Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds A Review

 

All the cool kids on the SF booktube, Media Death Cult, I watch have been reading Alastair Reynolds books, so when I found one at a local charity shop, I picked it up. It happened to be Pushing Ice, one of his stand alone books. Below is my review of that book. Unlike Reynolds’ book, I won’t spoil the review in this prologue.

Pushing Ice

By Alastair Reynolds

The reviewer’s bias: I prefer stories with well developed, pleasant characters. I like writing that is clever and witty – entertaining in itself. I prefer first person narratives, or close third person narratives. I dislike thinly disguised fanfic or stories with gaping plot holes.

Pushing Ice begins with a prologue set 18,000+ years in the future – a future with thousands of human inhabited planets. A politician wants to honor the “Benefactor and her people” are who are “still out there and moving away from us,” far away, but less than 18,000 light years away. The Benefactor is Bella Lind.

The first chapter then introduces us to comet ice mining rocketship Rockhopper, the actual story set, according to the back cover blurb, in the year 2057. I am always amazed at the optimism of science fiction writers. To have nuclear powered space ships pushing around comets 52 years from the date Reynolds wrote this book is pretty damn optimistic.

The Rockhopper is captained by Bella Lind, the eventual Benefactor. As the story opens, a minor moon of of Saturn proves to have been an alien artifact by breaking free of its orbit and heading out of the solar system. Captain Lind’s Rockhopper is the only (non-Chinese) ship in position to intercept and investigate the artifact for the few days they would have before having to turn back, and only if they push their ship hard. They are tasked with the mission and agree to head out to intercept the artifact.

The prologue basically tells the reader that they succeed in intercepting and gathering enough data to eventual create an interstellar human society. And it also tells us that the Rockhopper never returns to the solar system, since it is still moving away, 18,000 years later. So the reader knows “who did it,” leaving the story to tell the “how.”

Foreshadowing is once again used several chapters in. He begins a section with the line: “No death in a spacesuit is ever good, but Mike Takahashi’s was especially bad.” And proceeds to spend the next 13 pages describing the failed rescue attempt in great detail. 

Since the reader already knows that the Rockhopper will not return to the solar system, as planned, the only question is what goes amiss? As it turns out, there is an onboard accident that suggests that the fuel tanks have less fuel than what they should have according to ship sensors. How did this happen? It is suggested that the numbers were tampered with by the ship’s owners back on Earth via a software upgrade or bug fix. I can’t say for certain if this is the cause, since I did not get much farther in the book. I found that I couldn't believe this, and gave up around page 125 out of 780 pages. This may've been a red herring, but it doesn't matter, they don't return.

So why the DNF? I like character driven stories with at least a few pleasant characters. Reynolds introduces what seems like several dozen characters in the first couple of chapters in a shotgun spray of conversations laced with dense techno-minutia details and fragmented backstories. My wife will write down names of characters in books to keep them straight, but I’m not one to do that. When there are too many characters tossed at me at once, willy-nilly, I just don't care about any of them. They all tend to fall under the category devices designed to provide background info and world building rather than people. Basically, they’re interchangeable, and while they may become more distinct later on, I’m still not likely to care about them. And this criticisms includes our main protagonist, the Benefactor, Captain Bella Lind.

While Bella is presented sympathetically, I felt that she was not in the story enough at this point to anchor the narrative. First, she’s in and out of it, with all the other bit players speaking their parts, often on tangents (at least in the first hundred twenty plus pages of the story). Secondly, Reynolds has her do something that doesn’t seem in character, no doubt in order to set up a conflict. After that accident aboard ship, on day 11, Chapter 4, Bella’s best friend aboard the ship is the person who discovers the apparent discrepancy between what the fuel data says now and what it said before it was altered. Bella doesn’t entirely believe her and contacts the managers of the mission on Earth regarding the discrepancy – who, of course, deny it is possible, and suggest that the person reporting it has gone off the deep end. To check on it herself, she and the corporate guy who is second in command, go down to the section of the ship to collect this data themselves – while Bella’s best friend is sleeping. As the captain of the ship, there is no reason why they needed to do this behind her back. The captain would have every right to investigate the issue herself when her friend was on duty. Indeed, you would expect a captain to do just that. The only reason for witting this scene this way was to set up a conflict. This was the part that sent my book flying, if not across the room and into the wall, but across the table next to me. I found that I couldn’t like any of these people and didn’t care what happened to them.

Reynolds is an astro-physicist who writes like one. His writing is very dense. It is nondescript in the sense that it doesn’t get in the way of the story, save that all the techno-minutia and snippets of dialog between lots of characters make for slow going. He is very interested in both tech and big sweeping ideas. He seems to use people as talking points, like many classic SF writers did. Now on one hand, all this techno-info may serve to build his world, but on the other, because the characters are pretty nondescript at this point, I found myself thinking “Who cares?" get on with the story." To that end, I found myself constantly skim reading. In short, it’s slow, heavy, unengaging reading for a reader like me. Your mileage, will, of course, vary.

So, to sum it up for me – I felt that Reynolds' use of foreshadowing diminished not only the suspense of the story, but my desire to push on, knowing how it ultimately ends. "Mind blowing" ideas and revelations are not my cup of tea, I simply didn't care what they will find on the artifact. There were no characters that I liked. I felt that he was setting up a lot of conflict within the crew which would make unpleasant reading for a reader like me. I didn’t believe for a minute that the managers on Earth could add 16% more fuel to the ship's log without someone onboard noting the change in readings. Not to mention that fact that the people on Earth could ruthlessly send the ship and people on a mission that they knew was a suicide one. In short, a lot of unpleasantness. 

Goodbye, Alastair Reynolds, it’s on to D E Stevenson’s The Two Mrs. Abotts.

My Top 10 Favorite SF Books of All Time

I recently watched a Media Death Cult video on the viewers' favorite books and I have to admit that haven’t read more than one or two of them. Still it got me to thinking about my favorite books of all time. So I racked my memory to come up with a list of my ten favorite SF books. This proved to be rather hard since I've forgotten 97% of them. On the flip side, it means that if I do remember them, and remember really enjoying them -- they're a candidate for the list.

Before I begin, I should note that “all time” is the trick words here. What I’ve done is try to recall what were my favorite books during my nearly sixty years of reading SF, in one era or another. They are not necessarily my favorite SF books today. Indeed, most of them would not even being the running today, since my tastes have evolved over my lifetime. Still, at one time, they were my favorite books and I still recall them fondly because of that.

All but two of the books come from my early years of reading SF in the 1960’s and early 1970’s when I was reading  50 to 100 books a year. This means that most of the books are classic SF. I'm not going to list them in any order, and I’ll save my recent favorite books for last. 

1. Starman Jones, Robert A Heinlein. This is my favorite of Heinlein book. Farm boy with a photographic memory inherits an astro-navigator's books and saves the day when the ship he is serving on gets lost. Or something like that. I think it is my favorite Heinlein because I liked his juveniles the best and this one has just a hint of romance in it that was quickly shut down. Heinlein didn’t do romance in his juveniles. The fact that I can still remember the basic plot of the story is telling since, I can’t say that for most of his juveniles. I reread it in my early 20’s and was surprised at how much of what I remembered wasn’t actually in the book. A testimonial to how much a young reader’s imagination adds to a story. Back in our day, at least, we spend our days making up stories while playing, and this skill lingered on into adolescence. From my records of the period, I can say that I rated it “E” for excellent together with Space Cadet, a book that I have no recollection of.

Credit:  http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?258176, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48787509

2. The Star Conquers, Ben Bova. This book is a military SF, story with space battles, and an appealing young hero. Reading the Wikipedia description doesn’t bring back the story for me. I loaned this book to a friend 30 years ago to read to his son, and every time I see him he offers to return it, but since I know I'll not read it again, I tell him to keep it. Still it was a favorite of both of ours. I seem to recall that the sequel, Star Watchman wasn’t as good. I guess he wrote two more in the series years later. Who knew? I rated it a “E” back then.

3. Galactic Patrol, E E Smith. The best book, by far, of the Lensmen series. A space opera on a vast scale. I haven’t reread it, and would likely find it too grand and nonsensical for my tastes these days. I made a galactic wargame board game out of it, at the time. Still, its another “E” book in ‘65.

4.Ossian’s Ride, Fred Hoyle. An adventure set in Ireland. A recent graduate is recruited by British secret service as an amateur agent and sent to Ireland to discover the secret of a wildly successful company with amazing technology. It has a lot of hiking around Ireland, and, in a way, foreshadows my appreciation of the books like John Buchan’s 39 Steps which had his hero tramping around Scotland. I recently reread this book for the third time at least, and, indeed, I still enjoyed it. I first read it in 1966, but I wasn’t rating books that year, it seems.

5. Highways in Hiding, George O Smith. To begin with, the version I have has a wonderfully evocative cover by Roy G Krenkel, The story is a mystery story that centers around two opposing secret organization dealing with a deadly disease brought back from space. Road signs are modified by one group to lead people in the know to contact agents. This is another book of travel, thought this time it was road trips around the pre-interstate US. At the time there seemed something romantic about getting into a car and taking to the open roads which appealed to me back in the day. These days, an hour in a car is about all I can take. No contemporary rating for this book either.

6. Sands of Mars, Arthur C Clarke. I count this as the first adult SF novel I read. How could you not like a book about Mars – a Mars still unexplored by remote spacecraft when I read it. A Mars that anything could go? The hero was a middle aged SF writer visiting Mars that he wrote SF books about early in his career, which seems a strange hero for a young teen. Indeed I find in my records of the time that in 1965 I rated it only a “B” so I guess its memory must’ve aged well. The thing is that I remember it when 97% of the books from that period I have no recollection of at all, That must mean something. Plus, I know I reread it. On the other hand, another Clarke book, Dolphin Island I rated an “E” though I believe it was a juvenile. In any event, I have no recollection of the story.

7. A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs. One of my perennial favorites. But even with so much to love about it, there's still so much I wish was better – bigger, fuller, with deeper characters. I’ve reread this book probably four or five times. I read it to the kids at bedtime. In 1971 I rated it ***½, which is a little above average. But like Sands of Mars, it seems to has aged well, and I now consider it the best of ERB's books. Contrast that with his Venus series that I rated “E” back in ‘65, but never have had any interest in rereading. The first three books of Barsoom are one of my favorites for all their flaws.

8. The Witches of Karres, James H Schmitz. I’ve read this book several times -- indeed, after pulling it out of the bookshelf for this post, I'm rereading and enjoying it once again. I’m a sucker for stories set on spaceship, and worm weather was such a cool idea. So cool, in fact, that I sort of borrowed it for an episode in my Bright Black Sea. I must have acquired the book prior to 1968 as it is on my inventory for that year, but I have no record of when I read it or my original rating.

The last two entries on this list are recent books (relatively speaking) and are still very much in favor.

9.Johannes Cabal The Detective, Jonathan L Howard. This is one of my current favorite books. In fact, I just reread it. It is the second book in a series of five featuring the necromance Johannes Cabal, and is my favorite of the series, perhaps because it is a take on an old fashioned detective story and set in a mythical Balkan country, like A Prisoner of Zenda. Howard is one of those British authors with a clever, witty style that I really enjoy reading in my old age. Each book in the series is a little different, with a nod to Lovecraft, plus werewolves, vampires, and the devil himself. Normally these types of stories would not be my cup of tea, but his writing draws me in.

10, Shades of Grey, Jasper Fforde. This is my all time favorite speculative fiction book. In part because of Fforde's writing – cleaver, witty, endlessly imaginative, all of which plays a large part in my enjoyment of the story. It can be read as satire or absurd fiction, which again wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but not only is the writing wonderful, but he still manages to make the narrator and other characters seem like real people in a very unusual world where there is a strict cast system based on the color that they can see. I’ve read this book maybe four times – and will pick it up and read it again. I guess it’s my “comfort read.” Unfortunately its sales did not justify continuing on with the planned trilogy so that, Painting by Numbers, and The Gordini Protocols were never written, leaving so many mysteries left mysteries. The only bright side is that it did not give Fforde the chance to screw it up. I’ve read almost all of his adult novels and while the last two novels written after Shades of Grey were witty and endlessly imaginative, I couldn’t help wishing I was reading the last two books of the series. Life can be cruel.

So those are my nine favorite books. However, as a bonus, while looking up my old ratings for these books in my papers from the era, I found my top 22 book list from the mid-1960's. Heinlein dominated it.

1 Starman Jones – Heinlein

2 Star Conquers – Bova

3 Tunnel in the Sky & The Stars are Ours! – Heinlein & Norton

4 Sixth Column – Heinlein

5 Galactic Patrol – EE Smith

6 Space Cadet & Farmer in the Sky – Heinlein

7 Dolphin Island & Islands in the Sky – Clarke

8 Time Traders – Norton

9 Crossroad of Time & Citizen of the Galaxy – Norton & Heinlein

10 Outside the Universe & Raiders from the Rings – Hamilton and Nourse

11 Sargasso of Space & Plague Ship – Norton

12 Space Viking – Piper

13 The Star Kings – Hamilton

14 Revolt on Alpha C – Silverberg

15 Robot Rocket – Rockwell

16 Venus Series – Burroughs

The Constant Rabbit, A Book Review

The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde

Published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton July 2020 (In the US Sept 29 2020)

A book review

I’m a big fan of Jasper Fforde’s work. His Shades of Grey novel of 2009, is probably my favorite speculative fiction book of all time. It was set to be the first of a trilogy, but sales of Shades of Grey disappointed and the remaining two books were canceled. Instead, we have two books, Early Riser, of 2018 and now, The Constant Rabbit of 2020, though he did write three YA books from 2010 to 2014, which where turned into a TV movie.

The Constant Rabbit is foremost a story about bigotry, making it a very timely read. It is also a story about personal redemption. It is set in an alternate England and concerns the efforts of a very vocal, and violent right-wing faction, inside and outside of government, that are bigoted against a certain element of the English population of this story – rabbits.

Rabbits? Well, yes. The blurb:  “England 2020. There are 1.2 million human-sized rabbits living in the UK. They can walk, talk, and drive cars, the result of an Inexplicable Anthropomorphising Event fifty-five years ago.” In addition to rabbits, several foxes, weasels, and other animals were also made large, human-like and intelligent during this Event. And it seems that similar happenings have occurred in other places around the world. For example, the intelligent bears in Washington state can shoot hunters in self-defense, which hunters find unfair. The Event is never explained, but then, neither are the crop circles, which continue to appear, in our world, without explanation.

The narrator, Peter Knox, is employed by the government’s Rabbit Compliance Taskforce, as a “spotter”, since he is one of the rare humans that can tell rabbits apart. This talent serves to aid in every sort of legal matters concerning rabbits, from drivers licenses, to marriage, to criminal activity. The story centers around a female rabbit, Connie, who was a friend of Knox from his college days. She and her husband move into the village, next door to him. The anti-rabbit leaders of the village want the rabbits out, and want Knox to help them move them along. But though Knox still likes Connie, he has a guilty secret – he was involved in wrongful arrest of Connie’s second husband, who was later murdered by anti-rabbit thugs, which complicates his relationship with her and the rabbits.

This village drama is set against a looming large scale crisis – the government’s plan to rehouse all the rabbits into a single large colony in Wales, where they can be better controlled. Knox is tapped at work to track down a rabbit believed to be part of the rabbit underground.This rabbit soon has connections with his not only his new neighbor, but with his daughter as well, forcing him to make hard and dangerous choices. Dangerous, because his bosses at work are ruthless. There’s a blood thirsty group leader who happens to be a fearful anthropomorphized fox who threatens to gouge out one of his eyes and eat it if he doesn’t cooperate. In short, Knox is between a rock and a hard place, and must try to navigate the complicated and threatening situation as best he can.

While the story is full of Fforde’s wonderful flights of wit and imagination, the story itself is grim, dark, and sad. Bigotry, with the support of government and the complacency of the majority who don’t care enough, is hard, if not impossible, to defeat. And there is no easy victory in this story. Indeed, I think either the author or the editors realized that the story was so grim that a solution is foreshadowed in a number of passages throughout the last half of the book to offer some hope.

As much as I am a fan of Fforde, I’m not a fan of dark stories filled with unpleasant characters. And while Fforde’s wit, imagination, and writing can make me smile, I have to say that this story was too dark for me to enjoy to the fullest. And well, I could never help but wonder what I could’ve been reading if Fforde had applied all his wit, creativity, and talent to the third book of the Shades of Grey series.

In his afterword Fforde says “I am indebted to my agent… and editor … who interpreted a very troublesome first draft of The Constant Rabbit in a positive manner, and were sufficient bold to see that the core idea was sound and something good may come out of it.” While I would hope that it sparks a conversation about the evils of bigotry, which is all to the good. There is, however, still troublesome elements remaining in the story itself. Namely, the ending doesn’t follow from the story he wrote.

I like small stories about people. I don’t mind a story set against great events impact on the characters. In this book, that great event is the government’s decision to move all 1.2 million rabbits to one colony in order to better keep them in check and exploit their labor. Knox works for the agency in charge of this rehousing, and it would seem that his assignment is important in this plan. I think. I think finding one of the underground agents of the rabbits would lead them to the spiritual leader of the rabbits. Taking her into their custody would, perhaps, insure the smooth rehousing of the rabbits. Though the connection isn’t very clear. In addition, Knox becomes involved in the affairs of the rabbits as well, meeting this very spiritual leader, who arranges certain events that will affect Knox’s life. In short, it would seem that our narrator is at the heart of something big, even if he doesn’t know just what it is.

However, when we reach the climax of the story, nothing he did, or happened to him, seems connected to the ultimate outcome. In part this is because the climatic outcome is pulled out of thin air. And even then it has problems, for other characters are given choices that our narrator isn’t – for no apparent reason within the story – only because of the storytelling.

So what we have is one story, on a personal level, as our narrator is torn by the ruthless bigotry of his employers and the leaders of village vs his fondness, if not love, for Connie, and his growing regard for the life and philosophy of the Rabbit Way. The crisis of the rabbit rehousing is playing on the green screen in the background. Knox makes sacrifices to redeem himself in the eyes of Connie and the rabbits, but in the end, those sacrifices are just that – they have nothing to do with the greater events the story is played against. Indeed, while he shows up for the climax, he has nothing to do but help make cucumber sandwiches, which pretty much sums up his involvement.

As a writer, I have issues with this story in that regard. Fforde is writing a satire, and perhaps this disconnect could be a deliberate choice to highlight the fact that to defeat something like so widespread as bigotry, an individual can only do so much – really, so very little – which is nevertheless, worthwhile. However, as a reader, my concern is more for the characters and story, than for the lessons it may be trying to teach, and so this story does not really work for me. As always, your millage my vary.

Thoughts on The Calculating Stars

image credit: https://www.tor.com/2017/09/14/cover-reveals-mary-robinette-kowal-lady-astronaut-books/

This is another entry in my series of remarks and observations directed at the clouds – which is to say, an opinion piece.

Having joined the Tor.com ebook club, I am occasionally offered a free ebook, usually titles that they are using to promote the release of a new sequel and such. The Murderbot novellas were such books, as were a number of mostly fantasy novels and novellas, which I sampled, and did not get past the first page, or chapter. The most recent free book is The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal. Kowal’s novel winner of the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2019 Locus Award for Best Novel, the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the 2019 Campbell Memorial Award. Since the price was right, the book is speculative fiction rather than fantasy, and very highly regarded, I eagerly downloaded my ebook copy and dived into it.

The book is an alternative history of the American space program of the 1960’s. In this story, an asteroid strikes the east coast in 1952, triggering an extinction event. An accelerated space program is launched that echoes the actual 1960’s program, but with the aim of establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars before the earth becomes uninhabitable. Its premise is a classic speculative fiction story. Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud coming immediately to my mind.

It did not, however, click with me. I found myself, at the halfway point, skimming through the book in the hopes of just getting it done. Not good. Realizing this, I called it a day. I’m not one who feels obliged to finish a book I don’t care for. After giving The Calculating Stars half a book to hook me, I couldn’t find a reason to continue.

Having read only half the book, I can’t really review it. But I will share my thoughts about the first half, just between you, me, and the clouds.

In many ways, The Calculating Stars should’ve clicked with me. I prefer first person narratives. The story is one. I prefer smaller stories. The first half of the story, anyway, is not grandiose. I like to spend my reading time with pleasant characters. The supporting characters are, for the most part, likable, though I confess to having lost track of them, given the very episodic nature of the story structure. Given that my stories are episodic in nature, that too, should not have been a problem. So it had a lot of things going for it. But…

Thinking about it, I think there are two aspects of The Calculating Stars that failed to click with me – the narrator and the premise.

I’ll start with the narrator, Elma York. She was born in Charleston SC in the early 1920’s, the daughter of an army officer, eventually a general. He taught or encouraged her to take up flying. During World War Two she was one of the group of female pilots who flew airplanes from factories and bases to other bases, freeing men for combat duty. She is a mathematical genius, earning a PhD in mathematics and physics, at some point. She is happily married to another PhD, a well known rocket scientist. At the start of the story, she is working in the government bureau, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics doing computations. She has emotional scars from her college years, when she was called to the head of the class and made to shame the male students with her ability to do math in her head that they had trouble doing on paper. This seems to have given her a great fear of calling any attention to herself – at least that is how I read it.

The problems I have with her is, first, both she, and her husband, are comfortable ignoring the fact that she’s a PhD. She’s known simply as Mrs. York (rather than Dr. York) and despite her brilliance, works in a fairly menial capacity, presumably because that’s all women were allowed to do. Yet, I find it hard to imagine that any woman of her accomplishments, even in 1952, would have settled for this situation, especially someone with her bravery and determination. While she is not quite content with her status, she wants to be an astronaut, she doesn’t really ever stand up for herself, nor, for that matter does her husband. Secondly, growing up in the south of the 1920’s and 30’s, in the household of a fairly important army officer, I would think that they would’ve had a black servant or two – a cook, a maid, a nanny, and certainly yardmen and such. She would’ve been familiar with blacks, and would’ve had a definite opinion of them, one way or the other. She is, however, written as if she grew up in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. She treats the black characters as if she is first meeting black people, and their lives are a mystery. Race relations is touched on in the story, but tiptoed around. Her treatment of them, as a southerner just didn’t feel authentic. And lastly, despite her accomplishments, she comes off as rather needy… She simply doesn’t make sense to me, at least in the first half of the book – which is probably due to me being clueless. Perhaps these issues are resolved by the end of the book, but in the first half, she never struck me as being the person she would have needed to be to have achieved what she achieved. I found it hard to relate to her, and the often mundane nature of the story she relates.

I lived through the 1950’s & 60’s, and in reading this story I never experienced even a glimmer of recognition for the time period. The same can be said for the setting and larger backdrop of the times. The backdrop of the post-asteroid world is merely hinted at with a quoted news story at the beginning of the chapters. “Mrs York” doesn’t relate much beyond her immediate concerns. Indeed, even the space program, which she is part of, mostly plays out in the background. Every so often we have a rocket launch viewed from the control room, and that’s it, at least in the first half of the book. And even her focus on everyday life doesn’t seem to bring that life into context. Once you get past the premise, there’s not a whole lot of speculative fiction in this the story – at least in the first half. And that brings us to the premise.

One of the main reasons I stop reading a book is that I find something too stupid to want to continue reading. Given the praise this book has generated, I turned a blind eye to its stupid premise. But in the end, with the story just dragging along, I could no longer ignore its nonsensical premise. That premise is, that because of the greenhouse effects, due to the amount of water put into the atmosphere by the impact of the asteroid, the earth will gradually heat up and become uninhabitable. Well, okay, I’ll give that a pass. Nothing is simple, and I would suspect that there would be a lot of unknown unknowns that might mitigate the effects somewhat, but what the heck, let’s go with it. The solution to saving humanity that the story proposes, however, doesn’t get that pass. The solution we are supposed to buy is that humans need to rapidly develop rocket ships in order to use them to escape earth and set up colonies on the moon and Mars. (Another very old and familiar premise.)

But think about it. Why would we go to all the trouble of developing a space program from scratch so that we could set up self-supporting bases on harsh, faraway, airless and/or uninhabitable worlds, in order to escape our someday uninhabitable world? I mean, if you can establish self-supporting colonies millions of miles away, and only after you perfect a whole new technology just to get there, why would you not set up those same colonies here on the earth? It would be several orders of magnitude easier, far less expensive, and it would save many, many times more people than any moon colony would. I simply can not imagine that establishing a colony on the airless, radiation bombarded moon would be easier than building underground self-supporting underground shelters here on earth – near the poles if need be.

So, long story short. The premise makes no sense to me. I suppose it makes the book more dramatic, and easier to option for a movie deal. But the reality is that the story is not all that dramatic. I have to believe that a similar story could’ve been told against an alternate cold war space race against a more accomplished Soviet Union, with, perhaps, greater effect.

All art is subjective. I don’t write criticisms. I write how stories, TV shows, and art strike me. This story, despite my best efforts, just didn’t appeal to me. Things about it just seemed off. I found that I could not relate to the narrator. It failed to make me suspend my disbelief. And well, the premise is silly. That said, I recognize that this book has much to say about the struggle for equality, something that should be said. I’m glad it found an audience.

My Library -- Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A Heinlein
image credit: https://bcmuseum.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/robert-a-heinlein.jpg

Ah, the elephant in the room. When it comes to speculative fiction fans of the early baby boomer era, the ones who discovered speculative fiction in their youth, there is one dominate figure – Robert A Heinlein. All of us must have read his “juveniles” in hardcover, with those distinctive black & white interior illustrations. And for many of us, he was one of our favorite, if not our favorite speculative fiction writer. I find that I have a dedicated list of the books of his that I either owned or read from back in the day. The two other dedicated lists I have are for the books of Andre Norton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Starman Jones
Image credit:  https://www.rafeeqmcgiveron.com/scribnerrsquos-yajuveniles.html 

Though I read most of the juveniles as library books, I do have some of those books in mass market paperback in my collection as well, purchased in the mid to late 1960’s. However, I first got to know those books on the Greendale Library book shelves. They may’ve held them all. They were mostly good, even great, and were, along with the works of Andre Norton, they were the perfect introduction to speculative fiction.Starman Jones was my favorite SF book for quite a while, along with Ben Bova’s Star Conquers. Everyone has their favorite Heinlein juvenile, and it seems that Starman Jones was not a common pick. But it was mine. Looking back, and looking forward, I think it was my favorite for two reasons. The first was its opening set on a farm. Every summer my mom would take us kids back to her childhood home, a dairy farm in Wisconsin for two weeks, so that the farm setting resonated with me. The second reason is that there was just a faint hint of romance in the story. Though, perhaps I just read that into the story. In any event, given the appeal of Edgar Rice Burroughs books had on me, with their common thread of romance, I think this had to be a factor as well.

Starman Jones
image credit: https://www.rafeeqmcgiveron.com/scribnerrsquos-yajuveniles.html 

These juveniles were perfect for a very specific age in one’s life. I reread Starman Jones, just six years later, and I was surprised how “thin” the story actually is. When I first read it, I had been making believe all my life as a child, and I suspect that this ability allowed me to flesh out the story with my own make believe. Later, as that ability faded, and I was left only with the book Heinlein had written, I found it rather disappointing. In any event, I read all of his juveniles, and still remember the plot of Tunnel in the Sky, though all others, have left no specific memories. I think I enjoyed Citizen of the Galaxy a lot, and seem to recall that The Star Beast wasn’t very good at all.

Below is my current collection of Heinlein books:

Like my Norton collection, what is missing is telling. So what is missing? First is Stranger in a Strange Land. I did have a paperback copy, but I got rid of it. Now I usually keep all my books, so when I get rid of a book, you have to know that I really, really didn’t like it. Stranger in a Strange Land falls into that category, as does my Science Fiction Book Club edition of Farnhan’s Freehold. I can still remember selecting that as one of my monthly selections, and being really disappointed it when I got and read it. Beginning with Farnham’s Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein and I started to part ways. My records show that I finished Stranger in a Strange Land on 24 Jan 1966. Following that, I read Gulf,(?) Podkaybne of Mars, Glory Road, Assignment in Eternity and The Puppet Masters all in 1966.

Glory Road was the last of Heinlein’s new books that I enjoyed. Though, strangely enough, I only recently discovered that I had a copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress on my shelves. I have no memory of ever reading it, much less owning it. But there it is. However, I can not find it listed on any of my lists, so I may’ve picked it up sometime in the early 1970’s after I stopped recording books I read. Who knows?

Starman Jones
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Once again, taking out my “Science- fiction Books I Have Read, 1/5/65” list, I find that at that date I had read and rated the following Heinlein books:

Starman Jones E

Space Cadet E (No memory what so ever.)

Double Star A (ditto)

Starship Troopers B (I’m surprised I rated it that high.)

The Star Beast C (I guess I remembered correctly)

Tunnel in the Sky A (I know I read this twice.)

Rocket Ship Galileo B

Farmer in the Sky B

Between Planets A

Time for the Stars B

The Door into Summer B (Another book that I am surprised I rated it this high.)

Citizen of the Galaxy B (Only a B, but on a later list it is upgraded to an E, perhaps I reread it.)

Podkayne of Mars B

Have Spacesuit, Will Travel B

The Rolling Stones B

Waldo & Magic, Inc C & A

The Green Hills of Earth B (I’m surprised that this collection of short stories is rated so high.)

In short, a solid “B” writer. With a couple of standouts, and a couple of average books. By the end of 1965, I had added, but not rated; Orphans of the Sky, Methuselah’s Children, The Puppet Masters, Revolt in 2100, The Man Who Sold the Moon, Farnhan’s Freehold, Red Planet, and Beyond this Horizon to my list of Heinlein books read. And as I already mentioned, I read six more Heinlein books in 1966. I also have an undated list of only Heinlein books – 33 in total – with my ratings. On it, I had rated Waldo, The Star Beast, Farmhan’s Freehold, 6XH, and Stranger in a Strange Land all “C”s None of my lists include The Moon if a Harsh Mistress.

Farmer in the Sky
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From these lists, it would seem that Farnham’s Freehold was the book that started to sour my relationship with Heinlein. But I rated it a “C” so it could’ve been worse, and I continued to buy Heinlein books after Farnham’s Freehold, I guess I took Farnham as just one of those bad apples every writer occasionally produces. I also remember that, while I purchased them, when I came across them, I was never a huge fan of Heinlein’s short stories from the 40’s in those anthology books published by Signet. However, seeing that I seemed to have rated them in my Heinlein only list as “B” books, it is possible that my later falling out with Heinlein has colored my recollections of them. In any event, in 1966 I read five Heinlein books, starting with Stranger in a Strange Land, and only one of his books in 1967. My list of books I read for 1970 has no Heinlein books. Clearly, by the time he wrote I Will Fear No Evil, Heinlein was history.

Between Planets

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I did try, in the 1980’s or 90’s, to read several of his later novels, but I found them so bad – sorry soapboxes for Heinlein, the self-styled philosopher, to preach his strange philosophy from – that I couldn’t get more than a couple of chapters into them. A sorry end, in my opinion. If he aspired to be a philosopher, he should have published his ideas and insights in non-fiction books, not plow them, into fiction “stories.” These days, the more I learn about the man, the less I like him. So, unlike Andre Norton, I no longer have any fond memories of this pillar of my early speculative fiction reading. I guess that rereading my favorite story only half a dozen years after I first read it, and finding it lacking, tells the story of Robert A Heinlein in my life.

Robert A Heinlein
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All Systems Red Review

Image: https://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/overall-a-reviews/a-minus-reviews/review-all-systems-red-the-murderbot-diaries-1-by-martha-wells-2/

All Systems Red, by Martha Wells, is the first of four “The  Murderbot Diaries” novellas feathering the SecUnit who calls itself Murderbot. It won the 2018 Nebula and Hugo Awards for best novella.

I don’t read a lot of contemporary science fiction, or indeed the science fiction of any era these days. Except for a few authors I know and like, I may sample just a book or two a year. So, given my limited exposure to modern science fiction, and as writer myself, what do I think of All Systems Red?

It was okay.

Damned by faint praise?

What may be more damning, in my view, is all the novellas that didn’t win. All Systems Red does not, in my opinion, set a high bar of excellence. So what does that say about the rest? Maybe there were not a lot to choose from, so the best of the lot didn’t have to be brilliant. I can't say.

Or it may be just me. I like novels, so a cut down novel, or an extended short story doesn’t fit my preferred style of story. That said, it was okay enough for me to read it to the end. I don’t read bad books to the end.

Since this is a famous four year old story, most science fiction fans have already read it, so I’ll skip the story summery, and just share my thoughts on the story.

The story opens with giant worm breaking out of a crater to threaten a survey team. The team’s hired security bot, “Muderbot” acts swiftly to save several members of the survey team from the jaws of this worm. It reads like an opening action scene straight out of lesson one of How to Write a Thrilling Story 101. In short, while it gets the job done of introducing the character, it is pretty standard, unoriginal fare.

And speaking of unoriginal fare, a planetary survey team facing danger on a planet is one of the most well worn tropes in the first three or four decades of science fiction, to the point were it is almost a cliché. No points for originality so far.

There is no real sense of place in the story. The planet is so generic that there are episodes of the original Star Trek with more convincing locales.

As for the story that follows… Well, Jason Sheehan says in his review for NPR, “The story itself is simple to the point of nonexistence.” It is certainly rudimentary. A series of unexplained computer system failures leads to finding another survey team on the planet massacred, which sends our team fleeing the unknown killers. The mystery of why the killers were acting this way, and how they were saved seems to have been pulled, more or less, out of the hat. Not that it matters. None of this stuff matters.

All this doesn’t matter because the story is a character study of the first (non)person narrator, Murderbot, a half mechanical, half biological “SecUnit.” It is sort of an introvert Bender – snarky, indifferent, haunted by its past, or rather what it can remember of its past, but, unlike Bender, very shy and uncomfortable around humans. Why a security bot is part machine, and part organic is not clear. It seems a weakness, not a strength, as there are pure sentient machines in the stories as well. I assume it is because Wells wanted to explore what a person is. Is this half machine a person?

Murderbot is, however, a special SecUnit because it had, somehow, managed to hack its control unit, its “governor,” giving it free will. It can no longer be controlled. I find it hard to imagine how it even knew how to disable its interior control governor without giving a hint to all the systems that monitored it, or how it reached it to alter it. And if it knew how, you’d think every other SecUnit, would know as well and be able to do it too. Just what makes Murderbot so extraordinary, and apparently unusual is not explained. Murderbot also seems to be able to hack any, or almost any, computer system. Not only is one is left wondering how it learned how to do so with relative ease, but you’d have to wonder why these systems wouldn’t be more secure than they apparently are. However, in a world where everything is connected and surveillance omnipresent, I suppose that being able to hack these systems to defeat them is a necessary skill for the stories in the series to work.

The story, as told by the SecUnit, Murderbot is largely concerned with the various procedures it implements to protect the humans in its charge from danger. During the story, Murderbot finds itself caring for its human charges, and they show concern for it – which makes it very uncomfortable. It prefers being treated as a machine rather than as a person, and finds it unnerving when they treat it like a person, and especially when they see it without its armor as basically a human. Jason Sheehan, whose review is actually very positive, sees the story as a “coming out” story – of a constructed entity finding its personhood, with the awkwardness and fear such a step entails for a very “shy” SecUnit.

Be that as it may, you still have to put up with the trite setup, almost nonexistent story line, the generic setting, and all the techno-procedural mumbo-jumbo that makes up the bulk of the story. I did, hence my “It’s okay” rating.

However.

Martha Wells is an experienced writer, so you should probably assume that she knows just what she’s doing. And in that case…

I also write first person narratives. My approach is that the narrator tells the story from his point of view. (All my stories use male narrators, hence the “his.”) A number of reviews have said that my stories need an editor – presumably to eliminate nonessential wordage. I would reply that it is the characters in the story who are telling the story and they are not professional writers. These characters may include details that are unnecessary for the story’s plot, from a professional writer’s point of view, but are, nevertheless, significant to the character. I think that these non-essential details make the story feel more authentic. I believe that Martha Wells is doing the same thing. Since she has the SecUnit Murderbot tell the story, it would, naturally, tell the story from its point of view. It may well be blind to the beauties of the planet. It may well view the human characters as flat, two dimensional more or less standard humans. And main focus of its story would be its techno-procedural actions that it used to protect the humans in its charge. Seen from this point of view, the limitations of the story that I outlined above, are simply the limitations and priorities of the story’s narrator, Murderbot. Which is clever.

Still. It took me four days to finish the story. And so it is still just okay.

And yet.

I have some additional thoughts after reading the three subsequent novellas in the Muderbot Diaries series, Artificial Condition, Rouge Protocol, and Exit Strategy. Since the series focuses on, and comes back around to the events of in All Systems Red, I can’t help but wonder if Wells and her publisher decided to take what would have been an episodic novel and divide it up and sell it as four novellas.

In any event, the three novellas that follow, are, in my opinion, much better stories. Murderbot becomes a more interesting character at as it continues to explore is personhood and its relationship with humans and other constructed entities. Not wanting to be a pet of the humans it saved in All Systems Red, it runs away to find its own life. In these stories Wells casts Murderbot as a Philip Marlowe type of hardboiled private eye, since now, without its armor, it can pass itself off as an augmented human. In Artificial Condition it hires itself to a group of people looking to hire a security consultant to ride shotgun on an iffy rendezvous with a dubious and dangerous person. And if Murderbot is now Phillip Marlowe in this story, it has acquired a new sidekick, a sentient ship who acts like a Nero Wolf type of character who can pull techno-strings and provide support in the background. All of which makes this story a much more compelling read. In Rouge Protocol, Murderbot is searching for evidence to help the people it saved in All Conditions Red, in their continuing fight against the evil corporation that tried to murder them. In doing so, it ends up saving another group of people from this evil corporation which is trying to protect its illegal activities. And in Exit Strategy, we find Murderbot once again saving the leader of the first group, who had been kidnapped by the evil corporation.

In all of these stories there is a ton of techno-procedural mambo-jumbo – hacking this system and controlling those drones or that machine. They are thriller/military sf stories set in a high-tech dragon and dungeons maze within large space stations. In many cases I didn’t get a clear picture of the locales, but I guess that doesn’t matter in the end. The stories are about Murderbot, and if you like the character, you’ll enjoy the stories. I like character focused stories and so I enjoyed these stories, especially the last three. I’d give the series an almost four star rating as a whole, the opening story giving the series the "almost."