Mission Statement ...or something like that

Since starting this blog a miniscule two years ago, I've struggled backstage to put in words that literary quality which separates really good books from superb books--the billionaires from the millionaires, for lack of a better metaphor.  Reading Olaf Stapledon's preface to his 1937 Star Maker I found relief. 

"...while the decades pass, no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of our social order. [...] In these conditions it's difficult for writers to pursue their calling at once with courage and with balanced judgement.  Some merely shrug their shoulders and withdraw from the central struggle of our age.  These, with their minds closed against the world's most vital issues, inevitably produce works which not only have no depth of significance for their contemporaries but are also subtly insincere.  For these writers must consciously or unconsciously contrive to persuade themselves either that the crisis in human affairs does not exist, or that it is less important than their own work, or that is anyhow not their business.  But the crisis does exist, is of supreme importance, and concerns us all.  Can anyone who is at all intelligent and informed hold the contrary without self-deception?"

I know my readership is (ahem) limited, but I'd like to think this tiny corner of the review world identifies and values writers who take up Stapledon's challenge.  It is writers like Ursula Le Guin, Michael Bishop, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, James Tiptree Jr. Ian McDonald, Ian Macleod, Maureen McHugh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Stanislaw Lem, Gene Wolfe, and others who speculate upon major concerns of humanity in prosaic, and often challenging fashion.  None, to my knowledge, are New York Times bestsellers, but it would seem making it to that list is not their primary concern.  So while I certainly enjoy a ripping yarn and can appreciate it as such, I aim to critique books for their ability to address the concerns as Stapledon puts it: the human condition.

Take this as Speculiction's mission statement (as borrowed as it is).

Review of All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson

All Tomorrow’s Parties, William Gibson’s 1999 conclusion to the Bridge trilogy, plays out more lines into the river of Virtual Light and Idoru, then reels them in for a conclusion that, while abrupt, underscores the sociological, technological, and cultural agenda the author has been working toward.  What I’m about to write will probably get me shot, but this concluding volume cements the Bridge trilogy as being superior to the Sprawl series.  But before I get into the details of that discussion, a few particulars about the book.

Where Virtual Light and Idoru each featured two main characters with a handful of quickly but effectively drawn background roles, All Tomorrow’s Parties bears more in common with Mona Lisa Overdrive.  Several characters given equal time in the spotlight, the chapters of the novel are a turnstile of viewpoints, from characters already introduced to those new to the series.  Living in a corrugated box in a Tokyo train station with an aged painter of miniatures as his “doorman”, Laney opens the novel trying to come to terms with the stalker effect of the 5-SB trials he participated in as a youth.  Drowning himself in data in the stuffy box, his life slips away as he draws closer to the mother of all nodal points.  Rydell, now working security for the chain of convenience stores Lucky Dragon, quits his job one day when an offer he can’t refuse comes down the pipe.  Chevette, having ended her relationship with Rydell years prior, is having trouble with her current boyfriend.  Named Carson, his abusive nature has Chevette on the run to a place she remembers as home: the bridge.  Fontaine (the erstwhile lift repairman from Virtual Light) spends his days on the quake rattled structure guarding over his antique watch shop until a all-too-quiet young man knocks on his door one morning.  

Review of Idoru by William Gibson

Idoru, William Gibson’s 1997 middle entry into the Bridge trilogy, takes the baton of Virtual Light’s conclusion and runs with it.  Celebrity worship, pop culture, media influence, and the futuristic tangents advanced technology offers these take-it-or-leave-it facets of modern existence are the centerpiece.  Less standard noir than Virtual Light, Idoru expands the themes into an imaginative, singular story that develops the series positively.  

Like Virtual Light, Idoru features a young woman and man as main characters.  Chia MacKenzie is a fourteen year old member of the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club who has been asked to go to Tokyo to investigate whether the lead singer of the world-famous band will actually marry the virtual pop star Rei Toei, as rumor has it.  Living and breathing the band like millions of other fans around the world, Chia’s reluctance to take up her club’s commission is surpassed by her devotion to Rez, the lead singer, and she soon after finds herself on a plane to the earthquake re-building city.  Colin Laney was an orphan who spent time in an experimental school being administered drugs for research purposes.  Emerging with the ability to see through masses of data to their underlying patterns, he took his unique talent to a paparazzi corp and was put to work digging up the secrets of celebrities.  When a scandal broke out, Laney found that Southern California was no longer friendly ground and Japan is a place to escape the legal and personal troubles his life has brought, and it is to the island nation he heads in the opening pages.  With the otherworld-ness, cult fetishes, and streamlined, materialist mindset of post-modern Tokyo buoying them along, Chia and Laney find their orbits intersecting in ways that only a console savvy, pop culture saturated, all-too-plausible vision of our future can offer.

Review of Virtual Light by William Gibson

William Gibson’s Sprawl, as seminal a trilogy of books if ever there were in modern sci-fi, is a tough act to follow, let alone by the man who wrote the books.  But if the series can be considered raw steel, then the follow up has to be considered the bare blade.  Honing in on the present, Gibson shows no shortage of the futurological imagination and wordsmithing that made him famous.  1993’s Virtual Light, the first book in the Bridge series, is every bit as genius.

Virtual Light, and the Bridge series as a whole, have a lot in common with the Sprawl series.  Gibson continues to paint vignettes of the future and examine the intersection of technology and culture, society, religion, and politics.  And the writing, as always, is kept drum tight.  But the Bridge series is also a departure.  Set merely years in the future rather than decades, the world presented in Virtual Light will feel extremely familiar to readers of today.  The technology Gibson features is more subtle and connected to contemporary development—the beginnings of the cyberworld presented in Neuromancer, for example, cell phones, communications infrastructure, lo-res holograms, data manipulation, and others. There is a small contingent of people who feel nothing compares to Neuromancer.  Ignore them.  Gibson, though more subtle this time around, keeps the momentum going.

Review of The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard

Looking at the spread of colors, shapes, and lines smeared across the canvas that is J.G. Ballard’s 1979 The Unlimited Dream Company, it’s easy to get lost in the details, the view to the whole, submerged.  Superficially disorienting to say the least, the narrative packs a bewildering visual punch while beneath the surface lurk the powers of nature, myth, and beast—the book certainly art more than story.  Surreal only the beginning of the description, for those uninitiated to Ballard strap yourselves in and prepare for a ride—on erotic wings.

The Unlimited Dream Company, if it were the work of a visual artist, would be part of Dali, Paalen, or Ernst’s portfolio.  Imagery jumbled and intense in semi-recognizable fashion, Ballard twists the story of the protagonist Blake in neo-pagan, erotic, primeval fashion, drawing on the leitmotifs of the eponymous poet/painter to create his picture.  Either dead or alive after a plane crash in the opening pages, the young man finds himself on the shores of the Thames in Shepperton, an odd group of people looking on.  Psychotic at best, Blake wanders the streets of the area like a mad man, having wild sexual fantasies, tea with a priest, stating the oddest, most unpredictable of things to strangers, and assisting the zoo keeper.  Shepperton slowly converting into a dense jungle of birds, wildlife, and flowers of all variety in the wake of his mad roaming, the story’s focus burgeons into “inner space”.

Review of The World-Thinker and Other Stories by Jack Vance

The World-Thinker and Other Stories, like The Potters of Firth and Other Stories and Golden Girl and Other Stories is a collection of Vance’s earliest short fiction.  The quality not the same as the work he would produce later in his career, there nevertheless exists that little spark of wit that would define the grandmaster’s style of sci-fi.  Perhaps for the die-hard fan only, the following is a light breakdown of the collection.

“Seven Exits from Bocz” - Vance scheming on what Hitler's rightful fate should have been - in a sci-fi setting of course!

“The God and the Temple Robber” - A confused story, but one which hints at an anything-goes, Dying Earth sensibility  A man steals a jewel but returns it when dire consequences incur.  What he finds upon his return to the temple is not what he thought.

“I’ll Build Your Dream Castle” - A strange tale for Vance, the focus being the building industry and the integrity of the business concerns backing it.  An early story, Vance obviously is experimenting with form.

“DP!” – After WII troglodytes begin emerging from caves in serious numbers, and as a result, affirmative action has never received such a Vancean twist.  The movie District 9 has something in common, though it is possible Vance is playing off Wells’ The Time Machine, trying to give credit where credit is due to the real heroes of the war.

Review of Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy is one of the grandest thought experiments in literature, let alone science fiction.  Red Mars setting mankind’s inhabitation of the red planet into motion, Green Mars delving into terraforming and the social and political aspects of the inhabitation, it remains for Blue Mars to make the final statement regarding man’s potential on Mars. Working ever deeper into the concepts outlaid thus far, the book continues evolving the series’ main ideas, bringing our own society into sharper focus by comparison.  Fully contextualizing life on Earth, Blue Mars expands to solar system size, and is thus a grand finale in more than just story. 

Wasting no time, Blue Mars picks up events precisely where Green Mars concluded.  After the successful revolution against the United Nations Transition Authority, those still alive are trying to clean up the remnants of a planet torn by war.  But with the divide between the Reds and the Greens growing ever wider over the existence of heavily politicized items, e.g. the space elevator and sun mirror, it may only be a matter of time before the remnants are smashed even smaller.  With the fragile Martian society threatening to collapse inwardly, evolving the Dorsia Brevia agreement into a planet-wide constitution may be more than Mars and its people can handle.  Complicating matters further is the fallout of the ecological catastrophe which occurred on Earth at the end of Green Mars.  Millions and millions homeless, Mars seems the obvious point of emigration.  But can the planet’s precocious infrastructure handle the influx?  Peaceful coexistence in the solar system is anything but a foregone conclusion.

Review of The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is a landmark of science fiction.  The books visualizing the terraforming of the red planet from a desert wasteland to a verdant living space, Robinson examines humanity from economic, psychological, political, sociological, and ecological viewpoints, culminating in the most in depth look at colonizing Mars as has yet been written.  The quantity of material so great in fact, The Martians was published three years after Blue Mars.  Collecting material spilling over in the creative effort, it features short stories published from magazines, cuts from the novels, Robinson’s notes, musings, and others—26 pieces in all.  The time and place of the selections scattered throughout the three novels, some fill gaps not explicitly described, some are alternate “histories”, some are just sketches, and some are minor thought experiments.  Written in a variety of modes (pure short story, memoir, poetry, technical writing, and constitution included), there seems a little something of everything.  

Quality varying significantly, this collection is for the serious fan of Robinson’s Mars universe, only.  Without an underlying sub-text to link the whole, each of the individual pieces requires a vested interest in the universe to be appreciated; most of the selections are vignettes featuring familiar settings, few expanding the series in any significant fashion.  There are, however, a few threads running through the collection: a couple Michel stories, three featuring Coyote, and two involving Archaean bacteria.  Spurious, it’s easy to see why they were cut from the novels.  

Review of Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars was a big, bold thought experiment on the environmental, political, and social aspects of colonizing Mars.  Perhaps the most in-depth look at the topic (a sci-fi one if there ever was) to date, the novel was only the beginning of the story.  Terraforming and social evolution examined in even greater depth, the story of the First Hundred and those who survived the revolution of 2061 continues in Robinson’s Green Mars (1994).  

Green Mars begins with the introduction of two new main characters.  The Underground still a hunted entity by the Transnationals, the first is one of Hiroko’s many love children, Nirgal, who lives in hiding with the other rebels under the polar ice cap.  The second is a businessman named Art Randolph, who begins the story on Earth,.  Working for the most moderate and progressive of the Transnationals, a business entity called Praxis, Randolph is called upon by the company to go to Mars and act as an ambassador/negotiator with the Underground on Praxis’ behalf. The company’s leader, William Fort, seeks to create an alliance of eco-capitalist proportions.  Many familiar characters also return.  After undergoing cosmetic surgery, Sax finds employment with one of the largest Transnationals, working undercover as part of their plant biology program, making the air of Mars thick enough to breathe.  Maya, while still an emotional rollercoaster, continues to occupy a respected leadership position in the underground community, as does Nadia and her skills as an engineer.  And Ann, still practicing geology in the most morose of fashions, wanders the Martian landscape, mapping and monitoring the ever-quickening pace of changes, more and more defiant of the planet’s development.

Review of The Illearth War by Stephen Donaldson

Having just finished the second book in Stephen Donaldson’s ongoing The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant called The Illearth War, I can’t help but be put in the mindset of The Empire Strikes Back.  This is in comparison to the strong (underscored three times) The Lord of the Rings feel Lord Foul’s Bane, the first book in the series, exudes.  Both Illearth and Empire the middle story in a trilogy (and like Thomas Covenant, Star Wars has since spawned additional trilogies), the outcome is not as cotton-candy as the first in their respective series.  As many will agree, this is an advantage, rather than disadvantage.

Having awoken back in the real world at the end of Lord Foul’s Bane, The Illearth War finds Thomas Covenant trying cope with his dreams (as he believes them to be) of the Land and his feelings about reality based on these dreams.  With a newfound sense of bravery to behave as normally as possible with leprosy, he sets out into the world beyond his door.  But it isn’t long before he’s back in the Land.  Forty years having passed compared to his two weeks in the real world, Covenant shakes his head in further disbelief: if ever there was proof it was all a dream, the time disparity is it.  Waking up in Revelstone, he learns that a new set of Lords, overseen by the enigmatic Elena, have replaced those who died at the end of Lord Foul’s Bane. Well versed in the wards of magic, the Lords inform him of Foul’s movements in the time that has passed.  Somehow making the giants disappear and massing a huge army, the good people of the Land will need to defend themselves sooner rather than later against the looming machinations of Foul.