What Makes This Book So Great Read online

  This ideal relationship doesn’t always work out. Even when I like the book in the first place, sometimes a re-read is a disappointment. This usually happens when the thing that was good about the book was a temporary shininess that wears off quickly. There are books that pall when I know their plots, or become too familiar with their characters. And sometimes I read a book that I used to love and find it seems to have been replaced with a shallow book that’s only somewhat similar. (This happens most often with children’s books I haven’t read since I was a child, but it has happened with adult books. This worries me, and makes me wonder if I’m going to grow out of everything and have nothing to read except Proust. Fortunately, when and if that day comes, in several hundred years, Proust will be there, and still pristine.)

  A re-read is more leisurely than a first read. I know the plot, after all, I know what happens. I may still cry (embarrassingly, on the train) when re-reading, but I won’t be surprised. Because I know what’s coming, because I’m familiar with the characters and the world of the story, I have more time to pay attention to them. I can immerse myself in details and connections I rushed past the first time and delight in how they are put together. I can relax into the book. I can trust it completely. I really like that.

  Very occasionally, with a wonderfully dense and complex book I’ll re-read it right away as soon as I’ve finished it, not just because I don’t want to leave the world of that book but also because I know I have gulped where I should have savoured, and now that I know I can rely on the journey that is the book, I want to relax and let it take me on it. The only thing missing is the shock of coming at something unexpected and perfect around a blind corner, which can be one of the most intense pleasures of reading, but that’s a rare pleasure anyway. Re-reading too extensively can be a bad sign for me, a sign of being down. Mixing new possibilities with reliable old ones is good, leaning on the re-reads and not adventuring anything new at all isn’t. Besides, if I do that, where will the re-reads of tomorrow come from? I can’t re-read the same 365 books for the next 800 years. I’ve already read some dearly beloved books to the point where I know them by heart.

  Long before I am 800 I will have memorized all the books I love now and be unable to re-read them, but fortunately by then people and aliens will have written plenty more new favourites, and I’ll be re-reading them too.

  JULY 19, 2008

  3. A Deepness in the Sky, the Tragical History of Pham Nuwen

  Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky (1999) wouldn’t be a tragedy if it existed alone. It’s a tragedy because it’s a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and the reader knows things about the universe the characters do not know. All the other things I can think of that make this trick work are historical or mythological. Deepness does it entirely within SF and entirely within Vinge’s invented universe. I think it’s an incredible achievement.

  In A Fire Upon the Deep we learn early on that our immediate cosmic neighborhood is divided into Zones, working outwards from the Galactic core. In each Zone, cognition and technology work better. So in the core it isn’t possible to be intelligent at all, in the Slow Zone it’s possible to be as intelligent as a human but no better and you can’t go faster than light, in the Beyond you can have FTL and anti-gravity and enhanced intelligences, and in the Transcend you can have godlike intelligences and Clarke’s Law tech. The novel takes place in the Beyond, with an excursion to the Slow Zone, and concerns a problem from the Low Transcend risking upsetting the whole thing. (Vinge apparently thought up this brilliant universe as a way around his idiotic Singularity non-problem, which just goes to show that a) constraints can produce excellent art and b) every cloud has a silver lining.)

  The whole of Deepness takes place in the Slow Zone, among characters, human and alien, who have absolutely no idea that their universe works that way. They don’t know there are other Zones out there, they think they’re part of a baroque and complex civilization that stretches for light-years, that’s held together by a thin skein of trading spaceships.

  The universe they believe they live in has a long history of Failed Dreams—AI, FTL, really good life-extension techniques—which have kept receding as they are chased. There’s a profession of “Programmer/Archaeologist” where your job is to excavate the underlayers of the old programs your computers are running—and they’re very old; in some cases, there are slower-than-light starships running on Linux.

  The plot of Deepness is an exciting one, with aliens going through a technological revolution, with two groups of opposed humans trying to use them and each other, and with tiny incremental advances in technology meaning a huge amount. Whole civilizations are perishing in the background because they’ve got as far as it’s possible to go—their planets are at the point where one little bit of overload will bring it all down around their ears. There’s mindwipe, and the fascinating idea of Focus (enslaving people and fixing their brains in one direction so that they become obsessive about it), and a carefully timed revolt, and secrets among the aliens. There are great characters and a great character-driven plot, and I didn’t even mention how terrifically alien and yet entirely comprehensible the aliens are, who have evolved on a planet around a star that goes out regularly and freezes even their air. There’s a happy ending.

  But in the end what brings me back to Deepness again and again isn’t any of that but the terrible tragedy that surrounds that happy ending, that Pham Nuwen wants to find the secret at the heart of the galaxy and he sets off in the wrong direction to find it.

  At the end of the movie Far from Heaven the hero, a black guy in a segregated 1950s US, leaves the white heroine and gets on a train in Hartford, Connecticut, towards the US South. “No!” I said in an anguished whisper. I wanted him to walk across the platform and get on the train going the other way. In Montreal even then he could have married the girl. He’s heading in the wrong direction and he doesn’t even know there’s a possible way out.

  It’s a heck of an achievement for Vinge to make me feel the same way in an entirely SFnal universe, and without a word about it in the book.

  JULY 22, 2008

  4. The Singularity Problem and Non-Problem

  I mentioned in my post on Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky that I don’t believe the Singularity is a problem. Commenters Dripgrind and Coveysd asked about that, and I decided the answer was worth a post. Vinge came up with the Singularity in Marooned in Realtime (Analog, May–August 1986; Bluejay, 1986), which I read in 1987 when it came out in Britain. I thought then that the Singularity was a terrific SF idea—the idea was that technological progress would spiral so fast that something incomprehensible would happen. In the book, most of humanity has disappeared, and the plot concerns the people who missed it. (Incidental aside—the reason I re-read Marooned in Realtime is for the journal of one of the people who missed it. The plot, the ideas, the other characters have all worn fairly thin over time, but Marta’s journal as she lives alone on a far-future Earth remains compelling.) I was astonished at reaching the end of the book to discover a little afterword in which Vinge claimed to believe in the coming Singularity. I thought it was a great idea for a story, maybe even two or three stories, but too obviously silly for anyone to really believe.

  Since then, the Singularity has come to be an object of almost religious faith in some quarters. In The Cassini Division (1998), Ken MacLeod has a character call it “the Rapture for nerds,” and that’s just how I see it.

  I understand how Vinge, a brilliant writer who had worked in computing for years, could, in 1986, have seen how incredibly quickly computers had developed, and extrapolated that to other things. I mean it’s like someone seeing in 1950 that a hundred years before, the fastest speed was twenty miles per hour and now it was supersonic and extrapolating that line straight forward to having FTL by 1983. Nevertheless, I regard this as a kooky belief. Yes, in 1950 we were supersonic, and gosh, we’re in 2008 and … we’re still traveling in jets only very slightly faster than in 19
50, and cars, and subways, and buses. Even computers are only incrementally better than they were in 1987, and this isn’t entirely because they’re mostly handicapped with Windows. I’m not saying they haven’t improved. I’m just saying that if we’d carried on the extrapolated curve between 1950 and 1987 we’d have something a lot better. Instead, we got the Internet, which is a lot better, which is a new thing. That’s what people do. They come up with new things, the new things improve, they have a kind of plateau. It doesn’t go on forever. A microwave is shiny and science-fictional but a toaster makes better toast, and most people have both, and few people have much in their kitchen that’s much newer. And people are still people, traveling fast, using the Net, and though they may go through paradigm shifts, I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where understanding the future would be like explaining Worldcon to a goldfish, and even if we did, it wouldn’t be very interesting. If you want to argue about how much closer to the Singularity we are than we were in 1987, fine, but I’d suggest taking a look at The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton first. But my view remains, nice SF idea, not going to happen.

  I wouldn’t care at all about people believing in the Singularity, any more than I care about them believing in the Great Pumpkin, if it wasn’t doing harm to SF for everyone to be tiptoeing around it all the time.

  What irritates the heck out of me is that so many other people have come to have faith in this, despite zero evidence, and that this is inhibiting SF. It’s a lovely science fiction idea, and so are Gethenians, but I don’t see people going around solemnly declaring that we must all believe there’s a planet out there with people who only have gender once a month and therefore nobody should write SF about gendered species anymore because of the Gethenian Problem. Yet somehow the Singularity resonated to the point where Charlie Stross called it “the turd in the punchbowl” of writing about the future, and most SF being written now has to call itself “post-Singularity” and try to write about people who are by definition beyond our comprehension, or explain why there hasn’t been a Singularity. This hasn’t been a problem for Vinge himself, who has produced at least two masterpieces under this constraint. But a lot of other people now seem to be afraid to write the kind of SF that I like best, the kind with aliens and spaceships and planets and more tech than we have but not unimaginable incomprehensible tech. (Think Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy or pretty much anything by C. J. Cherryh.) I recently asked about this kind of SF in my LiveJournal and got only one recommendation for something I wasn’t already reading. Maybe it’s just a fashion, but I blame the Singularity—and that, to me, is the Singularity Problem.

  JULY 25, 2008

  5. Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Why isn’t it a classic of the field?

  Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence is one of my favourite books, and indeed, one of the favourite books of everybody who lives in this apartment.

  Outside of this apartment, I know only a handful of people who have even heard of it. It always strikes me as strange when there’s something like that, a book that’s brilliant and ought to have been seminal, a book that clearly should have set the world alight and yet sank with barely a ripple.

  Random Acts is written in the form of the diary of Lola Hart, a twelve-year-old girl in a near-future New York City. As the book progresses she changes from being a sweet middle-class child to a robbing murdering street girl as society changes around her. Presidents are assassinated and money is devalued and martial law is declared as she worries about her sexuality and groans about being forced to read Silas Marner for school. At the start of the book she’s writing in standard English with the occasional odd word choice, by the end she has progressed into a completely different dialect, and you have progressed step by step along with her and are reading it with ease. I can’t think of a comparable linguistic achievement, especially as he does it without any made-up words. (Random example: “Everything downcame today, the world’s spinning out and I spec we finally all going to be riding raw.”) I also can’t think of many books that have a protagonist change so much and so smoothly and believably. What makes it such a marvellous book is the way Lola and her world and the prose all descend together, and even though it’s bleak and downbeat it’s never depressing.

  So, why haven’t you read it?

  There are four reasons I can think of.

  First, it might be because it didn’t get much attention. It had some reviews, but it wasn’t even nominated for any awards. It was published in 1993, in Britain first, by HarperCollinsPublishers, and then in 1995 in the US by Grove Press. This probably messed up its award eligibility. I was just looking on the Locus index of awards, and I saw that Womack’s previous and (only slightly less terrific) Elvissey (1992) won the Philip K. Dick Award and was on the short list for the Locus Award, but Random Acts doesn’t seem to have been nominated for anything. It would have been eligible for the 1993 BSFA Award in Britain, which was won that year by Christopher Evans’s Aztec Century, thus proving that there’s no accounting for taste. Secondly, it might be because it has had singularly appalling covers. The original British hardcover was fairly bad, but sufficiently appealing that I got it out of the library on a cold day just before Christmas 1993, when I was feeling particularly desperate for something to read. The paperback covers—British and US—are just eye-gougingly awful. Despite having already read it and loved it I recoiled from the British cover. I’ve had friends who sounded intrigued by my description of the book change their minds when they actually see it.

  Thirdly, it might be because the title is off-putting. You may have noticed I haven’t been calling it Random Acts of Senseless Violence every time I mention it, and there’s a reason for that. It’s not a bad title for the book, but it’s off-putting for the kind of people who would enjoy it. It’s also off-putting, according to some Amazon reviews, to the kind of people who would really love a book with that title and don’t want the diary of a twelve-year-old as the world goes to hell around her.

  It seems to me that the purpose of the title and the cover are to help the book find its friends. This hasn’t worked here. I’m the only person I know who started the Dryco series—which also includes Terraplane (1988), Heathern (1990), and Ambient (1987)—with Random Acts; the rest of the handful of people I know who have read it read it because they already loved the others. Yet it’s the first—chronologically—and the best place to start.

  Now awful covers, a worrying title and no attention are damning enough for a book, but I think the thing that really relegated it to such undeserved obscurity is that it was a novel that didn’t meet the zeitgeist. It didn’t meet the expectations of what SF was supposed to be doing. It doesn’t fall into an easy category and so it’s hard to sell. The UK edition has a William Gibson quote on the back that says, “If you dropped the characters from Neuromancer into Womack’s Manhattan, they’d fall down screaming and have nervous breakdowns.” Gibson said that, and he meant it in a good way … but in the late eighties and early nineties Gibson was what people were looking at and cyberpunk was what they were expecting, with the New Space Opera just starting to come along to replace it. Gibson’s affect is very cool, very noir, and that of his imitators even more so. What Womack was doing was hot and realistic and emotional, as well as edgy and weird. It didn’t quite fit, so people didn’t know how to take it—and very few of them did take it. I think it might do better today in today’s more fragmented SF field, but in 1993 being totally astonishingly brilliant clearly wasn’t enough.

  JULY 26, 2008

  6. From Herring to Marmalade: the perfect plot of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

  You know those polished wooden egg puzzles that people buy for you, the kind that are beautiful when they’re an egg but that fall apart into shards that seem impossible for mortals to reassemble? Then maybe after a lot of trying suddenly all these impossible three-dimensional jigsaw pieces suddenly slot together and you ha
ve a lovely fragile egg again? Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) always reminds me of one of those.

  I didn’t read it for ages. It wasn’t that I didn’t like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it was just that I thought the plot had rather fallen apart in the later books. Indeed, the “throw in everything including the kitchen sink and St. Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God” style of the Hitchhiker books had lent the series high initial energy but did not lead to continuous plot, or even necessarily making sense. They were inventive and amusing, but he seemed to be juggling too many balls and letting a lot of them drop. I wasn’t in a hurry for more Douglas Adams in 1987. I didn’t get around to picking Dirk Gently up until Emmet insisted on lending it to me in the mid-nineties. I read it for the first time on the train, the long six-hour (if nothing went wrong) train journey between Cambridge and Lancaster. I read it with a five-year-old Sasha reading Tintin and Asterix comic books beside me and asking (admirably rarely) if we were nearly at Crewe yet and (regrettably frequently) to explain a pun to him. (There’s nothing like discovering how much sheer context and world knowledge a pun requires like explaining the puns in Asterix to a five-year-old.) Despite the inauspicious circumstances, Dirk Gently kept making me giggle, whereupon I resolutely refused to read the funny bits aloud. “You’ll want to read this yourself one day,” I said, and time proved me right. When he read it, aged about twelve, he loved it. I’m going to give you one example, the one that had me laughing so helplessly on the train that people were turning around to look and poor Sasha was embarrassed to be seen with me. Dirk Gently has a holistic detective agency of the kind that you’d expect to find in a Sheckley novel. Earlier, his secretary has torn out the middle of the dictionary to fit it into a drawer.