What Makes This Book So Great (38 page)

This is the most unsuitable book for children in the history of the universe. I think it’s quite appropriate that there be books for grown-ups, and that this be one of them. It’s odd only in that it’s the sequel to
Orbital Resonance,
which is pretty much a YA.

It seems as if Barnes sat down in 1990 when writing
Orbital Resonance
and worked out in detail everything that happened from that day onwards for a hundred years, and then didn’t change anything in the future history even when time changed it. This means that when he wrote
Kaleidoscope Century
in 1995 it was already alternate history—never mind Heinlein’s 1957 giving us an out-of-date 1970 and 2000. This is weird, and while I don’t think it hurts
Kaleidoscope Century
much—there are possible reasons for it—it is a real problem for me once the series gets to
The Sky So Big and Black
. The details sound like real science-fictional future history, but they are uniformly unpleasant—and far more unpleasant than anything that has actually happened in the 19 years since. This is a really detailed and well-thought-out future, with a good understanding of the way changing tech changes possibilities, but it seems to have been thought out by someone who always looks on the black side and doesn’t have any faith in humanity. Having said that, horrible as Barnes’s century is, even when made deliberately worse by the characters, it can’t hold a candle to the twentieth century for real horror.

Barnes is always immensely readable. That’s a problem here, actually. Joshua Ali Quare is an unreliable narrator, he’s also a horrible person. There’s more rape and murder in this book than in everything else on the bookcase put together—and it’s rape and murder seen from the point of view of someone for whom they’re fun. Yet most of the time Quare is written to be kind of endearing, just getting along, but getting along includes a lot of making the world a worse place in big and small ways. He starts riots. He assassinates people. He rapes—or as he puts it “serbs”—women and girls. He’s a mercenary. And at other times he rescues a little street girl and brings her up as his daughter, works quietly as a rigger on a space elevator, or as a prospector on Mars. He justifies himself to himself and to his best friend and to the reader. He’s too much of a monster, or not enough of one. You spend a lot of time in his head when reading the book, and his head is a nasty place to be.

Now actual spoilers: The plot doesn’t quite work. Closed timelike curve me whatever handwaves you like, if you’re dead you stop going through. And I’m not sure the book needs it anyway, it would have been perfectly good with the 15 years and losing memory thing without the endless repetition. And if they have ships that can do that, can skip bits of it, then it doesn’t make emotional sense, and really in the end emotional sense is all you can hope for.

But despite making no sense, rape, murder, and a very unpleasant future, it’s still an excellently written and vastly ambitious book, with a scope both science-fictional and literary. That’s what ultimately makes it a good book, though I do not like it. It has such a vast reach that it doesn’t actually matter that it exceeds its grasp, or that it seems to be Hell rather than Heaven that it’s reaching for.

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

98.
Growing up in a space dystopia: John Barnes’s
Orbital Resonance

Orbital Resonance
(1991) is one of my favourite John Barnes novels, and I re-read it to take the taste of
Kaleidoscope Century
out of my brain. This didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped. On the one hand,
Orbital Resonance
could be a Heinlein juvenile—it’s about kids growing up on a captured asteroid looping between Earth and Mars, about teenagers finding out they’ve been manipulated and taking control of their own destiny. On the other hand this really stood out:

“Maybe you’re right and people can’t live like this for very long. But the best evidence—with so much lost and so many people dead—is that they can’t live the old way at all. Individualism is dead because it didn’t work.”

Barnes doesn’t seem to have much faith in human nature, and he seems very fond of those cold equations that say the characters have to do the hard thing for everyone’s good. Of course, the writer makes up those equations for themselves.… I think there’s a general tendency in SF to make those human equations very cold and the choices very extreme. Here it’s “We had to do horrible things to our children so humanity would survive!” How can you possibly blame them for that! What kind of a softie are you, anyway? I think this does tend to get valorized, and I don’t think it’s a good thing.

However,
Orbital Resonance
is a brilliant and very readable book. It’s from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old girl called Melpomene Murray, writing about the events of the year before, when she was thirteen. Barnes does the teenage girl point of view absolutely flawlessly without an instant of any kind of problem. Melpomene lives on the
Flying Dutchman,
cycling between Earth and Mars with off-Earth industry and cargo. She lives with her parents and her brother and she goes to a very interesting school. She takes her life for granted, but the book is in the form of a school project intended to explain life in space to people on Earth, and as the book goes on you discover that very human, very real Melpomene lives in a highly designed society, and one designed to produce consensus, cooperation, and good corporate employees—and she likes it that way.
Orbital Resonance
is as much a dystopia as anything you can find, but because Melpomene is our point-of-view character, and because she likes it, it’s easy to miss that and mistake it for a bouncy growing-up-in-space novel with a happy ending.

This is the same universe as
Kaleidoscope Century
. Earth has been ravaged by the mutAIDS plague, which killed George Bush Sr. in the middle of his second term. Then there was a horrific war that was waged against biosystems, and now Earth is scrambling just to survive—these space habitats are an essential part of the survival of the human race. They had to make these kids be like that! They had no choice! And anyway, Melpomene doesn’t mind that she’s been manipulated, once she works it out, she’s having fun.

But those people born on the ship are really different from the ones that came from Earth. The worst thing they can call someone is “unco” which stands for “uncooperative.” But we see them having fun. They race around the outside of the asteroid. They have parties. They have best friends and boyfriends and eat pizza and express their emotions freely. But when a boy from Earth comes along and can’t move well in the gravity and thinks there are rules you follow only when other people are watching, everything goes the way you expect—for about three pages and then it completely turns that inside out. That’s why I love this book.

Their school really does sound like fun. One of the things that really works is Melpomene’s matter-of-fact attitude to working singly, in pairs, in teams, in pyramids. Two of her school friends are paired in math and the overall result pushes one of them down one place but brings the other up five, so they’re delighted and hug each other. And their gym sounds wonderful—not only do they play games in complex gravity but the games have comprehensible rules and sound as if they’d be fun too. One of the climaxes of the book comes during a game of aerocrosse, where you have multiple teams and multiple mobile goals in microgravity, and double crossing is part of the game—but double crossing within the rules.

I generally don’t like future slang, but I’ll make an exception here. Barnes has a good ear, and doesn’t overuse it. He also knows that slang tends to produce words for “very” (“lim” here) and “good” and “bad” (“koapy” and “bokky”) and he limits it. I will admit that Sasha is still saying “pos-def” for strong affirmatives (positively-definitely) years after reading the book. It feels like language and it doesn’t jar. I also adore the names—these are kids born twenty years after the book was written, and they have names that mark them as a generation, long Greek names (Theophilus), weird nifty names (Randy is Randomly Distributed Schwartz) and the occasional recognisable name like Tom or Miriam for leaven. So many people get this wrong, and Barnes does it pitch-perfectly.

Melpomene is writing the story of the events of one week, a year before. This is what I call “first-person reflective,” meaning that the first-person point-of-view character knows how things will come out and can comment on her actions from a later perspective. Barnes makes very good use of this to show us how it does come out before we know how it gets there. This is a very good book to read if you’re interested in how to write characters and how to make stories interesting. The pacing of revelation—the way it tells us what it tells us about what happens after that week in particular—couldn’t be better.

This may be Barnes’s best book. (Or that may be
A Million Open Doors
.) It’s a book almost everyone who likes SF will enjoy, and if it gives you a lot to think about as well, then that’s all to the good.

FEBRUARY 28, 2010

99.
The joy of an unfinished series

A long time ago I wrote a post on series that go downhill, and whether it’s worth starting a series when everyone tells you that it isn’t worth carrying on. Just now, Kluelos commented on that old post asking about unfinished series, saying:

If you’re one of us forlorn David Gerrold fans, you know the agony of waiting forever for sequels, so that’s the opposite point, I guess. Is it better to endure a long wait, maybe never see the next book (I will never speak to James Clavell again, because he died before writing “Hag”), than to have the next book even if it is worse than disappointing? I dunno.

Well, if you come face-to-face with James Clavell in the afterlife, my advice is to tell him first how much you like his books, before asking if he’s had time up there to finish
Hag Struan
.

I have an immediate answer to the question too, it’s definitely better to endure a long wait and have a quality sequel, or no sequel, than have a bad sequel. A bad sequel can spoil the books that came before. A good sequel after a long wait enhances the previous books. No sequel, whether because the author died or lost interest in the series isn’t ideal, but it doesn’t spoil anything. “We’ll always have Paris.” Besides, there’s something about an unfinished series that people like. I’ve been thinking about this recently. When you have a finished series, it’s like a whole book. It’s longer, but it’s the same emotional experience, it’s complete, over. An unfinished series on the other hand is much more likely to provoke conversation, because you’re wondering what will happen, and whether the clues you have spotted are clues or red herrings. People complained that
The Gathering Storm
wasn’t the one final volume to complete the
Wheel of Time,
but they’re clearly loving talking about it. And I’ve noticed a lot less conversation about Harry Potter recently, now that everyone knows as much as there is to know. The final volume of a series closes everything down. With luck, it closes it down in a satisfying way. But even the best end will convey a strong sense of everything being over. An ongoing series remains perpetually open.

One series I read where the author died without finishing it was Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. I started reading it while he was still writing them, but I read the last book after he had died. It did colour my reading of
Blue on the Mizzen,
but one of the things I kept thinking was that O’Brian was rather fond of killing off his characters, and nobody could kill them now. I have a term for this, “forever bailing” from
Four Quartets
. There will be no more books, but the characters will always go on traveling hopefully.

Some people find it off-putting to discover that a book is part of a long series. Other people are delighted—if they like it, there’s so much more to discover. I’ve heard people say they’re not going to start A Song of Ice and Fire until it’s finished, but I think they’re missing half the fun. My post on
Who Killed Jon Arryn
won’t be worth the pixels it’s written in when everything’s all down in black and white. If you read the books now, you get to speculate about where the series is going.

Anyway, reading unfinished series gives you something to look forward to. The first book I ever waited for was
Silver on the Tree,
the last of Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising books. There were other books I’d read that had sequels I couldn’t find—indeed, that was a normal condition for me. (I waited twenty years for Sylvia Engdahl’s
Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains
. This is my record, so far.) But
Silver on the Tree
was the first book that hadn’t been published yet when I started to want it, and that had a publication date that I waited for. The second, a few months later, was
The Courts of Chaos
. I’d gone from the normal chaotic state of turning up in a bookshop and being thrilled with whatever had come in since the last time, to a state of constant and specific anticipation of what was forthcoming. I was thirteen.

Right now, like everyone else on the planet, I’m waiting for
A Dance with Dragons
. I’m also waiting for
Tiassa,
the Vlad Taltos book that Steven Brust is writing even now. And I’m waiting desperately for
The City in the Crags
or whatever it ends up being called, the next
Steerswoman
book. (Rosemary Kirstein said at Boskone that she was working on books five and six together, so maybe they’ll come out quite close together too.) I’m waiting for
Deceiver,
the new Atevi book, and this one, excitingly, is actually finished and coming out on May 4. And there’s Bujold’s new Vorkosigan book
Cryoburn,
which I know is finished, but which doesn’t seem to have a release date that I can find. There’s Connie Willis’s
All Clear,
the sequel to (or as we say where I come from “the other half of”)
Blackout
. That’s coming in October. And there’s Patrick Rothfuss’s
The Wise Man’s Fear,
due sometime early next year.