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.

A Regular by Andrew Bonazelli (2010)

The title of A Regular refers to a permanent fixture at a dive bar. And it starts out by observing the man living the kind of life you'd expect of him. Until things take a sudden, drastic turn, and just about everyone in the bar is suddenly a zombie, and our hero capably slays them. Sounds like a cool way to start a novella, right? And it would sound even cooler if I told you there was a pornogrind band, a Decepticon, a conjurer, and a street fight or two, right?

The legendary Clive Barker can throw a shitload of different stuff into a short book. Cabal features a serial killer, fantastic monsters, and a god that makes you ejaculate if you see him (it's been a few years since I read it, but I swear it's true). The book is awesome. That odd juxtaposition of different genre features is a staple of Barker's work, as is the post-modernist declination to explain why it all fits together. He is a master at it.

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.