What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  People often talk about how few women there are in LOTR. The Hobbit has none, absolutely none. I think the only mentions of women are Belladonna Took, Bilbo’s mother (dead before the story starts), Thorin’s sister, mother of Fili and Kili, and then Bilbo’s eventual nieces. We see no women on the page, elf, dwarf, human, or hobbit. But I didn’t miss them when I was eight and I don’t miss them now. I had no trouble identifying with Bilbo. This is a world without sex, except for misty reproductive purposes, and entirely without romance. Bilbo is such a bachelor that it doesn’t even need mentioning that he is—because Bilbo is in many ways a nominally adult child.

  I think Bilbo is ambiguously gendered. He’s always referred to as “he,” but he keeps house and cooks, he isn’t brave except at a pinch—he’s brave without being at all macho, nor is his lack of machismo deprecated by the text, even when contrasted with the martial dwarves. Bilbo’s allowed to be afraid. He has whole rooms full of clothes. There’s a lot of the conventionally feminine in Bilbo, and there’s a reading here in which Bilbo is a timid house-proud cooking hostess who discovers more facets on an adventure. (I’m sure I could do something with the buttons popping off too if I tried hard enough.) Unlike most heroes, it really wouldn’t change Bilbo at all if you changed his pronoun. Now, isn’t that an interesting thought to go rushing off behind without even a pocket handkerchief?

  SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

  123. Monuments from the future: Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths

  Robert Charles Wilson has the best “what if” ideas of anybody writing today—well, maybe he’s equal first with Schroeder and Egan. When people complain about science fiction these days lacking originality, he’s one of the first people I mention as a counterexample. He thinks of wonderful “what if” questions and then tells stories about realistic characters living in the futures those questions lead them to. Sometimes he makes this work, and other times he asks a terrific question and gives it a less satisfying answer. (I’m looking at you, Darwinia.) He’s never less than really really interesting, and when he pulls it off he’s quite astoundingly good. The Chronoliths (2001) is one of my favourites. It was my very favourite until Spin overtook it.

  The premise of The Chronoliths is that one day in 2021 a huge glassy monument commemorating a victory in 2041 comes crashing down in Thailand. Other monuments follow in other cities across Asia, many of them doing huge damage to life and property when they appear out of the future. They are made by a new kind of physics, and are definitely being sent back in time. Their monumental existence starts to shape the future they celebrate. Meanwhile people get caught up in their fields of weird probability, and their lives get even more distorted than the rest of history. This is the first-person close-up story of Scott and his family and what happened in the twenty years between the first message from the future arriving and being sent.

  Our first-person narrator Scott is the typical modern everyman—he’s a divorced father with problems with his own parents. He’s divorced because he wasn’t there for his wife and child when the first chronolith touched down and his daughter had an ear infection. The story covers twenty years—the daughter grows up and has agency, representing the next generation, the generation shaped by the inevitablity of the coming victories. The heart of the book is about being there for your family as opposed to finding out what the heck is going on with the huge mysterious world-changing thing that’s happening—and Wilson does remarkably well with focusing on a dilemma that most SF doesn’t even spend time blinking at.

  There are enough cool ideas here for anyone. The speculation about time and probability and the implications of the technology that’s sending the chronoliths back through time are fascinating. Then there’s the human level—the motivation for doing it. They say they celebrate the victory of a mysterious Kuin—and before very long there are a lot of people claiming to be Kuin, everywhere. Kuin doesn’t state positions, so Kuin stands for anything people want him to. Kuin’s victory is inevitable. Everybody’s responding to Kuin in some way, whether to welcome him or oppose him—but he isn’t here yet.

  There’s also a mad scientist—she’s called Sulamith Chopra, a Tamil who immigrated to the US when she was three. She’s gay, too. (She’s one of the good guys. But she is definitely a little mad.) There’s a whole planet, though the hero and his family are American and most of the actual book takes place in the US. But really I think Wilson gets points for starting in Thailand and having excursions to Jerusalem and Mexico—so many books set in the near future barely footnote the rest of the world. There’s a fanatic and a love interest and a whole set of complicated people in the kind of complicated shapes of relationships people get into. There’s a really good story—a really good human story and a really good science fiction story.

  There’s a particularly odd issue with reading a book that’s ten years old and set ten years in the future—it seems simultaneously ahead and behind where it ought to be. There’s a comment in the very beginning about the wats of Thailand, and the character says you can see pictures of them in any encyclopaedia—and that seems so old-fashioned! Google image search will show you pictures of them without getting out of your chair! Something weird seems to have happened to the Internet, because it’s sort of there and sort of isn’t—there’s something more like satellite TV, and people print things out all the time and have printouts lying around. Maybe that’s what people did in 1999, which is probably when this was written? It feels weird, it feels retro, and I didn’t notice this when I first read it in 2002. There are also people going to airports and catching planes with only the most farcical levels of security—pre-9/11 U.S. norms, but how odd they seem! This doesn’t make the book less enjoyable, and it certainly isn’t the kind of problem Wilson could have done anything about, it’s just odd. Twenty years ahead is one of the most difficult times to write.

  The Chronoliths is a character story that also gives us a lot to think about—exactly what science fiction ought to do.

  I read this in one gulp, barely setting it down at all, and I think I remember doing the same the first time I read it. So you might want to clear some time in your schedule for this one.

  SEPTEMBER 28, 2010

  124. The Suck Fairy

  I believe I’ve mentioned the Suck Fairy a few times here but without ever discussing her in depth. I first heard of her in a panel on re-reading at Anticipation, when Naomi Libicki explained her to the rest of us. Naomi has since said she heard of her from her friend Camwyn. Wherever she came from she’s a very useful concept. This post is directly related to that panel, and also one at Boskone this year.

  The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, that’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading—well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time—or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it. The advantage of this is exactly the same as the advantage of thinking of one’s once-beloved ex as having been eaten by a zombie, who is now shambling around using the name and body of the former person. It lets one keep one’s original love clear of the later betrayals.

  Of course, there isn’t really a Suck Fairy (also, there isn’t really a zombie) but it’s a useful way of remembering what’s good while not dismissing the newly visible bad. Without the Suck Fairy, it’s all too easy for the present suck to wipe out the good memories. And it’s much better than doing the whole “hate myself for loving you” thing and beating yourself up. The name is genius, because it’s always helpful when something isn’t real but is a useful model to have names that make this clear. Nobody really believes in an actual literal Suck Fairy, bu
t that doesn’t stop her being very handy to know. She’s wonderful shorthand for a whole complicated process.

  In her simplest form, the Suck Fairy is just pure suckitude. You read a book you used to love, and—something’s happened to it! The prose is terrible, the characters are thin, the plot is ridiculous. Worst of all, that wonderful bit you always remembered, the bit where they swim into the captured city under the water gate at dawn, and when they come out of the water in the first light and stand dripping on the quay, it all smells different because the enemy’s campfires are cooking their different food—it turns out to be half a line. “Next morning we went in by the water gate.” This most typically happens with re-reading children’s books. It’s like the moral opposite of skimming, where you’ve dreamed in extra details the book never mentioned. The thin thing you’re re-reading can’t possibly be what you remember, because what you remember mostly happened in your head. The Suck Fairy has sucked all the juice out of it.

  Suck Fairies travel in battalions. Her biggest siblings are the Racism Fairy, the Sexism Fairy, and the Homophobia Fairy. Here, the thing you have to ask yourself is, “How could I have missed that!” and the real answer is you were younger, more naive, less conscious of issues that now loom larger. It’s sometimes the “it was 1961” defence—very few people were thinking about these issues, and they went right over your head, too. These are ones that frequently attack my shelves. Sometimes I can justify them with “the author was ahead of their own time on this issue, if behind ours.” Heinlein gets far more hassle for his female characters than Clarke or Asimov, because Heinlein was actually thinking about women and having female characters widely visible. Other times, not so much—I just have to shudder and move on.

  Then there’s the Message Fairy. The lovely story you remember as being a bit like The Phantom Tollbooth has been replaced by a heavy-handed Christian allegory! Again, this most often happens with children’s books or books read when you were a kid. Kids are really good at ignoring the heavy-handed message and getting with the fun parts. It’s good they are, because adults have devoted a lot of effort writing them messages thinly disguised as stories and clubbing children over the head with them. I read a lot of older children’s books when I was a kid, and you wouldn’t believe how many sugar-coated tracts I sucked the sugar off and cheerfully ran off, spitting out the message undigested. (Despite going to church several times every Sunday for my whole childhood, I never figured out that Aslan was Jesus until told later.) The Message Fairy also attacked some YA books to insert messages telling teenagers not to do drugs and/or sex. Political messages also abound.

  Closely related to the Message Fairy is the Trope Fairy. This isn’t a case where the author’s trying to disguise a message that you should love God, or the Free Market. It’s more a case of buying into a message that there’s One Person for Everyone, or Love Always Has Three Corners, or People Who Have Sex Die, or Torture Gets Results. These things are very common in narrative, and it’s possible to read past them lots of times, and then when you do become aware of them, they’re everywhere and make you want to scream. Once you’ve noticed The Black Guy Always Dies you can’t but groan when it happens.

  I find it very hard to re-read books once I’ve found the Suck Fairies have been at them. If I don’t pick up the book I can try to keep the memory of the good times, but re-reading brings me face-to-face with the Suck Fairy.

  OCTOBER 5, 2010

  125. Trains on the moon: John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless

  At the heart of John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless (1993) is a train trip by a group of teenaged role-players across the far side of the moon. It’s also the story of how thirteen-year-old Matt Ronay discovers what growing up means, and how his father, Albin, writes a symphony about water on the moon. It’s set four generations after Luna became independent—and that’s pronounced “lunna,” not “loona,” and absolutely never call it “the Moon,” as if it were something Earth owned. This is a future with complex history that feels real. There’s a story going on in the background about water and sacrifice and power politics. In fact there’s a lot going on here—of course there is, it’s a John M. Ford novel—but most of all it’s about Matt Ronay and his role-playing group making a trip from Copernicus to Tsiolkovsky Observatory on the train, two days there and two days back, without asking permission or telling their parents where they’re going. It’s wonderful.

  This is a solid science fiction future that feels absolutely real and worked out in every detail. We see a whole complex universe as it spreads out from Matt; Matt is our stone dropped into the puddle of this universe. He lives in Copernicus and hates Earth, resents his father, resents the constant surveillance he lives under, and is caught up with his group of friends and their computer-mediated role-playing game. He wants to go to the stars. His family have been important since his great-grandfather was one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. His father, Albin, is trying to solve the problem of water, in an antagonistic relationship with the Earth company Vaccor. His mother, Sonia, is a surgeon fitting people up with the enhancements they will need for space. She doesn’t communicate well. Ships come in from the New Worlds, worlds around other stars, and Matt watches the ships land and longs passionately to be on one. Meanwhile he and his friends are getting old enough to accept jobs—Matt has offers, from Transport, from a theatre company, but none of them will let him leave home. He feels oppressed by the fact of Earth hanging in the sky above him. The secret trip to Tsiolkovsky is important because it’s something they are doing unobserved and in the last moment before they have to take up responsibility.

  As with Delany’s Triton, Growing Up Weightless shows us a utopia from the point of view of people who aren’t aware it’s a utopia. They have faster-than-light travel and New Worlds out there, government is by consensus and committees meet in VR. Matt percieves his father and his world as oppressive, but he’s thirteen—I’ve never seen both sides of a parent/teenager relationship done as well as they are done here. This is a better world—moon—for teenagers than anything else I can think of. And they have trains. (The appendices on the trains, for people really very interested in trains on the moon—that would be me—can be found in the NESFA collection From the End of the Twentieth Century.)

  If John M. Ford had a flaw as a writer it was assuming too much. He never talked down to the reader. This is a book where every word has to be read with full focused attention, or it absolutely will not make sense. Even with full attention I know I didn’t understand everything that was going on the first time I read it. It’s a book I enjoyed the first time with a side order of “huh?” and that I have liked more and more as I have re-read it and seen more and more in it. This is definitely a book that rewards re-reading, that blossoms and flowers on re-reading, a book I plan to re-read every few years for the rest of my life and see more in every time. I also think I’d have loved it when I was thirteen.

  Growing Up Weightless is set very firmly within the points of view of the Ronay family, and they know what they know and don’t think about it more than they naturally would. The point of view moves between Matt and Albin and (more rarely) Sonia as their paths cross. There’s the central story to do with Matt growing up, and the background story to do with Albin and the water, and they coincide in the way father and thirteen-year-old sons usually do, rockily. There’s also a sub-plot to do with Avakian, co-discoverer of the FTL drive. There’s the relationship between Earth and Luna, there’s the relationship between the solar system and the rest of the universe, there’s the group of role-players and the dynamics within them. All of this, and the future in which they are all embedded, is written with the full fractal complexity of reality.

  It’s not surprising that Ford got the role-playing right—he was a major RPG writer and designer, winning three Origins Awards. But role-playing, and gaming in general, is usually so badly done in books that I want to put up a sign ten feet tall with blinking lights saying, “Look
, he got the RPG right!” The kids are playing a Robin Hood–style game, within a VR interface in which the GM has programmed NPCs and situations for them. This prefigures World of Warcraft (the book is 1993!) but it’s also got the feel of a real gaming group, which is social interaction as much as anything. They’re using VR to see what the characters see, but they’re doing the dialogue from their own hearts. When the tech gets to the point where you can design your own worlds, this is what we will have. The computers too don’t feel clunky—they might in another ten years, but for now the slates feel like future iPhones. Shall I say 1993 again? There’s nothing here that makes you feel the book wasn’t written yesterday. And it’s full of the little details that make it feel solid—for instance, after so much about Matt hating the Earth and the Earth tourists (“Slammers”) and defining Luna in opposition to Earth, we get a traveler from another solar system casually referring to “the Terralune.”

  Most books are in dialogue with other books, and this one speaks especially to Heinlein—to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and its Lunar revolution, and to Space Family Stone and its happy family leaving the post-revolutionary moon.

  This is one of Ford’s best books, written at the top of his powers, and I recommend it very highly.

  NOVEMBER 4, 2010

  126. Overloading the senses: Samuel Delany’s Nova

  I can’t think of any other book that’s anything like as old as Nova (1968!) that feels as modern. There’s nothing here to apologize for or to smile ruefully over—there’s one mention that by the end of the twentieth century humanity was on more than one planet, and that’s it. This book was written the year before the moon landing, and it could have been written tomorrow without changing a word.