I first read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy not long after it first came out. Like everyone else, I was left gobsmacked not only by the multi-generational scale of the epic but also by the eerie sense that the scenario was all too plausible. It felt like we could wake up one morning and discover that it all came true.
I’m still slowly working on reading the great classics of science-fiction that every fan of the genre should read at least once. I’ve been a fan of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series ever since high school but I’ve read precious few of her more substantial Hainish Cycle novels. The Left Hand of Darknes, originally published in 1969, is perhaps the most well-known of these and was the big book that made Le Guin a great SF writer so it’s well past time that I got around to reading it.
I have read The Dispossessed, published in 1974 but judging from the events in the books apparently set thousands of years before The Left Hand of Darkness. There are obvious stylistic and thematic parallels between the two books. In each of the two books, two different societies that are rivals to each other are described. The reader takes the role of tourist to compare and remark upon the differences and similarities between the two rival societies. In The Dispossessed, the contrast is between the capitalist Urras and the anarcho-communist Anarres, obvious allusions to the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Gripping Hand is the sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye. In some markets, it is also sold as The Moat around Murcheson’s Eye, which is a mouthful for a title but perhaps makes more sense. It was released in 1993, a full eighteen years after the first book was published. (George R.R. Martin fans might want to take note.) That’s almost as long as the time that has passed in-universe between the events of the two books.
The sequel centers around two characters from the first book. Kevin Renner who was navigator on board the INSS MacArthur during the mission to Mote Prime and Horace Bury, the trading magnate who initially saw the Moties as a tremendous money-making opportunity but later became terrified of them. The two are now agents of Navy Intelligence, with the responsibility of ferreting out rebel threats to the Empire while the Imperial Navy concentrates its resources on the Motie blockade.
The Mote in God’s Eye is yet another book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. It’s co-authored by Larry Niven of Ringworld fame and is considered one of the finest examples in the sub-genre of alien first contact stories. I’ve been actively looking for stories of this type ever since I read Peter Watts’ Blindsight earlier this year. For the most part, it holds up surprisingly well for a book originally published in 1975 and the alien species at its center compares favorably even against the strangeness of today’s science-fiction.
The most dated aspect of the novel is the banality of its vision for the human civilization of the future. It basically amounts to aristocratic feudalism in space, with absolute loyalty to an emperor justified on the grounds that human unity must be upheld at all costs because of the horrific devastation interplanetary warfare can cause. To modern eyes, the novel’s glorification of military service looks positively quaint. Here the good guys are invariably the noble and hard-headed soldiers while the bad guys are the civilians, whether businessmen who are out to make a quick buck at the expense of humanity as a whole, or bleeding heart civilian scientists who are woefully naive about the harsh realities of survival.
The Book of the New Sun is the insanely praised magnum opus of Gene Wolfe. It’s so well reviewed that it’s been called science-fiction’s Ulysses. Since the people praising it are fellow writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, George R.R. Martin and Alastair Reynolds, any serious science-fiction fan had better sit up and pay attention. The tetralogy is also notoriously difficult to make sense of, so much so that there are published analyses of its deeper meanings and themes, such as Michael Andre-Druissi’s Lexicon Urthus.
I found a copy of the hardcover Gollancz 50 edition of the first volume, comprising the first two books The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator in a local bookstore and promptly bought it, knowing it to be one of the classics of SF that I never got around to reading. Unfortunately the second volume, comprising the books The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch doesn’t yet exist in that edition, and I ended up ordering a paperback copy online. That was many months ago. Yes, it took me that long to finish the series to my satisfaction.
Midnight Riot is a book that I picked up as light reading from book recommendation threads on QT3 and Broken Forum. I had some trouble finding information about it on the net and later discovered that this is because it was originally published as Rivers of London is the UK but its US publishers chose the title Midnight Riot, probably because the original name sounded like a boring treatise on British geography. The Americans also changed its cover, creating controversy by choosing to depict the lead character in silhouette. The critics claimed that this was to hide the fact that the protagonist is of mixed race, which would supposedly turn off would-be buyers.
Anyway the book’s back blurb describes it accurately as what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and became a policeman in the UK. Peter Grant, a young constable who has just completed his probation, seems set on a boring career of pushing paper at the Case Progression Unit, when a chance event alters the course of his life. He is standing guard at the scene of a seemingly random act of murder when an eyewitness comes up to him with critical information. The witness turns out to be a ghost, the uncanny nature of the case gets it referred to Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who is the sole member of the London’s Metropolitan Police to specialize in magical crimes, and Grant becomes the first officially sanctioned wizard’s apprentice in Britain in 50 years.
Once again, I’ve been remiss in posting entries, so here’s a smattering of stuff that I’ve recently found to be of interest around the web:
One of the most common and popular Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) stories is of a student coming to Wiener after class and saying, “I really don’t understand this problem that you discussed in class. Can you explain to me how to do it?” Wiener thought a moment, and wrote the answer (and only that) on the board. “Yes,” said the student, “but I would really like to master the technique. Can you tell me the details?” Wiener bowed his head in thought, and again he wrote the answer on the board. In some torment, the student said, “But Professor Wiener, can’t you show me how the problem is done?” To which Wiener is reputed to have replied, “But I’ve already shown you how to do the problem in two ways!”
Dick Swenson, who was at MIT in those days, tells this variant of the story: Wiener showed the kid the answer twice, as just indicated. Then the student said, “Oh, you mean…,” and he wrote the answer (and only the answer) on the board. Wiener then said, “Ah, very nice. I hadn’t thought of that approach.”