What Makes This Book So Great (22 page)

Katin is trying to write a novel, though the art form is obsolete. He’s been making notes for years, but hasn’t written any of the novel yet. Mouse learned to play the sensory syrynx in Istanbul when he was a boy, and he can create three-dimensional scenes and beautiful music, and he does, frequently, in different styles and for different people. Katin is over-educated and Mouse under-educated, or they have educations orthogonal to each other. Katin explains things to Mouse, and through him to the reader. But it’s Mouse who knows the songs and the stories and knows how to make them real with his syrynx. These two with their different takes on creativity seem more important to me than Lorq Van Roy and his quest for Illyrion—he just wants it to defeat his enemies and protect himself and his worlds. They want to find ways of telling significant stories in the moment they find themselves in. Their story is about being alone and wanting to create, which doesn’t balance with the story of stealing fire.

Nova
is a space opera set in a far future that has a working class, that has people of all colours and lots of different cultures, that’s plausibly a future we could get to, or could have got to from 1968, with real hard science and mythic resonance—and I’m glad I didn’t like it before so that I come to it fresh now.

I wish Samuel Delany would write more SF. I know there’s a theory that he wrote SF because he couldn’t write openly about the experience of being gay, and now he can, and I like his mimetic novels and memoirs but … science fiction is what I really like to read, and I just wish he’d write more SF anyway.

JUNE 1, 2009

55.
You may not know it, but you want to read this: Francis Spufford’s
Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin

Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin
(2003) is about the history of technology and society. I keep wanting to say it’s thought-provoking and full of nifty information, but what I really want to say is that it’s unputdownable.

It’s about six engineering projects that have taken place in Britain since WWII. It’s very time and place specific, and very specific to its six subjects too, but nevertheless I recommend it to anyone who wants to write science fiction and most people who like to read it. This is a history book about how science and engineering are embedded in culture, arising almost organically from the cultural matrix of their time. And it’s written fluidly and amusingly, with prose that makes it a joy to read and re-read. I read it the first time because it had been recommended to me as interesting and I thought (quite correctly) that it would also be useful for worldbuilding. But I read it again because reading it is such a joy.

The projects range from rockets through Concorde to computer games, cell phones, and the Human Genome Project, and they’re all described with good-humoured understanding and sympathy and in the complete context of their time and the people involved with them. Also, they’re full of charming anecdotes and amusing asides, and unexpected angles of seeing things.

The first project covered is the Blue Streak/Black Knight rocket project of the forties and fifties, which succeeded in putting one satellite into orbit once. It begins with a description of a meeting of the British Interplanetary Society which was interrupted by a V2 rocket, at which the members cheered. Later there’s an amazing glimpse of some of our cultural heroes:

It was at about this time that an encounter took place between two outlooks almost equally marginal to the spirit of the time in Britain. Arthur C. Clarke, by now a well established science fiction writer as well as the author of the pioneering paper on satellite communications, had been growing increasingly irritated by the theological science fiction of C.S. Lewis, who saw space travel as a sinful attempt by fallen humanity to overstep its god-given place. […] Clarke contacted Lewis and they agreed to meet in the Eastgate Tavern, Oxford. Clarke brought Val Cleaver as his second, Lewis brought J.R.R. Tolkien. They saw the world so differently that even argument was scarcely possible. As Orwell said about something completely different, their beliefs were as impossible to compare as a sausage and a rose. Clarke and Cleaver could not see any darkness in technology, while Lewis and Tolkien could not see the way in which a new tool genuinely transforms the possibilities of human awareness. For them, machines at the very best were a purely instrumental source of pipe tobacco and transport to the Bodleian. So what could they do? They all got pissed. “I’m sure you are all very wicked people,” said Lewis cheerfully as he staggered away, “but how dull it would be if everyone was good!”

You couldn’t make it up.

The strangest thing about this book is how directly relevant it is to my life. There’s a section about the computer game
Elite
. I played that! (Along with everyone else with a computer in the late eighties.) And a friend of mine was in the room when the designers brought the first demo of it to Acornsoft! As for the Human Genome Project stuff, my husband barely misses being namechecked. It talks about how the cell network was set up in Britain and how the cells were mapped, but it also talks about how contracts to re-sell were shared among many tiny distributors. That was one of my first jobs, when I was in university, selling cell phones part-time when they were car phones. (I still don’t own one.) It’s fascinating to think that this book touches even my unscientific untechnical life at all these points, and for practically everyone who grew up in Britain between 1945 and 2003 I think it would touch it somewhere—because science and engineering run all through society, which is one of the book’s points.

The “boffins” and “backroom boys” of the title are the unglamorous engineers who get things done invisibly. The men (and they are mostly men, with a few women visible as it comes closer to the present time) in this book are definitely that. Few people would be familiar with their names. But that’s the point, they don’t need that to be significant to our lives.

This is a book about Britain, but I think it would be no less interesting to North American readers, if slightly more exotic.

Imagine Romford. No, go on, imagine Romford; or if you can’t quite bear that, at least imagine the approach to Romford in the north-eastern corner of London where thinning city is shading over into built up Essex.

It’s funnier if you do shudder at the thought of imagining Romford, but even if you’ve never heard of Romford, you can treat it as a voyage of discovery.

It’s remarkably interesting and a surprisingly fun read.

JUNE 4, 2009

56.
Faster Than Light at any speed

When I read
Nova
I noted how unusually fast the faster-than-light was. The ship goes from Alkane to the Dim Dark Sister in five hours, and from the Pleiades to Earth in three days. These are cars-in-the-US velocities, the whole inhabited galaxy is about as far apart emotionally as New York and San Francisco. And they land directly on the planets too, and can be used on the planet to whizz around to the other hemisphere.

Normally in science fiction, faster than light has a speed that has nothing to do with Einstein and everything to do with self-referentiality and the way other science fiction has done it—faster-than-light ships go at the speed of sailing ships, taking months to go between stars. There are wormholes or Jump or something letting them go faster than light, but it takes months of the crew’s real time. And when they get there, they can’t land on planets, any more than sailing ships can (outside of Dunsany) sail on land, they need space stations to be their ports, and they need dedicated career sailors and officers.

There’s nothing wrong with doing the Napoleonic Wars in space, as Honor Harrington does, and the
Midshipman’s Hope
books, and perhaps Dread Empire’s Fall too. And if that’s what you’re doing, it’s reasonable that your ships work that way. But there are a lot of books where there isn’t an explicit analogy, where the ships aren’t even naval vessels but commercial shipping. Cherryh’s Union-Alliance and Chanur, Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War books and her Aunts in Space series, Larry Niven’s Known Space, George R. R. Martin’s
Dying of the Light
universe. That’s a lot of really different kinds of books that have this kind of “standard” FTL.

I don’t know where it comes from. Was there some ur-novel that did it at this speed and everyone copied it? If so, what? Was it
Citizen of the Galaxy
? Or was it from the influential role-playing game
Traveller,
or even the influence of
Star Trek
?

And what’s the appeal? Is it that it gives you lots of time in space, in a contained environment where adventures can happen, coming to planets as ports at usefully specified intervals? Because I can see how it’s plot-useful, but there isn’t any natural law saying that this is how FTL will work.

There are a few books with notably slow FTL. Ken MacLeod’s
Cosmonaut Keep
series, and David Zindell’s
Neverness
series, but it’s very unusual. And then there’s the ever brilliant Vernor Vinge who always thinks about what he’s doing, with a whole range of speeds of faster than light in
A Fire Upon the Deep,
and “nearly as fast as light, plus coldsleep” in
A Deepness in the Sky
.

I think at this point, if you’re writing anything with FTL, it would be worth considering other models than the sailing ship. Delany did long car-trip distances. We could also consider commercial planes, getting us around North America in a few hours, and across the world in half a day. And there are always trains, either long distance or commuter rail—and how about freighters as long-haul trucks? I don’t mean copy them slavishly, just take the internalised emotional truth of the way they work and try it on a larger scale. Never mind leaving Earth and putting in at Madeira’s Star for water in a month’s time, how about leaving Earth and spending seven hours in cramped seats eating awful food and ending up in Andromeda. It doesn’t mean people would do it all the time, how often do you cross the Atlantic, after all, and anyway, a universe where people did it all the time would be an interestingly different universe. Best of all, how about something that isn’t an Earth model, something that will make me look up from the book and say, “Wow, wow, you’ll never believe the way they did faster than light in this one!”

JUNE 8, 2009

57.
Gender and glaciers: Ursula K. Le Guin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness
is one of those books that changed the world, so that reading it now, in the world it helped grow, it isn’t possible to have the same experience as reading it in the world it was written in and for.
The Left Hand of Darkness
didn’t just change science fiction—it changed feminism, and it was part of the process of change of the concept of what it was to be a man or a woman. The battle may not be over. What I mean is that thanks in part to this book we’re standing in a very different place from the combatants of 1969. Almost all books that do this kind of historic changing are important afterwards as historical artifacts, but not as stories, and they get left behind by the tide and end up looking quaint. Ninety percent of the discussion I’ve seen of
The Left Hand of Darkness
is about the gender issue, about the Gethenians and their interesting states of kemmer (of either gender for a few days a month) and somer (neuter for the majority of the time). But what makes it a book that continues to be great and enjoyable to read, rather than a historical curiosity, is that it’s a terrific story set in a fascinating culture, and the gender stuff is only part of that.

The Left Hand of Darkness
is the story of how the Terran Genly Ai comes to the planet Gethen to persuade Gethen to enter the Ekumen, the community of worlds. And it’s the story of the Gethenian Therem Harth rem i’r Estraven who recognises something larger than the horizons he grew up with. And it’s the story of the journey these two people take together. The book is written in such a way that you have Estraven’s journals written at the time and Genly’s report written later and various poems and folktales and stories of Gethen inserted in the text at appropriate points, so that the world is not only a character but one of the most important characters. I love the world, I love Karhide at least, the country and the people and how different it is from its government, and the religions. The planet is in an ice age, and the adaptations to the climate have shaped the cultures of the planet at least as much as the gender thing has. They’re like real cultures, with real oddities, and the way the story is told enhances that. If you haven’t read it, and if you’ve always seen it mentioned as a worthy feminist classic with weirdly gendered aliens, you might be surprised by this interesting story of the discovery of a planet and a journey across the ice. It is a living breathing story that happened to change the world, not a dry text with a message.

The book is set in the same universe as a number of Le Guin’s other books, many written much earlier. It has the same furniture, the ansible, the Nearly as Fast as Light ships, the long ago Hainish experimental colonization of planets with tweaked humans—were they trying to make their own aliens? The previously worked out background doesn’t give the book any problems, it makes it seem more solidly rooted.

We don’t see any of the other planets, the book is firmly focused on Gethen, also known as “Winter.” There is one narrative voice from an earlier report on the planet that’s a woman from Chiffewar, but the non-Gethenian we are given to identify with is Genly Ai, a black man from Earth. We’re not given his cultural context on Earth, though his dark skin, darker than most Gethenians, is mentioned. Neither “Genly” nor “Ai” are names I’m familiar with. A quick Google search finds me a town called Genly in Belgium, a factory in China, and people in the Philippines, China and India—Ai is regrettably unsearchable. Rene Walling suggests that it’s the French “Jean-Louis” with the Japanese surname Ai, and he’s from Montreal. In any case, whatever his ethnic background, Genly is our “normal” character, our filter, the one who is a gender we recognise and from a planet we’re familiar with. He’s our “unmarked” character, if you like. I think that’s cool, even though we don’t hear anything from him that makes his ethnicity other than “Terran.” His sexual preference—heterosexuality—is mentioned, and his gender essentialism is very much dated from the world the book was written in, not the world in which it is now read.