Tag Archives: book club

Scifi book club recap: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

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First, an announcement: for June only, the Scifi book club meeting will be at 6pm on the SECOND Tuesday, June 14, instead of the normal first Tuesday. We will be reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, which is the book that Jane Austen parodied in Northanger Abbey, and was also one of Edgar Allen Poe’s major inspirations.

So, Shades of Grey. This was our favorite book so far, with an average score over 8.5/10. Unfortunately, this was also our only book so far that no one finished by the meeting - one person got within 30 pages and just didn’t quite squeak by the deadline. Despite that, we were all pleased with the intricacy of Fforde’s world and the humor woven into the story. I finished it on Wednesday, and the plot really picks up in the second half of the book. Eddie starts seriously investigating the weird happenings in the village, and, by extension, the mysteries underlying his world.

In the far future of Shades of Grey, hundreds of years after the Something That Happened, society is rigidly segregated based on acuteness of color perception. Order is rigorously maintained by adhering to the Rules of Munsell, an extraordinarily thorough collection of edicts governing almost every aspect of life. For example, the Rules specifying which articles may be manufactured left spoons off the list, so spoons are valued heirlooms, passed down through generations and jealously hoarded. Loopholery is a respected art and the only method of getting anything done. Also, most damagingly, there are periodic Leapbacks and DeFactings, reducing the level of technology and the amount of knowledge available each time. The most recent Leapback removed mechanical tractors, zippers, and yoyos, among other things, leaving people dependent on trains and Model Ts for transportation. It is, in many ways, a dismal place to live.

Although the book is indeed very funny - I even literally laughed out loud a few times - the best part is that almost none of it is funny to the characters. Fforde walks a delicate balance of pathos and lightheartedness. The situation of the characters and the world itself is deeply sad, but due to the fact that they are inside the world, the characters have no perspective to compare the world to anything else. Except one: the female protagonist, Jane.

Jane’s setup reminded me very much of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. She busts into the normal, boring world of our loser protagonist, Eddie Russett, and, by being surly and uninterested in him, causes him to fall in love with her (and her extremely retroussé nose.) In a novel all about the metaphor of vision, she is the one person with perspective. It makes her violently angry, all the time, often in situations where it would benefit her to just keep her head down. As her character develops, her anger and lack of self-control reminded us of the protagonist from The Darkship Thieves, which we read earlier in the year. Jane ends up more interesting and sympathetic than either Ramona of Scott Pilgrim or the protagonist of The Darkship Thieves, because “a quirky working-class girl fighting the Establishment” is much more fun than either “a quirky emo girl whining about her life” or “a rich heiress fighting the establishment”.

If you’ve read any of my reviews before, you’ve likely noticed that I’m always keeping a running tab in my head of the Bechdel test - 1) are there two named female characters, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a guy? This book has lots of female characters, and a pleasing number of them are in positions of authority. It meets the conversational criteria in a couple of places - but every female character is a total bitch. There are Society matrons scheming for arranged marriages and committee politics, female cops with no compassion or concept of bending the rules, young women using sex as leverage and double-crossing their lovers at every turn. Granted, most of the guys are jerks, too.

The only exceptions to the “every major character is a jerk” trope are Eddie and his dad, the Librarians, and the Apocryphal Man, who is (or was) a historian. A few technicians also seem pretty okay - maintenance workers and so on. The symbolic representatives of knowledge are sympathetic characters, many working underground to share their knowledge, whether it’s Morse code bedtime stories or questions answered in exchange for Loganberry Jam. Except for Jane, who is the omega bitch, and the ambiguously moral but always polite Color Man.

Shades of Grey touches on such a wide range of subjects that we found ourselves circling back to it naturally no matter how far off-topic we wandered. For example, there is a throwaway joke about retail sales - “buy one get one free” vs. “half off”. What would you rather have, something for half price or something for free? One character, Tommo, speculates that there used to be a whole science of selling, which they, of course, have lost. Eddie’s hobby is advanced queuing systems; in this world, “take a number” counts as a radical new idea. But when they discuss their ideas, each greets the other’s with disinterest and/or skepticism.

There were many parallels with Lois Lowry’s The Giver. A society removes color perception from the general population as part of a system to suppress individuality and conflict. Those with color perception are singled out for special privileges but also isolated from the rest of the community. Planned life stages result in strictly controlled birth rates and euthanasia in old age. There were even specific moments of congruence, such as the protagonists both seeing red hair on their girlfriends. It’s like Fforde read The Giver and decided it would be a much better book if it were funny. (He may be right.)

One caveat - on literally the last page of the book, Eddie is forced to make an ambiguous moral choice. While I don’t object to the principle, it’s a seriously contrived, last-minute, deus ex machina sort of problem manufactured to lend a sense of urgency to the forthcoming sequels. Personally, I have decided the incident simply didn’t happen, and the book ended two pages earlier.

Shades of Grey comes highly recommended, and we still have a couple of copies in the store at 20% off – grab one while we’ve got them. :)

Scifi Book Club 1/3/11: The Darkship Thieves

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Our December book club book was The Darkship Thieves by Sara Hoyt. Because of the weather and my poor memory, the author wasn’t able to join us after all, but we still had an energetic discussion.

The story is a romantic space opera, told from the first-person perspective of a twenty-something princess with serious psychiatric problems. After her spaceship is mysteriously hijacked, the princess is rescued by a mutant pirate/miner, then taken to a libertarian asteroid-city. Hijinks ensue, a conspiracy is uncovered, and to no one’s surprise, the main couple does eventually admit their love. Don’t let the tone of my summary turn you off- one of the book’s strengths is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

We agreed that the coolest thing in the book is the “forest” ringing the earth. A geneticist designed these space trees, which use photosynthesis to make energy pods. The “miners” harvest the pods to provide cheap, abundant energy for the entire planet. The science is a little hand-wavy, but the important part is the imagery. The forest is a dark, twisted jungle, navigated by small ships with small crews, and made dangerous by the covert game of cops and robbers being played by legitimate miners and the titular thieves (flying mining ships painted black =”darkships”).

Although this is a book written by a female author about a female protagonist, I personally was disappointed that it didn’t pass the Bechdel test (1. two named female characters 2. have a conversation with each other 3. about something other than a man). There are only two occasions where the princess speaks to another woman - once to the miner’s sister, about how much they missed him, and once she orders her father’s female secretary out of the office at gunpoint. Her biker gang (“broomer lair”) only appears to have one other female member, who has no lines.

The princess definitely softens and becomes more complex as the book progresses, and everyone in the group liked her better at the end. Her romantic relationship gives her a more convincing emotional grounding, and revelations about her juvenile delinquency make a more interesting life story. One member pointed out that she doesn’t exactly grow a conscience - she just wants to avoid the inevitable conversation with her very lawful-good boyfriend about why she just killed a guy.

One of our members, a middle-aged male engineer, found the first-person POV too distracting, too far removed from his own experience, to even finish the book. The rest of us had varying reactions to the narrator, both as the “voice” of the story and as a main character. Several people mentioned that it was interesting to have a female character whose primary characteristic is anger and instability, rather than responsibility and caring. On the other hand, that did make her head an uncomfortable place to hang out over the course of an entire novel. We also had mixed reactions to the princess’s use of her body and sexuality to advance her own ends - it reminded one member of the X-Files episode where Scully flashes her cleavage to a teenager to test if he’s a human male, because no human male will resist the chance to take a peek.

There are definite shades of Heinlein’s libertarian tendencies (though I’ll take Luna City over the asteroid-city Eden any day). There are also explorations of a couple of ideas found in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books. First, Hoyt uses some ideas about the artificial womb (uterine replicator) very reminiscent of Bujold - but there is also a hint of the idealism possible in a feudal political system, where the aristocrat has a personal obligation to every vassal.

One of the princess’s more appealing traits is her feeling of responsibility to the people she’s supposed to rule - when she stages her getaway from Eden, that’s the main reason she gives.

[spoilers]
Oddly, at the end of the book, the princess seems to abandon that idea in favor of living happily ever after with her boyfriend. All of our members (who finished the book) agreed that we’d like to read a sequel about the heavily-foreshadowed revolution that’s about to be led by the heirs of the current nobility. Will the ties binding their biker gang together hold through the coming storm? Can they use the princess’s connections to Eden to help reform the political system on earth? Will the princess go back and help at all?
[/spoilers]

Join us next time, Tuesday, February 7 at 6pm, for That Sweet Little Old Lady by Randall Garrett.

December’s Scifi Book Club Meeting

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Sorry for the delay in posting this recap. Our scifi book club meeting for December was our best-attended yet, with 11 participants! We read Theodore Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels. It’s a very dark story of Horty, a boy with mysterious powers, who runs away to the carnival.

Perhaps because Theodore Sturgeon was primarily a short story author, we all agreed that The Dreaming Jewels felt very much like three different short stories loosely connected by the central character. First is a very YA-feeling story of the boy running away to the carnival to escape an abusive home situation; then a psycho-social family drama involving Horty’s long-time crush Kay and his step-father; then a high fantasy-style showdown with the Big Baddy. Because the three stories were so different in tone, different people liked different stages of the book. Almost nobody liked the entire book.

The themes of the book were a mixed bag, and that’s part of the reason the different sections of the book felt so different.

The first and last stories are very concerned with alienation and connection - Horty’s abuse, and his unusual origins, make it very difficult for him to form normal relationships with his family and friends. His only points of contact with friendship and love are two women - his childhood crush, and the dwarf who “adopts” him at the carnival. [Point of interest: “dwarf” is the term used in the book, which was written in 1957.] In the last story, the final battle reveals the nature of the titular dreaming jewels - beings so alien that humans are are unable to comprehend their purpose:

All earthborn life proceeds and operates from one command: Survive! A human mind cannot coneive of any other base.
The crystals had one-and a very different one.
Horty almost grasped it, but not quite. As simple as “survive!”, it was a concept so remote from anything he’d ever heard or read that it escaped him.

Doesn’t that sound just like something you’d read in HP Lovecraft?

Oddly, for the 1950s, the first and second stories have a lot to say about gender. There are only two female characters - Horty’s crush Kay and his surrogate mother Zena. Both behave in fairly stereotypical feminine ways. Kay is pure Virgin, unable to take control of her sexuality and powerless against the judge who victimizes her. Zena is a loving but very manipulative mother figure, unwilling to let Horty take control of his own life until external circumstances force his hand. It gets interesting when Horty takes control of his own shapeshifting powers - and changes into each of them. It seems as though every time Horty grows as a person, he first has to become female.

The second and third stories consider the nature of force and power, especially the power of a powerful father figure over his subordinates. The second story is the subtler of the two. Horty’s step-father, now a judge, is victimizing Kay. Kay is timid, virginal, and utterly powerless, until Horty anonymously helps her escape. But then Horty assumes her form, and takes control of the power of female sexuality to seduce his stepfather (!) and get his revenge. In the third story, the Big Baddy - literally the circus’s ringleader - goes toe-to-toe with Horty in a battle of psychic power. In the end the battle hurts the victims at least as much as the Big Baddy himself. The direct confrontation of power against power is disastrous for everyone concerned.

There was a lot of grist for the mill in this one, but in the end our consensus was that it was more interesting as an intellectual exercise than as a story. The writing was direct, almost like a kids’ chapter book, and the main character was so alien(ated) that it was difficult to care about him. Our average score for the book was about 6.5/10 (although personally I gave it an 8.5, the highest score of the group).

Join us next week, January 4th 2011, for Sarah Hoyt’s The Darkship Thieves. The author lives in southern Colorado, and she said she may join us, schedule permitting.

Scifi Book Club discussion: Brains, a Zombie Memoir

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Last night’s scifi book club meeting was a little smaller, only four people, but I suspect that’s because a) the book didn’t appeal to the broader scifi crowd and b) it was voting day. We read Brains, A Zombie Memoir, by Robin Zecker. It’s a slim volume, only 178 pages, and it’s an almost-parody of the zombie genre.

The consensus among us was that it was an entertaining read, fast-paced and often very funny. It’s chock-full of pop-culture references, the perfect inner monologue for a self-aware zombie who knows how deep into cliche he’s falling. Zecker did a really good job with the main character, showing by turns his pre-zombification personality (total jerk) and his totally alien nature as a zombie. There are vestiges of human feeling in their little zombie posse - a sort of family bond - coupled with a bizarre lack of empathy for the living.

But the ending was a little strange. In broad terms, there were several climaxes to the story, as though the author lost track of the arc of the action. And specifically, [[spoiler alert] the final confrontation with the scientist who created the zombie virus felt very deus ex machina - there was no real reason for him to come out to meet the zombies and talk with them, and his death was pretty anti-climactic.]

We spent most of the rest of the meeting comparing and contrasting other zombie media and the differences between zombies and other paranormal fiction. The dominant paranormal theme is always the price you would pay for immortality. But with vampires, the metaphor is sex and death. With werewolves, the metaphor is the symbolic death of the ego, subsumed in animal awareness - not so much immortality as not caring about the possibility of death. But with zombies, the metaphor is alienation - to become immortal, you have to become one with death, and the dead cannot retain their humanity.

We voted on the books for the first half of next year:

- January (Modern) Darkship Thieves Sara A Hart
o Ppb 4/1/10 - Space opera political/thriller style – a woman who hates space is forced into space adventure
- February (Classic) Brain Teaser (That Sweet Little Old Lady) Mark Phillips
o 1959 - funny short novel – psionics are real, FBI investigation
- March (Modern) The Search for Wondla
o hb 9/28/10 - YA - young girl is forced to flee from her underground home with only a mysterious piece of cardboard
- April (Classic) Pirates of Venus Edgar Rice Burroughs
o 1934 - “astronaut Carson Napier crashes on Venus and is swept into a world where revolution is ripe, the love of a princess carries a dear price, and death can come as easily from the blade of a sword as from the ray of a futuristic gun”
- May (Modern) Shades of Gray by Jasper Fforde
o ppb 3/1/11 - “a screwball comedy future in which social castes and protocols are rigidly defined by acuteness of personal color perception”)
- June (Classic) The Mysteries of Udolpho Anne Ward Rudcliffe
o 1794 – Ultra-gothic – prelude to modern horror/fantasy genre

Join us December 7 to discuss the Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon: a very dark tale of a boy with secret abilities escapes from his abusive home to join the carnival