Wednesday, May 13, 2015

#41: A Clockwork Orange, #21: The Forever War

A Clockwork Orange:






















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"Goodness comes from within...Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man."
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"The heresy of an age of reason...I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong."
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"Some of us have to fight. There are great traditions of liberty to defend. I am no partisan man. Where I see the infamy I seek to erase it. Party names mean nothing. The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be prodded..."
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A Clockwork Orange is a classic of dystopian fiction, and I think the only reason that it might not be as highly regarded as Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World is the fact that it is so shockingly violent. It was published in 1962, and I would imagine that it was even more startling back then than it is now. By any standards, the first third of this novel is eye-opening for its casual depictions of "ultra-violence" of all varieties. But the point of this novel (the main point, at least) is not simply to shock us with such brutality, but rather, to provoke thought on the issues of freedom, coercion, and criminality.
Before I dive into a brief description of the plot, I must note that Burgess's fantastic introduction, A Clockwork Orange Resucked, found in the Norton Paperback edition, is highly recommended. It sets the tone for the novel, particularly the latter two-thirds. I could see how a squeamish reader, not understanding what Burgess wishes to do later on in the novel, would drop it after a few chapters, due to the violence. Reading this introduction should alleviate situations like this, I think.
The novel begins with the tale of four restless teenage hooligans, led by Alex, our narrator. The four trouble-makers spend the evening in an unnamed city (I believe it is London), imposing their violent whims on whatever innocent bystander they happen to meet. They beat a man senseless and take his clothes. They break into a house, rip up a man's novel-in-progress and rape his wife. They fight with a rival gang. Later, Alex gets two under-age girls drunk and violates them. Throughout all of this, we get Alex's gleeful perspective on violence. He loves seeing blood, and he has no problem with any of what is being done --he enjoys it all, and he's startling casual about the whole affair.
Alex narrates this all in a strange Russo-English slang that takes some getting used to. Burgess was a disciple of James Joyce, and it certainly shows in the fun he has with language. I would compare the narration to what we see in The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, but I found that Burgess pulled off his own unique style of narration a bit better than Heinlein did. I found myself enjoying learning this new "language", where you find that certain words don't exactly synch up with any one English word (while others do), so you have to constantly reevaluate your grasp on the language. It's unsettling, but I think Burgess wants it that way.
After the violence of Part 1, Alex is eventually captured, sent to jail for several years, and forced to undergo a kind of moral conversion therapy. This treatment forces a negative physical reaction out of him when he has violent thoughts. The "therapy" also has its side-effect, purging Alex's love of classical music from his system. All the while, the reader is meant to question, Is this right? Are you taking away Alex's humanity by forcing him to be good? Is it worth it for the betterment of society to turn this complex human being into a piece of clockwork that will never cause any trouble? It's certainly thought-provoking stuff, and by the third part of the novel, after Alex has been released, we get another swing of the pendulum. Libertarian intellectuals have adopted Alex as a sort of poster-boy for their cause --unaware of the extent of his past violence, they label him a misunderstood young man who has been turned into an automaton by the government. But ironically, they too want to "use him for the cause", denying him his free will just as much as the government did with their conversion therapy.
The last chapter of the novel is yet another important one to consider, as Burgess throws something different at us that changes the whole thing. Of course, I won't spoil it here. There's a lot of philosophical complexity here, more so than most novels you'll read. There's a good chance that you will be going back and forth about the last few episodes in this book long after you have finished the novel. Both sides have powerful arguments: Alex's free will is very much a valuable part of humanity, but so is the dignity and livelihood of his victims.
I blazed through A Clockwork Orange in a matter of a few days. It was a quick, powerful, yet simply told tale (excepting the language barrier you must work through in the first few chapters). Characters like Alex, Dim, F. Alexander, and the prison chaplain all jumped off the page --the last one was especially well done, and in so little time.
I'd certainly recommend this classic to anyone over the age of 18 who won't go to pieces over a bit of violence and some neologisms. With the powerful, universal themes that it addresses, these small roadblocks are very much worth getting over, and very much what makes the book so effective. Indeed, this novel seems to be one of those works that will never stop being relevant.



The Forever War:























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"I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn't prepared me for this sudden reality... that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn't a solider nor ever wanted to be one"
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"...while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters..."
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"There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi-memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn't make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn't have any fun."
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I'm not too well-versed in the rich subgenre of military SF. Probably the only other two works that I have read that fall under this term are Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Card's Ender's Game. I tend to gravitate more towards SF that focuses in on societal issues, rather than interstellar travel and battle (although I obviously don't mind the latter on occasion). But Haldeman's The Forever War is supposed to be one of the all-time greats of the genre, an excellent example of military SF, with the addition of some interesting social commentary, so I recently decided that a reading of this acknowledged classic was long overdue.
The Forever War tells the story of William Mandella, a physics student drafted by a United Nations-type ruling body to fight in a war against the mysterious Taurans in the near future. Nobody knows much about these aliens --their motivations, their language, even what they look like. All anyone knows is that a war has broken out between humans and the Taurans, and super-smart, fit, young people are needed at the front lines. Mandella goes through some tough training on Earth and Charon, a dark, Pluto-like planet, in preparation for a jump through space that will take him to a planet where the Taurans have set up base. While he's travelling in space, relativity takes its effect. Earth years shoot by, while he only ages a few months with his fellow soldiers.
We follow Mandella down the centuries (Earth time), as he returns from battle, finds himself unable to adjust to a grim new Earth, and is called back out into space by the army to do battle with the Taurans again and again. The novel is, for the most part, a fast-paced page turner. The sections leading up to Mandella's first battle on Aleph-1 are very much action-oriented. We breeze through exciting training situations and Mandella is off to battle in very little time. Haldeman manages to fit in some Hard SF elements and serious pondering as well. And the scene in which the Taurans are first encountered (and subsequently slaughtered) is extremely vivid and well-done.
Up until this point, the novel is practically flawless. But the pace slows down a bit when Mandella comes back to Earth the first time. He putters around in this strange new place, very much maladjusted and unhappy. In fact, the new Earth is filled with many non-military who seem maladjusted and unhappy as well.
The novel picks up a bit after he is called back to duty from Earth, really climaxing in the final battle scene, a tense ride that is probably the highlight of the novel. There's even an unexpected ending which strains believability somewhat, in my view...but, hey, this is science fiction.
One of the high points of The Forever War is how well Haldeman communicates the alienation that Mandella feels thanks to the time dilation he has undergone. For most of the novel, he is frustratingly alone in a group of people he doesn't understand --and vice versa. And these aren't even the people he's supposed to be fighting against! He's easily the most well sketched-out character in the novel, and I felt a definite uniqueness to his voice. I suspect that he is very much like the author, Joe Haldeman, in his demeanor and way of thinking.
We also get a great depiction of the monotony and boredom of army life in The Forever War from Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, that is certainly effective, sometimes to the point of creating a similar effect in the reader. A lot of people have compared this novel to the Vietnam War itself, especially focusing on the seemingly pointless nature of the war, and the alienation of homecoming veterans afterwards, and I can definitely see the parallels. I don't know much about Vietnam War history, but this novel had a sort of bite to it that felt inspired by real life occurrences.
I enjoyed The Forever War quite a bit, especially the first and last sections, and found it to be a thoroughly effective anti-war novel. The violent action scenes where as well done as the pacifistic undertones. As far as the pantheon of SF is concerned, The Forever War can stand with a lot of great novels. It is quite well-written, tackling a unique concept that was probably even more revolutionary in its day than nowadays (although it still felt very new and original reading it today). I wouldn't call it the greatest science fiction novel ever written as some have, reserving that honor for something like Dune, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Star Maker, Brave New World, and a few others I've gushed about in the past. However, it's still a very solid, though-provoking book with a lot of fun action and a lot of interesting ideas.

#43: Flowers for Algernon, #86: Blood Music

Flowers For Algernon:




















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"Although we know the end of the maze holds death (and it is something I have not always known --not long ago the adolescent in me thought death could happen only to other people), I see now that the path I choose through that maze makes me what I am. I am not only  thing, but also a way of being --one of many ways-- and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming."
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"No one really starts anything new...Everyone builds on other men's failures. There is nothing really original in science. What each man contributes to the sum of knowledge is what counts."
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"I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damned thing. Here in your university, intelligence, education, knowledge, have all become great idols. But I know now there's one thing you've all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn."
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"And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other's arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other --child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death. 
But this was the counter-weight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing."
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Like Brian Aldiss' excellent novel, Non-Stop, I feel that Flowers For Algernon is a novel that must be partially "spoiled" in order to be adequately reviewed. The plot might already be familiar to you, even if you haven't read it yet, because it is one of the most famous science fiction novels ever written (and justifiably so). I, too, was somewhat familiar with the plot before I cracked open my old paperback edition of Flowers, and I didn't find that this noticeably hindered my enjoyment of the novel. But I will repeat my statement from my review of Non-Stop, for those who like to go into a read completely blind and unknowing: If you are one of these people, stop reading this review right now, and take my word for it: this is an engaging and emotional read --not to mention the fact that it's much more accessible to the average reader than most SF works.
Flowers for Algernon is a first-person account of Charlie Gordon's odyssey through various stages of intellectual development. Charlie lives most of his life as a mentally retarded individual, and as the novel opens, we see him plodding his way through life: doing menial labor at a bakery, and trying his hardest to learn basic reading and writing skills in a class for slow adults. He has been chosen to participate in an experiment that could drastically increase his intelligence through surgery, and he is writing down his thoughts in a diary of sorts for the scholars behind the experiment to examine and learn from. The experiment has been shown to work on animals, as evidenced by the lab mouse, Algernon. The little mouse constantly beats Charlie in various mental challenges, such as running mazes, in the early stages of the novel, but after Charlie receives the surgery, things slowly start to turn around. Charlie's prose gradually becomes more thoughtful and articulate, and he starts to notice things in everyday life that he hadn't observed before. Some things frighten him, some things startle him, and some things delight him. As Charlie's intellectual development progresses, he develops feelings for his old teacher at the center for slow adults, Alice Kinnian, but she remains very hesitant about the whole situation, a big area of frustration for Charlie moving forward.
Charlie soon intellectually outclasses the professors who are working on the project --and they even become threatened by his sudden glut of knowledge. He learns new languages at a stunning pace, and gains expertise in a great number of subjects. But his mental state is fragile with all this new information and reeling from such rapid growth. He starts remembering his old family, and how they abandoned him after many painful incidents at home and school. And soon, Algernon starts to deteriorate mentally. Charlie figures out that it won't be too long before he follows the same path --the experiment was flawed and there is nothing he can do while he watches his sharp intellect grow duller and duller. Algernon dies, and as the novel ends, we are left with little hope that Charlie, now as mentally slow as he has ever been, won't suffer the same fate soon.
The highlight of this novel, for me, was certainly Keyes' excellent depiction of Charlie's intellectual and emotional development. The way he sketches his narrator is nothing short of masterful. The other characters in the novel are only there to interact with and influence Charlie, and we remain fixated on him, even as other dynamic and ambiguous characters like Alice Kinnian spring up. Even when you know it's coming, Charlie's decline hits you harder than you expect. The gradual change in voice as the novel closes is, in a word, heart-breaking. In the weeks before he reverts back to his child-like state of mind, we experience a profound sense of tragedy and loss along with Charlie --it's quite reminiscent of the end of Silverberg's Dying Inside: emotional, bleak, and devoid of hope.
If I had to pinpoint my favorite scene in this novel, it would be the episode at the Chicago psychological conference. It's the pivot that the whole book turns on, the scene where Charlie has the ghastly realization that his intelligence will soon wane. It's poignant, wise and sad, like the book as a whole.
Although the plot meanders at times (I think 50 or so pages could have been cut out without great detriment to the story), Flowers For Algernon leaves one with the impression that it is one of the best character studies in all of science fiction. The rare moments of tenderness save Flowers from being a complete downer, but again, the conclusion hits hard and certainly is no "happy ending". Flowers is extremely accessible, but also potentially draining and depressing. I'd certainly recommend it, with these things taken into account, to SF and non-SF fans alike.

Blood Music:























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"There was only so much change a single individual could stand. Innovation, even radical creation, was essential, but the results had to be applied cautiously, with careful forethought. Nothing forced, nothing imposed. That was the ideal. Everyone had the right to stay the same until they decided otherwise.
That was damned naive". 
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"Life is the right held by an individual to normality and normal progress, normal aging...who would take away that right."
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"Vergil simply did not think such things through. Brilliant in the creation, slovenly in the consideration of consequences. Wasn't that true of every creator? Didn't anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people --perhaps many people --to death, grief, torment?"
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It is strange, looking back after having read Blood Music, to even think of it as a single book. For me, Blood Music felt more like two short novels, very different in tone from each other, sandwiched together with connective tissue that felt somewhat thin. The first part of the novel was enjoyable enough, but the second part was very much out-of-left-field for me. Perhaps it was this fact that made me enjoy the second part, and thus the entire novel less. I felt like I was waiting for a more sensible conclusion to the material from the first part, while also gradually forming the opinion that the novel's second part could have worked a little bit better with a more suitable introduction.
Blood Music opens with the story of a character that I immediately connected to, Vergil Ulam (think half mad-scientist, half Coretti from William Gibson's The Belonging Kind). He's a disgruntled young scientist working at a biotech company, and he certainly has some ideas of his own in terms of research. He has been working on engineering lymphocytes with the intellectual capability of rhesus monkeys --but his work is deemed dangerous and unproductive, and his superiors order him to shut down the project once they learn of it. Ulam, unwilling to give up his work, injects himself with the intelligent lymphocytes...and they soon begin to get ideas of their own. The way Bear deals with these opening sequences is interesting but sometimes heavily scientific; it's enough to get the non-science-savvy reader like myself bogged down slightly, but it doesn't become a significant hinderance to the narrative. And if you like this sort of thing, Bear is one of the acknowledged masters of modern Hard SF, so you will find enough to sink your teeth into, science-wise.
Once Ulam's "plague" has begun to spread, Bear expertly conveys a sense of the panic and disbelief that seem to accompany swift natural disasters in a very immediate and real way. As more people are infected with Ulam's smart cells --"noocytes" he calls them-- the novel starts to shift in a way that seemed unnatural to me. I had been expecting, and had gotten, a super-charged version of The Andromeda Strain up to this point, filled with baffled scientists and fumbling, panicky attempts at a quick cure, to go along with a real world break-out than isn't ever fully experienced in The Andromeda Strain. But Bear takes a sharp, post-apocalyptic turn after this that still has me scratching my head. It's not so much the fact that we get a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the novel's second half, but more so the weird tone that it adopts, that provokes this reaction. The atmosphere is suddenly calm, tranquil and even psychedelic, as opposed to the run-of-the-mill, but well-done, disaster type panic we see in the first part. It can get frustrating and outlandish at times, although there are still strong points to be accounted for.
The conclusion was one of the frustrating points, a mysterious, but optimistic vision of a united, enlightened humanity that I might have enjoyed more if it didn't clash so obviously with the first part of the novel.
Another bone I have to pick with Bear is his characterization. Suzy was endearing, and the Milligans were relatable enough, but not many of the other characters were extremely likeable. There were too many characters that I felt neutral towards, and some of the dialogue and interaction felt unrealistic at times. You could say that Bear writes too much "like a scientist" in some sections of this novel.
At the end of the day, Blood Music was a good, but not a great read. There are some nice ideas in there, especially Gogarty's theory of physics (perhaps the most intriguing part of the book), and some colorful descriptions of the forms that the "plague" takes after it envelops North America. It's also a book that is very disturbing, in more ways than one. You might even classify it as SF/Horror. I might add that, although the first half is the more conventionally disturbing, I found the second half to be just as unsettling --I just don't like a lot of the enforced singular utopias you see in SF dating back to Clarke and Asimov --the elimination of individuality never strikes me as a good thing. So the verdict is this, Blood Music is recommended with reservations: Hard SF junkies should check it out, but as far as general readers go, I don't think it's for everybody.