The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson, was a Hugo award nominee in 1961. In The High Crusade, the medieval British village of Ansby is visited in 1345 by scouts from an invading alien army. Much to everyone's surprise, Sir Roger de Tourneville and his doughty men-at-arms defeat the scouts and capture the ship. Thinking to use the ship to terrorize and destroy the French and then the infidels in the Holy Land, the English commandeer it, only to find themselves and their entire village whisked away to face the alien army itself.
First of all, this book was a lot of fun, and just flew by in the reading. It was enormously entertaining to read, time and time again, how the Wesgorix underestimated the guile and the strategy of what quickly become the invading English. There is a definite sense at every turn that the aliens got their just desserts, with the tables turned upon them by those the Wesgorix sought to enslave.
The Wesgorix settlement pattern sounds much like an unflattering account of human spread: the Wesgorix seek out planets with the correct conditions and begin settling them; if there are natives, those people are exterminated or enslaved to the Wesgorix. The aliens are insatiable; as soon as a given planet begins to feel crowded, off a scout ship goes to seek another likely frontier. Any other space-faring races in the way are destroyed, or, if it is too troublesome to eradicate them, confined to their current frontiers, with all other new territory taken instead by the Wesgorix. The Wesgorix consider themselves the epitome of civilization and sophistication, and consider all other races beneath them and unworthy of equal, or even honest, negotiations. They rely upon their numbers and their superior firepower to squelch all opposition.
Anderson clearly has a lot of fun setting the English up as the foil to the Wesgorix: the English consider themselves the apex of civilization and believe that the exclusivity of their Christian faith only holds them to treat fairly and honestly with other Christians. Well, to be fair, Brother Parvus clearly thinks good Christian men should be honest with everyone, but Sir Roger de Tourneville thinks that if the Wesgorix will lie and deceive him, they deserve the same in return. And it quickly becomes evident that the Wesgorix have become so dependent upon the threat of their firepower that they no longer remember most ground-fighting tactics, and are continually broadsided when de Tourneville refuses to believe that their defenses are impassable, and then in fact finds the chinks and blows them wide open.
Throw in some traditional plot points for medieval romances, and there you have it. Throughout the book, it seemed to me that the English were very, very lucky to run into alien conquerors who shared so many familiar foibles; it allowed Anderson to praise humanity and make fun of their faults at the same time. As I said before, this was a really fun read, and I enjoyed the "twist" at the end--I won't spoil it, but if you read The High Crusade, you will see it coming!
The last book for 1961 is Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X.
Saturday, May 9, 2015
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Deathworld
Deathworld, by Harry Harrison, was a 1961 Hugo Award nominee. In Deathworld, gambler Jason dinAlt receives an irresistible offer: to run up a huge winning streak to get enough money to save the planet Pyrrus. dinAlt, whose psychic talent helps him hold on to winning streaks, is bored with his cycle of resort-planet gambling, so he insists on returning to Pyrrus, where everything is deadly and dinAlt expects to be excited by the challenge.
First of all, huge spoiler, as it was one of my favorite things about the book: I loved the idea of a psychic planet, where literally everything around you is capable of responding to the thoughts you put out. What would you do if you could walk outside and...commune with your lawn? With the birds in your shrubs, the insects, the squirrels, the stray cat down the street? Pyrrus obviously took it in a different direction, and I enjoyed the wide range of perils Harrison imagined to play out the conflict between the planet's native denizens and its human colonists. On the other hand, I wished there had been more imagination in the creation of the grubbers: these folks had that chance to work directly with their surroundings, and apparently all settled for what was essentially a hunter-gatherer existence. To be honest, I found the entire set up of military-industrial city set at odds with the planet versus the bucolic grubber villages a little simplistic. I felt like there was room for nuance (psychic planet, people!) and to push at or complicate the boundaries of the two groups.
I also greatly enjoyed the depiction of how committed the Pyrran colonists were to the idea that they could beat the planet. The mental break Pyrrans experienced when forced to confront the fact that all of their hostile measures weren't even keeping their population static was handled beautifully, and I think underscored the extent to which the colonists were wholly invested in the rightness of their fight to survive. That they would need to believe that they were winning to continue fighting with that kind of commitment made complete sense to me, even as individual colonists took actions that belied that belief, like Kerk Pyrrus' purchase of the enormous set of arms dinAlt's win funded.
I liked the way Harrison had dinAlt humbled by Pyrrus; he's the omniscient outsider, able to solve all the planet's problems in a single bound! He decides to go to Pyrrus because he thinks it will be a new challenge, and he's sure that he is the equal of the bad ass Pyrrans. I enjoyed how quickly he learns that he was wrong.
This was the first book where I felt like I could not ignore the flat depiction of female characters--okay, really just the female character, Meta. Some of the flatness is absolutely justified by the story: the Pyrrans on-planet are practical to the exclusion of everything else. You don't need a great personality to survive, and in fact, it will probably distract you or others around you, which will kill you/them. I get it. And I get that, in contrast and to demonstrate how the Pyrran mindset constricts Pyrran expession of self, off-planet Meta has to be more of a "normal" person, recognizable as a woman. But off-planet Meta seemed a stereotype: the pretty, willing, semi-alien female. Although I'm quite sure some of the other supporting female characters I've read already could be accused of the same, Meta was the first one I felt really was just arm candy. I liked the super-capable on-planet Meta much better.
On the whole, I enjoyed a lot of the ideas in this book, but felt like a huge opportunity was lost in choosing to focus on the Pyrran fight to survive rather than exploring what could be done with a psychic planet. Deathworld spawned a series of books, and Harrison may have saved those ideas for later installments. If any of the other Deathworld novels show up on my lists, I will certainly find out!
The next book up for 1961 is Poul Anderson's The High Crusade.
First of all, huge spoiler, as it was one of my favorite things about the book: I loved the idea of a psychic planet, where literally everything around you is capable of responding to the thoughts you put out. What would you do if you could walk outside and...commune with your lawn? With the birds in your shrubs, the insects, the squirrels, the stray cat down the street? Pyrrus obviously took it in a different direction, and I enjoyed the wide range of perils Harrison imagined to play out the conflict between the planet's native denizens and its human colonists. On the other hand, I wished there had been more imagination in the creation of the grubbers: these folks had that chance to work directly with their surroundings, and apparently all settled for what was essentially a hunter-gatherer existence. To be honest, I found the entire set up of military-industrial city set at odds with the planet versus the bucolic grubber villages a little simplistic. I felt like there was room for nuance (psychic planet, people!) and to push at or complicate the boundaries of the two groups.
I also greatly enjoyed the depiction of how committed the Pyrran colonists were to the idea that they could beat the planet. The mental break Pyrrans experienced when forced to confront the fact that all of their hostile measures weren't even keeping their population static was handled beautifully, and I think underscored the extent to which the colonists were wholly invested in the rightness of their fight to survive. That they would need to believe that they were winning to continue fighting with that kind of commitment made complete sense to me, even as individual colonists took actions that belied that belief, like Kerk Pyrrus' purchase of the enormous set of arms dinAlt's win funded.
I liked the way Harrison had dinAlt humbled by Pyrrus; he's the omniscient outsider, able to solve all the planet's problems in a single bound! He decides to go to Pyrrus because he thinks it will be a new challenge, and he's sure that he is the equal of the bad ass Pyrrans. I enjoyed how quickly he learns that he was wrong.
This was the first book where I felt like I could not ignore the flat depiction of female characters--okay, really just the female character, Meta. Some of the flatness is absolutely justified by the story: the Pyrrans on-planet are practical to the exclusion of everything else. You don't need a great personality to survive, and in fact, it will probably distract you or others around you, which will kill you/them. I get it. And I get that, in contrast and to demonstrate how the Pyrran mindset constricts Pyrran expession of self, off-planet Meta has to be more of a "normal" person, recognizable as a woman. But off-planet Meta seemed a stereotype: the pretty, willing, semi-alien female. Although I'm quite sure some of the other supporting female characters I've read already could be accused of the same, Meta was the first one I felt really was just arm candy. I liked the super-capable on-planet Meta much better.
On the whole, I enjoyed a lot of the ideas in this book, but felt like a huge opportunity was lost in choosing to focus on the Pyrran fight to survive rather than exploring what could be done with a psychic planet. Deathworld spawned a series of books, and Harrison may have saved those ideas for later installments. If any of the other Deathworld novels show up on my lists, I will certainly find out!
The next book up for 1961 is Poul Anderson's The High Crusade.
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Rogue Moon, mark 2
I am trying out a new format on the last book I read, Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon. If I like this format better, I will remove the original post. In case I do just that, warning to readers: there will be spoilers...
Rogue Moon was a Hugo nominee for 1961--the winner for that year was Canticle for Leibowitz, which I hope to return to in a later post. In Rogue Moon, scientist Ed Hawks has figured out how to transmit men to the moon. The lunar explorers have discovered a strange structure that keeps killing them; sometimes over and over. The explorers are all cracking under the strain until Hawks finds someone totally new to send to the moon: Al Barker, millionaire playboy extreme sports junkie. Barker is bound and determined to see the exploration mission through, no matter what the experience costs him.
There are a lot of interesting things going on in this book--and the book itself isn't very long. The story takes place firmly in the grip of the military-industrial complex: Hawks works in a large industrial lab, in tandem with the military (the moon base is manned by space sailors) and supported by government funding. Hawks seems to view himself as both separate from and loftier in view than the providers of the resources for his experimentation. In fact, Hawks is set up very early on as a man gifted with vision beyond his peers and driven to understand the vistas that vision opens up to him. He sees the path laid out before him (and the path of exploration set out before mankind), and has no compunctions about pushing those people around him into place to follow that path. He knows what kind of man he is, and is not afraid to be that man. The clear self-knowledge Hawks displays seems to be the key to puzzle of the strange moon structure.
The structure is a labyrinth--it seems to be a metaphor for exploring and confronting one's true self. The landscape and obstacles appear differently to each explorer, although the perils stay of the same type and in the same places across multiple descriptions. Explorers entering the structure are completely isolated from everyone outside the structure--attempts to record the experience, to transmit descriptions, or to transport objects from within the structure all both fail and result in the death of the attempting explorer. Once you enter, you are on your own until you die, which can (and is) caused by a dizzying range of seemingly innocuous gestures, noises, or circumstances. There is no option except to go forward as best you can until something kills you.
Then you wake up, safely back in the lab on earth--except that you remember being on the moon, exploring the structure, and best of all, dying. I loved this--I doubt it is the earliest treatment of the idea of beaming a person from one place to another but it is one of the earliest I've read. Budrys doesn't sugarcoat the ramifications of breaking a person down into their components and rebuilding at the destination location a brand-new person who remembers being the person who was transmitted from Earth. He points out to the reader that, since the original person is destroyed, there is no way to tell that tiny, seemingly insignificant changes might very well exist between the destroyed original and the new copy. There is no way to tell, and so no use worrying about it. However, since it is dangerous to destroy a person and rebuild them on the moon only to send them immediately into even greater peril, Hawks uses a safeguard: when a man is transmitted, he is transmitted twice, simultaneously. One copy goes to the moon and its death in the lunar labyrinth, and the other goes to another section of the lab on Earth. Although differences in experience almost immediately separate the copies into two distinct persons, Hawks discovers that they maintain some kind of psychic bond. When the lunar copy dies, his memories--including those of his death--revert to and somehow merge with the terran copy. That man, shaken by remembering his own dying, has to come to grips with that recollection enough to describe as best he can what path he took and what he did to cause his own death. Then he faces the option to go right back and do it again.
Here's where Barker comes in--he is in it for the bragging rights. He's built his sense of self-worth on being the toughest and most daring person he knows, and as an indication of his propensity towards self-destruction in the pursuit of that goal, he wears a wooden prosthetic on one leg. He lets other people goad him into danger--in fact, that's exactly how Hawks gets him to start on the lunar mission. Here again we see Hawks' vision--he sees how to get Barker to take the bait at first, and he at least hopes he sees Barker's ability to move past that empty pride to persevere in the face of repeated deaths. Of course, Barker does; bravado and daredevil recklessness wouldn't be enough to get him through the labyrinth.
On the final day, the day Barker will navigate the last section of the maze and reach the other side, Hawks goes to the moon with him. This has clearly been Hawks' plan all along--he needs to see the maze itself, and to be walked through it safely so that he can supervise its dismantling. Hawks' journey is the first time the reader gets to "see" the landscape of the labyrinth--and I have to admit I laughed out loud when Hawks noticed that from within the maze, he can see right through the outside walls of the structure to the rest of the lunar landscape, just as if they aren't there.
I admit I was too caught up in the story to follow through the setup Budrys laid out, but he makes sure you aren't able to escape it: there are already a Hawks and a Barker back on Earth; those men get to continue on in the lives the Hawks and Barker on the moon remember living as their own. Ditto for all of the men manning the lunar base--this is a permanent assignment.
One thing Budrys does fudge a little bit is just when the psychic bond between the copies breaks irretrievably. Hawks tells us that it does eventually break under the weight of differing life experiences, and makes it clear that the brevity of the lunar exploration missions are the reason why the terran counterparts of the lunar explorers remember their explorations. The total trip Hawks and Barker take through the labyrinth takes under ten minutes, and after walking the maze, Hawks deliberately wanders off to die of asphyxiation (apparently the tanks in their spacesuits are meticulously filled just enough...) so that his counterpart can wake and start constructing his maze-destructing team. But the men on permanent lunar assignment are not otherwise addressed, receiving only a brief commendation on their sacrifice for mankind's progress.
When it comes down to it though, that seems to be what it was all about: the confrontation with and deconstruction of the maze was presented by Hawks as a necessary next step in lunar exploration. Since Hawks seems to be our prophet in this story, what I got from him was that man's destiny was waiting for him out in space, and that he needed to stop mucking about, take a good hard look at himself, and go find it. Not every person would make it; some would crack first, or retreat. But ultimately, mankind needed to go find its place in the greater universe.
I expect to revisit the books I've read previously at least in brief, and I've located versions of both of the books I initially couldn't find (and so skipped)--including an earlier Budrys novel, which I am now very interested to read and see if these issues of self-knowledge are a consistent theme. More on those as I get to them, but for now, the library system has found me Harry Harrison's Deathworld (all three volumes together), so that will be next.
Rogue Moon was a Hugo nominee for 1961--the winner for that year was Canticle for Leibowitz, which I hope to return to in a later post. In Rogue Moon, scientist Ed Hawks has figured out how to transmit men to the moon. The lunar explorers have discovered a strange structure that keeps killing them; sometimes over and over. The explorers are all cracking under the strain until Hawks finds someone totally new to send to the moon: Al Barker, millionaire playboy extreme sports junkie. Barker is bound and determined to see the exploration mission through, no matter what the experience costs him.
There are a lot of interesting things going on in this book--and the book itself isn't very long. The story takes place firmly in the grip of the military-industrial complex: Hawks works in a large industrial lab, in tandem with the military (the moon base is manned by space sailors) and supported by government funding. Hawks seems to view himself as both separate from and loftier in view than the providers of the resources for his experimentation. In fact, Hawks is set up very early on as a man gifted with vision beyond his peers and driven to understand the vistas that vision opens up to him. He sees the path laid out before him (and the path of exploration set out before mankind), and has no compunctions about pushing those people around him into place to follow that path. He knows what kind of man he is, and is not afraid to be that man. The clear self-knowledge Hawks displays seems to be the key to puzzle of the strange moon structure.
The structure is a labyrinth--it seems to be a metaphor for exploring and confronting one's true self. The landscape and obstacles appear differently to each explorer, although the perils stay of the same type and in the same places across multiple descriptions. Explorers entering the structure are completely isolated from everyone outside the structure--attempts to record the experience, to transmit descriptions, or to transport objects from within the structure all both fail and result in the death of the attempting explorer. Once you enter, you are on your own until you die, which can (and is) caused by a dizzying range of seemingly innocuous gestures, noises, or circumstances. There is no option except to go forward as best you can until something kills you.
Then you wake up, safely back in the lab on earth--except that you remember being on the moon, exploring the structure, and best of all, dying. I loved this--I doubt it is the earliest treatment of the idea of beaming a person from one place to another but it is one of the earliest I've read. Budrys doesn't sugarcoat the ramifications of breaking a person down into their components and rebuilding at the destination location a brand-new person who remembers being the person who was transmitted from Earth. He points out to the reader that, since the original person is destroyed, there is no way to tell that tiny, seemingly insignificant changes might very well exist between the destroyed original and the new copy. There is no way to tell, and so no use worrying about it. However, since it is dangerous to destroy a person and rebuild them on the moon only to send them immediately into even greater peril, Hawks uses a safeguard: when a man is transmitted, he is transmitted twice, simultaneously. One copy goes to the moon and its death in the lunar labyrinth, and the other goes to another section of the lab on Earth. Although differences in experience almost immediately separate the copies into two distinct persons, Hawks discovers that they maintain some kind of psychic bond. When the lunar copy dies, his memories--including those of his death--revert to and somehow merge with the terran copy. That man, shaken by remembering his own dying, has to come to grips with that recollection enough to describe as best he can what path he took and what he did to cause his own death. Then he faces the option to go right back and do it again.
Here's where Barker comes in--he is in it for the bragging rights. He's built his sense of self-worth on being the toughest and most daring person he knows, and as an indication of his propensity towards self-destruction in the pursuit of that goal, he wears a wooden prosthetic on one leg. He lets other people goad him into danger--in fact, that's exactly how Hawks gets him to start on the lunar mission. Here again we see Hawks' vision--he sees how to get Barker to take the bait at first, and he at least hopes he sees Barker's ability to move past that empty pride to persevere in the face of repeated deaths. Of course, Barker does; bravado and daredevil recklessness wouldn't be enough to get him through the labyrinth.
On the final day, the day Barker will navigate the last section of the maze and reach the other side, Hawks goes to the moon with him. This has clearly been Hawks' plan all along--he needs to see the maze itself, and to be walked through it safely so that he can supervise its dismantling. Hawks' journey is the first time the reader gets to "see" the landscape of the labyrinth--and I have to admit I laughed out loud when Hawks noticed that from within the maze, he can see right through the outside walls of the structure to the rest of the lunar landscape, just as if they aren't there.
I admit I was too caught up in the story to follow through the setup Budrys laid out, but he makes sure you aren't able to escape it: there are already a Hawks and a Barker back on Earth; those men get to continue on in the lives the Hawks and Barker on the moon remember living as their own. Ditto for all of the men manning the lunar base--this is a permanent assignment.
One thing Budrys does fudge a little bit is just when the psychic bond between the copies breaks irretrievably. Hawks tells us that it does eventually break under the weight of differing life experiences, and makes it clear that the brevity of the lunar exploration missions are the reason why the terran counterparts of the lunar explorers remember their explorations. The total trip Hawks and Barker take through the labyrinth takes under ten minutes, and after walking the maze, Hawks deliberately wanders off to die of asphyxiation (apparently the tanks in their spacesuits are meticulously filled just enough...) so that his counterpart can wake and start constructing his maze-destructing team. But the men on permanent lunar assignment are not otherwise addressed, receiving only a brief commendation on their sacrifice for mankind's progress.
When it comes down to it though, that seems to be what it was all about: the confrontation with and deconstruction of the maze was presented by Hawks as a necessary next step in lunar exploration. Since Hawks seems to be our prophet in this story, what I got from him was that man's destiny was waiting for him out in space, and that he needed to stop mucking about, take a good hard look at himself, and go find it. Not every person would make it; some would crack first, or retreat. But ultimately, mankind needed to go find its place in the greater universe.
I expect to revisit the books I've read previously at least in brief, and I've located versions of both of the books I initially couldn't find (and so skipped)--including an earlier Budrys novel, which I am now very interested to read and see if these issues of self-knowledge are a consistent theme. More on those as I get to them, but for now, the library system has found me Harry Harrison's Deathworld (all three volumes together), so that will be next.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Intro
I read...a LOT, largely speculative fiction, and while I won't claim especially discerning taste, I do enjoy a good yarn. I happened to be looking at the wiki for the Nebulas last year with my husband, and realized that there were a lot of entries, both nominees and award winners, that I'd never read. I decided that I should. Then I decided to add the Hugo nominees and winners, and the Dick and Clarke nominees and winners. I see as I am doing a general search on sci-fi awards that Wikipedia thinks I should also be following the John W. Campbell award--I'm not familiar with it, but I will look it up, and most likely add those nominees and winners as well. You really can't have too many books on your to-read list...
So, I got together a spreadsheet listing the nominees (and noting the winners) for each award each year, beginning with the 1953 Hugo award winner, The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (the earliest entry according to my records). I decided right away that I wanted to read these books chronologically--I was expecting to run into a lot of gender bias, especially early on, and that can really rub me the wrong way. I also wanted to watch how the genre grew and changed over time.
Let me set some ground rules: this is a totally for-fun project for me. I enjoy intense, critical discussion of literature, but day-to-day I mostly read for fun. I am also not knocking myself out locating long-lost copies of difficult or out-of-print tomes: in fact, I am limiting my reading to the books I can get through my local library system. Surprisingly, so far that's been hardly any limitation at all, which has been wonderful.
Also, as of this writing, I'm almost a decade into my spreadsheet, so I will not be starting with an in-depth analysis of The Demolished Man. I would like to do a sort of catch-up entry with some of my impressions and surprises from the thirteen books I've already read, but I'm almost done with Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon, and that entry may sneak in first. So far, I've had to skip two books: Algis Budrys' Who? of 1959 and Mark Phillips' That Sweet Little Old Lady (alternate title, Brain Twister) of 1960.
I think that's it for the introduction; I will be back in the next week or so with the entry for Rogue Moon and hopefully a review of what I've read so far.
So, I got together a spreadsheet listing the nominees (and noting the winners) for each award each year, beginning with the 1953 Hugo award winner, The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (the earliest entry according to my records). I decided right away that I wanted to read these books chronologically--I was expecting to run into a lot of gender bias, especially early on, and that can really rub me the wrong way. I also wanted to watch how the genre grew and changed over time.
Let me set some ground rules: this is a totally for-fun project for me. I enjoy intense, critical discussion of literature, but day-to-day I mostly read for fun. I am also not knocking myself out locating long-lost copies of difficult or out-of-print tomes: in fact, I am limiting my reading to the books I can get through my local library system. Surprisingly, so far that's been hardly any limitation at all, which has been wonderful.
Also, as of this writing, I'm almost a decade into my spreadsheet, so I will not be starting with an in-depth analysis of The Demolished Man. I would like to do a sort of catch-up entry with some of my impressions and surprises from the thirteen books I've already read, but I'm almost done with Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon, and that entry may sneak in first. So far, I've had to skip two books: Algis Budrys' Who? of 1959 and Mark Phillips' That Sweet Little Old Lady (alternate title, Brain Twister) of 1960.
I think that's it for the introduction; I will be back in the next week or so with the entry for Rogue Moon and hopefully a review of what I've read so far.
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