Hey, Look What I Found! (May Reading)
6xH: Six Stories by Robert H. Heinlein (Robert A. Heinlein): 1961 collection of "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag", "The Man Who Traveled in Elephants", "All You Zombies", "They", "Our Fair City", and finally, "And He Built a Crooked House".
My spoiler for "Unpleasant Profession": art critic. It takes a long time to get to that point, but it's pretty cool once you get there. Cynthia and Teddy are a very cute blunt Heinlein couple, and get the most romantic-only-in-context sendoff ever: "When they go to bed at night, before he turns out the lights, he handcuffs one of his wrists to hers." Very disturbing sentence by itself, but in the world of the story, this is absolute and true love.
"Elephants" starts, "Rain streamed across the bus's window. John Watts peered out at wooded hlls, content despite the weather. As long as he was rolling, moving, traveling, the ache of loneliness was somewhat quenched. He could close his eyes and imagine that Martha was seated beside him." I thought this was a gooey, overly nostalgic trip down memory lane, and then read someone else's opinion that it was a story about how we carry experiences with us. Which makes sense in other contexts.
I saw a radio show production of "All You Zombies" and "Our Fair City" at DragonCon years ago, when I was in high school. I like "All You Zombies" more now (gender-bender and time travel, how often d'you get that?), but "Our Fair City" still is very cute, and has an essential faith in human nature I would like to think I might find some day.
"They" might make more sense, and be more interesting, in the context of "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag".
"And He Built a Crooked House" has a tesseract house. This is awesome ideas SF. We are very lucky the idea is awesome, because the characters were less so. I was not impressed with the portrayal of the wife as a self-deluding fainting, shrieking flower. However, the energetic architect and the consequences of his tessaract house thrill me to my bones. (Tessaract. One of the magic words of my childhood, like Mars and spaceship.)
I think the unifying theme of the collection (other than, "hey! We have the rights to six random Heinlein stories!") is the all-consuming Idea, the single sense-of-wonder moment when your mind expands a bit to contemplate a new perspective. Most contemporary SF fails at this, possibly because we've come to emphasize other writing components: character, plot, elaborate worldbuilding, meta. Instead of the writing building to that vertiginous Moment of Cool, we get the more considered Novel of Interesting, and occasionally very interesting genre conversation. But I came for the cool, for the morning of the world, and its afternoon sometimes fades compared to the remembered joy of the Idea.
Girl, Interrupted (Susanna Kaysen): Autobiographical vignettes of a year as a mental health resident. This could have been a downer, this could have been emo, this could have been just terrible. However, Kaysen sticks to her strengths - pithy, sharp turns of phrase - which forces the reader to pay attention to snapshots of life in the ward as they come. I will not say that it rewards close attention, though people paying more attention than me might find something to say about the psychology and biochemistry mental illness; life in the United States, 1967 - 1969; or health care in the same time and place, and now; but I do think the prose is astonishing. If Diana Wynne Jones' prose is a very workmanlike basket for holding story, if Lois Bujold's is a yellow brick road of practicality and flippant whimsy, then Kaysen's is a lens or a prism, catching the light and forcing your eye to follow it where the lens-creator intended.
Related link: Girl Interrupted in her Music, a painting by Vermeer. There is a connection between the book and the painting.
The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy): This is not a fixer-upper novel. It's an expanded novella! I think expanding previous works is the worst idea ever, and submit for consideration Asimov's "Nightfall", Card's "Ender's Game", and Kress's "Beggars in Spain", as well as "Once Upon a Matter Crushed", which was expanded for this novel. Thanks to a lousy physics education, I find myself reeling at the "science" part of this SF novel, and mostly cheering on Bruno de Towaji, who - yes, meril - is a grumpy, brilliant scientist. Despite many author-awarded accolades, de Towaji is interesting, not obnoxiously overpowered. I suspect the character's own awareness of his super-powered status, as well as introductory circumstances, and the stratospheric circles he interacts with in the novel, help stack the deck in his favor. (That meril totally called my love of grumpy, crazy, brilliant physicists is a sign of my complete predictability.) He is also capable of occasional moments of human compassion that do a great deal for his character.
"But how did I die? Was I dramatic? Was I brave?"
"Yes, sir. Very brave. You were on a spaceship blasting for Mercury, on a mission to save the Queendom, and you ran afoul of some stray collapsium."
I find that I like this book much more if I think of it as a yellow-spined DAW paperback, pages soft from age and spine cracking down the center, or as a fantasy epic that happens to be set in space. This is a reflection of my own expectations. Guessing what physics and materials engineering will do next is a familiar SFnal game, and by the old standards this is a fun "dash around and save the solar system" story, but I find myself increasingly curious about the economics behind the stories of harder-than-diamond McGuffin Material and "more hipster than thou" physics. I like Bruno de Towaji, wealthy eccentric, but I find myself distracted by curiosity about the society he lives in. Also, there is a certain lack of subtlety. In this novel, when someone cries, "x is the villain!" they're an unvarnished author mouthpiece, so that the plot may get to the good bits (as decided by the writer). They really mean that x is the Big Bad! It's not part of a double-crossing smokescreen! I've gotten too used to unreliable narrators; the act of relaxing and not cross-checking character statements takes conscious thought.
I also reread great swaths of the graphic novel version of Stardust, a pretty little fairy tale written in Neil Gaiman's comptetent fashion and brought to life by Charles Vess's illustrations. I think the words-only version is much inferior, and strongly urge you to hold out for the graphic novel for many reasons, including the Vess panel on the very last page, which works magnificently with the concluding written paragraphs.
Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein): A 208 page political polemic I managed to miss in my feckless teen years. Papa Heinlein, educate us all on how life as the infantry is the best way to train hot-blooded men to value their electoral franchise.
This isn't so much a novel as a political statement. The characters are author mouthpieces, the plot is in blatant service of the moralizing, the rambling infodumps are (unusually for SF) less about the tech and more about how Heinlein would construct society, dissenting viewpoints need not apply. The wiki article suggests that the novel is an origin of the military SF subgenre; compare and contrast to David Weber et al. Is Downbelow Station mil SF? Discuss.
Heinlein and I disagree from square one on gender attitudes. See also previous tartness, which, okay, was a reaction to Starship Troopers, but was even more a reaction to the clash of Heinlein's culture with mine.
I lose at connecting war and patriotism. Really. Once the guns come out, I start whining about peace processes and why can't we all just get along. With that said, I find it very interesting that there is no discussion in the narrative of how the Bug War starts. Also, thanks to an unfortunate series of references, I'd like to retire the phrase "between their loved homes and the war’s desolation" from the fourth verse of the Star Spangled Banner for a while. (Did you know there are four verses? I was almost out of elementary school before I did.)
What I think this adds up to is this: I really want someone's pastiche/homage/reworking of Starship Troopers for the 21st C. Lose the patronizing "gee, look at those plucky women!" attitude, add in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq (the first and second times). One of the most disturbing turns of 21st C warfare is the unintended consequences of our amazing medical advances; surviving with some pretty scary brain damage isn't out of the question. How do you reconcile that with the political system Heinlein presents? Starship Troopers is classic science fiction: it holds a mirror to a moment that created the story. Compare this 1959 Hugo-winning novel with Panshin's Rite of Passage, which was published in 1968 and also nailed a Hugo.
Polio: An American Story (David M. Oshinsky): Entertaining account of the creation of the polio vaccines. Oshinsky juggles the glut of characters and their agendas very nicely. This is more a book about the social side than the science side; I was hoping for tangents into the biochemistry of polio, but this is more about the whos and whys than the science. But what a story. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis very conciously manipulated the public to wring donations "for the children" from them, through tactics like the March of Dimes and FDR's involvement. It's disturbing to read a level-voiced account of fundraising, but that may be a personal quirk. Three cheers for heavily footnoted histories!
I could do a knee-jerk reaction to Dr. Isabel Morgan's contributions to polio research, and how they came to a screeching halt when she married and Dr. Morgan got sidelined by Mrs. Mountain, but if you're reading this, you're probably familiar with the story of women's careers getting shafted by their gender and marriage.
My spoiler for "Unpleasant Profession": art critic. It takes a long time to get to that point, but it's pretty cool once you get there. Cynthia and Teddy are a very cute blunt Heinlein couple, and get the most romantic-only-in-context sendoff ever: "When they go to bed at night, before he turns out the lights, he handcuffs one of his wrists to hers." Very disturbing sentence by itself, but in the world of the story, this is absolute and true love.
"Elephants" starts, "Rain streamed across the bus's window. John Watts peered out at wooded hlls, content despite the weather. As long as he was rolling, moving, traveling, the ache of loneliness was somewhat quenched. He could close his eyes and imagine that Martha was seated beside him." I thought this was a gooey, overly nostalgic trip down memory lane, and then read someone else's opinion that it was a story about how we carry experiences with us. Which makes sense in other contexts.
I saw a radio show production of "All You Zombies" and "Our Fair City" at DragonCon years ago, when I was in high school. I like "All You Zombies" more now (gender-bender and time travel, how often d'you get that?), but "Our Fair City" still is very cute, and has an essential faith in human nature I would like to think I might find some day.
"They" might make more sense, and be more interesting, in the context of "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag".
"And He Built a Crooked House" has a tesseract house. This is awesome ideas SF. We are very lucky the idea is awesome, because the characters were less so. I was not impressed with the portrayal of the wife as a self-deluding fainting, shrieking flower. However, the energetic architect and the consequences of his tessaract house thrill me to my bones. (Tessaract. One of the magic words of my childhood, like Mars and spaceship.)
I think the unifying theme of the collection (other than, "hey! We have the rights to six random Heinlein stories!") is the all-consuming Idea, the single sense-of-wonder moment when your mind expands a bit to contemplate a new perspective. Most contemporary SF fails at this, possibly because we've come to emphasize other writing components: character, plot, elaborate worldbuilding, meta. Instead of the writing building to that vertiginous Moment of Cool, we get the more considered Novel of Interesting, and occasionally very interesting genre conversation. But I came for the cool, for the morning of the world, and its afternoon sometimes fades compared to the remembered joy of the Idea.
Girl, Interrupted (Susanna Kaysen): Autobiographical vignettes of a year as a mental health resident. This could have been a downer, this could have been emo, this could have been just terrible. However, Kaysen sticks to her strengths - pithy, sharp turns of phrase - which forces the reader to pay attention to snapshots of life in the ward as they come. I will not say that it rewards close attention, though people paying more attention than me might find something to say about the psychology and biochemistry mental illness; life in the United States, 1967 - 1969; or health care in the same time and place, and now; but I do think the prose is astonishing. If Diana Wynne Jones' prose is a very workmanlike basket for holding story, if Lois Bujold's is a yellow brick road of practicality and flippant whimsy, then Kaysen's is a lens or a prism, catching the light and forcing your eye to follow it where the lens-creator intended.
Related link: Girl Interrupted in her Music, a painting by Vermeer. There is a connection between the book and the painting.
The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy): This is not a fixer-upper novel. It's an expanded novella! I think expanding previous works is the worst idea ever, and submit for consideration Asimov's "Nightfall", Card's "Ender's Game", and Kress's "Beggars in Spain", as well as "Once Upon a Matter Crushed", which was expanded for this novel. Thanks to a lousy physics education, I find myself reeling at the "science" part of this SF novel, and mostly cheering on Bruno de Towaji, who - yes, meril - is a grumpy, brilliant scientist. Despite many author-awarded accolades, de Towaji is interesting, not obnoxiously overpowered. I suspect the character's own awareness of his super-powered status, as well as introductory circumstances, and the stratospheric circles he interacts with in the novel, help stack the deck in his favor. (That meril totally called my love of grumpy, crazy, brilliant physicists is a sign of my complete predictability.) He is also capable of occasional moments of human compassion that do a great deal for his character.
"But how did I die? Was I dramatic? Was I brave?"
"Yes, sir. Very brave. You were on a spaceship blasting for Mercury, on a mission to save the Queendom, and you ran afoul of some stray collapsium."
I find that I like this book much more if I think of it as a yellow-spined DAW paperback, pages soft from age and spine cracking down the center, or as a fantasy epic that happens to be set in space. This is a reflection of my own expectations. Guessing what physics and materials engineering will do next is a familiar SFnal game, and by the old standards this is a fun "dash around and save the solar system" story, but I find myself increasingly curious about the economics behind the stories of harder-than-diamond McGuffin Material and "more hipster than thou" physics. I like Bruno de Towaji, wealthy eccentric, but I find myself distracted by curiosity about the society he lives in. Also, there is a certain lack of subtlety. In this novel, when someone cries, "x is the villain!" they're an unvarnished author mouthpiece, so that the plot may get to the good bits (as decided by the writer). They really mean that x is the Big Bad! It's not part of a double-crossing smokescreen! I've gotten too used to unreliable narrators; the act of relaxing and not cross-checking character statements takes conscious thought.
I also reread great swaths of the graphic novel version of Stardust, a pretty little fairy tale written in Neil Gaiman's comptetent fashion and brought to life by Charles Vess's illustrations. I think the words-only version is much inferior, and strongly urge you to hold out for the graphic novel for many reasons, including the Vess panel on the very last page, which works magnificently with the concluding written paragraphs.
Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein): A 208 page political polemic I managed to miss in my feckless teen years. Papa Heinlein, educate us all on how life as the infantry is the best way to train hot-blooded men to value their electoral franchise.
This isn't so much a novel as a political statement. The characters are author mouthpieces, the plot is in blatant service of the moralizing, the rambling infodumps are (unusually for SF) less about the tech and more about how Heinlein would construct society, dissenting viewpoints need not apply. The wiki article suggests that the novel is an origin of the military SF subgenre; compare and contrast to David Weber et al. Is Downbelow Station mil SF? Discuss.
Heinlein and I disagree from square one on gender attitudes. See also previous tartness, which, okay, was a reaction to Starship Troopers, but was even more a reaction to the clash of Heinlein's culture with mine.
I lose at connecting war and patriotism. Really. Once the guns come out, I start whining about peace processes and why can't we all just get along. With that said, I find it very interesting that there is no discussion in the narrative of how the Bug War starts. Also, thanks to an unfortunate series of references, I'd like to retire the phrase "between their loved homes and the war’s desolation" from the fourth verse of the Star Spangled Banner for a while. (Did you know there are four verses? I was almost out of elementary school before I did.)
What I think this adds up to is this: I really want someone's pastiche/homage/reworking of Starship Troopers for the 21st C. Lose the patronizing "gee, look at those plucky women!" attitude, add in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq (the first and second times). One of the most disturbing turns of 21st C warfare is the unintended consequences of our amazing medical advances; surviving with some pretty scary brain damage isn't out of the question. How do you reconcile that with the political system Heinlein presents? Starship Troopers is classic science fiction: it holds a mirror to a moment that created the story. Compare this 1959 Hugo-winning novel with Panshin's Rite of Passage, which was published in 1968 and also nailed a Hugo.
Polio: An American Story (David M. Oshinsky): Entertaining account of the creation of the polio vaccines. Oshinsky juggles the glut of characters and their agendas very nicely. This is more a book about the social side than the science side; I was hoping for tangents into the biochemistry of polio, but this is more about the whos and whys than the science. But what a story. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis very conciously manipulated the public to wring donations "for the children" from them, through tactics like the March of Dimes and FDR's involvement. It's disturbing to read a level-voiced account of fundraising, but that may be a personal quirk. Three cheers for heavily footnoted histories!
I could do a knee-jerk reaction to Dr. Isabel Morgan's contributions to polio research, and how they came to a screeching halt when she married and Dr. Morgan got sidelined by Mrs. Mountain, but if you're reading this, you're probably familiar with the story of women's careers getting shafted by their gender and marriage.