Ringworld by Larry Niven (1970)

Halo

In my continuing exploration of many of the classics of speculative fiction, I read Larry Niven's Ringworld. If you're familiar at all with the Halo video game franchise, you know at least one thing this book inspired. The central feature is an artifact, a made world in the shape of an enormous ring. It surrounds a sun, spinning to simulate gravity, with high walls at the edges to keep air, soil, and water from flowing off the edges of the ring's inner surface. "Shadow squares" at a closer orbit to the world's sun provide daylight intervals on the livable surface. To get a good visualization of the Ringworld, you can follow this link, although you should be warned that if you look too closely at it that will provide some spoilers.

Much of the book's descriptions focus on the sheer enormity of the world's scale. The total surface area of that inner ring is about the equal of three million Earths. That's too mind-boggling to really hold in your brain all at once. All of this is a pretty cool concept, but it doesn't by itself justify a novel dedicated to it. Not unless there's something else going on.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974)

A Reason to Fight

I'm a bit of a nerd. And I love to read, but I don't have the time/motivation to read a book in a weekend. It takes me a bit longer. So as I may have mentioned before, I set out to identify and collect some of the classics of science fiction. I'm still going through that collection that I amassed mostly over a decade ago.

Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is the latest book I finished. It deals with the prospect of interstellar war--and if you think war is hell on Earth, then you haven't seen anything. The hostile environments of space and distant planets make survival that much more difficult. Those unusual tactics and pitfalls are an intriguing part of the story, but they are not the most interesting part of it.

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (1980-1983)

The Color That Is Darker Than Black

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is the best thing I've read in ten years, since the first time I read The Lord of the Rings. In fact, professional critics have placed it right alongside that work. If that doesn't grab your attention enough, let me also state that it's the most metal book I've ever read.

The most key point to explain what makes this book so great is captured in a cover quote from the third volume: "The most extraordinary hero in the history of the heroic epic" (Washington Post Book World). Roger Ebert famously stated that only good villains separate good stories from bad, because heroes are all the same, but that is definitely not the case here. Severian begins as an apprentice in the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, the guild of the torturers. They carry out judicial punishments ranging from all manner of torture to execution. He, like most members of his guild, has no family. He has a strong sense of justice, like all heroes, and the torturers' philosophy to justify their actions is well-considered. But he also does some rather unsavory things along his journey. He is prone to mercy, but can also be quite ruthless. Peculiarly, he often repeats that he remembers everything, and doesn't know what it's like to forget.

Gene Wolfe: The Shadow of the Torturer (1980)

This weekend, I finished reading the first book in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series, The Shadow of the Torturer. I'll do a full review of the series when I'm finished with it, but a few things jump out at me immediately that demand mention.

1. I can't tell whether it's science fiction or fantasy.

2. How the hell has there not been a movie made of this?

3. Parts of it are grim as fvkk.

4. The main character was raised in the guild of the torturers, which is exactly what it sounds like.

5. Like The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings, the book is ostensibly written by a major character from the book. He uses an execution as a metaphor for writing a book.

I'll be detouring from the series to read a book that was sent to me for review, but if this intrigues you, stay tuned.

I'm a Nerd Wannabe

An Examination of My Nerd Pursuits

Given the crossover between metal and a whole lot of nerd pursuits, I don't think it will come as any surprise to anyone that I've been into some really nerdy things in my 31 years. When I say that, I'm referring to the kinds of things usually mean when they say "nerdy," even though people can be nerds about anything.

The weird thing is, I've never been able to fully commit to nerdery, or any other subculture for that matter. I've often said I'm a wannabe nerd, because I want to do the things that nerds do, but I fall short. I've got some theories on that, but it's better to start at the beginning.

Science Fiction

Of course, the ultimate nerd thing is science fiction, and that's where I started. Here, I'm using the term broadly to encompass true sci-fi as well as stories that take place in space or the future.

It started with Star Wars. What else? I grew up with it. Every year some channel would play all three movies in three nights, and so we would miss the first one and record Empire and Jedi. My brother and I watched those VHS tapes every day for a whole summer. I drew space battles all the time in 2nd grade.

By the fifth grade, I was reading the Robotech novelizations, and a year later I was on to the BattleTech books. There was a pretty dry spell there for a while, but late in college I started onto classic science fiction books, which I still read today. Dune and the Hyperion Cantos are great examples. I discovered Firefly late (thank you, Aaron!), and love it intensely.

But otherwise, there's a lot about sci-fi that I can't commit to. I've never really cared for Star Trek, because it's objectively terrible. I've never watched Dr. Who or Battlestar Galactica. And Star Wars was ruined, that's a matter of public record. A big part of me wants to be the guy who dresses up like a Storm Trooper, but aside from building a model AT-AT I just can't do that.

Comic Books

Comic books were my next nerd pursuit, but I never made it very far. I had a subscription to the G.I. Joe comic for a while, until it ended, and had a few issues of some TMNT comics. But, as you can tell, that interest was just collateral to my interest in the worlds surrounding my toys. I also had Spawn #6, which had excellent art, but I never got around to getting another issue. My brother and I did have some Marvel trading cards, but that wasn't out of any affinity for the characters.

Some of the art is cool, and I like the movies, but that's mainstream. Something about comic books makes them the least appealing form of nerdiness to me.

Video Games

I played video games almost as far back as I can remember. We had an Atari 2600. But, seeing that I skipped the 8-bit generation (other than playing at friends' houses) I didn't get into it until the Sega Genesis. Streets of Rage 2 was my first game. But the Final Fantasy series has almost always been my favorite since I watched my cousins play the original. Unfortunately, I had to play them with friends until the Playstation era. I faithfully played the games until XI. I tried it, but less than a month into that grueling experience I quit.

Helliconia Summer by Brian Aldiss (1983)

I recently read the second book of Brian Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy, Helliconia Summer. You should read my review of the first book to get a description of the setting.

Aside from being set on the same planet, the setting and story in this book have very little to do with the first one. It takes place hundreds of years later, and the setting has been completely transformed by the different weather on the planet. The general writing, characterization, and descriptions are just as compelling as in the first one, which is very strongly in its favor. However, it falls far short of the first one for many reasons.

The book starts out strong--but it starts out 2/3 of the way through the story. This would be fine, if it was only one chapter. But instead, there are three chapters before it jumps back in time, and the fourth chapter is presented as a flashback. So, when I started the fifth chapter, I thought it jumped back forward; I was wrong, so needless to say I was confused for the next couple of chapters.

The setting is not nearly as compelling as in Spring, the supposedly extreme heat of the long season being almost forgotten through most of the book. And one of the reasons Spring was so interesting was that the setting changed a great deal during the story, something that doesn't happen in Summer.

After I finally figured out what was happening, things go interesting for a while. But just when it got really good, some deus ex machina rears its ugly head. And finally, the end is unsatisfying.

The Verdict: Still, the story which is told is a good one, and, as I said, the characters are compelling. So, I give it 3 out of 5 stars.

Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldiss (1982)

I recently read Helliconia Spring, part of the Helliconia Trilogy by Brian Aldiss. While the book did not win any of the major awards, it was in the running for the Nebula.

The story takes place mostly on the planet Helliconia, which orbits a rather weak sun, Batalix, which provides little heat and light. Batalix in turn orbits Freyr, a much larger and hotter sun. The orbit of Batalix around Freyr (a "Great Year") takes about 2500 Earth years, and at some points Batalix and Helliconia are closer to Freyr than others. Consequently, the climate of the planet undergoes stark change from centuries of extreme cold to centuries of extreme heat.

The planet is populated by both humans and some wampa-like creatures called phagors, along with several species of subhumans and both plants and animals of remarkable biologies necessitated by the harshly varying conditions of the planet. Aldiss went so far in exploring his premise that he even considered the microbiology of the planet.

Helliconia Spring begins in extreme cold, following a character who moves from a nomadic and extremely difficult solitary lifestyle, to living in an underground society, to finally joining an established surface settlement and becoming their leader. He is the most interesting character in the book, his experiences making him a uniquely capable person.

Sadly, the book drops him about a third of the way through and picks up several generations later. But at least it picks up on another interesting character. The settlement soon experiences the onset of the spring of the Great Year, the ensuing changes in their environment and the creatures inhabiting it, and new challenges brought on by these developments. This arc of the book has many, many characters, but Aldiss somehow manages to present each of them as unique, and I don't ever recall being confused about who was whom. Most of these characters are by necessity flat characters, but enough of them are developed well so as to make them seem human.

I do have two complaints about the book, but very minor ones. First, Aldiss included some history of Earth and a space station orbiting and observing the planet, but the people of Earth and the space station do not affect the events of the story. I am, however, already in the middle of the second book, Helliconia Summer, and am beginning to see that they do affect events later in the series--so this fault is forgiven completely. Second, I found two contradictions in the book. Earlier in the book, a creature called a "stungebag" is characterized as "proverbially difficult to kill," as in, they have a saying something like, "It was tougher than killing a stungebag." Later in the book, they are characterized as easy to kill. The other contradiction is that earlier in the book a phagor would only use his horns as a weapon on another phagor and never a human, but that turns out to be untrue as well. However, the contradictions did not affect the story other than being a minor annoyance.

The Verdict: The characters are compelling, the setting is scientifically plausible (as far as I can tell) and very interesting, and the plot is complex, being driven by independent forces of both people and climate. Despite the very minor problems, I give it 5 out of 5 stars.

Asimov

I've recently begun reading Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov in the beginning of a journey toward reading the entire Foundation series (as written by Asimov, not the posthumous sequels). It always strikes me when I read works by Asimov what an incredibly bad writer he is, at least as far as novels. His short stories generally are good, but that's because you expect something different from a sci-fi short story than what you expect from a novel. A sci-fi short story is supposed to explore some kind of futuristic scientific speculation--and Asimov is the undisputed master of this style. A sci-fi novel, on the other hand, is supposed to be just like any other novel, and the speculation is incidental to the story, or at least the story takes the forefront. Asimov seemed to have missed the distinction.

Which is not to say that I don't like it. I'm one of a limited number of people that actually enjoys reading that kind of thing. But let me explore why it's bad from a fiction-writing standpoint.

The most important rule of writing fiction is "show, don't tell." Asimov is absolutely famous for telling rather than showing. Every novel of his that I've read has a character unfamiliar with his surroundings and a person who knows about it. The one familiar with them shows the other around and explains all the workings of the space station or planet or whatever else is involved.
He's famous for having long passages of explanation of what's happening. He does make concession to the rules of fiction by adding some exciting events, but this is the lesser part of the story.
And in Nemesis, for example, we see one of the largest failings of most Asimov novels. The main characters are often scientists who sit around and discuss the scientific problem until they come to a solution.

If you like that kind of thing, like me, it's fine, and reading Asimov is great. Of course, if you like that kind of thing you've probably already read a lot of Asimov, so what I'm saying here won't be much help.

Revenge of the Sith

I just saw Episode III with my parents (the last time I saw a Star Wars movie with them outside of the home was Return of the Jedi, and then I was in a car seat at the drive-in). I was disappointed. Now, to indulge my dorkitude by expounding upon my complaints about another installment of George Lucas's thorough mediocrity.

Sure, the story as a whole was solid, and the special effects were top-notch. The problem is that George Lucas is a total jackass.

Some might say the acting, but I'm not inclined to believe that all of those actors are really that bad. I think it's likely Lucas's poor directing abilities.

On top of that, he felt it necessary to give cameos. There is no logical reason why one of the wookies had to be Chewbacca. That's just silly. Going even deeper in this vein: why did C-3PO have to be in the prequels? He plays no relevant part--they don't need a translator, and his comic relief in the new movies is substandard. In addition, why did the clones have to be clones of Boba Fett's father? Boba Fett was originally intended to be a minor character.

And at the end, they give the droids to Captain Antillies. True, in the original movies they did belong to Captain Antillies, but this can't be the same person. In the original movies, Wedge Antillies (the only surviving pilot of the attack on the first Death Star besides Luke/the X-Wing pilot that made it to the center of the second Death Star) was not nearly 40 years old, as he must be if he's the same person. And I highly doubt that someone would have the exact same rank after 20 years, only in a different organization (because there was no "rebellion" at the end of Revenge).

Episode II was clearly the best of the prequels, but even in that movie the over-emphasis on cameos, using familiar characters, and special effects make the movie fall far short of anything that could be considered "good."

I hope that someone has gotten something out of this foray into my youth.