The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Day 1: The Underqualified Chauffeur

After Wells and Asimov, who to experiment with next? As I've said, there are a lot of well-known names in the Science Fiction field, and I won't be getting to most of them.


But next up, I wanted to try something by Robert Heinlein (or, as the book I have credits him, Robert A. Heinlein; I suppose the middle initial is optional).


Robert (A.) Heinlein won the Hugo Award (which I'm pretty sure is one of the biggest, if not the biggest honor in Science Fiction) four times. The totally unbiased description on the book jacket of this book calls him "the dominant science fiction writer of the modern era". He's well-known and popular. In short, there are a number of reasons I felt I should include him in my lineup.


But like I said in my first Foundation post, choosing an author is only half of the process. Next I had to decide which book I was going to read, and I had three candidates: Starship Troopers (because it's been made into a movie, which seems to indicate that it's fairly popular), Stranger in a Strange Land (because, from what admittedly little I've seen, it appears to be his best-known work), and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (because a friend of mine read it last year and had good things to say about it, which is how I first heard of Robert Heinlein) (or Robert A. Heinlein).


So I asked a widely-read mentor knowledgeable about these sorts of things which of the three she thought was his most famous and important work, and she said The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (she later changed her answer to Stranger in a Strange Land, but I opted to go with her first instinct).


Thus...




***


I've gotten tired of saying negative things about books that are popular, well-loved, and come to me recommended, and I'm sure that anybody reading these posts has gotten tired of reading said negative comments. But it's starting to seem like it can't be helped. I don't like Science Fiction. And I'm sorry about that. I'm really, truly sorry, for a lot of reasons.


I'm not really enjoying this book. Again... lots of reasons for this.


First of all: this book is kind of hard to read.


The basic setup of the book is that in the not-too-distant future the Earth sets up a penal colony on the moon. Criminals of all different calibers and a few voluntary colonists are sent up from every major country on Earth, where they live and work. Decades later, the Moon is shared by the more recently arrived criminals and by the children of the earlier groups, born free and raised on the Moon (or Luna, as its citizens call it). And, as one might imagine, the Lunar citizens (or Loonies) have developed their own unique dialect.


This is where the difficulty comes from.


Of course, it makes perfect sense for the Loonies to have their own dialect. Language is constantly evolving, and a group of people isolated from the main body of humanity as they are would certainly be talking differently within a few generations. Honestly, I think it's almost unrealistic how little Heinlein's future Moon-language differs from modern English. There are only two major differences - first, a number of foreign words and phrases of various origins have become incorporated into everyday English, and second, the language has grown more abrupt, with Loonies frequently leaving out words like "I", "you", "a", or (most notably) "the".


And the book is written in first-person narration. So the entire book is made up of sentence fragments and sentences completely devoid of the word "the".


But wait, there's more.


Like a lot of Science Fiction, this book deals with social science as much as it does physical science. The book chronicles the main characters' decision to revolt against Earth (or, as they say, Terran) rule and establish their own Lunar government (think American Revolution but in space and instead of the Founding Fathers you have an AI computer running everything). This decision is brought about because of the unfortunate economic situation on Luna - the Authority (which I think is the Lunar government established by Earth; the book's never actually said) controls everything, which leads to overpricing of necessities and inefficient trade (like I said; American Revolution). What this all amounts to is that the book has a lot of explanations of complex economics, introductions of various unconventional political ideologies, inflammatory speeches, statistical analyses, lengthy conversations, and, eventually, long descriptions of the steps taken to set up a revolutionary party and start engineering the revolt - all written in this choppy patois, as if everything going on wasn't hard enough to understand already.


Now, I get what Heinlein's doing. As I said, it makes sense to have a unique Lunar dialect. And it probably wasn't easy for an obviously educated and well-read man like Heinlein to write a whole book in this style. I respect the intelligence of the decision and the effort it must've taken to pull it off. But in practice, it's driving me a bit crazy.


There is a small amount of relief in that there are two characters who don't speak in the dialect, an eloquent earthborn Professor and the aforementioned AI computer who is running and organizing the revolt. Why the book couldn't have been narrated by one of them is anyone's guess.


As for characters, they're slightly more developed than Foundation's characters are, because the whole book is one continuous story and it's much more a story about people (and a computer) than it is about human history and human nature in general. But there still isn't an overlarge amount of time spent with the characters. I know the main characters' physical descriptions, backstories, political ideologies, and not much else.


Such is the case with just about every aspect of the book. Anything essential to the central plot is described in detail. Everything else the readers have to figure out on their own. For example - Lunar society involves both polygamy and polyandry, often simultaneously. But there are no expository paragraphs helpfully telling the reader this or explaining how such uncommon and outdated practices have become the norm in this highly advanced, futuristic society. Rather, there's a scene early on where the narrator briefly chats with a new acquaintance about his four wives and four co-husbands and if the readers can't figure out what's going on and shift all their paradigms accordingly, that's their problem. I have only the vaguest idea what the cities on Luna look like. I barely understand why this revolution is happening in the first place.


But Heinlein makes sure to spend sixty pages describing the financing of the revolutionary party, the circulation of propaganda, and a lucky sequence of events that gains the revolution an ally on Earth.


I've talked before over the course of this project about preferring character-driven books over plot-driven ones. Here I want to say that there's nothing inherently wrong with plot-driven books. I've read plot-driven books before without having trouble getting through them. I've even enjoyed them. Just because they're not my preference doesn't mean I can't think they're good.


But I think that in order for a plot-driven book to work, in order to have a book that has almost no emphasis on character or setting be readable and enjoyable, the plot has to actually drive the story. And so far, in my opinion, this one just doesn't.


But maybe it will. (This is me trying to get some positivity and optimism into the post.) I'm only halfway through the book; so far it might all have been set up for a thrilling and engaging second half. Plots can become better and more engaging. This could easily prove to be a really great example of a plot-driven book... provided you can get through the first half.


*Shrugs* Well, I suppose I'd better go read some more...


~Pearl Clayton

The Foundation Trilogy, Days 9 & 10: And Thus, He Gets to the Point

Well, I've now read Second Foundation, the third Foundation book. I probably won't read the four additional books he wrote decades after the trilogy. My apologies to Mr. Asimov, but I'm just not all that interested in seeing where the story goes from here.


First of all, I'd like to say that it's very confusing to have the third book in the series be called Second Foundation. I can't help but feel like it would have made more sense to have Second Foundation be the second book in the series. In fact, considering how short these books are, I think it would've been quite manageable. Asimov would've just had to split Foundation and Empire down the middle, combining the first half with Foundation and the latter half with Second Foundation, and he'd have ended up with two longer, more reasonably named books. It would've made more sense from a storytelling standpoint, too, because the overarching plot of Second Foundation has its origins about halfway through Foundation and Empire.


Oh, I know I'm just pointlessly nitpicking. I wonder if this is something all aspiring and/or successful writers do; constantly think about what we would've done differently had we written the book that we're reading.


But on to the book itself.


This book was weird.


It was weird in a number of different ways, not least of which in the fact that there's a fairly substantial difference in tone and feel between this book and the other two. It's almost entirely free of political discussions (hooray!) and instead introduces the rather bothersome concept of mind control. For the entire book, the reader can never be sure whether someone is behaving or speaking in a certain way because they're under mind control or because they're mentally controlling someone else, but it's safe to assume that's it's one of the two. Thus, there's a new surprise revelation every few chapters. It turns out this person you thought was stupid is really in charge of the entire situation! (Jarring chord) And it turns out this person who you thought was working against this organization was actually working for them and using mind control to keep people from figuring it out! (Jarring chord) But in fact, he and the organization wanted him to get caught and used mind control to make sure he would, because it was all part of the plan! (Jarring chord) And by the way, this character who you thought was the most independent character in the book and the only one who'd escaped being controlled has been under mind control for the past fifteen years! (JARRING CHORD)


There are so many "shocking" twists in this book that they cease to be shocking. By the time I got to the last two, which were probably supposed to be the most shocking of all, I was far past the point of being surprised.


The effect is even more damaged by the fact that the reveal of the second-to-last shocking twist was brought about through one character delivering a lengthy monologue to another character... full of information the second character already knew. Asimov attempted to explain this little issue away by saying that the first character wasn't really speaking to the second character and was more expositing to himself. Which, if you ask me, makes even less sense. "I'm just going to stand here staring out a window, outlining at great length and in great detail the brilliant plan which I have just personally carried out with rousing success. I'm so awesome."


I wonder if Asimov ever stood staring out a window describing the plot of the Foundation trilogy in great detail to no one in particular when he'd finished it.


***


I got the distinct feeling reading this book that this was what Asimov was leading up to, that the only reason for the first two books' existence is to set up the action of Second Foundation. This was what he was heading for all along. This is where he gets to the point. This is where he makes his big profound statement about humanity and existence.


And I have no idea what it is.


Truly. I think he's trying to tell me something, and I can't figure out what it is.


See, throughout most of the book the organization with all the mind control is set up as the bad guys. They're fought against and hated and feared. Because of course, you don't want your mind and your thoughts and actions controlled by an outside force. That's human nature. And as the book progressed, it felt more and more like a strong, embittered anti-deist statement (not actually sure if anti-deist is the exact phrase I'm looking for, but... y'know... anti-God).


But in the end (spoilers), the organization with the mind control wins. Because of course the mere mortals aren't going to succeed against the all-powerful organization capable of mind control; that wouldn't make any sense. And there are a couple of indications, in the last chapter and a place or two earlier in the book, that it's good that they win. That without them, humanity would destroy itself, and that because of their success, humanity can now proceed into its bright future, into a golden age unlike any experienced before in its history.


So... what am I supposed to be feeling? Is this meant to be a crushing ending, inspiring despair with the thought that no matter what actions humans take or how much they fight it, they'll (we'll) always be forced along an unchangeable path by some manipulative higher power? Or is it meant to be hopeful, communicating the idea that no matter how presumptuous or foolish or unaware of what's good for us we get, there's always someone greater looking out for us, guiding us to the place where we belong and where we'll be happiest and most prosperous?


I don't know too much about Asimov, but I'm guessing that for him it was probably the former. But like I said, I can only guess. His message isn't clear.


His message, whatever it is, is also really hard to get to.


There were a lot of things that bothered me about this series. Some of them I've attempted to articulate in these posts, others I've had difficulty pinpointing. Characters are thrown about carelessly, often underdeveloped and randomly abandoned midway through their stories. Whole subplots and events take place and are practically forgotten, barely effecting the bigger story. A lot of things are under-explained. A lot more things are exhaustingly over-explained. There are explanations that make very little sense. Second Foundation is the best and easiest to read of the trilogy (as you may have gathered from the fact that I read it in two days after taking a week to get through Foundation and Empire), but it still has some of these drawbacks, and it also has all the crazy mind control, which was frustrating in its own way, since I was having to go through the whole book knowing that nothing was as it seemed and nobody was trustworthy.


The point that I'm attempting to get to is that if I had merely been experimenting with this series, reading it on my own time rather than blogging about it, I probably wouldn't have read past the first book. And in light of that, I question Asimov's decision to put his big, grandiose conclusion (whatever that happened to be) after over three hundred pages of dry, repetitive inaction and another hundred and fifty pages of headache-inducing mind games. Didn't he ever worry about losing readers before he got the chance to tell them... whatever he was trying to tell them?


***


I feel like I'm not really saying anything of much importance here (maybe my readers will disagree; that would be nice). It goes back to that burden of intellectualism post I wrote after finishing the first book in this trilogy. Science Fiction is an intellectual genre. It's known for allegory and for probing human nature and making sweeping political commentaries and sociological statements. People write papers about Sci-Fi books, people discuss them at length. And so, I feel like this last Foundation post ought to be describing some huge epiphany I had about Science Fiction or humankind or something along those lines.


But it's not. Because I didn't have any grand epiphanies or discoveries. This series didn't change my life or my way of looking at the world. It didn't make me fall in love with Science Fiction. Honestly, there were times while I was reading it when I'd stare blankly at the page number, stunned that I'd read so much and been so little impacted by it. These books washed over me, when I was able to make progress through them. I think I'll be lucky to remember anything of significance about them by this time next year.


I still feel bad that that's the case. I feel bad that this whole genre and I have yet to get along. But there's not much of anything I can do about it. I don't have the ability to make myself appreciate things that some people possess. Oh, well.


There're still two more books on my roster, books that appear to have few similarities to the Foundation trilogy. So I still have some hope of eventually writing a less whiny, critical post. Stay tuned.


~Pearl Clayton


   

The Foundation Trilogy, Days 3-8: The Struggle Continues

So, needless to say, I've gotten really thrown off. I've spent the past week slogging through Foundation and Empire, the second book in the trilogy, and - obviously - not posting anything here about my progress. I don't have an excuse or an explanation or anything. Merely that every time it was a good time to be reading, I thought of something else to do, and that whenever I did manage to force myself through a chapter or two, I felt like I hadn't read enough to warrant a new post. So then I decided I would just post when I'd finished the book. And then that kept not happening.


In the first three years of doing this type of project, I never took so long to finish a book, and I don't think I ever went this long without posting an update on my reading. I don't even know if the "Days 3-8" caption in the title is accurate, because I've gone so many days without writing anything new, and I'm pretty sure there were days when I didn't read. As a planner and a scheduler, I'm frustrated that I've gotten so messed up and that this reading isn't going smoothly. As a generally fast reader, I'm frustrated that it took me an entire week to read a 150-page-long book. As a people pleaser, I'm frustrated by the fact that I'm struggling so much with a book series that people I know and respect enjoyed and recommended. And as someone used to being able to articulate her opinions and know her own mind, I am incredibly and increasingly frustrated by the fact that I don't like these books and I don't know why.


It's not only that feeling of an intellectual obligation to like it that I described in my last post anymore. There are descriptions that I like. There are characters I almost like and almost care about. There have been little observations and asides of Asimov's that have amused me. Like this one, for instance:


"Inevitably, he said, 'What is the meaning of this?'


It is the precise question and the precise wording thereof that has been put to the atmosphere on such occasions by an incredible variety of men since humanity was invented. It is not recorded that it has ever been asked for any purpose other than dignified effect."


See, that's amusing. I liked those two paragraphs. Also, Foundation and Empire was better than Foundation. It has a more concentrated plot, and more developed, central characters. There's even a female character, shockingly enough. She's got a name and she sort of has a personality and everything. The lengthy conversations aren't only devoted to politics and psychology.


But even if they were -


Alright, for some reason I'm having a lot of trouble getting my thoughts on paper (or, um, screen) at the moment. I actually started a post about the first third of Foundation and Empire several days ago that I never ended up finishing because I couldn't get the words out in any kind of comprehensible order. I have no more explanation for this dilemma than I do for any of the others I've been running into in my attempts to get through this series. So please forgive me if this post ends up being a little choppy. I'm doing my best.


Here's the thought that occurred to me somewhere midway through reading this book: I read nineteenth-century slice-of-life novels. I've talked about this in other posts this summer. I like Jane Austen. I like some of the Bronte sisters' books. I read a book by Thomas Hardy earlier this summer and I'll probably read more books by him at some point in the future. I have repeatedly read books that have no plots beyond, "this is the story of a few months or years in the lives of some characters experiencing drama somewhere in England". There is a book on my handwritten list of favorites called North and South (by Elizabeth Gaskell) that features lengthy scenes made up almost entirely of characters debating the morality and fairness of labor distribution and wages during the Industrial Revolution. North and South is longer than the entire Foundation trilogy.


What I'm saying here is that I have happily read books which are probably far more boring and certainly substantially longer than these ones with a fraction of the difficulty I'm having now. I can no longer in good conscience say I don't like these books because they're dry, or political, or lacking action, because I've read books that are dry and political and lacking action before without any trouble (or at least, with a lot less trouble). And I can also no longer blame my disinterest on underdeveloped, insignificant characters, because like I said, Foundation and Empire is more character-focused than Foundation.  


So I don't have an explanation for disliking these books. Unless I want to go with the idea that labor debates are just way more appealing than political dialogues.


The optimistic view I can gain from this conclusion? Maybe now that I've acknowledged that there's no logical reason for me to be struggling to get through them, I'll be more likely to enjoy the third book and it'll be easier to get through.


The cynical view? I'll keep disliking the series without knowing why and that'll drive me insane.


Which view will prove correct? Watch this space for developments.


~Pearl Clayton

The Foundation Trilogy, Day 2: The Burden of Intellectualism

Today I finished Foundation, the first book in the trilogy. In a shocking change of pace, the second half of the book contained not only many many more political dialogues, but also some very exciting trade discussions and a courtroom scene. As I rapidly approached the conclusion, I felt certain that some sort of thrilling climax must be near, some great burst of action or unexpected reveal that the whole book had been building up to.


I proved to be incorrect. It was really just more talking and then something that doesn't even quite deserve to be called an abrupt ending. And then it was over.


Also, today's reading featured a character who I briefly felt might be this story's equivalent of Han Solo (because, having first noticed similarities to Star Wars, I fully intend to keep looking for them). But then he just turned out to be the exact same conniving, scheming, unsympathetic, too-smart-for-his-own-good politician that the first half of the book was about. And I really mean that; if you asked me to make a list of all the noticeable, extreme differences in character, personality, or methods of action between the two men who are the closest things to protagonists this book has, I doubt I'd be able to come up with anything.


Because, you see, this book isn't really much of a book.


Yes, yes, I know it's a book. When I say book, though, I mean the written-out, nicely bound version of a fictional or retold story.


Most of the books you're likely to find in the fiction section of your library will be about a person or group of persons in some kind of interesting situation. The book, or series of books, will then follow the person or group of persons through the twists and turns and pitfalls of the interesting situation to that situation's resolution. Maybe new characters will be introduced along the way. Maybe the action will unfold over the course of several years. Maybe the situation will become increasingly complicated and multi-layered, until the situation that is ultimately resolved at the story's end is completely different from the original situation. There are mystery series that take readers through multiple different stories in the life of one central character. There are multi-generational epics that tell the converging and complementary and evolving life stories of characters and their children and grandchildren. Whatever it is, there is almost always some common thread of character or plot to tie everything together and keep the reader interested. The ending of a book is rarely the ending of all its characters' stories; rather, it is the ending of that particular epoch, or situation, or incident, or whatever you want to call it in their lives that the author wished to chronicle. Books are things of finite ambition that describe contained incidents.


And it could be argued that Foundation contains some of these elements. It describes characters and their movements through contained incidents. But every contained incident is part of a larger narrative.


Essentially, there is a presumed conclusion to some of humanity's current (that is, current in the far-distant future) struggles that will come about several centuries (further) in the future. The only way to get to this desirable conclusion is through a series of crises. So... the book is a series of crises. There's a problem, a man emerges who somehow knows exactly what needs to be done to fix the problem, he rises to ultimate power with stunning ease, he does what needs doing, the crisis is averted. Skip forward several decades to the next crisis and the cycle is repeated.


So to get back to my earlier point, this book isn't a book, it's a freaking essay.


That's why the characters are cardboard cutouts which are practically indistinguishable from each other. They don't need to be any more than that, because this isn't about them. This isn't a story of people, or individual triumphs, or isolated occurrences with beginnings and endings. This first book doesn't so much end as stop; pause, more like. Because, again, it's not a book. It's Asimov's commentary on politics and ideologies, on the inevitable trends of humanity, on reoccurring cycles of power and control, on the endlessly fickle masses and the ever-changing but unstoppably repetitive tides of popularity and fate that they mindlessly ride. It subtly paints a picture of hopeless, depressing, exhausting, headache-inducing infinity. You know that even if humanity reaches this objective that every major decision in the story is being made in pursuit of, it'll be no more an ending or a reprieve than any other pause in the story has been. The tides will keep coming in and before too long the solution will have unraveled and the human race will have to go through the whole mess again. Asimov studied, and pondered, and philosophized, and finally wrote his thesis, converting it into dialogue and half-hiding it behind thin characters and something vaguely resembling an overarching plot in order to get it to the masses, to the people whom he felt most needed to read it.


(My sense of pacing demands that there be some sort of pause following a paragraph like that, so imagine me sighing heavily, leaning back in my chair, rubbing my temples, knocking back the dregs of a glass of iced tea, and taking a deep breath before resuming.)


I don't know if I'm actually doing a good job of expressing myself at the moment, being by no means a good or impartial judge of my own writing. As it often does, my frustration has made me feel addled and incoherent. Whether I actually am addled and incoherent is beside the point; I feel like I am, which naturally does nothing to lessen the feelings of frustration.


And the source of that frustration (aside from the boringness, and the repetitiveness, and the weird sameness of the characters, and the apparent futility of everything everybody's doing)?


I feel like I should love this. And that is a feeling that I'm tired of having.


I've spent a fair portion of my life being that one really smart kid. You know, the one who knows all the answers and does all the assignments and gets straight A's. The teacher's pet, if you will. This was inadvertent at first, but I confess that it wasn't long before I started taking pains to make sure I retained my status. I have been (and at times still am) a showoff, a braggart, and an egotist. When, in high school, I started encountering people unquestionably more intelligent and capable than I was, it dealt a blow to my self-esteem and my feelings of self-worth that I've scarcely begun to recover from.


This position of "gifted-child-totally-bursting-with-potential" brings with it a lot of expectations and assumptions. Oh, you'll do well on this assignment. You'll understand what the teacher's saying. You'll know the answer to this question. You'll like this book/movie/project. You're smart. You're intellectual. You're into this kind of thing.


At this point, I hardly know if these voices ever truly existed or if I imagined them. I'm reasonably sure that there must've been some, but probably nowhere near as many as I've been prone to think. Whatever the case, I've brought them into my own head now, and I hear them constantly, when I watch movies, or have conversations, or read books.


Why in the world are you still blathering on about how cute your favorite actors are? You're supposed to be smart. You're supposed to be above that shallow nonsense. Why can't you talk about something that matters for once?


Quit whining about how bad you think this movie is. It's a classic. Smart people like it, so complaining about it makes you sound stupid. And you're not supposed to be stupid. Everyone thinks you're smart. I guess they must be wrong.


Oh, come on, this is brilliant intellectual writing! He's studied history and is applying those studies to his writings about the future. Intelligent people love it for the commentary and criticism it provides. It comes recommended by people whose opinions matter to you, people whom you want to think well of you. You pass yourself off as some towering intellectual, and yet you don't like this masterwork about precedent and human nature because the characters aren't developed enough? How disgustingly shallow and pathetic. You should feel ashamed of yourself for accepting all those compliments of your intelligence over the years, because if you were really the person that the people giving them thought you were, you would love this.


As I think I've said before, my favorite books are all children's books, or fantasies, or nineteenth-century dramas. I like books with humor and adventure, with characters I feel like I've known personally for years, maybe even with just a touch of romance. But I find I'm often reluctant to admit to that. I get annoyed with myself for going on about how much I love Jane Austen, or for recommending the Charlie Bone series to people and telling them it's my favorite book series.


Those are the kinds of books normal girls like. You're meant to be so much more than that.


By failing to properly appreciate the intellectual, symbolic, and cautionary significance of this book, I feel like I'm letting down the people who think highly of me. I feel like I'm failing to live up to my full potential by preferring Austen to Asimov.


All this, when deep down I know that if I actually asked any of the people whose disappointment and disapproval I'm so consistently afraid of, they would tell me that my failure to get into Science Fiction doesn't matter to them at all. They don't care. These are demons I've created for myself.


And more than the boredom, more than my inability to connect with the characters, more than the repetitiveness, more than the abiding sense of absolute futility, that is why I got so frustrated with this book. Because it made me feel frustrated with myself, and then frustrated with myself because I'm so continually frustrated with myself.


So here is my new resolve for the summer (reached sometime during the rather lengthy process of getting this post written): not only to better familiarize myself with Science Fiction and develop a taste for it if I can (and there's still time to do that; I've got four books left), but also to work on being more aware of how silly and damaging this fear of not living up to others' expectations of me is. And to work on getting the heck over it.


***


And with that massively cathartic and personal vent over and done with, I think I'm ready to face the rest of the Foundation Trilogy, not as a frustrated intellectual wanting desperately to like a book series in order to maintain peoples' confidence in her, but as a booklover reading books (or, y'know, essays disguised as books) and openly and honestly saying what she thinks of them.


After sleep. First - first there needs to be sleep.


Until tomorrow (er... later today) (or possibly tomorrow; we'll see).


~Pearl Clayton        

The Foundation Trilogy, Day 1: SpaCe-SPAN

Now that I've covered very early Science Fiction with Wells, it's time to move into the twentieth century, and that's where choosing what to read gets hard. The list of famous and iconic Science Fiction authors is pretty long, for one thing. A lot of well-known, respected authors didn't make it onto my planned reading lineup; Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, etc. For another thing, have you ever noticed that Science Fiction authors seem to write a lot of books? Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like even when I'd finally decided which authors I wanted to make sure to get to, I still had a lot of books to choose from.


Authors first, though. And I decided that after The War of the Worlds, I wanted to read something by Isaac Asimov. He's one of the classics. I'm pretty sure he's also the only author referenced in a great quote from my favorite TV show which is meant to parody technobabble ("I've realigned the Penrose Tubes and jettisoned the stream of Einsteinium through the Hawking Converter, thereby reversing the Oppenheimer Effect and propelling us through the Asimov Space Curtain") (Mystery Science Theater 3000, Season 7, Episode 6, "Laserblast", in case anybody's interested).


But which book(s) to read? With Asimov, there are a lot to choose from. So I thought it'd be best to consult a widely-read mentor with very valuable opinions who would undoubtedly be reading these posts. She suggested that I read the Foundation Trilogy. So that's what I'm doing.


There are seven books in the Foundation Trilogy (a statement which makes no sense and is therefore really fun to make). This is because the first three books were published in the 1950s and known as the Foundation Trilogy for thirty years, until Asimov randomly wrote four more books in the 80s. However, this month I'll only be reading the original trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation.


Which brings us at last to the first review. Having read the first half of Foundation, the first book, what are my initial thoughts?


Um... well... at least the characters have names.


You might've noticed that I didn't post yesterday. I meant to, but it didn't end up happening because I had trouble getting into this book.


Allow me to attempt to describe my difficulty by comparing this book to other things.


One of my very first thoughts upon starting the book, popping up around page 2, was, "Ooh, this is like Star Wars!". It takes place in a society consisting of millions of planets united under one centralized government, incidentally called the Empire. People move between planets by traveling through hyperspace. The planet where the seat of government is located consists of nothing but a single city. People with existing names like Lewis and Yohan hang out with people who have names like Salvor and Hari. There are definite similarities.


Especially to the prequels.


Now, I know that everybody hates the prequels (I've actually never had a problem with the prequels, but that's a different discussion). There are a lot of common, constantly repeated complaints against the prequels. One complaint against them which I've heard surprisingly infrequently is how talky they are.


See, the original Star Wars trilogy follows a pretty basic outline: there are some bad guys, there are some good guys, they all have interesting story arcs to follow, eventually the good guys win and we all go home happy. There's a lot of fighting and adventuring and flying around in spaceships, with occasional pauses for character drama. It's pretty straightforward storytelling.


The plotlines in the prequels are a lot more complicated. The distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys are less clear, and as many battles occur in state rooms and audience chambers as they do on battlefields and in space. The prequels feature shifting alliances, multiple different treaties, double agents, double-crosses, decoys, fronts, and situations which are not what they seem. And all this leads to a number of lengthy discussions of policy and strategy and elaborate schemes. So I have seen one (like I said, this seems to be a surprisingly rare complaint) person on the Internet say that watching the Star Wars prequels feels like watching C-SPAN.


And reading Foundation feels like reading C-SPAN.


Granted, I can't say that with any real certainty, having never actually watched C-SPAN (real quick, in case anybody doesn't know, C-SPAN is a specialty political TV and radio network which broadcasts things like Congressional and Parliamentary meetings; as one might imagine, it's infamously boring). But I'm saying it anyway, because it has a nice ring to it.


The whole book so far has basically been various different groups of people discussing politics, psychology, or both. When war looms, brilliant manipulators use political machination to prevent actual fighting. Political unrest is quieted through the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the acting government. Men move calmly and confidently along a path marked out for them decades earlier by a group of psychologists so good at their jobs that they could flawlessly predict the future of human progress and considerately arranged everything precisely the way it needed to be arranged. How nice.


The trouble is that it doesn't make for very exciting reading.


Because every issue so far has been resolved through diplomacy and/or manipulation rather than open warfare, and because the reader enters every new plotline knowing the basic eventual outcome (the psychologists being kind enough to give us glimpses of said outcomes), the book basically amounts to various groups of scheming businessmen having long, roundabout conversations with inevitable conclusions. You go into every new situation knowing who's going to get what he wants and who's going to be proven wrong. Everybody talks things through behind closed doors, things that we already knew were going to happen happen, and we move on to the next bit of the story. There's no suspense and no action. And, like in The War of the Worlds, there is almost no character development. Like I said earlier, these characters at least have names, but in many cases all you know about a character is his name, maybe something very basic about his appearance, and, of course, his political affiliations and aspirations. So not only is the whole book so far made up of nothing but discussions of events and the sly countermeasures being taken to make sure events don't get out of hand, they're events I don't really have any reason to be interested in.


Having said all that, I am trying to be optimistic about the second half and the other two books. There have been a few throwaway comments by various people which could imply that policy alone isn't going to work forever. I feel like there might eventually be some more interesting content. I guess I'll see tomorrow (if I have enough willpower to read further).


Until then.


~Pearl Clayton                        
     

The War of the Worlds, Day 2: I Wish He'd Named the Narrator

Okay, so I am waaaay late in posting this. Well, maybe not way late. Two days late, anyway, which I like to think of as being pretty unheard-of for me. My plans are all thrown off and stuff.


Why?


Because, frankly, this book is boring.


Seriously. It's only 180 pages long, no more than a novella, really, and yet it took me a while to get through it because... well, like I said, it's boring. Martians are destroying the world (er... well... Martians are destroying England) (in actual fact, Martians are destroying London), and they're massacring the human race (that is, that part of the human race which lives in London). It's exciting and awful and horrifying. In theory. In reality, I kept getting bogged down in it.


Alright, I know I'm leaping out of the gate here with a great flurry of complaining. Let me backtrack slightly and attempt to compose a somewhat more intelligent and reasonable sort of review/response.


In my last post, I said that I have yet to find a Science Fiction book I like. There are a number of reasons for this. Here's one: I read books for the characters.


Naturally that isn't the only reason I read books, but if I don't care about the characters in a book, chances are good I won't like the book. I like unique characters. I like meaningful character development. I love watching the relationships and interactions between characters evolve and unfold. This is probably one of the reasons, perhaps even the main reason, why I like Jane Austen and other nineteenth-century authors so well; their books are primarily, sometimes even entirely, character-driven. Little to no plot, maybe some sort of moral or social commentary, but generally nothing too heavy-handed, mostly just interesting, varied, well-written characters going about their lives.


From what my limited reading experience and my wider observations have told me, this is basically the opposite of Science Fiction.


Now, before anybody gets all offended, I know there are character-driven Sci-Fi books, and I'm not saying that all Sci-Fi books are populated by one-dimensional or uninteresting characters. But it seems to me that Science Fiction tends to be focused on one or both of two main elements: scientific innovation and speculation or political and/or social commentary and satire. It's all technological imaginativeness and cautionary storytelling, often heavily plot-driven and loaded with debate and morally challenging concepts - and all this sometimes comes at the cost of character. I've had trouble getting into Science Fiction, because I've had trouble finding characters whose lives and fates I can be invested in.


So maybe I'm being a silly emotional girl, unreasonably demanding that stories be about people in whom I can be interested. I know there are tons of people who find that the science and the technology and the politics and the moral quandaries amount to more than enough reason to read a book, and just as many people who can't stand my beloved Austen and Bronte and Dickens books because not enough happens in them. To each their own. I am what I am, I know what I like, and I'll admit to getting a little pettish and whiny when a book doesn't have what I like.


And honestly, The War of the Worlds might very well be the least character-focused book I have ever read.


The fact that this book was adapted into a radio play which consisted of nothing but an announcer delivering news bulletins about the Martians' progress should tell you how much the characters in this book matter. There's a nameless narrator who spends the whole book wandering around having so many near-death experiences it starts to test the limits of suspension of disbelief and looking at Martians; he has a nameless wife who appears in the very beginning and the very end of the book; he has a nameless brother who disappears halfway through and is never mentioned again; there's a nameless artilleryman whose only purpose in the narrative seems to be to give the narrator someone to talk to, so that the book can have some dialogue; and there's a nameless curate whose purpose seems to be enabling H. G. Wells to make fun of religious people. And... that's basically it. The rest of the book is essentially just a straightforward description of the Martians' doings. Honestly, the Martians don't even show up that much. Most of the book is just the narrator wandering around various towns looking at ruined buildings and dead bodies. A high point was the absolutely thrilling (note: sarcasm) five-page-long action scene in which the narrator's brother attempts to cross a street.


According to some notes in the back of the book, the prolonged descriptions of ruined towns that the narrator aimlessly meanders through actually added to the eeriness for initial readers. See, unlike a lot of authors of his time, Wells used names and descriptions of actual places. All the action occurs in and around London. The references to geography are constant. Every time the narrator or his brother or a Martian moves an inch, he lets you know which direction he's facing and which town he's heading toward. So someone living the region in question at the time of the book's publication would, in reading it, have the unsettling ability to determine exactly where the Martians landed and every place that they went. They might encounter a description of the town they lived in in ruins, littered with corpses. It'd be creepy. It'd stick in your memory. I get that.      


The problem is, to an American who's never been to England, sentences like, "The seven proceeded to distribute themselves at equal distances along a curved line between St. George's Hill, Weybridge, and the village of Send, south-west of Ripley" mean nothing. It's just a lot of words, and it's hard to get through.


So here's what Wells did well: he did a great job imagining (and describing) (in GREAT detail) the widespread panic and destruction that would result from an alien invasion. In the Martians, he created a reasonably believable and well-designed alien race, clearly putting a lot of thought into how Mars's makeup and atmosphere would affect the evolution of its inhabitants. The science he's basing his descriptions on is, of course, very outdated now, but he operated well with what he had. He also seems to have predicted the laser, which is kind of neat.


But again, the widespread panic and destruction and the Martians' terrifying technology and unfeeling slaughter of humanity is all fairly unaffecting, because I don't care about anybody. If every character in the book had died and the Martians had won, I would've been fine with it, because I would've had no reason to be saddened by the deaths of Nameless Narrator, Nameless Wife, Nameless Brother, or Nameless Artilleryman. (Spoilers - Nameless Curate actually does die. And I couldn't care less.)


And that, at long last (yeesh, this is getting to be a long post) brings me to my final problem with the book. Man wins. The Martians are defeated and we're left to dissect them and their machinery and thus achieve grand scientific advances and a vast influx of new knowledge. Humanity prevails. Yay us.


I won't spoil how this comes about. But basically, the alien race which is miles beyond us in intelligence and technological capability, the aliens which have invented space travel and got all the way from Mars to the Earth in a matter of weeks, maybe even days, are laid low by the world's most convenient deus ex machina.


And not only is this pretty implausible, even for a book about Martians invading the Earth (or, rather, invading London) (actually, that's another thing that bothered me; why, with the whole entire Earth just sitting there asking to be invaded, did all the Martian ships land around London? For that matter, how did they do that? The ships take off from Mars at twenty-four-hour intervals. The Earth would've been moving in between takeoffs and the Martians' transport ships don't seem to have steering, so the Martians' aim would've had to have been insanely good for them to get all the ships to approximately the same place. But I'm getting off-topic), it also confuses Wells's token social commentary.


Throughout the book, Wells regularly compares the Martian invasion to other colonial invasions throughout history. He talks about dodo birds and human populations of colonized islands being hunted to extinction, and says that to the Martians, this is the same scenario; a superior species dealing with a pesky inferior one. So how do we feel now that we're the dumb animals? There seems to be a fairly strong criticism of British colonialism being built - a criticism which is then completely overthrown by his ending conclusion that natural selection has declared that Man and only Man can rule the Earth, and by his assertion that the Martians' coming ultimately benefits humanity more than harms it, through the aforementioned scientific advances and influx of knowledge.


It's bizarre, and it's a mixed message, and it makes all his comments about previous colonizations seem as pointless as his characters.


So in conclusion, I still have yet to find a Science Fiction book that I like. But hey - there're still five more to go.


~Pearl Clayton     

The Final Lineup and The War of the Worlds, Day 1

If you'll recall my post from the beginning of June, you may remember that I had two goals for the summer.


The first was to write a story/book. I'd rather not talk about this goal at this time. Suffice to say the book and I aren't getting along at the moment, but the summer is not yet over, and I have been writing more, on this blog at the very least.


Instead, let's talk about my second goal - partaking in my fourth consecutive summer of reading books I wouldn't normally read and providing public commentary about them.


This year, things are going to be a little different than they have been in the past. The last three years, I've read popular contemporary YA fiction series (Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Divergent). This year, I have opted not for such a series, but rather for a broad overview of a genre that I have yet to develop a taste for: Science Fiction.


Yep, I decided to go with the Sci-Fi.


See, here's the thing; three years ago, when I first decided to read the Twilight series, my aim in doing so was to understand its popularity, if I could, and to form my own opinions of it separate from the constant stream of feedback, both positive and negative, that it constantly receives. This aim continued to be my primary motivation throughout the next two summers. And it still is. Going on a trek through some Science Fiction classics fits in nicely with that motivation.


I've read very little Science Fiction, because - well, because I have yet to find a Sci-Fi book that I like. There are a few Sci-Fi TV shows and movies that I like, but so far no books. And, being the proud-of-my-awesome-reading-abilities borderline literary snob that I am, it's always felt strange that I evidently have no taste for such a popular and diverse genre. I know people, people whose taste and opinions I admire and respect, who love Science Fiction. So why don't I?


The aim of the next few weeks is to look into that question. I feel I've picked out a pretty broad spectrum of books to read. As I have in previous summers, I'll read a little every day, and then jump on here and write about the day's reading. I might try to delve into why Science Fiction and I haven't really clicked in the past. If I get lucky and end up reading a book I like, you can be sure you'll read about it. And, because Science Fiction frequently deals with subjects like politics, philosophy, and sociology, I could very well end up rambling abstractly about things a lot more complicated than mere chances of literary taste.


So with all that being said, here is the final lineup of Science Fiction books I intend to read this month (I'll explain my reasons for picking each one as I get to it):


The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
The Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson


***


As indicated by the title of this post, I started The War of the Worlds today. I didn't get as far in it as I had initially intended to, so probably I'll say most of whatever I'm going to say about it tomorrow (when I'm hoping to finish it, it being a pretty short book, but... we'll see).


I figure my reasons for choosing to start with this book are probably fairly obvious. Wells was one of the pioneers of modern Sci-Fi. The genre started with him and Jules Verne; thus, my small-scale exploration of the genre should start there as well.


As for why I chose The War of the Worlds specifically... well, it's probably his most famous work. It's the quintessential aliens-invading-the-planet story. I'm sure there are people out there in the world who would argue that your education is incomplete if you haven't read it. So I'm reading it.


Like I said, I'm not very far in it yet. The Martians have landed, the Martians have destroyed things, our nameless narrator has survived two shockingly close brushes with death (if it happens again I'm going to have to start keeping a tally), and that's basically it. At this point, I neither love it nor hate it. I don't even like it or dislike it. I haven't gotten back into my summer rhythm, where I can find all sorts of things to talk about every single day, just yet. I'm afraid I'm a bit dull today.


One thing I'll say about the particular edition I selected from the library: the endnotes are hilarious. I don't know if you've ever read an annotated classic by a publication group that specializes in them (the book I'm reading now is published by Penguin Classics, but Barnes & Noble Classics editions are like this too), but as long as you don't allow yourself to get frustrated by it, the almost aggressive over-explaining of things can really add to the enjoyment of your reading experience. My favorite so far -


The book says, "Denning*, our greatest authority on meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about ninety or one hundred miles."


The corresponding endnote says, "Denning: William Frederick Denning (1848-1931), Britain's leading authority on meteorites."


WOW. Thank you, Penguin Classics! How would I ever have known who Denning was if I'd only read the non-annotated version of the book?


Anyway. One other thing today's reading has resulted in is my excitement about this project. Before I was feeling somewhat lukewarm about the whole thing, but actually getting properly underway has gotten me really thinking about it and looking forward to it.


So off I go, on my two-week mission to explore strange new genres, to seek out new interests and new forms of expression, and to boldly go where a lot of people have gone before.


Forward.


~Pearl Clayton