Reviews: sf
John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos: Everyone in Midwich is struck unconscious for a day - and when they wake up, every woman is pregnant with what turns out to be a flock of blond, blue-eyed superpeople. Will they take over, or will humanity rally against their strange powers? The setup is excellent, explaining the attraction of remakes even without the social stigma of unmarried pregnancy to help drive the plot. The execution is pedestrian, and hampered by the POV of detached observers rather than the people who end up doing the most important things in the plot. If I were doing the remake, I’d make the kids as dark as Wyndham’s are Aryan.
Peter David, Battlestar Galactica: Sagittarius is Bleeding: Set during the second half of Season 2, this tie-in novel begins annoyingly, with the kind of recaps precisely unneeded by anyone who’d pick up a BSG novel. Fortunately, David gets beyond that with the plot - Roslin is having disturbing dreams portending disaster, dreams that spill over into her waking life, but she’s not taking the chamalla root any more, and she begins to suspect that she may have a dangerous connection to Sharon’s baby. Meanwhile, Boxey is back, getting kicked off the Galactica and taking up with a Sagittaron religious minority that, through a twist of fate, is now substantially less of a minority than it used to be, and wishes to have more political power accordingly. David does a lot more with Boxey than most tie-ins are allowed, which is most of what makes the story interesting; I don’t know if we’ll be seeing him again on the show, but the result is either spoilery or already noncanonical.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars: This is the story of the first few decades of the human colonization of Mars, full of landscape (of course) and debates over the proper treatment thereof (ditto). I’ve read criticism that Robinson treats non-American ethnic groups like monolithic blocs - the Swiss and various Arab groups figure in the plot, but don’t provide any major characters. Certainly some of Robinson’s characters do think of groups that way, but I’m not sure Robinson does - some of the main American characters also think of Russians as having a particular national character, but two other main characters are Russian, and they (a) would disagree on the description and (b) are very different people, so I’ll withhold judgment on that point. Anyway, you don’t come to a KSR novel for characters, you come for talking heads with political and environmental positions moving through landscape, and this is exactly what you get, complete with revolution and world-whomping terraforming.
Joe Haldeman, Worlds: This makes a good contrast with Red Mars -- it’s the story of Maureen O’Hara, a girl from one of the space colonies populating the solar system in the late 21st century who comes to study in New York and gets caught up in the political convulsions of the day. Haldeman focuses on character as revealed and formed by circumstance, rather than using characters to investigate questions of political theory. Though the particular forms of his speculations no longer seem as likely as they did in 1981 - remember, there was such a thing as the Soviet Union then -- his concerns with how violence affects the individual and how individuals face apparently overwhelming historical tides keep the book readable.
Future Washington, ed. Ernest Lilley. SF stories about future DC - how could I resist? Well, I should have, and not only because it turns out that Z. bought a copy too. The first chapter of KSR’s Fifty Degrees Below is in here, with individuals surviving in Rock Creek Park under the pressure of climate change. Cory Doctorow contributes a polemic against intellectual property that even I don’t buy. L. Neil Smith, who wrote the Lando Calrissian tie-in novels in the 80s, has a story whose libertarian protagonists say things about Lincoln and FDR that are so offensive that I don’t want to believe that these are Smith’s own sentiments - for one thing, one would think that libertarians might, possibly, oppose slavery - but I pretty much do. Retroactive sadness for my like of the Lando books! Jane Lindskold has a sort of perplexing fantasy about the feng shui of the District. Joe Haldeman adds a dystopian view of what a real civil insurrection might look like in an age of high technology and secret prisons for threats to the state - it would be a good piece to analyze in tracking the history of Haldeman’s various views of the future. James Alan Gardner’s story about selling off pieces of DC, and finding it hard to do so without outrageous lies, is less than his best. Overall, not a great collection. Other authors: Steven Sawicki, Jack McDevitt, Brenda W. Clough, Nancy Jane Moore, Thomas Harlan, Edward M. Lerner, Travis Taylor, B.A. Chepaitis, Sean McMullen, and Allen M. Steele.
Peter David, Battlestar Galactica: Sagittarius is Bleeding: Set during the second half of Season 2, this tie-in novel begins annoyingly, with the kind of recaps precisely unneeded by anyone who’d pick up a BSG novel. Fortunately, David gets beyond that with the plot - Roslin is having disturbing dreams portending disaster, dreams that spill over into her waking life, but she’s not taking the chamalla root any more, and she begins to suspect that she may have a dangerous connection to Sharon’s baby. Meanwhile, Boxey is back, getting kicked off the Galactica and taking up with a Sagittaron religious minority that, through a twist of fate, is now substantially less of a minority than it used to be, and wishes to have more political power accordingly. David does a lot more with Boxey than most tie-ins are allowed, which is most of what makes the story interesting; I don’t know if we’ll be seeing him again on the show, but the result is either spoilery or already noncanonical.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars: This is the story of the first few decades of the human colonization of Mars, full of landscape (of course) and debates over the proper treatment thereof (ditto). I’ve read criticism that Robinson treats non-American ethnic groups like monolithic blocs - the Swiss and various Arab groups figure in the plot, but don’t provide any major characters. Certainly some of Robinson’s characters do think of groups that way, but I’m not sure Robinson does - some of the main American characters also think of Russians as having a particular national character, but two other main characters are Russian, and they (a) would disagree on the description and (b) are very different people, so I’ll withhold judgment on that point. Anyway, you don’t come to a KSR novel for characters, you come for talking heads with political and environmental positions moving through landscape, and this is exactly what you get, complete with revolution and world-whomping terraforming.
Joe Haldeman, Worlds: This makes a good contrast with Red Mars -- it’s the story of Maureen O’Hara, a girl from one of the space colonies populating the solar system in the late 21st century who comes to study in New York and gets caught up in the political convulsions of the day. Haldeman focuses on character as revealed and formed by circumstance, rather than using characters to investigate questions of political theory. Though the particular forms of his speculations no longer seem as likely as they did in 1981 - remember, there was such a thing as the Soviet Union then -- his concerns with how violence affects the individual and how individuals face apparently overwhelming historical tides keep the book readable.
Future Washington, ed. Ernest Lilley. SF stories about future DC - how could I resist? Well, I should have, and not only because it turns out that Z. bought a copy too. The first chapter of KSR’s Fifty Degrees Below is in here, with individuals surviving in Rock Creek Park under the pressure of climate change. Cory Doctorow contributes a polemic against intellectual property that even I don’t buy. L. Neil Smith, who wrote the Lando Calrissian tie-in novels in the 80s, has a story whose libertarian protagonists say things about Lincoln and FDR that are so offensive that I don’t want to believe that these are Smith’s own sentiments - for one thing, one would think that libertarians might, possibly, oppose slavery - but I pretty much do. Retroactive sadness for my like of the Lando books! Jane Lindskold has a sort of perplexing fantasy about the feng shui of the District. Joe Haldeman adds a dystopian view of what a real civil insurrection might look like in an age of high technology and secret prisons for threats to the state - it would be a good piece to analyze in tracking the history of Haldeman’s various views of the future. James Alan Gardner’s story about selling off pieces of DC, and finding it hard to do so without outrageous lies, is less than his best. Overall, not a great collection. Other authors: Steven Sawicki, Jack McDevitt, Brenda W. Clough, Nancy Jane Moore, Thomas Harlan, Edward M. Lerner, Travis Taylor, B.A. Chepaitis, Sean McMullen, and Allen M. Steele.