Embarrassingly for someone who claims to be fan of science-fiction, it’s been a while since I last read a sci-fi novel. Most of my fiction reading these days are on the web, either web-based originals or fanfiction. I picked Charles Stross’s Halting State to read recently both because I’d previously read his Accelerando and thought it interesting and because this particular novel’s tie-in with online gaming worlds seems like a good fit for my own interests.
This last book of the Mars trilogy is the most epic in scope, covering some one hundred years worth of events and extending the saga to the rest of the Solar system and even beyond. At the same time, it feels frustratingly parochial, with its strong focus on the same old set of characters who are forced to deal with new iterations of familiar problems. As much as we readers have grown to love these characters over the course of the previous books, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that this book isn’t just a retread of what has come before with added proviso that many of the characters are now so mature as to leave little room for additional character development.
When I first read the second book of the Martian Trilogy, I was immediately struck by the epic sense of history it embodies. Set fifty years after the end of the first novel, it shows how the real Martians are the children of the settlers who have never known Earth. Standing over two meters tall, they move with a grace that those born on Earth can never achieve. Moreover, their profound disinterest of all things Terran and unselfconscious Martianness marked the passing of an era.
So here we are at the end. I’ve finally gotten around to reading the final book of the Wheel of Time saga. That’s more than 20 years since I read the first book. The whole series amounts to fourteen books and over four million words. So it’s with relief that I can bring this chapter of my life to a close.
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.
So I finally finished reading Worm, a massive web serial that clocks in at over 1.6 million words. That’s easily over a dozen regular books. Like many others, I was drawn in by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s recommendation. It’s a superhero story with a teen-aged girl as its protagonist. It starts out on a small scale in a high school setting and could easily be dismissed as yet another Young Adult story. But as you read on, the camera pulls back and you realize what a massive and well-developed world this story is set in, with tons of characters each with intriguing side stories of their own.
Soon enough our protagonist becomes embroiled in ever greater and more earth-shaking events and the whole thing ends with a massive battle that redefines what it means to be epic in the superhero genre. This story pretty much has everything that any fan of superheroes could want: inventive superpowers and more importantly, creative uses of said superpowers, superb character development and very satisfying inter-character interaction, masterful handling of tension and cliffhangers, a rich setting with mysteries such as the origin of superpowers that are slowly explained over the course of the story, giant kaiju-style threats that all characters must team up together to drive back, and a fantastically written overall arc that must have been planned right from the beginning.
Perhaps more impressive than all that is that the author apparently managed to finish all this in about two and a half years of work, cranking out chapters twice every week like clockwork. Later he used bonus interlude chapters as incentives to drum up donations, so many weeks had three chapters. Early chapters were pretty short in the 3,000 to 4,000 word range, but chapters grew in length over time so by the end 8,000 word chapters were the norm and 10,000 word chapters were not unheard of. That is an inhuman level of dedication and hard work over such an extended period of time.
I do have plenty of complaints and nits to pick but I would like to make it clear that this is a fantastic piece of literature and I don’t want my negative comments to discourage readers from reading it so I’ll refrain from listing them here. It still needs editing and some revision but I sincerely believe that this epic deserves to be published and sold alongside A Song of Ice and Fire, the Harry Potter series and works of similar stature. If we’re very lucky, very lucky, we might even see movies or television shows based on this many, many years down the road (though given the scope of some of the fights, I find it hard to imagine how one would go about filming the scenes).
Now go and read it. You’ll be enthralled.
I’ve heard of China Miéville from his work in other genres but this is, I believe, his first science-fiction novel, and the first book of his that I’ve read. Embassytown received some very impressive reviews so I delved into it with plenty of anticipation and not a little bit of trepidation. As it turned out, the novel is less ambitious and more traditional than I expected so I needn’t have worried myself.
As its title implies, the book is about a city called Embassytown, the sole human settlement on the alien planet of Arieka. In the universe created by Miéville, humans traverse interstellar space by going through something called the immer, while hinting that some aliens, called exots, have wholly incompatible forms of FTL technology. It so happens that Arieka is located just about at the edge of explored space in the immer. This means that while Embassytown is formally a colony of a human empire known as Bremen, it is de facto semi-autonomous due to its remote location so visits from spacecraft crossing interstellar distances, called voidcraft, are both rare and the occasion for grand celebration.