The deadline for Hugo Award nominations is shockingly early this year: midnight (PST) February 28th. Hence, I feel ill-prepared to vote, notwithstanding that, for a change, I’ve read several eligible novels. (Short fiction is hopeless, as usual.) FWIW, here they are, alphabetically by author, with comments of varying cogency:
■ Combining politics with future history (and more than a shred of outright fantasy) is Sins of the Assassin, the middle volume of Robert Ferrigno’s trilogy set in a near-future America dominated by Islam. Prayers for the Assassin led off with a not-too-far-fetched scenario, in which the Moslem religion spread from celebrity culture to most of the United States (the South, Utah and Las Vegas being conspicuous holdouts).
Of course, since Mr. Ferrigno is a thriller writer and true to the conventions of his genre, he also had to create an archvillain whose fantastical manipulations drive the plot. In Sins, the thriller is more to the forefront than in its predecessor. Most of the action takes place outside the Islamic Republic, in the “Bible Belt”, a fractured state that shows, I think, what a regime distilled from fundamentalist Christianity might look like in reality (ramshackle and semi-libertarian), as opposed to secularists’ self-induced nightmares. The threats confronting the hero are stranger than in the opening volume and his escapes more astonishing. At the end, he has uncovered the secret of a super-weapon, while the Islamic Republic has fallen into the hands of a clique even less rational than its former “moderate” rulers. The climax of volume three will star, I foresee, a suicide bomber of truly massive ambitions. (See “A Return to Islamic America – And a Visit to Its Rival” for my earlier comments on this book.)
■ Marsbound by Joe Haldeman is a distinctly Heinleinesque variation on the popular theme of settling our neighboring planet. For a few pages, it is so Heinleinesque as to call up memories of Podkayne of Mars: The narrator is an adolescent girl discontented with her family, particularly her brilliant, irresponsible younger brother. She does not, happily, develop into a reprise of the least successful Heinlein heroine, and not just because she shrugs off her virginity early on. She learns and grows. At the beginning, she is bound for Mars. At the end, she is Marsbound in a different sense. In between, she discovers the Red Planet’s dangerous secrets and saves mankind from destruction. If the Hugo nominators have any yearning for “old-fashioned” SF brought up to date, this book will get one of their nods. It will definitely be on my ballot.
■ The facile take on Terry Pratchett’s Nation would be that it is about loss, forgetfulness, survival and hope, and to relate its themes to its author’s personal tragedies, except that it would then sound solemn and preachy, which it is not. Any profundity emerges unforcedly from a brisk tale of two youngsters stranded in the wake of multiple global and personal catastrophes. Each is a lone survivor: Mau (a boy caught in between souls) of a tsunami that wiped out his tiny Polynesian clan (the “Nation” of the title), Ermintrude (an upper class Victorian girl who loathes her given name) of a mutiny and shipwreck. (“Polynesian” and “Victorian” are approximations. The world of the story is not precisely our own.)
To keep their lives going and cope with various helpful and unhelpful personages who show up at their island refuge, this naive pair must inter alia learn each other’s languages, milk pigs, practice death, argue with silent gods and noisy ghosts, rediscover the secret of the Nation's “god anchors”, repel a flotilla of cannibals, and make peace with the British Empire. The odds and gods are overwhelmingly against them, but ingenuity, perseverance and a peculiar kind of nonbelieving faith bring them through to a suitable, if not conventionally happy, ending.
While not set in Discworld (for plot reasons that are obvious in retrospect), Nation fits the Pratchett template: a rather farcical background, a quip-infused text, and a narrative as carefully crafted as in any dead-serious novel. Humor is never an excuse for sloppy writing. There may, sadly, be few more books from the prolific Pratchett pen. This one, happily, maintains the very high standards of its predecessors.
■ Readers with no interest in how Platonic philosophy relates to the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics may not fully appreciate Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and will certainly wish that the characters talked less. The first 50 or 100 pages are slow going (nothing unusual for a thick Stephenson book); after that, even the non-philosophical may be captivated.
Anathem’s world is not, but is very like, our own. The most conspicuous difference is that philosophy, mathematics and the pure sciences are sharply separated from the “practical” world. Their savants dwell in secluded “maths”, from which they emerge to mingle with layfolk for only ten days out of each one, ten, hundred or thousand years, depending on the math’s particular discipline. This arrangement has been stable for millennia. In Anathem, the separation breaks down, as abstract concepts become palpable in the world of senses. Compared to some of the author’s previous works, this one is straightforward. The plot builds to a comprehensible resolution that derives logically from the philosophical discourse. The opening segment’s strange jargon, peculiar social arrangements, odd dialogues and slow story progression should be endured for the sake of what is to come. To my mind, this is the best Stephenson since The Diamond Age.
■ Though I doubt (indeed, more than doubt) it was the author’s intention, The Man With the Iron Heart would be a strong contender for “Right-Wing Novel of the Year” if such an award existed (and I do not advocate establishing one). Harry Turtledove, our most prolific chronicler of “alternate history”, imagines that the dying Hitlerite regime lived on as a post-war resistance movement. Historically, its plans along that line were dashed by Nazi infighting and ineptitude. To alter the course of history, the competent, ruthless Reinhard Heydrich is allowed to survive his real-world assassination (May 1942) and set up a well-organized underground network to conduct guerrilla operations against the Allied occupation.
The parallels to the American liberation of Iraq and its aftermath are explicit. At one point, Rep. Fortney Stark’s loathsome quip that American troops were being sent to Iraq “to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement” is put into the mouth of a Republican Congressman, speaking of President Truman and Germany. The controversy is a mirror image of our world’s: Isolationist right-wingers want to withdraw from a seeming quagmire; Harry Truman and other liberal Democrats are determined to win.
If the novel were just an inversion of the Iraq debate as it stood about a year ago, it would be a thought-provoking squib and nothing more. What sustains its 500-plus pages is the careful detail of thrust and counter-thrust. In Germany, Heydrich’s “werewolves” devise new ways to disconcert the Allies, and a diverse group of American and Soviet intelligence officers try to come up with counter-measures. On the home front, an Indiana housewife’s grief at her son’s death touches off a powerful anti-war movement. In each case, while the Iraqi turmoil was the inspiration, the development is true to the period. The Nazi holdouts are not a copy of Al-Qa’eda in Iraq. Their tactics, and the Allied responses, are plausible as a sequel to World War II. Similarly, Diana McGraw is not the demented Cindy Sheehan. She is an earnest Hoosier of the 1940’s, with the virtues and faults of that species. Her story is, in a way, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with a more cynical (or realistic) appreciation of the consequences of the politics of good intentions.
One cautionary note for those readers who (like me) regret the passing of the era when Norman Mailer had to euphemize the obscenities in The Naked and the Dead: The principal characters in this book are toughened soldiers, for whom “f— you” is as commonplace as Caroline Kennedy’s “you know”. (The Midwestern heroine, by contrast, thinks that “darn” is pretty strong language.) The dialogue is as awash in vulgarity as, well, a middle school playground. On the redeeming side, the obscenities, especially those employed by the Russians, are unfamiliar and interesting. If we can’t go back to mid-century Puritanism, the next best thing is imaginative foulness.
■ After the Downfall is another Turtledove opus. (Well, he writes about two a week, so how can one not read a couple a year?) Like The Man with the Iron Heart, it begins at the end of World War II, this time featuring a Wehrmacht officer magically catapulted out of the ruins of Berlin into a parallel universe. The setting seems, at first, like a reification of the Hitlerite world view: tall, blonde warriors presided over by a living goddess subjugating swarthy, primitive dwarves. Of course, that isn’t the way it really is, and the gap separating Captain Hasso Pemsel’s assumptions from reality is perhaps made a little too evident a little too early. The book would be more challenging if the hero were more of a diehard Nazi in the Heydrich vein. As matters stand, it’s a pleasant, fast moving story that will win no awards but is definitely worth the reader’s bheer money.
■ Gene Wolfe’s An Evil Guest is partly a show biz novel redolent of Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve, partly an homage to H. P. Lovecraft, partly a super-scientific thriller. A century or so in the future, a soi disant wizard, who may simply be adept at manipulating otherworldly physics, metamorphosizes never-was actress Cassie Casey into the most desirable woman in the world. Pygmalion falls in love with his Galatea. So does the world’s richest man. The ensuing intrigues waft the heroine about the world to her destiny in sunken R’lyeh while revealing that the universe is a strange amalgam of illusions. “Many worlds” is a popular hook for SF these days. Gene Wolfe puts them all into our own universe.
Now I must sign off and start desperately reading for next year.
Further reading: NESFA 2008 Hugo Recommendations
I would also suggest the LiveJournal Hugo Recommendations Community as a place where people are encouraged to post recommendations throughout the year and whose "tagging" system helps you pull the recommendations back when it comes time to stare at your ballot (like me) and say, "Now what did I read/see/watch this past year?"
Posted by: Kevin Standlee | Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 10:19 AM