What Makes This Book So Great Read online

There has been no case in the whole of my history where somebody has told me not to read the sequels and I have listened to them. I have always gone on to read the disappointing sequels, and been disappointed. Occasionally, I’ve read the sequels and liked them despite the consensus. But mostly the consensus is right, and I just haven’t listened. Once I stop, I stop, I don’t keep on and on if I’m no longer enjoying something. But I’m hopeless at not seeking out sequels as long as I have enjoyed the series up to that point.

  So, better to have loved and lost?

  I think a lot of it depends on the way in which the sequels are bad. If there’s an initial brilliant volume and then the sequels fade off with less and less originality until they’re just going through the motions, then I haven’t really lost anything. I’m thinking of the Pern books. I haven’t read all of those (goodness me, there’s one called Dolphins of Pern!) but I’ve read enough of them to be able to tell you that none of them is Dragonflight (1968), but they’re all perfectly reasonable extra helpings of books with dragons and weyrs. None of them are going to spoil the experience of Dragonflight, except perhaps by diluting it a little. And you can’t really get back the experience that was Dragonflight, because let’s face it, you have to be twelve. If I was camping in the rain and there was nothing to read but Dolphins of Pern, I’m sure I could pass a happy enough afternoon with it. The same with the sequels to David Feintuch’s Midshipman’s Hope (1994). I’ve read all of them. I’d urge you to stop with the first book, but the sequels haven’t done me any harm.

  Where there’s a real problem is when the sequels spoil the original book.

  The books about which I feel most strongly negative are all sequels to earlier books that I really like, and which spoil those earlier books. I’m immediately thinking of Card’s Xenocide (1991) and Mary Gentle’s Ancient Light (1987). In those cases, I can’t re-read the earlier books without the memory of the later books coming between me and the page. I know the Ender series has gone on far past Xenocide, and though, or perhaps because, I loved Ender’s Game (1995) and Speaker for the Dead (1986) so much, I haven’t been able to bring myself to read them, and I can’t really re-read the first two either. With Ancient Light it’s not so bad, I have after many years been able to forget it sufficiently that I can re-read Golden Witchbreed (1983). But I’m afraid Xenocide has poisoned the universe forever for me.

  I think my problem here was that part of the fundamental pleasure of reading SF for me is putting the hints and clues together and extrapolating where they’re going, and in re-reading seeing how they go together when I know where they’re going. I can’t do that if I have to turn my eyes away from where they’re going. I honestly wish I hadn’t read those books. When we were talking about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I said that if Lacuna was real, the thing I’d have wiped would be my memory of Xenocide. “But then you’d read it again!” Sasha said. And he’s right! (In fact, the only way I know this hasn’t happened already is that I read Xenocide about three days after it was published.)

  So, why is it worse when this happens in a sequel?

  When a writer takes a book in a new direction, it can feel jarring, and if it’s a direction I don’t like and that doesn’t fit with what has gone before, I won’t like it. But it’s happening while I’m reading, and though I may be invested in the plot and the characters and the world, it won’t disappoint me as much as when this happens in a sequel, where I may well have read the first book(s) several times before the new one comes out. There are a number of books that I think go downhill in the last third, but I don’t start foaming at the mouth when I think of them. But when it’s a series and when I already love all of the earlier books and have read it and read it and read it, sometimes when I hear there’s going to be a sequel I’m as afraid as I am delighted. This happened recently with Regenesis (2009).

  I think whether it’s worth starting a series that goes downhill depends very much on how self-contained the good books are. In the case of A Million Open Doors and Dune that isn’t a problem. The books stand alone. With something like a fantasy series (I haven’t read either of R. Fife’s examples of King and Goodkind) it’s a lot less clear-cut, because a series like that is very much a voyage where you want to feel sure of your destination. A lot of this is a problem with trusting the author. If I trust the author, I’ll put up with a lot, but once I start feeling distrusting, I start picking fault with everything.

  And a lot of it is individual taste. Mostly when this has happened to me, I’ve started the series before all the books are out. I know there are people out there who won’t read series unless they’re complete. But it’s very difficult if someone says, “Read this one, and then stop.”

  APRIL 1, 2009

  34. More questions than answers: Robert A. Heinlein’s The Stone Pillow

  When you read a book that’s been so tremendously influential on the whole genre of SF and inspired a whole subgenre of its own, it’s hard to see it clearly. It’s hard to see what it was that seemed so wonderful when it was new that fans rushed to give it the Hugo and pros the Nebula. Even when I first read it in the early eighties it knocked me over, but I have to recapture my inner twelve-year-old to really appreciate The Stone Pillow now.

  If The Stone Pillow were a new book today, I’d call it derivative. But the reason for that is the tremendous influence it has had. Is there a word for a book that was genre-changing and is historically important but that has been left behind by changing times? I don’t know.

  Before The Stone Pillow, nobody had written about a world where the stars go out. Oh it’s a familiar conceit now, it’s been done by Robert Charles Wilson (Spin), Robert Reed (Beyond the Veil of Stars), Greg Egan (Quarantine), Joanna Russ (Edge and the Border), Margaret Atwood (Exceed His Grasp) and even Arthur C. Clarke (“The Nine Billion Names of God”). That isn’t the only way the book has been influential—it introduced Heinlein’s theme of older aliens and younger women, so prevalent in the genre today. It was the first introduction of aliens with an agenda and affected SF from Ken MacLeod to Battlestar Galactica. It prefigured the first-person kick-ass female protagonist in Friday. It was also, astonishingly so late, the first story in which all the women went away.

  Did the genre really need the introduction of robotic sex kittens?

  As always with Heinlein, when I’m actually reading it, I get caught up in the story and I don’t care about the flaws. OK, Desdi likes to be wolf-whistled at, I guess some women do. OK, her nipples go “spung,” maybe mine are defective, they’ve never made any noise at all. The future world without stars is well drawn—and in so few words, too! Heinlein’s really astonishing skill at sketching detailed backgrounds with a few brief strokes was never better. I like the aliens, well, I mostly like the aliens. If I have issues with the Crazy Greys it’s in their motivation sneaking around that way. My problem is with Desdi. When I was twelve this went right past me. But now I have to ask, why does she go with them at the end? And why do all the other women and femmbots? What’s so wrong with Earth? Why is the epilogue from the point of view of the men left behind (with no stars!) and not with Desdi and the others aboard the spaceship? And why did the ship change from a saucer to a teapot? I remain perplexed.

  And I appreciate that it’s influential, but why are all those books the same story? I mean at the end of Spin men as well as women leave the planet, and at the end of Beyond the Veil of Stars they leave the planet as mind vampires and I suppose you can call Exceed His Grasp and Edge and the Border feminist reimaginings and Quarantine a geek reimagining, but in my opinion only Clarke had the courage to do something really different with this story.

  I mean, it’s undeniably influential. And I guess it’s a good book. It’s certainly still a thought-provoking read. But I’m not sure it’s quite as good as everyone thought it was back in 1940.

  April Fool! If you are perplexed, you should know that this was a jape published on April 1. The Stone Pillow was a title of an announced Heinlein bo
ok that he never actually wrote. Robert Charles Wilson mentioned it in his short story “Divided by Infinity.” The conceit here is taking an imaginary book and making it the ancestor of a mixed set of books, some real and some made up. The Wilson, the Reed and the Egan are all real, and all really about worlds without stars. Clarke’s “Nine Billion Names of God” is also a real short story on this subject.

  MARCH 31, 2009

  35. Weeping for her enemies: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor

  Kate Nepveu mentioned Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga as a series where the quality increased as they went on, and the more I thought about that the more I felt like reading them, and as today is a “mostly horizontal” day, I spent the morning with Shards of Honor (1986). As Shards of Honor is now published as the first half of a book called Cordelia’s Honor, with Barrayar (1991) as the second half, and as plotwise Barrayar is the second half of the story, even if it was written a lot later when Bujold had become much more accomplished, I had intended to spend this afternoon reading that and then do one post on the whole story. But as I put Shards of Honor down and realised I had to get out of bed anyway, I thought it might be interesting to consider it alone, and as a very unusual beginning for the series. And then it occurred to me that it might be interesting to re-read the books in publication order, which I don’t think I have ever done.

  Shards of Honor was Bujold’s first published novel. It introduces the universe in which all the books in the series take place. Otherwise, it couldn’t be less like a standard first novel in a series. The main character (of the series) isn’t even born and this is about how his parents met. Major events happen that do cast their shadow a long way, but here they are mostly interesting in the context of Aral and Cordelia, who are minor characters in most of the subsequent books. This totally isn’t a case of writing something and following it with more of the same.

  What’s really good about Shards of Honor, what totally grabbed me about it on first reading and on every subsequent read, is the character of Cordelia. The book is written in a very tight third person in Cordelia’s point of view, and Cordelia is a wonderful character. She’s empathic and practical and she’s from no-nonsense egalitarian Beta colony. She is the commander of the exploration starship Rene Magritte, when on a newly discovered planet she encounters the aggressive forces of Barrayar. The universe is just sketched in compared to the way it is developed later, but it’s already interesting. The plot provides enough events to get from one end of the book to the other. The writing is nothing like as good as Bujold has since become, but it’s very absorbing. The other thing that’s notable is the emotional depth she manages to get into this space opera plot. It’s not so much the romance (though the romance is actually very sweet) as the genuine ethical dilemmas. Again, this is something where Bujold improved by orders of magnitude, but even here in this first novel she had enough to hook me completely.

  I said that the background of the universe is only sketched in, and that’s true. Everything she says later is reasonably implicit in what’s mentioned here, but an awful lot isn’t mentioned. The phrase “the Wormhole Nexus” isn’t used. Jackson’s Whole is mentioned as a name, and the Cetagandan war, but no other planets except Escobar, Beta, Barrayar and Earth. There’s nothing—and there should be nothing—about how the ships are powered, but the pilot we see does have implants.

  Shards of Honor is about the specific contrast between Beta and Barrayar, and Beta and Barrayar a generation before we mostly know them. For Beta we have Cordelia, female, a theist, competent and practical, an explorer, whose weapon is a stunner. For Barrayar we have Aral, male, an atheist, a militarist, a romantic, who has seen someone killed because he only has a stunner. (“How did they kill him with a stunner?” “They didn’t. They kicked him to death after they’d taken it away from him.”) Aral is practical too, but with a completely different kind of practicality. Of course they fall in love—and Bujold does it rather well by not dwelling on it. Beta here is democratic—except that nobody admits to having voted for the president. Malefactors are treated with therapy, which seems very enlightened until Cordelia is threatened with therapy that will peel her brain like an onion looking for the seeds. Barrayar is feudal and militaristic and has been having a problem with political officers and a Ministry of Political Education. Ezar, the dying emperor, gets rid of that but at a terrible cost.

  The immediate contrast between Barrayar and Beta is one of the things that does prefigure the rest of the series. But it’s surprising how little of what I know about Barrayar is mentioned here—there’s no mention of the Time of Isolation, no mention of the poisonous native vegetation, or the radioactivity of Vorkosigan Vashnoi. Also, we barely see Piotr. All of those things are clearly there, to an eye who knows to expect them, but they’re not explicit. Bujold has always said she reserves the right to have a better idea, but there’s remarkably little retconning or contradiction—just more information, as things become fractally more complicated as you get closer to them. When Cordelia mentions interrogation drugs, I’m pretty sure Bujold had not yet thought up fast penta, but when she has her allergic reaction to Dr. Mehta’s drug it prefigures Miles’s idiosyncratic reactions to fast penta even so. Similarly, Jackson’s Whole may just have been a name when she wrote it, but what I know about it from the later books fits in without a twitch.

  I mentioned the emotional depth. The depravity of Vorrutyer and Prince Serg, and the explicit minimizing of that evil compared to Ezar’s plan, is very impressive. But most interesting of all is Bothari, who is a monster, but an entirely three-dimensional one even here.

  There are a number of things that are quite intentionally set up for later books. What they are setting up is not Barrayar but The Warrior’s Apprentice (1986), which takes place eighteen years later but is what she wrote immediately next. Arde Mayhew is the pilot who takes Cordelia to Escobar, Vordarian is mentioned, Aral’s Regency, and Aral and Cordelia’s hope for children. Shards of Honor has a happy ending, I suppose. Aral and Cordelia are married, Aral is Regent, nothing bad has happened yet. Very few people would turn from that to poor Miles breaking his legs again as he fails to get over the obstacle course. But that’s why Bujold is such a terrific writer, and was, even at the beginning of her career.

  APRIL 1, 2009

  36. Forward Momentum: Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Warrior’s Apprentice

  The Warrior’s Apprentice (1986) is where I normally tell people to start the Vorkosigan books, and it is the other logical beginning to the series. It was written immediately after Shards of Honor but set a generation later—a literal generation. Cordelia and Aral’s son Miles, blighted before birth by a teratogenic chemical attack on his parents, is a manic-depressive dwarf with brittle bones but is still determined to serve in the military. On the first page of the book he fails the physical test to enter the military academy. After that he goes to visit his grandmother on Beta Colony and events spiral in the manner of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” until he finds himself the admiral of a fleet of space mercenaries. If you like MilSF you’ll love it, and if you don’t like MilSF you might just love it anyway, because really that’s the least of it.

  What makes this so good is that it has about 90 percent more depth than you’d expect it to have. The plot may be “seventeen-year-old with physical disabilities becomes admiral of space mercenaries” but the themes are much deeper and more interesting. This is a story about loyalty, duty, the weight of family expectations, and what it means to serve.

  Miles’s grandfather was a general, his father was an admiral and regent, his mother keeps telling him great tests are great gifts. He’s spent a lot of his childhood crippled physically and under a weight of expectation. The other person who brought him up was Sergeant Bothari. Bothari has been Miles’s bodyguard and batman since Miles was born and he is a deeply screwed-up guy. He has a daughter, Elena, and the mystery of Elena’s parentage (no mystery if you have read Shards) is one of the unusual plot strands of Warrior�
�s. Bothari raped Elena’s mother and made a fantasy that she was his wife. Elena, born out of a uterine replicator, is supposed to be his atonement—but one human being cannot be that for another. Miles loves Elena but once she gets away from Barrayar she never wants to go back. You’d expect from the first chapter of the book that Miles and Elena would be engaged at the end, but far from it, she rejects him to marry a deserter and remain a mercenary.

  The book largely takes place in Tau Verde space, with Miles taking over the Oseran mercenaries with hardly a blow being struck. (“Now I understand how judo is supposed to work!”) But the emotional heart of it is on Barrayar. In Shards, Cordelia says that Barrayar eats its children, and here we have that in detail. After Miles has assembled the fleet and is hailed as Admiral, he goes home to stand trial for treason. The climax of the story is not the surrender of the Oserans but Aral begging for Miles’s life. (Incidentally, she must have had most of what happens in Barrayar in mind if not on paper before she wrote this.) The whole plot happened because Miles wants to serve … something.

  Also unusual—how often do you see a bleeding ulcer instead of a bloody boarding battle? I think it was absolutely the right choice, but what a nerve! And Miles’s depression balances his mania—he manages astonishing feats, but he also has his black moods, his days of sitting doing nothing while everything goes to hell around him. Yet unlike some depressive characters in fiction, it’s always entertaining to be around Miles. And the conflict of Shards between Cordelia representing Beta and Aral representing Barrayar is internalised in Miles, who holds both planets, both accents, both value sets, and tries to reconcile them in his own person. Psychologically and plotwise it all makes perfect sense, it’s just, again, not the kind of choice you’d expect to see in a book like this. And again, you can spin this as a book about Miles winning, but it’s really just as much if not more about how much he lost, Bothari, Elena, his grandfather.… On this re-read, I was impressed with how much we see Miles play-acting outside of the part of Admiral Naismith. He gets out of bed to mime the mutant villain, he pretends to be rehearsing Shakespeare with Elena, he plays the Baba in Elena and Baz’s betrothal scene. Clearly acting parts has been part of his life for a long time, and that explains (partly) how he can take on roles so easily.