Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science
fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So,
hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the
old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm
more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us
about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they
think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?
From: Analog, December 1960
This is a fun little story. There's not a whole lot to it, and it's quite short, but as a bit of page-filler, it's quite enjoyable. I can find little about the author, except that as of 2000, he wrote a webpage about secret decoder rings on a website about old-timey radio.
Of course, it centers around the idea that the military really wants a certain new technology, and while everyone in the story seems to agree, I, for one, am quite happy that they can't have it. Of course a new and wonderful technology should be given right to the government for its future wars. Eep.
At any rate, an army general calls in an old scientist friend, wanting him to figure something out for him. The story he tells seems a little like he's gone round the bend - the other night, an insubstantial figure walked through the walls of his office. But far from Marley's ghost, this was a real person, the best friend of another scientist who had recently died. The best friend is a writer who knows nothing about science, but was given the task of delivering the experiment to the military.
It's a miraculous device that makes its wearer intangible, and impervious to harm, as both radiation and force pass right through. There's some science doublespeak about how you can still walk on the floor and not pass right through, but I'm fine with that. My worldview depends on Kitty Pryde being able to walk through solid matter, so I'm not going to push that aspect too hard.
Hilariously, the reason that no one knows how it works or how to duplicate it, without taking the original apart, is that apparently the scientist who invented it had "a childlike fear of putting anything into writing that had not been experimentally verified.”
I am pretty sure that is not how you science.
Notes, man, they're invaluable. For pretty much every experiment.
So the kicker to this story, where the author brings in his classical allusion about what this is really about is that the writer friend who was delivering it to the general tosses it carelessly onto the desk and the switch flips...and now the desk and the device are intangible, and it'll never run out of power because science.
The General gets to sit there and contemplate his intangible desk and how he'll never have the next great weapon for making intangible soldiers. Which, quite frankly, is how I prefer the military. His friend says he's pretty much fucked, and compares him to Tantalus. And he didn't even kill and cook his own son, unless you're extending the metaphor to the soldiers under his command. Which, hey, would make this even more subversive, but I think the author is referring to the punishment and not the sin.
Thursday, 30 April 2015
Wednesday, 29 April 2015
The Sunken Cathedral by Kate Walbert
This is a weird review to write. Let's start by saying that I liked this book a lot, then digress a little to why it's a weird review to write. I debated whether or not to start this way, but then again, I often use my reviews to talk about the experience of reading, if it seems relevant and/or interesting. Like my Gone Girl review that's largely about reading the last page near the beginning.
So, why is this a little weird? Well, because it's the first time ever I've gotten an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) from a publisher. I got a very nice tweet from Simon & Schuster Canada, and that led to someone there saying they had a book they thought I might like, and could they send it to me?
Now, I've never gone after ARCs - it seemed like a lot of hassle for books I'd get to eventually anyway, and there are lots of previously published books screaming at me to be read. However, it was damned flattering to be asked, and if someone comes to me and is an honest-to-goodness real publisher, I'm in! A week later, an exciting package containing TWO books appeared in my mailbox (I haven't gotten to the second one yet, but I will), and I settled down to read Kate Walbert's The Sunken Cathedral.
Every book I sit down with I hope I like. While a good snarky review cleanses the palate every once in a while, I would really prefer to read awesome books. And so it was with a great sense of relief that I discovered that the first ARC I'd ever gotten contained a book that I quite enjoyed.
And yet, I'm quite sure it's not for everyone.
Let's talk about what it's not before going on to what it is, and what themes I responded to most strongly. It's not big on plot. If you're looking for a strong throughline of stuff happening, this is not going to be for you. If you have little patience for meandering or meditative prose, I'm guessing ou may want to take a pass.
If, on the other hand, you like character-based books, where exactly what happens is not as important as how and to whom it happens, I would recommend this book. It's set in New York City, among four women, (or five - the back of the book talks about four, but there's another one who I thought had about as much of the book devoted to her as the other four), none of whom are young, and two of whom are quite old indeed.
Stories jump back and forth in time, trying to situate who these women are and how they got where they are, and I enjoyed both the prose and the interweaving of disconnected lives. There are ways in which I suspect it does not, in the final assessment, hang together perfectly as a work of art, but at the time, I was so strongly moved by it that that niggling feeling didn't really matter.
One of the best things about The Sunken Cathedral is that it's one of those books that welcomes readers bringing their own experiences to it. I suspect other people would find different parts resonating than I did. What was strongest for me were the themes of life continuing with absences, and the misinterpretation of our lives by others. The two older women are widows. A school principal has a daughter who doesn't talk to her. Most have children to whom they are no longer essential.
Although this book is perhaps melancholy, it isn't pessimistic. These women feel out how to live their lives, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, in the midst of people who care about how they are doing or don't. Connections are made. Connections fracture. People you had counted on being there forever are suddenly gone.
Yet life doesn't end when absences occur. They hurt and they alter, but it isn't over. There are still romances, still hope, still searches and stories. None of this is done in a linear fashion. As I said, there isn't a driving narrative. It's an impressionistic exploration, and it's not perfect. But it is provocative, and I was moved by it. I likely would never have read this book under other circumstances, but I'm glad that I did. It's taken me over a week to sit down to write this review and the book still lingers.
(An ARC of this book was provided by Simon & Schuster Canada in exchange for an honest review)
So, why is this a little weird? Well, because it's the first time ever I've gotten an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) from a publisher. I got a very nice tweet from Simon & Schuster Canada, and that led to someone there saying they had a book they thought I might like, and could they send it to me?
Now, I've never gone after ARCs - it seemed like a lot of hassle for books I'd get to eventually anyway, and there are lots of previously published books screaming at me to be read. However, it was damned flattering to be asked, and if someone comes to me and is an honest-to-goodness real publisher, I'm in! A week later, an exciting package containing TWO books appeared in my mailbox (I haven't gotten to the second one yet, but I will), and I settled down to read Kate Walbert's The Sunken Cathedral.
Every book I sit down with I hope I like. While a good snarky review cleanses the palate every once in a while, I would really prefer to read awesome books. And so it was with a great sense of relief that I discovered that the first ARC I'd ever gotten contained a book that I quite enjoyed.
And yet, I'm quite sure it's not for everyone.
Let's talk about what it's not before going on to what it is, and what themes I responded to most strongly. It's not big on plot. If you're looking for a strong throughline of stuff happening, this is not going to be for you. If you have little patience for meandering or meditative prose, I'm guessing ou may want to take a pass.
If, on the other hand, you like character-based books, where exactly what happens is not as important as how and to whom it happens, I would recommend this book. It's set in New York City, among four women, (or five - the back of the book talks about four, but there's another one who I thought had about as much of the book devoted to her as the other four), none of whom are young, and two of whom are quite old indeed.
Stories jump back and forth in time, trying to situate who these women are and how they got where they are, and I enjoyed both the prose and the interweaving of disconnected lives. There are ways in which I suspect it does not, in the final assessment, hang together perfectly as a work of art, but at the time, I was so strongly moved by it that that niggling feeling didn't really matter.
One of the best things about The Sunken Cathedral is that it's one of those books that welcomes readers bringing their own experiences to it. I suspect other people would find different parts resonating than I did. What was strongest for me were the themes of life continuing with absences, and the misinterpretation of our lives by others. The two older women are widows. A school principal has a daughter who doesn't talk to her. Most have children to whom they are no longer essential.
Although this book is perhaps melancholy, it isn't pessimistic. These women feel out how to live their lives, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, in the midst of people who care about how they are doing or don't. Connections are made. Connections fracture. People you had counted on being there forever are suddenly gone.
Yet life doesn't end when absences occur. They hurt and they alter, but it isn't over. There are still romances, still hope, still searches and stories. None of this is done in a linear fashion. As I said, there isn't a driving narrative. It's an impressionistic exploration, and it's not perfect. But it is provocative, and I was moved by it. I likely would never have read this book under other circumstances, but I'm glad that I did. It's taken me over a week to sit down to write this review and the book still lingers.
(An ARC of this book was provided by Simon & Schuster Canada in exchange for an honest review)
Tuesday, 28 April 2015
The Week in Stories - April 28
Seven Stars of Atlantis
The only game I played last week was also the very last session of our pulp game, The Seven Stars of Atlantis. At the end of the previous episode, we'd been drawn into a Hollow Earth (not our Earth, to the best of our knowledge), where the Atlanteans lived, waiting for worlds they'd seeded to be technologically advanced enough to bother plundering.
Quick reminder: I play Margot, a rich, spoiled cat burglar.
Other characters are:
Teddy, a "Custodian" for the Atlanteans and Margot's fiance,
Rex Powell, dashing famed explorer, and
Song Su Li, master detective and Daughter of the Dragon.
We managed to implode the Hollow Earth at the end, and personal matters came to a head in a bunch of cases. As the temple spun back to Earth, a void opened up, and not knowing which was the right way to go to stay alive, Teddy and Margot held hands and walked out into the void, while Su Li and Rex stayed with the temple. As it turned out, that meant Su Li and Rex got back to Earth, and started a long trek to Shambhala, while Teddy and Margot ended up on another planet. Teddy intends to support them with storytelling, while Margot's pretty sure she can supplement that with the cat burglary she's so good at.
So, personal matters. Su Li and Margot went to set an explosive in one of the other temples. Rex had just confessed some feelings for Su Li (I was upstairs pilling the cat while this was happening, so I'm not sure exactly what was said), but on the way to the temple, Su Li assured Margot that what was going on between her and Rex was "purely sexual." Which completely confused Margot at the time.
That got a lot clearer on the way back from blowing up the temple, when Su Li asked whether or not Margot forgave her for the apparent betrayal, and Margot said she wasn't sure. Then Su Li sandbagged Margot by likening it to Margot lying to Teddy - hurting someone you loved to protect them. Margot didn't get it at first, but then the penny finally dropped, about all that Su Li had done to save Margot's life, and a bunch of other things, and...oh.
I wish we'd had more time to play with this twist! I thought it reframed things in a very interesting manner - Margot and Su Li had each always been very concerned about what the other thought of them. And it gives Su Li a bit of a tragic arc - Margot was so crazy about Teddy that it's not like she was going to requite Su Li, but still, it would have and did change things in interesting ways. And now they're on different planets.
Which brings me to how hard it is to get everything in before the end, in almost every roleplaying game! And it's often the personal stuff, which is in someways the most important, but by the end, the plot is probably rolling rapidly to conclusion, and it's hard to balance. While I think it's a good idea not to draw things out, this is why having an epilogue in Sunset Empire worked well. I don't know how to find that balance, and there will probably always be things left undone. In this case, given the likely permanence of the separation of Teddy and Margot from the others (unless Shambhala has some interesting technology tucked away, I guess), an epilogue would not have helped.
One other thing that happened was that I went into the last session going for broke. Margot was going to save Teddy from being a Custodian for the Atlanteans, or die trying. Which probably hit its high point when she told Dr. Song, Su Li's father, that she'd sacrifice everyone on Earth to save Teddy. (My husband later said "you realize that makes her not a very good person." Which, yeah. But she wants what she wants, and would never sacrifice Teddy to save others.)
That ended up working, through the expedient of using Atlantean technology to drain all his blood and replace it with un-nanited blood. Thankfully. But that's not really what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about the draft....
Sorry. Drifted into Alice's Restaurant there a bit.
What I'm really here to talk about is about having something your character wants. In my various groups, we've been drifting more and more to systems-light systems, and that's great. I love it. But without the mechanical pressure, I think it's even more important for the players to be bringing their own pressure to the situation. Sometimes, though, it seems like we get into scenes without wanting anything, just to see what happens. That can be great. But sometimes it's just meandering.
I think there's a simple, non-mechanical way to kick that sort of thing into high gear. The terminology I like to use is "essential action," from A Practical Handbook for the Actor. It's the thing your character wants out of the scene. They may not get it, the tools they use to get it will vary, the tactics they choose. Every scene, no matter how small, is deeply enriched if both characters want something. More specifically, want something that has its proof in the other person.
(There's a whole list of things that make up a good essential action, including that it must not presuppose an emotional state in the actor or the scene partner, it must not be trying to get a specific emotion out of the other person, although you can be wanting a specific action: for example, you can't want to make them feel so bad they cry, but you can want an apology from them. There are more, and they're a good bullet point list.)
But it all comes down to this: when you go into a scene wanting something, drama happens much more easily and organically. The stakes are higher. (It doesn't, and shouldn't, always be in the key of angst.) It's more interesting. It'll play better to the other people at the table.
Of course, when you're acting, you can come up with essential actions during all the homework you do in advance. It's harder to do on the fly in a game. So here's what I'm going to try to do for the next little while, and I'll report back on how it goes. I'm going to try to think of one or two essential actions for each other player (or major NPC) going into the game, being fully ready to alter or discard them as the situation changes. That may mean that halfway through the session, I'll have exhausted my essential actions and will have to go on the fly, but I think it likely that by then, new wants will have arisen. And if not, I'll at least have gotten some scenes on the table where, dammit, I wanted something badly.
(Bill and I were talking about this over coffee on the weekend, and spun the conversation out into how to tell if what you're wanting to do is playing to others, and he came up with an idea for a minigame within a game (this would be purely for a oneshot), where before you start a scene, you write down your essential action and place it facedown on the table, and then after the scene, everyone guesses what it was. I think that might be fun to do once, to help get a better sense of what's coming across and what isn't.)
At any rate, with Teddy and Margot, they'd gotten back to each other and were now engaged, and I wasn't sure where to go next. So I decided that come hell or high water, she was getting him out of the finale alive, and went for that one with all my heart. And I enjoyed it.
So that's my personal experiment for the next little while, creating essential actions for my characters and recording the outcome. I'll let you know how it goes.
The only game I played last week was also the very last session of our pulp game, The Seven Stars of Atlantis. At the end of the previous episode, we'd been drawn into a Hollow Earth (not our Earth, to the best of our knowledge), where the Atlanteans lived, waiting for worlds they'd seeded to be technologically advanced enough to bother plundering.
Quick reminder: I play Margot, a rich, spoiled cat burglar.
Other characters are:
Teddy, a "Custodian" for the Atlanteans and Margot's fiance,
Rex Powell, dashing famed explorer, and
Song Su Li, master detective and Daughter of the Dragon.
We managed to implode the Hollow Earth at the end, and personal matters came to a head in a bunch of cases. As the temple spun back to Earth, a void opened up, and not knowing which was the right way to go to stay alive, Teddy and Margot held hands and walked out into the void, while Su Li and Rex stayed with the temple. As it turned out, that meant Su Li and Rex got back to Earth, and started a long trek to Shambhala, while Teddy and Margot ended up on another planet. Teddy intends to support them with storytelling, while Margot's pretty sure she can supplement that with the cat burglary she's so good at.
So, personal matters. Su Li and Margot went to set an explosive in one of the other temples. Rex had just confessed some feelings for Su Li (I was upstairs pilling the cat while this was happening, so I'm not sure exactly what was said), but on the way to the temple, Su Li assured Margot that what was going on between her and Rex was "purely sexual." Which completely confused Margot at the time.
That got a lot clearer on the way back from blowing up the temple, when Su Li asked whether or not Margot forgave her for the apparent betrayal, and Margot said she wasn't sure. Then Su Li sandbagged Margot by likening it to Margot lying to Teddy - hurting someone you loved to protect them. Margot didn't get it at first, but then the penny finally dropped, about all that Su Li had done to save Margot's life, and a bunch of other things, and...oh.
I wish we'd had more time to play with this twist! I thought it reframed things in a very interesting manner - Margot and Su Li had each always been very concerned about what the other thought of them. And it gives Su Li a bit of a tragic arc - Margot was so crazy about Teddy that it's not like she was going to requite Su Li, but still, it would have and did change things in interesting ways. And now they're on different planets.
Which brings me to how hard it is to get everything in before the end, in almost every roleplaying game! And it's often the personal stuff, which is in someways the most important, but by the end, the plot is probably rolling rapidly to conclusion, and it's hard to balance. While I think it's a good idea not to draw things out, this is why having an epilogue in Sunset Empire worked well. I don't know how to find that balance, and there will probably always be things left undone. In this case, given the likely permanence of the separation of Teddy and Margot from the others (unless Shambhala has some interesting technology tucked away, I guess), an epilogue would not have helped.
One other thing that happened was that I went into the last session going for broke. Margot was going to save Teddy from being a Custodian for the Atlanteans, or die trying. Which probably hit its high point when she told Dr. Song, Su Li's father, that she'd sacrifice everyone on Earth to save Teddy. (My husband later said "you realize that makes her not a very good person." Which, yeah. But she wants what she wants, and would never sacrifice Teddy to save others.)
That ended up working, through the expedient of using Atlantean technology to drain all his blood and replace it with un-nanited blood. Thankfully. But that's not really what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about the draft....
Sorry. Drifted into Alice's Restaurant there a bit.
What I'm really here to talk about is about having something your character wants. In my various groups, we've been drifting more and more to systems-light systems, and that's great. I love it. But without the mechanical pressure, I think it's even more important for the players to be bringing their own pressure to the situation. Sometimes, though, it seems like we get into scenes without wanting anything, just to see what happens. That can be great. But sometimes it's just meandering.
I think there's a simple, non-mechanical way to kick that sort of thing into high gear. The terminology I like to use is "essential action," from A Practical Handbook for the Actor. It's the thing your character wants out of the scene. They may not get it, the tools they use to get it will vary, the tactics they choose. Every scene, no matter how small, is deeply enriched if both characters want something. More specifically, want something that has its proof in the other person.
(There's a whole list of things that make up a good essential action, including that it must not presuppose an emotional state in the actor or the scene partner, it must not be trying to get a specific emotion out of the other person, although you can be wanting a specific action: for example, you can't want to make them feel so bad they cry, but you can want an apology from them. There are more, and they're a good bullet point list.)
But it all comes down to this: when you go into a scene wanting something, drama happens much more easily and organically. The stakes are higher. (It doesn't, and shouldn't, always be in the key of angst.) It's more interesting. It'll play better to the other people at the table.
Of course, when you're acting, you can come up with essential actions during all the homework you do in advance. It's harder to do on the fly in a game. So here's what I'm going to try to do for the next little while, and I'll report back on how it goes. I'm going to try to think of one or two essential actions for each other player (or major NPC) going into the game, being fully ready to alter or discard them as the situation changes. That may mean that halfway through the session, I'll have exhausted my essential actions and will have to go on the fly, but I think it likely that by then, new wants will have arisen. And if not, I'll at least have gotten some scenes on the table where, dammit, I wanted something badly.
(Bill and I were talking about this over coffee on the weekend, and spun the conversation out into how to tell if what you're wanting to do is playing to others, and he came up with an idea for a minigame within a game (this would be purely for a oneshot), where before you start a scene, you write down your essential action and place it facedown on the table, and then after the scene, everyone guesses what it was. I think that might be fun to do once, to help get a better sense of what's coming across and what isn't.)
At any rate, with Teddy and Margot, they'd gotten back to each other and were now engaged, and I wasn't sure where to go next. So I decided that come hell or high water, she was getting him out of the finale alive, and went for that one with all my heart. And I enjoyed it.
So that's my personal experiment for the next little while, creating essential actions for my characters and recording the outcome. I'll let you know how it goes.
Monday, 27 April 2015
The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein
Because he's pretty much incapable of writing something boring, this was enjoyable. I've written before about how I enjoy Heinlein's books while often feeling just a little weird about it. But I'm not about to let differences in politics keep me from reading him - a message that (ahem!) certain other jackasses in science fiction could learn today, with the recent hijacking of the Hugo nominations to make sure that those damn progressive, female, or non-white authors don't get recognized.
In The Door Into Summer, Dan is an engineer who cares less about making all the money than he does about being his own boss and making just the things he wants to make, with no one hanging over his shoulder or cost-cutting. Unfortunately, his best friend and business partner, combined with his secretary/fiance, do not agree. Together (and the secretary/fiancee is by far painted as the more responsible of the two, in the classic but slightly irritating "man duped by a dame" scenario) they rip Dan off for his entire company and try to hire him back, firmly under their thumb.
Dan and his cat are not about to take this. (And the cat is probably the best part of the book.) He signs up for cold sleep, waking up in 30 years, and tries to get back on top of engineering. Except, oddly, some of the new gadgets look like, well, they look like he'd designed them himself.
If there's a dirty dame, you know there's got to be a lily-white virgin, in this case Dan's best friend's stepdaughter, only 12 when he knows her, but due to other juggling, will be about 23 in 30 years. For a while, I was kind of hoping that she'd designed the new gadgets - I know Heinlein has written about female engineers - inspired by Dan's designs. But no. It's twistier than that.
The twistier comes about when Dan discovers a professor who knows how to send someone 30 years in time - in one direction or another, no guarantee as to which. And no way to return. Dan's made some discoveries that make him determined to go back and do some certain things that I won't give away.
He ends up on a nudist colony, and is taken under the wing of an entirely trustworthy nudist lawyer (no, I'm serious.) It's that and the plot with the young lady and the conniving dame that take this out of juvenile territory. He's only got a limited amount of time to get certain things done, and maybe I won't spoil it anymore.
There's not a lot deep here - if the later Heinleins are weirder, they've also got more to chew on. Neither are the paradoxes particularly mind-bending. Interesting, but not complicated. Still, the writing was entertaining, as it almost always is.
Friday, 24 April 2015
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare
Indeed, one of the colleagues of Mark, the main character, has recently disappeared, and no one investigates too closely. There is not even a moral dilemma about whether or not to do so - it's just accepted as something that happens.
This is not just an Albania that is priding itself on modernizing (and in this smaller mountain town, even that is debatable). It's also one where old stories and legends are still around - most prominently in the legend of a book that details every blood feud in the Albanian hills, those settled and those still outstanding. In a world where the disappearances seem antiseptic, a messier kind of erasure looms.
This book flips back and forth every other chapter (approximately) between Mark's life and a story or fable or legend he has thought about briefly in the preceding chapter, including one of a young woman who was happily married to a snake. The juxtaposition of folklore with the main story is very evocative, and the legends entirely new to me. (Presuming they haven't been made up wholesale for this book.)
Instead of everyone cheating on everyone, as often happens in a Kundera book, the romantic and sexual side of Mark come out in his relationship with his younger girlfriend. Neither is attached to anyone else, although he suspects her of having cheated on him on her trip to the capitol. They can't show their relationship in public, and the reasons for this are never quite clear. (I suspect they would be to someone who knew the social and political milieu better than I.)
There are also stories of a secret archive hidden in the mountains, to which the new absolute leader of the country came on the eve of assuming power, and left looking ashen. There is much here about the sins, past and present, of those in power, and the assumption of power as the assumption of all future guilt - that while you may not have committed atrocities yet, you will.
In this mix of autocratic state and swirling maelstrom of folk belief, Mark attempts to make art and stay under the radar. But neither will entirely go away, even if he can shield himself from the worst effects of either. They will affect those around him, and there is no barrier of stories or secrets tall enough.
It's an odd book, different from most of what I read, and intriguing as such. The inclusion of folklore is, of course, right up my alley.
Thursday, 23 April 2015
"The Long Voyage" by Carl Jacobi
Hey guys! Did you realize that the Gutenberg Project has old science
fiction? It does! (I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.) So,
hey, why not read some of them and review them? Not to poke fun at the
old science fiction, although there might be a little of that. No, I'm
more interested in looking at what this old science fiction tells us
about the worlds that were being imagined at the time. What did they
think about science? Gender? Race? The eventual fate of the world?
From: Fantastic Universe, September 1955
There are some plotholes in this story, but other than that, it's a pretty good one. Except that the women characters get shafted. That's not surprising, but what is is how many women are supposed to be on board this ship, and how very little they actually get to do. And, of course, we're given no indication that any of the crew on this "Long Voyage" are anything but white and heterosexual. Which is to say that it's a science fiction story written in the 1950s.
At any rate, Norris, one half of a famed inventor duo, is recruiting young couples, 18 of them to be exact, to undertake a perilous space journey outside the solar system, in search of a new world to colonize. Those fuddy-duddies at the "Space-Time Commission" won't like it, but who cares about those stick-in-the-muds?
He's got weird rules, and this is where the plothole kind of comes in. It's established he doesn't know what will happen when the spaceship travels, and absolutely established that he cannot possibly have tested it before the entire crew gets on board, or he wouldn't have been there to pick them up. But he's got all these weird rules so that they won't do things that he has no way of knowing would be an issue.
So, these young men and women have landed on several successive planets, ostensibly for colonization, they take samples, find there is no animal life on the planet, and Norris insists they move on. One of the young men decides this is silly - even with only the plant life available, they could certainly colonize one of these planets! He foments dissent.
But the dissent doesn't come to much - instead, he discovers that Norris has a dead guy in his bunk. The dead guy is the other half of the famed inventor duo, who had never told Norris how to make the endurable substance that made them rich. Norris is certain that the clue is hidden on his body - and indeed it is, as we discover over the course of the story. What's not clear is what Norris thought this spaceflight was going to do to help solve the problem.
The nice twist here, though, is that it is revealed that they've been travelling not through space but through time, forward in huge jumps to older versions of the planet Earth. That's where the precautions Norris takes to keep the group from realizing it's Earth (namely, being back indoors by dark, so they can't see the constellations) don't make sense - he can't have known it would be a jump forward in time until he'd done it, and since it seems to be one-way, he can't have tested it.
At any rate, it's a good reveal, and I may be spoiling things if I tell you that eventually the other occupants of the ship manage to find how to reveal the secret in the body of the other inventor, and that somehow knowing how to make Indurate lets them travel back in time to where they started.
I'm not all that sure of the logic on that one, but okay. The twist is good enough that I'll be forgiving.
What does get me, though, is that Norris packs a ship full of 36 people, and half of them are effectively useless. All the science, all the anything, seems to be carried out by the men. The women are literally there so that the dissenter's wife can be trapped by a fire, causing him to cut through into Norris' bunk and discover the body. That's the sole purpose - potential victim.
Why this gets me is that not six years later than this was published, Heinlein's Stranger in the Strange Land will come out, meaning it was being written in the years previous. And Heinlein gets it in a way Jacobi doesn't. When you only have a limited number of seats, you can't have half the people be useless. You need everyone to be a specialist of some sort or another, and probably to multi-class at that. In Stranger, the mission to Mars is made up of married couples, but everyone on that ship, women as well as men, is super competent at more than one thing. (I mean, this is part of the small section that happens around the mission to Mars, but it's important.)
Heinlein gets that one gender can't merely be brought along as ballast. Jacobi does not.
So the women here are victims, and maybe get told about the dissent, but that's about it. One woman gets led out coughing from a room on fire. And because within just a few years, someone will get this right where this does not, it bothers me.
So, in the long run, gender politics are wonky, everyone's white, but darn it, that twist is good, even if it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.
From: Fantastic Universe, September 1955
There are some plotholes in this story, but other than that, it's a pretty good one. Except that the women characters get shafted. That's not surprising, but what is is how many women are supposed to be on board this ship, and how very little they actually get to do. And, of course, we're given no indication that any of the crew on this "Long Voyage" are anything but white and heterosexual. Which is to say that it's a science fiction story written in the 1950s.
At any rate, Norris, one half of a famed inventor duo, is recruiting young couples, 18 of them to be exact, to undertake a perilous space journey outside the solar system, in search of a new world to colonize. Those fuddy-duddies at the "Space-Time Commission" won't like it, but who cares about those stick-in-the-muds?
He's got weird rules, and this is where the plothole kind of comes in. It's established he doesn't know what will happen when the spaceship travels, and absolutely established that he cannot possibly have tested it before the entire crew gets on board, or he wouldn't have been there to pick them up. But he's got all these weird rules so that they won't do things that he has no way of knowing would be an issue.
So, these young men and women have landed on several successive planets, ostensibly for colonization, they take samples, find there is no animal life on the planet, and Norris insists they move on. One of the young men decides this is silly - even with only the plant life available, they could certainly colonize one of these planets! He foments dissent.
But the dissent doesn't come to much - instead, he discovers that Norris has a dead guy in his bunk. The dead guy is the other half of the famed inventor duo, who had never told Norris how to make the endurable substance that made them rich. Norris is certain that the clue is hidden on his body - and indeed it is, as we discover over the course of the story. What's not clear is what Norris thought this spaceflight was going to do to help solve the problem.
The nice twist here, though, is that it is revealed that they've been travelling not through space but through time, forward in huge jumps to older versions of the planet Earth. That's where the precautions Norris takes to keep the group from realizing it's Earth (namely, being back indoors by dark, so they can't see the constellations) don't make sense - he can't have known it would be a jump forward in time until he'd done it, and since it seems to be one-way, he can't have tested it.
At any rate, it's a good reveal, and I may be spoiling things if I tell you that eventually the other occupants of the ship manage to find how to reveal the secret in the body of the other inventor, and that somehow knowing how to make Indurate lets them travel back in time to where they started.
I'm not all that sure of the logic on that one, but okay. The twist is good enough that I'll be forgiving.
What does get me, though, is that Norris packs a ship full of 36 people, and half of them are effectively useless. All the science, all the anything, seems to be carried out by the men. The women are literally there so that the dissenter's wife can be trapped by a fire, causing him to cut through into Norris' bunk and discover the body. That's the sole purpose - potential victim.
Why this gets me is that not six years later than this was published, Heinlein's Stranger in the Strange Land will come out, meaning it was being written in the years previous. And Heinlein gets it in a way Jacobi doesn't. When you only have a limited number of seats, you can't have half the people be useless. You need everyone to be a specialist of some sort or another, and probably to multi-class at that. In Stranger, the mission to Mars is made up of married couples, but everyone on that ship, women as well as men, is super competent at more than one thing. (I mean, this is part of the small section that happens around the mission to Mars, but it's important.)
Heinlein gets that one gender can't merely be brought along as ballast. Jacobi does not.
So the women here are victims, and maybe get told about the dissent, but that's about it. One woman gets led out coughing from a room on fire. And because within just a few years, someone will get this right where this does not, it bothers me.
So, in the long run, gender politics are wonky, everyone's white, but darn it, that twist is good, even if it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.
Wednesday, 22 April 2015
Dark Jenny by Alex Bledsoe
You know, when I started the book, I was wondering if the medieval sword-and-sorcery crossed with hard-boiled noir was going to wear thin. I have enjoyed the first two books in the series a lot, but has I seen all I was going to see? Would sword jockey Eddie LaCrosse start to become less engaging, the deliberately anachronistic names and patterns of speech annoying?
The answer is no. It's particularly no because you don't have to get very far into this book to figure out that it's a humourous noir riff on Arthurian legend, and I am a sucker for anything that has to do with Arthuriana. Sure, here it's Bob Kay, and Dave Agravaine. But despite that tone, the story is a faithful but interestingly different adaptation, with a suitably noir twist thrown in for good measure.
(A little weird having the Morgan le Fay equivalent be given my first name, but hey. I can remember the days when finding someone named Megan was a rare thing. I was named Megan a few years before the Irish name craze, and at the time, it was uncommon. Then it became a thing for a while, with all the added letters to make it look more Irish. It's actually Welsh. But I digress.)
King Mark Drake has created quite the kingdom, with his wife Jennifer by his side. Someone (I wonder who, she asked disingenuously) tries to shatter the peace by framing the queen for murder. Unfortunately for Eddie LaCrosse, he gets caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and those who don't want to believe the queen guilty are more than willing to believe it's that foreigner sword jockey over there.
Rumours have abounded for years about the relationship between Jennifer and Drake's most accomplished knight, and the loving portrait of her in the entryway to his home hasn't exactly stilled any tongues. LaCrosse is sent to retrieve that knight to fight for the queen's honour, and discovers that there's more going on than one might think.
We also pay a visit to this version of Merlin, a very high semi-nudist with big dreams and bigger regrets about what those dreams had wrought. Bledsoe weaves in the darkest aspects of the Arthur legend, and I shall not say anything more than that.
Did I mention the dame? Eddie falls hard for the beautiful doctor who patches him up after he punches Agravaine right in the jaw (deservedly so). But like all beautiful dames in noir, can she really be trusted?
Framing this as a story Eddie is telling years later is a device that I'm not sure adds a ton to the story, although I guess, given that Eddie has now settled down with Liz, gives Bledsoe a way to still introduce a new sultry female complication into Eddie's life.
So yeah, I still like this series. A lot. Bringing in Arthur and his court at this point in the series was a very smart move.
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