What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  Give him a try, you’ll be glad you did.

  JUNE 11, 2009

  59. The Net of a Million Lies: Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep

  Any one of the ideas in A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) would have kept an ordinary writer going for years. For me it’s the book that does everything right, the type example of what science fiction does when it works.

  There’s a universe where not only technology but also the very ability to think increases with distance from the galactic core, and the universe is divided into “zones of thought.” In the “Slow Zone” you can’t have true AI or FTL. In the “Beyond” you can have those things, but nothing that takes more than human-level intelligence. In the “Transcend” you have singularities and godlike beings, and above that, who knows? There’s an ancient godlike evil known as the Blight lurking at the edge of the Transcend, the level where it’s possible to become a Power. Humans poking around wake it up and trigger a catastrophe. Their escaping ship, which might contain the seeds of the Blight’s destruction, rushes to the bottom of the Beyond, where it lands on a planet where the inhabitants, the Tines, are pack minds, at a medieval tech level. Meanwhile, Ravna, a human librarian at Relay, and Pham, a human rescued from the Slowness and patched together by a Power, start a rescue mission.

  You could have lots of great stories set in the Beyond, with its solar systems full of uneasily co-existing alien civilizations. You could have stories set in the Slowness—Vinge later outdid himself with one, A Deepness in the Sky. You could have long series of books set on the Tines world, especially about first contact with them when humans get there. The interstellar newsgroups could themselves have sustained trilogies. What Vinge gives us of his universe is like what Tolkien says of Middle Earth, “an account … of its end and passing away before its beginning and middle had been told.” A Fire Upon the Deep is the story of an absolutely fascinating universe and of how it came to an end.

  The book alternates between the big events happening in space and the small events happening on Tines World. It never fails to leave one story at a point where you want more of it, and never fails to be enthralling with the other story. There are two stories on the planet—Jefri and Johanna are separated and dealing with two entirely opposed groups of aliens. Tines World has nations and climates and history and philosophies, as well as fascinatingly bizarre aliens. And for those aliens, the human language, Samnorsk, and human history and technology as revealed by the child’s toy dataset they have from the human children, is new and universe changing, while we know that humans are trivially unimportant in the larger scale of things and that Samnorsk is a minor unimportant language. There’s a good cognitive dissonance with that.

  Vinge does really well at making the wider universe seem real, even though we don’t see all that much of it. We have what Ravna takes for granted, and what she has to explain to Pham. We see the newsgroups and get to know some of the posters—like the Aphranti Hegemony (“Death to Vermin”) and Sandor at the Zoo. We see a little of Relay and a little of Harmonious Repose, but it’s surprising how much detail is evoked with so little. The Beyond feels solid, with its layers of translation and weird aliens—ones that walk on tusks, and ones like potted plants, and Twirlip of the Mists, who sounds demented but is always right.

  He does a lot with evocative names and casually mentioned references that get nailed down by being referenced from different directions—for example the planet from which humanity emerged from the Slowness, Njora, is mentioned in the context of the fairy tale “Age of Princesses” several times by the kids on Tines World comparing the Tines tech, and there’s a reference to the fountain flowing on Straum to say humanity would never forget its origins, not to mention the Straumli forests with mechanical copies of Njoran wildlife, and then on the ship (the Out of Band II, great name) when Pham makes the illusion of a castle Ravna thinks that in the Age of Princesses the castles were in tropical swamps so they didn’t have fireplaces. That’s just one tiny thing, but everything is as well sourced as this, and all the information is delicately inclued, dropped in smoothly. The details build up a picture that’s consistent and interesting, and some of the details are major clues you can’t recognise the first time through.

  I read A Fire Upon the Deep from the library pretty much as soon as it was published in 1992. I was already looking out for Vinge; I’d enjoyed The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime a few years before, though I was very impressed with how much better this was. I bought the Millennium paperback I now own as soon as it came out in 1993. So I’d read it at least twice before I got online in May 1994. The thing about that was that when I saw Usenet, I immediately recognised it from Vinge’s “Net of a Million Lies.” I can’t thank Vinge enough for educating me in how Usenet worked so that I could plunge right in and not make too much of a fool of myself. It’s weird that blogs, which didn’t come along until much later, work like the net in Ender’s Game, which I first read on New Year’s Day 1986.

  A Fire Upon the Deep remains a favourite and a delight to re-read, absorbing even when I know exactly what’s coming. Deepness is a better novel, but A Fire Upon the Deep is more fun.

  JUNE 14, 2009

  60. The worst book I love: Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday

  On a miserably wet Saturday morning in 1982, when I was young and desolate, I went into the library, as I always did, without very much hope. As I reached the New Books section there, entirely unexpectedly, was Friday, a new Heinlein book. It was not just as if the sun had come out, it was as if the sun had come out and it was an F-type star and I was suddenly on a much nicer planet.

  Friday is one of Heinlein’s “late period” novels. The general rule if you haven’t read any Heinlein is to start with anything less than an inch thick. But of his later books, I’ve always been fond of Friday. It’s the first-person story of Friday Jones, courier and secret agent. She’s a clone (in the terms of her world an “artificial person”) who was brought up in a crèche and who is passing as human. It’s a book about passing, about what makes you human. I think it was the first female out-and-out action hero that I read. It’s also a book about being good at some things but with a large hole in your confidence underneath. No wonder I lapped it up when I was seventeen!

  What’s good about it now? The whole “passing” bit. The cloning, the attitudes to cloning, the worry about jobs. The economy. It has an interesting future world, with lots of colonized planets, but most of the action taking place on Earth—that’s surprisingly unusual. There’s a Balkanized US and a very Balkanized world come to that, but with huge multinational corporations who have assassination “wars” and civil wars. There’s a proto-Net, with search paths, that doesn’t have any junk in it—that’s always the failure mode of imagining the Net. It was easy enough to figure out you could sit at home and connect to the Library of Congress, but harder to imagine Wikipedia editing wars and all the baroque weirdness that is the Web.

  Friday’s point of view works for me as someone with severely shaken confidence, and as always with Heinlein it’s immersive. Reading this now I can feel myself sinking right in to Friday without any problem. There’s a complex multi-adult family, not unusual in late Heinlein, but this one disintegrates in a messy divorce, which is unusual and well done as well. And it’s a fun read, even if it’s ultimately unsatisfying.

  What’s wrong with it is that it doesn’t have a plot.

  Even at seventeen I couldn’t love it uncritically. I can’t think of any book for which I have expended more energy trying to fix the end in my head. It’s practically a hobby. For years I would tell myself I’d re-read it and just stop when the good bit stops and skip the end—though I have to say I’ve never managed it. Heinlein’s ability to write a sentence that makes you want to read the next sentence remains unparalleled. But the book as a whole is almost like Dhalgren. Every sentence and every paragraph and page and chapter lead on to the next, but it’s just one thing after another, there’s no real connection going on. It
has no plot, it’s a set of incidents that look as if they’re going somewhere and don’t ever resolve, just stop. It doesn’t work as an emotional plot about Friday growing up, though it’s closer to working as that than as anything else. (Even as that—well, I really have problems with the way she forgives the rapist, if that’s supposed to be maturity.) It really doesn’t work on any of the other levels you can look at it on.

  Heinlein wrote about how he wrote in several places—Expanded Universe and some letters in Grumbles from the Grave. From this it’s quite clear that he worked hard on the background and the characters but that he let his backbrain do the plotting. There are comments like, “There were Martians in The Door into Summer for a few pages until I realised they didn’t belong so I took them out.” (Paraphrased from memory.) As he got older, it’s clear that he lost some grip on that ability to tell what didn’t belong. Friday is an example where you can see this in action. It sets things up that it never invokes, most notably Olympia and the connections back to the novella “Gulf.” It starts hares both in the human plot and the wider plot, and loses track of them. You can see how he did it, and you can imagine how he would have pulled it together, and what he might have gone back and fixed.

  Even as it is, I love it for its moments of clarity and beauty. I wouldn’t be without it. I taught myself almost all I know about how to plot by lying awake trying to fix the end of Friday in my head.

  JUNE 16, 2009

  61. India’s superheroes: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

  Saleem Sinai, the first-person narrator of Midnight’s Children (1981), was born in the very moment of India’s independence in 1947. The conceit of the book is that he, and other children born in that first hour, have astonishing magical superheroic powers. The story is bound up with Indian independence, not just after 1947 but also before—the story of how Saleem’s parents meet is one of the best bits—and how Saleem’s telepathic powers are at first a blessing and later a curse. What makes it great is the immense enthusiasm of the story and the language in which it is written. It isn’t Rushdie’s first novel, that would be the odd and openly science-fictional Grimus. But it has the kind of energy and vitality that a lot of first novels have. Rushdie’s later novels are more technically accomplished but they’re also much drier. Midnight’s Children is a book it’s easy to sink into. And the prose is astonishing:

  I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date. I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th 1947. And the time? The time matters too. Well then, at night. No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out, at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps, and outside the window fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later my father broke his big toe, but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, when thanks to the occult tyrannies of the blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter.

  This is a very Indian book. Not only is it set in India, written by an Indian writer in an Indian flavour of English, but the theme is Indian independence as reflected in the life of one boy and his friends. Even the superpowers are especially Indian, connected to Indian mythology rather than to the Western myths that give us the American superheroes. But it is also extremely approachable, especially for a genre reader. It was written in English (one of the great languages of modern India…) and by a writer steeped in the traditions of literature in English. Midnight’s Children is usually classified as a kind of magical realism, but Rushdie has always been open about enjoying genre SF and fantasy; he knows what he’s doing with manipulating the fantastic. The powers are real, in the context of the story. It isn’t allegory. There’s no barrier of translation here or problem with different conventions.

  Midnight’s Children invites you to immerse yourself in India the way you would with a fantasy world—and I think that was partly Rushdie’s intention. He was living in England when he wrote it. He has talked about how writers like Paul Scott and E. M. Forster were untrue to the real India, and with this book I think he wanted to make his vision of India something all readers, whether they start from inside or outside that culture, could throw themselves into. I don’t think his intention was to teach Indian history, though you’ll certainly pick some up from reading it, so much as to demonstrate the experience of being plunged into Indian history, as Saleem is plunged into it at birth.

  If it weren’t so brilliantly written, it would fall flat on its face. As it is, it has become a classic—it won the Booker Prize when it was published in 1981, and the “Booker of Bookers,” as the best Booker winner ever, twenty-five years later. It’s still in print and still being read, but largely as mainstream literature. It’s not much discussed as a genre work. I do think it has had influences on genre though, notably on Martin’s Wild Cards series. Both were clearly influenced by the comic book superheroes of earlier decades, but I think the Jokers in the Wild Cards books, the people with minor useless superpowers, may have come from Rushdie:

  The closer to midnight our birth times were, the greater were our gifts. Those children born in the last seconds of the hour were (to be frank) little more than circus freaks: a bearded girl, a boy with the fully operative gills of a freshwater mahaseer trout, Siamese twins with two bodies dangling off a single head and neck—the head could speak in two voices, one male one female, and every language and dialect spoken in the subcontinent; but for all their marvellousness these were the unfortunates, the living casualties of that numinous hour.

  In any case, this is a delight to read, bursting with characters and description and the excitement of a whole real complex country sprinkled with magic.

  JUNE 22, 2009

  62. A funny book with a lot of death in it: Iain Banks’s The Crow Road

  I bought this particular copy of The Crow Road in Hay-on-Wye. Abacus had done nifty patching B-format paperbacks of all Banks’s novels, all with metaphorical covers, the mainstream books in black and white and the SF coloured. (I’m sure they were thinking something when they made that decision, but it’s too obvious to be interesting.) Emmet had all the other ones in matching editions, but had lost his Crow Road, and meanwhile they’d come out with new ugly covers. So I was in Hay-on-Wye, town of books, and I was writing Tooth and Claw and reading Trollope. In one of the secondhand bookshops there I bought fifteen Trollope novels and The Crow Road. The shop assistant looked at me oddly. “That’s a bit different!” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose it is a bit different in that it’s set in 1990 rather than 1880, but they’re all books with a strong sense of place and time and family, where the boy gets the girl in the end and the family secrets are unraveled. I’ll grant you the Banks has a bit more sex.”

  This somehow didn’t stop her looking at me oddly. I think there may be a lot of people out there whose reading tastes are incredibly narrow. My main question on re-reading The Crow Road now is to ask why people don’t write SF like this. SF stories that are about people but informed with the history that is going on around them. More specifically, why is it that Iain Banks writes these mainstream books with great characters and voice and a strong sense of place and then writes SF with nifty backgrounds and ideas but almost lacking in characters? The only one of his SF novels that has characters I remember is Use of Weapons. There are lots of writers who write SF and mainstream, but Banks is the only one whose mainstream I like better. Mystifying.

  The Crow Road famously begins:

  It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, l
istening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.

  “The crow road” means death, and “he’s away the crow road” means that someone has died. The book begins with a funeral, and there are several more, along with a sprinkling of weddings and christenings, before the end. It’s also the title of a work of fiction Rory’s working on at the time of his death. Rory is Prentice’s other uncle, and Prentice is the first-person narrator of a large proportion of the novel. This is a family saga, and if you can’t cope with a couple of generations of McHoans and Urvills and Watts, you won’t like it. I’d also advise against it if you loathe Scotland, as all the characters are Scottish and the whole novel takes place in Scotland. Oh, and they drink like they have no care for their livers. But if you don’t mind these little things, it’s a very good read.

  The present tense of the story is set very precisely in 1989 and ’90—coincidentally, the exact same time as Atwood’s The Robber Bride, which I read last week. The First Gulf War is mentioned in both books. One of the characters in The Crow Road goes to Canada, but when I wonder if she’ll encounter the characters from The Robber Bride, my brain explodes. Toronto and Gallanach—or maybe just Atwood and Banks—are clearly on different planets. And yet there are similarities. Both books have a present and long flashbacks into the past—The Crow Road goes back to Prentice’s father’s childhood. Still, different planets. Different assumptions about how human beings are.

  So, why do you want to read The Crow Road? It’s absorbing. It’s very funny, with humour arising from situation and characters. (There’s an atheist struck by lightning climbing a church.) There’s a family like my family, which isn’t to say realistic. There are the sort of situations you have in real life but so rarely in fiction, like the bit where the two young men are digging their father’s grave while the gravedigger sleeps, and they wake him up by laughing, and he’s appalled. There’s a mysterious disappearance that might be murder. There’s True Love, false love, skullduggery, death, birth, sex, cars, and Scotland.