April 24, 2008 at 10:00 pm · Filed under Books Etc
The Sci-fi Classics Challenge was a personal challenge I started July 1, 2007, to broaden my knowledge of the best-known (and best-loved) works of science fiction. I’d just realized that, although I love the genre, I didn’t know much about its roots, or have more than sketchy knowledge of its most influential writers.
A year later, I feel like I have a much richer understanding of the genre. Of course, the ten books I read are only a fraction of all the complex, rewarding, challenging works of science fiction out there, but they are some of the best.
I now know that I love Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game more than any sci-fi novel I’ve ever read, and that it and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, fully deserved to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards in consecutive years. I’ve discovered that although I don’t agree that Dune, by Frank Herbert, is the best SF novel around, it is definitely among the best of the genre, as are Ursula K. Le Guin’s [review: The Left Hand of Darkness] and Foundation by Isaac Asimov.
I’ve read and enjoyed The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester, who I’d never even heard of before I started the challenge. I finally got around to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and realized that although it’s an interesting and inventive novel, Dick’s novels will probably never be among my favourites. I’ve sampled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I didn’t enjoy, but at least now I can recognize the myriad references to it that pop up in so many other books!
I even went back to the 19th century, and read some of the earliest works of science fiction. I wasn’t thrilled with either The Time Machine or Frankenstein, but they were worth reading just to experience the roots of the genre.
All in all, I read ten books, some great and some not so great, and had a wonderful time doing it!
Tags: Sci-Fi Classics Challenge
April 24, 2008 at 8:41 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
63. Foundation by Isaac Asimov (Science fiction) 285 p.
This was my first experience with Asimov. Of course I’ve heard plenty of good things about him, like that he was considered to be (along with Clarke and Heinlein) one of the Big Three of science fiction, and the Foundation series is supposed to be his best work, so I had high expectations for this book. Asimov didn’t disappoint me.
Foundation is the first of a trilogy exploring the fall of the Galactic Empire and the period that follows it. Hari Seldon, a brilliant psychohistorian, predicts the inevitable collapse of the 12,000-year-old empire within 300 years, followed by a 30,000-year period of anarchy before the rise of a second Empire heralds return of civilization. In an attempt to shorten this period, he devises a plan: two great Foundations will be established at opposite ends of the galaxy, on the distant planets of Terminus and Star’s End. There, scientists and scholars will preserve humanity’s knowledge throughout the coming dark age, shortening it to a mere 1,000 years.
The book is actually a collection of five short stories, four of which were originally published in Astounding Magazine. It opens with The Psychohistorians, in which were are introduced to Hari Seldon and his plan. The Encyclopedists takes place 50 years later, in the now-established community on Terminus, which faces its first outside threat, from the newly-independent kingdom of Anacreon.
Thirty years later, The Mayors sees renewed aggression from Anacreon, but this time a political solution won’t be enough to save the Foundation from invasion. The Traders shows the rise of a class of interplanetary traders, one of whom attempts to expand the Foundation’s influence through a few shady deals. The last story, The Merchant Princes, sees the shift from religious to economic power as the basis of the Foundation’s dominance in its sector of the galaxy.
Foundation is a very political book; not surprising, since it was inspired by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was a quick and absorbing read, and I am dying to read the rest of the series. I have only one serious complaint about the book: it contains no women.
Of course, classic sci-fi is probably the most misogynistic literary genre of the 20th century, and a dearth of women was pretty much to be expected from a political SF novel published in 1951, but I was still surprised. In the first four stories, not one single female character appears, in any capacity, nor is one even mentioned. In fact, the very existence of women is only referred to, offhand, in one story. In the fifth story, there are two female characters: a servant appears in one scene, although she never speaks and isn’t mentioned by name, and there are a couple of scenes where the arrogant, nagging, caustic wife of a planetary ruler browbeats and insults her husband. The lack of female characters is so marked that it actually threw me out of the story more than once. I don’t want to argue about whether this exclusion is justified or not, given the genre and time period in which the book was written, but merely to point out that the book is the poorer for it.
Asimov’s writing is so good in every other way that it didn’t impede my enjoyment of the book, or make me the slightest bit reluctant to continue the series.
Pages read: 18,156
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, A ~ Z Reading Challenge, Foundation, Isaac Asimov, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge
April 13, 2008 at 8:18 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
52. Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (Science Fiction) 382 p.
I don’t know what to say about this book, because it’s so good, so wonderful, so human, in ways I don’t know how to articulate. But I’ll try.
Speaker for the Dead begins about 3,000 years after the end of Ender’s Game. It takes place on the small colony world of Lusitania, whose only human inhabitants are a small village of Brazilian-Portuguese Catholics. However, Lusitania is also home to the first sentient alien species humanity has encountered in the Bugger Wars three millenia earlier. Due to the time dilation effect of faster-than-light travel, Andrew Wiggin is still only 35 years old. When the call goes out for a speaker for the dead, he can’t resist travelling to Lusitania.
That’s a really inadequate summary, and it only touches on the plot, which, although excellent, isn’t at the core of the book. It’s the people and ideas that make Speaker for the Dead so special, that set it apart from other science fiction. OSC manages to explore some really compelling xenology and xenobiology (i.e. alien anthropology and biology), without sacrificing character development. Not all the people in Speaker for the Dead are human, but they are all interesting and complex and very, very real, because Card never takes the easy way out.
A good example of this is Bishop Pelegrino, the religious leader of the community. At first, he seems like the reactionary, righteous, slightly stupid Catholic priest recognizable from many other books, but Card is a better writer than to stop there. Although he does have these traits to some degree, they are far outweighed by his ability to be flexible, by his caring for his community, and by his compassion.
I love the world Card creates on Lusitania, because it’s just so interesting. The Piggies, of course, and the mystery of their society, but especially the human community of Milagre. I look forward to seeing more of both in the third book in the series, Xenocide. When I started this book, I didn’t think any sequel could come close to being as good as Ender’s Game, but I was wrong. As amazing as that book was, Speaker for the Dead somehow manages to live up to it. I can now number Orson Scott Card among my very favourite writers.
Pages read: 14,286
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Cardathon Challenge, Ender quartet, Enderverse, Eponymous Challenge, Orson Scott Card, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge
February 18, 2008 at 12:25 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Mystery and Suspense, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
14. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (Science Fiction, Mystery) 243 p.
Ben Reich, head of Monarch Corporation, is one of the richest men on Earth. Or on Mars or Venus, for that matter. Unfortunately for him, he’s being beaten by a business rival, Craye D’Courtney. When his offer of a merger between their interests is refused, he decides that killing D’Courney is the only answer, despite the danger it would involve. And in Reich’s time, when Espers—mind readers—are common, it’s very hard to commit murder. And even harder to get away with it.
Lincoln Powell, the Police Prefect, is put in charge of the investigation into D’Courtney’s murder. As an esper, he has a dubious advantage—he knows Reich did it, but he needs hard evidence to prove it in a courtroom.
I’ve read that some people found Reich the more sympathetic of the two, charming despite his selfish viciousness. Having now read the book, I’m baffled by this. I’ve sometimes been charmed by a suave villain, but I found Reich totally unlikable: an egotistical, arrogant bully with an anger management problem. I found Powell far more interesting.
I found The Demolished Man a rather choppy. It starts with Reich planning the murder. After its execution, the story becomes a police procedural with Powell as the protagonist. Then, with less than no warning, there’s suddenly a save-the-world climax. There are one or two hopelessly inadequate lines of exposition explaining the nature of the threat. There’s a little more detail given in the dénouement, but not enough that I felt I actually had a grip on the situation. The whole thing left me scratching my head.
[spoilers]
I was also kind of disgusted by Powell’s romance with Barbara. I have read books containing actual incest that I found less disturbingly yucky. Barbara’s line at the end, about Powell having always been “a mean daddy”, made me cringe. I don’t think I’ve ever read a love story less convincing, or less romantic. (Also, the relationships between men and women in general remind me of those in Philip K. Dick’s books—and I don’t like them there, either.)
[/spoilers]
Despite what I find to be some rather serious drawbacks, The Demolished Man is a great book. It kept me riveted from the beginning to the very end, and contained some fascinating and brilliant world-building. I’m not the slightest bit sorry I read it, and I eagerly await the chance to read Alfred Bester’s other novel, The Stars My Destination, which I’ve heard is even better.
Pages read: 4,323
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Alfred Bester, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge
February 11, 2008 at 3:33 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
8. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (Science Fiction) 226 p.
At the age of six, Andrew Wiggin, who prefers to be called Ender, is taken from his family to be trained as a soldier. Test results and close observation have convinced Earth’s military, in the form of a certain Colonel Graff, that Ender may hold the key to the planet’s defence. The enemy are the buggers, a race who have already sent two invasion forces with near-disastrous consequences for humanity. Once at Battle School, a combination of coursework, games, and psychological manipulation are used to train Ender for the most important battle of all.
Some time ago, I picked up a copy of First Meetings, a group of four stories set in the Enderverse, including the original Ender’s Game, a novelette that appeared in Analog in 1977 (it wasn’t expanded and published as a novel until 1985.) Somewhat against my better judgement, I read the novelette. Having heard so much about the novel, I wanted to read it. Once the novelette was in my hands, though, I couldn’t help but read it, even though I feared that it would provide an inferior experience and lessen my pleasure when it came time to read the “real” story. I was justified in the former fear, but not the latter.
The novel is by far the better telling of the story. It takes everything that was good about the novelette, and adds a wealth of detail, character development, and emotion, without a single wasted word. I thought knowing the end would make reading the novel pointless; instead, it only made clear to me how little Card depended on a flashy climax to keep the reader’s interest. As well as having more time to explore the existing characters from the novelette, the expanded form gave Card room to create many new secondary characters, all of whom are worth the space they’re given in the novel.
My trip to the bookstore today will definitely include a search for the first sequel, Speaker for the Dead. If you’re the slightest bit interested in SF or war fiction, and you haven’t read Ender’s Game yet, do it. Now. Today.
Pages read: 2,589
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Ender quartet, Enderverse, Orson Scott Card, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge, Unread Authors Challenge, What's in a Name?
January 10, 2008 at 12:52 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I set myself quite a number of reading challenges this year. I met my main goal of 100 books for the year, and I completed the 2nds challenge. For the rest, I’ve decided to make my goals slightly more reasonable, partly so that I’ll have room for some of the other interesting challenges that have cropped up.
World Lit Challenge: I actually love this challenge, and I think it will probably be an annual thing. It forced me to search out new authors I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of, and encouraged me to read books I might otherwise have avoided.
Looking over the list of books I read this year, it seems that quite a few turned out to be favourites, and there are only 3 I didn’t like (Reading Lolita in Tehran, Like Water for Chocolate, and Portrait in Sepia, if anyone’s interested.)
I managed to finish 26 books. While that falls far short of my goal of 50, it works out to one book every two weeks, which isn’t bad at all. So I’ve decided to renew the World Lit Challenge for 2008 and read a further 26 books in 2008.
Sci-fi Classics Challenge and Fantasy Classics Challenge: I’m definitely not going to meet my stated goal of 25 books for each challenge by June 2008, so I’m lowering my goal for each to 10 books.
Tags: Fantasy Classics Challenge, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge, World Lit Challenge
October 11, 2007 at 4:28 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
106. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (Science Fiction) 244 p.
Sci-fi Classics Challenge
Course reading: Science Fiction
Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job is to find and “retire” androids who have escaped to a dying Earth from the colonies on Mars. By now, corporations have learned to create ever-more realistic androids: they look and think just like humans. One of the few detectable differences is in the human capacity for empathy, which androids do not share. A mission to hunt down and retire six of the most sophisticated androids ever created has Deckard wondering just how close to human androids have become…and whether he’s in the right profession.
This isn’t the first work of Dick’s that I’ve read, so I wasn’t surprised by the amount of confusion I had about the plot. I rather expected new information and unexpected twists to come out of nowhere, as indeed they did, although knowing they were coming didn’t help me to anticipate what they would be. All in all, I enjoyed this book a lot, although (not for the first time) I found the treatment of women in the novel extremely depressing.
Books read: 106
Pages read: 31,334
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge
September 24, 2007 at 4:33 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
101. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Science Fiction) 300 p.
Sci-fi Classics Challenge
Course reading: Science Fiction
At the opening of the novel, Genly Ai, representative of the Ekumen on the planet Gethen, has been two years on that cold world, attempting to convince its people that he is an emissary from the council uniting more than eighty worlds, a union Gethen in being invited to join. The tense Gethenian political situation and his difficulty in persuading them of the truth of his story make Genly’s job dangerous, but help from a very unlikely source gives him a chance—a slim chance—of success.
I particularly like the structure of this book, which displays all of Ursula K. Le Guin’s considerable talent for world-building. Genly’s account of the events forms the main narrative, but it is interspersed with various Gethenian tales, both historical and legendary, and by a surprisingly intimate first-person perspective from one of the Gethenian characters. Each of the Gethenian tales, while they illuminate some point of Gethen’s history or culture related to the plot, yet manage to seem organic, natural, as though they really arose from Gethenian society, rather than being created to throw light on the main narrative.
Since the science fiction course I’m taking this term is intended to be something of an introduction to the genre, we’ve naturally talked a good deal about what in particular makes a book “science fiction” (which I’ll probably write more about some other time.) It’s a good course, and like all good courses, I’ve learned to recognize and articulate things that might have occurred to me, but never did. I particularly agree with the idea that science fiction is inherently a contemporary genre: no matter when or where it’s set, it’s always a reflection of, and a commentary on, its own time—and perhaps, any time. Science fiction—or at least, good science fiction—has a psychological reality that transcends the physical reality in which the action takes place.
I found that very true of The Left Hand of Darkness, which is surely one of the best science fiction novels ever written. The novel itself spends some time exploring the ways in which beings from radically different cultures can connect with one another, but it also allows the reader to connect with an invented culture, but one with enough things in common with her own to entirely suspend her disbelief over the course of the book. For example, one of the Gethenians makes a point about patriotism that resonated strongly with me:
What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession…
Although the book is mainly serious, there was at least one amusing line, which has got to be one of my favourite descriptions in fiction:
He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.
I am very grateful to have finally read this book, not just because it’s such an awesome read (although it is), but because I was so disappointed not to have liked Le Guin’s Earthsea books. She’s such an amazing person, and has done so many interesting and groundbreaking things within SFF, that I wanted to love her books, and I just didn’t. Now, at least, I can be at ease knowing that I throughly enjoyed her masterpiece, rather than just admiring its message.
Books read: 101
Pages read: 29,934
Next up: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (re-read), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge, Ursula K. Le Guin
September 22, 2007 at 10:57 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Fiction and Literature, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
100. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Science Fiction) 244 p.
Sci-fi Classics Challenge
Course reading: The Novel
Whew! I really had to force myself to finish this. It’s been a long time since I read this, but not long enough—I remembered it well enough that there was no suspense whatsoever, but not well enough to skim any of it. Still, it’s done, and I must admit that it’s an interesting book to study in an English course, even though I didn’t get much pleasure from reading it.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading it, however. Frankenstein is a classic, and deservedly so. It’s quite a fascinating tale, and very different from the expectations I had based on what I’d heard about the story. The most important thing, which many people know but often forget, is that Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster—the being Frankenstein creates has no name, and although the being gets the chance to tell his own story, the book revolves very much around Victor Frankenstein himself.
Probably my least favourite element of the novel was Frankenstein’s personality, in particular an aspect he shares with the being: they’re both such drama queens! Frankenstein moans constantly about how wretched he is, while the being can’t shut up about his own wickedness and despair. I also found that there were so many coincidences in the text that they intruded on the narrative.
I did enjoy the book to a certain extent, and I’m glad read it—but I’ll be equally glad never to read it again.
Books read: 100/100 (100%)
Pages read: 29,634/30,000 (99%)
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge
September 18, 2007 at 9:09 am · Filed under Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
99. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (Science Fiction) 85 p.
Sci-fi Classics Challenge
The Time Machine begins, as so many old-fashioned SFF novels seem to, with a framing story. The narrator is a guest of a man he introduces to us as the Time Traveller, a learned gentleman in the late Victorian style, when most experts in scientific fields seem to have been enthusiastic and experienced amateurs. During an after-dinner discussion at his home, the Time Traveller opens the subject of time, specifically time as a fourth dimension little different than the three dimensions of space with which his listeners are already familiar. He claims to be on the verge of completing a working time machine, and demonstrates his success with a functional model. The next week, at a similar dinner party, he staggers in late to the table, and recounts his tale of a journey into the far future, one which presented him with a very unexpected picture of humanity’s future evolution.
The Time Machine is actually only a novella, and the future humans, the Eloi and the Morlocks, are explored with a shallowness that would win instant censure in a modern-day SF novel. Still, the story was ground-breaking in its day, and it still has enough interesting ideas to be an important SF text, as well as a fairly enjoyable read. It isn’t a book that I would recommend to someone purely on its own merits, but for any fan of the genre as a whole, it’s essential reading.
Books read: 99/100 (99%) — just one more to go!
Pages read: 29,390/30,000 (98%)
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, H.G. Wells, Sci-Fi Classics Challenge
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