Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death
General reading, possibly the last such I shall comment on before buckling down to the Hugos... and starting off with Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, a selection of the best short fiction of James Tiptree Jr.
Like the collections I read a while back, of J. G. Ballard and Leena Krohn, this is one I probably shouldn't have binge-read. Tiptree writes with positively vicious effectiveness on central themes of the human psyche - love, and sex, and death, all three of which intertwine in these stories (notably so, in the short story whose title I've pinched for this review). The thing is, collecting so many of the good ones together like this gives the reader time to get used to the style, and even to anticipate the effects. She (we do all know "Tiptree" was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, right? Just checking) makes the reader work for the meanings of her stories, often starting in media res with a potentially baffling situation that unwinds, comes into focus, and makes sense as the story progresses to a fateful conclusion. Almost invariably, a tragic one - Tiptree deals in tragedies, and does them uncomfortably well. The safe bet is usually that the protagonist will suffer an ironic death by the end of the story, and if they're very lucky, they won't take the whole of the human species with them. (There are, to be fair, exceptions. "The Women Men Don't See" has no deaths, which is a rarity; "And I Awoke to Find Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" only forecasts the eventual demise of humanity; the last surviving males in "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" are permitted to die in captivity off-camera.... That's all I can think of, offhand.)
So... it's not cheerful reading. It is powerful, haunting, and unnerving - and that's why I probably should have taken it slower. Tiptree had a unique talent for tragedy, and for empathy; she gets you under the skin of her characters, then makes you watch as it is slowly peeled off. It's tough, effective, and uncompromising writing; it makes the reader uncomfortable in all the right ways.
On to a tale of alien invasion featuring corruption, betrayal, and the occasional nuclear detonation... so, something much more cheerful, then: Chains of Command, the fourth installment in Marko Kloos's "Frontlines" series. This amiable piece of milSF came to everyone's attention last year, when Kloos turned down a slate-tainted Hugo nomination for book 2, Lines of Departure (thereby letting the eventual winner, The Three-Body Problem, get its rightful place on the ballot.) I put up a review of Lines of Departure at the time, and if I weren't dead lazy, I'd link it here. (Oh, all right, then: http://sjwright.livejournal.com/113175.html)
Anyway. Since that time, things have gone from bad to worse, as the nigh-invincible alien "Lankies" have reached the solar system and are currently Lanky-forming the previously terraformed planet Mars (much to the discomfiture of the surviving colonists there) and are sending probing missions at Earth itself. The government of the North American Commonwealth (whose peculiar invisibility I commented on, as something of a flaw in the world-building) are now actually absent, having responded to the ongoing crisis by grabbing a bunch of spaceships and sodding off for parts unknown, leaving the bulk of the population facing eventual extermination at the hands of the Lankies. Fortunately, the bulk of the population, as represented by series protagonist Andrew Grayson, have declined to be exterminated, and - under-resourced and quarrelsome as they are - have started to put together effective defences against the Lankies, and are even planning a full-on counter-attack. The shortage of resources is telling, though. Grayson is training up new soldiers when a somewhat shady military acquaintance comes to him with a mission he can't turn down; the absconding NAC government took a whole lot of useful resources with them when they fled, and now military intelligence knows where they went, and is organizing a strike team to go get all that stuff back....
As I said: amiable milSF. Andrew Grayson is a suitably competent military protagonist, while also having enough depth to his character to, for example, worry about the overall role of the military and its interaction with society - there are nuances here, even though the overall situation doesn't leave much room for nuance (the Lankies are an uncommunicative bunch, more a force of nature than a living antagonist, while the NAC government deserters are black-hearted villains of the deepest dye and are treated as such by the story). Kloos continues to write fluently and well - if this one seems to move a little slower than its predecessors, that's mostly because it's gradually ramping up towards an absolutely rip-roaring final action sequence. I'm still a bit worried about the world-building, though. (They have artificial gravity. Generated artificial gravity, they don't spin their spaceships or anything. That is a game-changer in physics terms, but they don't do anything with it. I can think of useful military applications for a gravity generator, why can't the NAC?) (Also, Marko Kloos still appears not to have read Ken Burnside's essay, also made famous in the brouhaha last year. Much is made of the active polychromatic skins of his stealth spaceships, which render them practically invisible to the naked eye against the blackness of space... nothing is made of the black-body radiation from those stealth spaceships, which will show them up like a Mardi Gras float in the frequency ranges where enemies should actually be looking.) (I appear to be in brackets again. How odd.)
Never mind. It's still good quality entertainment, and a useful chaser after the tragedies of the Tiptree collection. I wonder, though, if Marko Kloos has plans to write anything a little more challenging than these (as he himself put it) "space kablooie" novels? I think he could do it; he's got the ability. I'd be inclined to read it if he did, whatever it might be.
That's it for this entry. Next up will probably be Hugo-related reading, most likely the Retro Hugos - I've already read a lot of that stuff, after all, and it looks like the Retros are going to be more fun than the real thing, this year, by some orders of magnitude.
Like the collections I read a while back, of J. G. Ballard and Leena Krohn, this is one I probably shouldn't have binge-read. Tiptree writes with positively vicious effectiveness on central themes of the human psyche - love, and sex, and death, all three of which intertwine in these stories (notably so, in the short story whose title I've pinched for this review). The thing is, collecting so many of the good ones together like this gives the reader time to get used to the style, and even to anticipate the effects. She (we do all know "Tiptree" was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, right? Just checking) makes the reader work for the meanings of her stories, often starting in media res with a potentially baffling situation that unwinds, comes into focus, and makes sense as the story progresses to a fateful conclusion. Almost invariably, a tragic one - Tiptree deals in tragedies, and does them uncomfortably well. The safe bet is usually that the protagonist will suffer an ironic death by the end of the story, and if they're very lucky, they won't take the whole of the human species with them. (There are, to be fair, exceptions. "The Women Men Don't See" has no deaths, which is a rarity; "And I Awoke to Find Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" only forecasts the eventual demise of humanity; the last surviving males in "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" are permitted to die in captivity off-camera.... That's all I can think of, offhand.)
So... it's not cheerful reading. It is powerful, haunting, and unnerving - and that's why I probably should have taken it slower. Tiptree had a unique talent for tragedy, and for empathy; she gets you under the skin of her characters, then makes you watch as it is slowly peeled off. It's tough, effective, and uncompromising writing; it makes the reader uncomfortable in all the right ways.
On to a tale of alien invasion featuring corruption, betrayal, and the occasional nuclear detonation... so, something much more cheerful, then: Chains of Command, the fourth installment in Marko Kloos's "Frontlines" series. This amiable piece of milSF came to everyone's attention last year, when Kloos turned down a slate-tainted Hugo nomination for book 2, Lines of Departure (thereby letting the eventual winner, The Three-Body Problem, get its rightful place on the ballot.) I put up a review of Lines of Departure at the time, and if I weren't dead lazy, I'd link it here. (Oh, all right, then: http://sjwright.livejournal.com/113175.html)
Anyway. Since that time, things have gone from bad to worse, as the nigh-invincible alien "Lankies" have reached the solar system and are currently Lanky-forming the previously terraformed planet Mars (much to the discomfiture of the surviving colonists there) and are sending probing missions at Earth itself. The government of the North American Commonwealth (whose peculiar invisibility I commented on, as something of a flaw in the world-building) are now actually absent, having responded to the ongoing crisis by grabbing a bunch of spaceships and sodding off for parts unknown, leaving the bulk of the population facing eventual extermination at the hands of the Lankies. Fortunately, the bulk of the population, as represented by series protagonist Andrew Grayson, have declined to be exterminated, and - under-resourced and quarrelsome as they are - have started to put together effective defences against the Lankies, and are even planning a full-on counter-attack. The shortage of resources is telling, though. Grayson is training up new soldiers when a somewhat shady military acquaintance comes to him with a mission he can't turn down; the absconding NAC government took a whole lot of useful resources with them when they fled, and now military intelligence knows where they went, and is organizing a strike team to go get all that stuff back....
As I said: amiable milSF. Andrew Grayson is a suitably competent military protagonist, while also having enough depth to his character to, for example, worry about the overall role of the military and its interaction with society - there are nuances here, even though the overall situation doesn't leave much room for nuance (the Lankies are an uncommunicative bunch, more a force of nature than a living antagonist, while the NAC government deserters are black-hearted villains of the deepest dye and are treated as such by the story). Kloos continues to write fluently and well - if this one seems to move a little slower than its predecessors, that's mostly because it's gradually ramping up towards an absolutely rip-roaring final action sequence. I'm still a bit worried about the world-building, though. (They have artificial gravity. Generated artificial gravity, they don't spin their spaceships or anything. That is a game-changer in physics terms, but they don't do anything with it. I can think of useful military applications for a gravity generator, why can't the NAC?) (Also, Marko Kloos still appears not to have read Ken Burnside's essay, also made famous in the brouhaha last year. Much is made of the active polychromatic skins of his stealth spaceships, which render them practically invisible to the naked eye against the blackness of space... nothing is made of the black-body radiation from those stealth spaceships, which will show them up like a Mardi Gras float in the frequency ranges where enemies should actually be looking.) (I appear to be in brackets again. How odd.)
Never mind. It's still good quality entertainment, and a useful chaser after the tragedies of the Tiptree collection. I wonder, though, if Marko Kloos has plans to write anything a little more challenging than these (as he himself put it) "space kablooie" novels? I think he could do it; he's got the ability. I'd be inclined to read it if he did, whatever it might be.
That's it for this entry. Next up will probably be Hugo-related reading, most likely the Retro Hugos - I've already read a lot of that stuff, after all, and it looks like the Retros are going to be more fun than the real thing, this year, by some orders of magnitude.