StarShipSofa: Science Fiction Audio Podcast

The Android's Dream
By John Scalzi

Let's get this out of the way immediately: There is no android in this book and therefore no dream for said non-android to have. The Android's Dream of the novel is actually a breed of genetically engineered sheep named by science fiction geeks and there the book's very tenuous connection to Philip K. Dick ends.

I've been leery of the youngish breed of science fiction writers that nest so comfortably online. Cory Doctorow, Scott Westerfeld, John Scalzi and the sort, they all seem like smart self-promoters who use the web to its maximum marketing potential and I can't blame them for that. The question has lingered though. Can they write?

The Android's Dream was my first venture into Scalziland and I believe it may be his only work of fiction that isn't part of his Old Man's War series which has generated quite a bit of notice in the science fiction community. Dream is set in a future where the Earth has been accepted into an interstellar community consisting of hundreds of alien races and one of her closest alien allies is also the race she's most likely to war against. After a flatulence-ridden diplomatic disaster (that's right), the alien Nidu are none too happy with humanity at large. However, the Nidu might see be persuaded to drop the whole thing if Earth's state department is able to track down a suddenly elusive sheep known as The Android's Dream, a breed gifted to the aliens by humans and one that plays an essential role in the coronation ceremony of the Nidu nation's next leader. Unfortunately, it needs to be a living sheep and for some reason all that anyone, Nidu or human, has been able to turn up lately are dead ones.

Harry Creek, diplomat, war hero and computer genius, is on the case and only half a step ahead of those who are not so excited about the Nidu coronation. These are the bringers of pain and sometimes death, consisting of psychopaths, human-devouring aliens exploring religious paths and undercover agents for The Church of the Evolved Lamb, a very Scientologisty sort of group.

The story itself is good time, and even when we're waiting for action, we don't mind the wait as we explore juvenile delights such as the disgusting sexual habits of aliens, a bit of not so alien bestiality and the aforementioned gas-passing incident. And then we can jump into the bloody, bone-breaking fun.

Even with all of this, I had issues with the story. For about the first third of the book the characters are not easy to tell apart.  We're given names and job positions to distinguish them and that's about it. The names come fast and the reader may require a scorecard early on to track the somewhat intricate relations of who's working for whom, from governmental big boys to creepy hit-men. The united Earth seemed far too American for belief, especially given the current rise of China and India on the world stage. Similarly, the aliens often seemed far too human in motivation, technology, and dialogue. These problems must be noted but can be forgiven in light of the rest of the tale.

Scalzi's method of story-telling has been christened, "The New Comprehensible," in response to the ever-thickening jungles of jargon embraced by so many modern science fiction writers (I'm looking at you, Mr. Stross), and so it is that The Android's Dream is a very easy and remarkably fast read, even at close to four-hundred pages. It's a good nominee for a gateway book for your friends who aren't nearly as excited about science fiction as they should be.

So, again, "Can they write?"  As for Scalzi, the answer is a big "Yes." But not in the way that makes a book stick in your gut long after you've read it. He writes entertainment, pure and simple and he writes it well enough that I was able to appreciate entertainment for it's own sake for the first time in years.

-Matthew Sanborn Smith

Just in case there was any lingering doubt in your mind, the cover art confirms it.  The villain--the leering one with the satiny robe and the arrogant, crooked eyebrow--is holding a broadsword.  The colors are faux-faded, with the red ink turned brown and the blue turned pale, leaving the green to dominate.  Finally, the folds of the dust cover show fake wear, just like the paper cover of any 50-year-old book on your shelf.

Yes, this is a self-consciously retro bit of futurism.  This is golden age space opera recreated.  This is an SF novel with the highly improbable title Space Vulture.  The phony aging is a lie so obvious, it becomes a kind of über-truth in advertising.  Having scared off all fans of hard-SF, post-cyberpunk, or any other up-to-the-minute, super-sophisticated sub-genre, this book makes a promise to all who remain:  read me and I will give you that same golden feeling you had when the world was young, you were twelve, and science fiction was the coolest thing you could possibly imagine.

Alas, it doesn't quite deliver.  Not quite.

In the plot department, you really can't complain.  The action relentlessly propels you down a beautifully greased chute toward the conclusion.  Character development is simplistic, but that is completely, atavistically in the spirit of the primordial pulps (in a way that this sentence, for example, is not).  Furthermore, in plot-character interaction, Space Vulture scores bonuses:  you've got the impossibly perfect hero plus an anti-hero in addition to a strong heroine and a couple of cute kids who are way too resourceful to be mere kidnap bait (although the authors don't leave that plot device under-utilized;  they are way too smart to overlook that golden opportunity).

A final gold star goes to the authors for an excellent villain, the key to any good yarn.  Actual, real thought went into inventing a scenario whereby the eponymous baddie is not only the smartest, but also the strongest and most devilishly handsome, being in the universe.  It gets to the point you catch yourself thinking, "you know, this is almost sort of plausible."

So, what's wrong?  I just couldn't forgive the failings of the story on the level of its prose style.  Yes, space opera is supposed to be crudely written.  But it's supposed to be crudely vigorous.  Unfortunately, you read passages like this:

The lieutenant tossed the two of them a salute.  She had been at the top of her academy class, and her salute was still sloppy.  It was indicative of the general lack of military precision that pervaded Star Patrol.  "You've got my respect.  We've been chasing that scoundrel for a long time.  My superior officers will be happy to know he's out of commission.

-The Fredösphere

It happened in a season of my life devoted to snatching up used books for almost nothing that I was browsing the disorganized stacks at the Used Book Sale run by my local library.  Under a table, I found a cardboard box labeled "youth SF" and, although the box was small, I dared to tell myself, "how cool it would be if I found a copy of Neil Gaiman's coveted Coraline here for only a buck?"  Such was the magic of that time and place—very appropriate magic, as it turns out—that my wish came true.

If you love spooky details, you should read this book.  It's got a talking cat with an attitude, zombie parents with buttons for eyes, an old man who talks to mice, a fog-shrouded alternative universe run by rats and an opressive maternal presence, and (most disturbingly) retired actresses.

Gaiman excells here at viewing the world through the eyes of his young protagonist, Coraline.  In sketching the characters of her parents, he supplies only those details you expect a young daughter would see.  He also imagines a compelling alternative universe, a World on the Other Side of the Door.  Finally, he populates Coraline's (tiny) known world with a collection of ancient and lovable oddballs.  This is all achieved with a marvelous economy of words.

Less appealing to me was the forward momentum of the story, or lack thereof.  There's a whole lot of dream sequence going on in this book.  For the record, dream stories always disappoint me.  For example:  lately I have been watching Youtubed installments of the 1985 TV adaptation of Alice in Wonderland with my daughter (she's six), and I'm noticing just how little this "classic" propells me anywhere.  I hate the free-floating, unpredictable feeling AIW gives me.  Indeed, I have a problem whenever a story allows for truly anything to happen next: 

A giant rabbit starts talking?  Okay, whatever.

A giant rabbit starts talking with an incredibly creepy, diabolical voice, foretelling that the end of the world will occur in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds?  Oooooookay, whatever.

-The Fredösphere

Samuel R. Delaney is a living legend among writers of SF, but even legends begin their careers as unknowns.  Delaney's first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was written when the author was only 19 years old, and published in 1962.

The story concerns itself with Geo, a poet; Urson, his burly self-appointed guardian; Snake, a telepath and the victim of brutal treatment; and Iimmi, a dark-skinned sailor whose character is less well-formed than the others, which is strange considering Delaney's own racial background.  (Perhaps he had to compromise for the readership of the time.)  These four set sail on a quest, lead by a spooky priestess, to possess the jewels of Aptor, of great magical (or is it technological?) power.

Delaney's craft as a writer is widely known, yet the precociousness on display in this first effort still surprises.  Consider the poetry of this paragraph from near the beginning of the novel:

Gangplanks, chained to wooden pullies, scraped into place on concrete blocks; and the crew, after the slow Captain and the tall Mate, loped raffishly along the boards which sagged with the pounding of bare feet.  In bawling groups, pairs, or singly, they howled into the waterfront streets, by the yellow light from inn doors, the purple portals leading to rooms full of smoke and the stench of burnt poppies, laughter and the sheen on red lips, to the houses of women.

Gangplanks, chained
To wooden pullies,
Scraped into place
On concrete blocks;

-The Fredösphere

I would like to recommend a book that I think is very important to any discussion of contemporary science fiction and religion, and that is Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996). This exceptional novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and British Science Fiction Award in 1997, and also was nominated for a Hugo. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

SETI Program picks up radio broadcasts of beautiful music originating from a planet in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. Before the United Nations can respond, the Jesuit order sends the first human expedition to the planet from which the music originated, an international group of men and women representing not only the Jesuit faith but also agnosticism and Judaism. The first contact between the humans and aliens leads to a tremendous tragedy for all concerned, despite the best of intentions, thanks in large part to unexamined assumptions on both sides and unforeseen cultural miscommunications. All but one of the humans are killed, and the planet Rakhat is plunged into bloody civil war, while the survivor (Puerto Rican priest Emilio Sandoz) and his superiors on Earth are left to make sense of what happened in the context not only of science, but also of faith. Was the disaster at Rakhat a tragedy, a comedy, or a farce? Did God allow it to happen, even intend it, or did the very fallible human participants see what they wanted to see, and simply justify their own desires and actions with the rhetoric of their religious traditions? In some ways, The Sparrow is James Blish's A Case of Conscience taken to the next level. In others, it is a study of history repeating itself.

The book is particularly important because Russell, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology, wrote it while converting from Catholicism to Judaism. She also was struggling with understanding two specific historic events. One was the Columbian Encounter of 1492; she had just witnessed the quincentenary of Columbus's first contact with the Americas, and the sharp protests that the celebration drew from Native Americans and human rights activists. She was wrestling with the legacy of the Holocaust, as well, a subject made more personal since she had chosen to become part of a tradition that included the haunting memory of that ethnic cleansing. In other words, this novel represents part of Russell's process of making sense of apparently senseless death, drawing on her impressive knowledge of both Catholic and Jewish thought.

The Sparrow is a profoundly spiritual work dealing with guilt, culpability, and faith. It's also riveting science fiction that makes the reader face all of the big questions of what it means to be human. Russell uses her expertise in anthropology to great effect, and neither her aliens on Rakhat nor humanity's first contact with them are easy to forget. Her sequel, 1998's Children of God, is also a terrific and thought-provoking read with tremendous relevance to the subject of religion in science fiction. Learn more about Mary Doria Russell and her works at her official website.

AHS

Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge is one of the most wonderfully complex science fiction novels I've read in recent memory.  No doubt about it; it's a brick.  My paperback had nearly 700 pages!  So there's plenty of room for complexity.  But don't get me wrong, it's not dull - quite the contrary!

The action takes place over billions of light-years on several different planets and systems and we meet the most wonderfully weird aliens.  Normally in a SF novel, we're lucky if we meet one alien different to humans, but Vinge's imagination seems limitless.  We meet plenty of humanoids or rather people descended from Human stock.  But we also meet bug people, seaweed/tree people, evil butterfly people, people with ivory for leg appendages and several glimpses at even more - ah the possibilities.  Most interesting are the Skroderiders (the tree people) and the "Tines", who play a central roll in the action and narrative.  They have the most depth as aliens.  The Tines are a collective consciousness. They need at least 3 members (which are like dogs with weird tympana for making and receiving sound (within the human threshold and what they call "mind-sound") to become more than "mindless" animals.  They gain intelligence and complex communication skills.  And they don't necessarily die if one of the members dies.  They "recruit" a new member somehow and carry on, changed slightly but still the same "individual". 

The idea is that based on what area of space you are in, there are divisions of how well technology functions and/or can even develop.  In the outer-most section of the galaxy, it is even possible for "Powers" or Gods to be born. These are super-intelligences which only flourish for a decade or 2 at most. And the action begins when one of these Powers is born - but it is malevolent.  It wasn't to take over all lesser beings as extensions of itself. They call it the Blight.  Before the Blight was fully manifested one ship managed to escape the research planet that released it. A family of four and most of the children from the planet.  They flew to the Bottom, almost to the Slow Zone, where faster than light travel doesn't exist. They crash land on the planet of the Tines and are brutally attacked. The 2 adults are killed and the two children are captured by opposing factions and they don't know the other is still alive.  Thus begins a mad race to rescue the children without alerting the Blight, because they believe a counter-measure was transported with the ship.  Something that would save the Universe from mindless servitude.

This is a fantastic romp, which will hold your attention from beginning to end.  Coming from me, someone who doesn't do well with the really hard SF, that's saying a lot. The ideas are complex, and if you want to understand the concepts you can, and if you don't it's not a big deal!  From what I understand A Deepness in the Sky, by Vinge, is a prequel.  The events in that novel take place before A Fire Upon the Deep, but was written afterwards.

Highly recommended!

DivaDiane 

Hints of science fiction themes and sensibilities show up in the oddest places, if you look hard enough for them.  Take a moment to one of my favorite poems, by James Elroy Flecker:

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure in the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago,

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

The constant in Fukuyama's analysis was that human nature remains constant. My favorite short definition of conservatism was offered by Boston University Professor Glenn Loury, who seems to be wondering whether he's still a conservative. He said that the essence of conservatism was that human nature has no history.

If we can really alter human nature, than the constant of The End of History equation has suddenly become a variable.  I think he's probably right.  History is on the move again. (Remember how the always prescient original Star Trek predicted that the Third World War would be between genetically engineered supermen and the rabble?)

Since I cannot decrypt your code,
Or comprehend the width of your band:
Through time and space I send my node
To ping you.  You will understand.

Say it over and over again to yourself, until you believe it:  Jorge Luis Borges is not a science fiction writer.

Spend a few minutes, if you never have before, reading Borges' The Library of Babel.  Despair has never looked so beautiful.  The narrator describes life in a universe that consists of nothing but an array of rooms, endlessly replicated horizontally and vertically.  Each room contains the same number of bookshelves; each shelf, the same number of books; each book, the same number of pages, and even letters.

The narrator is one of the librarians, the humans who struggle to live in and make sense of the library.  Nearly all the contents of the books are gibberish, yet very occassionaly someone will discover a startling order, sometimes even a short passage of coherent meaning, in a randomly-selected book.

Any human seeks order and meaning.  This story shows how randomness and chaos always produce tantalizing moments of coincidence that the human mind thinks is portentious.  In this library one will find no monkeys, not to mention typewriters, but no doubt if one traveled far enough, one would eventually find the book that contains Hamlet.

Typically I hate such stories and want to quarrel with them.  (Would such a thing as a library be generated by chaos?  Better to posit an inscrutible or even cruel creator!)  Here, I felt swept along by the vision, even if I wasn't tempted by it, probably because Borges' prose is, well, gorgeous.  Even in translation, the orderly and precise exposition combined with a gentle, insistent tone of absolute futility matches perfectly the strange monomaniacal regimentation of the library combined with the hysterical gibbering nonsense of the texts it contains.

Hysterical, suffocating, and terrifying:

[T]he Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

My eyes hurt.

This review was inspired by Stefan Beck's post about Borges at The Horizon.  He wrote something at the end that raised my hackles, responding to the suggestion that Borges' library prefigured the internet:

In fairness, it’s a potentially intriguing connection—but one can’t help thinking it diminishes Borges’s great achievement. He wasn’t an SF writer. It’s unlikely that he cared to see the future, even though the Aleph was supposed to let him see everything at once. Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia have turned out to be nothing but a load of faddish, privacy-invading trouble, and if you can’t see Borges sub specie aeternitatis, can you see him at all?

Oh no!  Not that old nonsense! Is Beck asserting the inherent inferiority of SF?  Thus, if you find something good, it must be anything but SF?  Well, no.  I was going to leave a complaint in the comments section of Beck's post, but then I read more carefully.  Beck defines SF (reasonably) as futuristic; alt worlds located in interterminent time periods belong in the category of speculative fiction.  So, Beck is okay on that point.  (On the other hand, what is this nonsense about Google being "nothing but...trouble"?  Is he ... crazy?)

I'm glad that our world is infinitely richer (if not larger) than Babel's Library, and that our world's Creator is generally kinder (if even more inscrutible).  I wouldn't want to live in the Library; nevertheless, I wouldn't mind a visit.

Over at a blog maintained by Commentary Magazine, Peter Suderman reviews Blade Runner ... and those who review it.  He (and others) believe the story of the film is weak, but that the film succeeds wildly in realizing an exhaustively detailed alternative environment.  He also believes the film is a turning point for thoughtful SF on the screen:

Much science fiction, especially the low-grade junk that flourished in the decade before Blade Runner hit the screen, was cheap, rough, and carelessly assembled. That’s not to say that none of it was enjoyable in some adolescent way, but it was hardly serious; even the best efforts (Star Wars) rarely transcended their pulp origins.

Read it, and follow the links.

-The Fredösphere

Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke