What Makes This Book So Great (7 page)

It’s a great pity it isn’t in print. I’d love to be able to share it with people.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

15.
To Trace Impunity: Greg Egan’s
Permutation City

There are readings of a book you can’t have on first reading. One of them is the reading in the light of later work. Another is being impressed how much it hasn’t dated.

I loved
Permutation City
when I first read it in 1994. It blew me away. It does everything science fiction ought to do—it has a story and characters and it’s so full of ideas, you almost can’t stand up straight.

I still love it. I noticed all sorts of things about it on that first reading, but I didn’t then see it as part of Egan’s passionately engaged one-sided argument against God. In 1994 Egan hadn’t yet written
Teranesia
(1999), or
Oceanic
(1999) or “Oracle” (2000). The cumulative effect of these, with
Permutation City
’s concluding denial of the possibility of deity, is not so much an assertion of “I don’t believe in this, and you can’t either” as of the intellectual equivalent of watching the world champion heavyweight blindfold shadow-boxer.

Permutation City
takes a brilliant (but apparently impossible) SF-nal idea and works through it pretty much perfectly. This is the Dust Hypothesis, the idea that consciousness finds itself out of the dust of the universe and constructs its own universe where its existence makes sense. We first see this with an AI whose brain states are being calculated out of order, and eventually with entire infinite universes, human and alien.

The book begins in a 2050 that still plausibly feels like a possible 2050 we could reach from here—which is a major feat for a book written in 1994 and focused on computers. It palms the card of strong AI by putting us right into the point of view of a Copy, a simulated human. Because we’re reading, and we’re used to reading and empathising with a point of view, we don’t ever stop to consider whether or not Copies are conscious. We just accept it and right go on into the Dust Hypothesis. Along the way we see the 2050 world, the far-future virtual world of Elysium, and the meticulously modeled autoverse.

The book has three central characters: Paul Durham, an obsessive who launches the virtual city out of the dust of the universe; Maria Deluca, programmer and autoverse junkie; and Peer, a Copy who persistently rewrites who he is. All of these, and the fourth point-of-view character, Thomas the guilty banker who sends his cloned self to hell, are among the best characters Egan has ever created. I don’t think I’ve ever put down an Egan book without saying “Wow, look at those sparkly ideas,” but this is the one I re-read to hang out with the characters.

Reflecting the Dust Hupothesis, the chapter titles, which recur and mark threads within the novel, are all whole or partial anagrams of the words
Permutation City
. So is the title of this piece, which comes from the poem that begins the book in which each line is such an anagram.

The last time I read this book, a couple of years ago, on what was probably my tenth or eleventh read, I got so caught up in the end that I missed my stop on the metro. About a year ago, my son Sasha read it and was enthralled. His top quality category of SF is what he calls “Books like
Spin
(2005) and
Permutation City
!” By that he means very well written SF with characters you can care about and plots that keep you on the edge of your seat, with ideas that expand the possibility of what you can think about. He wishes there were more books like that, and so do I.

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

16.
Black and white and read a million times: Jerry Pournelle’s
Janissaries

Sometimes, not every month, but every few months, I come over all Victorian and have pains in my stomach and want to spend a day lying on the couch reading Jerry Pournelle. When I feel like that there really are very few books that satisfy me—I want black-and-white military fiction with good and bad clearly delineated, guns, obstacles, military training, things blowing up, glory, death, and the good guys definitely winning. Also, it has to be written to a certain standard. I don’t want rubbish just because I’m in that particular mood.

It isn’t only Jerry Pournelle that scratches this itch. He’s the best, especially when he’s writing on his own. He can bring tears to my eyes with lines like “The sergeant survived? Then the Legion lives!” There’s also Piper, Weber, John Barnes’s Timeline Wars books, and more recently I’ve discovered W. E. B. Griffin, whose books are not SF but straight military historical fiction. (“Wow,” I thought when I read
Semper Fi,
“a whole book about Bobby Shaftoe!”) I can also thank this reading mood for my discovery of Lois McMaster Bujold, who I adore even on days when I don’t want to bite something.

But when I’ve got those cramps and that urge, the canonical most perfect book in the world for me is suddenly
Janissaries
(1975).

Janissaries
would push a lot of my buttons at any time. There’s a planet, Tran, where groups of people from Earth have been taken by aliens at 600-year intervals to grow drugs. So they have brilliant weird cultures, because they came from different parts of the planet and at different tech levels. There are Romans who have copies of Roman books we don’t have. They also have interestingly weird tech, because it has merged oddly. So when our heroes give them gunpowder, things get interesting. You get new military formations, for instance. And beyond all of that and the good guys and bad guys and the things blowing up, there are fascinating hints of a wider universe and Other Things Going On. Oh, and it’s got a girl. I mean, of course it’s got a girl, even W. E. B. Griffin has girls, but it has a girl who isn’t just there as a prize and a sexual partner—well, it has one of those too, but it also has a major female character who does significant things.

They don’t make military adventure fiction better than this, and you get bonus extra history of tech stuff thrown in for free.

There are some sequels, by Pournelle and other people, or by other people on their own, which I have read once and never felt the urge to pick up again. My original copy of
Janissaries
has been read so much, it’s in danger of disintegration.

As I was putting it back on the shelf, I admired the serendipity of alphabetical order, that allows Marge Piercy, H. Beam Piper, Plato, Karl Popper, Jerry Pournelle, and Tim Powers to sit so peacefully on the shelf together.

OCTOBER 8, 2008

17.
College as Magic Garden: Why Pamela Dean’s
Tam Lin
is a book you’ll either love or hate.

This is one of my very favourite books, and one that grows on me with every re-read. But I know from other online discussions that it isn’t a book for everyone.

Tam Lin
(1991) is based on an old Scottish ballad. It’s the story of a group of friends at a liberal arts college in Minnesota in the 1970s, talking, reading, discussing, seeing plays, falling in love, meeting the Queen of Elfland, coping with ghosts, worrying about contraception and being sacrificed to Hell.

That makes it sound much more direct than it is. The story, the ballad story, the way the head of the Classics Department is the Queen of Elfland, is buried in indirection. Many readers wake up to the fact that one of the main characters is about to be sacrificed to Hell as an unpleasant shock sometime in the last couple of chapters. It isn’t just a book you like better when you re-read it, it’s a book that you haven’t had the complete experience of reading unless you’ve read it twice. Some readers have even argued that Dean wanted to write a college story and pasted on the magic to make it sellable—sellable outside the mainstream ghetto, no doubt. If you hate indirection and re-reading, you’re probably not going to like it.

In fact the magic, the ghosts, the ballad story and the Queen of Elfland are integral to the whole thing. The central thing the book is doing is college as magic garden. The whole experience of going to university is magical, in a sense, is a time away from other time, a time that influences people’s whole lives but is and isn’t part of the real world. College is where you are, as the protagonist, Janet puts it, paid to read for four years. It’s also many people’s first experience of being away from home and of finding congenial friends. But it isn’t, and can’t be, your real life. It’s finite and bounded. It falls between childhood and adulthood. And it’s full of such fascinating and erudite people who can quote Shakespeare. Where did they come from? They certainly can’t have come from high school, and “Under the hill” is
Tam Lin
’s very interesting answer.

The other thing some readers object to is the pacing. The first year takes up far more of the book than the subsequent years, and the climax is over with almost before you’ve had time to savour it. I didn’t understand this properly myself until I wrote a play version of the ballad—the pacing of the novel is the pacing of the ballad. It’s very impressive, and I kicked myself for not spotting it until I tried to do it myself.

Furthermore, you won’t like
Tam Lin
unless you like reading, because a lot of it is about the meta-experience of reading and thinking and putting things together. (There are plenty of books you can enjoy even if you don’t like reading. This just isn’t one of them.)

You may not like it if you didn’t feel the need to go to, or hated, university—you may find yourself passionately envious though. I mean, I was a Classics major myself, but not only did I never meet any magic people (so unfair!) but I was at a British university where I did nothing but Classics for three years, never mind all those fascinating “breadth” requirements. (Incidentally, I’ve known a couple of parents who have given this book to their teenage kids who are bored with high school and can’t see the point of more education. This works.)

One of the main reasons I re-read certain books over and over is to hang out with the characters. The characters in
Tam Lin
are so cool to hang out with that I sometimes wish they were with me when I go to see plays. If you don’t get on with them, then it isn’t going to work for you. Myself, I think they’re wonderfully real and three dimensional and fascinating.

Oh, and the last reason you might hate it? If you hate books that mention other books so that you wind up with a reading list of things the characters read at the end. Now I adore this, and not just with books. I found Rodin because Jubal Harshaw liked him, and Bach because Cassandra Mortmain liked him, and the Beatles because George Orr and some aliens liked them. Similarly,
Tam Lin
encouraged me to read Christopher Fry and
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
and Dr. Johnson. I hate it when books rely on knowledge of something external, when they lean on it as if everybody through all time knows who Cordelia is
*
and it’s enough to namedrop a reference to get automatic free atmosphere. In a book replete with references, Dean never does this. Even with Shakespeare she quotes enough and fills in enough that it doesn’t matter to understanding the story whether or not you knew it beforehand, without boring those who did know before.

It’s a fairly long book, but I’m always sorry when I get to the end and have to stop reading it.

Full disclosure: Pamela Dean is a friend of mine, I’ve beta read her latest book, and I’ve had her
Tam Lin
–conducted tour of Carleton College. But if you think that makes any difference to what I think about the book, you should see all the friends I have whose books I keep meaning to get to sometime.

OCTOBER 11, 2008

18.
Making the future work: Maureen McHugh’s
China Mountain Zhang

China Mountain Zhang
(1992) is a fascinating example of a near future science fiction mosaic novel. There are a number of notable mosaic novels—my favourite other examples are
Hyperion
(1989),
Tales of Nevèr
ÿ
on
(1975) and
The Jewel in the Crown
(1966). A mosaic novel seems at first more like a short story collection all set in the same world, like
Four Ways to Forgiveness
(1995) or
Capitol
(1979), but it soon becomes apparent that it is more than that. A normal novel tells a story by going straightforwardly at it, maybe with different points of view, maybe braided, but clearly going down one road of story. A mosaic novel builds up a picture of a world and a story obliquely, so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
China Mountain Zhang
is one of the best mosaic novels ever written, and this was reflected in the attention it got on publication. It won the Tiptree and Lambda and was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula. I read it because of the Hugo nomination (after all, how many first novels get Hugo nominations?) and I’ve read it again probably every couple of years since, because reading it is a very enjoyable experience.

It’s a very unusual book. It’s not just the mosaic thing. It’s also a small-scale book about ordinary people winning small-scale victories without changing or saving the world. Yet it’s immensely readable and very hard to put down. It raises the stakes for what the stakes can be. Also, it has terrific characters.

China Mountain Zhang
centers on Zhang Zhong Shan. His story spirals through the novel, and all the other stories and characters touch his. Zhang is fascinating. He’s a gay man from New York with spliced genes who’s passing—not only passing as straight, but also passing as Chinese. His voice is immediate and compelling—indeed, one of McHugh’s strengths is in the splendid solidity of the voices of her characters. But the real central character of
China Mountain Zhang
is the world.

This is a world dominated by China. At some time in the past, the US has had a proletarian revolution, and at some time only about fifteen years ago had the Cleansing Winds Campaign, an overwhelming event like the Cultural Revolution in China. Global warming has made much of the interior of the US uninhabitable. Mars is being settled. Everything is socialist, but there are cracks. Stories often take place in the cracks, and this one is no exception.