Bibliophilia

I wish I had a lot more time to read. I own hundreds and hundreds of books, some of which I’ve been carting around for 30 or 40 years. Don’t remember a thing about some of them except that I enjoyed them. It would be nice to sit down for a few years and just read.

And not just the old books, either. I’d love to buy lots of new ones.

I generally read the Resnick/Malzberg column in the SFWA Bulletin, and this month they were talking about specialty publishers — small houses that are supporting the history of science fiction by keeping classics in print. So today I have an itch to rush out and buy all the science fiction I can find. It’s a mild form of mania — a raw desire to buy thousands of books simply because it would be so cool to own them! Complete collections of Heinlein, Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, and a host of other visionaries. I’ve got most of the Philip Dick paperbacks … but maybe I’m missing a few!

I won’t do it, of course. I wouldn’t have time to read them all, and I’m not rich enough to indulge such whims purely for the sake of having a well-stocked private library. Besides, a lot of the old science fiction wasn’t actually very good. Reading it would be in the nature of a research project – to find out what ideas were amazing or trendy in 1950, and what cultural blind spots the writers wallowed in without knowing it.

Some of the cultural blind spots are interesting. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of SF in which everybody was having happy sex with everybody else (or at least, with everybody else of the opposite sex). STDs weren’t even a blip on the radar, and nor was the importance of long-term pair-bonding to emotional health.

But I’d still like to own all those books!

Reading: Connie Willis

Many years ago I was knocked out by Doomsday Book, Connie Willis’s novel of time travel to the dark days of the Black Plague. But then I tried another of her books, found it disappointingly shallow, and gave up on her.

This month I decided to give her another shot. I borrowed To Say Nothing of the Dog from the library, rolled up my metaphorical pant legs, and waded in.

Imagine a Victorian sitcom. Imagine Lucy and Ethel wandering around in Victorian England, trying to fix up a mixup that just gets worse and worse.

The history department at Oxford is using a time machine to travel back from 2057 to 1940 in order to do a blazingly trivial bit of research (the whereabouts of a spectacularly ugly vase that vanished during the Nazi bombing of Coventry Cathedral). But there are complications, so the narrator takes a detour

Reading: The Dragons of Babel

Elves, centaurs, dragons, trolls, witches, hippogriffs, and other creatures even more fantastical throng through Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of Babel. But it isn’t what you’re thinking. Swanwick has taken classic fantasy and mythology and done a cheerfully brutal mash-up with the seamier elements of our own modern world. There’s plenty of technology (from cigarette lighters to subway trains with electrical third rails), explicit sex, and casual profanity, not to mention overt references to actual historical figures like Mozart and Flaubert.

The first 2/3 of the novel seems almost picaresque — young Will is wandering through the world without much direction, falling in with whoever he meets, getting into trouble, falling in love, and so on. But Swanwick has a deeper design. Eventually the story is revealed as a modern expression of one of the timeless fantasy themes.

I’m not even going to tell you which theme, because that would spoil it. This book is a winner. If you’re looking for something fresh in the fantasy genre, you won’t want to miss it.

Video: Battlestar

I never saw the original BattleStar Galactica series. The new series looks pretty good, though it’s far from flawless. Last night I watched the pilot miniseries, which is essentially a 3-hour movie. I’ll try a few more episodes before making up my mind.

Script: Pretty good. Plenty of human elements, and it’s always nice to have Truly Evil Bad Guys that you can love to hate. I love seeing a woman fighter pilot who (though apparently heterosexual) smokes cigars with evident enjoyment.

What the Cylon sexpot is doing inside Gaius’s brain is a bit hard to decipher. Why the Cylons would build a new Cylon race that was all but biologically identical to the humans — mystifying. What the Cylon was doing lurking in the weapons depot — even more mystifying.

Effects/animation: Very good. Marred mainly by a few concessions to what TV viewers will expect to see. The fighter spacecraft look way too much like conventional jet fighters — and when we see a profile of a pilot in the cockpit, the stars in the background are whipping past! This is just wrong. The stars would appear stationary unless the craft were spinning rapidly, in which case it would be out of control.

Casting: As Commander Adama, Edward James Olmos looks the way Captain Kirk should have looked, but didn’t. Too bad Olmos can’t act. He seems to have only one facial expression: craggy.

And speaking of Star Trek, when Galactica is hit by enemy fire in the final battle … you guessed it, everybody on the bridge staggers sideways and falls down, and sparks fly from the control panels. We have so been here before.

But overall, it’s not too bad.

World-Building

Writing science fiction is enormously difficult. If you cut corners, it gets easier. Cutting corners is always a temptation, because (a) if you don’t, your whole story may collapse, and (b) your readers or viewers probably won’t notice or care.

Quick example: Last week I watched an episode of Dr. Who called “Daleks in New York.” It’s the 1930s, and the Daleks are doing something to the spire atop the Empire State Building in order to capture the energy of what is clearly described in the dialog as an impending “solar flare.” Solar flares can’t be predicted, and not much of their energy reaches the surface of the Earth (for which we can all be thankful), but never mind that. As the climax of the story nears, the “solar flare” has transmuted into a simple bolt of lightning emanating from a thunderstorm.

I’ll bet not one viewer in ten even noticed the switch.

A reader named Conrad Cook has been grilling me about my unflattering view of Riverworld, by Philip Jose Farmer. I was critical, among other things, of

Time After Time

I am so bummed. The third season of Primeval has only just started airing on BBC America, which means it won’t be out on DVD for at least a year. And I don’t have a TV!

Is it a good enough series for me to rush out and buy a nice new TV and subscribe to cable? Basically, no, it’s not that good. Besides, the first few episodes have already aired. Who knows when they’ll go into reruns? It’s the kind of series that you sort of want to watch in order, because there’s a long story arc involving Nick Cutter’s ex-wife, who is quite clearly Up To No Good.

I wonder why the good science fiction is on TV these days. Not all of it, I’m sure. Lately most of the novels I’ve been reading have been fantasy. I think I need to stray over into the other aisle.

I do hope the SF novels being written today are less juvenile than Riverworld.

Up a Creek

Jean-Paul Sartre’s aphorism, “Hell is other people,” keeps drifting across my mind as I wade through Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld saga. Right now I’m halfway through volume 2, The Fabulous Riverboat, and I’m rather distinctly unimpressed with Farmer’s view of human nature.

The story, in case you’re unfamiliar with Riverworld, is that every human who ever lived has been resurrected, in the flesh, along the 20 million miles or so of a great planet-girdling river. (Children under 7 years old are not resurrected, probably because it would have been inconvenient for Farmer to have a lot of toddlers underfoot. What happened to the children, we’re not told.) Everybody starts out naked, healthy, and physically young, but their whole lifetime’s memories are intact. Food is provided, but nothing else. So they have nothing to do for amusement except make knives, spears, and axes out of flint and bamboo and start stabbing and bashing one another.

Their compunctions about doing so would seem minor enough in any case, but are soon erased by the discovery that people who are killed in Riverworld only pop up again somewhere else along the river. Effectively, everyone has become immortal. So there’s no reason not to bash someone’s head in or rip their guts open, if it suits you.

There’s more to the books than stabbing and bashing. There’s also a lot of slavery, some highly unlikely metaphysics, equally unlikely biology and planetology, sophomoric philosophizing, authorial intrusions, Esperanto, five hundred novel uses for bamboo, and a great deal of name-dropping. The major characters in the first two books include Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), Sam Clemens, Hermann Goering, Cyrano de Bergerac, King John, and Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves (the real Alice after whom Alice in Wonderland was named). Nobody who was nobody in their Earthly life counts for much except as a sidekick; it’s the Great Man theory of history run amok.

The writing is sometimes adequate, but not, on the whole, very good. Farmer seems to relish the scenes of hand-to-hand combat, but tends to fall back on narrative summary at other times – possibly in order to keep the sprawling story from developing a monstrous word count, or possibly because he knew his primary readership was made up of teenage boys.

There’s no music in the writing, and none in the story either. Nobody makes a flute out of the ubiquitous bamboo. Nobody makes any sculpture. Nobody dances. It’s all hacking and stabbing. Wheeee….

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

 You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s why it’s so hard to write science fiction.

The first Riverworld novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, was published in 1971. That was less than an eon ago, culturally, but Philip Jose Farmer was born in 1918. His ideas about the world were formed before World War II.

Read in 2009, certain moments in the novel are amusing, sad, and creepy, all at once. The story, in case you’ve never read it, is that every human who has ever lived wakes up after death in the Riverworld. This is neither Heaven nor Hell, but it’s a bodily resurrection for sure. Everybody is restored to youth and health. Everybody is naked

Monsters Invade London

I’ve been watching a British TV series called Primeval, in which a variety of prehistoric monsters wander through time/space anomalies to menace innocent civilians. Thank you, Netflix — no commercials!

The monsters are scary, and so is the technology. Most of the creatures are so well animated that you can actually believe they’re real. And on a television budget, and coming alive within the time-frame of TV’s compressed production schedule. Very impressive.

Some of the scripts are better than others. The giant centipede in episode two was … well, they tossed the square/cube law out the window on that one. But most of the science isn’t too bad. The series has a story arc that makes you want to find out what happens in the next episode, some of the editing work is very stylish with a debt to fast cut rock video, the actors have charisma, and did I mention the great animation? Not to mention Hannah Spearritt flouncing around in her undies. Mmm.

Here & There in Sci-Fi

Had a video pig-out last night — watched three episodes of Season Four of Doctor Who. This is cheesy sci-fi at its finest. I’m still not sure why I like this series. Goofy devices, creepy aliens in silly rubber masks … none of the science fiction makes a lick of sense.

I think my favorite moment in these three episodes was when the Doctor is menaced by a stone creature whose interior is molten lava. So what does he do? He whips out a big yellow squirt gun and squirts it with water, which naturally sends it into paroxysms of agony because the water cools it off, thus giving him time to dash away. We never saw the squirt gun until that moment — no groundwork is laid, and there’s no reason on Earth (or any other planet) why the Doctor would be packing a squirt gun. But suddenly, there it is. And it does the trick. That’s a true Doctor Who moment.

Maybe I like this series just because I feel more attuned to the story and the action when the actors have British accents. But I think it’s more to do with emotion. The stories in Doctor Who are silly, but the emotions of the characters are real. In American sci-fi, on the other hand — well, Buffy was consistently good, but what can you say about Stargate? The characters go through hell, and what they’re feeling never, ever shows up on the screen. Not a glimmer. Maybe it’s bad acting, or maybe American directors think American viewers don’t care.

Or maybe American directors, when they’re doing cheese, secretly feel demeaned. They refuse to take it seriously, and their lack of involvement comes across on the screen. Whereas (just speculating here) maybe British directors of cheesy sci-fi take their work seriously, and care about doing it well.

Or maybe the American actors are showing emotion, and I just have no patience with Americans. Also a possibility.