#35: Solaris, #132: Nova

Solaris:





















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"We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is."
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"The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.
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"We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them."
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I have read a staggering amount of science fiction over the years, so I am always excited to dive into an SF work that is like nothing I have ever read before. The experience of reading Solaris was, for me, exciting in this way --but it is also an excellent novel in its own right. Indeed, I have a feeling that even if Solaris was a more run-of-the-mill space opera (which it certainly is not), Lem's erudition and intelligence would have elevated it into the SF pantheon regardless.
The originality of Solaris's central plot device is impressive and essentially unlike anything I've read thus far in SF. On a distant planet, far from Earth, there is a mystery entity that is like nothing mankind has ever encountered. The simplest way to define it would be to call it a "sentient ocean", but this term does not fully capture the weirdness or mystery of the strange living force covering much of the planet Solaris. Even calling it a single "living" thing might be misleading. The ocean certainly displays puzzling phenomena, indicative of some sort of purposiveness...but just what kind of purpose are we talking about? The scientists of Earth have been trying to answer this question for decades, producing no definitive answers. Likewise, they have been unable to establish any sort of meaningful contact with the intelligence inherent in the ocean --it is clear that this being is a completely different sort of "creature" when compared to anything of Earth. As one character states, "The preconceptions of Earth offer no assistance in unraveling the mysteries of Solaris".
In the action of the novel, Kris Kelvin, our narrator and protagonist, is sent to a space station above Solaris. After decades of discovery and enthusiasm, study of Solaris has dried up, simply because the ocean has been so hard to penetrate; so unwilling to give up her secrets. The research station is populated by only a handful of scientists, and it would seem to be a relatively quiet, boring affair. But Kelvin soon finds out that this is not the case. Mysterious, eerie goings-on creep into the narrative. One of the scientists onboard has committed suicide, just before Kelvin arrives. The other two researchers on board are extremely reticent, cautious, and paranoid. They speak with frustrating mysticism, and all we (and Kelvin) are able to discern is that something is very wrong on board the station.
Kelvin gets a dose of this himself when he wakes up one morning to find an uninvited visitor in his room --an ex-lover who committed suicide on Earth many years ago. Shockingly, she seems to be there, in flesh and blood, on the station. As Kelvin and his fellow crew members struggle with similar apparitions, the audience too, must wonder just what exactly is going on. Is the ocean taking painful memories from the crew and resurrecting them in physical form? If so, why? And how will they deal with these new "people," who hold so much significance in their lives, suddenly springing up out of nowhere, exactly as exist in memory? The plot of this short novel revolves mostly around this struggle, with the occasional digression into the field of "Solarist Studies", as Kelvin describes old experiments and expeditions conducted in the early days of the exploration of Solaris. Lem certainly plays with the minds of his characters (and audience!) throughout the novel in a jarring way that seemed almost Philip K. Dick-esque at times.
Solaris is much more a psychological novel than an action-adventure novel, but this never discouraged me --an admitted fan of action in novels, but also a lover of rich, deep, meaningful dialogue. Solaris manages to be page-turning, yet profound, and for me, this is the highest praise. It's thought-provoking to the point of brilliance, while also being thoroughly unpredictable on the level of plot action (which kept me turning the pages). Two-thirds of the way through the novel, I had absolutely no idea how things would conclude.
I also enjoyed the way Lem mixed traditional space-exploration SF with shades of Poe-like horror, suspense, and fantasy. It made for a novel that, especially in its beginning chapters, was haunting in a way that few SF works are. In addition to embracing multiple genres, Solaris also deals with many academic disciplines, both implicitly and explicitly. Fans of hard science, phenomenology, philosophy, psychology (and many more disciplines): there is plenty of material to sink your teeth into here.
Solaris deserves its place in the upper echelon of SF novels, and I might venture that it is slightly underrated. It certainly blows some established classics of exploration (here, I'm thinking of Ringworld) out of the water. The one gripe that I've heard about the novel that might have some merit is the fact that there are some overlong "technical" bits on Solaris Studies --I (not a big Hard SF fan, mind you), found these parts interesting enough, but some may not). Overall, though, this is an excellent, mind-boggling read, with a weighty message at its core: There are some things that Man cannot, and will not, ever understand.



Nova: 

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"Real fear...it's the start of a million journeys...with your feet stuck in the same place."
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"It's something everyone has envisioned --making the rude and thoughtless pay for their thoughtlessness for the rest of their lives. Well, I just happen to have been born powerful enough to do it. I assure you, it feels exactly as good as you might ever have imagined."
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"We are drifting, Mouse, you and I, the twins, Tyy and Sebastian, good people all of us --but aimless. Then an obsessed man snatches us up and carries us out here to the edge of everything. And we arrive to find his obsession has imposed order on our aimlessness --or perhaps a more meaningful chaos. What worries me is that I'm so thankful to him. I should be rebelling, trying to assert my own order. But I'm not. I want him to win his infernal race. I want him to win, and until he wins or loses, I can't seriously want anything else for myself."
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There's no doubt about it --space opera is a huge hit amongst sci-fi fans, maybe the biggest subgenre in all of science fiction, thanks in part to mega-hits like Star Wars and Star Trek. But my own personal preference slants towards more "grounded", soft SF that deals with characters, planets, and societies in smaller numbers, but with a more penetrating gaze. Luckily for me, Samuel Delany's Nova, long considered a classic of the space opera sub-genre, manages to merge some of soft SF's stress on character study with space opera's trademark feeling of vastness and emphasis on impressive settings.
Nova mostly focuses on the story of Captain Lorq Von Ray, a wealthy, grizzled pilot with connections to the highest political and economic powers in the galaxy. Early on, we follow him in the early days of his rivalry with Prince and Ruby Red from Red Shift, Ltd, a company whose interests have begun to clash with those of his own powerful family's corporation. Prince, especially, is a suitably nasty villain, and Delany establishes this quite well with these early scenes.
Later, in the main story arc, we see Von Ray lead a diverse cast of characters in a race against Prince and Ruby to win a motherlode of illyrion, a mysterious element that helps run their interstellar society (it fuels everything from terraforming projects to the sensory syrynx, a music instrument that uses not only sound, but also smells and light to create a truly multi-sensory symphony). Whoever gets to this motherlode first will certainly put the other group's company out of business. The only catch? Getting to this treasure trove of illyrion means flying one's spacecraft directly into an imploding star! Von Ray has determined, through earlier trials, that a ship can be sucked into a sun's core once nova has commenced, and be trapped in a relative safe zone where illyrion can be harvested. The Reds are hot on his tail, but even they do not realize the full scale of his mission --they are only aware of the prize at its conclusion, and are determined to prevent Lorq from devastating their company with such a prize.
 Von Ray's unmistakable charisma helps him win over several recruits for this dangerous mission: the Mouse, a gypsy wanderer and master musician; Katin, a condescending, but brilliant intellectual who can never seem to stop extrapolating, explaining, or wondering out loud; Lynceos and Idas, a strange pair of twins, one black, and one white; Sebastian, with his strange way of speaking and his vulture-like pets; and Tyy, a Tarot-card reader and skilled pilot. Each has their own story, their own quirks. I might go so far as to say that this colorful cast of characters is Nova's premier strength.
Another strength is the way Delany promulgates a distinct sense of adventure from the novel's inception. Although I thought the plot as a whole could have used more action, this sense of adventure saves Nova from ever really dragging too much. With that said, there were a few sections that could have been trimmed down a bit --at times I found myself becoming quite engaged with the plot and building up momentum in my reading pace, only for that momentum to be halted by an overly long visit to another planet. Being that the novel is only 240 pages, these slower stretches never become overwhelming, but I did feel Delany could have maintained a great sense of excitement throughout the entire novel by cutting them down just a bit.
I also enjoyed how Delany blended fantasy and SF in the scene where Lorq has Tyy do a Tarot reading for him. It managed a kind of mystical tone that you'd expect from Lord of the Rings, rather than a space opera. Another highlight is a revelation at the end. The novel's very last sentence is a great "a-ha" moment, and a wonderfully creative touch on Delany's part.
While space opera is an excellent venue for Delany's fertile imagination (as evidenced by the great scenes featuring the net riders, among others), I still think I enjoyed this novel less than I would have if it featured a similar cast of characters on a single planet, on some other quest. Constant shifts in planetary setting can get a bit too jarring, as it seems not enough time is devoted to fully flesh out and enliven a locale. If a space-opera with shades of Moby-Dick (with the obsessive Von Ray playing Ahab nicely, and his dying star, the white whale) sounds interesting to you, give Nova a look. As for me, with my ambivalence towards space opera, I must conclude that it is a solid, well-written yarn that can be a bit hard to fully get into.

#136: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, #75: The Handmaid's Tale

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said:

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"Thank God for the weaknesses built into a vast, complicated, convoluted, planetwide apparatus. Too many people; too many machines."
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"Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can't feel grief unless you've had love before it --grief is the final outcome of love, because it's love lost."
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"Fear...can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you're afraid you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back."
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Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is both a typical Philip K. Dick novel, and an atypical Philip K. Dick novel. It deals with a lot of his usual themes: altered reality, drugs, police, conspiracies, the meaning of existence, and totalitarianism.
But the way this novel is written is somewhat different from the rest of his work. I have heard that Flow My Tears was one of the few novels that PKD rewrote several times before publishing, in addition to The Man in the High Castle and A Scanner Darkly. I must say that the unusually extensive editing is fairly clear here (at least to a veteran PKD fan like myself). Flow My Tears is definitely one of the most polished PKD works that I have read, and probably one of the most thoughtful ones. And although this polished tone often seems to help the story, I felt that it occasionally hinders it at times, too.
Flow My Tears is the story of Jason Taverner, a famous pop singer and TV star from the near future. PKD quickly characterizes him in the first chapter --he's supremely self-confident and misogynistic, but he's also a seasoned professional when it comes to dealing with fame and the adoring public. One day, Taverner wakes up in an unfamiliar motel room and soon finds out that no one knows who he is anymore. His romantic partner, his agent, and his lawyer seem to have forgotten that they ever knew him. His fanbase has shrunk from thirty million to zero in an instant. Even the databases of the police state that he lives in have no records of his ever having existed. And so Flow My Tears becomes an SF mystery, as Taverner attempts to elude the police, all while trying to find out what the hell exactly happened. Plenty of crazy, reality-bending theories get thrown around, and, as usual, PKD plays with the reader's head a lot...perhaps even more so than in your average PKD novel, which is really saying something. Was Taverner's past life even real? Was he hallucinating one of the two scenarios? If so, which one? And what about Felix Buckman and Herb Maime, the cops who are tracking him? Are drugs involved at all? Do the enclaves of student-prisoners mentioned throughout the novel have anything to do with the whole situation?
As is often the case with PKD, the novel is populated by individuals who are, at turns, crazed, confused, and compassionate. There are some characters (Kathy comes to mind) who say things that the reader simply must "go with", or quickly drive themselves crazy trying to decipher the ramblings. And there are indeed quite a lot of ramblings. Although Flow My Tears is more polished than most PKD work, it is also more talk-y. These conversations tend to be interesting, even fascinating, in their own right, but they often don't add much to the story. With that being said, Chapter 11 is one of the best chapters that I have read in all of SF...and it's a talk between Jason and Ruth about love and grief that isn't a pivotal part of the plot at all, in strictly concrete terms.
Another classic PKD touch is the bizarre humor sprinkled throughout the novel, perhaps more liberally here than in most of his other works. Flow My Tears depicts a scary totalitarian police state, but also humorously depicts the human failings of this supposedly omnipresent structure. The humor is always out of left field, and it always disorients you, as I'm sure PKD intended.
Similar to this, there is a lot of illicit content in this one --again, likely intended simply to raise eyebrows and shock the reader. The relationship between the Buckmans and the short scene featuring Mr. Alien Mufi both come to mind immediately.
In a decidedly un-PKD-ish turn, the conclusion of this novel is, well, actually a conclusion! The cause of Taverner's altered reality is very bizarre, but I quite enjoyed it. It was somewhat reminiscent of the ending of The Man in the High Castle for me, and even more strongly reminiscent of the entirety of Now Wait for Last Year. Furthermore, PKD actually ties up loose ends quite well, giving us an epilogue that satisfies almost every curiosity one could have about about any main character.
Flow My Tears was very well-done overall, and from a literary standpoint, it's PKD at his best. However, I hesitate to put this one in my, say, top three novels of his, simply because it lacks some of the raw, visceral, punch of some of his work. Make no mistake about it, this is a very good book... it just can't compete with the rollercoaster build-up of Ubik or the frantic energy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or the emotional powerhouse that is A Scanner Darkly.


The Handmaid's Tale:

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"But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."
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"I know this can't be right but I think it anyway. Everything they taught at the Red Center, everything I've resisted, comes flooding in. I don't want pain. I don't want to be a dancer, my feet in the air, my head a faceless oblong of white cloth. I don't want to be a doll hung up on the Wall, I don't want to be a wingless angel. I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject. I feel, for the first time, their true power."
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"Don't let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or, Don't be."
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Margaret Atwood doesn't like this novel to be classified as science fiction, and it's a shame, because science fiction needs more authors like her. I am admittedly biased towards her brand of SF --I like literate, contemplative "Soft SF" that focuses on ideas and people rather than the impersonal equations, stiff characters, and mechanical minutiae you often find in Hard SF-space opera (although there are certainly exceptions to this). Atwood certainly touches upon the best aspects of Soft SF in this novel, and that is a big reason why I enjoyed it so much.
The first comparison that comes to mind with Margaret Atwood's style is Ursula K. Le Guin. They are skilled technically, and less focused on action-packed plots. Both writers exhibit beautiful, creative, dream-like methods of description. Although I enjoy Le Guin's SF very much, I might be tempted to say that Atwood edges her out in terms of sheer technical skill. The Handmaid's Tale shows off Atwood's talent, while also making you turn its pages quickly and eagerly. Despite the fact that the first third of the novel was relatively barren of big action, I found myself immediately pulled in, streaming from chapter to chapter without looking up. Atwood combines the page-turner and the "serious novel" into one, and I cannot applaud her more for doing so. It's a difficult task, and I wish authors could pull it off more, because I love it.
The novel tells the story of Offred (Of Fred, that is), a handmaid in the near-future Republic of Gilead, an oppressive theocracy that has taken over a large part of the United States, after a coup. We never learn all the details about this coup, but it seems to have been partly militaristic, partly social. In this Republic, women are strictly relegated to a small group of roles. Offred is a Handmaid --simply a walking womb in the eyes of Gileadan society --tasked with reproducing with her assigned Commander, a higher-up in the social pyramid. Other roles include housekeepers and illicit prostitutes, and not much else. Even the Commander's official wife, who is too old to reproduce, seems to live a pretty miserable existence despite her comparatively high social standing. She is extremely jealous and dismissive of Offred, yet cannot legally do much to get rid of her. The tension in the story comes in Offred's small, tentative breaks with the rules of the system --sometimes with the help of other characters. By the end of the novel, things have gotten very suspenseful, and I assure you that you'll want to know more even after you've finished the book completely.
Atwood seems somewhat dismissive to the genre of SF in her statements, but again, I wish she wouldn't be. The efficient, rich world-building that she shows off here would be a welcome addition to genre SF. And if she can match the infusion of wisdom and deep thought that she has included in The Handmaid's Tale in another SF novel released some time in the future, I would scramble to read it. Atwood even manages to make the episodic, fragmentary plot of this novel work surprisingly well. I usually slow down quite a bit when I read these types of novels, but Atwood managed to keep me interested in an astonishing amount of subplots...no easy task, I assure you. And although it was a bit nihilistic here and there (which I can sometimes find grating after a while in SF novels), it was also quite the opposite in other places.
The conclusion of the novel was somewhat frustrating, but I have gotten used to this as an SF fan, and particularly as a Philip K. Dick fan. A somewhat dry, but interesting epilogue of "Historical Notes" provides some answers, while also offering some very clever tidbits --take a close look at Wilfred Limpkins, for instance, or the way Atwood sketches the future of the future through small details, or the casual instances of sexism in the speeches. After close examination, maybe this epilogue isn't as dry as it seems afterall...
As you can tell, I quite enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's haunting description of the hanged "snowman" and Offred's revision of the Our Father were two particularly memorable aspects that will stick in my head for a long time. This was a highly recommendable read and one of the most well-written novels that I have encountered in science fiction...and yes, despite Atwood's own words, I'm very much inclined to call this science fiction!

#141: Time Out of Joint, #79: The Lathe of Heaven

Time Out of Joint:

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"The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises. In the banks, in insurance companies, big electric companies, missile-building firms, universities. He had seen them as assistant professors teaching some recondite subject --survey of heretical Christian sects of the fifth century --and simultaneously inching their path up with all their might and main. Everything but sending their wives over to the administration building as bait..."
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"You have to take a chance with some someone... Or you can't live."
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"Evidently he had become valuable from the standpoint of publicity. Why the public would want the same person to win over and over again he did not know. Obviously, if he won he won over other contenders. But that was the manner of the public mind. They recognized his name. As it was explained to him, the theory went that the public liked to see a name they could identify. They resisted change. A law of inertia was involved; as long as he was out, the public wanted him --and everyone else-- out; as soon as he was in, well, that made it self-perpetuating. The force of stasis worked on his side. The vast reactionary pressures now ran with him, not against him."
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The same rule applies with this review as with my previous reviews on Flowers for Algernon and Non-Stop --I have to spoil the plot somewhat in order to review this book, so stop reading and rest assured that this is one of PKD's best novels if you would like to go in completely blind.
If you've read some of my other reviews, you know by now that I am a big PKD fan. I'd say he is my favorite science fiction author at the moment, and I might even say he is my favorite author, period, if forced to choose a single name. Most of the PKD novels on this list are from his fertile 1960s period, but Time Out of Joint was actually written in the late 1950s, and many people like to call it his first great novel. After reading this slim volume within the space of a few days, I'm inclined to agree. I was shocked at how good this novel was --it frankly puts some of his (very solid) 60's work like The Simulacra to shame, perhaps even rising up to the level of Ubik and A Scanner Darkly. The originality of the plot once again put me in awe of PKD's vibrant imagination just like Ubik or Now Wait For Last Year did when I read them years ago.
Time Out of Joint does not seem like a PKD in the first few dozen pages. We open on an idyllic 1950s small town, the kind that is featured in television shows like Leave it to Beaver, the kind of atmosphere that Norman Rockwell and Johnny Rocket's try to invoke. But in many ways, it's also a classic PKD opening. There's a slowish start as we are introduced to a cast of characters going about their daily routines, and then something goes wrong. After that, you practically can't put it down. The gradual build-up and then swift acceleration is quite characteristic of PKD's pacing in later novels.
The plot centers around Ragle Gumm, an ex-military man who lives with his sister, Margot, his brother-in-law, Vic, and their son, Sammy, in a nice, quiet suburban neighborhood. He doesn't have a traditional job like Vic, a grocer, does. Rather, his job consists in winning a newspaper contest every day. He must pick a square out of about 1200 squares, where "the little green man will be next". In a few years, he has almost never lost, thanks to an obsessive personality, and a myriad of charts, graphs, and other complex systems he has developed to help figure out the pattern of the contest. He often works over eight hours a day with his charts, and his winnings provide him a modest living. But soon strange things start happening that make him question if his entire existence is actually what it seems. Some back cover blurbs that I have seen give away too much detail in this regard, in my opinion, so I will recommend staying away from them for a more surprising reading experience.
As these strange occurrences start to pile up, Ragle leaves town. Here, the suspense, paranoia, and fear are ratcheted up even further than before. PKD does a remarkable job in conveying a desolate, lonely, scary tone as Ragle drives along a deserted highway trying to make some sense of his increasingly disturbed reality. And as you might expect from PKD, much of Ragle's paranoia is confirmed by the novel's conclusion --he indeed has much to be paranoid about, and his reality is revealed to have been a complete fabrication. I have seen some reviews complain about the ending of this book, but I found that it made the entire novel! Yes, you never really find out the full truth about the strips of paper, but there is a lot to be said about the way PKD gradually reveals information along the way about Ragle's reality, keeping you guessing and keeping you turning the pages much in the same way as Ubik does. There are so many twists in the road, yet never so much as to become convoluted.
Time Out of Joint touches on some interesting concepts beyond the usual paranoia, nature-of-reality, and anti-war stuff you get from PKD. There's a lot of psychoanalytic talk, some hints at what is now called the Mandela Effect (look it up...it's weird, and very Dickian), and some excellent depictions of the boredom, monotony, and meaninglessness of suburban life. In fact, you could read the entire novel under the last lens. As a recent student of literary theory and criticism, I also appreciated some of the hints at structuralist and post-structuralist thought, exploring how words construct reality, and the relationship between signifier and signified, amongst other things.
Plotwise, this novel is perhaps PKD's most engrossing and well-done, and I don't say that lightly. I was also surprised at the quality of writing (PKD usually takes flak here, sometimes deservingly, sometimes not) --the construction of characters was done economically, but well altogether. With its influence to be found in more modern stories, like The Truman Show, I could barely believe that this book was written in the 1950s. PKD was truly ahead of his time, and Time Out of Joint can stand up there with PKD's best in any of his periods.



The Lathe of Heaven: 

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"What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind so, each morning, waking?"
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"Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."
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"He was aware that in thus relegating to irreality a major portion of the only reality, the only existence, that he in fact did have, he was running exactly the same risk the insane mind runs: the loss of the sense of free will. He knew that insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void."
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"You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough. You have to...to be in touch. He isn't in touch. No one else, no thing even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the world only as a means to his end. It doesn't make any difference if his end is good; means are all we've got... He can't accept, he can't let be, he can't let go. He is insane... He could take us all with him, out of touch, if he did manage to dream as I do."
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The premise for The Lathe of Heaven is irresistible: there is a man named George Orr whose dreams change reality. He dreams something, and the next morning he wakes up to find that some part of his dream has changed things in reality, shifted him over to a completely different continuum, where only he has noticed the difference that his dream has wrought. For everyone else, this is the way that things have "always been". It might be one of the most clever premises in all of science fiction --simply reading the back cover of this book got me more excited for it than for your average SF masterwork.
Like some of Le Guin's work, I found this novel a bit hard to get into at first. Her style is certainly rich and thoughtful, but I wouldn't call it traditionally "page-turning", especially early on, even when a lot is happening, plotwise. The conclusion bucks this trend though, and I'll get to that in a bit.
The novel starts with our protagonist, George Orr, as he begins government-proscribed treatment after a drug overdose. His purpose in taking these drugs is to suppress his "effective dreams". He can change reality, but he is frightened by this strange, uncontrollable power. He doesn't want to change things, he doesn't want to effect huge shifts in society, he's just a normal, passive, moderate type of guy who wants to live his own average life. His psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, is of a different mind completely. After a short period of disbelief, Haber becomes the only other person on the planet who knows about George's power. While George wants Haber to help him get rid of these effective dreams, Haber wants to harness them to make the world a better place...or least, to turn the world into his view of a "better place".
Early on, you might even call his actions admirable, in a way. He reserves some of the trends of the near-future dystopia that they live in --overpopulation is solved (although it means six billion people disappear, and now never have existed), and the global food shortage situation is tamed. He also gives himself higher and higher positions in the government. Meanwhile, his meddlings with Orr have a negative psychological effect on the subject, who feels like a tool being used for purposes that he has no say in. He contacts a lawyer, Heather Lelache for help, but is unable to stop Haber for the time being; the government has required him to attend these therapy sessions, and the alternative is worse. Furthermore, Haber goes through the motions, pretending to George that his dreams do not alter reality, and that he is simply trying to cure him. From there, things start to get crazy, with jarring plot elements and conversations that wouldn't be out of place in a PKD novel. There certainly are a lot of enigmas and mind-bending moments to rattle around in your brain here. With this in mind, the novel's bizarre, surreal, yet engrossing ending seems to fit quite well.
I have a feeling that psychoanalysts and fans of Freud would love this book; there is so much great stuff about the nature of dreams and how they function that I couldn't begin to summarize it after a single reading. The premise of the novel and the thoughts behind it are undeniably brilliant. Although this was a short novel (only 184 pages), it felt so much longer because it was packed with ideas, details, and subtle points to ponder over a long period of time --and I must add that I don't mean this as either a pointedly negative or positive observation.
Another great aspect of the book was the duel between Eastern and Western philosophies that lurks beneath the surface throughout its entirety. Haber's Western, purposeful, proactive "doing" vs. Orr's Eastern, Taoist, simple "being" make for an interesting dichotomy. It's also very "Le Guin"; you'll know what I'm talking about if you've read her other Tao-influenced work, like The Left Hand of Darkness.
While this novel can require a long time spent on each individual page, it is worthwhile for its ingenious premise and its impressive, mystical style of thought. Books with the power to change one's entire perspective come along very rarely. This is one of them.

#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". 
_______________________________________________
"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.

#152: Dark Benediction, #98: We

Dark Benediction:

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"There is a difference between tragedy and blind brutal calamity. Tragedy has meaning, and there is dignity in it. Tragedy stands with its shoulders stiff and proud. But there is no meaning, no dignity, no fulfillment, in the death of a child."
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" 'You're one of the machine-age's spoiled children,' he fumed. 'Technologists gave you everything you could possibly want. Push a button, and you get it. Instead of taking part in the machine age, you let it wait on you. You spoiled yourself. When the machine age cracks up, you crack up, too. Because you never made yourself its master; you just let yourself be mechanically pampered.' "
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"It was true. When you hung onto a piece of the past, and just hung onto it quietly, you only hurt yourself. But when you tried to bludgeon a place for it in the present, you began knocking over the bystanders."
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"I have taken certain vows, young man. Sometimes when I see a beautiful woman, I feel desire. When I see a man eating a thick steak on fast-day, I feel envy and hunger. When I see a doctor earning large fees, I chafe under the vow of poverty. But by denying desire's demands, one learns to make desire useful in other ways. Sublimation, some call it. A priest can use it and do more useful work thereby. I am a priest." 
_______________________________________________________
The clearest unified feeling that I can draw after finishing this diverse collection of short stories is: Wow, I wish Walter M. Miller Jr. had lived longer/been able to produce more work in his life. The quality of these stories, in addition to Miller's superb novel, A Canticle For Leibowitz, have made me a rock-solid fan. His technical skill is impressive, considering the SF field, and his stories are creative, thought-provoking, and often blistering page-turners. I usually cherry-pick a few exemplary stories in each anthology I review, but the stories here were so well-done, --diverse, yet linked by several common themes that Miller loves to play with-- that I decided to do brief reviews for all of them!
The collection opens with You Triflin' Skunk!, a well-written, spooky, backwoods SF tale that reminded me of Clifford Simak's Way Station in the way it blended a rural setting with mysterious alien visitors. It was reasonably entertaining, and quite suspenseful for such a short piece. Miller, as usual, even throws a bit of humor in there. Next came The Will, probably my least favorite piece in this collection. It's a weirdly optimistic story dealing with time travel and cancer. It's similar to You Triflin' Skunk! in that SF elements only really come into play at the end. The story's conclusion was whimsical, yet somehow it left me dissatisfied...Maybe because things worked out perfectly, and hey, this is SF, that never happens! Anybody Else Like Me? is the next story --it reminded me a lot of Robert Silverberg's novel, Dying Inside. It begins eerily, then turns into a sharp, psychological thriller. This one is very well-done in all aspects, especially the excellent ratcheting-up of suspense at the end. You might even say it has a Nightmare on Elm Street quality to it. I found it far and away the best of the first three stories.
Miller gives us a sharp turn away from what I like to call the "normal-core" SF of the first three stories, taking us to Mars in Crucifixus Etiam. It's an emotional, religiously tinged tale of sacrificing in the present to ensure the success and prospering of future generations. Its conclusion is thought-provoking and powerful. All in all, it's one of the best Mars-centered stories that I have encountered. Next comes I, Dreamer, a short, intense piece narrated by a cyborg. We get some cyborg psychology, a nasty villain, and high drama within the span of several pages. Stories like this show Miller's mastery in one distinct field: old SF concepts executed in new ways. Extremely well-done, and probably top-three in the collection.
In Dumb Waiter, we get a fine action-adventure story and an interesting post-apocalyptic scenario somewhat reminiscent of Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains. There's not as much intellectual discourse here as you would find in some other Miller stories. Still, a warm, hopeful ending, and a warning that humanity must use and understand technology, rather than letting humanity be used by technology, lends depth to the piece. After this, Blood Bank continues the fast pace. It's an adventure-oriented space opera with a few Hard SF elements. I found it to be pretty fun reading overall, with a few dated, cartoony elements drawing back from the positives, including high drama and a great concept: Earthmen as villains! Next, in Big Joe and the Nth Generation, we get a decent, fast-paced piece that reminded me of Indiana Jones, as well as Miller's own A Canticle For Leibowitz. A backward society on Mars has secrets, and one outcast is out to discover them. Another fun one, but of average quality compared with the rest of the collection.
In The Big Hunger, Miller waxes poetic. We get a grand, Stapledonian story documenting Man's longing for the cosmos across the eons. Narrated by what I think is the Platonic ideal spaceship, this one is good, but draining in a way. There's very little dialogue, and a lot of big-picture talk. It's also not quite as well-done as Stapledon's phenomenal Star Maker, although few works of SF are. After this comes Conditionally Human, one of Miller's most well-known works. An excellent, stimulating premise gives rise once again to the age-old question: What does it mean to be human? This one could be shortened a bit in my view, but it's still very interesting. And the ending left me not quite knowing what to think.
Next, we come to The Darfsteller, a Hugo Award winner, and the best story in the collection by my estimation. It's highly emotional, immediately gripping, wise, and poignant. It's also one of the least science fiction-y stories in here. The plot concerns the art of the theatre in the near future, with one major SF element introduced to it, with many consequences. This one deals with losing one's job to technology in the most fascinating way, and also begs the question, Can robots ever be better artists than humans? One of the best short stories I've ever read, and highly recommended.
Dark Benediction, the titular story, is a close runner-up for best story in the collection. It's similar to Dumb Waiter in its post-apocalyptic setting --but richer, deeper, and more engaging. This one addresses some of the positive aspects of religion (very rare in SF), as well as a slew of other big ideas. Great SF concepts abound, including the plague which gives the story its name. The main character, Paul Oberlin, and his development throughout the story are also extremely well-done -- among the best character development in the collection. After these two greats, we come to The Lineman, a near-future lunar tale that has a lot of parallels with Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. This one is a bit dated, but there are some interesting concepts to be found (lust in space figures prominently!). The ending is like Crufixius Etiam's in that it looks toward the future with purpose --Miller's big on this in almost anything he writes, I've found. The Lineman was of average quality in the collection, feeling a bit lacking coming right after the previous two. Finally, Vengeance for Nikolai ends the collection with a bang. It's a short, dramatic one about a near-future USSR-USA war (akin to a more technologically-advanced World War II it seems). Here, a Russian woman attempts to avenge her infant's death on a ruthless American general. I found it to be enjoyable, if a little over the top.
So there you have it, an excellent collection of SF stories from one of the greats. I truly believe that there's at least something in this one for everyone --and for me, there was quite a lot!

We:





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"Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy."
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"Knowledge, self-confident knowledge, which is sure that it is faultless, is faith."
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"Desires are tortures, aren't they? It is clear, therefore, that happiness is when there are no longer any desires, not a single desire any more. What an error, what an absurd prejudice it was, that we used to mark happiness with the sign 'plus'! No, absolute happiness must be marked 'minus' --divine minus!" 
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Many people, including Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, will tell you that Man's end or goal is happiness. In We, Yevgeny Zamyatin takes Man's quest for happiness and flips it on its head, forcing his readers to do a lot of thinking. Written at the dawn of that supposed socialist utopia, the Soviet Union, We is a short, dense novel that has a ton of real-world significance. It's primarily known today as the main influence for Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, but seems to be rarely read in comparison to those two greats. And I'd say it's about high time that people get to taking a look at this one as well.
The main question that this very philosophical novel asks is, "Is freedom incompatible with happiness?" Our protagonist, D-503 seems to think so. He lives in a strictly regulated society, the United State, along with his fellow Numbers. They're all humans, but at times they seem more like well-oiled machines than anything. The population of the United State lives in glass apartments, an ingenious idea from Zamyatin that made me cringe. From his apartment, D-503 can look up, down, and sideways, and see exactly what his neighbors are doing. There is no privacy, save for intimate encounters with the opposite sex, which must be filed and approved with the State beforehand. Everyone's life is regulated by Tables of Hours --at all times they must follow their schedule, whether it calls for work, rest, or education in official State values.
Things get shaken up when D-503, the head builder for the Integral, a ship that will spread the values of the United State to the cosmos, falls in love. Indeed, the entire system that grounds the United State starts to experience trauma as he finds his place in a greater conspiracy against the State, and the Well-Doer --a supremely powerful dictator who rules over it. He is alternately paranoid for fear of discovery by State spies --the Guardians-- and hopeful that his treasonous activity will be found out and corrected by the State, to whom he never seems to completely lose allegiance. The novel is written as if it were D-503's diary, and we get a great glimpse into his frazzled state of mind throughout.
The novel starts off slowly and disorients you at times, but once the mystery of I-330's role in the story starts to be fleshed out with masterful suspense, it turns into quite a page turner. It's possible that this is a problem with Zilboorg's translation (the one I read), but the prose can be flighty and hard to follow in certain sections that detail traumatic events for D-503. There are quite a lot of unfinished thoughts and ellipses. I'm fairly sure this is intentional on the author's (and translator's) part for the obvious reason of accentuating the trauma of each situation, but just be warned: there will be a few paragraphs here and there that you will have to read several times over to get the full picture. The counterpoint to this occasionally awkward, bustling, unfocused musing are moments of feeling, beauty, and wisdom that we get more and more as the story progresses. I won't spoil any, but even in translation, it's clear to me that Zamyatin is a talented and pithy writer.
At its conclusion, We gives us an excellent, short scene that may be the inspiration for one of my favorite scenes in all of SF: the Savage's conversation with Mustapha Mond in Brave New World. The Well-Doer speaks eloquently and angrily in defense of the State, and we are forced to listen to his perverse, yet somehow also sensible logic. The novel's conclusion is chilling and much too abrupt (although again, there is an obvious reason for this), but it stays in your mind in the same way as the conclusion of 1984 does (although I think Orwell's conclusion was more powerful).
We is a book that challenges preconceived notions of many kinds. And it hasn't aged much since its publication in the 1920s. I'd highly recommend this one for the more philosophical-minded SF fan, and especially those who've enjoyed 1984 and Brave New World. This dusty old semi-forgotten classic is in fact filled with life and very much worth reading.

#103: A Scanner Darkly, #146: The Child Garden

A Scanner Darkly:

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"You put on a bishop's robe and miter...and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect...and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity...Where does the act end? Nobody knows."
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" 'It --must --be --day,' the junkie says, or anyhow the tape in his head says. Plays him his instructions, the mind of a junkie being like the music you hear on a clock radio...it sometimes sounds pretty, but it is only there to make you do something. The music from the clock radio is to wake you up; the music from the junkie is to get you to become a means for him to obtain more junk, in whatever way you can serve. He, a machine, will turn you into his machine."
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"What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me --into us-- clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too."
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I like to call Philip K. Dick the Shakespeare of science fiction because he produced a significant number of all-time classics in the SF field, just as Shakespeare did for literature in general, to go along with a good deal of sub-par work early in his career. But PKD may in fact be the anti-Shakespeare in one respect: he puts so much of himself into every page of his work, so that reading his novels can become similar to reading an autobiography --in contrast to the ever-elusive Bard.
A Scanner Darkly, along with VALIS, is amongst PKD's most heavily autobiographical works. A sort of drugged-out Jekyll and Hyde story set in the near future 1990s (Scanner was published in 1977), this novel is much less a work of science fiction, and more an anti-drug novel with a few sci-fi elements thrown in. It achieves its anti-drug message not through moralistic finger-wagging or larger-than-life theatrics, but through a straightforward, honest, realistic depiction of drug culture in Southern California. PKD himself essentially lived this book, futuristic police force aside, freely admitting in his afterword that many of the novel's characters are based on junkie friends of his (most of whom are dead or psychologically impaired thanks to their addictions).
The plot concerns a junkie named Bob Arctor, who lives in a dilapidated house in SoCal, along with two fellow addicts, Ernie Luckman and Jim Barris. But here's the twist: Arctor is actually an undercover cop known as "Fred", and he reports on the group and their surrounding social circle regularly. He is so deep undercover that his direct superiors don't know who he is, and of course, they assign him to monitor Bob Arctor more closely... he has been acting suspicious of late. The head trip isn't done there, because Arctor, thanks to the requirements of his job, is addicted to Substance D, a drug that causes personalities to split in two --now Bob has forgotten he is Fred, and Fred is desperately trying to figure out this Arctor character through the secret surveillance scanners that have been mounted in his home!
Scenes of frantic, wild-eyed paranoia abound, and as you'd expect with a PKD novel, you'll start questioning your own sanity somewhere along the line! But what truly makes this novel one of PKD's masterpieces is the way he turns depraved characters into objects of extreme interest; he is realistic and pitying, yet also harsh when dealing with the condition of the drug addict, and his descriptions are fed by all too much firsthand experience (I found certain scenes to be reminiscent of AMC's Breaking Bad in this respect). It is sad and scary in that it seems to be 100% sincere honesty from an author who has seen a lot in his time. The author's note at the end is a touching way to finish off this highly emotional work, which, as you'd expect from the author of Ubik, features a surprising ending. The only gripe I have with A Scanner Darkly is the slowish pace starting off. The story of Jerry Fabin is a phenomenal way to open an anti-drug novel, but after this, PKD slows down to introduce us to a sizeable cast of characters (quite typical for him). The pace accelerates soon after.
This may be one of PKD's most poignant and well-written novels. It has a depth and maturity that exceeds his earlier work and a certain introspectiveness that one would expect from a philosophy major. I'd recommend this one to any sci-fi fan, with one warning. It is very bleak and depressing, and the ending will not leave you a bright-eyed optimist. But it is one of the very best from one of SF's greatest authors.

The Child Garden:

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"They were all young and soft, and they had no time, and so they hated the silence, the silence in themselves that had yet to be filled by experience. Some of them were driven to make noise, were kept jumping by something that was alive inside them. Others like Milena, cleared the decks and waited for something to happen, something worthwhile to do or to say. They loathed the silence in themselves, not knowing that out of that silence would come all the things that were individual to them."
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"...it's hard to believe how complex people are. Like a whole universe. There's all this chattering going on in their heads. Mist we call it, like the inside of clouds. It fogs everything, stops people seeing. Most people function by shutting almost everything out. Below that, there's the Web. That's the memory. That's where everything is stored, and the Web is a real mess. You can get tangled up in it. A very complex personality is actually difficult to get out of. It can be very scary. Underneath that is the Fire, and that just burns. That's where the heart is."
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"If cancer did not swim in the same sea as us, we might admire it, as we admire sharks. We might admire its simplicity and fitness for purpose, its lethal beauty."
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I have thought, for quite a long time now, that Philip K. Dick's VALIS would remain the strangest, most unique novel that I have ever read. VALIS may have to move over at this point, because The Child Garden is quite unlike anything I've ever read before. The phantasmagoric plot of this science-fantasy novel defies any attempt at succinct description, but I will try my best. In fact, it felt like I was reading an Impressionist painting (in novel form) at many points.
The plot concerns a young woman named Milena who lives in a strange socialist London, hundreds of years in the future. Cancer has been cured, but people only live until their mid-thirties. Technology seems to have regressed quite a bit, and electricity has been lost. People are educated by specially-developed viruses that inject information-laden DNA into the brain so they can develop quicker than nature would allow, in order to make the most of their 35 years alive. And I haven't even gotten to the really weird stuff yet. Milena is resistant to the viruses, and thus struggles in a future in which almost everyone has the same conglomerated clump of knowledge present in their brains. She is also a lesbian, and she acts quite differently from the assimilated drone-like humans who have been "Read" for the "Consensus" --a living socialist organism that is made up of small copies of every normal Londoner's consciousness. Milena falls in love with another person who has not been Read by the Consensus, a genetically engineered woman named Rolfa, who is, physically at least, a bear. Geoff Ryman throws outlandish information such as this at the reader with alarming frequency, and you learn to go with the flow --or quickly drop the book in bewilderment.
But there's no doubt that Ryman is an excellent technical writer. He opens Part One with a whimsical, yet melancholy voice, giving this future London a moody, atmospheric vibe that leaps off the page. I quite enjoyed Part One, which is, all weirdness aside, a fairly traditionally told story. Part Two, however, was not as enjoyable for me. It is slightly reminiscent of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, jumping around in time without warning, and leaving the reader feeling disoriented and confused. Part Two was very episodic; I enjoyed some of these episodes quite a bit, but was bored or put off by others. In addition, Part Two focuses on Milena much more than Rolfa, and I felt that the novel lost some pizzazz with the absence of such an interesting character. Milena can come across as whiny at times, whereas Rolfa was mysterious, intriguing, and somehow, more genuine. I couldn't quite connect with Part Two as I think Ryman wanted his audience to connect. Although there were many powerful scenes, it was too disjointed and weird in the end for me to completely enjoy. Another gripe I had with the novel was its lack of a solid antagonist. Thrawn McCartney was suitably sadistic and crazed, and the psychological torments she visited upon Milena were suitably horrid, but she was underused in the grand scheme of things, in my view. Finally, I couldn't grasp the logic of Rolfa's Reading at the end of Part One --it seemed counterintuitive to say the least. But then again, listing all the minor points of this novel that seemed inexplicable would take up several pages of text.
With that being said, the novel had many strong points, most of all the phenomenal technical and descriptive acumen of the author. The meditations on silence throughout the novel are particularly excellent --they reminded me of the pseudo-SF short story, The Year of Silence. The SF ideas are incredibly creative, indeed some of the most interesting ideas about viruses and genetic engineering that I have ever encountered. Ryman gives us an outlandish world and somehow achieves a surprising sort of sense and normalcy; despite its weirdness, he makes the reader feel the realness of his world. Although I enjoyed the skilled tone and technique that Ryman flaunted in this novel, I could not connect to it as deeply as I would have liked. I would recommend it only to open-minded folks who are ready for bizarre beauty, twists and turns, and a novel like nothing that they have ever read before.