The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

I knew nothing about this novel before opening it. This novel follows Shevek as he grows up, goes on sabbatical, and invents faster-than-light physics. The structure of the novel interlaces the chapters with ones leading up to and from the first chapter. In the first chapter, Shevek leaves Anarres for Urras, chapter two begins way back at the beginning of his life, chapter three starts from the end of chapter one, chapter four starts from the end of chapter two, and so on until the end of the novel. This structure provides a slow start to the second chapter, but things quickly build up to tensions that take hold and drive the book forward.

The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model.

While reading this, I found aspects of it reminded me of one of my favorite books, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Similarities in the balance between science, character development, drama, and action first tipped me off—hey, this mix is familiar from a later-published but earlier read book. As Rhodes delves deep into Leo Szilard, Albert Einstein, and Robert Oppenheimer, he includes biographical sketches that expand and contract based on their importance to the Manhattan Project or character. Yet he never loses sight of the scientific development, political drama, and action around the Manhattan Project.

A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

Le Guin’s novel here predates this mix which favors biography but incorporates science, drama, and action. As Shevek works through the famine years, he is assigned to write up death lists, to decide which people will die and live—the post-bombing reaction of many of the Manhattan Project scientists is echoed in Shevek’s responses to questions surrounding this job posting. Of course, after I finished the novel and started looking around at information about it, I learned that Le Guin consciously modeled Shevek after parts of Oppenheimer. But this conscious modeling should never be an excuse, so was Shevek a believable character, or did Le Guin use Oppenheimer to get out of having to build all of Shevek’s character?

“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.” “It’s nothing to do with eternity,” said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?”

Shevek’s introverted nature is deep and wide. His lack of attention paid during his formative years handicaps Shevek later on in life—he wins some and loses some, but never really knows why he wins or loses. Shevek is just Shevek, and he expects others to react to him, rather than changing how he acts to better influence others. Yet he eventually begins to realize and appreciate the influence and insights of others in his life. I see it like this: Shevek unthinkingly accepts Odonian communal truisms as a boy, ignores everything to focus on physics as a teen and twenty-something, then gains understanding into Odo’s thoughts and meanings through discovering people. As this surface-level understanding of Odonism stretches and frays, as Shevek realizes that truth exists behind the truisms, he starts to understand that other perspectives are beneficial to his own thinking and problems. At first he forgets the people in the usefulness of their perspectives, but after he loses the people and feels their lack in his life, he realizes that he has to put energy and effort in to get energy and effort out, and finally he starts to value people for themselves rather than what they can do for him or the culture. To be clear, every other character in the novel is Shevek’s foil. Shevek faces down the world. And Shevek is a complex, changing character who is fully realized within the novel. His consistent tendencies are not dropped because of deus ex machina moments, but they are modified by things like his being posted to be a death lister, his realization of subtextual human intentions, and love.

Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don’t see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can’t make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.

And the novel is about that change in Shevek, about the journey from lonely scientific genius, to integrated member of a group. From not understanding his religious ideals, but holding them rigidly, to understanding the truth in them, and accepting his place in the world. The journey of enlightenment, in a sense. And that’s what makes this novel so keen. From a nominal anarchist to a real one. From a nominal Odonian to a real one. From a driven scientist who is on the brink of the great understanding of his life, to a scientist who has gotten that understanding and realizes what he has missed in the process.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

As noted above, the book—and Shevek’s changing—is about death, love, and the nastiness of humans. Though these themes are strong, Le Guin touches on many other themes and some of them are quite unique and well developed: anarchism and politics, collectivisation and personal property, gender relationships and the other, individuality versus and in support of the culture as a whole, interpersonal relationships, suffering and plenty, the creative process and overcoming barriers to it, introversion and hidden intentions, the effect of physical environments on personality and culture—this book covers a lot of territory.

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

But where other novels cover a lot of themes without satisfying depth to any, Le Guin tends towards depth, exploring concepts from multiple angles through including actions and changes in characters that wrinkle those concepts. Instead of pulp fictional writing which often hammers a single theme home and merely mentions other themes, Le Guin designs each scene to allow themes to expand. Yet she doesn’t lose sight of what her characters believe, and this is where this novel attains greatness: these character and theme changes throughout the novel do not diverge massively, it’s not a clean break from introverted Shevek to partnered Shevek. Rather, Shevek goes through stages of introversion and reliance upon others, finally finding a balance in the latter chapters. This tendency of Le Guin’s to modify instead of discard earlier aspects of characters, to allow space for the transition to breathe, reflects the brilliance of her storytelling.

And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

And her writing similarly rewards the reader. Instead of focusing on short, declarative sentences, she uses what declarative sentences there are as powerful transition points, as short summaries of understanding to both build towards and build from. Instead, Le Guin spends most of her words exploring topics and leading the reader to and from these transition points, these understandings. For instance, two sentences like, “I’m thinking like an Urrasti, he said to himself. Like a damned propertarian.” leads from a series of unanticipated realizations by Shevek about the nature of hidden intentions in those around him, and leads directly to the next few sentences which start to wrinkle and expand the realization of those two short sentences: “As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life!” This immediate expansion shows how these transition points work in Le Guin’s writing, and she builds from them further to deeper exploration of their effects on Shevek and the world around him.

It’ll be explained. The great physicist was misled by a disaffected group, for a while. Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicked deviationists.

Another strength of her writing rests on her ability to make characters feel alien. Though the aliens in the book are all humans from different planets, their views and personalities feel more alien than other science fiction books with exotic, non-human aliens. The nature of the Urrasti is significantly different than the nature of the Annaresti, and Le Guin never loses sight of that. She allows that difference to modify her characterisation of each individual. Though secondary characters are secondary, less focused on and less fully developed than Shevek, they feel different in their interactions with him and statements to him. Instead of changing both her writing of and the philosophies of aliens like Iain M Banks does in Matter, Le Guin changes only their philosophies, and it works. It kind of surprises me that it works as well as it does, but it’s a testament to her developed skill that the aliens feel so alien while sounding similar to Shevek.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

So, yes, this is a great book and I already look forward to rereading it. On one hand, it’s just a tale of a pretty cush scientist discussing suffering, but there is so much more to it than that surface level story. The story is fascinating because of the support it receives from the depth of the themes, exploration, character building, world building, structure, and writing. It lacks incessant action, so the book isn’t for fans of pulp fiction, but it gains so much more by exploring interesting themes to a satisfying depth. I love this book.

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

Outside of his short stories, my appreciation for Asimov remains pretty low. This novel helped me like Asimov more. I actually liked this novel more than Foundation’s info dumping and The Caves of Steel’s unbelievable police work. There were still some major problems with this novel—both in story and writing—but there were also positives that surprised me.

It is a mistake to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. [...] Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not cause cancer.

First, the biggest problem: the verb “was” appears more than any other word in the book. Whole paragraphs only use this verb. The repetition of “was” bores as the novel continues, and I wonder that Asimov can’t be bothered to put more effort into the writing itself. This mono-verb-use betrays even the alienness of the middle alien section, helping the aliens feel human. I applaud aliens that feel alien to human readers, and these aliens do not, largely because the writing so rigidly utilizes “was”. Nothing has caused me to stop reading any novel more that poor writing. I almost stopped reading this one.

Of such things, petty annoyance and aimless thrusts, is history made.

The book is composed of three novellas, and I think this novel shows how fixups can achieve cohesion.
—The first deals with Lamont discovering that the greatest boon to humanity ever, the electron pump, reflects the genius of parallel-universe beings, and not humanity—specifically not Hallam, who claims discovery and invention of the electron pump. Lamont also believes that the pump will blow up our universe much more quickly than Hallam believes. Through Hallam’s influence, Lamont is frozen out of important positions and outcast.
—The second novella deals with those parallel universe beings who exist in three genders that eventually melt together to form one. One of the three main characters wants to shut down the electron pump to save humanity, one of the others masterminded the pump in the first place, and the third tokens traditionalism. They eventually coalesce into a unified being that continues the pump’s usage.
—The third part of the book deals with humans again, as Ben Denison tries to escape earth to rehabilitate a scientific career shuttered by Hallam. Denison has similar concerns as Lamont and has been similarly frozen out by Hallam. He eventually wins the intellectual contest and gets the girl.
—I don’t feel that a fixup is necessarily a bad novel, and I’m actually pretty happy with this one as a fixup. One of the things that separates this fixup from bad ones is that these three novellas work together—they make sense to put together because they share a main theme and tension.

There's a certain drama in going down in a good cause. Any decent politician is masochistic enough to dream now and then of going down in flames while the angels sing. But, Dr. Lamont, to do that one has to have a fighting chance. One has to have something to fight for that may—just may—win out.

The main driving theme in all three surrounds ideas of the dangers of scientific advances being exacerbated by the ugliness of people’s behavior. It’s like Frankenstein, but the monster is a machine and Dr. Frankenstein is still Dr. Frankenstein (Dr. Hallam here). Asimov does a good job creating and not forgetting the central tension of the electron pump destroying the universe—his writing’s focus on science means that it’s pretty detective-novel-esque how he doles out terms and explanations to readers. Yet he doesn’t belabor the point too much, and gets on with the story. You know, instead of spending 600 pages setting up the central problem of the book, Asimov does it effectively much more quickly, and then writes the book.

His idiot face gets redder and his eyes bulge and his ears block. I’d say his mind stops functioning, but I lack the proof of any other state from which it might stop.

The one place where Asimov’s characterization really shines portrays the scientific community as a cut-throat place of backroom politics and conspiracies, most scientists searching for personal glory, and outliers appreciating scientific truths for their own sake. Considering the peer-reviewed, hierarchical nature of this scientific community, Asimov’s design of it rings true to human experience. When people are promoted for publicity and length of service instead of merit, these types of infighting always happen. Asimov did a great job here—Lamont being interviewed by the senator, Denison’s desperation for a fulfilling job in the sciences, Neville’s distrust of everybody but himself. This part of the storytelling or world building is the strongest I’ve seen Asimov do, though I haven’t read too much of him. Each of the characters reacts to this overall tendency in scientists in different ways—Lamont’s rage, the senator’s political calculations, Ben’s stoic acceptance, Selene’s spark to work around the problem, Neville’s secretive conspiring—they all end up different characters, but unified into a group by reacting to the same force of the group itself. I need to be better at this and here Asimov shows one way how. He focuses on the group dynamics in explaining character emotions. Like the following quote, which is Lamont reacting to the backroom politics of these scientists.

"I'm going to see Hallam again."
Bronowski's eyebrows lifted. "What for?"
"To have him turn me down."
"Yes, that's about your speed, Pete. You're unhappy if your troubles die down a bit.”

That said, the rest of Asimov’s characterizations are weak. Not as weak as other novels, but still weak. The characters are so consumed by their work that Asimov disallows them depth of personality. Selene and Ben end up in love, but this "romance" arises coincidentally, rather than naturally. I’m not even sure what either sees in the other—a break from the manipulation of her current man for Selene, and a nymph for Ben maybe? It’s thin, whatever it is, and it reads more like pulp fictional writing than an exploration. Dua ends up subverted completely by Odeen and Tritt in a way all to familiar to how women are consistently represented in fiction, again with no exploration at all—boring. Lamont’s great triumph is off-scene and the reader ends up as wistful as Denison that they may have been allowed to see this scene—probably because the rigidity of the novella structure Asimov set up disallowed him from going back to Lamont. And that’s a big problem. The structure might be a cool concept, a cool idea, but if it doesn’t let the author tell his story in the best way possible, why keep to it so rigidly? It hurts his building of characters.

“Does everyone just believe what he wants to?"
"As long as possible. Sometimes longer."
"What about you?"
"You mean, am I human? Certainly. I don't believe I'm really old. I believe I'm quite attractive. I believe you seek out my company because you think I'm charming - even when you insist on turning the conversation to physics.”

The biggest problem is that the main tension in the book, people discovering that the electron pump will destroy the universe much faster than they had thought, gets forgotten by the end. This search for evidence drives Lamont, Dua, and Denison, but they never discover conclusive evidence. Yet the book assumes they have and concludes as if they have won, without the main thread of tension actually resolving. Instead, Selene and Denison solve the problem that should have been proven, while the problem is never proven. This plot-hole is gaping and obvious and I am stumped as to why any author would let that slip past them.

There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

In all, this is a better Asimov book than any I have read yet. Though big problems remain, at least I now have something other than his short stories to point to when people ask me about Asimov. I look up to his writing of group-individual dynamics in here, and I’m thinking of reading more Asimov eventually.

Ringworld by Larry Niven

This novel is Niven’s most famous work, but I’ve never been as enthusiastic about it as friends have. Perhaps that’s why I picked it up for a second read. The pacing follows a typical detective-adventure tale’s pacing: it starts somewhere fairly normal, then keeps veering in unexpected directions so that the goals of the characters rapidly shift. I mean, I know they’re just trying to get off of the ringworld, but first they try finding locals, then finding a spaceport, then surviving a trap, then setting another trap, then surviving an ambush, then letting one of their members go, then climbing a mountain a couple of thousand miles high, then escaping out a giant hole. These quickly shifting goals keeps the exploration party and reader on their toes. And it works as well as it ever has, you know? Dumas could’ve written this book for all the structural experimentation done by Niven, but Niven pulls it off well.

“Exercise is wonderful," said Louis. "I could sit and watch it all day.”

One of Niven’s strengths is that when you stop reading to think about the events, cause and effect help these crazy shifts in goals and situations make sense.
—For instance, the wire they need to haul their half-dead spaceship up the mountain and off the ringworld was what they originally ran into to chop their spaceship up and cause themselves to crash in the first place. This mostly saves the ending from accusations of deus ex machina.
—Another example: the exploration party is composed of four characters, three of whom have been manipulated by the other, the one who picked them. So their tension and anger fits well within their context of being hand-chosen by Nessus—unknowingly before the book starts with the fertility lotteries and starseed lures, and knowingly with the actual mission to the ringworld.
—Or Prill, who initially comes out of nowhere, but actually fits well into the larger context of ramscoop ships and the failure of ringworld civilization.
—Niven doesn’t explicitly hammer these cause-and-effect tendencies of his writing down the reader’s throat, but he does mention them briefly.

Gradually he was learning the size, the scale of the Ringworld. It was unpleasant, like all learning processes.

It’s a book of brief mentions: Niven’s writing style forsakes interior monologue and narrative explanations. He trusts the readers to pick up what he is putting down, even when he uses just a single sentence to change the context throughout the rest of the book. Most authors would use a paragraph or two explaining and restating why everything would be different. Not Niven. Niven is more likely to say something like, “Louis laughed, and Teela burst into tears,” instead of explaining why Louis’ laughter caused Teela’s tears. It’s a book that goes beyond trusting the reader’s intelligence in a couple of different ways. First, with monumental shifts in interpersonal relationships and context taking place within a single sentence instead of a couple of paragraphs, Niven requires his reader’s undivided attention to every word. Second, his characters are rational as well. Hyper rational. And that seems to be a fault for this novel. In order to have the reader be able to extrapolate what they need to in order to understand the book, the characters have to be rigidly rational creatures acting rationally. Where Louis seems irrational, there is a contextual explanation for his rationale through the world that Niven builds. So, while in our world it is irrational to leave one’s own birthday party, here, Niven explains how the culture allows this to happen and makes it seem normal for Louis in that time. Anywhere Teela seems irrational, it’s her Luck taking over and driving her around as its pawn, which is shown through Louis’ detectiving out Teela’s story and explaining it to her/the reader. These unrealistically hyper-rational characters leaves their portrayals flat, and makes the book feel more contrived than it needs to. Humans are not always rigidly rational creatures. Except here they are.

“Humans," said the puppeteer, "should not be allowed to run loose. You will surely harm yourselves.”

Of course, when it comes to the ringworld itself, Niven’s sparse language opens up and he spends a ton of time talking about it. It’s an interesting mental exercise, the ringworld, and I think Niven’s enthusiasm is one of the reasons that this book still resonates with so many people. But despite the time spent discussing it, Niven’s sparse language means that the main, on-the-surface, applicable theme is not the ringworld itself. His theme is really about the other place where he spends the most words, where he breaks with the sparse language to explore a concept: luck and planning. It’s a detective novel with Speaker and Louis discovering the plans of Nessa and the nature of Teela. The ringworld itself plays as the setting, the science fictional theme that helps push the book along a path and provides a complex context for the interpersonal detective work. And Niven treats his theme fairly even-handedly. Initially, Niven gives the readers the positives of luck and planning; but as the book goes on, the negatives come to light and start to wrinkle the awe Louis and Speaker feel at Nessus’ planning and Teela’s luck. Both planning and luck are shown as a double edged sword. Teela’s luck keeps her alive, but drives her towards a future fit for her in ways that are uncomfortable to her and her companions. Nessus’ planning is solely focused on preservation of his species, Pierson’s Puppeteers. This focus helps the species survive, but also gives other species a casus belli against them. Some of the tensest parts of the book are when Louis and Speaker discover the Puppeteer acts that have altered their races in egotistical ways. Also, the planning of the ringworld’s builders has created this vast monument, but has also led to its downfall. Because Niven allows his wordcount to explore these concepts of luck and planning more than others in the novel, I believe that these are the main themes of the book.

Danger doesn't exist for Teela Brown.

Subtextually, questions of technology are prevalent throughout the novel.
—For example, these four explorers who can travel anywhere on their worlds in an instant, and who can travel faster than light—something as short as “we were using the wrong theories before we bought the right ones from galactic Outsiders” being the explanation given for FTL travel—are suddenly stuck on a huge ringworld moving at what is a snail’s pace to them. They are forced back to our time in terms of travel speeds. Niven never lays out clear conclusions to this thread, but he examines its effects on the characters through plot point after plot point.
—Another example is that Louis uses sabbaticals to reconnect with boredom. Being 200 years old when the novel starts, he represents a bit of an anachronism in his culture. Is his method of relaxation Niven commenting on technology having a dislocating effect on humans? Niven doesn’t say, but that could certainly be read into the novel.
—The most obvious example is that the ringworld itself is a failed technological marvel. As an artificial thing it offers positives and negatives—this is perhaps his most Heideggerian example about technology within the book. On the one hand, more space allows more people to dwell there—which solves the problems of overpopulating planets. On the other, resources are vastly limited and too fragile because of the artificiality of the world—the solution to overpopulation creates its own problems. In other words, to borrow from Heiddeger, technology will never solve technology’s problem: the ringworld solves certain problems of planets, but creates new problems of its own by being solely focused on solving those planetary problems.
—These questions concerning technology keep popping up in the novel, but Niven doesn’t explain them. As much as I want to hold this up as the best science fictional novel dealing with Heidegger’s great book Questions Concerning Technology, Niven doesn’t spend enough time extrapolating for the reader to make this connection obvious. He does not discuss conclusions, just lays out the situation. These questions are a prominent undercurrent to the whole book, but not the main focus of it.

Heat is produced as a waste product of civilization.

Louis has sex with every human-like female in the book. This is clearly anachronistic to the science fiction of today. Teela is the best sex Louis can imagine, before he meets Prill. This one-note portrayal of human relations bores me. It’s unrealistic and smacks of Captain Kirk syndrome—sex everything. Louis even sells Teela to a local wandering hero with a big sword at one point. It’s too typical of older science fiction to have strong male characters and complex relationships between males, while featuring weak female characters and one-note relationships between males and females. Louis sexing both of the women in the novel comes off like wish fulfillment, and not like a discussion about sexual relationships between lovers.
—While Teela and Prill are sexualized, the relationships between Louis, Speaker, and Nessus are given space to grow and gain complexity. A friendship develops between Speaker and Louis that is touching. Their relationships with Nessus go through distinct phases throughout the novel, and affects their budding friendship deeply. It’s not the strongest friendship in fiction, not the most well developed, but it’s certainly above average and better than Louis and the two women.

The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

As to Niven’s ability to write aliens here, they speak like humans, and are just as hyper rational as Louis. Speaker and Nessus both feature different premises than Louis, premises from which to build their rationality. But these premises are not divergent enough for their alienness to be believable—all out warrior-hunter and calculating coward are both easily understood as extremes of certain human traits. This is a weakness in the novel, a novel with such prominent aliens.

The puppeteer unrolled completely. "Did I hear you call me cute?"

Niven prioritizes showing over telling. I understand that Louis is moderately compassionate and vastly curious through his actions alone. I understand Speaker is a natural warrior-hunter when he bounds off to hunt a ringworld rabbit, or when he steals the weapon from Louis. I understand that Teela’s luck is her driving force through the way she burns her feet, or questions Louis concerning pain. And I think Niven portrays both the positives and negatives of “show don’t tell”. I appreciate the cause-and-effect of the story, but some more interior monologue about technology could’ve really made this novel something spectacular.

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.

So, in closing, Niven writes characters and human relations poorly, but tells an engaging story well. Cause and effect helps his story make sense, but it requires the reader to extrapolate from sparse hints spread throughout the book. He focuses his words on an interesting mental exercise, the ringworld itself, and really shines when his worldbuilding is doled out to the reader slowly throughout the book. He does a good job, but it’s a book that I still don’t like as much as some of my friends. For a book about exploration, he certainly doesn’t allow his writing to explore enough of the interesting concepts and questions the exploratory party of characters uncovers. I see it as a worthy successor to Asimov, a science fiction author whose short fiction is often great, but whose longer works don’t speak to me because he often just drops ideas in the reader’s lap without exploring them much himself. I like this book better than any Asimov book I’ve written, but they are similar writers and I still don’t really enjoy the hyper-rational characters, the female sexualization, and the lack of believable aliens. Good book. I’ll read more Niven for sure. Not great though.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

A typical writing tactic is to reflect the character’s mental state with the writing mechanics. For instance, when a character goes crazy, the word choices, phrase lengths, and sentence structures follow: they all reflect this by being more imprecise, more inconsistent, and more convoluted. A crazy person’s narrator often pushes the boundaries of grammar and communication. Jeff VanderMeer doesn’t. When his biologist main character encounters the unknown it gets to her. But he doesn’t stop telling the story his way. VanderMeer writes short sentences. This is no Jack London. VanderMeer’s biologist pendulum swings to and from uncertainty throughout, but VanderMeer keeps his writing steady. Instead of using intentionally messy sentences, he uses imprecise terms, like “The Crawler”, to denote the unknown. His writing is precise in description, yet obscure in meaning.

That’s the main thing that stands out to me, his use of language and sentences. This is a story about the main character grappling with an esoteric mystery, and his writing matches. One example is that he applies multiple terms to the same set piece: the tower, the tunnel, two separate descriptions of physical size—one precise and one approximate—and what two different characters see—a biological organism or a concrete and shell built structure. In this way, the main character uncovers what she does of the mystery slowly, over time. As the terms shift back and forth, so does the reader’s understanding of both the set piece and the biologist’s mental state. So, rather than the sentence structures’ repetition becoming boring, the importance placed on the word choices lend inherent interest.

The whole is couched as a transcription of the biologist’s journal. She narrates the novel. Revealed near the end is the premise that these words are her writing out her journal after the fact, sitting up in the lighthouse and trying to communicate the prior few days. Her biologist’s training seems to affect the story as she describes, contextualizes, and attempts to synthesize hypotheses. She samples things and is just as confused about what is beneath her microscope as what is before her eyes. Much of the narrative deals with description. Like a biologist with a new species, as the story progresses, she slowly comes to terms with the unknown and unexpected. Beginning in a mental framework of familiar biological premises, her experiences and explorations lead her to unthinkable ends. It’s a slow process, even for a fringe biologist like herself.

Yet there is another half of the story, involving her now-dead husband. And this half VanderMeer holds away from the reader for the first quarter of the novel. I can see reasons for this: a wish to not overwhelm the reader right off the bat, a desire to allow the basics of Area X to be fixed in the reader’s mind, and the fact that the rest of the expedition is still alive for this part of the book, leading the biologist herself to cover up this half of the story intentionally. But by holding something away from the reader for so long, VanderMeer runs the risk of jarring them out of the narrative when it is introduced. Maybe the husband is a later invention of the writer, put there because of some perceived lack in the narrative, some perceived dissatisfaction with his own writing. Does it jar me? No. But for so much emotional weight and screen time, I’m not sure the payoff is there. Ultimately, the husband serves to set up the sequel. Sure, his presence does add some gravitas and some interest to the main character’s personality and mental anguish, but it seems a lot of effort for too little payoff. And if the main point of the story is the biologist overcoming her personal tragedies, which I don't believe, then the husband needed to be introduced much sooner in the novel.

The Area X part of the story is a mystery, inherently. Why has this shadowy governmental institution, The Southern Reach, shut Area X off from the world, and why are they interested in studying it? What is Area X? All we know by the end is that some sort of symbiotic, assimilatory relationship occurs there that exists outside of the normal human experience on earth. It’s mysterious and esoteric intentionally. The story is more that the biologist is coming to grips with the fact that there is mystery, than understanding any solution to that mystery. Is Area X’s origin and current state climactic in nature? Extra terrestrial? Nuclear or biological disaster? We don’t know. Neither does the biologist.

But what the writing, characterization, and story all work towards is the biologist growing in understanding of something she doesn’t discern at first. The coolest thing here, and the thing that the novel does best, is to show this process of coming to grips with the unknowable. You could read this book as a metaphor for religious experience, alien encounter, or the biologist dealing with the loss of her husband. In other words, any esoteric understanding or situation that changes everything. And VanderMeer portrays this wonderfully. The biologist starts out resisting the thought that things are changed, then she takes that thought way too far, then she reins it back in to what she considers a sensible response, all while she changes fundamentally. It’s a gripping journey, and one that uses science fiction to help explain what is fundamentally a universal experience. In this thread, it reminds me of Embassytown, by China Mieville—a favorable comparison as Embassytown is a great novel to me.

The focus of the writings rests on description and internal monologue. Though there is some action—one chase, one murder, the discovery of two bodies, and one attack by an unknowable creature—most of the story is the biologist either walking around getting freaked out, or sitting down getting freaked out, and thinking about things. VanderMeer uses internal monologue to ramp up the tension and there are more psychological crises than physical ones. More close calls that satisfying action scenes. This ruminatory focus isn’t inherently a problem, obviously, unless he writes physical action better than psychological action. But I did find myself slightly wishing that something meat and ballistics would occur more often than just walking down a set of stairs, or across a beach, or up a lighthouse. Slightly, I emphasize. And probably only because there is so much implied action that occurs off scene. VanderMeer says that so much has happened off scene and does not show it to me. I think I wanted a little more on screen. One or two more actions. Less buildup for actions that are averted. But this story being the biologist’s journal means that VanderMeer probably wants to reinforce the mystery by having the biologist confused how half of her squad died. It works, but may not have been more than a good tactic.

So, since the words focus on what’s happening in the biologist’s head, I should at least mention some of the themes she’s thinking about: mortality, perception, wildlands versus areas humans live, interpersonal relationships, the status of self during upheaval, the ecology of areas between other areas, spirituality (lightly), morality (also, lightly), and the nature of linked relationships like a marriage, or expeditionary squad, or coworkers. These are a lot of themes. VanderMeer focuses on perception and mortality, relationships and self, ecology and mystery. And I am curious about where he will take these themes. But the main theme here is how humans approach mystery, how we categorize and dissect the unknown, and how we react when our normal processes don’t pay off. VanderMeer shows that to approach something sublime necessarily changes us, like the biologist left alive at the end of the book, or we try our best to ignore it, like the murdered surveyor.

In closing, this somewhat Lovecraftian tale is good. It’s dark and tragic and I’m not sure I want to read more in this series. There are two other books dealing with The Southern Reach, but I like the mystery so much that I’m not sure I want to know more about it. I appreciated his writing and will probably read another novel by him, but not next. I usually appreciate more complex sentences than this. I would compare this novel to Embassytown in humans approaching the unknowable, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in the main character narrating the tale. But I find Mieville to be something I want to reread more, and Heinlein allows his characters more influence over their tale. This is a good book, but not great.

Uprooted by Naomi Novak

0. Well, as of 26 April 2016, the nominees have been announced for the 2016 Hugo Awards. Five novels were nominated. I am reading through them all so that when I vote, I’m sure of why I think that one is better than the others. I understand the inherent ridiculousness of this—it is simply a popularity contest, after all. But I find it fun to explore new-to-me novels and writers, and learn from their works. The nominees are: Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Jim Butcher’s The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, and Uprooted by Naomi Novak. Next up, Uprooted is a well told story, but I'm struggling to understand whether it's trying to say anything, and if so, what.

1. This seems like nothing more than pulp fiction. That’s not a condemnation: I enjoy pulp fiction and this certainly fits the bill—I enjoy reading this novel while actually reading it. But when not reading it, I am slightly bemused. The plot is simple: there is an evil Wood with sentient malice, a powerful wizard who has lost touch with his humanity while living in a tower, a young woman who doesn’t yet realize her own power as a witch, some political court drama, and a messianic tale of her understanding leading to the resolution of an old conflict. You already know how this ends. Structurally, this book captures the cliff-hanger chapter endings that help make pulp fiction engrossing to read, the constant action that leaves the reader feeling breathless, and the heroism that befits a fairy tale. Novak weaves in Polish myths because she is Polish-American, but change a few names and you have any fairy tale. The book moves from scene to scene, chapter to chapter, with the reader knowing as little as the main character about what’s coming next, outside of the predictability of the tropes.

2. And that’s where I need to start about my problems with this novel. First, because the reader has such little to go on in terms of foreshadowing, it relies upon deus ex machina moments to get to the end. Starting with the first chapter, these sudden moments of shift are passed off as the main character’s intuition and revelatory accidents. It’s something she can’t understand, so the author doesn’t either. It comes off as a bit of a disappointment to me when the river helps guide them to the sacred grove, for instance. Or that Kasia is suddenly invulnerable. Or that all the tests show the Queen is free from the Wood’s corruption before it’s suddenly obvious she is still enslaved. Later it seems to begin to contradict itself when a priest can't detect corruption, but the bishop can? Or maybe the bishop's wizard can? These moments are right in line with pulp fiction tropes, like the rest of the plot and structure.

3. As far as what themes this novel, I couldn’t say for certain. I guess it’s a general call to be nicer and understand people more, but honestly the plot gets in the way of any theme Novak put in here. If she was trying to say something, to claim some theme driving the book, it didn’t work because there is so much action distracting from it, and the plot points tend to imply different themes. For instance, Agnieszka is downright nasty to the wizard in the tower, yet she ends up gaining enough power from him to stop the Wood invading at one point. Later, her kindness and friendship to Kasia allow her to do something that hasn’t been done in fifty years. So is Novak advocating kindness or nastiness? It’s muddled. So I think we have to look to the end, to where the characters finish at, and they end up relying upon each other, trying to understand and live with the enemy, then working with the enemy to fix the underlying problem and forgive. That’s probably the theme. I think.

4. The main character, despite always shouting at the people around her, is fairly engaging. She’s iconoclastic and memorable, but not exactly understandable or interesting. Novak builds her like most pulp characters: showing Agnieszka’s reactions to dangerous situation after dangerous situation. She’s loyal but realizes she’s probably growing out of that loyalty. She strikes a good balance between shown and told—she’s a bit of a puzzle, but since she’s still trying to figure herself out, this sort of works.

5. The writing is good. There was a nice mix of sentence structures and word choices. I came across a couple of phrases that really sang, and a rare few awkward sentences. But in all, it didn’t annoy me in the least.

6. I do really like how Novak builds this world by assuming our myths are real, yet still building a mythical world off of that. It’s the myths that come after the myths. I enjoy when an author uses real-world touchstones to anchor the reader’s understanding—fruits and cows and plants that are familiar and help this world feel real rather than using made-up words as analogies to these familiar things. Typically it helps an author drive their point home without distracting the reader by making them memorize what word analogizes to horse, or hamburger, or sun. Here though, with such a muddled point, it is just good writing. And using this tactic to actually build the whole world is inspired.

7. For all that the novel tries to delve into actually probable causes for fairy tale myths, it certainly comes off as simply a wish fulfillment novel. This is the book for you if you ever wanted to be a witch or wizard.

8. In all, I feel like I missed something here. It’s a well-told story in all its parts, but it feels like it wanders overall. It’s got an engaging main character but I’m typically annoyed at her reactions—also at the reactions of the other characters. It’s got no theme really, but the myths are still interesting. It builds an engaging world, but then tells a typical fantasy messianic tale. It tries to encourage working together, then spends hundreds of pages showing how people can’t work together. It goes one layer deeper into the myth, uncovering possible causes for some of the fairy tale tropes, but doesn't really coalesce into a consistent vision of the world or myths. Based on this novel, I will not be reading more of Novak’s work, but I also didn’t hate it. If it wasn't for the one sex scene that adds nothing to either character involved, this would be a good young adult novel. Like I said, I’m bemused here: it seems to do nothing new, just does old things well and slightly shifted, but it is extremely popular all over the internet. Not the book for me, but enjoyable and a well told story.

A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg

1. Another pseudo-memoir in the science fiction field. I think science fiction authors like the pseudo-memoir because they can say things and discuss things with plausible deniability: it’s only the characters that are discussing these out there ideas, not the author, don’t be mad at the author. [4/14/16: But speculative fiction as a genre accomplishes this remove already, so it's not quite necessary for just this remove.] It also allows them a path to follow and fits a linear narrative form: The Chronoliths and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, to name two others here on this blog. Though some attempt a non-linear narrative: Starship Troopers is one of the more famous examples. The memoir tactic involves the narrator breaking the fourth wall and setting down their memories of what happened for posterity—in speculative fiction, usually a fictional posterity. For instance, Mannie tells the true story of the moon rebellion, its war for independence. Scott tells the story of The Chronoliths in an attempt to explain the final Wyoming chronolith, but explains portions through interludes of backstory. Both Mannie and Scott talk to the reader consistently and explain themselves in order to force some nebulous fictional reader to understand their actions and points of view; and Kinnall Darival does the same here. Kinnall’s story involves subverting the basic tenants of the society that he is a part of, so he continually seeks to explain his actions to other members of the society, his hoped for readers. This takes place in a linear fashion with only three or four parts told from the “now” perspective of Kinnall exiled in the desert, alone and hunted while feverishly writing his memoir. So he doesn’t add anything to the tactic, but that’s fine because he pulls off the tactic well—not spectacularly, but not poorly.

2. The theme here is interesting, and well wrinkled by Silverberg. Silverberg’s ultimate point seems to be that only in understanding others can we understand ourselves. But he shows an even-handed amount of negative and positive effects of baring one’s soul to others: Kinnall is hunted and exiled for it, he loses his faith and closest friends, but he also gains a perspective that he values in feeling kinship with all humanity and wishing that they were less unnecessarily self-repressed. The society is one of self-separation—talking frankly is discouraged and obscene—but Kinnall discovers that the repression of self in this way is not placing self on a pedestal, rather subsuming it beneath the society. Instead, he proselytizes a bonding of people with others in order to truly understand self and the relationship it has with the surrounding society. He does this through a magic drug, but I think it’s an interesting discussion none the less. His musings on sociability and friendliness are fascinating and applicable.

3. The writing is not something spectacular or groundbreaking, but it doesn’t induce cringing too often. His sentence structures are not as varied as I prefer, but it’s also not so simplistic that it’s annoying. His word choices are sometimes awkward, but not too often. It’s fine writing.

4. There is a lot of sex, but I think it’s less sensationalism and more a desire to compare and contrast sex with the self-baring that Kinnall engages in. Even sex can be a thing one does mentally alone, despite the presence of a partner. And though both share in the experience, one or both can be objectified and not understood. The connection may not be a serious one and hence, Kinnall’s self-baring is more effective. This keeps the sex from being a sensational inclusion into the novel.

5. The characters are well-developed. Halum is innocent to a fault. Noim is suspicious to a fault. Kinnall, despite the punny name, is neither, but he has his own faults. He’s a well-developed character who, having found a true release, can’t help but share it with others. In this way he’s a convert to a new religion, away from the one of his youth, and wracked by existential guilt and self-questioning to try and come to terms with his new state of being. But he's also that over-enthusiastic new-convert who wont shut up about it. He’s understandable and engaging as a character, and I think that’s a strength of Silverberg’s writing.

6. One thing Silverberg did really well is skip unimportant portions. There is a section of the book where the short chapters grow even shorter—a single paragraph long each—to catalogue the various converts Kinnall initiates into his drug-cult. Rather than dwelling on each and creating a story for each, Silverberg shows hints of the others and gives the reader a sense of the spreading influence of Kinnall’s spirituality. This is about the only experimental writing in here, but it works well to keep the story moving and not bog it down in descriptions of similar situations occurring over and over again.

7. In all, I am not too impressed with this book. It is an enjoyable read and it engages applicable, interesting ideas in a good way. Kinnall is well rounded. But I’m not terribly enthused about the writing or the structure.