This book cracked me up. I am reasonably sure it was not written as a comment on Twilight. And yet. The POV teenage girl character, Zoe, is such a cri...moreThis book cracked me up. I am reasonably sure it was not written as a comment on Twilight. And yet. The POV teenage girl character, Zoe, is such a critique of Bella that I kinda want to leave her something in my will.
Like Bella, Zoe is the unreasoning object of devotion of alien creatures. Zoe’s father gave them a gift that their gods withheld from them. Zoe is the object of devotion, protected and cherished. Devotion that also makes her a target.
(Full disclosure: I have never read Twilight. I have, however, read a lot about Twilight. I find it alternatingly hilarious and depressing).
Unlike Bella, Zoe is the subject of treaty obligations. Unlike Bella, her story plays out against the bigger universe. And unlike Bella, she’s not just defined by desire. She’s an active player in the Great Game, as it may be played, once upon a possible future.
This is not a stand alone book. I knew that, dimly, when I picked it up off the Sci Fi New Books’ shelf at the Tacoma Library, long before I knew Twilight existed. I liked it. The POV character had both spunk and giraffe/spider aliens! But I didn’t love it. The ending seemed a bit deus ex machine, and I wasn’t emotionally invested in this slightly sinister future. Having now, at long last, read the whole series, I love it. There’s this galactic war. There are these supersoldiers. There are these scientists. Sometimes, they have children. Sometimes, these children make good decisions. Sometimes, they aren’t moping narcissists. Sometimes, they have a sense of what a knee might look like on an alien. On such things are worlds saved.
The book begins: “The sun is always just about to rise.” (1). Which is true for most of the people on Mercury. They either walk in the predawn light o...moreThe book begins: “The sun is always just about to rise.” (1). Which is true for most of the people on Mercury. They either walk in the predawn light or live in the one city, Terminator, that circles Mercury in that same predawn light, driven by the sun like a remote controlled car. The “heat of the coming day expands the tracks, and the city’s undercarriage is tightly sleeved over them; so sunlight drives the city west.” (5). Always announcing the dawn. Until the tracks are attacked and the city melts in the bright light of day.
Most of the book follows Swan Er Hong, the privileged granddaughter of the 7th (and possibly last) Lion of Mercury. In her exuberant youth, she designed worlds; little terraria built in the interior of asteroids; open on one end to the sun, engineered as little reservoirs of life as ends to themselves or for the day when Earth can welcome her nonhuman children home again. She has become grumpy with age. Once her city was smashed from the sky, she became positively shrill. She inserts herself into her grandmother’s attempt to save the human race from . . . well, “itself” isn’t quite right. History is closer. From something Swan herself (along with so many others) carries around in her head.
The book is a challenge. Captain Exposition does not show up to explain the world to a clueless POV character (our POV character knows this world better than we ever can). Instead, Wiki-Exposition appears in little passages between the chapters that begin and end as if we’re skimming down passages we already know well, without the standard capitalization and periods that normally signal beginnings and ends. Sometimes, they are awesome, viz:
“all the invisible events make the history of that time hard to write. And all the events continued to occur against the most intense resistance of time, material, and human recalcitrance – human fear, in fact, seizing with a desperate grip imagined props out of the past that were somehow felt to hold the world together. Because of this, there is still and always the risk of utter failure and mad gibbering extinction. There is no alternative to continuing to struggle” (553)
Swan meets one of the villains in an idyllic world she helped make. They play an inane game. Balls clacking and bouncing through systems can do a lot of good, a lot of damage. She, of course, ends up being one of the heroes of the future, even though she remains grumpy, self centered, and kinda arrogant. Though she has moments of great insight, such as:
“No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn’t true. Each part of the triune brain had its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. That’s good is what’s good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape – some pace for people to live in for ages to come – then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough.” 542.
There were things I loved about this book. Outside of Earth itself, no one hesitates to save each other. I want to believe in that future. The children we sent up the space elevators want to save Earth. I want to believe that.
[mild spoiler ahead]
In a singularly heroic moment, the crew of a ship slam it into a swarm of those billiard balls to save a world. Anyone who can put on a space suit evacuate in one; those who can’t go on the life rafts. This passage was awesome:
“Rescue vessels had been alerted and were already on their way, so everyone would be picked up within hours rather than days. It would all be fine. “Still, it was a spooky thing to dive off an accelerating spaceship into blackness and stars, clothed in nothing but a personal suit. Many a round-eyed person entered the lock, and Swan could sympathize, even though in ordinary circumstances she liked this kind of thing. “Some lock groups jumped out together, holding hands, hoping to stay together; once the ones still inside saw this on the screens, it became something almost every group tried to do. They were social primates, they would take the risk together. No one wanted to die alone.” (482)
[end spoiler] Brought a tear to my eye.
There’s a lot in this book. A meditation on society, capitalism, using others as means to an end, terraforming, genetic engineering, gender thwarting, the possibilities of surviving the sixth great extinction, artificial intelligence, human speciation, on “vampiric rich people moving around the Earth performing a complicated kleptoparasitism on the poor," on becoming something wonderful. I know there was a lot in this book I did not get. I did not get the meta-significance of all the circles: each planet in its orbit; the fights on the various worlds on the lengths of days planets should be have (such things can be managed with billiard balls of sufficient force) the management of all the circles of life; predators and prey, each eating one another, until the end. I did not get the significance of the box of eyeballs until way too late. I did not think about poor Swan and her frog-man (a genetically engineered scientist from Titan named Wahram) walking around Mercury in the tunnel beneath the train tracks after the city was attacked), like Ra himself piloting the boat of the sun through the darkness or through the sky until they were standing on Olympus Mons.
I don’t understand why KSR made his main POV character so unlikeable. I do not understand why people fall for her. There’s probably something in there about us all being in this together, even with the people who are offputting. But I’m not sure.
There is a character who goes up a space elevator in a worm bin. There’s a lot there.
The book ends, “This is for life.” (561). There is no alternative to continuing to struggle. This I believe. And I’m sure Kim Stanley Robinson has something to do with that. (less)
I was startled recently by having three friends of mine respond with polite incomprehension to the name “Freeman Dyson.” I can’t remember not knowing...moreI was startled recently by having three friends of mine respond with polite incomprehension to the name “Freeman Dyson.” I can’t remember not knowing who Freeman Dyson was. I may live in a world where, for one of the first times in my life my fandom is appreciated and my president is on the right side of history, but I still, apparently, live askew. I told the third one he was a “science hero.”
It also made me realize that I hadn’t actually read any books by Dyson. This may not have been the best one to start with. It’s a collection of previously published essays, some with postscripts, covering war and peace (from the perspective of a guy who did geek stuff for the RAF during WWII and a nuclear engineer who is deeply anguished about the bomb), history of science (from the perspective of a man who ran with Feynman, Von Neumann, Teller, and Oppenheimer, helped develop nuclear power plants and – why I can’t remember the first time I heard his name-- came up with the Dyson Sphere), and contemporary issues (from a guy who helped make modern history). It’s not an exploration of a big idea; it’s lots of pieces plucked out of context and put together. A good bus book, but not a deep read.
It did introduce me to the idea that we could engineer trees that could live on comets as part of a terraforming project, which is AWESOME. Also, that I live in a world where, once upon a time, the State of California could ask someone like Richard Feynman to review their high school science and math text books. Given what’s going on in textbooks these days, I felt a pang of envy.
I also came away with the feeling that Dyson as a deep streak of contrariness that we are lucky he found a non-destructive outlet for. In a weird way, he reminded me of a certain contrarian I used to work with (and perhaps will again), who once picked a week-long fight with an Englishman over the fact the UK had moved to the metric system. (less)
**spoiler alert** I’m somewhat abashed to admit that I picked up this book first in the Vorkosigan series, which is sorta silly as it’s the 11th and M...more**spoiler alert** I’m somewhat abashed to admit that I picked up this book first in the Vorkosigan series, which is sorta silly as it’s the 11th and Miles is definitely a character who is changed by his experiences. But it was at the library, and I was recently out of law school, and it mentioned terraforming in the first few pages. I had a yearning for new worlds.
It was okay as a stand alone science fiction/political thriller. As part of the overall series, it’s awesome. Miles has settled into his life as an Imperial Auditor and is tackling his father’s ghost as the Butcher of Komarr. In the sense that he’s at Komarr, investigating an accident that seriously damaged the solar mirror that focuses more of the sun’s rays on a very cold planet. He’s also falling in love. Again.
It’s a definite change from the previous books in the series. In most of the others, Miles is over his head immediately and talks and charms his way out of it. In this one, he’s . . . thoughtful. Measured. Except for that one bit, where he heads into the unterraformed darkness with the husband of the woman he’s falling in love with. It really isn’t his fault the other guy dies horribly. He really feels bad about it.
It’s subtler than the ones before it. Again, no fight scenes, though the female protagonist does wreck some truly spectacular violence with a float pallet. In many of the previous books, Miles has power without real responsibility. In this one, he has both. It seems to slow him down. Might be some good modeling in there.
I am a little unsettled by the woman who Miles falls in love with, Ekaterin. She’s been in a progressively more abusive arranged marriage for ten years to a man with a mutation from the mutation-fearing Barrayar. She copes by mostly shutting down and pacifying. She has a lot of hallmarks of learned helplessness, but she bounces right back into functionality when her husband dies. She’s not nearly as damaged as I think she would be. She shows great compassion and heroism. She saves Barrayar and probably Komarr too and simply shrugs at the fact that only a handful of people will ever know. That amazing moment doesn’t seem to wash away 10 years of progressive abuse . . . and Miles falls for her. Considering that his last girlfriend’s a mercenary admiral and the one before it a super soldier, that’s a little surprising.
The characters in this book all have to deal with the consequences and benefits of decisions made generations ago. Hundreds of years before, hopeful settlers started a terraforming project. 80 years before, Komarr let an invasion fleet through that killed five million Barraryans. 35 years before, Barrayar conquered Komarr to make sure such a thing never happened again – and someone, with or without sanction, killed 200 of the world’s most prominent citizens to make the point that it was really pissed about the invasion fleet. Now, Barrayar seems to be trying to build a workable alliance, even though a good portion of Barrayan women who go there to study never come back. The existence of the other is unsettling. But whatcha gonna do? Twas ever thus.
The adventure stories are more to my taste, but I really enjoyed the thrumming of science fiction through this one. Lurking underneath is the project of terraforming – building better worlds, and the moral consequences of having the power to do so. (less)