Science Fiction

SF Book Review – Part 41: The Road to Roswell and moar!

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).

The Road to Rosewell

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?

A Half-Built Garden

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…

Vintage Science Fiction Month: Star Maker

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.

Star Maker book cover

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.

SF Book Review – Part 40: Expeditionary Force and More

It’s been a while since once of these. This is partly due to covering some books in Tasting Notes style posts or Vintage SF Month posts, but mostly because I’ve been reading less SF. Or maybe not, but what I have been reading has been part of a single series (which I’ll cover below). Anywho, I thought it was time to catch up and clear the baffles before the Six Weeks of Halloween gets started in September.


Columbus Day, by Craig Alanson – Expeditionary Force Series – Aliens choose the thematically appropriate Columbus Day to invade. Sergeant Joe Bishop organizes a small counteroffensive, and eventually ends up joining with different aliens who come to Earth’s rescue. Now he’s headed offworld to fight the invaders. But is he fighting for the right side?

Expeditionary Force Book 1: Columbus Day

I’m eliding a lot of things because the plot here is almost besides the point. This is straight-down-the-middle military science fiction comfort food. The defining characteristics of the series don’t really take hold until about halfway through the first book, when (spoiler alert, I guess) Skippy the Magnificent arrives. Skippy is an ancient and powerful AI that decides to help out lowly monkeys humans in their quest to not be wiped out by various warring factions in the galaxy.

Whether or not the series will work for you depends greatly upon how much you like the bro-ey bickering between Skippy and Joe Bishop, dad jokes, military slang, and pew-pew style action, as well as the general problem solving patterns that represent the bulk of the series. Even if you do like those things (and I enjoy them well enough), the series gets extremely repetitive, and while Alanson never takes it easy on our protagonists and forces them to come up with workable solutions, they do sometimes rely a bit too heavily on Skippy’s almost magical powers. And there’s this whole thing where Skippy is a genius but can’t ever seem to think up the basic schemes that Bishop proposes. Skippy’s frustration at this sort of thing gets old fast, but the series eventually outgrows it as Skippy and Joe (and the rest of the crew) establish a more meaningful rapport.

There are fifteen books in the Expeditionary Force series (and a couple of spinoff books called Mavericks) and I’m about two-thirds of the way finished, so obviously this works for me. I won’t call it mindblowing and it’s not especially filled with the sense-of-wonder that populates the best SF, but it’s entertaining and fun and absolutely perfect audiobook fodder. It helps that the audiobook narrator, R.C. Bray, is excellent. What’s the audiobook equivalent of a page-turner? That’s what this series is.

Alanson does a good job exploring various dynamics of the universe he set up, from the differing alien factions to the technology and other worldbuilding, and as mentioned earlier, he never takes it easy on our protagonists, who always encounter problems on top of problems. It does get repetitive, and sometimes the story bogs down into minutiae of a specific operation that, in the grand scheme of things, probably isn’t that important. This leads to the books feeling a bit samey and repetitive (hence I’m reviewing the entire series here, not individual entries). Alanson’s good at that sort of problem solving stuff, and his strategic outlook on the galaxy’s various forces works. Interpersonal relationships are perhaps not as successful; the professional military stuff works very well, the more romantic stuff a bit less so. Pretty much par for the course there.

There’s some semblance of a larger background story surrounding Skippy’s past and the Elder race that supposedly “transcended” eons ago, but that stuff is super slowly explored (like, don’t get your hopes up, even when it seems like progress is being made). I’m assuming this stuff will come into play as the series comes to a close (though I’m guessing that Alanson could keep this sort of thing going indefinitely), which could be interesting. All in all, I’m enjoying the series. Your mileage may vary, depending on how much of Skippy and the treading-of-water inherent in these stories you can tolerate at any given time.


Paradox Bound, by Peter Clines – Eli has a few encounters with a mysterious woman who wears a tri-corn hat, drives a steampunk version of a Model-A Ford, and is being chased by… something. So Eli and the woman go on the road, but this is a road through time and history. So yeah, this is a sorta goofy Mystery Box style time travel story. It’s not exactly rigorous, but there’s some clever twists and turns and the villains are suitably creepy.

It’s perhaps not as good as 14 or The Fold, but Clines is good at turning pages (or the audio equivalent; this is another good audobook presentation) and has decent storytelling instincts. This isn’t breaking any new ground, but it’s fun and interesting and worth a look if you’re into American History or simple time travel stories with a hint of horror lurking in the background.


The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke – An engineer seeks to build a space elevator, but runs into challenges ranging from the technical, to the geographic, to the political, to the religious. The concept of a space elevator had been around for a while, but Clarke was among the first to portray such a thing, and he does so in a fairly thorough fashion.

The potential sites for such a project are limited, and the most promising site is in a fictionalized version of Sri Lanka. As our engineer works through various obstacles, we also get a series of flashbacks to thousands of years earlier as a Sri Lankan king builds a palace (complete with a pleasure garden and functioning fountains) high on the mountain top. The parallels between the two projects are well established and provide some themetic heft and characterization that is atypical of Clarke’s oeuvre.

It’s a short novel that nevertheless covers a lot of ground, but still hews to a lot of Clarke’s common themes and subjects, particularly once you get towards the ending (which I will not spoil!) This won a Hugo award in 1980, and it’s easy to see why, even if it’s not Clarke’s most propulsive or exciting effort.


Slow Time Between the Stars, by John Scalzi – Short story about an AI sent out into space on a desperate mission to find a new home for humanity. Of course, space is big, so it takes a long time to traverse, and that gives the AI plenty of time to think about it’s place in the universe, what it was built to do, and more importantly, what it should do. There’s a few nuggets of a good idea here, and this functions just fine as a short story, but it’s not breaking new ground and it comes off as somewhat preachy and condescending on Scalzi’s part. Still, he’s a good writer and this is a snappy little story with some interesting notions.


I’m finishing off some mystery/crime books I’ve been exploring of late, and then I have several horror books I’m looking forward to during the Six Weeks of Halloween, but I’ve got a few SF books on tap for later in the year.

Revisiting Snow Crash

I bought the paperback edition of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash sometime around 1993-1994. Near as I can tell, this was the first edition of the mass market paperback (Bantam paperback edition / May 1993). Obviously, I enjoyed it quite a bit at the time, and it’s become one of the few books I’ve reread multiple times. As a book of dense ideas, it’s natural that new things strike me with each subsequent reread. People like to dismiss rereading/rewatching because the book hasn’t changed, but that doesn’t take into account that you’ve changed (and the world has changed… not to mention that the book actually might have been changed without notice for dubious reasons).

My first read of Snow Crash struck me as a fun Science Fiction action story about a samurai sword-wielding pizza delivery boy saving the world from a computer virus that originated in Sumerian myth. Lots of interesting ideas and weird tonal stuff went over my head. Subsequent rereadings happened after I’d sampled more of the cyberpunk canon (thus better recognizing the more parodic elements of Snow Crash for what they were) and learned more about linquistics and so on, all of which gave the book enough new context that it felt fresh. Such is the power of a dense book of ideas.

Anyway, 2022 was the 30th anniversary of Snow Crash, and seeing as though my paperback was basically falling apart, I splurged on a new anniversary edition of the book, complete with new, “never-seen-before material” and pages that aren’t falling out of the book. It’s been approximately a decade since I’d last reread it, and a few things struck me about it.

It’s always been hailed as a sorta prescient book, for obvious reasons. Stephenson was clearly ahead of the curve when it came to the internet, computers, and hacking, not to mention popularizing the notion of “avatars” and other stuff like VR and AR and so on. But the thing that struck me this time around was that the Metaverse, as portrayed in the book, is essentially a social network, and Stephenson clearly saw the potential drawbacks. Early in the book, our Hiro Protagonist meets up with an old friend named Juanita. In the world of the novel, they both worked on the early Metaverse infrastructure, but Juanita had pulled back somewhat of late, because:

… she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships.

Snow Crash, Page 74

It’s a perfectly concise and trenchant critique of social networks (that is implicitly elaborated on throughout the book). I mean, it’s not like we haven’t all been drowning in this realization for the past decade, but it’s always good to remind ourselves that we saw it coming a few decades ago… and yet, still fall into the trap all the time.

It’s also worth noting that people have been trying (and failing) to implement the virtual reality Metaverse since the book came out. Right now, Mark Zuckerberg is literally dumping billions into his conception of the Metaverse… and no one is biting. It’s funny to read, though, that even Stephenson recognized the limitations of the VR approach:

And when hackers are hacking, they don’t mess around with the superficial world of Metaverses and avatars. They descend below this surface layer and into the netherworld of code and tangled nam-shubs that supports it, where everything that you see in the metaverse, no matter how lifelike and beautiful and three-dimensional, reduces to a simple text file: a series of letters on an electronic page.

Snow Crash, Page 401

I have not really played around with VR much, but the notion of bulky goggles is enough to make me think it won’t find much of a mass audience until we get less obtrusive methods of connecting and viewing a VR space. And, like, they have their own drawbacks. The notion of plugging something directly into your eyeballs or jacking the eye’s connection to the brain somehow seems… inadvisable. I dunno, maybe contact lenses might work?

So not everything has aged quite as well (there’s a whole subplot about an infection that is spread through vaccines, which is a conspiracy theory that is obviously a more touchy subject these days). Anywho, it’s still a great book, and worth revisiting if you haven’t read it in a while. The “never-seen-before material” at the end of the book comes in screenplay form, and provides a bit of background for the character of Lagos, who people mostly just talk about in the rest of the novel. It’s a nice treat for Stephenson obsessives like myself, but mostly unnecessary.

Vintage Science Fiction Month: Voyage of the Space Beagle

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.

These are the voyages of the Space Beagle. It’s continuing mission: to explore intergalactic space, encounter new life forms, new civilizations, and survive their deadly advances. Yes, A.E. van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle is a pretty clear precursor to Star Trek, right down to the episodic nature of the narrative. Of course, that’s mostly because this is a prime example of what was called a “fix-up” novel, a book comprised of a compilation of four previously published stories. The title of the book is also a pretty clear reference to Charles Darwin’s book about his five-year mission (another Trek connection) of scientific exploration on the HMS Beagle.

The first story details an encounter with Coeurl, a starving, intelligent cat-like creature that plays dumb in order to trick the crew of the Space Beagle into allowing access to the ship. Several members of the crew are killed before they wise up and manage to trick the beast into an escape capsule and strand it in space.

The second story follows the chaos resulting from telepathic contact with a race of bird-like aliens. One member of the crew recognizes that the signals are meant to be a benign, friendly message, but the form of the message is incompatible with the human mind, and only quick actions by the aforementioned crew member saves the ship.

The third story has the Space Beagle picking up a red creature called Ixtl, which seeks to reproduce by kidnapping members of the crew and implanting eggs in them. Some details of this story are close enough to the film Alien that van Vogt actually sued for plagiarism (the case settled out of court, and for the record, the filmmakers deny any influence).

Finally, the fourth story shows an encounter with a galaxy-spanning consciousness that has, more or less, consumed its entire galaxy. The crew must devise some sort of strategy to deal with this situation, especially given that they don’t want to lead this entity back to our home galaxy.

In fixing these stories up for the novel, van Vogt would establish a new central character, Elliot Grosvenor, the lone “Nexialist” onboard the Space Beagle. Nexialism is van Vogt’s name for a sorta holistic approach to knowledge. As he describes:

Nexialism is the science of joining in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields. It provides techniques for speeding up the processes of absorbing knowledge and of using effectively what has been learned.

The problems which Nexialism confronts are whole problems. Man has divided life and matter into separate compartments of knowledge and being. And, even though he sometimes uses words which indicate his awareness of the wholeness of nature, he continues to behave as if the one, changing universe had many separately functioning parts.

In essence, Grossvenor is van Vogt’s equivalent of Heinlein’s competent man. As Heinlein famously quipped, “Specialization is for insects.” At times, you can feel the “fix-up” nature of the novel, as it seems Grossvenor fades too much into the background of the narrative. Also, though the stories have satisfactory conclusions, they do feel a bit repetitive, and while the holistic approach of Nexialism is certainly admirable, the solutions aren’t quite clever enough to really justify the idea. Still, there’s something fundamentally optimistic about van Vogt’s vision that is refreshing in this cynical age. It’s telling that the alien creatures are all undone by their own egotism and selfishness, while the crew of the Space Beagle prevail through decency, self-sacrifice, and cooperation. Of course, there’s plenty of infighting amongst various specialized factions of the crew, but that’s the point of Grossvenor’s holistic approach.

This is almost certainly one of those books that suffers due to it’s influence. So much of what has followed in its footsteps have improved on the ideas that going back to read this now makes it feel quaint. It is certainly an interesting exercise to see such ideas in their embryonic form, even if the terminology used can be a bit stiff or even laughable (the crew repeatedly brandish a weapon that van Vogt calls a “vibrator” – it’s not his fault that the term has taken on other meanings since then, but still), but at this point, it’s probably more suitable for students of the genre than anyone else.

None of which is to say that the novel is bad, per say, just that it doesn’t quite hang together as well as you would generally want from a novel. Not entirely unexpected, given the “fix-up” nature of the novel, but it’s ironic that a novel with the theme that holistic thought is critical would be so episodic and disjointed. From what I can tell, van Vogt’s concept of Nexialism lead him to start thinking about how humankind would need to transcend its limitations, and thus followed Space Beagle up with the novel Slan, which represents a more cohesive vision from van Vogt. Still, if you want to see how early Space Opera stories influenced much of the current Science Fiction landscape, Voyage of the Space Beagle is a pretty good place to start (if perhaps not the earliest).

Vintage Science Fiction Month: SF Stories About Christmas

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.

When you think of Christmas stories, the first genre that comes to mind is probably not Science Fiction. But decades of initially flippant but increasingly earnest proclamations that “Die Hard is a Christmas movie!” indicate that perhaps the notion of what constitutes a “Christmas Story” is somewhat malleable. Naturally, none of this is new. Witness To Follow a Star, a collection of nine science fiction Christmas stories published in 1977, featuring stories from Golden Age stars dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. One of the great things about reading vintage SF is the continual discovery that everything old becomes new again at some point (in this case, debates about what makes something a “Christmas Story”).

To Follow a Star book cover

On its surface, the notions of Science Fiction and Christmas represent something of a contrast, but such conflicts can be useful in storytelling. As is typical of collections like these, the stories are a bit uneven, but it’s always nice to read something along these lines during the holiday season. Quick thoughts on each story:

  • Christmas on Ganymede by Isaac Asimov – Cute little short story written in Asimov’s traditional non-style, with a button of an ending that you might see coming, but which brought a smile to my face.
  • Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl – Naturally Pohl takes on the commercialization of Christmas and imagines a far flung satirical future in which “department stores begin celebrating the Christmas sales rush in September”, imagine that absurdity! (I don’t talk much about my day job here, but I work for a digital retailer that starts their Christmas sales rush in July, so I had a nice chuckle at this part of the story.) Amusing predictions aside, this is perhaps not your typical romantic Christmas story, but that’s ultimately where its heart lies.
  • Santa Claus Planet by Frank M. Robinson – A man crash lands on an alien planet, and finds that the natives have rather odd and perhaps gift-giving traditions. An interesting, if exaggerated and fatalistic, exploration of the power dynamics inherent in gift giving. Not terribly Christmassy, to be sure, but interesting.
  • Christmas Tree by John Christopher – Short tale of a space traveler who plays with fire and ends up getting grounded (i.e. stranded) on the moon because his body can no longer the trip back to earth. Spoilers, I guess, but while the character will miss Christmases back home, this is not especially Christmassy either.
  • The Star by Arthur C. Clarke – One of Clarke’s most famous short stories, this won’t exactly put you in the Christmas mood, but pitting the cold hard science against the faith of believers (in this case Christians) will certainly make you think. This is not the first time I’ve read this story, and even knowing where it’s going – an excellent rug-pull at the end of the story where everything clicks in a devastating way – does not diminish its power.
  • The Christmas Present by Gordon R. Dickson – I guess they wanted to put all the bummer stories in the middle of the collection, which makes sense. This is another story about how aliens learn about Christmas, this time with tragic results. It stands in stark contrast to Asimov’s earlier story in this collection (which also deals with aliens trying to figure out Christmas), which is a nice touch.
  • Christmas Treason by James White – Much is made of the “lies” we tell kids about Santa and Christmas, and as you might expect, science fiction authors (and fans, for that matter) are the type who will not accept traditional explanations of the logistics of Santa’s delivery service. In the case of this story, kids with teleportation and psychokinesis powers assume that Santa must have a series of underground bunkers secreted throughout the world to support his Christmas Eve shenanigans. The only thing is: these bunkers are actually nuclear missile silos. While certainly a recipe for disaster, James White takes a decidedly more fun view of the situation and does a reasonable job balancing the tone of the story (which does need to walk a rather tight line).
  • The New Father Christmas by Brian W. Aldiss – In an increasingly automated world, will the machines and AIs adopt Christmas traditions in strange ways with unforeseen consequences? I suspect the writers of Futurama might have been inspired by this story in their conception of Robot Santa…
  • La Befana by Gene Wolfe – Christmas is about the birth of Earth’s savior, but what about other planets? Neat idea, and Wolfe uses one of my favorite Santa precursor legends in this short story.

As already mentioned, it might seem odd to see mixtures of Science Fiction and Christmas, but as it turns out, I’ve read several collections of Christmas Science Fiction stories, and there are probably a bunch of others. There are other collections from various authors, like Isaac Asimov’s Christmas (which is a collection of stories from Asimov’s magazine, rather than the author himself), but also some specific authors who seemingly specialize in the holiday, like Connie Willis’ A Lot Like Christmas and John Scalzi’s A Very Scalzi Christmas. All of these collections have their charms, in part because I like the contrast inherent in this micro-genre, and To Follow a Star is no exception (though I think I would probably recommend Willis and Scalzi books ahead of this one, for whatever that’s worth).

Next up for Vintage Science Fiction Month: Space Beagles!

SF Book Review – Part 39: Reunion and Moar!

Hard to believe it’s been over a year since the last one of these, though there’ve been plenty of other posts covering the Hugo Awards or Halloween Reading, and so on. Still, I’ve built up a backlog of SF books that need reviewing, so here goes nothing:


Reunion by Christopher Farnsworth – Four teenagers save the world in a small town during an event that became known as “New Year’s Evil.” Twenty years later, and the cyclical evil has returned. The four heroes, now cynical adults, must return home to go to their high school reunion and face the evil again. Or do they?

Reunion by Christopher Farnsworth

It’s a premise that recalls Stephen King’s It in more than a few ways, though Farnsworth obviously puts his own spin on it and clocking in at just 332 pages, it’s clearly not going for the epic sensibility King was working through in his novel. Farnsworth does make ample use of archetypes though, and it’s almost like he’s using It as a structural archetype. Each of our heroes follows a well established model. Eric is a magician, a la Merlin. Carrie is the girl detective, as in Nancy Drew. Alana is the Warrior Princess, like Xena. And Danny is the boy genius who goes on super science adventures in the manner of Jonny Quest. Each character is introduced in a sorta where are they now chapter, then they come together to confront evil (again), and each also gets flashbacks extolling their teenaged adventures. It all culminates in dueling climaxes, where we get the true story of “New Year’s Evil” cross cut with a redux in the present.

I was a little hesitant at first, but the book quickly won me over, and by the end I was wishing it was an It sized doorstop. It’s a story that does play to Farnsworth’s strengths, as in his President’s Vampire novels, where he gets to mix and match various bits of classic folklore and modern urban legends to craft a page turning adventure. There are some twists and turns and unexpected character revelations, which all worked well enough for me, even if some of them are a tad predictable. It’s still fun seeing each character leverage their talents, then team up to defeat a seemingly unstoppable evil by using clever combinations of said talents. It’s clearly drafting on its archetypes, right down to the structure, but hey: they’re archetypes for a reason. It all resonates quite well in the end. Solid page-turning beach-read type stuff, and a lot of fun.


Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells – NASA discovered an alien ship hidden in the asteroid belt in the 1960s and the entire space program has been a covert attempt to develop the technology to reach it. Dr. Jane Holloway is a linguist recruited to help decipher any alien language they stumble upon. When they reach the ship, Holloway discovers it’s not completely uninhabited. A disembodied voice guides and helps the astronauts as they make their way through the ship. But is the voice on their side? Or is it manipulating them for some nefarious purpose?

Straightforward space opera comfort food, this turns the pages and presents a few interesting conflicts that drive tension throughout, but it’s also not going to blow your mind with anything especially new. Plenty of SF tropes and info-dumps, but nothing too unusual for the genre. Alas, the biggest issue here is that it’s all in service of a larger series of books, and while the ending is a natural conclusion for some of the characters, there are still lots of open questions that will presumably be explored in later books. That being said, I might be amenable to reading at least one more of these, which is usually a good sign…


Travel by Bullet by John Scalzi – This is the third novella in a series about “dispatchers”, people who are legally empowered to take a life (except in this world, anyone who is murdered survives – they just wake up in their home after being murdered. Natural deaths still occur uninterrupted, only murders are affected). It’s a silly premise, but Scalzi has set up internally consistent rules and used them to tell tightly plotted murder/mystery stories that rely on the vagaries of the dispatching process in some way. As per usual, lots of snappy dialogue and light humor keep the tone playful and the pace moving sprightly. For some reason, this entire series was conceived as an audio book exclusive (though I think the first two eventually got a print edition), but they’re solid listens and Zachary Quinto does a good job reading the stories. This has been a fun series and I look forward to more installments (for the record: each story is a self-contained mystery, so it’s not the kind of series that leaves you with lots of loose threads and open questions.)


Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez – The sequel to and conclusion of the story started in Suarez’s Daemon, about a quasi-AI system that attempts to take over the world after its inventor dies. I found that first book to be enjoyable enough in a surface-level pulpy fiction way, but was not inclined to immediately seek out the sequel. But I did seek out more Suarez, and he’s grown on me as an author, so I have finally circled back to this sequel. The first novel primarily saw the Daemon as a villain, but in this book Suarez attempts to soften the image a bit. It’s still a situation where the Daemon has to break some eggs to make the omelet, but maybe that omelet is worth it?

There are some interesting ideas floating around here about better ways to organize a society and its various supply chains given a high tech base to start from, though it all still feels like we’re only really scratching the surface, and a lot of plot elements are far-fetched to say the least. That being said, that sort of thing can be a lot of fun if you can get on its wavelength and don’t ask too many questions. I’m glad I read it and enjoyed it well enough, but my complaints from the first book remain and this would not be the first Suarez I’d recommend (if you’re interested, go for Influx or Delta-V first…)


Still a few more books to catch up with, and we’ve got Vintage Science Fiction Month coming soon too, so stay tuned…

Hugo Awards 2022: The Results

The Results of the 2022 Hugo Awards were announced last night, so it’s time for the requisite joyful celebrations and/or bitter recriminations. I jumped back on the participation bandwagon this year, though I didn’t really end up reading much beyond the novels (which, in my mind, were something of a mixed bag). In any case, congratulations are due to all the winners! For those who want to really nerd out and see instant-runoff voting in action, the detailed voting stats for the 2022 Hugo Awards are also available (.pdf).

Best Novel

A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine takes home the rocket, the second book in the series and the second Hugo win. Good for Arkady Martine, and I enjoyed this novel just fine (it was third in my ranking), but book series are difficult when it comes to awards. All things being equal, I tend to prefer standalone works (or maybe works that are starting a series, though I guess some series are comprised of basically standalone entries that are only loosely affiliated, like Becky Chambers Wayfarer’s books).

A Desolation Called Peace

Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki is the runner up, which actually fits my ranking, but Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, came in dead last (it was my #1). More indication that I’m not exactly in lockstep with the rest of the Hugo voter community… Then again, it did reasonably well in the first pass of voting (#3), so there is that.

Short Fiction

As mentioned above, I didn’t read much of this year’s short fiction (certainly not enough to vote), so I don’t have much to say here, other than that we do see a lot of familiar names. Typical for a populist award like the Hugo, but given that my tastes don’t run particularly close to other Hugo voters’, I think I’m entering a bit of a fallow period when it comes to participation.

Best Series

Wayward Children, by Seanan McGuire wins best series, which is interesting because I feel like Seanan McGuire is the most nominated author over the last 15 years or so, but this is only her second fiction win. Congratulations! I have not read anything from this series, but I’ve always enjoyed McGuire’s work. Still, the thought of being able to read enough of each series nominated in order to make an informed vote is daunting, which has always been my biggest complaint about this category…

Best Dramatic Presentation

Often a strange category, but this year the answer was pretty obvious and the voting went pretty much as expected: Dune takes home the rocket, as it should. Naturally, the two finalists that are the most off the beaten path, The Green Knight and Space Sweepers, come in at the bottom of the voting. I suppose it’s reward enough that they got nominated at all. Anywho, pour one out for Werewolves WithinI’m Your ManFinch, and Malignant, amongst others not nominated (even in the longlist of nominees, only I’m Your Man had any traction, and it was pretty low on that list).

Other Thoughts on the 2022 Hugo Awards

Cora Buhlert takes home the award for Best Fan Writer, which was nice (she was #1 on my ballot), and there’s a few other winners that I was pleased to see (Naomi Novik won the Lodestar YA award, and I’ve enjoyed several of her novels, so it’s nice to see some recognition for her). Congrats again to all the winners. Given the nature of the awards, I have access to nominate next year, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I will not want to participate much next year. As usual, I’ll probably keep an eye on things, but as mentioned above, I feel like my preferred style is not in fashion much these days, but I guess we’ll see what the future brings.

2022 Hugo Awards: Final Ballot

The voting deadline for the 2022 Hugo Awards is this week, so this is about as final as my Ballot will get. The categories I’m voting in are a bit on the slim side this year, but you only have time and motivation to do so much. Let’s take a gander:

Best Novel

  1. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir [My Review]
  2. Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki [My Review]
  3. A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine [My Review]
  4. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers [My Review]
  5. She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan [My Review]
  6. A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark [My Review]

Everything after #2 could shift around a bit depending on my mood, and a part of me thought about throwing a “No Award” at #3 and leaving it at that, but that’s unfair. These are all solid books, even if some are not especially my cup of tea. I have no idea what to expect when it comes to the winner. Project Hail Mary seems to be getting a lot of criticism because there’s too much science and math (in Science Fiction? No way!) and not enough character, but it’s always hard to tell how representative such sentiments are…

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

  1. Dune
  2. The Green Knight
  3. WandaVision
  4. Space Sweepers
  5. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
  6. Encanto

Harder to complain about voters’ tendency to favor bland blockbusters over anything artistic or weird when you’ve got The Green Knight as a finalist. Even Wandavision takes some pretty bold chances (even if the ending rubs me the wrong way). Still, pour one out for Werewolves Within, I’m Your Man, Finch, and Malignant, amongst others.

Additional Categories

  • I took a look at some short fiction categories, but didn’t get anywhere close to having read enough to actually vote.
  • I might catch up with the Dramatic Presentation, Short Form episodes I haven’t seen yet (but I doubt any would surpass For All Mankind: The Grey.
  • I might also catch up with some of the fan awards (Fan Writer and Fanzine both have folks I already follow, so might as well make it official).

And that about covers the 2022 Hugo Awards Final Ballot… stay tuned in a few weeks for the results!

Tasting Notes

Just a series of quick hits on my media diet (and sometimes, uh, regular diet) of late:

Television

Obi-Wan Kenobi – Perfectly cromulent but completely unnecessary. It feels like a two hour movie drawn out to five hours, but I’ve always liked Ewan McGregor’s take on Kenobi and it’s fun enough hanging out with him. It’s a little weird that people being offed with light sabers seem to keep surviving and one of the things I’ve always been disappointed by was that all the Jedi were hunted down and killed by people other than Darth Vader. We do get some Vader though, and it’s all reasonably well done. Not disappointed that I watched, but again, it’s unnecessary.

For All Mankind – What if the Soviets landed on the moon first? This alternate history NASA chronicle is a little overheated and sweaty, a space program soap opera, but it’s quite entertaining. Now in its third season, having jumped through the space program from the late 60s through the 80s and now the 90s and with the race for Mars in place, it’s holding up reasonably well… except for an ill-advised subplot from the second season that they inexplicably doubled-down on in the third season (the weird Karen/Danny relationship is just cringe in the extreme, I can’t believe they are still trying to draw it out like this.) Recommended!

Only Murders in the Building – I initially resisted this, then when my Amazon firestick kept crashing during one of the first episodes (which I looked up and was apparently a known issue for several months at least) I kinda fell off the train. Once the second season rolled around I picked it up again and immediately binged the entire first season (I guess they fixed the bug). It’s quite fun, Steve Martin is great, Selena Gomez is fantastic, and they have a solid restraining effect on Martin Short’s excesses. The chemistry between them is unconventional but well done, and the story offers enough twists and turns and stylistic gambles that it all comes together in a balanced way. The second season is starting off alright, though I think Amy Shumer is a distinct downgrade from guest stars from the first season…

Stranger Things – Season 4 comports itself as well as ever, though the strain of characters and geography are starting to show. Too many characters being spread too far apart geographically is not helping, though they do manage to pull it off reasonably well. As usual, the Steve/Robin/Dustin thread is the best (perhaps because they quickly link up with Max/Lucas/Nancy), while the Mike/Will/Jonathan/Argyle crew is clearly the worst. Eleven is separated from most for the bulk of the season (leading to amusing “we usually rely on this psychic girl we know to fight these things” moments), but her story is illuminating and you can see the overall arc of the series taking better shape (maybe a little retconny, but still). The initial 7 episodes play pretty great and lead to a solid finale, but the next two feature-length episodes are perhaps less successful, in part because there’s so much maneuvering to get people back together for next season, but then, I’m looking forward to the next season, in part, because a lot of the characters are back together, in one place.

Movies

Hustle (2022) – Solid Adam Sandler Basketball movie (not a recipe guaranteed for success at Kaedrin HQ, to be sure, but they pulled it off). It’s got some fun little procedural elements of a basketball scout, and it’s largely set in Philly, which is always a plus. Not perfect, by any means, but a solid underdog sports flick that’s worth a watch. **1/2

The Princess (2022) – An inverted medieval take on The Raid‘s episodic, video-game-esque battle through a tower. There’s a bit of a fairy tale component to it and the whole story is cheesy, but the action sequences and choreography are great and quite entertaining. **1/2

Stone Cold (1991) – A last gasp of 80s action tropes that I’d definitely seen bits and pieces of back in the day, but had never sat down and watched from start to finish before. Totally ludicrous cops and criminals action genre comfort food. Brian Bosworth felt a bit hokey at the time, but looking back at his absurd excesses is fun enough these days, and boy, they don’t do car crashes and explosions like they used to anymore… ***

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) – A quintessential 70s movie, riffing on an inverse Easy Rider premise about a highway patrol motorcycle cop in Arizona angling to become a detective. Apparently derided in its time, it seems like it’s due for a revival. Really great filmmaking and visual style throughout, with set pieces ranging from an action car chase, to tense cops vs hippies confrontations, to a woman emasculating a corrupt cop at a biker bar.

Electra Glide in Blue

It’s deeply cynical stuff, which usually isn’t my bag, but it’s well made and interesting in a lot of ways. Recommended for fans of that sort of 70s dusty crime road movie sub-genre. ***

What’s Up, Doc? (1972) – Pretty much the complete opposite in tone to Electra Glide in Blue, this is something of a screwball comedy starring a young Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, with supporting turns from lots of folks you might recognize, like Madeline Kahn and Austin Pendleton. The whole thing revolves around four identical suitcases and the various wacky schemes people are going through to get their hands on one or the other of these bags, only to find it’s been inadvertently switched with another. It’s really fun! ***

Mad God (2021) – Famous effects guy Phil Tippit spent decades hand crafting the stop motion animation for this sprawling passion project filled with visually spectacular imagery…

Mad God

Almost no plot or dialogue, but lots of squishy sound design and creative creatures and monsters and gross out body-horror-esque sequences. I generally prefer more plot or story meat on the bone, but it’s hard to deny the visually spectacular imagination at work here (definitely a shoe-in for the Most Visually Stunning Kaedrin Movie Award). **

Ambulance (2022) – Alright, who let Michael Bay get his hands on a drone? Pretty great action flick about a heist gone wrong with a few robbers hijacking an Ambulance and driving it all around LA to avoid the cops and so on. There’s some typical Bay style macho dudebro posturing, but Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Eiza González are a compelling trio, and the action is the real standout here. Clocking in at 136 minutes, it maybe overstays its welcome a bit, but this sort of non-green-screen action is worth celebrating these days (and this was definitely underseen in theaters). Worth a look for action fans.

Books

The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi – The usual enjoyable Scalzi experience, snappy and fun, but clearly middle tier at best, perhaps in line with his Lock In or Head On offerings. Actually, that comparison is quite apt, as that series also had clumsy worldbuilding and a protagonist whose gender is unclear. The plot of Kaiju takes a while to formulate itself and relies on a cliched, shortsighted corporate CEO villain, but even when the story is bogged down in establishing various Kaiju protection schemes (ranging from mildly clever to outright silly), Scalzi’s page-turning ability, likeable, competent characters, and zippy dialogue keeps everything afloat. I still generally look forward to all of Scalzi’s releases and while this is hardly his best, it’s entertaining and fun.

The Broken Room, by Peter Clines – A young girl escapes from a government science project and enlists the help of a former CIA operative. Decent little thriller with some nice procedural spy business and a supernatural body-horror element that gets more pronounced as it goes. Nothing particularly new here, but it’s brisk and nimble with a few twists and turns and solid action.

Into the Black Nowhere, by Meg Gardiner – A minor improvement over Gardiner’s first Unsub novel, this is another serial killer thriller that strikes that page turning airport novel balance, but isn’t especially doing anything special. Still, it’s entertaining enough and I’m looking forward to Gardiner’s co-written sequel to Heat coming soon.

The Finer Things

I’ve recently been covering my annual hiatus from beer, including some thoughts on Pétillant Naturel wine, Mead, a local Southeastern PA wine, Bourbon, and just to show that it’s not all alcohol, all the time, I also reviewed a whole slew of August Uncommon Tea offerings.

Naturally, Beer is still on the menu, and most recent reviews include: Westbound & Down Bourbon Barrel Aged Stout (and thoughts on packaging size, sip tests, and New Coke) and East End Gratitude Barleywine (we put birds on things).