he believed in a mish-mash of philosophy and instinct that does not always add up.  Another part of me thinks he might just have adopted different ideals for different books in the service of the stories.  Because sci-fi is a speculative genre, he was able to play out different scenarios based on what he was thinking at the time.  Another part of me wants to give up trying to piece together an over-arching view of him as a writer and just take the books as they come.  But where I finally come down, as my training compels me, is to two conclusions.  The first is easy; I need to read more Heinlein.  Beyond this question about his politics, I do like his writing.  The second conclusion is a bit more complex.  There is a tension between the strong individual who wishes to take control of their own fate and the place that the individual has in a collective.  Farnham is a strong individual who struggles against a world that doesn't make sense to him to return to normalcy.  In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the protagonist feels allegiance for the community on the Moon against the community on Earth.  He creates a world that relies on the collective power of many individuals united together against an outside foe.  Finally, Starship Troopers demonstrates the extent of the tension in the infantry.  Service to the collective becomes service to self.  Heinlein seems interested in the way that self-interest knocks against other motivations.  He seems to recognize that self-interest sometimes dictates agents to band together or even sacrifice themselves for something bigger than themselves.  This is the central tension that these novels seem to share.