Richard's comments (member since Nov 01, 2008)

Richard's comments from the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.

Whitaker wrote: "The overarching theme seemed to be great power and its use and abuse. The Dwellers use their's benignly..."

I'd say the Dwellers do almost everything they can not to exercise power at all, but not due to benevolent reasons. Although I laissez faire abdication looks pretty good in contrast to many active uses of power, I suppose.

But I think the evidence doesn't support that as the primary theme. The only interminable navel-gazing section of the book was just after Fezz learned all his relatives had been killed, and Banks skipped the opportunity.

I think it more likely that there is enough abuse of power on hand in this—and many other novels—that it is easy to impute such an attitude. For example, I think that would be true among the novels this was roughly reminiscent of, to me: Frank Herbert's Dune, or either of Vernor Vinge's space operas (A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky).

I just wrote my review, reprinted here for your convenience (but click through and "like it" if you like it, 'k?):

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Meh.

Well, better than that — 3½ stars — but not as good as I'd hoped.

There were two major problems. The first I could almost forgive—as simply not being to my taste, the same way I don't enjoy the silliness of Terry Pratchett. The Algebraist tossed together rather high-concept themes (persecution of AIs, morally ambiguous revolution against a powerful hegemon, mass-death tragedy) and silliness bordering on stupidity. The major alien race is depicted as bumbling Woosters enjoying the life of a Gilbert & Sullivan farce... except when it is convenient for one or more to suddenly turn into James Bond. The high and low concept was like a radicchio-marshmallow salad.

The other problem was simple carelessness. For example...

Our hero spends most of the novel inside his micro-spaceship. It is described as "about five metres long, four across the beam if you included the outboard manoeuvering nacells and a little under two metres in height." So, in its smallest dimension it is a bit bigger than a typical adult male. Yet much of the time Fessin is stuck inside this oversized coffin, he seems to be strolling the corridors of spaceships and otherwise moving naturally. Yet this is in the same text as careful depictions of how narrow wormholes are, and thus the reason for "needleships".

Another problem is the bewildering decision of Quercer & Janath. Why on earth did they take that risk? And the Voehn knew who they were? How, and why? And the megalomaniac psychopath really deserved either a novel of his own; his subplot was so obvious and dead-ended so casually it was a pity the author spent so much time on him. The occasionally eruptions of profanity and sex were bizarre discontinuities.

I have the sneaking suspicion that Banks was working out a really clever novel, using graph paper and plotting out relationships and plot arcs on butcher paper tacked to the wall when he realized he was putting too much effort into a non-Culture novel and shut it down. Then he came back some years later and stormed through it to get it out the door, but he had coincidentally just re-read and become inspired by Good Omens.

I'll read Consider Phlebas 'cause the Culture series deals with topics some friends think I'll find interesting, but I'm wary.

Marc wrote: "Alien races are impossible to depict as truly alien, simply because the author is human."

Interesting assertion, but I suspect it is a bit of hyperbole. Sounds a bit too much like "Female characters are impossible to depict by male authors, simply because the author is male."

Difficult, yes. The "more alien", the more difficult. But something that is "completely alien" is probably not something we'd ever even meet, since that implies no grounds for commonality at all.

In my recent reading memory, the alien "presence" in Peter Watts' Blindsight was very alien.

But, yes, the aliens here in The Algebraist aren't very well portrayed. I don't see all that many parallels between Sal and Y'sul, though. Sal's arrogance is his defining characteristic, while Y'sul and all the Dwellers seem to be party people. Y'sul reminds me much more of Bertie Wooster, but without Jeeves.

I broadly agree with all the forgoing. I read this series as it was published and loved it.

I never re-read books. There are simply too many others waiting to be read. The Amber series is the only exception I can think of (well, I've started Swann's Way at least three times, but that's a different story).

But I also partially agree with—

David wrote: "Well, I personally wouldn't recommend the last 5 books. They seemed almost like they were written by a lesser author."

Read the Chaos books, but they are a bit of a letdown.

[A different Richard!:]

I'm only 75 or so pages in, and have no clear idea where this is going. Well, actually, I unfortunately glanced at the text of a GR trivia question about the book that told me more than I wanted to know, darn it.

I'm enjoying the complexity and confusion, but it had better be worth it. I've had to go back to earlier passages to check names and dates just to clarify.

So far, it reminds me most of Dune.

My difficulty is that each of the four Earthsea books I've read so far is pretty short, and all involve Ged as a major character, so they could be treated as a collection instead of individual books, permitting a holistic examination.

Since there are a total of five novels (and six books) in the Earthsea series, if we were to allocate one month per book it could be years before we get around to finishing 'em.

I say let's wrap up the series in this discussion folder.

The book under discussion, Tombs, was so short that I finished off the two following books as well. I'm curious whether anyone wants to push this discussion towards the entire series instead of just this one portion.

I remember enjoying Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger — as the title suggests, the protagonist expresses his magic through music. It's been a while since I read it, but I vaguely recall that other forms of art could also be the basis for magic. Many/most of the other characters are anthropomorphized animals.

Check out (at Lulu.com) The Cat's Meow: The Annotated Version, by David Parker.

Like so many fantasy novels inflicted on an undeserving public, this was written by a teenager. What sets it apart from the rest is that, before rushing into print, the author waited until he was old enough to know better, and then decided to release an annotated version, mocking it ruthlessly for your entertainment.

Sounds fun! Perhaps there is an annotated version of Eragon in the works?

I've got an old friend that, last I heard, has kept every book he's ever read. He "introduced" me to scifi over thirty years ago when we were in college together, and he already had a library of several hundred books. I would be very surprised if he wasn't in the twenty thousand range by now, especially since he was a fast reader and could finish a typical scifi book in three or four hours.

On the other hand, I live in a city apartment. The only scifi/fantasy books I've held onto are Zelazny's Amber series. Everything else comes from the library...

Excellent interpretation.

If the "Power of unlife" came into Ged's world and was forced to use his life as a pattern in order to remain there, it makes sense that one of the elements of his life that would be most attractive to an intrinsically evil being would be fear.

I don't think that LeGuin made that linkage—certainly it wasn't explicit—but it does provide a plausible reconciliation to a troubling ambiguity.

Actually, I meant to say that Sauron did what he did because he was evil. I've never understood why Tolkien choose such similarity in the names Sauron and Saruman.

I agree with respect to Saruman — we are given to understand that he had been presumably as good as Gandalf before we meet him, but by then he had been 'corrupted', as if evil is a disease one can be infected with, and not the result of one's own decisions. (The fact that he presents his reasons for defecting while arguing with Gandalf show, however, that he perhaps was making a conscious choice).

Corrupting influences such as the One Ring are a common device in fantasy. The Speaking Stone plays a similar role in "Wizard of Earthsea". The girl Serret was corrupted by it (although she had been morally flawed beforehand) yet she still has some power to act when she tried to escape.

But here, again, we see LeGuin invoking the myth of pure evil when she identifies some entities in her world as fundamentally evil. The shadow Ged struggles against is supposed to be such: "You summoned a spirit from the dead, but with it came one of the Powers of unlife. Uncalled it came from a place where there are no names. Evil, it wills to work evil through you" (p. 72).

In fact, the way LeGuin resolves this we must conclude that the shadow is something that Ged must defeat by integrating it into himself — which certainly doesn't sound like an alien "power of unlife" evil. In fact it reminded me of nothing so much as the "Good Kirk/Bad Kirk" conflict in the Star Trek episode The Enemy Within (an episode which aired in 1966, two years before LeGuin's publication date. Think she saw the show?)

Rachel Starr wrote: "I have to disagree with that assessment--is there no ambiguity in Gollum? in Boromir? in the Steward of Gondor?"

First, I said he had no ambiguity in his evil. I'll give you Gollum — one character that spent most of his time on the 'evil' side of the ledger sheet whose character we saw with any complexity.

And most of his good characters were adequate imperfect and showed very good depth of character, although the worst we ever saw Gandalf was when he grew angry.

Rachel Starr wrote: "Who's to say that other beings and races must share the human race's ambiguity? "

Tolkien's had the say, and he declared that Humans, Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits all were basically akin to one another in their moral capacities. As were Wizards -- Saruman was a wizard just as was Gandalf, and jumped before we met him into the fundamentally evil camp.

But I agree: an author is free to declare that his villains are simply and basically evil, no doubts. But that is what precisely will render it juvenile.

A child might reason that an oppressor — a bully or nasty teacher — is just evil. But an adult has to understand that even as people commit evil acts, they do these for comprehensible reasons, albeit often for reasons we don't consider rational. Saruman did what he did because he was evil; Voldemort, Hitler and Stalin were evil because of what they did.

Similarly, if LeGuin returns to Jasper and never explains why he is so nasty, then she will have failed to differentiate him from a schoolyard bully seen from a child's perspective.

Well, its been a long time since this group read the book, but I'm covering it in preparation for the upcoming The Tombs of Atuan.

I don't really have a least favorite character — the book felt mostly shallow and bloodless to me and I didn't feel much intensity towards anything.

However, the Jasper character was the one I was enjoying the most. Part of my disappointment was that he made no later appearance, so whether my hopes for him are fulfilled will have to wait for the later novels.

But villains give an author a chance to show they can go beyond the stereotyped tropes of their genre. If LeGuin is good, Jasper will have matured into a more complex character, with understandable motivations and depth. Why was he so supercilious? J.K. Rowling did a pretty good job explaining that Snape was caustic because he saw Harry in the mold of his smug parents; Rowling also did a decent job at presenting the pathos of Voldemort's childhood.

Meanwhile, the vaunted Tolkien never permitted any ambiguity in his evil, thus leaving his series emotionally juvenile.

More recently, as much as I disliked where Philip Pullman ended up with His Dark Materials, he masterfully allowed us to see both the charismatic and repellent sides of Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel. And Guy Gavriel Kay painted his villains with such nuance in Tigana that I was left wondering why I felt so much affection for the bad guy.

Jasper is the only character LeGuin put in her book that was left with room to grow. I didn't much like the young Jasper, but I can hope he turns into a Severus Snape, and not into a trivial Saruman.

OK, found it. Hmmm, didn't realize it was part of a trilogy.

I wanted it for a suggestion for the real-world reading group hosted by the wonderful Borderlands Books. (I'm always conflicted when buying scifi books — Amazon et al support Goodreads, but we've got a world-class SciFi/Fantasy bookstore in San Francisco. Thus the shameless plug.)

Oh -- old polls are deleted?

When we were choosing this month's "Eco Disaster" SF book, I grumbled about how most of the choices were really old, except one of 'em. Or at least I think I did. I was trying to go back and find that one to read it, but it would have been in the discussion under the poll...

Are those discussions hidden away somewhere, or gone?

For those of you that haven't yet picked up the "prequel" — A Deepness in the Sky — I can strongly recommend it. I think it actually is the better book, which shouldn't be surprising, since it was published eight years later.

In terms of plot, it is a surprisingly similar book: a space opera in which technological advanced civilizations are fighting over first-contact with a (relatively) technologically primitive world, at the same time that fought-over world is racing to the climax of a conflict of its own. Also, adorable alien children play significant roles in both :-) (Actually, in Deepness Vinge got better at making them realistically appealing, instead of just manipulating his audience by putting the kids in peril).

A few more details can be found at my review.

Alex wrote: "Then I would take them back to, I don't know, Newton's time..."

Funny you should mention Newton. I'd forgotten until then that someone wrote a short story about someone meddling in history using time travel.

The protagonist had been frustrated that the great genius Newton had spent so much time studying theology when he could have been making yet more scientific contributions. So the meddler decided that, since he had been limited to what could be calculated with pen & ink, what Newton really needed was a calculator -- this would at least make him vastly more productive.

Unfortunately he hadn't realized that such a device would appear supernatural to someone of Newton's age, and the red LED numerals (this was before LCD calculators -- quite a few years ago) spooked Newton, making him believe the offer was from the devil (I think the demonstration multiplication provided by the time traveler may have had the unfortunate product of 666, even).

That the forces of darkness had taken such an interest in him scared Newton and made him decide to devote enough of the remainder of his working life to spiritual understanding in order to save his soul.

Which, of course, is what Newton did -- it just turned out the time traveler had caused what he had found so disagreeable in the first place.

Hmmm, before modern medicine? Before refrigeration or decent household heating systems? When men could beat their wives and children and it wasn't even considered unusual? Before women had the vote, of course. I'd re-read The Jungle (first published 1905) and investigate whether dental care was available and check the average life expectancy, then think about cold beer and hot soapy showers and stay right here...

Marc wrote: "For the library at Alexandria etc., get copies made and store them someplace safely, then come back to the present and dig them up again, just so they'll have the right age."

Well, maybe if what you want is to make money -- or you just want museum artifacts. But I'm not interested in faking artifacts, just the knowledge that was lost. For example, just six or seven plays by Aeschylus have survived (one is of dispute authorship), but he probably wrote eighty or so.