Review of Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is one of genre’s more divisive offerings.  Loved or hated, it tells of an alien arriving with a message of universal love and the religious, political, and social reaction as a commune of belief is created around it.  Heinlein painting the scene in black and white, his ideas are presented via contemptuous satire, rendering the novel largely a soapbox—the reason behind said reader discord.

Enter Nnedi Okorafor’s 2014 Lagoon.  About aliens who arrive in Nigeria bearing a message of love, likewise all manner of chaos is unleashed as they spread knowledge of their mission.  Lagoon is significantly different from Heinlein in tone and attitude, however.  Rather than bludgeoning the reader with jaded cynicism, Okorafor presents the social and political issues Nigeria is dealing with in candid fashion while integrating the alien viewpoint, arriving at something greener, something more holistic than just the disparaging dichotomy of Heinlein.  Her commentary may sometimes be (indirectly) cutting, but Lagoon remains a warm, parental novel—the strong hand of love—that is more constructive than destructive.  Not just Heinlein’s stick, Okorafor also offers the carrot. 

Review of Miracle Visitors by Ian Watson

Abductions in the middle of lonely fields; crop circles; strange lights hovering in the sky and disappearing at impossible speeds; beings in society who look just like us but are not; strange, late night visitations.  What does it all mean?  Do people who claim such things need psychiatric help, or are they real experiences, real perceptions?  Is it something they are among the chosen few to be participant to, or is it mere hallucination?

    He raced his bicycle towards the rise.

    Resting among the gorse sat a wingless metal ellipsoid as large as a milk tanker. It no longer glowed, but seemed to be pulsing as if breathing: a metallic lung, emitting a bee-like hum.  As he watched, it steadied, firmed.  Light streamed from a porthole.

Such is the intro to Ian Watson’s 1987 Miracle Visitors.  A persistently evolving novel, what starts as an alien encounter develops into a story of consciousness, perception, and hints of the collective unconscious.  Arabic sufis, anti-gravity Ford Thunderbirds, and a little green man round out the genre contribution to what is a kaleidoscope story difficult to pin down—just like claims of alien encounters.

As a boy, Michael Peacocke had the above alien experience riding his bicycle home late one afternoon on an empty meadow road.  But he has no memory of it.  It’s when taking part in Prof. John Deacon’s hypnosis studies that the knowledge escapes.  Relaying the details of the encounter while in a trance, even stranger events conspire around Peacocke, little to his knowledge.  In faraway North Africa, an unearthly wiseman makes himself known to a local sufi—the wisdom of the ages spun perennially in the aftermath.  A young woman in the US sees a green goblin.  And a former Air Force pilot, now UFO hunter, sees things he’d never seen before.  But it’s when returning to the meadow road that Peacocke gets the (conscious) experience of his life.  Taken on a most amazing ride in a Ford Thunderbird souped up on alien matter reactors, he learns what’s happening behind the closed doors of the perceived reality.  Or does he?

Review of "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein

Robert Heinlein was one of the most influential writers of sci-fi in the 20th century.  He published more than thirty novels, several of which won awards, and many more received nominations.  Considered one of the ‘big three’ alongside Asimov and Clarke—the American perspective, that is—Heinlein’s agenda included independence, personal responsibility, freedom, and the influence of religion and government on society.  Stranger in a Strange Land, arguably his most famous book—and perhaps most controversial—is the subject of this review.

Stranger in a Strange Land is the story of Valentine Michael Smith.  The only remaining human of the Mars’ settlers, he is brought back to Earth and kept under wraps by the US State Department.  Raised by Martians, Smith’s cultural perspective is radically different, not to mention he has the ability to control body and mind telekinetically.  As the sole survivor of the Mars missions, Smith is seen as “owning” Mars in the government’s eyes, and is therefore protected and treated as a pawn in larger world affairs by US officials.  Jubal Harshaw, retired attorney-at-law, comes into contact with Smith one day and kidnaps him in the hopes of protecting him from the various social and political interests at work, plugging his own agenda in the process.  Smith, as innocent as a child, is allowed to develop by Harshaw, giving the cultural instincts he acquired on Mars free reign on Earth.  Where these instincts take him flies in the face of all that’s thought “right”, telling Smith’s tragic tale in the process.

Review of "Pushing Ice" by Alastair Reynolds

Imagine a person, their heart set on a steak.  They go to the shop, buy a hunk of meat and throw it on the grill.  But just as the juices start sizzling, they decide they’re rather have a salad.  It’s a sunny day, why not something light.  But in the middle of cutting the lettuce, the sudden desire for tomato soup hits them, and out comes the big pot and garlic—no wait, dessert first…  And so on.  You now have the basic plot structure of Alastair Reynold’s 2005 Pushing Ice.  The ideas half-baked, a meal is never served.  Exposition on near-future tech, character feuds, cryogenics, FTL, a murder mystery, time shifts—each follow one on top of another but never congeal into a larger purpose.  What happened to plot?  What was my goal? Inter-character conflict or First Contact?  I’ve waded in so deep I  forget...  Oh well, I’ll just throw in some watermelon seeds with a space chase and see what happens…

I want to like Reynolds, I really do.  Similar to David Brin, Greg Egan, and Greg Bear, he’s an idea guy, and I like idea guys.  However, like Vernor Vinge he doesn’t have that natural touch of a writer or storyteller.  Chasm City and The Prefect hopefully not sucking Reynolds dry of talent, most of his works lack an adhesive, a glue—that writer-ly something—that ties a story together and gives it substance and impact.  But enough horseplay: what went wrong in Pushing Ice?

The book starts on firm footing.  It’s near future and mankind has developed the tech to reach and mine comets.  The ship Grasshopper has locked down another for drilling and blasting, when they receive a call from headquarters telling them that one of Saturn’s moons has come out of orbit and is now headed across our universe, pieces of ice sloughing off to expose a Death Star-esque superstructure beneath.  In amazingly ho-hum fashion, the Grasshopper, led by Captain Bella Lind, sets off in pursuit.  Ahh, space chase you say; I know what that is.  When Chief Engineer Svetlana finds suspicious data regarding the speed of Saturn’s “moon” and is rebutted reporting it to Captain Lind, you say: “I know that, too!  That’s called: character conflict!”  Unfortunately, from this point onward all sense of familiarity is lost—and not in a good way.  

Irregular and unnatural, the number of sub-plots and storylines Reynolds chooses to slap onto Pushing Ice amounts to a plate of spaghetti with ice cream and frogs legs.  Cryogenics, first contact, nano-forging, big dumb objects, alien linguistics, and other major sci-fi tropes take their turns, randomly occupying center stage.  If any of these devices were interwoven into plot or characterization to build toward a larger goal, then all would be understandable.  But that they work alone, discarded as necessary, leaves character and dialogue as disposable and wooden as can be.  Little coheres into an umbrella concept, the overall integrity of the novel suffering, as such.

For example, Reynolds fills multiple pages with characters figuring out the dials and buttons on a foreign space suit.  Is this knowledge later used for any of the characters’ benefit? No.  To spring a plot twist?  No.  Is it original, a space suit like no other writer of sci-fi has ever imagined?  No.  (It speaks English.)  Why then go into the detail?  As a result of this and many other useless digressions, the book is bloated with empty text that points to the fact the novel has no single driving purpose.  Is it a character examination?  A plot driven story?  A thought experiment on first contact?  Sadly, it is none.  

And the writing, well, let me be brief and give an example of how telling is so much worse than showing.  This is an actual sample from Pushing Ice:

            Bella thought about that for a few paces. “How long do you think that had been up there?”

            “How should I know?”

            “I was asking for your opinion, that’s all.”

            Christine’s defenses cracked.  She let out a quiet sigh, as if she had decided to finally stop being obstructive and there was a kind of relief in that.

That, my friends, is immature style; thanks for directly telling us the temper of Christine’s thoughts and working a major emotional change into a few words.  Suffice to say, good writers are more subtle.

A question remains: if dialogue and behavior cannot be counted on to portray character personality, what can?  Pop-culture references, of course.  T-shirt slogans and music files (all pre-21st century—a strange coincidence) are a device Reynolds uses to inform readers of his characters’ traits.  “I’ve got one nerve left and your standing on it.” is the slogan printed on Bella’s t-shirt at one point in the book.  On top of being extremely anachronistic (I mean, really; couldn’t Reynolds have had a touch more imagination to fill the media gap between now and the time the novel is set?  Take a look at Stand on Zanzibar or Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology if you want to see a writer imaginatively examining the possibilities for future entertainment.), the reader’s intelligence is insulted.  Surely there must be better tricks to impart knowledge of a character.  And I won’t even go into the obvious politically-correct casting of blacks, Asians, and whites from various European backgrounds;  at times it’s like a Wal-mart ad for home appliances. 

I don’t normally write reviews so wild in tone, but I simply don’t know how else to address Pushing Ice.  It was an extreme struggle to finish.  Nothing congealed.  The characters did not behave like normal humans.  The sci-fi tropes—aliens, big dumb objects, futuristic tech, etc.—all were dealt with in ho-hum fashion.  “Hey Joe, the first aliens humanity has ever encountered are approaching.”  “Oh yeah, I think I’ll go get some breakfast.”  There are many other sci-fi writers that have gone in-depth into these tropes in far more interesting detail.  Read an Arthur C. Clarke novel and you’ll find the same cardboard engineer characters, but at least you are grabbed by an idea that is unwrapped for all of its potential with an interesting plot.  Pushing Ice, on the other hand, contains numerous half-baked ideas and tense moments that never add up to anything.  There are also cheap plot tricks (super-secret secrets teasing readers), but are disappointments when revealed.  The scope is set epic, but the novel feels more like a cracker barrel mix of whatever sci-fi trope happened to cross Reynold’s mind at the moment.  Everything that makes a novel good suffers for it, the meal never served.

Review of "Ringword" by Larry Niven

I really wanted to give this book high praise; its ideas are at times truly fantastic.  But in the end Ringworld is hurt by a lack of style - literary qualities as it were.  As if written by an engineer, the technology, hard science, and scope of the novel exist huger in the mind but black and white on the page.  Informed by the latest knowledge in astrophysics, geology, and meteorology, the magnificent ideas aren’t communicated in a motivating enough style to make the book anything more than an interesting look at the possibilities of space.  Flashes here and there, the plot generally lacks color and impetus; Niven is not a natural storyteller.

That the ideas are at times fascinating, is a shame.  At roughly 350 pages, Ringworld could have been much longer given the plethora of ideas Niven tries to relate with depth.  The plot, what little there is, is loosely structured around two humans, an aggro Chewbacca style creature, and a strange little puppet alien, all sent to explore a strange “strip of ribbon” orbiting a sun.  Ringworld is a mystery to all, and as the group traverses the landscape trying to answer the who’s, what’s, and why’s, questions piling on top of themselves.  One after another, interesting cultural and technological possibilities come to light.  But Niven barely takes the time to explore one before the characters are zooming off to another, little interaction of interest occurring in the meantime.  Appealing for its mysteriousness, the setting remains the sole strength of the “novel”, all else worldbuilding for worldbuilding's sake with little story to flesh it out.

 

Thus more an exploration than a story, at its conclusion Ringworld leaves the reader wanting to see more of the strange man made landscape orbiting the planet, while at the same time disappointed that such an interesting mix of creatures and landscapes couldn’t have been better combined to produce a story that grabs you.  For his ability to paint a most fascinating picture of a world beyond the scope of human understanding, Niven deserves praise.   Should I come across more of Niven, I will read it in the hope setting and plot have been better intertwined. (Perhaps this is why he involved Jerry Pournelle in later novels?)