I really enjoyed The Forever War when I read it in 2010; the version which I read had a fantastic cover which is the collection, Peace and War, which includes the other Haldeman books on the same theme, Forever Peace, a companion novel, and Forever Free, the sequel which I describe (accurately) later in this diary as “batshit fucking loco”. I’ve put together several entries from my diary about the novel, with the dates attached.
24th May 2010
In reading The Forever War I have become much, much more interested in proper sci-fi. The book, thus far, is brilliant, conveying a proper sense of isolation, of distance, and of the difficulty involved in long distance space travel, and especially war. There’s a lack of distinct otherness to the alien life-forms and world – although the cold, empty planet on which the Privates train is certainly well feeling. It’s mostly that the Taurons, as bi-pedal two-armed upright-walking creatures are just a bit too close to human for me. Insofar as interstellar travel is concerned this is certainly the best sci-fi I have ever read.
But I suspect that my interest grows for other reasons, too. A Scanner Darkly is probably the best Philip K. Dick book I’ve read [this remains true], and I have been reading a lot of Interzone too. But I am starting to believe that while fantasy can and perhaps should [be able to] get away with principally being a romp (as Retribution Falls and The Lies of Locke Lamora are) sci-fi needs to be more than that. The Forever War is a commentary on the Vietnam war (and by extension all wars) by a veteran; A Scanner Darkly by a veteran of the war on drugs, showing that the side on which he fought was the wrong one.
26th May 2010
Some initial thoughts upon finishing The Forever War: it is good, very good. One of the best books that I have read so far this year, and certainly the best that isn’t by Ursula Le Guin [which were The Earthsea Cycle, in its entirety by this point I think]. I’m not too certain about its attitude to homosexuality, but given the contexts of a) the time it was written and b) its use in the book [as an alienating factor for the veterans] I think that I can understand it. I’m not certain that it’s meant to be condemnatory, rather than just alienating.
I like the ending, even [obviously, edited for spoilers]. I think that works, as does most of the rest of it, especially the [spoilers deleted]. It was a satisfying conclusion.
The warfare, the technology, the extraterrestrial setting – I liked all of that. The sense of distance, isolation, and loneliness I thought were fantastic. My internal imagery was usually better [in my opinion] than, say, the comic book, and though Alien is probably the closest film adaptation and despite my love of Blade Runner, I’m not certain that even Ridley Scott should bring this to the screen. [As he was rumoured to be doing at the time; this was before Prometheus, so I didn't complain about this film, despite the opportunity to do so. It's rubbish!]
My criticism, ironically, is mostly to do with (so far as I can tell) the novella “You Can Never Go Back”, which wasn’t in the original publication of the book because it was too dark and negative. If it is the earthly part of Lieutenant Mandella the it’s mostly because of the treatment of homosexuality, but I wasn’t so keen. It did, however, provide the right sort of sense of isolation that I thought was necessary for the story. [The soldiers go home to a world that has moved beyond them and changed, which is now unrecognisable - they can't stay, and re-enlist in the army, as I recall.]
Other than that, there were some minor inconsistencies which, frankly, I’m willing to ignore. Generally, I really liked it, and I’m looking forward to reading some more classic sci-fi this year.
I’ve been meaning for years to use entries from my old diary (23rd May 2010-2nd July 2012) as the inspiration for blog entries. Now that I have some distance between then and now, and as many of my more recent entries are based more firmly on notes from my current diary, I feel more able to do this. The plan is to copy out slightly edited versions of the entries themselves, perhaps with annotations [in square brackets]. In some cases (such as the entry on Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino) I may re-read the books in question and add new comments; in others (such as the entries on The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin) I will have to check that there isn’t already information on this blog which matches them. I guess I will try to make these updates regular, once or twice a week, rather than just whenever I can be bothered with them. It might help the blog keep going, and prevent further four-month gaps in updates.
The entry with which I am going to begin is from 23rd May 2010.
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding was alright. As good as I really expected it to be, not at the level of the best fantasy like the Earthsea cycle but it was a readable, Firefly-esq jaunt in a fantasy world. The problems which I have with it [are typical:] towards the end, especially when dealing with the character’s feelings, he over-indulges in telling rather than showing. I also wasn’t particularly impressed by his female characters – they were minimal, and exclusively introduced with sex in mind: Frey thinking about how useful it was that Jez was plain, the beauty of the female Century Knight, and the others being primarily Frey’s conquests in one form or another.
The other part is setting. Much of the geography of the world in Retribution Falls, besides some of the NSEW locations, is indistinct. I couldn’t figure out my way around the Ketty Jay, nor even precisely what it looked like. [I think my gist here is that the type of ship the Ketty Jay was - airship? Aeroplane? - was unclear, so there were no clues about how it should look apart from the cover.] Greater descriptions would have been nice, but there was also the chance to imagine it for yourself, which was quite good.
[I think the comparison of this novel to Firefly was over privleging, but I know what I mean. The idea was that there was a group of misfits, on the run, on a ship. You'd like them because they were roguish, although I don't remember them being funny. I have a lot more to say about this book in later entries concerning the rape of all the female characters; a theme of this diary was how many of the novels I read approached rape, as a vast number of fantasy novels seem to do. Perhaps also worthy of note is that this book has two sequels now, neither of which I have read or really intend to.]
His sole purpose was nothing more nor less than to prove that God was no longer necessary.
I thoroughly enjoyed this play, which coined the word “robot” for all subsequent SF authors. I don’t usually enjoy reading plays that much, and I have to say that I probably would have enjoyed seeing this more than I enjoyed reading it. Which is not, of course, to say that I did not enjoy reading it. But plays are not there to be read, unless you’re an actor (or director etc.).
The Robots are very different to what robots would become, although the cover of the Gollancz Masterworks version by Arthur Haas seems to have taken its inspiration from the Will Smith adaptation of Čapek-derider Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. Was that sentence too long? Is it too late to add an idle reference to the wonderful title of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that is “I, Robot . . . You, Jane”? Anyway. The Robots themselves are very different, organic rather than mechanical, but the themes of creator and created, of the soul, and of the relationship between class and mechanization were not new, nor would they end at this point. The story is said to have been described by Čapek himself as a modern version of the Jewish Golem legend (although a citation is needed on the wikipedia article), and Philip K. Dick is just one of the many later authors who would ask what ultimately will distinguish “artificial” life from biological.
“I don’t believe that rascal is a Robot at all any longer.”
“Doctor, has Radius a soul?”
“He’s got something nasty.”
The play’s importance is one thing, but what makes it any good? There is an interesting tension between the Robots and the men in charge of the factory; it is demonstrated that the Robots themselves have no concerns about the work they do, about their enslavement, despite the protest groups from those who have not encountered robots. Even as they overthrow their human masters the Robots continue to work – more efficiently, but without purpose – there will be no-one to benefit from their work. But work is what they do. I haven’t seen the film, but this prefigures in some ways what I understand about George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, where the zombies follow their former lives, wandering about the mall with no direction or intent. But I digress. The Robots have no purpose beyond work, but they are still threatening. It has been necessary to rid workers of their desires beyond work. But as soon as they are changed, they are a threat. And why would the Robots keep humans around, as soon as they realized that they did not need them?
You are not as strong as the Robots. You are not as skillful as the Robots. The Robots can do anything. You only give orders. You do nothing but talk.
My assumption is that Čapek was writing from the Left, although in post-Second World War Communist Czechoslovakia his work was said to be too bourgeois. His later work, in the 1930s before his premature death in 1938, was thoroughly anti-Nazi; if R.U.R. is anti-Nazi it is especially prescient as it was first performed in 1920. The presentation of the factory owners is clearly critical, despite Domin’s desire for a (human) utopia without work:
It was not an evil dream to shatter the servitude of labour – the dreadful and humiliating labour that men had to undergo. Work was too hard. Life was too hard. And to overcome that -
His dream can of course be criticised on a number of accounts – freedom from labour is not necessarily freedom from work; many who perform labour would not find it “dreadful” and “humiliating”, but he as a man who (presumably) has never worked in his life assumes that it must be so. He identifies the mistake as being the Universal nature of the Robots – split the Robots up, create National Robots, and they will not rise up. Divide and conquer, as was done with human labour across the glob, unable to organize itself through the communication barriers. But he is cut off in his explanation of his dream (above):
Was not what the two Rossums dreamed of. Old Rossum only thought of his God-less tricks and the young one of his millards. And that’s not what your R.U.R. shareholders dream of either. They dream of dividends, and their dividends are the ruin of mankind.
But the Robots are not beyond criticism. Radius wishes to rule over men – his end is not equality, it is dominance. They will continue to work – nothing but work – until the end. Radius is one of few individual Robots, one of few who fears for his life and has the sickness of a soul; the rest are a mass, identical, as far as having the same face. But they are an angry mass. They have the numbers – when they are armed and unified they become unstoppable. Whether this was intended as an approving Left-wing message or as a dire warning for the bourgeoisie, the message is clear – if those we oppress, the workers, unite against us, they are the many, we are the few – they will win.
The question of mechanization, of workers replaced by efficient “machines”, has always been and remains strong. Were the Luddites whose names have become synonymous with anti-technology wrong to oppose mechanization which increased production but potentially put people out of work? The Robots represent both these workers and their replacements, but these replacements are intelligent, and alive. And that makes them a threat.
2001, as I’m sure everyone has noticed, is long past. The future imagined by Clarke and Kubrick has not come to pass – there are no bases on the moon, humankind has not gone as far as Mars, let alone Jupiter or Saturn – but things which they can’t have imagined have occurred, such as mobile phones and tablets and female characters in SF novels. When you read slightly older SF, especially slightly older SF which insists on having a date in the title which a fair portion of its original audience will live to see, you have to accept that much of the narrative will seem dated. Can you imagine Siri doing any of the things Hal does? Of course not. Siri is nowhere near that competent. But then again . . .
Were it not for that date in the title, 2001 would not seem like an impossible future today. True, it would require a revival in the space programme which doesn’t seem to be particularly pending (when is the first manned flight to Mars planned?) but that is a minor point. Also, discoveries and knowledge of the solar system has grown exponentially since the publication of 2001 in 1968 and the Moon landings which followed. I expected this book to feel a lot more dated than it did. As it stands, there is very little in it which (to someone uneducated in astronomy and physics) couldn’t feature in a novel today. The book even features an e-reader, albeit only for newspapers, and not wireless; and is somewhat prescient about the response to such devices:
Despite all the electronic read-outs, there were times when good, old-fashioned printed material was the most convenient form of record.
And so, having established that the story is not hopelessly dated, on with its actual contents. 2001: A Space Odyssey claims to be about the human race’s place in the universe. As such, it begins with the origins of the human race as a tribe of ape-men on the verge of becoming sentient, definably human. From the beginning, it suggests, the human race was guided along the path which it takes, with evolutionary bounds encouraged by those who have passed them before us. Having seen one of these mysterious monoliths guide the apes towards humanity, we leap a few million years in time to twelve years ago, when (mild spoiler alert) another one of these monoliths is discovered on the Moon. Archaeology happens, and it is discovered that this object hasn’t seen light in millions of years – but it has just broadcast a signal deep into the solar system.
After this, much of that story is forgotten for the bulk of the book. We are treated to poetic exposition about the solar system as Bowman and Poole travel past Jupiter towards Saturn; the time, beauty, and also boredom involved in this is conveyed throughout the middle section. Eventually, of course, things start to go wrong. The next events are pretty famous, but still – spoilers. And it is far from the end. The adventure continues as the true meaning of the mission becomes clear – even if the true meaning of the novel never really does.
As far as I can tell, having not seen the film, the novel is a little less ambiguous and seemingly insane than the film. That doesn’t mean it is in any way obvious. Humanity is shown to be remote, insignificant – but potentially of enormous importance. The ambiguity of this ending is similar to that which Ridley Scott achieved in Blade Runner (although it is less obvious what is supposed to be ambiguous) and seems to be exactly what he was hoping to achieve in Prometheus, and failed miserably. There is a short essay at the beginning of this edition of 2001 titled “Back to 2001″, written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1989, in which he comments:
He [Kubrick] wanted to make a movie about Man’s place in the universe – a project likely to give a heart-attack to any studio head of the old school, or, for that matter, of the new one. It’s certainly difficult to imagine it being welcomed in Hollywood today.
This may have been true of the late 80s, but it is no longer true. Hollywood produced Prometheus, and showed that it may be willing, it was no longer able. I feel as if I have come across these two narratives the wrong way around, although Prometheus’ apparent lack of knowledge that these topics have been covered before does somewhat suggest that Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott haven’t seen or read 2001. I don’t wish to elevate 2001 too far by comparing it to something so completely inferior; it is an interesting meditation about how humanity’s exploration of the universe may change its very meaning. But because of the ambiguity, the answers really come from the reader, from their disposition. It is an aid to thought, not a place where the answers will be found.
I look forward to watching the film at some point. Perhaps I will have more to say then.
[EDIT] I forgot to say… it is IMPOSSIBLE to read this book without having this as your earworm for days afterwards:
On the planet Jeep there are only two options: change or die. A virus centuries ago wiped out all of the planet’s men and altered their women, who survive somehow reproducing despite the lack of males. Anthropologist Marghe Taishan is sent to the planet to find out the secrets of their society, and to test out a new vaccine which will allow Company to exploit the planet for its natural resources. But she soon finds that she is changing, and the women of Jeep are much more than they seem. A profound and moving novel, Ammonite stands in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Joanna Russ’ The Female Man as an evocative study of the role of gender in society, and what it means to be human.
This was not Earth; this was Jeep, a planet of alien species, a place where the human template of dual sexes had been torn to shreds and thrown away.
Or . . . that’s how it was sold to me. At least, that’s how it seems that it has been sold, ever since it’s publication in 1992. But it took me some time to fathom while reading and since finishing the novel why Jeep needed to have had its men eradicated. There are hints: Company cannot come to the planet (and exploit it) because they are men and the will not survive (although the virus kills about 20% of women, too); the virus represents the male in society, it is destructive and kills (this one does not hold up at all through the narrative of the book). What I have ultimately settled on is that Griffith is aiming so show that a society without men could work – it is imperfect, stone age in its technology, but it works. Having found a way to reproduce without men the human race goes on, and it is not that unfamiliar. But further speculation has made me think a little further: perhaps, perhaps, Griffith has taken a world like, say, Middle Earth (or perhaps more likely Gethen) where the default is male (the use of the male pronoun in Left Hand) and only when a character’s sex matters is that particular character female. Except that Griffith’s default is female – there are no men. And for most of the characters, it doesn’t really matter. What can’t a female character do that a male can?
In that last instance, I used the word “sex” carefully. Because I think that is, really, what Ammonite is about – the quote above from page 56 of the recent Gollancz Masterworks edition seems to reinforce that. The virus has wiped out everyone with a Y chromosome; it does not care about gender identification. This, is feel, is really the fault at the heart of Ammonite and The Female Man – having removed one of the sexes, rather than replaced the binary concept of gender as in The Left Hand of Darkness or, uh, reality, the situation becomes about biologically determined characteristics rather than culturally defined concepts.
But then again . . . Ammonite is sold, as I suggested above, on the basis that it has profound things to say about the sexes, and it won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for precisely that. But after about three chapters there is no real discussion of sex or gender. There are possibly three mentions of something male (although I can only remember two of those, off the top of my head). Non of the female colonists think about how they might miss men, whether male family members or the male member, even those dissatisfied with the way that things are going on Jeep. In fact, it is either implied or shown that several of them have engaged in same-sex relationships. To take a non-utopian approach, Griffith could be showing how easy it is to have a science fiction novel where lots of the characters are female (indeed, all but one of the speaking characters). Slightly more troubling for me is that she is showing that society could exist perfectly well without the male. And I actually find myself convinced.*
Beyond this major issue, Ammonite is a serviceable SF book. Occasionally suffers from telling-over-showing; we do not see the action from a varied enough perspective, and Griffith has far too much faith in the conviction of Marghe, the main character, which is not entirely warranted. There are, I feel, a few too many loose plot ends, threads started unnecessarily which disappear or are never resolved. I’m willing to let this slide as it was a first novel, although that seems a little patronising. The natives are not alien, and they work as humans who have learned to live on this planet, in these climates, with this virus, without men. The colonists seem to be coping well with those things too (except I really do feel they could have spared a thought for the last one). It is both enjoyable and food for thought, although not quite as much food as I was hoping.
* Since finishing the book I have listened to the In Our Time podcast on Modernist Utopias, which mentions that most utopias are reductive (something has to be taken away from society to make it perfect); through that I learned of Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, perhaps the first example of an SF story about a land occupied only by women (Amazons notwithstanding, of course); and discovered this page on Lesbian utopias on Wikipedia. Of course, Ammonite never uses the word lesbian (fair enough, none of them are from Lesbos) but there it is on that Wikipedia page.
Looking closely at this picture may tell you things about my life I don’t necessarily want you to know.
Is there anything more depressing than empty bookshelves? Yes. Many things, like war and the Conservative Party and other bad things. But empty bookshelves seem fairly depressing, and I am not entirely certain why. The books which we are removing from the Taylor Institution library tend to be those which have been entirely replaced by the internet, like bibliographies from other libraries which were out of date before the ink was dry (according to the antiquarian bookseller who is taking a lot of the books which we are getting rid of). And many of the empty shelves are the result of books being moved, not disposed of. So why do I look at an empty bookshelf and want to fill it? I believe this is something which I have come to think of as book fetishism.
The thing is that books like Fahrenheit 451 seem to value the book as an object. This is fair enough – certain books, like The Book of Kells or The Voynich Manuscript are beautiful objects, worthy of veneration. But these books are 1200 and 600 years old respectively. Is the average paperback – like my copy of Fahrenheit 451 – a work of beauty? Some of the covers which I will display later are certainly not beautiful, but they have brought delight by being objects rather than texts. This should not disparage the text. But if we are not to judge a book by its cover, then the eBook should be a wonderful thing which removes the problem of covers, and my girlfriend should stop being so worried about what might be chosen to represent her novel when it is sent to an artist. What book fetishism does is value the object over the function: we like books rather than liking reading.
I suppose my point is that getting rid of books shouldn’t necessarily be regarded as a bad thing simply because books are things of intrinsic value. There is a danger, if we devalue books, that reading loses value as well and people star to read rubbish or, worse, don’t read at all. But a book can lose its value if it is updated, replaced, or rendered unreadable; similarly it becomes of lower value if it is not read and no pleasure or purpose can be gained by reading it. Cheapening books, as much as censoring books, is a problem. But loosing a connection to the physical object should not be considered such a bad thing. A book can still be entertaining, funny, moving, risible, beautiful, lovable on an e-reader. They can still be valued, perhaps more for their content than for their covers.
On the subject of book covers…
This novel won the Hugo Award in 1965. Seriously. And yes, it does include sex with a humanoid cat thing.
I’m sure there’s a 100% valid, plot worthy reason why that woman’s clothes got torn in that precise way which isn’t objectifying or horribly sexist at all.
No need to illustrate this one – everyone knows what Gerard Sorme gets up to.
This book was actually shortlisted for an award by the Guardian, which suggests that it is probably actually quite good, maybe. But the title and cover don’t do it any favours, do they?
I thought this book sounded good and genuinely wanted to read it!
There’s one review of this on amazon.com, which complains that it likens Jesus to the old gods, and the reader felt this lessened Him. I studied Greek and Roman religions, including early Christianity, and I can tell you this: He is exactly the same se the old gods; his dad was one for Christ’s sake.
I ought to warn that this post will be a lot of pictures, and that some of them will contain ladies and some gentlemen not wearing very many clothes at all. Not real ladies and gentlemen, though, arty, book cover ladies and gentlemen. So that should be okay. You have been warned!
Over the past week I have been working in three separate libraries for about four separate reasons: the usual studying and shelving which I do in the Sackler, in addition to which I have been working as a part of the “weeding” team at the Taylor Institute/Modern Foreign Languages library. I have also been helping to catalogue and sort out the library of the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group, or “OUSFG” as it prefers to be known.* This also may undergo a kind of weeding. Or, as we have been calling it at OUSFG, a “cull”.
OUSFG cataloguing the library!
The difficulty of working in a library is that you discover, to your dismay, the complete and total non-existence of L-Space.** It transpires that, like museums, libraries actually never have enough space in them, being built for collections which are already too big and only ever expand. Therefore periodically the libraries must be “weeded”of books which take up space and are never used, of which there are duplicates, and on which the precious library space cannot be wasted.
Suddenly, your value system has to change. I have recently read Fahrenheit 451, although I haven’t mentioned it on here I don’t think. The value of the individual book there is outstanding, although really the value is placed on reading rather than the physical object. How valuable are the many volumes of bibliography which fill the corridors at the Taylor Institute now that we have an online catalogue? The dust on some of the volumes suggests that they may never have been used at all. Ray Bradbury was said to have hated the internet, calling it a distraction. But for an academic, having that much easy access to certain kinds of information, is refreshing, and frees up considerable amounts of time for other things, like research. Furthermore, scientific journals go out of date within years, if not months. So when libraries like the Taylor and the Sackler have journals going back to the mid-19th century on their open shelves, it does seem to be a little out of date.
With the OUSFG library the value judgements are different, and much more difficult. The part which we have been sorting and cataloguing is the “open stacks”, from which, theoretically, if you knew what was in there, you could request a book and get it fairly easily. The open shelves are where the library meetings take place every week (usually, if they’re available), while the closed stacks are hidden at the back of someone’s garage, and have not been seen in many years (at least as long as I’ve been an OUSFG member… which is slightly less than two years). Given this state, one must wonder whether these books are being valued as objects at all given that they are difficult to access, have no permanent home, and hardly ever get read.
This picture was taken after cataloguing and sorting about half of the open stacks.
There was a tiny cull last year, and when I say “cull” I mean some duplicates were donated to OXFAM. This also resulted in the creation of the open stacks. This year it looks likely to be bigger, if we can decide what we need to get rid of. The books are old, some are in terrible condition, many are works of which I have never heard. Several are classics. It includes an old Penguin classics version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which, being out of copyright, is freely available on Project Gutenberg and will probably go. But when we don’t know anything about some of these books, how can we judge them? By their covers?
Of course, it is usually terrible to judge a book by its cover, unless you’re six and your mother has bribed you or something. But I am sure I used to know a blog which would post terrible fantasy and science fiction covers call “Covers of Doom”, even if I can’t find it on the internet. I present here some of the most striking covers from the sorting of the OUSFG library. WARNING, some of them are terrible.
* As China Miéville is said to have said, we say it “as though it was some kind of word”.
** With reflection, I should have realised this when I worked in an OXFAM bookshop, which was also limited in space. But that is an afterthought.
What could be cooler: not only Samurai, but surfers, and robots! For some reason, also a bird wearing a hat.
What sums up New SF to you? Is it a naked woman floating about a green face plugged into a machine with maybe a rocket there too? If not, WHY not?!
This one just struck a chord because my girlfriend’s been away. I agree, it would be a TERRIBLE DYSTOPIA. I ask you, Ray Bradbury, what would be worse – a future without books or one without kissing?!
I’m sure, in the mid-sixties New Wave glow of LSD and excitement and everything, this would have been a sensible cover. In 2012 naked ghost-like lady with green-yellow boobs: less popular.
You don’t get titles more dramatic than this. It could be the last episode of House (which I haven’t seen, please no spoilers). FINAL DIAGNOSIS. No word on if treatment follows, or what.
Not a mind I would like to be trapped in, that’s for sure.
I don’t want the nearly naked people on the cover to put me off reading “The Golden Penis” sorry, “Sword”, but it doesn’t exactly scream quality literature. Plus I don’t think the gold nipple coverings are quite enough armour for the sort of combat that sword would actually be useful for.
. . . yeah. This exists.
The meat cleaver is what I go for every time there’s a floating, balding middle-aged demon in the foetal position on my chaise longue. Don’t normally bother with the cap, though.
- No judgement is being made about the quality of these books by their covers, of course! They could be brilliant. But… wow.
A couple of things have prompted this blog, which is about authors’ first novels. Primarily it is a combination of reading Endless by Matt Bone and the fact that my girlfriend’s first novel is currently being edited for release in January next year. But a second prompt came from the author Sam Sykes, whose work I have never read and whom I do not follow on twitter, but the publisher Gollancz re-tweeted this a few days ago:
Now, I don’t agree 100% with the sentiments expressed in these tweets. As Sykes himself confesses, he hadn’t found his voice by the time he was published. And there is a reason, for example, that I “publish” this blog rather than keeping a diary or something which would be private, rather than public. Even though only a few people look at it the response of the public, of people I don’t know, can generally be very interesting. Sometimes it can be offensive or rude, but those can hopefully be ignored. But some of the most constructive criticism you can get is from people who will be blunt, because they don’t know you. And in this way, you can improve.
The idea that a first novel should be very good is in some ways an anathema. After all, it is the curse of many bands that, after an exceptional first album, the second just cannot live up to the hype. Arcade Fire suffer from having an excellent and well-loved first album despite their later success and I firmly believe that by most other bands Neon Bible would be regarded as a classic and one of their best; for Arcade Fire it is sidelined, hidden away, simply because it could not live up to Funeral. Fortunately, The Suburbs was magnificent enough that it challenged the first album for greatness. A better position to be in, however, is that of a band like the White Stripes who, as far as I can tell because I wasn’t really paying attention at the time, had two fairly OK albums, and then two magnificent ones a bit later on. As Sykes argues, the first books often don’t have a voice. If you emerge with a voice fully formed, then all you will attract later is complaints when you try to change and develop it.
To apply this to novels, the first author who springs to my mind is, as ever, Ursula Le Guin. Her first novel, developed from short stories, was Rocannon’s World,a fairly good science fiction/fantasy novel which, as she would later comment herself, is not as good as what Gene Wolfe does with similar concepts. The ensuing trilogy, Planet of Exile and City ofIllusions is fine, but much of what is done with these books – the ethnographer on a strange planet in Rocannon’s World, the permafrost of Planet of Exile – is picked up again and developed in The Left Hand of Darkness, an undoubtably superior book. At around the same time she began the Earthsea series, and again we see improvement as the trilogy goes along, but personally I feel that the trilogy as a whole shows a lot more competence as a writer because she had grown more, learned by doing, and reached a better point in her skill to do what she wanted as an author. Should Rocannon’s World have remained unpublished? Of course not! Then the series may not have developed, and we would not have Left Hand nor The Dispossessed, and the world would be a more impoverished place.
A counter-argument perhaps emerges when a first book is phenomenally successful, or belongs in a series which becomes phenomenally successful and relies on reading every volume. I’m thinking of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. I don’t think I’m going to be expressing too controversial an opinion if I suggest that Stone is not the best of the Harry Potter books (it’s Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban) but it has to be good enough to fit with the standard of the rest of the series. And I would say it does, perhaps because in the latter part of the series the books become too long and perhaps were less successfully edited. But here I would suggest the problem is more Arcade Fire, and the series has to be considered as a whole rather than as individual parts. The “second novel”, therefore, is not Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets but The Casual Vacancy. Comments on the internet are already being bitter about the success of the well-loved by all ages Potter and the fact that Rowling can’t write anyway so it will be rubbish blah blah blah; these are people who will never be pleased. But even for those who devoured the Potter books as children, writing something different after such a long time poses difficulties, and it might be a lot easier (if not necessarily better, or more successful) were the first series not to have attracted the attention which I did, and if there were less pressure and fewer assumptions about how the book needs to be.
I think I will have some more thoughts on this topic in the future, when I have read King Rat, China Miéville’s first book, which is unlikely to be as good as The City and the City. As a concluding thought I would perhaps say this: when my literary intentions were greater, and I was reading about the publishing industry, I kept on being told that most authors have an unpublished first novel. Others, for example The Flood by Ian Rankin, are published but sink without a trace only to find a new lease of life when the author finds success elsewhere, such as in the phenomenal Rebus series. The first is not the most important. It is important, as a foot in the publishing door if nothing else. But, really, the follow-up is much more important. Showing that you have longevity, and can keep on going – that’s what you want in an author.
I started to write this blog immediately after I had written the previous Prometheus blog, which can be found here. That was some time ago. My life has kept me away from writing this blog and the film has faded into memory a little, now generally only refered to as a joke (saying “So that’s what Prometheus was about!” whenever someone says something profound, or stupid) or as a proverbially bad film. Furthermore, what I wanted to do with the blog changed after I read Film Critic Hulk’s very long analysis which I felt covered everything which needed to be said about why the film was bad, and what needed to be done with it.
After reading The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell I began to have some more profound thoughts about the questions prodded by Prometheus. One of my problems with The Sparrow was that the aliens did not feel to me to be suitably alien, as they engaged in what was basically a Capitalist system, and while there were a couple of fundamental differences the aliens were fairly similar to humans, with similar motivations and desires. One of the beautiful things about the Alien franchise was that the xenomorphs were so completely alien in so many ways. The lethal, perfect predator desired by The Company, evolved for survival. It did not appear to be intelligent in the way that we are, but it was smart and skilled. It adapted. In Prometheus we learned that, contrary to known facts about the evolutionary process, they shared the same creators as us, which were basically massive humans (even having the same DNA!).
In the Hainish Cycle/Ekumen books I find that Ursula Le Guin has a good excuse for the similarity all the species have to human beings: they are descended from the same ancestors, the Hain, who colonised the universe in a far distant past. Some, such as the Gethen, appear to have been the result of genetic engineering, while the Athsheans have evolved to be very different indeed. There differences are intended to reflect on aspects of Earth society and this works. I suppose that in The Sparrow they are intended to look very similar, but to turn out very, very different. In Alien, it seems to me, they were intended to be absolutely terrifying. In Prometheus they were designed to… what? To generate a question. To ask “what if we were made by another species?” But the answer is provided by the film: “Ah, but who made them?” It’s not actually an answer. It’s a deferral of the question. It’s like asking what a Lego structure is made from and answering “Lego”. The real answer is plastic, but it’s being deferred to sound clever, even though it isn’t.
With the xenomorphs ruled out the most alien aliens I know of are the Areikei/Hosts in China Miéville’s Embassytown. The Areikei are very different to the human beings whom they host but are changed by their contact with the outside world in a number of ways which make them more similar to humans, but they are still incredibly different in both biology and social structures. This is perhaps due to my ignorance with a lot of SF but they seem very alien in ways that I can’t see being easily topped. But what, then, is the point of creating an alien species? It is different in Embassytown, which explores the nature of language, to the use in Prometheus, which is closer to The Sparrow and A Case of Conscience by James Blish. These three narratives aim to ask questions of the place of human beings in the universe and in relation to god when there are other intelligent beings in the universe. One of the key questions, both in the fictions and for the Catholic Church, is the importance of the crucifixion in the wider universe.
I didn’t notice the correspondence in Prometheus between the disaster which occurred on LV-223 and the crucifixion – that they were both 2000 years ago. Once this is pointed out one can begin to see that the problems began to occur because humanity killed the Engineer’s embassy to Earth who was Jesus Christ. I’m not entirely certain what Prometheus is trying to say with this. Catholic dogma always taught me that the crucifixion was necessary to the forgiveness of human beings for the sin of Adam (who they also taught me was fictional). Also, it is followed by the resurrection. Removing the divinity of Christ from the question and the resurrection as the proof of the power of god’s love seems to me to render the story of Christ fairly meaningless. He is not much more profound than any other ancient philosopher, it’s just that his story thrived in a way that others didn’t. It suggests to me a great ignorance about the religions of the world in the early Roman Empire – why, for example, was it not Mithras, or Alexander of Abonoteichus who was the Engineer, and the rejection of their teachings the problem? It seems to me that Christ has done very well, and being annoyed because he was sacrificed (when individual Engineers had been sacrificed to create life anyway, in the opening scene of the film) disregards the fact that he was the most influential figure on the last 2000 years of human history. Although I suppose portraying god as a petty, stupid creature actually comes as close to the god in which I could actually believe as any representation of god I have heard.
The Sparrow and A Case of Conscience never directly reference the crucifixion, as I recall. Jesus plays something of a side-part in their narratives; perhaps analogous to contemporary Christianity? But they do question, if there is other life in the universe, what part do they play in creation? Like Prometheus they don’t really provide an answer – how can they? We have not yet encountered extraterrestrial life and it is questionable whether religious belief will play much of a role if we actually do so. The likelihood is generally decreasing. But they ponder the question in a way Prometheus completely fails to do. Blish mentions that the Catholic Church has guidelines for the treatment of extraterrestrial life, but the internet is not very forthcoming with them. It involves the question of whether the beings have a soul; if they are fallen (as we are) in which case they need to be saved; if they are not fallen then how do we interact with them? A Case of Conscience was written before he knew of this guide, if it exists; The Sparrow appears to exist in ignorance of it.Prometheus doesn’t even seem to think that it will cause a problem, except in the sense of deferring the question which I mentioned above.
Something which is acknowledged by The Sparrow but which appears beyond the grasp of Prometheus is that science and religion aren’t actually in competition. Not really. The argument is that while science can tell you what happened it cannot tell you why it happened. As The Sparrow puts it (and I have heard elsewhere, an In Our Time on the subject can be found here) “God is in the why”. This is a fault inherent in both modern religious thinking – which tries to insert god into science where it doesn’t belong, as in the intelligent design hypothesis – and in modern atheism – which in general can prove that religion probably isn’t right, and has no real basis, but can’t actually prove it wrong in most cases. I believe that there are actually some biological arguments to suggest that religion is actually wrong, but I don’t know them so I won’t come down on that side of the argument. Instead, I will resort to popular culture. For you see, the real answer to this question (which a lot of proper atheists will accept and probably tell you) comes from a lesser-known quotation of the Jedi Master Yoda in the film The Empire Strikes Back:
There is no why.
This is fundamental to being an atheist. If you think there is a reason why, then you are agnostic. That’s OK too. Here we have reached the state of philosophy, and there are no right answers. Or rather there should be no way of confirming the right answers. If a god appeared to me and explained all the whys to me in a logical way which made sense to me I’d start believing that there was one. Or would I know there was one? I’m afraid my philosophical education was cut short when I decided archaeology was the most interesting part of Classics.
Does this make life pointless? Is this a negative attitude? I believe Jean-Paul Sartre had something to say on the matter, but in this circumstance my actual source for my personal philosophy is Mr Joss Whedon again,* in his second greatest television series (bearing in mind I haven’t watched Dollhouse) and, if you are reading this Jonathan, this is a SPOILER ALERT but I am going to remove character names and not mention where it is from to reduce that, if you want to read it nonetheless.** This is what I think:
“[...] it’s like nothing I do means anything.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Doesn’t what?”
“Mean anything. In the greater scheme, in the big picture, nothing we do matters. There’s no grand plan, no big win.”
“You seem kind of chipper about that.”
“Well . . . I guess I kind of worked it out. If there’s no great glorious end to all this, if . . . nothing we do matters . . . then all that matters is what we do. ‘Cause that’s all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long for redemption, for a reward, finally, just to beat the other guy. But I never got it.”
“Now you do?”
“Not all of it. All I want to do is help. I want to help because I don’t think people should suffer as they do, because if there’s no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.”
“Yikes. Sounds like you’ve had an epiphany.”
“That’s what I keep saying, but nobody’s listening!”
So where to conclude? That I got more out of an episode of one of Joss Whedon’s shows than I got out of the entire film Prometheus? Is that such a surprise? I think I get more out of that than I get out of most of the ancient literature I’ve read, except perhaps Lucretius, which taught me not to believe in an afterlife and won me a lollipop from Josie Long. Perhaps that asking the question isn’t enough, proposing an answer is necessary? But I have admitted to believing that there is no answer. Accepting, then, that there is no answer. But this is not good for everybody. Some people want an answer. Sometimes it is hard, believing or understanding the universe to be pointless.
But perhaps it is this. I loved The Sparrow. I liked A Case of Conscience. And I was raised Catholic. While I was wondering around colleges the other day I commented to the girlfriend that I was glad we’d had religion, as it had produced so much or beauty. And it still does, if you would like to look at Aaron Sorkin’s question of theodicy in the excellent West Wing episode “Two Cathedrals” below. I don’t believe in a god, and I don’t think that it is necessary to do so. But I do think that it is essential to come to that conclusion yourself, and to have a reason, and to understand that it means no reason. But no reason doesn’t matter. If there’s no reason, everything is important.
Which perhaps is the more scary answer, after all.
* This episode of this particular series is actually written by Tim Minear, but as he was an executive producer on Firefly and worked on Dollhouse too, we can say fairly strongly that he was close to Mr. Whedon.
** Obviously it’s from either Buffy or Angel, as you’ve seen Firefly and Dollhouse (which I haven’t). And a later point than I know you to be at. But you can get an idea about it, if you don’t read the quotation, from the commentary on Objects in Space, if you have the Firefly DVDs. Or if you know anything about Sartre, which neither I nor Joss Whedon really do.
I mention my girlfriend a lot in this blog lately, but that’s because in the last four months she’s had a profound effect on my life. This is only a minor effect, but she recommendedThe Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell to me several times, ultimately as a book asking similar questions to the film Prometheus, but which actually engaged with those questions. I have been reading it for a little over a week. For the girlfriend, it was the last book she called in sick to work to finish. I thought that my equivalent was staying up late to finish a book, as I dutifully did last night until about 12:30 (it’s late for me these days!) but then I also failed to go into the library to do work today, so I guess that I do both. A plot summary can be read on goodreads. It is about a Jesuit mission to another planet; the review below contains mild spoilers. It is also a fairly raw review with little meditation on the story besides what I did while reading, and a few minutes afterwards.
First, my problem with the book. The alien societies, while in some ways very different to our own, had too many remarkable similarities. They were capitalists, which highlights a distinct problem with this world that we can’t envision a way of life which is complex and yet different to capitalism besides communism. Even The Dispossessed only manages anarchism, rather than envisioning something entirely different to our own experience. The closest a science fiction book has come to achieving this in my opinion is Embassytown by China Miéville, a book which I already feel like re-reading even though I only read it last year. This theme will be discussed a lot more in my forthcoming second Prometheus blog, which should appear tomorrow.
The next point is one of ambivalence, which will depend on your own subjective experiences of reality to interpret. I believe that, had I read The Sparrow as a teenager, perhaps before the age of twenty-one, it might have made me feel Catholic and believe in a god for a little bit longer. This was the effect of the film Dogma (which I now find to have a fairly juvenile answer to the question of belief, but there you go). I think in many ways it fairly represented the challenge of faith under fire and showed how compassionate and good some priests can be. It mentions but does not explore the darkness which can come from celibacy, or perhaps motivate it. This may simply be a product of the time, but personally I would say that sexual abuse by priests is an issue of the church not of the faith. It is man, not god, who is responsible; thus it is not a concern for this book. Furthermore, I think this would be a very different (and not substantially improved) book had it been written after September 11th 2001. We cannot complain about what the book does not discuss, but in what it does discuss I find many reasons and justifications for faith.
I enjoyed all of the characters, especially Emilio Sandoz, although I would understand how much more difficult the book would be if you didn’t like him. Some of the others fall into the background when they reach Rakhat, which is a shame. But I did not find a single one of them unlikable. In general, I would say the book is a bit better in the build-up to the mission rather than when they are on the planet itself; however it is well paced with revelations and reflections throughout. I would suggest that my (very mild) disappointment with the mission itself is that I did not find the aliens to be as alien as I had been led to believe that they would be; rather much of it seemed like some less developed Earth societies. But this is perhaps because I have focused on the similarities rather than the quite horrific differences. There are a few differences in evolutionary path which make all the difference, and I suppose that is what should be emphasised.
So there we have it: an excellent book which should be food for thought for both the religious and the atheist. I would recommend it to most of the people I know and despite the qualifier I can’t think of a person to whom I would not recommend it. I would be especially interested to hear from anyone who has read it while questioning their faith and the response which they had to it.
