I’ve read enough novels influenced by this series, particularly ones billed as “Horatio Hornblower in Spaaaace”, that I figured I should at least give the first book a shot. Beat to Quarters (aka The Happy Return – a rare instance of the original British title being worse than the American one) was C.S. Forester’s introduction to the character and the first novel published, but as he fleshed out the series, he delved backwards into Hornblower’s history as well, such that this is actually the sixth novel in terms of the series internal chronology.
The novel opens with Captain Hornblower being ordered by British Admiralty to South America in order to form an alliance with rebels (led by a madman who fancies himself as a god) against the Spanish colonial government. Along the way, he encounters a larger Spanish warship, is obliged to take on Lady Barbara Wellesley (the sister of the Duke of Wellington) as a distracting passenger, and must deal with the shifting allegiances of the Spanish government.
Forester was clearly an influence on other writers operating in a similar milieu. When it comes to my little Salty Sea-Dog project, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series was clearly seen as an heir to Forester’s Hornblower series, has many similarities, and as such, makes for a good point of comparison. Which is to say, Forester’s approach is significantly better than O’Brian’s.
Superficially, these books are quite similar. British naval tales set during the Napoleonic Wars with elements of restrained British romance sprinkled throughout, I must say that Forester’s take on this demonstrates a much better sense of storytelling and page turning ability. O’Brian’s books are quite episodic in nature, and Forester also has a bit of this, but does so in a much more fluid manner, with one episode leading to the next, building in tension and scope as we go along, eventually reaching a suitable climax. O’Brian’s tales felt perfunctory and anticlimactic to me, while Forester provides a better sense of pacing and escalation of stakes.
Forester clearly knows his seafaring stuff, but does not feel obligated to overburden the story with jargon in the way that O’Brian tends to do. His prose is direct and clear, and while the whole affair retains a typically British stiff upper lip, the characters are relatable and their travails lively. Despite what I’ve always thought of as a silly name, Horatio Hornblower himself is a bit gruff in this first entry in the series, but he softens a bit as you get into his head and see why he makes the decisions that he does (even as he’s filled with self-doubt, something I typically don’t love in a story like this, he’s ultimately quite competent and decisive). He’s certainly faced with a series of difficult dilemmas throughout, and there is one big sequence of naval warfare that is extremely well executed (again, Forester balances the technical aspects of the battle with a page-turning, character-based approach that flows more readily than O’Brian’s jargon-heavy exposition).
I’m definitely interested in continuing the series, always a good sign, and indeed, I might even revisit some of the aforementioned SF renditions of this sort of thing. I’ve already read all the Vorkosigan books, but I might have to check out more of the Honor Harrington series (or watch some Star Trek or pick up another book series, there are a lot of options…) There’s also a decently regarded 1951 film adaptation of this first novel, under the title Captain Horatio Hornblower, starring Gregory Peck and directed by the fittingly eyepatched Raoul Walsh that I shall have to check out at some point (apparently there was a TV series as well, but that does not appear to be widely available).
So ends my Salty Sea-Dog Era of reading, though it will live on as I make my way through more of the Horatio Hornblower books (I already have the next one sitting on the shelf, so this is not an idle threat). Altogether a worthy exercise, and it’s funny, I just picked up a collection of Edgar Allen Poe stories to kick off my Six Weeks of Halloween reading and the first story is, fittingly, a salty sea-dog story. So perhaps there are more salty sea-dogs in my future than I originally thought.
A few months ago, I embarked upon my Salty Sea-Dog Era of reading, have been reviewing the progress thus far, and so we come to Moby-Dick. Herman Melville’s sublime, layered exploration of obsession and vengeance may be the most famous American novel ever written, and as such, the prospect of reviewing something people have themselves been obsessing about for well over a century is somewhat daunting. In an early review, London publication Morning Advertiser‘s anonymous reviewer opined: “To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits… is impossible in the scope of a review.” There is little to be said about Moby-Dick that has not already been explored ad nauseum, but I spent a couple months reading the damn thing, so I should probably record some thoughts, if only for posterity.
I used the words obsession and vengeance above as a shorthand for the themes of Moby-Dick, and indeed, they are quite prominently featured in the text, but the thing about Moby-Dick is that it’s notoriously difficult to pin down. Like the sea that Melville aptly describes throughout the novel, there are numerous thematic undercurrents and tidal forces at work underneath the surface levels of the novel.
Take obsession, one of the more obvious and famous themes of the book, usually attributed to captain Ahab’s mad quest for revenge on the white whale that took his leg on a previous voyage. It’s certainly presented early on, but quickly takes a back seat to another form of obsession; that of Melville’s interest in whales and whaling. We’re frequently presented with an almost non-fictional survey of knowledge about whales, ranging from an analysis of historical artwork used to depict whales, to a catalog of mythological references to whales (including from Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Hindu literature, with obvious focus on the story of Jonah), to various culinary considerations (including this bit of irony in Chapter 65: “Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it?”), to biological taxonomies of whales, to countless other digressions on the art of whale hunting. Only a man in the grip of obsession could compile and write such a thing.
So it goes with other various themes. Ahab’s fruitless thirst for vengeance is infamous, but while it is brought up early on, it only becomes truly prominent during the final sequence of the novel. Melville, though, is clearly concerned with epistemology and perception; with the difficulty of observation and knowledge. This is demonstrated through his aforementioned digressions on non-fictional topics, many of which may seem a bit quaint to modern audiences. We’ve grown up with exquisite underwater photography of all manner of sea life, not just whales and sharks, so it’s easy to underestimate how difficult it was to piece this sort of thing together in 1851, when Melville was talking about old paintings as the primary source of what a whale looks like. Also interesting are Melville’s love of seafaring, defense of whaling, and justifications of its excess. Whole chapters are devoted to such, and surely caused an escalation in the hot take industrial complex of its day. I could spend years cataloguing the themes of Moby-Dick, probing and teasing out theories on religion, race, philosophy, and the like (this sort of inspired study in its readers being, in itself, yet another layer of the theme of obsession).
As you might gather from the above, this is not exactly an easy-going read. The overarching story itself is quite simple, but the language and style are complex and frustratingly beautiful at times. There’s an almost poetic, dreamlike quality to the whole affair that is difficult to pin down, and can lend itself to an trance-like reading state. You read a page or two, realize that you have no idea what’s going on, but then when you go back and reread the page, you find that you’ve absorbed it in some ways, but not in others. It’s a very odd and challenging read in that way, and I must admit that I’m sure some of this went over my head.
Another stray thought about the numerous digressions in this book: I don’t want to hear anyone complain about Science Fiction’s propensity towards info-dumps ever again. Sure, most SF writers don’t have the facility with language and stylistic prose that Melville does, but if this book can spend hundreds of pages going off on non-fictional tangents and yet still be one of the canonical candidates for Great American Novel, so can Science Fiction. If Nostromo represents literary fiction’s propensity towards worldbuilding (a la high-fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings), then Moby-Dick represents literary fiction’s propensity towards info-dumps and tangents (a la science fiction epics like Dune or Neal Stephenson’s entire bibliography).
One final note on editions. As a book in the public domain, Moby-Dick is available in numerous different editions, including plenty of free digital copies. I looked around and settled on the Third Norton Critical Edition, mostly because it contains a huge amount of supplementary material. And the material is great! Like Melville’s obsessive study of all things whaling, people have been hunting down supplementary materials like Melville’s correspondence, biographical material, and even old reviews from nearly forgotten publications. New material is still being discovered to this day (or, at least, until 2018, when this edition was published), and while my “obsession” with has not reached the fervor with which those who compiled this information have, I did sample some of it, and it’s quite interesting. That being said, this book is almost certainly not the greatest. In particular, the paper it’s printed on is way too thin, making it difficult to handle and more importantly, some of the ink bleeds through to the other side, making it difficult to read. As already mentioned, there are countless other editions that are invariably cheaper than this one, so if you are going to read Moby-Dick, I suggest maybe seeking them out. If you become obsessed and want an exhaustive resource of supplementary material, then maybe jump on that Norton edition.
A few months ago, I embarked upon my Salty Sea-Dog Era of reading and now we review progress. I’ve already covered Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo at a level of detail that I probably won’t reach in this post, but I will be covering several books, so there is that. Let’s get to it:
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – There are books that are archetypal to certain genres or sub-genres. Books with outsized influence on all that come after it. They may not be the first to cover a certain topic, but they are always in the conversation whenever someone tackles the subject. Such is the case for Treasure Island and Pirate adventure stories.
All the tropes we know and love are here: treasure maps where X marks the spot, peg legs, eye patches, and parrots on shoulders as standard pirate accessories, the “black spot” as a death sentence that pirates hand out to traitors, copious amounts of rum, mutiny, lovable rogues, euphemisms for pirating (namely “gentlemen of fortune”), shipwrecks, marooned survivors, and oodles of nautical slang (“Shiver my timbers!”). Heck, even the title “Treasure Island” is a trope.
The novel is shorter and more accessible than I thought it would be, a sorta 19th century YA novel complete with plucky teen protagonist Jim Hawkins who undergoes a bit of a coming of age through the whole ordeal. And it is quite an ordeal, most of the crew dying once the treachery begins, and Hawkins finds himself in real danger often. Stevenson’s prose is mostly straightforward, occasionally veering into a sort of baroque patois for the pirates, but there are plenty of classic lines that originate right here and it all comes together in a thrilling way. It’s hard to hear Long John Silver intoning “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.” before battle and not get worked up, is what I mean. It’s a book I probably should have read 30 years ago, but it still plays pretty well even now.
Master and Commander and Post Captain by Patrick O’Brian – The first two entries of the 20-novel Aubrey-Maturin series, set mostly in the era of the Napoleonic Wars. The series centers on the (sometimes contentious) friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin, a physician, natural philosopher, and intelligence agent.
I can see why the series has gained such popularity, but I must admit to being a bit underwhelmed by a few factors that just rarely play well for me. For instance, the novels are largely episodic in nature (and I mean this within each novel – obviously a 20 book series is episodic by its very nature), meaning that the overarching story is haltingly progressed in an oddly paced way. There’s plenty of connective tissue, to be sure, but this sort of approach rarely works for me.
O’Brian’s prose is a little more imposing here than I usually care for as well. He’s obviously well versed in nautical concepts and terminology and the character of Maturin, unfamiliar with the high seas, presents a sort of audience surrogate that allows explanations for ideas we might not be familiar with. More surprising is the influence of Jane Austen on O’Brian’s writing (particularly in Post Captain). I was not expecting Austen-style social commentary, irony, and even romance in these novels, but it’s all there.
Again, the episodic nature of the stories does tend to harm the pacing, and there are several episodes that tend to undercut the overarching sense of storytelling that I usually look for in these types of books. I don’t need protagonists to be superheroes, but ending the first book with Captain Aubrey’s ship being captured by the French and subsequently released to face court martial is… not quite the rousing ending I was hoping for. I suppose I should note that I listened to these in audio-book form (I read the other books in this post in dead tree format) and that the narrator was, in some ways, excellent, but I also found myself spacing out from time to time. Obviously, these are all “me” problems, as the series has quite a following and I suspect later installments would improve upon these first two, but I must admit, I’m not particularly inclined to continue the series myself.
Stay tuned, Moby Dick and Beat to Quarters (the first Horatio Hornblower novel) are next up…
I have been woefully neglectful of keeping up with reviews for recent reading, science fiction or not, but there’s only one way to rectify that situation, so here are some reviews of recent reads, including The Road to Roswell, A Half-Built Garden, and Summer’s End.
The Road to Roswell, by Connie Willis – Francie arrives in Roswell, New Mexico as the maid of honor in her college roommate’s UFO themed wedding (the groom is the true-believer, and Francie thinks there’s a fair chance the ceremony will implode). Frustrated by the crowds of gullible conspiracy nuts chasing potential alien sightings, Francie is surprised to find herself abducted by an alien. It looks like a tumbleweed, but it’s got quick and almost infinitely elastic tentacles, and it needs her to drive a car. Where? That’s what Francie needs to figure out. Along the way, they accumulate a rag-tag group of additional inadvertent abductees, and they all try to figure out how to communicate with the alien, which they’ve nicknamed Indy (after Indiana Jones and his whip).
This is old fashioned stuff, almost to a fault (and probably would be to a lot of the modern SF crowd), but I found it almost refreshing in that way. It’s got a nice blend of genres ranging from alien first contact/abduction/conspiracy, to romance, to a road-trip adventure, to comedy, and more. The UFO nut crowd is in for a healthy dose of merciless mockery, but given the light-hearted tone, it all works reasonably well. Willis relies perhaps a bit too heavily on dialogue, much of it centered on trying to figure out how to communicate with Indy, find out where he’s going, and why. This might bog things down for some folks, but the story’s got a lot of heart, and the logistics of how they learn to work with Indy are clever and well-thought out. He’s an interesting creation, and not something we’ve seen before, which is always a nice touch in a first contact story. It’s not super-deep or earth-shattering, but it’s a fun little caper with some clever SF embedded and worth a look for fans of Willis working in a more light-hearted mode.
A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys – Judy is awakened to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. Assuming it’s a false alarm, she investigates only to find the first alien visitors to Earth. They’ve crossed the galaxy to save humanity from itself. As a technological society, they say we can’t help but destroy our planetary ecosystem, so it’s better for us to live among the stars, where we can control all the variables and establish a more sustainable community. But earth has found a hard-fought balance with nature, thanks to a revolution that sidelined corporations and set about healing the planet. Will the aliens recognize these actions for what they are, or will they save us… by force!? More importantly, why didn’t the aliens use the pronoun badges that Judy’s wife thoughtfully laid out upon their first meeting?
Alright that last bit is a dig on this story’s ham-fisted attempts to incorporate gender fluidity into a first contact story, but it’s well deserved. I honestly don’t know what this book is really going for though. The first contact dilemma (leave the planet or stay and potentially be forced to leave by the aliens) is bizarrely established as an all-or-nothing choice and the obvious solution, which every reader will develop within like 5 seconds of hearing the dilemma on page 20 (or whatever), is treated like a revelation at the end of the novel. It’s incredibly frustrating that everyone seemingly accepts the framing as an all-or-nothing decision (maybe I’m being too harsh, as there is some debate about whether or not to take the aliens up on their offer – the corporations are totally into it, for instance – but the aliens don’t seem to be very flexible on the matter, which seems weird).
There’s some notion of how the climate revolution has changed the relationship between corporations, nation states, and watershed communities (the new ecologically sound communities that are healing the earth), but it’s all very hand-wavey – there was something called the Dandelion revolution which apparently set us on the right ecological track for reversing the damage of global warming, but there is nothing about how that is actually accomplished other than bland platitudes.
Decision-making is also a big deal in this world and they describe some revolutionary networked technology that is supposed to facilitate these decisions, but this generally feels like every decision becomes a reddit thread that only experts are allowed to contribute to or something. This is a little silly, but it’s at least in good company – this sort of thing has been peppered into tons of science fiction for several decades (even going back to Ender’s Game and A Fire Upon the Deep, where the solution looked more like usenet than Reddit, but still.) It would be nice if the novel published in 2022 progressed things a little more than this does, but it’s not a deep fault or anything.
The real purpose of the novel, and the bulk of its prose, seems to be an exploration of gender ideology and sexual fluidity. There are several different systems at play, and a lot of time is spent… well, not exactly exploring these differences. Everyone is super defensive about their gender and sexual identities, to the point where they often refuse to explain in more detail, even to aliens who are clearly confused by what they’re seeing. Tons of lecturing and scolding about how this or that question is rude and offensive and so on and so forth. It’s so weird that this is the approach.
Speaking of the aliens, they’re actually multiple species, some plant-based, others more, er, spidery, and so on. But they speak perfect English from day one, and while their society seems to prioritize mothers more than ours, they are basically small variations on humans, with no real “alien” characteristics other than their bodies. Maybe if Judy’s wife put out xenogender pronoun badges, things would have gone better.
The book blurb calls Ruthanna Emrys a literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, and boy does that comparison not do her any favors. There’s plenty of room for explorations of gender and identity in SF, and Le Guin was pretty great at it (there’s a reason The Left Hand of Darkness is often cited in this conversation) and lots of other SF authors have found ways to do it that are simultaneously less preachy and yet more informative (even when it comes to pronouns). Clearly this wasn’t a book for me, and it seems to be a bit divisive in that respect, but even if I were really into gender ideology, I don’t think I’d like this very much.
Summer’s End, by John Van Stry – A freshly minted spaceship engineer is forced to take the first berth off of Earth he can find because his stepfather is a politician who wants to have him killed. He ends up on a small freighter plying trade routes throughout the solar system, dodging assassins, pirates, and criminals along the way.
This starts off promisingly enough, if a bit derivative, but it quickly bogs down into some rather severe problems. One is that everything that happens is seemingly coincidental, and our hero just happens to be perfectly suited towards the situations he’s faced with. Alright, fine, that’s not always a major problem, and some degree of that is expected if you’re trying to tell an exciting story worth telling. But when it keeps happening, over and over again, it gets cloying. Another major issue is the way Van Stry treats his female characters. Most of the characters in the novel are underdeveloped, but the women are especially so – and often just objects of sexual fantasy (in particular, after the pirate attack, our protagonist shacks up with a character that is almost comically fantastical). The relationships our protagonist develops are just excruciating. It’s not so much that the overarching theme is wrong, it’s just so bluntly presented and awkward that I cringed whenever the subject came up (which was frustratingly often).
Finally, Van Stry isn’t exactly a stylist, and the prose is functional at best. I’m often quite forgiving of this sort of thing in science fiction because functional prose actually works when you’re exploring interesting ideas and trying to evoke the fabled sense of wonder that powers the best science fiction. But there are…no real interesting ideas here. All the science fictional aspects of the story are mere window dressing, and the politics are incredibly ham-fisted. This was actually nominated for the Prometheus Award last year, and you can see why, but like the aforementioned A Half-Built Garden, the political lectures are not very effective. The ending picks up a bit, but by that point, I was totally out of it. There’s nothing new here and no matter what you think of its politics, it’s not a very good representation of them.
I ended up writing more than expected here, so I’ll just finish off by saying that The Road to Roswell is the only book in this post that I’d actually recommend. I have a few more books I still need to catch up with, not to mention some of those Salty Sea-Dog reviews, but I’ll leave it at this for now…
The first book I read as part of my salty-sea dog era was Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, by Joseph Conrad. Published in 1904, it did not receive much in the way of critical or commercial success, and to this day, it is far from Conrad’s most read or famous work (which I guess would be Heart of Darkness). In the fullness of time, its reputation has only grown and its themes surrounding imperialism, revolution, and the corruption of greed remain relevant to this day.
Set in a fictional South American country, this novel tells the story of a silver mine that gets thrust into disarray during one of the periodic revolutions that plague the country. The infamous difficulty of the novel is not so much due to the plot, but the setting and background. The majority of the novel is comprised of flashbacks and detailed histories of the fictional country, it’s geography, the various periods of rule ranging from colonial exploitation to post-colonial misrule and various rebellions and revolutions. The backstory and motivations of the numerous characters are also related through lengthy flashbacks.
As a result of this extreme reliance on flashback, the pacing of the novel, especially in the early goings, is choppy and sometimes jarring. That being said, this was a conscious choice, and there are stylistic benefits of the approach as well. The insistence and influence of the past upon the present is well established by this approach, and the ambitious, multi-faceted view of an entire society in the grip of revolution would not be possible without the diverse origins of each component of the conflict. The plot actually resembles a simplistic adventure story, but this is given weight by the thematic depth of its tragedy.
“… We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it – and neither can we, I guess.”
Nostromo, Page 63
At this point, I must admit that there are elements of pessimism, fatalism, and near-nihilism in this novel that would, in most cases, cause me to roll my eyes. However, there are some mitigating factors that propel this book beyond my usual complaints. One is Conrad’s humanism, which is on ample display in Nostromo. This is the sort of novel that seems to provoke criticism from all ideological corners. It does not paint a pretty picture of imperialism, colonialism, religion, capitalism, or Marxism (nor probably several other ideologies or dogmatic enterprises that I’m missing), but it does affirm the power of love, the sanctity of family, the importance of the individual, and the need for empathy, sympathy, and understanding. He puts individual relationships above politics, which has the potential to annoy those of all political stripes. And since everyone has some inherent political stripe… you get the picture. Of course, I am not above the fray on this (witness my aforementioned eye-rolling!), but I can appreciate the level of detail and thought that have gone into this and which deserves a corresponding amount of consideration in response.
The other major mitigating factor, and the thing that endears me the most to this novel, is that I couldn’t help myself from thing about how similar this novel is to… The Lord of the Rings. Early on in reading one of the flashbacks in Nostromo, I couldn’t help but chuckle as I thought of similar digressions in Tolkien’s infamous high-fantasy. I realize that, in some ways, this is a deeply silly comparison, but that’s precisely why I find it so endearing. Sure, Nostromo is an intensely political novel with keen insights into the nature of mankind, but setting it in a fictional country means that Conrad spends a huge amount of time fleshing it out with history and culture, especially as seen through a handful of characters (each with their own similarly detailed backstory)*.
Sometimes it felt like reading a realistic, non-fantasy version of The Simarillion. Plus, you get numerous characters who have several different names (take the titular Nostromo, who also goes by Giovanni Battista Fidanza, Capataz de Cargadores, etc…), just like the LotR characters (i.e. Strider, Aragorn, Elessar, etc…) And the treasure from the silver mine? Everyone greedily seeks it out, and it corrupts even those described as incorruptible. Sound familiar? No? I’m just a huge nerd? Yeah, that checks out.
Tolkien was famously dismissive of “allegory” and denied any topical meaning or “messages” in his work. This has not stopped people from speculating, which is the point, but there’s a similar humanism in Tolkien’s work that can thwart many political interpretations. Conrad is obviously more bluntly addressing politics in his book (in a way that I’m not sure Tolkien would particularly approve of), but I do think there’s a similar perspective underlying both authors’ work.
If the name “Nostromo” sounds familiar to you at all, it’s probably because it was the name of the mining ship from Ridley Scott’s Alien (similarly, the name of the Colonial Marines’ ship in Aliens is Sulaco, which is the name of the town in Nostromo.) There’s also some thematic similarities, though obviously Alien is more fanciful in its presentation (not to mention that it implies its background setting, rather than explicitly establishing a comprehensive setting the way Nostromo does).
I will leave you now with a selection of quotes from the novel that I found interesting. They will give you the flavor of Conrad’s prose, which is not exactly free from hooptedoodle, but which is stylistic and expressive.
Charles Gould did not open his heart to her in any set speeches. He simply went on acting and thinking in her sight. This is the true method of sincerity.
Nostromo, Page 49
Gould is the owner of the silver mine, and this is a reference to his relationship with his wife, which is a humanizing one that, like a lot of individual characters, offsets some of the cynicism inherent in the novel. It’s also the sort of thing that would give people of a certain political persuasion the hives.
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our actions can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.
Nostromo, Page 54
A nice turn of phrase that might help explain some of our political issues of the day.
In all these households she could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though the government of the country had been a struggle of lust between bands of absurd devils let loose upon the land with sabres and uniforms and grandiloquent phrases. And on all the lips she found a weary desire for peace, the dread of officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration without law, without security, and without justice.
Nostromo, Page 71
Conrad again emphasizing the way individuals are caught up in official events, ground up and spit out of political machinery, and so on… Once again, something that is easy to relate to and apply to our current circumstances.
“I think he can be drawn into it, like all idealists, when he once sees a sentimental basis for his action. But I wouldn’t talk to him. Mere clear facts won’t appeal to his sentiment. It is much better for him to convince himself in his own way. “
Nostromo, page 171
Its easy to think that facts and reason will prevail (and to be fair, they probably should), but that often does not matter to idealists or ideologues, something that will be good to keep in mind during an election year.
It was part of what Decoud would have called his sane materialism that he did not believe in the possibility of friendship existing between a man and a woman.
Nostromo, Page 176
Imagine the takes, the hot takes on this in 1904! One of the many beneficial things about reading older books is that you can see that many topics that concern us today are not new, and indeed, have been hot button issues for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.
There was between them an intimacy of antagonism as close in its way as the intimacy of accord and affection.
Nostromo, Page 200
Maybe not quite directly relevant to LotR, but the notion of conflict being the basis for a relationship that can be strong is one that crops up often (in fiction and in life).
The mere presence of a coward, however passive, brings an element of treachery into a dangerous situation.
Nostromo, Page 216
Not much to say about this one other than that it’s a nice turn of phrase, so I Googled “Lord of the Rings coward” and the results are just a never-ending succession of “Is [x character] a coward?” followed by “No, [x character] is clearly not a coward because of y and z.” Except for Denethor. The way he eats those tomatoes, man.
A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane.
Nostromo, Page 298
A concise description of something that seems to happen a lot, especially in our current social media environment.
“There is no peace and rest in the development of material interests. They have their law and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.”
Nostromo, Page 403-404
Way to finish on an optimistic note, amiright?
* – I should note that parts of this post, particularly the comparison with LotR, are adapted from and originated in a Tasting Notes post from last year.
Since I’ve basically depleted the last Book Queue, it’s time to embark upon my Salty Sea-Dog Era of reading. You might notice a certain bias towards science fiction (and certain realms of non-fiction covering subjects like film or technology) in previous book queues, so I figure it’s worth exploring some other areas. For various reasons, a few different books kept cropping up as “Hmm, I should go out and read that.” and they all happened to take place at sea. I’m going to include one that I’ve already read, but this’ll perhaps motivate me to pick it up again and do a full review here. So here goes:
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad – This is the one I’ve already read and am planning to review in full soon. It’s long been on the larger book queue and I did finally pull the trigger last year. Lots of complicated thoughts about this highly respected literary novel, but that’ll have to wait for the review. True, much of the story takes place in a mining town, but it’s a coastal town, the titular Nostromo is basically the head longshoreman, and enough of the novel takes place on the sea that its subtitle is literally “A Tale of the Seaboard.” More to come.
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville – I suppose no introduction needed here, one of the most famous Great American Novels ever written. At one point a few years ago, I read the first chapter or so on a whim and found it surprisingly engaging, but never got around to reading the full thing. I plan to rectify that this summer.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – When I was growing up, my parents had a bookshelf filled with some sort of series of hardback books of classic novels. One was Moby-Dick, daunting due to it’s size, but another was Treasure Island, an evocative title that always thrilled me. I was perhaps too young when I first picked it up, but never circled back to it, even once I got the reading bug. (Funny to note, the title of the first chapter literally has “sea-dog” in it, though it doesn’t say “salty”, even if I’m sure said sea-dog is actually quite salty.)
Beat to Quarters (aka The Happy Return) by C. S. Forester – The first novel (going by publication) in Forester’s popular Horatio Hornblower series. I’ve read enough novels influenced by this series, particularly ones billed as “Horatio Hornblower in Spaaaace”, that I figure I should probably take a gander and see what all the fuss is about.
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian – The first novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series, one that most would be familiar with because of the underseen film adaptation. I remember quite enjoying the film, though I have not seen it in quite some time. Might be good to revisit in book form.
So there you have it, lots of salty sea-dog fun. Obviously not a ton of novels on this list, but there are two starts to famously long-running series that could provide ample further reading.
The 2024 Hugo Awards finalists were announced a few weeks ago, so I figured it was time to catch up with the Hugos to see what’s been going on. For the uninitiated, it’s been a rocky year for the awards. Let’s take a look at last year’s winners and briefly examine the requisite controversy around the awards (there’s always something, but last year’s faults were somewhat more glaring). Then we’ll take a quick spin through the 2024 finalists to see if it’s worth participating again (spoiler alert: I most likely won’t be participating this year.)
Hugo Awards 2023: Results
I didn’t participate last year, mostly because I didn’t have anything to nominate (it helps to have something worth championing) but also because the last few years have demonstrated that I’m almost completely out of step with the current voting body. This is not to mention that the Worldcon was being held in China, which complicated matters with fears that turned out to be well founded. The controversy primarily surrounded censorship and exclusion of works for political reasons, and the whole thing is a mess. There are tons of overviews of the controversy, so I won’t cover it in detail, but it’s a bit of a mess. You could sorta tell something was off last year just due to the lack of visibility in the process and the numerous delays.
As for the winners, it seemed like a pretty straightforward year (despite the censorship) that’s right in line with previous years (and pretty much what I expected in my Initial Thoughts).
Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher ne Usula Vernon won for best novel. I didn’t read the book, but I’ve read some of Vernon’s work before, and I’ve always enjoyed it well enough (not so much that I would seek out more, but her stories were usually some of the better ones in the short fiction categories). The short fiction categories have some familiar names (another win for Seanan McGuire), but a few new ones too, including a Chinese winner for Best Novelette (not entirely unexpected given the host country – and to be clear, no real controversy here, it’s natural to see participation rise in the host country).
Best Series went to the Children of Time Series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which… is actually a great choice. Tchaikovsky is an author who has never had a novel nominated (I have not checked the short fiction categories, but I don’t remember seeing his name there either) and writes lots of series, which is exactly the sort of thing this awards should go for. Previous awards have often gone to folks who already have a Hugo for a Novel in the series in question (some get nominated in both Novel and Series in the same year). As usual, I still find the logistical overhead for this award a bit daunting (if you haven’t read a given series, how are you supposed to read all of it within the allotted voting period?), but I’ve read enough Tchaikovsky to know that he’s quite good and it’s nice to see him get some recognition.
It appears that this year’s awards have returned to the traditional timeline for the nominations, with the finalists being announced on Easter weekend. Let’s take a quick spin through the Novel finalists:
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (ne S.A. Chakraborty) – Looks to be a fantasy on the high seas sorta adventure and sounds pretty fun. Chakraborty has garnered lots of plaudits and nominations in other awards, but not the Hugos, and it’s always nice to see new names. I’m currently planning my “salty sea dog era” of reading, so maybe I’ll pick this up at some point.
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera – One thing I have to give the Hugo voters credit for is seeking out fantasy novels that aren’t just warmed-over European history, but with wizards and shit. If I was a big fantasy reader, this one might be interesting. It’s a debut novel, so we’ve got yet another new name too.
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh – Looks to be a pretty straightforward Space Opera with queer themes, a pretty standard Hugo choice.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi – The one nominee that I’ve actually already read… and I really enjoyed it! It’s significantly better than last year’s The Kaiju Preservation Society, though it still seems rather slight to be the best SF/F of the year. Certainly worth a look if you like Scalzi or spy-adjacent comedies.
Translation State by Ann Leckie – Leckie returns to the Hugos with another book from the Imperial Radch series, though I believe it looks like a standalone novel set in the Radch universe. Still, I’ve read enough of these that I know I don’t want to read more…
Witch King by Martha Wells – As a big fan of Wells’ Murderbot stories (which have been nominated several times and won multiple awards in Novella and Novel categories), I might actually be tempted to check out one of her fantasy stories, and this seems like a decent enough place to start…
So we’ve got 3 familiar names and former Best Novel winners and 3 new names (and one debut). Genre-wise, there’s 4 fantasy and 2 science fiction, which is not my preferred mix, but it could be worse.
Short fiction categories have some familiar names, but it appears that there’s more Chinese nominees here than even last year, which makes a certain sort of sense (membership in one year allows you to nominate in the following year, so it’s not a big surprise to see this).
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form has… zero billion-dollar Disney productions! Of course, there is a Spider-Man movie (er, half of a Spider-Man movie, womp-womp), but it’s still a pretty decent ballot, with oddball fare like Poor Things mixed in with underseen stuff like Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Nimona. The only real surprise is The Wandering Earth II, another result of increased Chinese participation. All that said, I still kinda expect Barbie to win (though it’s not as much of a lock as EEAAO was last year).
As per usual, I can’t let the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category go without suggesting more underseen alternatives. The most glaring absence: Godzilla Minus One (seems like it would be right up the Hugo voters’ alley). Other worthy movies include The Artifice Girl, Lola, No One Will Save You, Command Z, Knock at the Cabin, and Infinity Pool. There are some eligibility questions for some of those (a bunch of premieres at film fests in 2022 with release in 2023, etc…), but they’re all worth your time. (Some of those are horror adjacent, which generally don’t do well at the Hugos, but I’m not including several other more straightforward horror flicks that are worthy of recognition, like Sick, Brooklyn 45, Talk to Me, and more…)
So yeah, I’m likely not participating again this year, but I might pick up a book or two from the list and will follow along. Definitely curious to see how some of the categories turn out…
A little over ten years ago, Neal Stephenson teased a new series of historical fiction in an interview with the BBC:
Stephenson says he has returned to the past to tap a “similar vein” to that covered in his globe-spanning Baroque Cycle.
“They’re historical novels that have a lot to do with scientific and technological themes and how those interact with the characters and civilisation during a particular span of history,” he says of the new series, refusing to be specific about the exact period.
“It looks like it will start with two back-to-back volumes.
“One of those is largely done and the other will be done early next winter. So I think [they will be released] mid-to-late 2014 perhaps – something like that.”
Not long after, listings for something called Polostan and BombLight started showing up in various places that dorks scour to find new books, but the descriptions associated with those listings seemed to indicate that they were just working titles for Seveneves, which would be released in 2015 (the BombLight listing on Goodreads still has that old Seveneves plot description…)
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. would come out in 2017 and featured some time travelly historical fiction and appeared to be first in a series (his co-author did continue the series, and I’d definitely be up for a third, but I digress…) I thought maybe the historical novels he mentioned were either sidelined permanently, or perhaps they had morphed into the D.O.D.O. books.
However! A couple months ago, some of those placeholder Polostan pages started to be updated with actual details, and now there’s even an official Harper Collins page, complete with a new plot description:
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Termination Shock and Cryptonomicon, the first installment in a monumental new trilogy—an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging the dawn of the Atomic Age.
The first installment in Neal Stephenson’s Bomb Light cycle, Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.
Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic, and the start of a captivating new series from Neal Stephenson.
Well that’s certainly interesting… Funnily enough, the plot doesn’t mention any particular scientific or technological themes (I guess “dawn of the Atomic Age” is something), so it’s quite possible this is just a new historical fiction series, but who knows? Also: who cares? I guess goobers like me, but whatever the case, we’re getting some new Stephenson soon. The Russia angle feels relevant without being too on the nose, and I’m guessing this will be more of a spy thriller type of historical fiction, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Current release date is October 15, 2024, which is right in line with Stephenson’s normal cadence of new books every 3-4 years. No book cover yet, and who knows, maybe they’ll further complicate matters by changing the title. (Hat tip to Kaedrin friend and fellow Stephenson fan ARNE for the pointer…)
Update: Book cover has been revealed, so I added it above.
Vintage Science Fiction Month is the brainchild of the Little Red Reviewer. The objective: Read and discuss “older than I am” Science Fiction in the month of January.
Info-Dumps inhabit a unique place in Science Fiction. Much maligned and discouraged by conventional standards, they nonetheless serve an informative need that might otherwise be impossible in a traditional narrative. Obviously this can be done well and it can be done poorly, not everyone can be Greg Egan or Neal Stephenson, and in a very real sense it often conflicts with admirable rules of thumb like “show, don’t tell.”
There are some tricks that can hide the worldbuilding in the very mind of the reader by implying rather than baldly stating information. The typical example of this is when you encounter the phrase “ground car” in a science fiction story. There’s an obvious meaning here, a car that drives on the ground just like many of us ride in every day, but the inclusion of “ground” as a modifier implies not just the existence of other modes of transportation (most likely an “air car”) but potentially entire worlds that can be unlocked (including, for example, differences in architecture or how accessibility of previously difficult terrain changes, and so on). Eric S Raymond explains how these SF words indicate prototype worlds, delves deeply into what makes them work, and how this operations within the works of the genre, but the ultimate point is that science fiction operates on information and as such, info-dumps, even ones cleverly implied by previously established jargon are a key part of the genre.
I say all of this because Olaf Stapledon’s 1938 Star Maker is less of a novel than an extended info-dump. A man gazes at the stars one night only to find himself hurtling through the firmament, a disembodied mind exploring the cosmos, stumbling on alien cultures, and traveling beyond galactic boundaries, eventually to glimpse the eponymous Star Maker, an inveterate and eternal tinkerer who has been creating each cosmos with more ambition than the last.
All of this basically takes the form of a sorta fictional Athropological text, part memoir, part travelogue (I suppose the more accurate term would be Xenology). Stylistically stripped down, simplistic, and conversational in tone, it’s not really a fast-paced page-turner, but neither is it bland or boring. This is why info-dumps are generally frowned upon in the first place, but on the other hand, the idea quotient is astounding. There’s a massive amount of imagination on display as Stapleton cycles through observations of astronomical features, exoplanets, alien life (humanoid at first, but then stretching boundaries to all manner of strange consciousnesses, galactic societies, utopias, and eventually even alternative cosmoses.)
The sheer quantity of novel ideas on display is impressive. Stapledon covers a lot of ground and popularizes if not originates numerous concepts that would become famous genre tropes later. For example, Freeman Dyson credits his idea of a hypothetical megastructure that surrounds a star and captures a large percentage of its solar power output to Star Maker, even suggesting it be called a Stapledon Sphere (it’s now known as a Dyson Sphere). That example is also illustrative of the fact that Stapledon was writing this before the terminology or jargon was even invented. He touches on things like the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Great Filter, and the Dark Forest Hypothesis, even if he didn’t have the words to describe it. And I’m only really scratching the surface here. There are a ton of big ideas that originate from this book. The only thing that isn’t particularly well captured are computers and artificial intelligence (and associated speculations like the Technological Singularity, etc…), but that’s a topic that wasn’t particularly well explored in science fiction for another 30ish years (and even those early examples were rudimentary compared to later efforts).
More surprising is how spiritual the book can get. Stapledon was an agnostic, but the yearning for meaning and utopia that is present here is essentially a religious impulse. When the titular Star Maker appears, it’s portrayed in conflicting terms as indifferent yet somehow also loving, but also at its core: unknowable. Our humble narrator is overwhelmed by the task of describing it using our imperfect language, and essentially leaves it at that. Still, he describes many an alternative cosmos, including one that is basically Judeo-Christian in nature: a universe that consists of successive phases where lives end in one phase and reappear in another (there are two alternative secondary phases that could be described as heaven and hell). Stapledon’s story doesn’t entirely resolve anything here – you could see this as a a Turtles all the way down type of situation – and as such, there are some who could consider this view of God as heretical. For instance, C.S. Lewis, in a letter to Arthur C. Clarke, famously quipped that Star Maker “ends in sheer devil worship.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but the spiritual endgame of the universe is something you don’t see often in science fiction.
It’s a fascinating, seemingly foundational work of science fiction. It doesn’t necessarily dive deeply into every concept, but it prefigures much of what would come after. It’s not really a beginner’s text, nor is it a fast-paced page-turner, but it’s not impenetrable either. Very much worth seeking out for students of the genre and a perfect example of the sort of thing Vintage SF Month is all about.
It’s become fashionable to point to a specific date on the Gregorian calendar and call it arbitrary (and I’m certainly guilty of this), but the calendar is based on astronomical movements in the solar system. Even granting that it doesn’t perfectly capture, for example, moon cycles (not to mention other idiosyncrasies), it’s not entirely arbitrary. It’s rational and considered. Our tendency to use this specific time to take stock of our lives, where we’ve been, and where we’re headed, is perhaps a touch more arbitrary, but I dunno, it’s cold out and I’m stuck inside, so might as well do something. Given the state of the world these last few years (not to mention that 2024 is a presidential election year in the US), such examinations can get a bit depressing, but let’s focus on the positive and less-existentially terrifying aspects of life, like book reading in 2023.
I keep track of my reading at Goodreads (we should be friends there), and they have a bunch of rudimentary statistical visualization tools that give a nice overview of my reading habits over time, especially now that I’ve been logging books there for over a decade. So let’s get to it…
Graphing Books and Pages Over Time
I read 56 books in 2023, a little above last year (and my usual calendar-based goal of 52) but still a far cry from the pandemic fueled heights of 2020. It’s more or less in line with pre-pandemic reading patterns…
You can see the full list of books I read in 2023 on Goodreads. Pandemic patterns have mostly disappeared, socializing and other activities are higher than the past few years, and so on, such that earlier in the year I was actually lagging behind my usual goal. But then I got kinda hooked on a series (who happened to have a great audibook reader) and that fueled something of a resurgence.
Average book length was 347 pages, a slight uptick from last year, but basically on par with established patterns (and honestly not that far behind my record average of 356, set in 2013). I didn’t read a lot of short fiction this year (I also didn’t participate in the Hugos, which can drive shorter fiction reading), though I didn’t read a ton of massive tomes either. Overall page length is also basically on par with last year as well (again, a slight uptick).
Of course, we must acknowledge the inherent variability in page numbers, which can be very misleading. In any case, this seems like a pretty solid pace that I seem to be gravitating towards.
The extremes
The shortest story being just 26 pages is notable given the relatively high average this year, but it was basically the only short fiction I read all year (maybe one novella?). The longest story being 758 pages is the lowest since 2017, though not by much. Basically, this just speaks to me having read mostly 200-400 page books throughout the year, with only a handful of things significantly above that count. The most shelved book is Agatha Christie’s first Poirot book, a series that I read several entries in last year (and will most likely continue to explore). The lowest shelved book was something I didn’t enjoy very much, which perhaps indicates why it’s not very popular… All of these extremes are fiction, and I do seem to have had an off year on the non-fiction front.
Assorted Observations and Thoughts
I’ve been leaving off the graph of publication years because I read some Shakespeare a few years ago which has made the overall chart look awkward (a ton of whitespace), but last year’s reading was sufficiently diverse in publication year that I think it’s worth trying to crop the chart down a bit.
The X Axis is cut off to avoid copious whitespace, but the last two columns are 2023 (click the image to embiggen and see the full, uncropped image).
Of course, there’s still something of a bias towards recent releases, but the overall pattern is more consistent.
Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad was the oldest book I read in 2023. Published in 1904, it’s also the fourth oldest book I’ve read since 2010. That said, the bulk of Agatha Christie novels that I read were all in the 1920s and 1930s, and there was also some Vintage SF Month entries early in the year. Plus, a bunch of 1960s and 1970s novels creeped in, which drove a pleasing pattern to 2023’s reading in the graph above…
7 non-fiction books in 2023, a dramatic decrease from last year. I can’t think of a particular reason for this, but it’s something I should try to improve in 2024, I think…
14 books written by women in 2023, a significant decrease from last year. This isn’t something I generally try to consciously control, but it’s worth noting that at least half of those 14 were written by Agatha Christie. I suspect this number will go up in 2024, but you never know…
26 science fiction books in 2023, a bit of an uptick, mostly driven by the Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson, which I kinda got hooked on (and which represents a rather significant portion of my overall reading in 2023). I have mostly caught up with the series at this point, though, so it’s a bit of an outlier in 2023.
My average rating on Goodreads was a 3.9, which is a tad higher than last yea, but I will note that I tend to round up to 4 stars for the grand majority of books. A lot of those 4 ratings would be 3.5 if that option was available. Also of note: I didn’t participate in the Hugo Awards this year, and that tends to drive at least a few lower ratings…
So 2023 was yet another solid year in book reading. The only thing I think I’ll consciously change in 2024 is seeking out some more non-fiction. I’m still on the fence for participating in the Hugos, but I’ll at least be checking in on the nominees.
Anywho, stay tuned for the year in movie watching, at least one Vintage Science Fiction Month review, and the kickoff of the Kaedrin Movie Awards, starting in mid-January and culminating in the traditional top 10 in February sometime (yep, two months after most people post theirs, I know, I know).
