What Makes This Book So Great (13 page)

At the beginning of the book, all three of the main characters are screwed up. The story is the process of them being healed, and in the process renewing their culture, but they are healed by going through annealing fire. Simon is mute and about eight years old, he doesn’t know where he comes from and thinks that he is bad, and that when people find that out about him they will hurt him. This has been the pattern of his life. Kerewin is artistically blocked and cut off from her family, from human connection and from love. Joe has lost two vocations and a family and he has a child who does misbehave, who does do wild things, who deliberately invites violence because he sees it as redemptive. Simon wants everything to be all right again and he wants that to happen after punishment, because that’s what he understands. He thinks he is the scapegoat. He doesn’t want to be hit but he wants to be loved, and being hit is part of that, and he will deliberately provoke it. Simon’s healing involves being very badly hurt, being taken away from his father, and then eventually coming to see value in himself and a way of going on that is not the way of violence. And Joe, who was beaten himself as a child and comes out of a pattern of this, goes through prison and then physical distress and then being trusted with something real and magical before he can start seeing the world differently. Kerewin tears down her tower (she has the best tower, but it’s the wrong thing) and almost dies before she can come to renewal, to be able to create again.

The magic works like stone soup. It gives them the confidence to begin again, to do what needs to be done, to rebuild, and then everyone comes to help and add their little bit. The book wouldn’t work without it. It’s there and real and alive, like everything else in the story. I’m afraid I’ve made it sound cold, but it isn’t at all, it’s a very warm and welcoming book. It’s also very readable, with beautiful use of language and point of view. The place and the people feel real and close enough to touch, which is why you can come to care about them so much.

MARCH 26, 2009

33.
Better to have loved and lost? Series that go downhill

In my post on
A Million Open Doors
I mentioned the advice given to someone on rec.art.sf.written when they asked about the reading order for the
Dune
series. “Read the first one. Then stop.” In the comments, R. Fife said:

I feel your pain. I have not read Barnes in particular, but I have read the first three
Dune
books. After the third one, I was left with a kind of disillusioned aftertaste that has led me to not finish the other three. Same with
Sword of Truth,
where I forced my way to
Naked Empire
then gave up (and had to start forcing after
Faith of the Fallen
). Heck,
The Dark Tower
by Stephen King did it to me after
Wolves of the Calla
(read two pages of
Song of Susannah
and threw the book).

So, is it better to have loved and lost than never loved before? Is it better to pretend the series could still be good and never read the disappointing sequels, but still know they are out there, somewhere, and possibly even why they were disappointing, than to experience it firsthand?

I think that’s a very interesting question. And there’s a related question. Is it worth reading the early good books, if the series isn’t going to live up to its promise?

There has been no case in the whole of my history where somebody has told me not to read the sequels and I have listened to them. I have always gone on to read the disappointing sequels, and been disappointed. Occasionally, I’ve read the sequels and liked them despite the consensus. But mostly the consensus is right, and I just haven’t listened. Once I stop, I stop, I don’t keep on and on if I’m no longer enjoying something. But I’m hopeless at not seeking out sequels as long as I have enjoyed the series up to that point.

So, better to have loved and lost?

I think a lot of it depends on the way in which the sequels are bad. If there’s an initial brilliant volume and then the sequels fade off with less and less originality until they’re just going through the motions, then I haven’t really lost anything. I’m thinking of the Pern books. I haven’t read all of those (goodness me, there’s one called
Dolphins of Pern
!) but I’ve read enough of them to be able to tell you that none of them is
Dragonflight
(1968), but they’re all perfectly reasonable extra helpings of books with dragons and weyrs. None of them are going to spoil the experience of
Dragonflight,
except perhaps by diluting it a little. And you can’t really get back the experience that was
Dragonflight,
because let’s face it, you have to be twelve. If I was camping in the rain and there was nothing to read but
Dolphins of Pern,
I’m sure I could pass a happy enough afternoon with it. The same with the sequels to David Feintuch’s
Midshipman’s Hope
(1994). I’ve read all of them. I’d urge you to stop with the first book, but the sequels haven’t done me any harm.

Where there’s a real problem is when the sequels spoil the original book.

The books about which I feel most strongly negative are all sequels to earlier books that I really like, and which spoil those earlier books. I’m immediately thinking of Card’s
Xenocide
(1991) and Mary Gentle’s
Ancient Light
(1987). In those cases, I can’t re-read the earlier books without the memory of the later books coming between me and the page. I know the Ender series has gone on far past
Xenocide,
and though, or perhaps because, I loved
Ender’s Game
(1995) and
Speaker for the Dead
(1986) so much, I haven’t been able to bring myself to read them, and I can’t really re-read the first two either. With
Ancient Light
it’s not so bad, I have after many years been able to forget it sufficiently that I can re-read
Golden Witchbreed
(1983). But I’m afraid
Xenocide
has poisoned the universe forever for me.

I think my problem here was that part of the fundamental pleasure of reading SF for me is putting the hints and clues together and extrapolating where they’re going, and in re-reading seeing how they go together when I know where they’re going. I can’t do that if I have to turn my eyes away from where they’re going. I honestly wish I hadn’t read those books. When we were talking about
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
I said that if Lacuna was real, the thing I’d have wiped would be my memory of
Xenocide
. “But then you’d read it again!” Sasha said. And he’s right! (In fact, the only way I know this hasn’t happened already is that I read
Xenocide
about three days after it was published.)

So, why is it worse when this happens in a sequel?

When a writer takes a book in a new direction, it can feel jarring, and if it’s a direction I don’t like and that doesn’t fit with what has gone before, I won’t like it. But it’s happening while I’m reading, and though I may be invested in the plot and the characters and the world, it won’t disappoint me as much as when this happens in a sequel, where I may well have read the first book(s) several times before the new one comes out. There are a number of books that I think go downhill in the last third, but I don’t start foaming at the mouth when I think of them. But when it’s a series and when I already love all of the earlier books and have read it and read it and read it, sometimes when I hear there’s going to be a sequel I’m as afraid as I am delighted. This happened recently with
Regenesis
(2009).

I think whether it’s worth starting a series that goes downhill depends very much on how self-contained the good books are. In the case of
A Million Open Doors
and
Dune
that isn’t a problem. The books stand alone. With something like a fantasy series (I haven’t read either of R. Fife’s examples of King and Goodkind) it’s a lot less clear-cut, because a series like that is very much a voyage where you want to feel sure of your destination. A lot of this is a problem with trusting the author. If I trust the author, I’ll put up with a lot, but once I start feeling distrusting, I start picking fault with everything.

And a lot of it is individual taste. Mostly when this has happened to me, I’ve started the series before all the books are out. I know there are people out there who won’t read series unless they’re complete. But it’s very difficult if someone says, “Read this one, and then stop.”

APRIL 1, 2009

34.
More questions than answers: Robert A. Heinlein’s
The Stone Pillow

When you read a book that’s been so tremendously influential on the whole genre of SF and inspired a whole subgenre of its own, it’s hard to see it clearly. It’s hard to see what it was that seemed so wonderful when it was new that fans rushed to give it the Hugo and pros the Nebula. Even when I first read it in the early eighties it knocked me over, but I have to recapture my inner twelve-year-old to really appreciate
The Stone Pillow
now.

If
The Stone Pillow
were a new book today, I’d call it derivative. But the reason for that is the tremendous influence it has had. Is there a word for a book that was genre-changing and is historically important but that has been left behind by changing times? I don’t know.

Before
The Stone Pillow,
nobody had written about a world where the stars go out. Oh it’s a familiar conceit now, it’s been done by Robert Charles Wilson (
Spin
), Robert Reed (
Beyond the Veil of Stars
), Greg Egan (
Quarantine
), Joanna Russ (
Edge and the Border
), Margaret Atwood (
Exceed His Grasp
) and even Arthur C. Clarke (“The Nine Billion Names of God”). That isn’t the only way the book has been influential—it introduced Heinlein’s theme of older aliens and younger women, so prevalent in the genre today. It was the first introduction of aliens with an agenda and affected SF from Ken MacLeod to
Battlestar Galactica
. It prefigured the first-person kick-ass female protagonist in
Friday
. It was also, astonishingly so late, the first story in which all the women went away.

Did the genre really need the introduction of robotic sex kittens?

As always with Heinlein, when I’m actually reading it, I get caught up in the story and I don’t care about the flaws. OK, Desdi likes to be wolf-whistled at, I guess some women do. OK, her nipples go “spung,” maybe mine are defective, they’ve never made any noise at all. The future world without stars is well drawn—and in so few words, too! Heinlein’s really astonishing skill at sketching detailed backgrounds with a few brief strokes was never better. I like the aliens, well, I mostly like the aliens. If I have issues with the Crazy Greys it’s in their motivation sneaking around that way. My problem is with Desdi. When I was twelve this went right past me. But now I have to ask, why does she go with them at the end? And why do all the other women and femmbots? What’s so wrong with Earth? Why is the epilogue from the point of view of the men left behind (with no stars!) and not with Desdi and the others aboard the spaceship? And why did the ship change from a saucer to a teapot? I remain perplexed.

And I appreciate that it’s influential, but why are all those books the same story? I mean at the end of
Spin
men as well as women leave the planet, and at the end of
Beyond the Veil of Stars
they leave the planet as mind vampires and I suppose you can call
Exceed His Grasp
and
Edge and the Border
feminist reimaginings and
Quarantine
a geek reimagining, but in my opinion only Clarke had the courage to do something really different with this story.

I mean, it’s undeniably influential. And I guess it’s a good book. It’s certainly still a thought-provoking read. But I’m not sure it’s quite as good as everyone thought it was back in 1940.

April Fool! If you are perplexed, you should know that this was a jape published on April 1.
The Stone Pillow
was a title of an announced Heinlein book that he never actually wrote. Robert Charles Wilson mentioned it in his short story “Divided by Infinity.” The conceit here is taking an imaginary book and making it the ancestor of a mixed set of books, some real and some made up. The Wilson, the Reed and the Egan are all real, and all really about worlds without stars. Clarke’s “Nine Billion Names of God” is also a real short story on this subject.

MARCH 31, 2009

35.
Weeping for her enemies: Lois McMaster Bujold’s
Shards of Honor

Kate Nepveu mentioned Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga as a series where the quality increased as they went on, and the more I thought about that the more I felt like reading them, and as today is a “mostly horizontal” day, I spent the morning with
Shards of Honor
(1986). As
Shards of Honor
is now published as the first half of a book called
Cordelia’s Honor,
with
Barrayar
(1991) as the second half, and as plotwise
Barrayar
is the second half of the story, even if it was written a lot later when Bujold had become much more accomplished, I had intended to spend this afternoon reading that and then do one post on the whole story. But as I put
Shards of Honor
down and realised I had to get out of bed anyway, I thought it might be interesting to consider it alone, and as a very unusual beginning for the series. And then it occurred to me that it might be interesting to re-read the books in publication order, which I don’t think I have ever done.

Shards of Honor
was Bujold’s first published novel. It introduces the universe in which all the books in the series take place. Otherwise, it couldn’t be less like a standard first novel in a series. The main character (of the series) isn’t even born and this is about how his parents met. Major events happen that do cast their shadow a long way, but here they are mostly interesting in the context of Aral and Cordelia, who are minor characters in most of the subsequent books. This totally isn’t a case of writing something and following it with more of the same.