Review of Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Growing up poor, no matter America or in Africa, is a difficult task.  Human nature being what it is, a variety of perspectives can be taken of the wealth gap.  The affluent side might be something mysterious and forever unattainable, it can be motivation to work hard and one day find yourself amongst the rich and likewise a lifestyle entirely undesirable, it can be something that becomes owed—like feelings of victim hood, it can be the nexus for crime and other means of obtaining fast wealth, it can be the source of depression and frustration, and it can be accepted as normal; life just goes on, best to be happy with what you have instead of don’t have.  An interesting examination of the haves and have nots, Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2011 YA novel Ship Breaker takes a look at the world through the eyes of a poor teenage boy.  Existing at one of the lowest rungs of society, it’s through a whirlwind adventure that the ultimate value of his life is made apparent.

Ship Breaker is set in a post-oil world warmed drastically by the greenhouse effect.  The polar ice caps have melted and raised sea waters hundreds of feet, inundating the continents.  Humanity pushed back but not defeated, the effect is nevertheless significant.  Whole cities drowned, conglomerates of the destitute have emerged wherever food can be found and valuable materials scavenged.  It is on the coastline of what was once Louisiana that young Nailer is found.  Rooting through abandoned tanker ships, he locates steel, copper, and other metals to earn his quota for the day.  Choking dust and mold filling every breath and the danger of being in tiny, enclosed environments haunting every step, his working conditions are abysmal.  But nothing is as bad as his return home.  Richard Lopez, Nailer’s father, is a drunken drug addict who beats his son for the most trivial of transgressions.  But one day, when a major storm breaks over the beach, their lives change forever.

Review of Gradisil by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts’ debut novel Salt was a story that balanced the meat and potatoes of conceptual science fiction with a political examination of the crossroads between anarchy and authoritarianism.  Later, his eleventh novel (excluding the parodies) New Model Army was the pertinent contrast of a purely democratic militia against a traditional army (an organization that historically has been, and is currently, totalitarianist).  Fitting nicely in the middle of these two is Roberts’ sixth novel Gradisil (2007).  An intriguing exploration of libertarianism, Roberts unpacks the political ideology with his trademark attention to society and the individual, telling the saga of one family’s rise into the highest ‘uplands’ of Earth possible and the turmoil that results.

Gradisil is at heart the story of three generations of one family—an atypical family, but a realistic one for it.  The novel opens with teenage Klara as she helps her father set up home in high orbit around Earth.  Wanting to escape the political trouble brewing between the European Union and the US, the pair are among the first people to fly into the upper atmosphere carrying a large metal tube and filling it with needed supplies: oxygen tanks, communications gear, food, sleeping hammocks, and the like—a truly Spartan freedom, but true freedom, nonetheless.  A tragedy interrupting their zero-g set up, Klara is left to pick up the pieces of life as war breaks out below.  Giving birth to a daughter, Gradisil, the narrative shifts ahead in time to when the Uplands, as the orbiting domiciles are called, have come to represent a political objective to the American government. The homes numbering in the thousands, most of which populated by rich dissidents, the President and his cabinet want to establish American governance and tax the burgeoning populace.  With violence between the land and sky threatening, Gradisil attempts to unite the Uplanders in defense of their “motherland”.  After experiencing catastrophes of her own, it is up Gradisil’s timid son Hope to resolve the political issues that have built around the Uplands, Earth’s most wide open frontier.

Review of Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson is, and mayhaps always will be, the speculative fiction writer who most integrates myth and legend into fantasy and science fiction.  The former relatively easy given myth and legend are typically already half fantasy, the latter is the more difficult given one of the aims of science fiction is believable futuristic extrapolation.  Failing spectacularly with The High Crusade (a novel that sees Medieval knights take a space ship to another planet to fight blue-skinned aliens), his 1970 Tau Zero is a more subtle mix.  While lacking in fully humanized characters, it nevertheless captures the ideal of a mythological journey in hard sf form.

Tau Zero is the story of a group of fifty astronauts on a mission to a distant star system.  The journey planned to take five years subjective time, thirty-three years actual time, the group know they are leaving their loved ones behind for good; the Earth they will return to in sixty-six years will be in differing circumstances.  Their ship, the Leonora Christine, the most sophisticated, technologically advanced space craft ever assembled by humanity, is capable of accelerating the vessel to near light speed with its massive Brussard ramjet.  Blast off going off without a hitch, when the ship flies through a nebula, however, a wrench is thrown in the works.  The gas pedal essentially stuck to the floor, the astronauts must find a way to remove the figurative wrench as they inch closer to light speed and further from the reality they are most familiar with.

Review of Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula Le Guin

The 1990s are a somewhat intriguing period in the career of Ursula Le Guin.  Publishing only one at the outset (Tehanu in 1990), the decade would end without another novel hitting the shelves.  She was far from idle, however.  Publishing almost fifty short stories and a handful of collections, Le Guin remained hard at work through her seventh decade.  (She is currently in her ninth and still writing.)  With Tehanu as the opening salvo, the vanguard of her efforts in this time was to revise and consolidate her worldview regarding gender, family, society, and sexuality, amongst other common themes.  Putting all these ideas in one pot is her collection Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995). 

Four Ways to Forgiveness contains “Betrayals,” “Forgiveness Day,” “A Man of the People,” and “A Woman's Liberation”—all novellas published separately between 1994 and 1995.  Three told from the perspective of women and one a man, all four involve the neighboring planets of Yeowe and Werel, and are set in Le Guin’s ongoing Hainish series—marginally, as with all the other related stories.  Bound together by a handful of strong threads, slavery, rural life, culture, social revolution, race, gender, and the meaning of sexuality form the ideological foundation upon which the four stories are built.

Review of Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

It is both the blessing and curse of the age of information to have laid bare many of life’s little secrets.  We may stop and admire the beauty of a rainbow, but we ruminate less on any mystical significance it might have knowing the scientific principles behind prisms.  The Earth is not flat, and indeed we are a speck of cosmic dust in the larger scheme of things.  Science has turned over the stone of knowledge such that we can see all the little insects of bald fact crawling beneath.  Fewer and fewer are the little mysteries that give life an edge of the perplexing and peculiar—that entities beyond humanity’s knowledge are still at play in the world.  Enter Hope Mirrlees’ 1926 masterpiece Lud-in-the-Mist.  Anything but fairy apologetics (ha!), it sets a little drop of something ethereal dancing on the fingertip of life—including its shadow.

Lud-in-the-Mist is the story of the town of Lud and its jolly, troubled mayor, Nathanial Chanticleer.  Though Lud is situated at the confluence of two rivers, the Dawl, which flows from wholesome English lands, and the Dapple, which flows from Faerie in the West, the people have evolved to the point all talk of fairies and elves is like unto heresy.  Even the slightest mention of anything ethereal is probable cause for scandal.  It’s thus when Mayor Chanticleer’s son admits in public that he ate of fairy fruit, the town goes into uproar.  But when a troupe of young girls at the local primer evince the same, a plague is proclaimed, and it is up to the Mayor to get a handle on the situation.  Fluffy white clouds and thunderheads descending on Lud, the sleepy little English village is never the same.

Review of The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is considered by Brian Aldiss to have been the first science fiction novel.  The story of a doctor who assembles a man from human parts and incites in him the spark of life, the resulting story examines the relationship of the the creator and created in fully human terms.  Inherent to the examination is the usage of biology to unnatural ends: human creating human in a laboratory.   Motivated by the uses of natural science in his time, H.G. Wells took this one premise of Shelley’s novel and expanded it into a novel of his own: 1896’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.  Extending into an examination of mankind’s primordial instincts, the resulting story is as intellectually stimulating as it is grippingly macabre, and is a worthy descendant of Frankenstein.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is the story of the doubly unlucky Edward Prendick.  Shipwrecked, the boat which rescues him proves equally, if not more dangerous.  Its decks a filthy squalor and loaded with cages of screeching animals, the drunk captain lumbers about, insulting the crew.  When Prendick dares to talk back, he is stranded again, cast off with the rest of the passengers and animals at a lone tropical island.  Things on the island somehow even stranger than the boat, humans of odd proportions come and go, and the mysterious man who oversees the island, Dr. Moreau, seems even more bizarre.  A major scare during an afternoon’s walk in the jungle sending Prendick running as fast as he can back to the main buildings, his whole world is about to be turned upside down by revelations of the grotesque menagerie of Dr. Moreau.

Review of "Tendeleo's Story" by Ian McDonald

The first two books in Ian McDonald’s Chaga series, the eponymous novel (called Evolution’s Shore in the US) and Kirinya, both feature white main characters dealing with a strange alien invasion in black Africa.  While local characters do appear as secondary, it’s fair to say much of the concerns of the continent are filtered through Western eyes.  Partially righting the imbalance is “Tendeleo’s Story” (2000), a novella set in the colorful, culturally tense milieu.  Like another short work in the setting, “Recording Angel,” it more concisely expresses aspects of the series, but gains a significant degree of perspective from someone locally dealing with the creeping crystalline invasion. 

Tendeleo, whose name means ‘early-evening-shortly-after-dinner’ in reference to her birth time, is the teenage daughter of the pastor at an Episcopalian church in rural Kenya.  Village life comfortable, things are turned upside down, however, when a chaga meteorite lands a few kilometers from her home.  Visiting the impact site with her little sister and given a tour by a few of the UNECTA scientists gathering data, Tendeleo has a part of her brain activated by the work, advanced technology, and mysteries she witnesses there. But she never has a chance to act on the interest.  The chaga taking over her village a short time later, life is spun out of control as she and her family are placed in a squalorous refugee camp on the outskirts of Nairobi.  Taking life in her own hands, the sacrifices Tendeleo subsequently makes break the heart, but prove worth it in the end.

Review of "Mr. Boy" by James Patrick Kelly

One of the undercurrents of science fiction is a concern for the relationship between biotechnical advances and wealth.  Immortality available only to the rich an oft used premise, there is an awareness among sci-fi writers that the evolution of technology may not be applied democratically given the economic system we currently exist within.  Locating one such rich boy in a post-human context, James Patrick Kelly’s 1990 novella Mr. Boy examines the possibilities in highly imaginative fashion, the boy eventually falling on one side of the title coin. 

Mr. Boy is the story of Peter Cage, legally known as Mr. Boy.  Though twenty-five years old, his ultra-rich mother has paid for stunting surgery twice, and at the start of the story Mr. Boy is emerging from a third, his twelve year old body fresh and ready.  But what makes him truly happy is that his sidekick, a ‘jailbroken’ assistant called Comrade, has just stolen for him a nice piece of death porn.  The autopsy photo of a murdered CEO, Mr. Boy delights in the image on his way to a party.  Meeting a hippi-fied girl there, getting to know her proves a game-changer in his life.  But it’s the photo which comes back to haunt him.

Review of Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

Movements within science fiction have come and gone—New Wave, cyberpunk, the Silver Age, etc.  But one which has been there nearly since the beginning is space opera.  No matter whether one cites E.E. Doc Smith’s Skylark series or Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, its popularity has ebbed and flowed, but always the sub-genre has had its foot in the field.  The canvas writ large, prose barely competent (Simmons and a few others are exceptions), complex plots, and semblances of character—all zig and zag across the galaxy to save something (anything!), discover the mysteries abound, and prevent the worst cataclysms from being unleashed on the universe.  Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series, opened by the eponymous novel in 2000, is no exception—in any way.

Starting as three separate strands that eventually intertwine, Revelation Space opens with the archeologist Dan Sylveste and the dig he is participating in on the remote planet Resurgam.  A mysterious obelisque revealed in the layers of dust from a long lost civilization of bird-like humanoids, Sylveste, along with the beta-level construct of his conniving father, attempt to interpret the mysterious runes on its sides.  Traveling near light speed in a massive Conjoiner space ship is Ilia Volyova.  On a mission to save her captain who is dying in cryo-sleep of a strange plague, she will stop at nothing to find a cure—including kidnapping and murder.  And lastly is the assassin Khouri. Legally working the bizarre architectural construct that is Chasm City, after one of her kills she is approached by a mysterious entity called the Madamoiselle and given an offer that goes against her oath as a legal assassin.  The bait too good, too personal to decline, it isn’t long before she is undercover, looking for a ride to Resurgam.  The three’s stories conflating in smooth fashion, the they find themselves chasing and facing a mystery that could mean everything to not only them, but all sentient species.

Review of The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett

If indeed social movements occur in cycles that over time have a net result of zero, what then is the value of scientific pursuit?  If humanity will inevitably revert to primitivism, of what use is maneuvering toward that fuzzy idea of ‘civilization’?  Is it just to give us something to do with our time on Earth?  Is it an innate, unavoidable aspect of being human we should shun? Is it just false hope?  Or, is there a light at the end of the tunnel?  These questions and more Leigh Brackett examines in her oft-overlooked 1955 magnum opus The Long Tomorrow.  A simple tale, it nevertheless lays bare one of the most fundamental questions we face: to what goal should humanity strive?

Post apocalypse, The Long Tomorrow posits an America where technologically advanced civilization was put to blame for the catastrophe of global nuclear war that followed upon Hiroshima.  Religious groups jumping into the void of leadership that followed, new laws were enacted to prevent cities from developing larger than 1,000 people.  Large gatherings of minds seen as the root cause for the development of such destructive technology, in the years that followed America became a scattering of pastoral micro-communities of religious groups of varying fervor.  Neighbor keeping close watch over neighbor, technology such as radios and tvs is the work of the devil, the simple life of farming the norm.