I read the first half of this on the private jet flight to and from Yuma.  Private jets are much more romantic in description than in practice.  Think tube of toilet paper.  Think hamster habi-trail.  Think sucky air conditioning in muggy 109 degree Yuma.  Good thing I had a good book.

This one is stuffed with tight plotting and gobs of delicious science fiction, plus a sixty year old genetic-designer woman named Lilo, plus a passel of  “death squad” goons, both male and female versions, all named Vaffa.  The Hotline is a stream of technical information that has flowed for 400 years, from an alien race.  It was a creative and frightening story up until the end, which was disappointing because the ending made no sense and was not satisfying in any way. 

Of course, I know endings are hard to write, and this was Mr. Varley’s first publication...

Background both grounds and deepens a story.  I know that seems like a very obvious lesson, but this story elucidated it in two remarkable ways.  First, Vaffa started off as a goon, but the revealing of what makes a “death squad goon” tick was fascinating, and actually created a sympathetic character.  Second, because the explanation of The Invaders – aliens who kicked humans off all arable planets – was completely lacking despite being pivotal to the plot on several levels, it was hard to get involved in that portion of the story.

There are no “U’s” on my list, since John Updike’s Toward the End of Time failed the “I must like you in twenty pages” rule.  Just too thematically f–king precious, in the wise words of Joe Haldeman.  And in twenty pages, no science fiction other than setting it in 2020.  But I loved the picture of the author on the back page, taken by his wife.  I need to keep that, if not the book.

Van Vogt has written a lot, and other books are touted as his best, but I chose this one because I loved the title.  As a biology major, every class I took started with a recap of Charles Darwin’s fateful voyage on The Beagle.  As the classes progressed, I got the feeling the teachers were bored with the introduction, and added increasing amounts of Darwinian trivia.   His wife was a Wedgewood heiress.  That’s one I remember. 

It seemed a worthy vessel to take into space.  I’m not the only one who thought that, either.  Did you ever wonder where Star Trek got its officers, decks, communicators, shields, and star dates from?  Did you ever wonder where the idea of the monstrous little alien eating its way through its host came from in Alien?  This book! 

That being said, not much more is offered than very cool ideas.  The stories, writing, and characterizations are boring, and sometimes painful.  In self-defense, I skimmed the last part of the book, a compilation of five original Space Beagle stories written between 1939 and 1943.

Clever ideas will hold their own over time, but good writing would be an added bonus.

What would you do if you accidentally killed your boss’s kid?

Never mind that this Irish author’s book suffers from “White Room Syndrome” or that none of the characters were sympathetic for me.  This book is a lesson in roller coaster plotting, in action and reaction, and “setting up the spike” for the next chapter.  For example, in the first seven chapters:

Ch 1: A flickership commander accidentally kills boss’s kid, and his boss is president of all people.  He hides the dead child and runs away.

Ch 2: Knowing he and his family are in danger, he runs home.  Just as he gets them to his flickership, his boss discovers her son’s death and demands the commander’s head.

Ch.3: The commander and his family board the flickership and flee.  They and the crew realize there is no safe world to run to. 

Ch. 4: They travel as fast as they can for months, hoping to find a theoretical planet.  They discover a “spaceship” that is millions of miles wide.

Ch. 5: They test the impervious surface and travel around it.  They find a fleet of three thousand ships gathered together.

Ch. 6: The ships are abandoned.  They hover over a gigantic hole in the spaceship, which the commander enters.

Ch. 7: The “ship” is a hollow world – Orbitsville – filled with empty, grassy landscape, a sun, and breathable atmosphere.  The Commander realizes his find will make him too famous to kill, and sends a message home.               

So, there.  Very well done.  A great plot is like a great ice-skating routine.  There is always motion, always something happening that is interesting or exciting or nerve-wracking, and each event flows into the next.  

Daleks, Cylons, the Terminator, the Borg and their immense cube, the machines of the Matrix, and the Death Star most likely all owe their existence to this book.  That being said, this collection of stories about Berserkers, a fleet of ancient moon-sized machines predisposed to destroying every “life-unit” in their path often feels slight, if not preposterous.  I did not read the last two of the twelve stories. 

Fred Saberhagen can surely write.  The introductions to each story, written by pacifistic alien observers, is written with an “alien” syntax, and each story changes timbre slightly, to reflect the voice of differing protagonists. Every once in a while, there is a truly thoughtful line: When I remember the truth, it will be terrible.  Still, when the Berserker inadvertently cures a man’s cancer was my only favorite story.  Saberhagen wrote the first story in 1963, and had made a franchise of novels and stories that exists to this day.  I’ll pass.

Writers need to write valuable stories.  Even if they are silly, stories need to be of value to the reader.  Remember what Michael Swanwick, Kelly Link, and Holly Black all said?  “Your story is about the most important day of the character.”  Don’t write slight stories.

Okay.  I couldn’t resist.  My books are a little out of order here, but my last “P” had not arrived, so I have an opportunity here to read three “Mars” books in a row!  Who could resist such synchronicity?  So, here it is.

First thing: Kim is a guy, not a girl.  Misunderstanding there, but hey, Chris made the same mistake, so I don’t feel so bad.  He lives in Davis.  Second.  Robinson has a case of Dune-itis.  This book is almost six hundred pages long, and continues for another two installments.  I found it very interesting that consistently, the last two lines of each chapter were weak and not as satisfying as they could have been.  Third, and perhaps most importantly, the author has an almost eidetic vision of his environment that makes this read like nonfiction: one does not doubt for a moment the things he describes.  You get the feeling he’s visited this place and is only describing what he saw.  That is very cool. Also, this is one of the few utopic books I have read – well, that is until they start popping bubble cities and flooding everything – and it works really well here.  And it makes perfect, pleasing sense that the cities are named Burroughs and Bradbury, after the writers who inspired us to look up.

The weak part of the book are the characters and their internal stories.  This may have been intentional: the paltry lives of human beings in comparison to the scope of a planet are small.  But the love triangle in the first third is both unbelievable and annoying; the mystery in the middle is musty; the last third, a tragic revolution, was difficult to get through and I ended up skimming a lot of it and probably not understanding as much as I should have.  In the first half, I thought, “Gosh, I like reading this guy, I have to read everything he’s written.”  In the second half, it became, “No.  Maybe not.  We’ll see.”

The lesson is well illustrated here, and better than in any other book I’ve read.  Whether through exhaustive research or exhaustive imagination, know your landscape and science backwards and forwards, so you aren’t just telling a story, you are in it.  That way, your readers will be, too.

 

I had two choices for Pohl, Man Plus and The Space Merchants, with C.M. Kornbluth.  I started with The Space Merchants because the reviews on Amazon.com were more enthusiastic, but dropped it within a few pages for Man Plus.  After reading 1984, the tone of that joint-authored book was, well, a little too smarmy and “my-look-how-naughty-and-dystopic-we-are!”  Maybe I’ll get to it another time.  I did however enjoy Man Plus, whose ending was much more engaging then the beginning.    

                                                                                      

Because of my traumatic experience with Mission of Gravity, I have not read much hard science fiction for this list.  Nor have I read any stories about Mars, which is another tragedy, since it was one of my very favorite topics as a kid.  That will change, fortunately.  The science here gets very creative and enjoyable: a man is made into a cyborg to make him more adaptable for life on Mars.  Roger Torraway’s backup computer makes him a perfect musician, athlete, and truthsayer. This story would have been a perfect pre-quel for The Terminator.  The pacing shoots along like a Crichton or Cook best-seller, and I can forgive this author his 70's preoccupation was the cyborg losing his “man-parts.”  

 

The lesson here is clear.  Science should be imaginative and entertaining. 

The weak shall inherit the galaxy.  And London (renamed Carter’s Snort) will be destroyed.

Well, this book is a first: StarWarsian space opera written before Star Wars, in Dickensian sensibility, and perfectly summed up by the Anarchist characters in this story, who fought their space wars as dandies, in alien ships with names likes Les Fleurs du Mal  and Atalanta in Calydon.  For the first half of this book, this tact doesn’t work well.  The flourished language and poetic descriptions get tangled in the feet of the action, coming off as somewhat psychedelic and unfortunately annoying, but by the middle of the book, they match strides and start to learn to run together.  By the end, some of the analogies and metaphors grow a little too cloying – perhaps trying too hard to be Ballardesque – however, there were other moments that deserve little monuments of their own in the Hall of Writing Greatness.

As I started reading this, I though to myself: this guy would be better as a fantasy writer.  When I went onto the internet, I saw that this was one of his first books, and as his career stretched out, yes, he did indeed go on to write fantasy.  One review said that if he had died young, The Centauri Device would have shown him to be a writer with a great future, instead of this just being one book in his talented canon.  I’ll have to add him to my fantasy list, I think.

I knew I was going to be in for a ride when I saw the quote that opened this book.  Mr. Harrison quoted from John Milton, but not from Paradise Lost.  It was from another work – Comus.  This told me “I’m a real writer, damn it, and I know what real literature is.  Watch out.”

Harrison makes good on the promise of his opening quote.  With beautiful language, The Centauri Device delivers that stunning literature: “Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial literals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition.  He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in.  From that first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more: and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize and moralize the grasping hand.”

“His dreams, those prices comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling around in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other.  Politics, religion, ideology – desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsiblity for his own actions: abdications.  His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest: but he’s always trying to hide the one behind the other.”

Is this point of view from the arcane Comus?  As an aside on the arcane, there are a zillion book reviews and lists of good books on Amazon, which I have used to guide and inform writing my list.  One reviewer has driven me into fits of Insane Jealousy because he gave his credentials to review fantasy only as “Cellar Door,” an Extremely Arcane Reference to J.R.R. Tolkein’s comment that “Cellar Door is one of English’s most beautiful sounds” and in fact saying, in two words, that this reviewer knows and believes in the beauty of language.  I am so jealous, I can’t stand it – both of Cellar Door and the quote from Comus.

And as beautiful and poetic as the metaphors of this book are, the real lessons of this book are in the heightening risks the protagonist takes until the end of the story.  Each chapter grows more and more perilous for him, and the stakes grow higher and higher.  Oh, also arcane literature references are a must.  Don’t ask me why.  But they are so cool, I just can’t stand it.

I was worried about reading this book. It was just over five hundred pages long, and it was about a war between two races, the Braxi and the Azeans.  I like war sci fi about as much as I like hard sci fi.

But hey, this wasn’t a book on war. It wasn’t hard sci fi.  Heck.  It wasn’t even written by a man.  “C” stands for Celia. That was a surprise, when I looked up the website – the male characters are more endearing in this story than the female.  And I loved this book so much, I wrote the author a thank you letter before I even finished the dang thing.  Now, I have to read her other works.

This was a sexy, intriguing story whose parts overlapped each other like the shingles on the roof of a really, really cool mansion.  Each portion moved, things happened, and the barbaric and arrogant Braxi were
the obvious superstars of this story. The plot twists and deviosity of it all was great fun. It was obviously influenced by Dune, but who among us hasn’t been?  I’m sure I will read many other books on this list that will show that tutelage. 
  
This story was my third and the best in a row of books on psychic ability – For Love of Mother Not and
Mefisto in Onyx – and not including the debonairThe Demolished Man or the insufferable Wild Seed.  Psychic phenomena are a common theme in science fiction, eh, although there is no suitable scientific explanation
for it in any of these books. I am glad that in my A Friend in the Dark  I am not going the psychic route and
there is a scientific explanation. It will make it stand out on its own.


Even better, In Conquest Born is not a perfect book.  That pleases me, because it’s proving my reading maxim: good doesn’t mean perfect. It means there is room for the rest of us to add to the collection.  As
Arwen had pointed out, this author’s language isn’t always spot on, and I never liked, related, or “got” Anzha. The last few hundred pages I thought were going to end in a completely lubricious liaison, which I dreaded, but thankfully, didn’t happen.   And the names sounded made up, and not like they followed any cultural system. (I’ll have to watch that in A Friend in the Dark).  Case in point, naming a gladiator Laun Set. 

Lawn Set?  Really? Do you  need a tarp to cover him in winter?  Never mind.

C.S. Friedman gives – aside from having a kickass cool race of beautiful warriors to play with  – each chapter a set up so it almost stands as its own story, with devilishly cool intrigue and plot twists within each. Plot twists! Go! Don’t wait until the end: do them all the time! That’s the lesson for writers.

As the fantasy artist Nene Thomas pointed out, never show complete nudity. There is lots of sex in this book, sex is actually a theme for the book, but no pornography – there are not graphic descriptions – and it makes the story superior. There’s no need to dip into the well. Readers are imaginative enough!

This story also has a flaw I would like to be wise of in my own work. I am not fond of stories where, against the odds of trillions of people in the galaxy, two people who have a specific background that stretches back
zillions of years, find each other. That coincidence just doesn’t work for me. However, it does not keep this from being a great story. 

London, and the rest of the world goes by the wayside as several centuries churn over, and William Mandella is enlisted in an army that goes to war forever. Haldeman is a deft and wistful writer in the John Christopher and Roger Zelazny style that I lump myself into.  

So, even though this was war scifi – which I traditionally loathe – I enjoyed it.  This book had a deservedly happy ending that I was relieved to get to, and rewarded my suspicions as I read. Scientifically, it is very savvy. Given the relativity of time and space travel at times, your enemies can be from your future, or you can be from theirs.

I looked up the author’s website. He teaches science fiction writing at MIT.  And in his book, which was
written in 1974, the love interest of William Mandella has the same name as his wife.  That is totally cool.  I also think Orson Scott Card borrowed from this book liberally for Ender’s Game. 
 
Another thing that was very interesting about this book is that there were blocks and blocks of dialogue (something I have never found a reason to do,) as well as blocks and blocks of summary that worked really well.  Usually, those things suck. Why did his work?  Maybe because this story was about being far removed from things, and the writing reflected that?  Maybe because it was filled with lots of science?  I don’t know. So, I asked him.  
 
He said: Nye, I guess the complete explanation is not very helpful: I write a book that I would enjoy reading. I do like books with "lore" in them, whether they're sf or not.  
 
My niece, who is just starting to write sf, asked me a few months ago how to get around the problem of "infodumps" -- big blocks of information that the reader needs in order to understand the novel. I told her that if the information is presented in an entertaining way, the readers won't notice that they're getting their vitamins. To scramble a metaphor.

Joe H.  (Thank you, Mr. Haldeman.)

Here’s the problem with deciding to read “The 100 Best Books of Science Fiction.”  How do you pick them?  Me, I made guidelines.  A few authors from each letter of the alphabet + the books they’ve had on “best lists” + my favorite books if there weren’t enough for each letter.

I know these guidelines will make me miss some really good and important books in the realm of science fiction.  Honestly, as I’ve begun reading, I have been tempted to read several works of a single author.  But I’ve realized that reading these books is like taking a journey through a new country: you don’t have time to stop everywhere, see everything, and get to know everyone.

Brian Aldiss is a good example.  He’s 80 in 2005, he’s been writing since the forties, and there are at least six books of his that are considered seminal science fiction.  They are Non-Stop, Greybeard, and the Hellonica Trilogy.  Non-Stop is touted as the first real generation-ship story, and Hellonica was recommended as better than Dune. 

Better than Dune?

I chose Non-Stop.  Generation star-ships are standard fodder for science fiction, and this was a formative story for the genre.  That makes it important.  My other top choice is a trilogy, and there are a lot more books to read on this year’s list.  I will visit Hellonica on my next reading journey, I think.

After reading Non-Stop on a whirlwind honeymoon to England, Wales, and Paris, I have this to say: it’s my favorite, so far.  Wow.  It has what the others had – concepts, bringing science forward and making it real, wonderful set-ups and spikes – and more.  It has world-building (or in this case, ship-building) that informs and affects every aspect of the story, and is so integral to the story that it provides cohesive glue for everything that happens.  This lent directly to what I loved best about this story: as the story went on, the plot twists and revelations came faster and faster.  But Aldiss didn’t tap out his source, he ended the book on a new cliff-hanger, a new “what-if,” and it was perfect.  It’s a really fabulous technique that I would love to emulate, because it solves the “weak ending” problems that I and so many others have.

Aldiss’s writing demonstrates that knowing the intimate mechanics of your written world can allow it to become an overarching character in your story.  It makes it easier to write mystery, plot twists, and surprise elements that are not contrived.  Pacing can make a good story great.  In this story, the pace continuously picks up, and toward the end, becomes a dead out race.  It is brilliance to suggest the next leg of the journey, too, and then just end the story there.