All reviews copyright 1984-2010 Evelyn C. Leeper.
AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS by Oliver Sacks:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/08/2010]
AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS by Oliver Sacks (ISBN 978-0-679-43785-7) is a collection of essays on neurology and related fields. In "To See and Not See", about a man who regains his sight after almost an entire lifetime without it, Sacks quotes another researcher with a way of describing blindness that could have been the inspiration (but probably wasn't) for Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life": "[Alberto] Valvo comments, 'The real difficulty here is that simultaneous perception of objects is an unaccustomed way to those used to sequential perception through touch.' We, with a full complement of senses, live in space and time; the blind live in a world of time alone."
The centerpiece of AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS is the title essay. "An Anthropologist on Mars" is by Oliver Sacks, but the title originates with its primary subject, Temple Grandin, an expert on animal behavior who is also perhaps the best-known "high- performing" person with autism. Sacks sees these two aspects of Grandin as somewhat paradoxical, since one of the effects of autism is that it makes it difficult--in fact, often impossible--for its victims to comprehend the meaning of many human behaviors. For example, someone with autism could see another person crying and not realize that meant that the person was sad (or, again paradoxically, happy). In fact, they might not even be able to explain what "sad" or "happy" was. Hence, Grandin describes herself as being like "an anthropologist on Mars." Not surprisingly, a lot of people with autism who are science fiction fans are big fans of Mr. Spock and Data in "Star Trek".
Autism has another (or perhaps it's really the same) aspect: people with autism see the world "slightly skewed". Grandin looks at the night sky and doesn't see (or even understand) any of the usual poetic images people without autism see. But this is not one- sided: what she sees is not something that those without autism can understand either.
All of this seems very connected to the whole idea of the Museum of
Jurassic Technology (which I described/reviewed in 2005 on my web
page at
Coincidentally, about a week after I read "An Anthropologist on
Mars", I saw the HBO film TEMPLE GRANDIN, which made clear a few
more details about being an anthropologist on Mars. The really key
point is that Grandin was the first person with autism to tell the
rest of us what life was like to people with autism--what they saw,
what they felt, how they thought. Throughout the film, you see
visual images of how Grandin's mind works, and you see a lot of
doctors and other "experts" on autism who are completely wrong in
what they believe.
Assume you are given a sequence of numbers and asked to provide the
next number. For example, "2, 4, 6". Is the next number 8 (the
nth term is 2n)? Is it 10 (the nth term is 2 times the nth non-
composite number, or the nth term is 1 less than the n+1th prime)?
Is there some other more complicated rule? That was the sort of
guesswork the doctors were doing. Grandin was able to tell them
the rules.
In science fiction terms, what we are seeing is a first contact
situation. By this, I don't mean that those with autism are a
separate species, but that their mode of thinking is so unusual
that there is a certain parallel to such a meeting. And rather
than just observing and guessing, people could ask Grandin (and
eventually others) what was going on in their minds. (For example,
one of the things people have said about teaching other primates
sign language is that we might be able to ask a gorilla *why*
gorillas beat their chests. Two-way communication is
irreplaceable.)
(The essay "To See and Not See" also has references to Borges in
its footnotes.)
To order An Anthropologist on Mars from amazon.com, click here.
THE ISLAND OF THE COLORBLIND
by Oliver Sacks:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/31/2010]
Coincidentally, I happened to read THE ISLAND OF THE COLORBLIND by
Oliver Sacks (ISBN 978-0-375-70073-6) at the same time as GENOME. This is
really two long essays: "The Island of the Colorblind" and "Cycad
Island". The latter never caught my imagination, but "The Island
of the Colorblind" fit in perfectly with GENOME. The "island" is
really two islands, Pingelap and Pohnpei, and then for good measure
Sacks visits two more (Guam and Rota) to study a family of
neurodegenerative diseases. And of these two sections, again it
was the first that was the most engaging. I think a large part of
that is that colorblindness is fairly easy to understand, both its
cause (a single gene) and its effect (everything looks various
shades of gray). While these are not entirely accurate statements,
they are not grossly inaccurate either. But lytico-bodig, which
produced wildly varying symptoms and which no one cause had been
agreed on, is just too elusive.
To order The Island of the Colorblind from amazon.com, click here.
THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT
by Oliver Sacks:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/18/2005]
Oliver Sacks's THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT (ISBN
0-684-85394-9) is a collection of essays about various peculiar
neurological syndromes. The title essay is about a patient with
the inability to interpret visual images: show him a rose and he
cannot identify it as a rose, but let him smell it and he has no
problem. "The Lost Mariner" is about a man with retrograde
amnesia (a.k.a. Korsakov's syndrome). I can't remember if it
used the term, but that is what the film MEMENTO is about. I
would be surprised if the writer of that was not at least
partially inspired by Sacks. And this is not the only pop
culture derivative of Sacks's work. Just a few weeks ago, the
"B" story on "House, M.D." was almost precisely the case
described in "Cupid's Disease". (And the writers of "Medical
Investigation" seemed to have taken their pilot episode from
Berton Roueche's "Eleven Blue Men". This seems to be the season
for taking television plots from classic medical case histories.)
Michael Nyman has even written an opera based on Sacks's title
essay. At times the writing is a bit dense, but still readable.
(Roueche, mentioned earlier, wrote for a wider audience and is
somewhat easier to read. Paul de Kruif, with his MICROBE HUNTERS
and MEN AGAINST DEATH, predates both of them in this genre.)
The consensus among our book discussion group, however, was that
the descriptions of the cases were far more interesting than
Sacks's philosophizing about them.
To order The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat from amazon.com, click here.
CONTACT
by Carl Sagan:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/05/2004]
In an attempt to get more people interested, our science fiction
discussion group chose Carl Sagan's CONTACT as this month's book. It
seemed like a good possibility to get readers who were not normally
involved, given the familiarity of Sagan's name outside of the
field of science fiction and the success of the film version. We
did get three new people, but 1) they came only because they knew
of Sagan as a scientist, 2) they said at the beginning they didn't
like science fiction and that basically they wouldn't be coming to
future meetings, and 3)they thought we would be reading the book
at the meeting, rather than having read it beforehand and
discussing it at the meeting. The last seems particularly
strange--how could one read a 430-page book at a two-hour meeting.
In any case, we didn't really build up our attendance and we all
pretty much agreed that Sagan was not a very good science fiction
writer. Many people found his digressions annoying, and one also
pointed out that Sagan never really describes any action. For
example, he leads up to the explosion, but then "cuts away" and
resumes writing quite a bit after it occurs. This was a
bestseller when it was published (1985), but I don't think it was
highly regarded by science fiction fans then, and does not stand
up well over time.
[And a follow-up]:
I got a couple of comments on my comments last week on our book
group's discussion of Carl Sagan's CONTACT. Mark Leeper said of
the idea that we would be reading it at the meeting, "Perhaps
they expected excerpts. We do call it a 'reading group' not a
'discussion group.'" Charlie Harris also said this, as well as
saying of the digressions, "I'd distinguish between two types of
digression: the science pedagogy--which I did not find annoying--
and the routine, non-sf, not-plot-related stories involving non-
central characters--which I did."
To order Contact from amazon.com, click here.
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
by J. D. Salinger:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/05/2004]
J. D. Salinger's THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (ISBN 0-316-76948-7) was a
book that everyone but I seemed to have read, so I read it. I'm
sure that in 1946 the frankness about sexuality, and the
opposition to authority was quite new and arresting, especially
when being read someone in its apparent target audience, teenage
boys. But it's now 2004, everything in the book (and then some)
has been on primetime television, and I'm a middle-aged woman.
Which is a long way of saying that while I can recognize it was an
important work, it did not do much for me.
To order The Catcher in the Rye from amazon.com, click here.
INSIDE HAMMER
by Jimmy Sangster:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/05/2004]
For fans of Hammer horror films, Jimmy Sangster's INSIDE HAMMER
(Reynolds & Hearn, ISBN 1-903111-20-X) is mostly a wonderfully
collection of anecdotes of his life at Hammer Studios. Towards
the end it does devolve into a listing of "then I worked on this
film, and then they made that film", but on the whole, his
comments are amusing and entertaining, if not entirely insightful
and meaningful about film-making. For example, he recounts how
Bray Studios was an old mansion used for storing army coats, but
when the roof leaked, the coats on the [British] first floor got
so heavy with water, they caused the ground floor ceiling to
collapse. He is also more honest about the various folks'
negative qualities, without making this a tabloid sort of book.
(For those who want a more academic approach, there have been
several other books about Hammer Studios.)
To order Inside Hammer from amazon.com, click here.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING BOOKS
by Ian Sansom:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/21/2007]
THE CASE OF THE MISSING BOOKS by Ian Sansom (ISBN-13
978-0-06-082250-7, ISBN-10 0-06-082250-3) is "A Mobile Library
Mystery", which makes it sound like a later book in a series, but
in fact it is the first book in a series. It is billed as
"expertly comic", and I suppose of you find the notion that
people who live in rural Northern Ireland act and talk as though
they are brain-damaged comic, you will laugh a lot. It struck me
as of the same ilk as Stella Gibbons's COLD COMFORT FARM, but not
as funny.
To order The Case of the Missing Books from amazon.com, click here.
STARRING T. REX!
by José Luis Sanz:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/07/2003]
Another import of sorts, though published by Indiana University
Press, is José Luis Sanz's STARRING T. REX! Sanz is a
professor in Madrid, and the book was first published in Spain,
then translated and published here. (The translation is
adequate, though occasionally there is an awkward turn of
phrase, and I noticed at least one "bare" where "bear" was
intended.) The book is a look at how the various theories about
dinosaurs reflected the sociological and philosophical climate
of their times. (For example, early theories tried to fit
dinosaurs into a Biblical universe.) But a large part of the
book is devoted to dinosaurs in popular culture--books, movies,
and even advertising. Sanz is a lover of categories,
categorizing the ways dinosaurs are portrayed in fiction as "The
Synchrony of Humans and Dinosaurs", The Myth of the Lost World",
"Frozen Dinosaurs", "Time Travels", "Dinosaurs of the Future",
and "Exodinosaurs". and in addition to the authentic dinosaurs
of more recent films, there have been -paradinosauroids" (a mix
of different theropods and sauropods; e.g. the Rhedosaurus in
"The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms"), "sauriodinosauroids"
(lizards passed off as dinosaurs; e.g., "Journey to the Center
of the Earth"), "dragodinosauroids" (a man in a suit; e.g.
Godzilla). (One wonders if this was the original word in
Spanish, as it seems to come from the English-language phrase
"to dress in drag.") It also has a lot of nifty stills and
posters from movies, and illustrations from books.
To order Starring T. Rex! from amazon.com, click here.
BLINDNESS
by José Saramago:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/30/2004]
I decided to skip José Saramago's
BLINDNESS, though it's hard to judge whether the problem was
Saramago or the translator or the fact that I was stuck reading it
in a large-print edition. Certainly whoever decided that the use
of quotation marks or paragraphing were unnecessary for dialogue
is partly to blame.
To order Blindness from amazon.com, click here.
DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS
by José Saramago
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/28/2008]
DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS by José Saramago (translated by Margaret
Jull Costa) (ISBN-13 978-0-15-101274-9 ISBN-10 0-15-101274-1) is a
straightforward fantasy novel, written by a major author and
published by a major publisher, yet it has received surprisingly
little coverage by reviewers of fantasy novels. (A review at
sfgate.com seemed promising, but it turned out to be the "San
Francisco Chronicle" website.) The reason seems to be that the
author is too major--Saramago has did win the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1998. Either the reviewers figure that people will
hear of this book a lot elsewhere, or that it is somehow above
being reviewed by "mere" genre reviewers. Neither seemed to affect
them in the case of Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA. though,
so I am confused. (And there was a review of Saramago's science
fiction novel BLINDNESS in "Locus", back in 1999.)
The premise is certainly not new--it is basically "Death Takes a
Holiday". In a small country somewhere (it feels like South
America, though I cannot pin down why), on the stroke of midnight
on New Year's Eve, death ceases. Well, to be more precise, human
death ceases--all the other animals and plants seem to be dying in
normal numbers. At first, people are overjoyed, but soon the
consequences become more obvious and what had seemed a blessing
becomes a curse. The Church, the undertakers, and the insurance
companies see the negative aspects first, followed by hospitals and
nursing homes. Halfway through the novel, death (who insists on a
lower-case "d") takes a slightly different approach, which I will
not reveal. I will say that the second half is weaker than the
first.
Saramago is not an easy author to read. Thank goodness the book is
short (238 pages), because the sentences are very long and complex.
The second sentence of the novel (for example) is 91 words long,
with fifteen commas. And I suppose one might observe that some of
the consequences will be obvious to readers familiar with fantasy.
But Saramago covers much more than the obvious. For one thing,
there is a long dialogue about its effect on religion, a topic
carefully avoided in earlier genre treatments of the same premise.
And there are other topics, such as a discourse on how the initial
display of the country's flag by a few people who used it as a
symbol of gratitude for (one supposes) Divine pleasure with the
country turned into an effectively compulsory requirement: "Anyone
who doesn't hang our nation's immortal flag from the window of
their house doesn't deserve to live. Anyone not displaying the
national flag has sold out to death." (Sound familiar? I can
remember shortly after 09/11 someone asking us why we weren't
flying a flag in front of our house, as if that were some sort of
requirement, like keeping your lawn mowed.)
In spite of the "run-on" sentences, this is clearly a book worth
reading, and I suspect will probably be better than the Hugo
nominees, yet it is so off-the-radar of most fans that its chance
of being on the ballot are vanishingly small.
To order Death with Interruptions from amazon.com, click here.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST
by José Saragmago:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/28/2010]
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST by José Saramago (translated
by Giovanni Pontiero) (ISBN-13 978-0-156-00141-0) is easier to read
than some of Saramago's other works, even though it has the same
quirks: incredibly long sentences and paragraphs, no quotation
marks, and no new paragraphs with each change of speaker. But
maybe Saramago's point of view is what makes it interesting. For
example, when Jesus was serving as an assistant to an old shepherd
named Pastor, Pastor tells him to choose a sheep ("unless you
really are a eunuch"). Jesus is horrified and tells Pastor this is
an abomination. "Then Pastor raised his arms and called out to his
flock in a commanding voice, Listen, my sheep, hear what this
learned boy has come to teach us, God has forbidden anyone to
copulate with you, so fear not, but as for shearing you, neglecting
you, slaughtering you, and eating you, all these things are
permitted, because for this you were created by God's law and are
sustained by His providence."
And Saramago's style is very immediate, as if we were actually
there when everything was happening: "Distracted by these
reflections, which are not entirely irrelevant to the gospel we
have been telling, we forgot, to our shame, to accompany Joseph's
son on the last leg of his journey to Jerusalem, where he is just
now arriving, penniless but safe."
This book is not for everyone. Saramago has his own perspective on
what is important in Jesus's life and what isn't, on what various
events meant, and indeed on exactly what happened (which does not
always exactly match the gospels). But I found it intriguing.
To order The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from amazon.com, click here.
INTRODUCING MATHEMATICS
by Ziauddin Sardar, Jerry Ravetz and Borin Van Loon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/20/2006]
INTRODUCING MATHEMATICS by Ziauddin Sardar, Jerry Ravetz and
Borin Van Loon (ISBN 1-84046-11-3) has the same flaws that Sardar
and Van Loon's INTRODUCING SCIENCE (reviewed in the 07/29/05
issue of the MT VOID) had: it spends more time criticizing
Western colonialism and imperialism than introducing mathematics.
I suppose that Eurocentrism and ethno-mathematics may be
interesting topics, but they are not mathematics per se.
To order Introducing Mathematics from amazon.com, click here.
INTRODUCING SCIENCE
by Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/29/2005]
Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon's INTRODUCING SCIENCE (ISBN
1-84066-358-9) is another book in the "Introducing" series that
did not live up to expectations, because it didn't introduce
science, but instead introduced philosophies of science. There's
nothing wrong with that per se, but when one is expecting an
overview of science and the scientific method and instead get a
comparison of the different philosophical attitudes toward
science--what it is, how it is done, what is permissible, and so
on--in different cultures, it is a bit jarring. Had it been
called INTRODUCING PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE, I might have been
more positive towards it. But it is ironic that on one page the
authors decry the Western attitude that only Western science is
important and on the next say that nothing happened in science
between the Greeks and the Renaissance! And when on page 101,
they explain that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is
"ethnocentric and racist", I decided that even as an explication
of different philosophies, it left a lot to be desired. Then
again, I suppose that the authors may have an explanation for
this when they claim that "both claiming and maximizing cultural
neutrality is itself a specific Western cultural value."
To order Introducing Science from amazon.com, click here.
CALCULATING GOD
by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/31/2003]
I'm in two book groups at our public library, the "original" group
(which does all sorts of books), and the science fiction group.
So almost every month I have a couple of books chosen for me by
other people.
But this month I think I chose both of them. I know I chose
Nikolai Gogol's DEAD SOULS,
and I think I may have chosen Robert J. Sawyer's CALCULATING GOD,
based on the group's request to do something recent, not too long,
and that the library network had enough copies of. We all thought
the book had a lot of ideas--maybe even more than a single book
should hold. There was first contact with aliens who have proof
that God exists, and immortality, and gun-wielding religious
fanatics, and .... Actually, in my opinion, Sawyer should have
left out the gun-wielding religious fanatics. I got the
impression that he put them in because he felt the book needed
some action instead of all the people and aliens just talking, but
I didn't feel that way. I also thought that the details seemed
somewhat artificially constructed so that the story could progress
exactly as Sawyer wanted. For example, the aliens have enough
technology so that Sawyer can justify why the government has to
let the main character be the only contact with them, but not
enough to solve his main problem. I liked all the philosophical
discussions among the characters; I just wish there had been more
of that.
To order Calculating God from amazon.com, click here.
FACTORING HUMANITY
by Robert J. Sawyer
(Tor, ISBN 0-312-86458-2, 1998, 350pp, hardback):
After the relative simplicity of his last book (Illegal Alien),
Sawyer is back to his typical high-density story. A. E. Van Vogt
claimed one show write by having a plot twist every 600 words;
sometimes I think Sawyer has decided to throw in a new idea every
few thousand words. I mean, I would think that deciphering the
messages from our first alien contact and building a machine from
their instructions with the functionality of the machine in
Factoring Humanity would be enough without adding an entire sub-plot
of artificial intelligence, suicides, accusations of abuse,
and repressed/manufactured memories. Yes, they all tie together,
but they make for a very busy novel. (And it's all the busier
because Sawyer keeps his novels to a reasonable length. He doesn't
take a thousand pages to cover all this--he does it in 350. Hang
on to your hats.)
I'm sure I could work up an explanation of how this novel ties in
with Sawyer's Canadian-ness and hence feelings of isolation, etc.
(as Clute did with fellow Canadian Robert Charles Wilson and
Darwinia), but I don't think that has anything to do with it. I do
think that this does deal with isolation, but on the level that
everyone feels when they are trying to communicate with or
understand someone else.
To order Factoring Humanity from amazon.com, click here.
FRAMESHIFT
by Robert J. Sawyer
(Tor, ISBN 0-312-86325-X, 1997, 347pp, hardback):
The only problem with Robert J. Sawyer's novels is that they're busier
than Shinjuku Station at rush hour. This one has a scientist working
on the Human Genome Project, driven by the fact he has a fifty-fifty
chance of developing Huntington's disease, mugged by neo-Nazis who may
be connected to the Treblinka guard Ivan the Terrible. Meanwhile the
scientist and his wife arrange to have a child by artificial
insemination by donor, and this child may or may not inherit some of
the wife's telepathic powers. There's also the question of whether the
scientist can get health insurance and how the insurance companies try
to get around legislation protecting people from being excluded due to
genetic pre-dispositions toward disease.
All of these are important, and all of these are interesting, but all
of these in a 347-page book makes for a lot of coincidences, strange
connections, and red herrings (and one whopper that's all three).
I found the parts about the genetic testing to be the most relevant.
(Of course, whether relevance is important is a subjective decision on
the part of the reader.) I understand why the rest was there, at least
in some sense, and Sawyer does connect it thematically. But as in The
Terminal Experiment, I found myself wishing for more concentration on,
and examination of, fewer topics.
This probably all sounds negative, but given that I plan on nominating
Frameshift for the Hugo this year, perhaps I should say something
positive. Okay: Robert J. Sawyer is the one of the two authors I first
think of when I think about who the successors to Asimov, Clarke,
Heinlein, and the other Golden Age authors in this "literature of
ideas" are. (Greg Egan is the other.) So maybe my complaints about
too many ideas seem a bit odd. If what you are looking for are ideas,
and consequences of science, and all that sort of stuff, Sawyer is
definitely high on my recommendation list.
To order Frameshift from amazon.com, click here.
HOMINIDS
by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/02/2003]
I read another Hugo nominee, Robert J. Sawyer's HOMINIDS. This
seemed a typical "Analog" story--a lot of emphasis on the science,
but the actual story and characters were not very interesting.
Part of the problem was that Sawyer seems to have designed his
non-human society so that it's better in all sorts of ways, and
without having religion. (Or maybe even *because* it doesn't have
religion.) As a result, it reads a lot like Heinlein, and when
the character talks about how well it works, I find myself
thinking, "Well, yes, because Sawyer wrote it that way."
Ultimately, in the context of the story, *Sawyer* is God, so it's
rather disingenuous of him to construct an ideal fictional society
and then say, "See, you don't need God."
To order Hominids from amazon.com, click here.
HUMANS
by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/20/2004]
I read Robert J. Sawyer's HUMANS, the middle book of his "H"
trilogy. (Well, what else would you call a series with books
HOMINIDS, HUMANS, and HYBRIDS?) As usual, it seems to have every
idea that occurred to Sawyer during its writing, although most of
them are connected to the plot. (It seems obvious that Sawyer
read Jared Diamond's GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL.)
[And later]:
Last week, I referred to Robert Sawyer's new trilogy as his "H"
trilogy, but Joe Karpierz points out that it is actually called
"The Neanderthal Parallax".
To order Humans from amazon.com, click here.
HYBRIDS
by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/26/2004]
I finished Robert J. Sawyer's "Neanderthal Parallax" series with
his book HYBRIDS, and found that I thought it the weakest of the
three, with Sawyer getting up on a soapbox about a lot of things:
Americans' supposed love of guns, selective breeding, rape, male
versus female psychology, and so on. There was also what might
truly be called a deus ex machina about religion, the human brain,
and the earth's magnetic field which all just happens to come to a
climax at a few minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve in Times
Square. This has always been my problem with Sawyer's books--he
seems to put everything in, and doesn't spend enough time to
develop a lot of it sufficiently. Somehow after working through
three books, I was very dissatisfied with the resolution. (This,
of course, is another problem with a multi-volume work. If at the
end a reader doesn't like it, the reader is going to be even more
annoyed at having spent so much time over such a long period to
read it.)
To order Hybrids from amazon.com, click here.
"Identity Theft"
by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/12/2006]
"Identity Theft" by Robert J. Sawyer (in DOWN THESE DARK SPACEWAYS,
edited by Mike Resnick, ISBN 1-582-88164-2) is a hard-boiled
science fiction mystery story in the vein of Isaac Asimov (on the
SF end) and Raymond Chandler (on the hard-boiled end). (Sawyer
has written at least one science fiction mystery story before,
ILLEGAL ALIEN.) Alexander Lomax (the first-person narrator) is a
detective on Mars hired to find the missing husband of his new
client, both of whom are "transfers"--people whose consciousnesses
have been transferred to mechanical bodies. As usual, Sawyer
deals with a lot of issues: the nature of identity, consciousness
and individuality, and of course the mystery itself. There do
seem to be a couple of flaws in the reasoning, though, which
detract from the story. (At one point Lomax says that a certain
murder must have been committed, but later we discover that this
is not true. Since his reasoning is part of what is given to the
reader as explanation, it seems unfair for it to turn out to be
false.)
To order Down These Dark Spaceways from amazon.com, click here.
ILLEGAL ALIEN
by Robert J. Sawyer
(Ace, ISBN 0-441-00476-8,
1997, 292pp, hardback):
Robert J. Sawyer has changed gears a bit for this novel. Rather than
an analytic look at the existence of souls or the implications of
genetic testing or a tour of the cosmos, he gives us a here a
classic first contact situation that rapidly becomes a murder
mystery. I found myself thinking of Isaac Asimov's science fiction
mysteries, and this is a worthy successor in the genre.
We start with a spaceship that lands in the Atlantic Ocean. It
turns out to be disabled and, after communication is established,
arrangements are made for the Tosoks to exchange their advanced
technology for our help in making repairs. All is going along
splendidly until a human turns up dead, and it appears as though he
was killed by a Tosok.
There is a lot of "courtroom procedural" here as well, and I can't
help but wonder if this was inspired somewhat by the Simpson trial.
(Sawyer has his characters make reference to it, which seems to
support this.) On one hand, this gets a bit heavy-handed at times.
On the other hand, I think this could be made into a very
interesting movie. (Not that it would be, knowing movie-makers,
but it could be, a la Witness for the Prosecution or even To Kill
a Mockingbird.)
Illegal Alien is an enjoyable mystery, a bit lighter than Sawyer's
recent works, but certainly worth a read.
To order Illegal Alien from amazon.com, click here.
ITERATIONS
by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/24/2006]
ITERATIONS by Robert J. Sawyer (ISBN 0-88995-303-1) is a
collection of some of Sawyer's short fiction. In fact, it is the
only collection so far of his short fiction. Considering that he
has been nominated for nine Hugos, you would think an American
publisher would have been interested in doing a collection, so it
could be that Sawyer felt that as Canada's most visible science
fiction author, he should have this collection published in
Canada. It includes his one Hugo-nominated short piece that was
published before the collection came out, but also a few pieces
less likely to have been seen by readers, such as one originally
published in "The Globe and Mail" newspaper, and several from
small press publications. Sawyer also wrote an introduction for
each piece, although in most cases it is just the explanation of
where it first appeared. I suspect that at some point a more
comprehensive collection may be done of Sawyer's work, but until
then, fans of his writing will want to seek this out. (It is
available from amazon and other sellers in the United States.)
To order Iterations from amazon.com, click here.
ROLLBACK
by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/04/2008]
ROLLBACK by Robert J. Sawyer (ISBN-13 978-0-765-31108-9, ISBN-10
0-765-31108-9) has two major problems. One, it has *two*
assumptions of the "what if?" variety: we've made contact with
aliens, and it is possible to "rollback" someone to the
physiological age of twenty-five. Either one of these would be a
reasonable basis for a book; both together seem like overkill.
In fairness, this is a standard Sawyer technique, so it could
just be me who finds this irksome. The other is that the ending
depends on a massive coincidence--literally a one-in-a-thousand
chance--to work out. (Actually, it is an even less-than-one-in-a-
thousand chance, now that I think about it.)
And there are smaller problems as well. Sawyer manages to fit it
his usual speech about how much better the Canadian health system
(and educational system) is than the United States version(s).
Even if it is true, I am not sure a statement to that effect
needs to be in every novel he writes. And every once in a while
there's something to bring you up short and destroy the sense of
time and place. For example, though it's 2048, any sense of being
in 2048 the reader might have is quickly stomped on when one
character says the following: "Hell, I got an email today with a
PDF attachment, and I thought, geez, I wonder if this is going to
be worth reading, 'cause, you know, it's going to take, like *ten
whole seconds* for the attachment to download and open." Which
is less likely: that in 2048 we will still be receiving email
with PDF attachments, or that if we were, it would take ten
seconds to open them? (For that matter, how likely is it that
both the Canadian and United States health systems will remain
unchanged by then?)
Sawyer can't have it both ways. He can't write a novel set forty
years in the future and have everything the same as now. Nor can
he write a novel set in the near future and have the alien
contact and rollback as he wants. (The alien contact is *not*
faster than light, so he needs time after our reception of the
first messages for our reply to travel out and their reply to
travel back.)
Clearly, Sawyer has his fans (Joe Karpierz gave this a very
positive review in the 05/04/07 issue of the MT VOID, and it did
make the Hugo ballot), and Sawyer is usually the example of an
"Analog"-style author on the Hugo ballot. But I have to say that
this book will not be high among my choices for "Best Novel" on my
ballot. [-ecl]
To order Rollback from amazon.com, click here.
"Shed Skin"
by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/17/2005]
"Shed Skin" by Robert J. Sawyer ("Analog" 01-02/04) has a plot
involving uploading a duplicate of oneself into a robot. This is
very similar to several other notable stories over the past few
years, and in particular this seems to be a response to David
Brin's KILN PEOPLE (reviewed in the 04/25/03 issue of the MT
VOID). I'm not sure how much new this adds to those stories, but
at least it is centered on an idea.
LORD PETER
by Dorothy L. Sayers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/14/2005]
Dorothy L. Sayers's LORD PETER (ISBN 0-060-91380-0) is a
collection of all Sayers's short stories featuring Lord Peter
Wimsey. I'm not a big Wimsey fan--I guess the whole upper-class
thing does not work for me, and she seems to feature less of the
puzzle aspect than, say, Agatha Christie. However, I enjoyed the
short stories more than her novels, maybe because of necessity
they have a higher proportion of puzzle and less of the setting
than the novels.
To order Lord Peter from amazon.com, click here.
THE SONG OF ROLAND
translated by Dorothy L. Sayers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/29/2006]
THE SONG OF ROLAND, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (ISBN
0-140-44075-5), is a classic, and also a classic example of
messing around with history. On 15 August 778 the rear-guard of
Charlemagne's army was killed in the Pyrenees by a small party of
Basque marauders. There were a couple of contemporary reports of
this, then nothing until around the end of the 11th century. At
that point, right about the time of the First Crusade (1096), the
story re-surfaced, with Charlemagne 200 years old rather than the
more accurate 38, and with the Saracens rather than the Basques
who attack. Oh, and there are about 100,000 of them rather than
just a small party (now against 20,000 French). Regarding this
tendency toward "historical adjustment", Sayers writes of one
character: "[The] historical prototype [of Richard the Old] is
Richard I of Normandy, who lived (943-996) later than
Charlemagne's time, but has been attracted into the Carolingian
cycle by the natural tendency of epic to accumulate famous names
regardless of chronology." The whole story has become the Cross
versus the Crescent, with Muslims willing to see their own sons
killed as hostages in order to defeat the Christians.
The problem (for me, at least) is that Roland appears to refuse
to blow his horn and call for reinforcements out of sheer
cussedness. He has decided that it is nobler to fight while
out-numbered five-to-one than to call for reinforcements, and
besides, being Christians of course they will defeat the
"paynims". That does not make him a hero--it makes him a dolt.
(The latter attitude--that the French are a match for any foreign
force--has gotten France into a lot of trouble since then, of
course.)
Even the poem acknowledges this. After most of the battle, when
there are sixty Frenchmen left and 96,000 Saracens [Lines 1685-
1689], Roland cries, "Why aren't you here, O friend and
Emperour?/Oliver, brother, what way is to be found?/How send him
news of what is come about?" [Lines 1697-1699] And Oliver
suddenly does his own about-face as well, saying, "And how should
I know how?/I'd rather die than we should lose renown." [Lines
1700-1701] Oliver then goes on to say, in effect, "Look, if you
had blown the horn when it might have done some good, that would
have been one thing. But now you've lost the battle and are just
trying to save yourself." But the Archbishop convinces Roland to
blow his horn anyway so that Charlemagne can exact vengeance on
the Saracens. Bleh.
If you are looking for early racial stereotypes, how about this
description of Ethiopian warriors: "As black as ink from head to
foot their hides are,/With nothing white about them but their
grinders." (Note the use of "hides" rather than "skins", in
addition to the actual description.) And of course, when the
French defeat the SaracensMuslims), "Some thousand French search
the whole town [of Saragossa], to spy/Synagogues out and mosques
and heathen shrines./With heavy hammers and with mallets of
iron/They smash the idols, the images they smite." [Lines 3662-
3664] So we learn two things from this. One, even though the
Jews were not involved in the battle, they get persecuted
afterwards. And, two, whoever wrote the "Song of Roland" was
seriously confused--synagogues and mosques are notable for their
*lack* of images and idols; those are found almost entirely in
Catholic churches. Oh, and afterward, any "Paynim" who does not
convert to Christianity is killed.
I do not know whether it is the translation or the original, by
the way, but both the French and the Saracens seem to have a
group called the "Twelve Peers". So Line 1308 says, "Of the
Twelve Peers ten already are killed," then later Lines 1511-1512
say, They urge on Roland and Oliver likewise/And the Twelve Peers
to flee for all their lives." In the first case, the reference
is to the Saracens, in the second, to the French. It is somewhat
confusing.
By the way, I just ran across a mention of Roland's Horn
elsewhere a week or so previous. The 1936 version of THE MALTESE
FALCON, titled SATAN MET A LADY, has the characters from THE
MALTESE FALCON (with slightly changed names) chasing after
Roland's Horn, supposedly stuffed with gems to keep it from ever
being sounded again. Why the jewels could not just be poured out
was never made clear, and in any case Roland broke the horn at
the end of the battle when he killed a Saracen with it.
To order The Song of Roland from amazon.com, click here.
THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB
by Dorothy L. Sayers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/12/2003]
Lord Peter Wimsey is a very popular amateur detective, but reading
Dorothy Sayers's THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB still
didn't make me put him up with Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.
(Sherlock Holmes is clearly above them all, of course.) It could
be that the trendy, social set that Wimsey travels in just doesn't
fascinate me as it does some others. I'm not saying the book was
bad, but I would place Wimsey in the second rank of English
sleuths.
To order The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club from amazon.com, click here.
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