Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov

After the surprisingly good Foundation and Earth, Prelude to Foundation also relies on a journey to drive the narrative. Instead of running towards something though, here the characters run away from capture. The protagonist, hyper-rational Hari Seldon, founder of the Foundation, journeys through several locations to come to grips with competing interpretations of human nature and power, and help codify his own.

⁠Mathematicians deal with large numbers sometimes, but never in their income.

Imperial Sector: First, the Imperial sector, where the whole truth cannot be seen from the outside. Seldon gives his paper, and the results of the talk surprise him. Chetter Hummin looks like a normal businessman, functionary, but ends up being tied in deeply with elements antagonistic to Imperial power. A couple of brightly dressed youngsters end up being thugs. Seldon ends up being a kung-fu master. The point here is that the outward appearance, and even the way people interact, doesn’t necessarily reveal their nature⁠—and can misdirect, especially when cultural differences stand in the way. The people here orbit power the closest of anybody in the empire. Power is attracted to itself. And power is a sliding scale where the closer you are to other people with it, the more of it you have. Seldon’s talk sets him up as a potentially powerful figure, and even potential power attracts the powerful around him. That’s his first lesson, his first unexpected truth.

I’ve seen many people with status, but I’m still looking for a happy one. Status won’t sit still under you; you have to continually fight to keep from sinking.

Streeling University: Dumped into familiar circumstances, an idyllic university, Seldon should feel comfortable and safe here. And he takes that feeling too far. He ignores what he learned in the Imperial sector. The new dimension to his life that the adventures in the Imperial sector added do not come home to his mind until it is too late and he heads topside. The familiarity of the college atmosphere blinds him to the pitfalls, potential traps, and importance of his flight. This second lesson of the book shows the importance of mental agility. Recognizing truth is not enough if you don’t allow it to change your life and thinking. Even Dors cannot warn Seldon effectively. Though a place of learning that demands much from the students, the faculty grows complacent, throwing ideas out there for the sake of inconsequential arguments, lulling each other to bumbling tenure. Seldon’s agility led to his sensational paper, yet he doesn’t apply that throughout his life and it gets him into deep trouble. In other words, dispassionate, detached, academia or knowledge doesn’t excuse you from still being acted upon by that knowledge.

“A great many things are possible.” And to himself he added: But not practical.

Topside: The danger he worked himself into shows up as he heads outside the domed surface of the planet Trantor. He almost dies here, maybe twice, certainly once. An aircar of some sort seems to be searching for something, and all of the unexplained phenomena of his time at the university finally catch up to him in his mind. Here he finally believes the truth he learned in the Imperial sector, and he interprets the aircar as hunting him, so he runs away. Then a freak storm hits and, lost, he almost freezes to death. In addition to finally believing his own power, Seldon learns about people here. He simply doesn’t know the intentions of those around him⁠—a fact driven home by the quotes at the beginning of the chapter. And the discussion about the aircar and the storm drive home the point that humans always operate off of incomplete information. Yet here is also a point where nature is the main enemy, not human nature, and this inclusion helps muddy the human waters, showing that what people serve helps them prioritize their actions, cares, and life.

How harmful overspecialization is. It cuts knowledge at a million points and leaves it bleeding.

Mycogen: The religious fundamentalists of Mycogen show a closed off culture. They export the highest quality food, but do not import. They are past and future looking, and do not pay much attention to the present. Their history shows Aurora, a semi-mythical planet to them and where humans orginated, and they revere robots⁠—a technology now lost, or outlawed. Seldon’s idea is that he can extrapolate from a single group of ancient humans the truths about all humans that he needs for psychohistory. He’s hoping that by collecting a ton of truths, he will be able to more easily get at the underlying premises that those truths fall out of, and develop psychohistory. Dors, as a historian, has been telling him that history is too complex for that⁠—at this late stage of the empire, too much is known to make a broad overview useful because it is too broad, or a detailed overview possible in one lifetime. History being written by the victors certainly doesn’t help either. So Seldon realizes here that history will not work perfectly the way he wants it to. Too little is known about Aurora to help him, too much is known about everything else. But he also sees in this isolated society truths that the more open university setting also allows. In short, he has looked at two extremes⁠—conservatives and liberals⁠—and seen the humanity that overlaps, seen the reasonings and premises of both, and is finally able to draw some conclusions towards psychohistory.

“There are many people, many worlds who believe in supernaturalism in one form or another... religion, if you like the word better. We may disagree with them in one way or another, but we are as likely to be wrong in our disbelief as they in their belief. In any case, there is no disgrace in such belief and my questions were not intended as insults.”

Dahl: Blue collar and violent. Shanty towns and always dreaming of being elsewhere. Yet this environment doesn’t lead to an all-in-this-together comaraderie, but rather yet another rigid social structure. It’s played as petty in the novel, but Seldon realizes that humans do separate themselves into social structures⁠—whether they are defined strictly like in the Imperial sector, or merely by unspoken convention like in Dahl, and all stages in between as shown in Mycogen and the University. He also learns that history can be contradictory, as he meets a woman who remembers tales of Earth and Aurora and these tales contradict Mycogen tales in interesting ways. He finally gives up his hope of short-cutting psychohistory through extrapolating from a focused historical study. He begins to realize that the psychology of humans had such a profound impact on history, that studying psych can help explain history.

There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society.

Wye: And then the foreshadowed kidnapping to Wye. Throughout the book the mayor of Wye is mentioned as a frustrated claimant to the throne, but once they get there, the characters find a “normal” society within the larger imperial sphere. It’s not the downtrodden of Dahl, or the isolationism of Mycogen, or the open temporary habitation of the Imperial sector or the university, this is middle class territory. This isn’t open or closed like the university and Mycogen, there are aspects that are open and some that are closed. It’s a balanced society. It’s not as poor as Dahl, nor as rich as the Imperial sector. Yet Seldon’s conclusions from those other sectors play out in how the mayoress loses her power: being close to her father’s power she is attracted to power, by not testing her power she doesn’t let the truth of the power change her life, she misinterprets the intentions of those around her, she illustrates the danger of living in the past and future at the expense of the present, and all of her failings are based on the psychology of humans more than the use of power. This section tends to confirm the earlier sections.

“It is not important what can or cannot be done. What is important is what people will or will not believe can be done.”

In this book, Asimov allows mystery. Where he usually explains all, here he leaves mysteries with the aircar, Dors’ nature as robot or not, and the inner workings of psychohistory. His tendency to point out that he has left mystery here unfortunately comes off heavyhanded, but the fact that there is mystery here adds to his repertoire as a writer in ways I appreciate. I like authors asking me to make up my own mind. I think the aircar was searching for him. Can I prove it? No. And that’s an important aspect of a book staying with me.

“Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing.”

In all, this is a good book. Not one I’ll be keen to reread again, as Asimov’s writing still seems aimed at a young adult audience in word choices, sentence structures, and heavy handedness. However, I liked this book more than I expected. I think Asimov is stronger as a short story author dealing with less ideas than a full novel typically relies on, and these short vignettes of Seldon’s journey across Trantor tend towards being like short stories. It’s an example of an author storytelling to his strengths.

“If people believe this, they would act on that belief. Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted.”

Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett

1. This novel is Terry Pratchett’s William Shakespearean tale—meaning that it heavily references Shakespeare, as well as themes, plots, and characters from his works. The themes of destiny, fate, tragedy, power, family, love, death, and supernatural occurrences come up throughout the book. Present are plots about succession, usurpation, a play-within-a-play, romance, and tragedy. The three witches from MacBeth are the eponymous main characters, while the fool from King Lear gets major billing as well. In some ways, most of the characters play on Shakespearean types.
—But this is more Pratchett’s Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead than his version of an Elizabethan play. In this way, a main theme of the novel is pointing out the differences between the mindset and life of people in Elizabethan times and in the present day. Pratchett pulls this off with his usual hilarity:

“She never sent the castle to sleep”, said Granny, “that’s just an old wife’s tale. She just stirred up time a little. It’s not as hard as people think, everyone does it all the time. It’s like rubber, is time, you can stretch it to suit yourself.”

Magrat was about to say: That’s not right, time is time, every second lasts a second, that’s its job. The she recalled weeks that had flown past and afternoons that had lasted forever. Some minutes had lasted hours, some hours had gone past so quickly she hadn’t been aware they’d gone past at all.

“But that’s just people’s perception, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes”, said Granny, “of course it is, it all is, what difference does that make?”

That’s a wonderful post-modern statement followed by a brilliant joke about it, set in Shakespearean times—this is fertile ground that others have gone over for many years. Yet, Pratchett finds points of agreement between the Elizabethans and us that help to understand their mindset, though the book is still firmly rooted in Pratchett’s contemporary philosophical emphases—for all of its fantasy window dressing. In other words, some of the themes of Shakespeare show up, but they’re all discussed by a variety of characters on the intellectual timeline from Elizabethan to today. Rather than feeling like a history of these themes, this book discusses this variety of viewpoints fairly and even-handedly. And the discussion is fascinating.
—But the main theme is witches. In his 1985 speech, “Why Gandalf Never Married”, Pratchett talks about how witches are perceived:

I'm talking here about the general tendency. There certainly isn't such a thing as a female wizard. Sorceress? Just a better class of witch. Enchantress? Just a witch with good legs. The fantasy world. in fact, is overdue for a visit from the Equal Opportunities people because, in the fantasy world, magic done by women is usually of poor quality, third-rate, negative stuff, while the wizards are usually cerebral, clever, powerful, and wise. Strangely enough, that's also the case in this world. You don't have to believe in magic to notice that. Wizards get to do a better class of magic, while witches give you warts.

[...]Of course I hardly need mention the true fairytale witches, as malevolent a bunch of crones as you could imagine. It was probably living in those gingerbread cottages. No wonder witches were always portrayed as toothless — it was living in a 90,000 calorie house that did it. You'd hear a noise in the night and it'd be the local kids, eating the doorknob. According to my eight-year-old daughter's book on Wizards, a nicely-illustrated little paperback available at any good bookshop, "wizards undid the harm caused by evil witches". There it is again, the recurrent message: female magic is cheap and nasty. But why is all this? Is there anything in the real world that is reflected in fantasy?

The curious thing is that the Western world at least has no very great magical tradition. You can look in vain for any genuine wizards, or for witches for that matter. I know a large number of people who think of themselves as witches, pagans or magicians, and the more realistic of them will admit that while they like to think that they are following a tradition laid down in the well-known Dawn of Time they really picked it all up from books and, yes, fantasy stories. I have come to believe that fantasy fiction in all its forms has no basis in anything in the real world. I believe that witches and wizards get their ideas from their reading matter or, before that, from folklore. Fiction invents reality.

And there it is, spelled out for his fans, the main theme of Equal Rites, and also the main theme here—though in a different way. Yes, he’s advocating for equal rights, but not as centrally or hamfistedly as in Equal Rites. He rebuilds fantasy in order to rebuild reality’s conception of it: he attempts to make a new reality about witches—he advocates for a new perception of witches as useful, boots-on-the-ground magic. And while witches do admit capabilities for sparkly lights magic, they treat it more along the lines of what Simon talks about in Equal Rites: magic that doesn’t need to be used because easier ways to do things exist. Headology, as Granny Weatherwax calls psychological warfare, is much less effort and more widely applicable than magic. As evidence, we see both: the mundane placebo effects of positive thinking, right action, and doing good despite traditions to the contrary; as well as powerful magic necessary to travel across time fifteen years into the future. But the focus intentionally stays on the day-to-day because of his wider project here. Instead of what he did in Equal Rites, by doing this recasting more fairly to a wide variety of viewpoints, Pratchett firmly roots this novel in rebuilding fantasy—and hopefully reality as well. He still gets his point across, but not in as preachy a way.

She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.

2. The characters are starting to fall in line too. Instead of Granny’s overbearing nature driving portions of the novel, like it did in Equal Rites, here she serves the story as a character. She does some amazing things that influence the plot heavily, but she still serves the plot here. For instance, in moving people fifteen years into the future, she advances the plot, but not in a way that only allows Pratchett to make more jokes with Granny. The time-leap is mostly for the plot itself. Yet this doesn’t make Granny any less interesting. Rather, it allows Pratchett to not mine his characters for as much content as he has in the past—I’m still interested in Granny at the end, rather than being slightly relieved that Rincewind goes away at the end of Sourcery. This is important to remember: well developed and explored characters help a story be understandable and memorable by readers, but when they are placed in service to the plot, it may be easier to retain interest in those characters, which let’s the reader still have some wonder left at the end of a book. This is the growth of Pratchett as a storyteller over his first books in the Discworld series.

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

3. The flipside of having the plot drive the novel is that the themes may jump around and end up shallow, the characters may be lost in service to the story. It’s a balancing act between plot and depth that needs to fit the novel as a whole. The question is whether Pratchett’s balance is more appropriate here or in his first couple of books, where the jokes run everything, or where the characters control it all, or where the themes take over—excluding Mort, of course. And I think this balance here shows storytelling strength, as I’ve hinted at above. He balances plot, characters, themes, and jokes evenly. Sure, in a delightful scene he’ll draw it out a bit to keep the jokes flowing, or he’ll skip through quick scenes to get the plot moving—but there are enough of both of these types of moments throughout the novel to make it seem balanced well. He doesn’t give preference to one over the others, in the whole.

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ...

Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from—hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated.

4. A temptation would be to adopt more of the poetry and cadence of Shakespeare, but Pratchett hasn’t here. He continues to write in his own way. It’s not all iambs, pentameters, and groundbreaking spelling. He doesn’t lose himself in his project, in other words. He is still Pratchett writing for us today. And that helps him communicate with his readers on one level, instead of narrowing his audience to Shakespeare nerds only.

I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.

5. And that’s Wyrd Sisters, a fantastic book that balances a lot of aspects of storytelling skillfully. It’s difficult to not look at the progression of Pratchett across his first novels. He seems to be trying a few different tactics and balances in storytelling in the first few books: the opening pair focus on the jokes and satire, the third tries to tell a character-driven story, the fourth balances things pretty well, the fifth puts the story too much in the front, while this sixth novel goes back to the balance Mort established and does it again. I hope he continues writing like this. And, because I like Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard quite a bit, I was delighted to read this for the first time. (Sorry about the lengthy quotes from Pratchett himself, but he said what he was interested in so well that I wanted to share his words too.)

Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It's the other way around.

Sourcery by Terry Pratchett

1. This titular pun gives a good sense of where Pratchett heads with the novel: if this were a movie, this would be the big, dumb, fun, action-comedy. This is a chase, this is a revenge story eight years in the making, this is powers growing exponentially. There's a harem, a magic carpet, some wizard fights, a rich caliph, a beautiful girl, a climactic battle in multiple parts, and the whole thing is an extended chase scene—this novel shows Pratchett demolishing pulp fiction, while simultaneously building up a good example of a pulp-based novel. It often references the Song of Solomon, One Thousand and One Nights, Kubla Khan, and Middle Eastern myth and tradition.

The truth isn't easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap and much more difficult to find.

2. In terms of a theme, this novel initially seems to be Pratchett returning to primarily lampooning fantasy tropes. But he continually plays on the action-adventure themes apparent in a lot of pulp fiction, so I believe his main theme is pulp.
—Supporting evidence is all over the place. Like in the way Pratchett uses deus ex machina plot resolutions—instead of simple escapes from tight spots by unforeshadowed powers, there’s always a twist to the escape: the carpet we half-expect because of the trope is unintentionally mounted upside down, the luggage is acting like a jilted lover when he stumbles upon and ends a wizard fight, the proto-hero is attempting to stop the Ice Giants when they stop because of the gods, all Rincewind has for the climactic battle is cynical compassion and a sock with a half-brick in it, etc. In one sense, this tactic shows Pratchett taking pulp and moving it one step closer to a rational reality—at least as rational as Discworld ever gets—showing him remaking the tropes as his own. While in another sense, they also point out the ridiculous in pulp plot resolutions. And those intertwined senses make Pratchett worthy of reading.
—On the other hand, there is no strong, central hero character, which pulp almost requires. So perhaps my conclusion on the theme is stretching things a bit. Maybe there isn’t a strong central theme outside of the base theme of the whole series—playing with the tropes of fantasy. Or perhaps this is the pulp novel that simply exists without a strong, violent lead—like Reservoir Dogs, the heist film without the heist. I like this idea.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said.

“No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,” said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. “Been completely at a loss my whole life.” He hesitated. “I think it’s called being human, or something.”

3. As for characters, Rincewind seems to exist for jokes, mostly. But also to stay out of the way of more interesting characters and provide a cynical, running commentary on them. Though the commentary is endearing, the Rincewind thing is starting to grow stale, and I felt a bit of relief that Rincewind ended up in the Dungeon Dimensions at the end, presumably unable to return.
—I think Coin was a real miss by Pratchett. His character arc reveals itself through others’ views of him and what others see him doing. We never see Coin and his father fighting, but we hear about it. We never get a sense of who Coin really is until the end, when Rincewind unlocks him. This could have been an insightful story about living up to the expectations of our parents versus finding our own path, about believing what our parents taught instead of thinking things through for ourselves, about a conflicted character trying to honor his father and also follow his conscious while coming of age—but the story is too caught up in action-adventure to delve into that and it’s all dropped on the reader at the end, with minimal exploration earlier in the novel.

Perhaps it would be simpler if you just did what you're told and didn't try to understand things.

—That said, Nijel as the hero-in-training, and Conina as the repressed, heroine hairdresser—are both wonderful characters. They’re full of internal conflicts and goals that they are constantly falling short of, while allowing their own strengths in other places to shine. It’s a tactic he has used well in the past, including with Rincewind, and one I hope he uses more often in the future of this series.

It's vital to remember who you really are. It's very important. It isn't a good idea to rely on other people or things to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong.

4. As a novel, this is better than the first two books in the series, but not as good as Mort. Plot-wise, it’s got a strong central theme—all of the parts relate back to the Sourcery war ongoing, but the scenes jump around in a series of short stories like the first two did. It’s a better novel because the short stories are all clearly related to the plot, and the characters carry-over, but it still left me not as enthusiastic about this novel as I am about Mort. Perhaps this attempt at synthesizing a novel with those earlier works results from the quick pace of publishing—this is his third novel published in seventeen months. Maybe my belief that the theme is pulp fiction comes from this jumping around. Any way you rationalize it though, this is not as good of a novel as Pratchett can write. It’s funny, but not his best.

As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.

5. And that’s about all I want to say about Sourcery. It’s a good novel, and I’d give it to a D&D player in a hearbeat because the plot echoes so many games that I’ve played. But that plot wears thin, the characters are inconsistent, and an ultimate theme may still be lacking. All of that’s okay in the end though: the jokes are good, as are the insights, and really, why are we still reading Pratchett if not for those aspects? By examining such a niche market so carefully in such a particular time, he reveals things about the world he lives in that other, more serious authors regularly miss.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist=s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.

This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.

Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one.

For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.

By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry.

Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

Cyteen by CJ Cherryh

1. Structurally, this book is perfect, and that surprises me because I don’t often find myself structuring a story like this—or even appreciating this type of structure. It’s certainly something that I will have to try. Okay, let me stop and explain this structure. This is a six hundred and eighty page novel, with only fourteen chapters—so, the chapters are very long, except the first. Each chapter is divided into sections by roman numerals, containing from three to seventeen sections per chapter—the first chapter having only three, the rest having at least ten. Each section spans from a page to well over twenty pages. Almost all of the sections only concern one situation or character, or two when a conversation is center stage. Late in the novel, the few sections that jump between places and characters within the section really ramp up the tension. Typically, each new section shifts the scene or characters from the last section: introducing a new scene, conversation or action, and characters. In this way, each section is essentially a mini-chapter: containing a scene or story that has a traditional arc or cliffhanger. Each section focuses narrowly and really digs into the specifics of the situation. This works well because so much happens—a lot goes on in this novel. But all of it is offered up in these small, digestible sections that focus clearly on the elements important to the scene. That focus and specificity is what makes this tactic of quick scenes work so well here. This gives me that “one-more-turn” feeling Civilization and other turn-based video games are famous for—I want to read one more section before sleeping. And did I ever: last night I was up until 2:45 before turning off the light.

2. This structure lets Cherryh pace the novel well in the sense that she spends unequal time on any section and because there are so many sections, it doesn’t feel unnatural. Rather, by having longer and shorter sections, she is able both to spend an appropriate amount of time on each section, and to ramp up tension. Specifically, I think of one section near the end where Jordan does something very important and his two sons don’t know of it while they spend eleven pages discussing similar things. Through each of those pages, I’m growing more and more anxious, waiting for the shoe to drop. By drawing that conversation out, Cherryh allows tension to build, but it still fits in her structure nicely. In short, she doesn’t equalize the section lengths and instead follows the scene of each section to determine their lengths. And by spending an appropriate amount of time on each section, the whole is paced well.

3. Cherryh focuses each section through the old adage of never show the monster—in other words, do not over-describe. The theory here may be twofold: one, the reader is going to fill in more effective details from their own mind, and two, not all of the details influence the story, or are important to it, so by only giving the interesting details that are influential, the reader is not reading unnecessary fluff and the author can get into the important parts of the story right away. Cherryh follows this tactic by giving a couple interesting details, sparking the reader’s imagination, but then moving on to the action and letting the reader fill in the blanks. This is how she builds the world: slowly laying down details throughout the whole book—Novgorad is only really understood as a functioning city in the final chapter—and by aggregation of details within the reader’s mind, trusting the reader to connect the dots. And this engrosses and engages me. When a word like pedways is first dropped, I’m curious and I file it away until she explains it later—showing Justin in the Novgorod pedways in the last chapter, explaining both what they are and how people interact with them. It’s a series of clues that start to form a startlingly complete picture of the world. But she never just explains the whole thing: she never shows the monster, simply shows bits and pieces and lets the reader fill in the blanks in their own minds. She doesn’t just apply this tactic to the world though—it’s also applied to experiences and characters: Grant is tall and handsome and red haired and elegant, beyond that, nothing is known of Grant’s appearance. And those four descriptors are more than most characters have. Sam is buff and tall, Amy is long-faced, Maddy is shaped lustily—most characters, even main ones like Justin, Jordan, and Ari, only have one or two descriptors of their physical appearance. And this description tactic works well because it focuses the novel on their personalities, and let’s me fill in their looks from my own opinions and experiences. Brilliant description throughout.

4. The description works superbly except, of course, the eight page intro-info-dump. But even that I find myself sympathizing with and not being annoyed by because her Alliance-Union universe is unique and the setting for many of her books. In order to get the reader understanding important context and backstory, she uses the intro-info-dump. Most of her books appear to not be sequels of each other—this isn’t a series like A Song of Ice and Fire where each book directly follows the last—but some information is still helpful to the reader and lets Cherryh get to the story quickly. I still think Iain M Banks’ tactic of integrating the context into the story works better, and Banks’ Culture series is like this series in that any book can be read first in the series. But Cherryh does the best intro-info-dump I’ve ever read, because she applies this focusing tactic to the information given in the dump itself. It’s good here, and I think I may now see why so many authors utilize the intro-info-dump.

5. The character building is astoundingly effective. She describes the main characters through conversations and actions and internal monologue—though only some of the main characters receive space to monologue to themselves. Like Banks, Cherryh uses all three tactics on the main characters, two of the three on the secondary ones, and only one of the three on the tertiary ones. This effectively lets the reader know who the main characters are almost at the start of the novel. But Cherryh is incredible at giving each their own voice and responses, and keeping those consistent throughout without making characters boring or predictable. This also helps inform the reader the extent of Justin’s lack of balance when he does break from his usual cast of responses in the final chapter. I wish I could figure out exactly what she does to keep her characters so distinct and unique—even with Ari Senior and Ari Junior, who are so close to the same person—because I want to be as good as Cherryh. To take the example of the two Aris, first, Cherryh allows Ari Junior to have contextual differences from Ari Senior. Second, she allows these contextual differences to affect Junior in honest ways that make her different than Senior fundamentally, as shown through her actions—a desire to draw together and protect rather than separate and rule over, a willingness to attach herself and risk her own safety in order to help herself feel less lonely, et cetera. And third, these changes cause consequences that she has to deal with. In other words, Cherryh separates her characters through differences in knowledge, those differences causing different reactions and goals, and those goals and reactions integrating with other characters’ goals and reactions to cause consequences. Sort of like real life. And that’s really the strength of Cherryh’s characterization: she has them well defined and consistent in her own mind and stays true to that within the novel; and the characters seem realistic to real life—they have a few contrasting ideas that give them tensions, but not so many that they’re entirely philosophically inconsistent. Again, like most people. This is breathtaking character building.

6. The theme here discusses change over time. In a sense, it’s a study of "the sequel": that second generation, or third, past the founding of a culture or government or settlement. Through this study she discusses what affects a culture over the long term, and how people react to those changes. This discussion ties into technology, inhospitable space travel and communication, and long-term planning with unknown variables. For example, a quote from Ari Senior, addressing Ari Junior:

The human diaspora, the human scattering, is the problem, but Centrism is not the answer. The rate of growth that sustains technological capacity that makes civilization possible is now exceeding the rate of cultural adaptation, and distance is exceeding our communications. The end will become more and more like the beginning, scattered tribes of humans across an endless plain, in pointless conflict—or isolate stagnation—unless we can condense experience, encapsulate it, replicate it deliberately in CIT deep-sets—unless psychogenesis can work on a massive scale, unless it can become sociogenesis and exceed itself as I hope you will exceed me. Human technology as an adaptive response of our species has passed beyond manipulation of the environment; beyond the manipulation of our material selves; beyond the manipulation of mind and thought; now, having brought us out of the cradle it must modify our responses to the universe at large. Human experience is generating dataflow at a rate greater than individuals can comprehend or handle; and the rate is still increasing. We must begin compression: we must compress experience in the same way human history compresses itself into briefer and briefer instruction—and events on which all history depended rate only a line in passing mention.

Ultimately only the wisdom is important, not the event which produced it. But one must know accurately what those things are.

One must pass the right things on. Experience is brutal and an imprecise teacher at best.

And the time at which all humanity will be within reach, accessible to us—is so very brief.

You’ll see more than I can, young Ari.

This theme is quite applicable in our day-to-day lives. Long-term planning is always a crap-shoot and our best guesses can be completely invalidated by a technological leap, or a cultural upheaval. Because of this, Cherryh argues for doing the best we can, but also accepting what comes and being able to react and change. Contentment with one's lot in life, but still striving to better oneself and the world. She shows this through her characters.

7. Ultimately, this novel is spectacular. It doesn’t rely upon violence or sex—though there is some of that in there—it focuses on psychology. It becomes a fascinating character study of the main characters and cultures in a way that mirrors the world. Written by a Spokane author before Ruby Ridge, she definitely tapped into something of the time’s cultural consciousness in this novel in a deep way. To say that I love this book doesn’t seem to be enough. I wish I had written this book. Yeah, I’d change the intro-info-dump, and I’d tack another section or two of reflection onto the end. But even these things work with Cherryh’s voice and context. I feel so much loss at not having read Cherryh before 2016—if I had this influencing my life earlier, I would be a much more skilled writer today.

[Added 12 May 2016. 8. I now remember my main complaint: she starts out by saying over and over again how close Grant and Justin are, and how important Jordan is to them both—on a personal level. But she doesn't show this significance for far too long and I ended up having to take this on faith for what felt like a couple of hundred pages without seeing it. It was a case of too much telling and not enough showing. Which is odd because the rest of the book shows well. But eventually I understood their relationship with the secret language between the two and references they shared that set them apart from others. I just wish I would've seen it earlier.]

The Player of Games by Iain M Banks

1. This novel successfully does so much: it’s a great space opera, and great science fiction. The novel doesn’t stray too far from space opera itself:

Space opera was typically defined [at a panel from this year’s worldcon] as exploring human emotions appropriate for opera, the story and writing serving to foster a sense of wonder, a large physical scale, a broad time period, and adventure and drama.

This one nails the emotions, the physical scale, the adventure and drama, but lacks a broad time period—it is a broad time period for the main character, but not in terms of the Culture or the empire they’re dealing with in this novel. It also seems to have some of the wonder, but not as much as the last novel’s descriptions. An example of Banks’ wondrous writing here:

It was not unusual to find distinct equatorial bulges on once fast-spinning planets, and Echronedal's was comparatively slight, though sufficient to produce a single unbroken continental ribbon of land lying roughly between the planet's tropics, the rest of the globe lying beneath two great oceans, ice-capped at the poles. What was unique, in the experience of the Culture as well as the Empire, was to discover a wave of fire forever moving round the planet on the continental landmass.

Taking about half a standard year to complete its circumnavigation, the fire swept over the land, its fringes brushing the shores of the two oceans, its wave-front a near-straight line, its flames consuming the growth of the plants which had flourished in the ashes of the previous blaze. The whole land-based ecosystem had evolved around this never-ending conflagration; some plants could only sprout from beneath the still-warm cinders, their seeds jolted into development by the passing heat; other plants blossomed just before the fire arrived, bursting into rapid growth just before the flames found them, and using the fire-front's thermals to transport their seeds into the upper atmosphere, to fall back again, somewhere, on to the ash. The land-animals of Echronedal fell into three categories; some kept constantly on the move, maintaining the same steady walking pace as the fire, some swam round its oceanic boundaries, while other species burrowed into the ground, hid in caves, or survived through a variety of mechanisms in lakes or rivers.

Birds circled the world like a jetstream of feathers.

The blaze remained little more than a large, continuous bush-fire for eleven revolutions. On the twelfth, it changed.

This is good wondrous writing, but I want more of it: more unusual descriptions of unusual places that manage to be legible. This novel is not just great space opera, it’s also great science fiction and fiction. The main character, Gergeh, changes fundamentally throughout the novel, but does so in a believable, honest way. This attempts literature and, in so doing, becomes that rare breed of science fiction that is a clear step above the rest.

2. Banks’ sentence structures are wonderfully varied. He clearly ups his writing game here. Let me give an example:

So, instead of the usual tension surrounding the final game, there was an atmosphere more like that of an exhibition match. Only the two contestants were treating it as a real contest.

Gurgeh was immediately impressed by Nicosar's play. The Emperor didn't stop rising in Gurgeh's estimation; the more he studied the apex's play the more he realised just how powerful and complete an opponent he was facing. He would need to be more than lucky to beat Nicosar; he would need to be somebody else. From the beginning he tried to concentrate on not being trounced rather than actually defeating the Emperor.

Nicosar played cautiously most of the time; then, suddenly, he'd strike out with some brilliant flowing series of moves that looked at first as though they'd been made by some gifted madman, before revealing themselves as the masterstrokes they were; perfect answers to the impossible questions they themselves posed.

Gurgeh did his best to anticipate these devastating fusions of guile and power, and to find replies to them once they'd begun, but by the time the minor games were over, thirty days or so before the fire was due, Nicosar had a considerable advantage in pieces and cards to carry over to the first of the three great boards. Gurgeh suspected his only chance was to hold out as best he could on the first two boards and hope that he might pull something back on the final one.

As the above passage indicates, Banks is not afraid of long, complex sentences. What I like best about the writing is how Banks allows complexity in his sentences—he allows interesting sentences. But he still keeps it all legible and doesn’t rely solely upon structural sentence complexity: he’s also not afraid of short, declarative sentences. It’s a good balance that allows those long, complex structures to be savored, while keeping them from overwhelming the writing.

3. However, the voice still lets it down: beautiful passages are too few and far between to leave me pleased with the writing itself. Mostly, the whole improves, in terms of the writing, but he doesn’t yet achieve a consistent beauty and experimentation to allow the novel to speak on a consistently literary plane. In other words, he brings the whole quality of his writing up on average, but that just means it’s more samey: the peaks are no higher, and he still doesn’t allow a consistent poetic beauty to invest the word choices. The two lengthy portions that I have already quoted show that Banks’ word choices are a weakness. Let me quote three of the better-written portions for contrast:

'Don't be so pompous,' she told him. Her short brown hair moved in the same wind which blew the tops from the falling waves and sent the resulting spray curling back out to sea. She stooped to where some pieces of a shattered missile lay half buried in the dune, picked them up, blew sand grains off the shining surfaces, and turned the components over in her hands.

+++

'All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine sentience societies.

'The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attributes of the pieces, is inevitably to shackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.'

+++

'These stars,' Worthil said - the green-coloured stars, at least a couple of thousand suns, flashed once - 'are under the control of what one can only describe as an empire. Now…' The drone turned to look at him. The little machine lay in space like some impossibly large ship, stars in front of it as well as behind it. 'It is unusual for us to discover an imperial power-system in space. As a rule, such archaic forms of authority wither long before the relevant species drags itself off the home planet, let alone cracks the lightspeed problem, which of course one has to do, to rule effectively over any worthwhile volume.

'Every now and again, however, Contact disturbs some particular ball of rock and discovers something nasty underneath. On every occasion, there is a specific and singular reason, some special circumstance which allows the general rule to go by the board. In the case of the conglomerate you see before you - apart from the obvious factors, such as the fact that we didn't get out there until fairly recently, and the lack of any other powerful influence in the Lesser Cloud - that special circumstance is a game.'

In these three portions, the word choices are adequate. Nothing spectacular, but stepping out from that pedestrian level Banks relies on throughout the rest—as shown in the other examples of writing quoted. It seems like he took a step back here: I remember the first Culture novel having better word choices than this. I’m hoping the next Culture novel will show improvement in word choices.

4. The real strength of the novel, and the real part where Banks progresses as a writer, is in the pacing. His pacing is perfect. Banks ignores downtime, brushing in broad strokes to inform the reader both why he’s not dealing with it, and what happened of note. For instance, most of the trip to the Empire of Azat is brushed over: Banks covers these two years quickly and focuses on Gergeh, the main character, coming to grips with his task of the game Azat, which is not “downtime”, but the continuation of the plot of the book—Banks doesn’t delve into lengthy descriptions of the travel, tech, or spaceship, but focuses on what is important to his plot and character. Let me briefly catalog the parts and their relative lengths to explain why I believe Banks’ pacing is so good:
• He begins with a lengthy portion explaining who Gergeh is, and what the culture is like at this point. In order to do this he explains and gives examples of what Gergeh cares about. Through this portion, Gergeh changes into what the Culture needs him to be. This first part takes up 31.85% of the novel’s length.
• He then travels to the empire of Azat. This is a short trip, distilling who the new Gergeh is and his insane focus on the game Azat. This is a quick section, 5.87% of the novel’s length.
• Then Gergeh is on Eä, introducing the empire and playing his first few games. Here he changes first into an admirer of the Empire, then an enemy of it through his experiences. Banks spends 37.61% of the book here.
• Then Gergeh travels to the fire planet, Echronedal, and plays his last few games. Here Gergeh changes from an enemy to a superior of the Empire, and struggles with his realization of that. This takes up 22.57% of the novel’s length.
• The closing part is fairly short, 2.65% of the length, dealing with the aftermath of the final Azat game, Gergeh’s return to his home, and Banks tying up all the loose threads that drove the first part of the novel. Here Gergeh tries to reintegrate into the Culture after all of the changes he has gone through.
This structure successfully portions off the novel and paces it perfectly. Within this broader framework, Banks takes more time with important parts, usually breaking them up to an initial scene, then a reflective scene later on to drive home the import. He also keeps the whole thing moving very well: every plot and thread adds to the overall. In the first Culture novel, Banks spent a lot of time on things that didn’t end up mattering to the overall plot—those aspects added to the world-building alone, not the character or overarching plot. Here, that problem is gone. Completely gone. I am quite impressed with how well the story is told and paced. He learned from the first novel and really progressed as a writer. This is captivating to read because it’s told so well.

5. In combination with this wonderful pacing is Banks’ focus. The first novel sent the protagonist off on random, inconsequential adventures that served the story only in so far as they flushed out the world uselessly. But here Banks stays on-task and creates a wonderful story where everything matters to the overarching plot or to the characters. Other than the introductions at the start of the first four parts, and the closing words from that same narrator, there is really no mis-step. Everything matters to the characters and story. Every portion serves to build Gergeh or the import of the plot. This focus is wonderful. After the first novel, I kept reading this book and wondering when the other shoe would fall. It never did. The focus is spot on.

6. The theme of this novel is the effect of outside forces on a person. Gergeh begins vaguely dissatisfied and uncomfortable in life, lacking any real motivations. As he gains a motivation from the context of his world and personal experiences, a dramatic adventure, he quickly finds that his motivation perverts into inappropriateness and has to reset himself to find his true motivation again—this grand, dramatic adventure gives him meaning in life and keeps him sane. Throughout it all, he is being deceived consistently and wholly. He often realizes this and breaks through a veil, but doesn’t suspect that his new truth is just another veil. But the fact of being deceived doesn’t matter, it’s what he does with what’s given to him and done to him that matters. The theme is this sense that humans need to step outside of their personal comfort zones at times to fully live life, go on a grand adventure and allow it to change them, but they need to be careful that the changes those uncomfortable experiences impose on them are properly integrated into their whole being. Otherwise it will really screw somebody up. This complex, good theme feels honest to my day-to-day life.

7. Overall, this is a good book and a good read. As a novel on it’s own, it's good: it shows off great storytelling and attempts to communicate something about humanity and our understanding of ourselves. It seems to almost achieve this literature attempt, but the writing quality lets it down from that plane, even though the writing is better here than in the first Culture novel. This book does not need any other Culture story or knowledge to be understood—it is standalone. The focus and the pacing are clear strengths here, while the sentence structures are wonderful. Consider Phlebas doesn’t even compare to this: this is a good story well-told, that was a mess. I was very surprised by how good this one was, based on how bad that one was.

Collected Sonnets by Edna Saint Vincent Millay

1. Her early sonnets are often emotionally descriptive of those emotional outbursts we can come to regret. But rationality and long-term context often intercede in the volta to frame the emotions. Because of the emotion in the first part, this can create relief in the second, a wry reflection on the moment and thoughts explained in the first. It comes off somewhat like my emo juvenalia that I have burned ages ago.

2. Many of the poems in the first half of the book concern lovers and ex-lovers—always separated by the death of one of the people, or the death of love itself. This becomes a bit repetitive because it is hard for me to stay on such a keyed up emotional plane for that long.  In the second half she seems to start using sonnets rather than being used by them, and I think it's generally an improvement.

3. It is hard to stay on this heightened emotional plane, especially when the language is often wooden, ridiculous, and overwrought. Reading just the first lines in the back of the book makes me burst out laughing: "Count them unclean, these tears that turn no mill," "A wagon stopped before the house; she heard," "Gazing upon him now, severe and dead," "That Love at length should find me out and bring," "Night is my sister, and how deep in love."

4. But there are still times when a poem or two really works—in this weird, stilted and archaic language that she often uses. For instance, on page 170, she uses the volta to shift time, not the focus of the poem: a tiger prowls around the house at night, but then, when the sky begins to lighten, the tone shifts from forthcoming doom to hope as the volta moves the plot along in time. This is fantastic!

5. Her narrative sonnets and narrative sonnet sequences are good. I think an interesting part was the closing sonnet sequence, "Epitaph for the Race of Man". Is this some sort of Arthur Clarke science fiction sonnet sequence? Most of the poems in this sequence were poor, but I was intrigued by the attempt. In her sonnet sequences she often uses the volta to progress the plot, meaning that many of these poems have two plot points, two actions within each poem. This shows something that I never suspected—the sonnet can encourage narrative poetry. This is something that I will use because it's engaging as all get out. It allows the poet a couple of opportunities per sonnet to shift the speed of the action.

6. Her end-stopped end-rhymes are often annoying. But when she uses enjambed end-rhymes, it works better. I think it might partially be her choice of rhyming words, but it's probably my own fatigue at end-rhymed poems, which isn't fair to her. She is willing to experiment syllabically, but not with end-rhymes. And that's disappointing, because when she does experiment it stands out, and I wanted more experimentation and less end-rhyming.

7. I most enjoyed the poems on page 60, 100, 101, 112, 140, 154, and 170.