Tag Archives: scifi

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.

Come start a scifi book club with me!

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There is so much cool scifi/fantasy/speculative fiction out right now, I’d love to start a book club for it. Who’s with me? If I can get 5 people to commit to coming every month and buying the books for it, I bet I can convince Steph to carry our book list.

For the first month, we could do a little compare/contrast between classic scifi and modern interpretations of the same themes. For instance, we could read Asimov’s collection of short stories I, Robot, and then also Cory Doctorow’s stories I, Robot and I, Rowboat for a different take on both machine sentience and legislating technological development. Or some time travel development between The Time Machine and Connie Willis’ Blackout or To Say Nothing of the Dog, maybe.

I hear that the Old Firehouse Bookstore is courting Paolo Bacigalupi to make an appearance at their store in September or October. So September would be the perfect time to read The Wind-up Girl, which just came out in paperback. It was up for an award this year, a Hugo, I think.

Then we could do a little genre-pushing. Maybe some Michael Moore, like Fluke (with singing whales) or You Suck (a paranormal romance parody). Or Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, where magic in the world is anything but sexy.

After that we’ll probably have a better idea what the group is into and what our tastes are. I’d love to talk about scifi marketed as mainstream, like The Time Traveller’s Wife or The Lovely Bones, which suck in people who pride themselves on not reading scifi. Compare notes on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers in today’s political context. Try a debut novel from somebody we’ve never heard of. See if Ursula K. Leguin’s communist moon in The Dispossessed lives up to The Communist Manifesto- and does it count as a utopia? Compare a movie and the book it was based on - or experiment with the novelization of a summer blockbuster.

Leave a comment here, and we’ll work out a time. I’ll put a sign-up sheet at the front of the store, too.

It’ll be awesome, you guys. I promise!

Hugo & Nebula Awards!

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It’s that time of year again; the grass is turning green, the trees are budding out, the Nebula awards ceremony is coming up and the Hugo award nominees have been announced! The Nebula nominations were announced in February, of course.

I haven’t read any of them myself (sad day!) but I’m about to start Boneshaker - a steampunk zombie adventure. How could you go wrong? I love zombie movies, and Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and I even liked Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (in defiance of the box office, movie critics, and the opinion of everyone I know).

Also! One of the nominees for the Andre Norton YA Scifi Award (presented with the Nebulas) is actually a free online novel: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making How cool is that?

Even if you’re one of those who “don’t read scifi,” there are plenty of boundary-defying books on the lists to satisfy you. Some of them, like Palimpsest and The Love We Share Without Knowing, aren’t even marketed as scifi or fantasy.

Did you like The Time Traveller’s Wife or The Lovely Bones? Or anything by Haruki Murakami or Kenzaburo Oe? The Love We Share Without Knowing is a very Japanese collection of strangers awakening to the strangeness and connection of everyday life. Or you might go for Palimpsest, where sleep takes you to a dream-city populated by other dreamers.

How do you feel about police and crime procedurals, like CSI on TV or maybe Anne Rule? China Mieville’s The City and the City is the story of a cop in the Extreme Crimes Division solving a murder in a universe right next door, with just hints of the supernatural for flavor. I’ve heard it’s a good match for fans of Jim Butcher or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, too.

Similarly, for the mystery buffs out there, Finch is a noir mystery set in a city under occupation. Reviewers have compared the setting to modern-day Kabul or Baghdad - this could be a good choice for fans of military fiction or thrillers like David Baldacci or Preston & Child.

Or maybe you enjoyed the post-apocalyptic dystopias of The Road or The Book of Eli. Julian Comstock would be a good bet, taking place after a series of disasters that drastically reduced the world population. The Wind-Up girl has a similar mood, though it takes place in a much more overtly-scifi urban environment.

The nominations for best new writers are also exciting - Gail Carriger’s sassy Victorian paranormal mysteries will appeal to fans of light-hearted paranormal romance or maybe the Stephanie Plum novels. Seanan McGuire’s paranormal mysteries are similar but closer to Kim Harrison or Jim Butcher - a little darker, with a little more action.
The Hugo ballot has six novels and the Nebula ballot has five. I’m always interested to see which selections, if any, overlap. It’s usually a good indication of excellence. This year there are two:
The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey, May09)
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor, Sep09)

The Nebula team also has these three on their list:
The Love We Share Without Knowing, Christopher Barzak (Bantam, Nov08)
Flesh and Fire, Laura Anne Gilman (Pocket, Oct09)
Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland Press, Oct09)

And the Hugo has these three:
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog)
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

I think we’ll be getting most of these in the store over the next few weeks - check them out and expand your horizons!

Pattern Recognition

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It’s been a while since William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognition came out, and I still haven’t managed to read it. I enjoyed Neuromancer very much, but haven’t been impressed by some of his other work.

Nevertheless, this interview in the Blackbird Archive is fantastic. Most of it, you’ll notice, is an extended meditation on what constitutes Science Fiction. This is important. I know I can’t give a real answer as to why it is- many more eloquent than me have tried. But I get so tired of the dismissive, “oh, I don’t read scifi.”

There is an extraordinary body of work that satisfies all the requirements of science fiction but is not marketed as such. The Time Traveler’s Wife is about a time traveler, for example, but it’s still in the Contemporary Lit section so everyone reads it. Likewise Gregory MacGuire‘s fairytale re-imaginings like Wicked would be perfectly at home in the scifi section - you wouldn’t even have to change the covers. Hundreds of CIA and crime thrillers deal with future weapons and genetic engineering and spy technology - but they have lots of guns, so that’s okay.

But more than the tropes listed above, science fiction is a way of thinking.

As the review says;

The next matter to be settled is genre. William Gibson is a science fiction writer, so is this science fiction? The answer is yes and no. Unlike Vonnegut, who goes to some pains to say he’s not writing science fiction even when he is, Gibson never shies from the label, even though he’s perfectly aware it’s not so simple a tag as it once was. Pattern Recognition is set in the present with no aliens or secret technologies. The plot turns on nothing more exotic technologically than chat rooms and posted film clips in a very recognizable Internet. Recently, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptomonicon, as fat as Pattern Recognition is lean, was largely treated as a science fiction novel by reviewers, bookdealers, and readers, even nominated for sf awards, though the main action involves the breaking of the Enigma code of World War II and isn’t science fiction in the usual sense. China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, on another end of the spectrum, seems science fictional even though it takes place in a Dickensian steampunk world with no connection to ours.

Science fiction, in effect, has become a narrative strategy, a way of approaching story, in which not only characters must be invented, but the world and its ways as well, without resorting to magic or the supernatural, where the fantasy folks work. A realist wrestling with the woes of the middle class can leave the world out of it by and large except for an occasional swipe at the shallowness of suburbia. A science fiction writer must invent the world where the story takes place, often from the ground up, a process usually called world-building. In other words, in a science fiction novel, the world itself is a distinctive and crucial character in the plot, without whom the story could not take place, whether it’s the world of Dune or Neuromancer or 1984. The world is the story as much as the story is in the world. Part of Gibson’s point (and Stephenson’s too for that matter) is that we live in a time of such accelerated change and layered realities, that we’re all in that boat, like it or not. A novel set in the “real world” now has to answer the question, “Which one?”

Via Science Fictional. That post also has a link to this interview with William Gibson, equally interesting.