Arts & Letters

A few years ago, Neal Stephenson wrote an article in Wired called Innovation Starvation. In it, he laments the decline of the space program (“Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars?”) and a general failure of our society to get big things done. He brought up concerns at a conference, and promptly got a finger pointed back at him: if Science Fiction authors weren’t so pessimistic, they might have inspired a new generation of folks who actually could get things done. Intrigued, Stephenson set out to correct that imbalance with something called Project Hieroglyph a collaboration between SF authors and real scientists at Arizona State University. There were two major challenges that Stephenson laid out: a moratorium on dystopian futures as well as “technology so advanced that the world it describes bears little or no resemblance to our own world.” In short, no “hackers, hyperspace and holocaust”. The result of all this is a collection of short stories, also called Hieroglyph, that was recently published. I would probably have read this in any case, but I was also hoping to find some short fiction to nominate for the Hugo Awards. Alas, like most anthologies that I’ve read, this collection is decidedly hit or miss. Surprisingly, there are quite a few stories that do read like a dystopia, and many seem to have a fundamentally pessimistic idea at their core. This is quite distressing, considering that this collection was supposed to get us away from such things. It’s not all bad, of course, and there are several bright spots, but I was overall pretty disappointed.

• Atmosphæra Incognita by Neal Stephenson – Unsurprisingly, this is one of my favorites of the collection. It’s a story about building a twenty-kilometer tall building. Stephenson explores the limits of our current civil engineering capabilities in his usual detail, and I am totally a sucker for the style. There are several moments of conceptual breakthrough and the sense of wonder is palpable. This is impressive since he’s not really proposing any crazy new technologies. This 20 km building is being built with current technologies, just on a much larger scale than anyone has actually dreamed to do. Stephenson, at least, seems to have taken his guidelines to heart. In addition, it feels like something actually happens in this story. Stephenson doesn’t downplay the difficulties of such a project, and the main conflict is derived from that, but his attitude is optimistic and the story is a great read. Highly recommended, and will probably be on my short fiction ballot somewhere (is this a short story or novelette?)
• Girl In Wave : Wave in Girl by Kathleen Ann Goonan – The idea at the core of this story is an interesting one, a way to dramatically improve the learning capabilities of the brain, and Goonan does a decent enough job exploring the possibilities. Alas, there’s not much of a story to hang this on. It reads more like a history lesson or short memoir than a real story. Nothing wrong with that, to be sure, and the idea is at least interesting and optimistic. Ranking this somewhere near the top of the middle tier of the stories.
• By the Time We Get To Arizona by Madeline Ashby – This one is about the interplay of technology with immigration. Once again, I’m not sure the story is particularly eventful, and the idea isn’t super clear either. In fact, one could read this more as a dystopia (especially with respect to the surveillance state), though Ashby thankfully doesn’t go fully down that path. This would be in the middle tier of the stories.
• The Man Who Sold the Moon by Cory Doctorow – This is the longest story in the collection and it reads strangely dystopic in its outlook. It centers around a couple of Burning Man like festivals, and spends a lot of time going through automated 3D printer robot thingies. Eventually it gets to the interesting part, where we send a bunch of these robots to the Moon to create the building blocks for our next trip to the moon. Alas, I was not particularly inspired by this story. The impression I’m left with is that we’d send these robots up there, they would build a bunch of stuff for us, but we’d never get there because we’re too busy destroying ourselves back on Earth or something like that. Lower tier!
• Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA by Lee Konstantinou – Another seeming dystopia, exploring some interesting ideas about drones and the commons, but it’s still an ultimately pessimistic look. Lower tier!
• Degrees of Freedom by Karl Schroeder – This is an odd one for me. On the one hand, it’s exploring one of the more relevant and important ideas in the anthology. It’s all about how Big Data and collaborative decision-making tools could make the political process more effective, and the system described here really stuck with me. Of course, we are talking about a short story here, so I have about a gazillion questions and am not really convinced that the particular implementation described in the story would work quite that well, but that’s also kinda the point. The particular system described here probably won’t work, but it does hit that goal of inspiration pretty hard. Bottom of the top tier!
• Two Scenarios for the Future of Solar Energy by Annalee Newitz – This one takes the form of a guided tour through a couple of futuristic, carbon-neutral cities, each of which uses an approach that mimics biological processes in some way. It’s got some interesting ideas, but the “guided tour” approach didn’t really work that well for me. Middle tier.
• A Hotel in Antarctica by Geoffrey Landis – An interesting idea and Landis does spend time working through the practical aspects of building a hotel in Antarctica. We hit it from many angles: political, environmental, and physical. There’s even a surprising interaction with an environmental activist, though I found that a bit on the nose too. Still, it’s a fun little story that ranks somewhere towards the bottom of the top tier here…
• Periapsis by James L. Cambias – Among the more out-there efforts in terms of being very futuristic, but it’s not so far-fetched as to be unapproachable. It’s set in the far future, and it covers a competition amongst a bunch of young adults. The prize: citizenship on Deimos, one of Mars’ moons. Deimos has become the economic powerhouse of the solar system, and features a small population of very innovative people. This is one of the few short stories that actually feels like a story. There’s an actual plot here! And there’s plenty of interesting bits of technology and breakthroughs too. It’s among the best in the collection and I plan on nominating this for a Hugo. Top tier!
• The Man Who Sold the Stars by Gregory Benford – An interesting story that covers how an ambitious businessman started mining out asteroids in order to fund his search for other Earth-like planets. It’s an odd one in that we’re spending time with the richest of the rich, but it’s implied that things aren’t going quite as well for everyone else, at least in the near term. By the end, though, things seem to be working out, and there’s a clever little bit around a nearby Earth-like planet that I enjoyed. Top of the middle tier? Bottom of the top tier?
• Entanglement by Vandana Singh – This one really didn’t do it for me. It’s all climate change and misery. I think. The only thing I really remember about this story is how much I didn’t like it, which probably says something. Bottom tier!
• Elephant Angels by Brenda Cooper – This one proposes the use of drones to prevent Ivory poaching (or track down the poachers after the fact). It’s an interesting idea, but comes off feeling a little slight compared to the other stories in the collection. Then again, that sorta rings true as well. Bottom of the middle tier.
• Covenant by Elizabeth Bear – An interesting look at a convicted serial killer who gets “rightminded” to prevent future murders. It reminded me a little of Clockwork Orange, only it seems to approve of this treatment. There’s lots to dig into here from a moral and social aspect, and Bear also tells a quick little story here too. Bottom of the top tier.
• Quantum Telepathy by Rudy Rucker – Lots of bioengineering and the titular concept of Quantum Telepathy work reasonably well, but it feels kinda like bio-punk or something like that. It’s a little too weird to be all that inspirational, but it works well enough I guess. Middle tier!
• Transition Generation by David Brin – At first this one feels like a dystopia, but it turns out well in a fairly predictable way that is nonetheless pretty entertaining to read. Top of the middle tier!
• The Day It All Ended by Charlie Jane Anders – One of the more fun entries in the collection, I have a hard time believing this could ever happen, but it’s still a fun story that tries to pull the rug out from underneath you several times. Anders is playing the game well enough that I don’t mind some of the more ludicrous aspects of the story. Top of the middle tier.
• Tall Tower by Bruce Sterling – The second story about a giant tower, this one has a decidedly less optimistic approach, though it’s clearly not a dystopia or anything like that. I’ve never been a big fan of Cyberpunk, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the authors famous for that (see also: Rudy Rucker) don’t really connect with me. This story has some interesting stuff in it, but it also doesn’t really go anywhere.

And there you have it. There’s also an interview at the end that has some interesting stuff, as well as a few introductions that are interesting reading. On balance, it’s a decent collection, though again, it’s hit or miss, and there were several stories that baffled me by their inclusion. Still, I’ve got a solid two stories that I would like to nominate (the Stephenson and the Cambias)

In recent readings, I seem to have inadvertently stumbled upon a series of First Contact stories. Like any sub-genre, these generally include other sub-genres (notably military SF and Space Opera), but there’s actually something of a through line with these three books that I found interesting. I will start with the most famous of the three, an exemplar frequently referenced when discussing First Contact stories:

• The Mote in God’s Eye by by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle – This is one of those novels that shows up in “Best Of SF” lists all over the place, and as a mix of military SF, Space Opera, and First Contact, I was pretty well on board with the premise. And yet, it took me quite a while to actually get into the story, which is my primary problem with the book: it’s a bit on the bloated side. Much time is spent with a lot of characters, but they still tend to feel two dimensional and functional, rather than fully fleshed out. This is not normally a problem, except that a lot of time is spent on character building, so if you’re going to go down that route, you should make that worthwhile. Fortunately, the dilemma at the heart of the book is a truly fascinating puzzle, both in figuring out what is causing the problem and what kinds of solutions could be proposed. The puzzle is posed by the alien species first encountered by humans in this book, and results as an interplay between biology and sociology. It also explores the weird moral quandaries of First Contact stories. I won’t go into more detail here because while this book is a little bloated and long in the tooth, the core ideas are fantastic and worth exploring. Just be patient with it at first, as it takes a while before things start to get really interesting.
• Blindsight by Peter Watts – This book made waves back in 2005/2006 (it was nominated for a Hugo), and as a novel of ideas, it is fantastic. Again, though, I’m left with characters that Watts wants to delve into, but are nevertheless not all that relatable. They are interesting, as a point of fact they are all “freaks” of one kind or another, but there’s no real point of entry for us normal humans. The closest we get is a guy named Siri Keeton, but he’s had portions of his brain removed and isn’t the most likable guy in the world. Again, not a terrible thing in a novel of ideas, except that Watts spends a bunch of time, for example, going into Siri’s childhood friend and ex-girlfriend. Outside of Siri, we’ve got a linguist with multiple personalities, a few other folks, and a Vampire. Yes, a vampire, and actually that’s one of my favorite bits about the book. As the universe of the book goes, Vampires were real predators from the distant past that have been resurrected through recovered DNA. They are far more intelligent than humans, their brains operating in parallel, allowing them to maintain multiple simultaneous thoughts in their mind. This leads to advanced pattern recognition, which ended up being their original downfall – they have trouble perceiving right angles (i.e. a cross would actually harm them). In the late 21st century, they’ve been resurrected and given drugs to help with the Euclidian problem, but their vastly different way of approaching the world means their speech patterns are cryptic and odd. They are very nearly an “alien” presence, and in fact, they are one of many explorations of consciousness that seems to really drive this book. The first contact with aliens goes rather oddly, and it’s never particularly clear if they are a conscious intelligence, or something less than that. There is a very rich exploration of the concept of Philosophical Zombies, for instance, among other ideas. Watts does not dumb anything down and really lays on the ideas thick. This makes for interesting reading, but it’s also clear that Watts has a very pessimistic approach to all of this, which hampers things a bit for me. Not fatally so, to be sure, and it’s clear that Watts knows his stuff and plays the game well. I just wish there was a bit more of a story here to hang all of these interesting ideas on… Watts just recently released a sequel of sorts (at least, it’s set in the same universe) called Echopraxia. After some initial Hugo Award buzz, the chatter around this seems to have dropped off considerably. I don’t know that I loved Blindsight enough to run after Echopraxia right away, but if it does get nominated, I will look forward to reading it.
• A Sword Into Darkness by Thomas A. Mays – This was one of the 2014 books I was looking to read as a potential Hugo Nominee for next year’s awards. As a self-published book in a sub-genre that the general Hugo voter tends not to like (military SF), I seriously doubt it will make the slate (or even come close, really), but I may consider nominating it. As a first contact story, it takes the angle of a potential invasion of aliens. Given the realities of space travel, we can, of course, see them coming once they turn their ship around and start decelerating, thus revealing their thrust. This is an implicit reference to The Mote in God’s Eye, made before a character in this book explicitly references the classic. A team of humans on earth recognizes the threat and privately finances the creation of a greeting party (complete with new drive technologies and weapons). The government is initially dismissive, then helpful, then, well, I won’t spoil anything there. The science behind everything is very well thought out, especially when it comes to the weaponry and battle sequences. This shouldn’t be too surprising, since the author was a longtime member of the US Navy. Of course, so is our main protagonist, a pretty obvious Gary Stu character who gets to fall in love with another cliche or whatever you’d call the SF equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. That being said, these are fun characters. They don’t have a ton of depth, but at least Mays doesn’t try to shoehorn it in where it doesn’t belong. They do their job well enough, and I enjoyed spending time with them. The story is well paced and has a more satisfying plot than the previous two novels mentioned in this post. Mays’ prose style isn’t anything to write home about, but it’s functional enough and propels the story along nicely. As plot goes, it’s a pretty tight little story, and Mays even manages to do something that most alien invasion stories get wrong: he’s come up with a compelling reason for a violent invasion. This is one of the major problems with most invasion stories. Given the amazing amount of resources and time it takes to reach another planet with a sentient species, why bother? When it comes to resources, our planet is hardly unique. You could mine whatever you needed from elsewhere in our solar system (or presumably lots of other systems) without ever having to risk your target fighting back. And so on. Mays has devised a pretty interesting reason for the invasion, one that gets at the hard of what makes a lot of First Contact stories tick while managing to turn it on its end at the same time. It’s an impressive trick, and something that elevates this book above a simple trashy SF Space Opera or Military SF story. I’m still on the fence in terms of whether or not I would nominate this, but if I did, it would be primarily because of the motivation factor.

Up next on the First Contact front, The Three-Body Problem, another potential Hugo contender.

Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice was a huge breakout novel that vanquished all comers during awards season. It racked up wins from Locus, the BSFA, the Arthur C. Clarke, Nebula, and Hugo Awards. As you might imagine, the recently published sequel, Ancillary Sword, was eagerly awaited. I enjoyed the first book despite some reservations, so I was really hoping this one would shore up some of the lacking elements of its predecessor. What I got was completely unexpected.

This is a really odd novel. It picks up where the first book left off, with Breq accepting a commission as an officer in Anaander Mianaai’s fleet and leading an expedition to… a space station with some minor strategic importance. There she butts heads with the local forces, led by one Captain Hetnys, and otherwise gets embroiled with various bits of local politics.

Like it’s predecessor, this book is somewhat lacking in plot, though I will say that it does become somewhat tighter as a result. Unlike it’s predecessor, many of the interesting things about the first book have been jettisoned. The complex non-linear narrative is gone. The first book’s heady mix of hard and soft SF has shifted much more to the soft SF side. Many of the most intriguing things about the first book, particularly the ambitious exploration of hive minds and what that means for identity, while present, aren’t really expanded upon in any real way. When Anaander Mianaai’s condition is revealed in the first book, it opened up many tantalizing opportunities… that are almost completely bypassed in this sequel. The mysterious alien presence of the Presger was hinted at in the first book, and while the Presger’s ambassador plays a significant role in this book, we still don’t really get much in the way of information on the Presger. Even some of the softer ideas, like the way Radch culture doesn’t distinguish between the sexes, calling everyone by female pronouns, aren’t really expanded on at all. I suppose we get some closer looks at Radch society, but little beyond what we already knew.

It’s a decidedly low-key approach that is not entirely unwelcome, but which makes me wonder where Leckie is trying to go with this series. It started off as a series filled with interesting ideas and an epic scope, and yet, it’s all shaken down to this rather simple story that doesn’t seem to really advance the series all that much. I suppose the implication is that the events of this book are happening all over the Radchaai Empire, which would make sense. And it’s not really bad per say, it’s just unexpected. Conceptually, I think this is something that could have worked really well, lots of crunchy ideas on a smaller, close-up scale. Alas, all of the interesting ideas originate in the first book and aren’t expanded upon very much in this sequel.

The book has a more episodic approach than its predecessor, and many of the individual episodes are quite good. The opening reveals Breq to be a capable leader who immediately recognizes the deception of one of her officers. There’s a great sequence where a pissed off Breq goes to the armory for target practice. Since she is a thousand of years old AI, she’s pretty good at it, leading to some slackjawed crew members (Seivarden memorably notes: “Fleet Captain is pretty fucking badass.”) Some of the incidents at the space station are less successful, though there are plenty of interesting bits about the formality of Radch society. There’s a decent enough courtroom drama at one point, and several other interesting tidbits here or there. Leckie’s not particularly great at action, but there’s not a ton of action here anyway and she gets the job done. Many of the new side characters are pretty fantastic. Alas, when you add it all up, it’s merely the sum of its parts, nothing more.

So I have mixed feelings about this. There are many bits to like, and I will say that it seems to be aging well in my head, but I don’t think it’s quite the equal of its predecessor either. It’s almost certainly going to appear on the Hugo ballot next year, but I’m doubting that it will win. One other side note: I listened to this on audio book, and I hated the reader. She was fine most of the time, but for certain characters, particularly the ones we’re not supposed to like, she puts on this ridiculous, high pitched, exaggerated cockney accent (I think). That wouldn’t be a disaster if she didn’t use the exact same voice for multiple characters, and if the story weren’t so talky (which it really is, and it gets kinda weird when Breq is speaking with two of the weirdly accented people). Just a fair warning, you’d probably be better off reading this one rather than listening.

I read a fair amount, but there are only a few authors whose output I eagerly await. Longtime readers already know that Neal Stephenson and Lois McMaster Bujold are the ringleaders, but John Scalzi is also among their ranks. Scalzi rankles a fair amount of folks because of his politics (which have been getting more and more pronounced over time), but in general, I’ve found his novels to be enjoyable pageturners. Being “easy to read” also rankles a certain element of fandom, those who seek “literary” status as opposed to entertainment and good old fashioned storytelling. Scalzi won a Best Novel Hugo award last year for Redshirts, which produced much teeth-gnashing from a wide range of people. It was an odd novel, but it’s one that seems to have aged well in my head (my only issues with it were meta-issues). I suspect I would not have ranked it #1 that year, but like this year’s Ancillary Justice win, I can’t really fault people from voting for what they like – the Hugo is a populist award, after all. So it’s with this baggage that I come to Scalzi’s latest novel, Lock In. In short, I found it disappointing. Not bad, per say, but I have trouble mustering up much enthusiasm.

Lock In takes place in the near future, after a global pandemic of something called Haden’s Syndrome that mostly presented flu-like symptoms, but for about 1% of the population, resulted in locked-in syndrome. This is a real condition that is thankfully pretty rare, but in the world of the novel, the amount of locked-in patients (called “Hadens” in the book) exploded. The world adapted and developed a whole suite of solutions, including a Haden-only virtual reality space, embedded neural networks, and robot-like machines that can be “driven” by Hadens. This is all worldbuilding though, and the story proper is a pretty straightforward police procedural, following FBI agents Chris Shane (a Haden himself) and Leslie Vann as the investigate a Haden-related death.

Science Fiction is perhaps infamous for its reliance on exposition and info-dumps, but the first chapter of this book is a pretty egregious example. It baldly lays out the worldbuilding, encyclopedia-style, and as near as I can tell, it’s completely superfluous. You get a lot of the same information through context as the story unfolds. I may be griping a little too hard about this, but it started me off on the wrong foot, and it took a while to recover.

While I’m complaining about things, Scalzi’s politics are showing. Of course, an author’s politics are always showing in one way or another, and Scalzi’s past novels were no exception, but this time around there are completely unnecessary tangents on things like, for example, gun control. These are disappointing tidbits, but fortunately, they aren’t pervasive. On the other hand, Scalzi’s concern with gender is much more successful. Agent Vann is great, a smart, tough, hard-drinking veteran agent who reminded me of the well connected smuggler at the heart of Polar City Blues (another SF mystery that, alas, I wound up enjoying more than Lock In). If you are paying attention, (and if you read Scalzi’s blog, how could you not pay attention to this stuff?) you’ll notice that Chris Shane’s gender is not specified. This apparently blew some people’s minds, but I was expecting this sort of thing from Scalzi. Of course, it’s pretty easy to pull off when your character is represented by a featureless robot 99.9% of the time in the novel, which did make me wonder much more about the lives of Hadens. Again, this is a detective thriller, so there’s not a lot of time given to exploring these aspects of a Haden’s life, but as tangents go, that would have been a welcome one.

The overall mystery is well done, but nothing particularly special. There aren’t any grand revelations, but it’s more satisfying than your typical episode of [insert CBS procedural here]. It took me longer than usual to be hooked (perhaps because of that clunky opening chapter), and while Scalzi normally excels at snappy dialogue, it wasn’t quite as snappy as his other recent efforts.

I ultimately did enjoy the book, but I found myself nitpicking, which I generally attribute to some deeper dislike (though I’m having trouble pinpointing that). It has been getting pretty good reviews though, so I’m fully expecting that it will be nominated for a Hugo next year (it will not, however, be appearing on my nominating ballot). Apparently Lock In was also optioned for a television show, and a SF police procedural might actually work really well. So I wasn’t totally on board with this book, but regardless, I’m very much looking forward to the second Human Division novel (er, collection?), as I really loved the first installment (even if it ended on an unexpected cliffhanger).