The Free Lunch by Spider Robinson: #tbt review

If the Master, Robert A. Heinlein, had been born a Boomer instead of a member of the Greatest Generation, he would have been Spider Robinson. If you have any fondness for Heinlein or for the Happiest Place on Earth or for ripping yarns where a young hero has to save the world, this book is for you.

Our protagonist, brilliant twelve-year-old Mike, has such a terrible secret that he needs to find a way to fall completely off the face of the Earth. He accomplishes this by disappearing into the “off-stage” areas of the world’s most perfect theme park, Dreamland. Nobody will find him there—except someone does. It turns out a woman named Annie pulled the exact same disappearing act thirteen years ago, and she’s still there. 

The two of them team up, watching each other’s backs and becoming friends. Then they discover that not only are they not as safe as they’d hoped, but the fate of the world is in their hands.

“Dreamland” is a futuristic Disneyland: a totally immersive theme park where the illusion is complete and the off-stage areas are extremely well-concealed. The book is worth reading for the descriptions of the magical theme park and its mysterious underpinnings alone; the close bond that Mike develops with Annie and the ripping yarn that ensues when they realize they have to save the world make it a must-read.

Dune by Frank Herbert

This was not my first time at this rodeo. I first read Dune somewhere around age 15, and I re-read it (and its sequel, Dune Messiah, and sometimes the third book, Children of Dune, and always the then-last book in the series, Chapterhouse: Dune) many times. In fact it was something of a yearly ritual of mine, to pick up Dune and whichever sequels I chose during the holidays every year for a very satisfying re-read. I estimate that I’ve read books 1, 2, and 6 at least a dozen times each, and book 3 perhaps half a dozen times. (I only bothered with books 4 and 5 once each; they didn’t do it for me.)

However, life is short and there are so many great books out there that I will never have time to read, and over the years I became a busier person. When you only finish about a book a week, you become much more selective about what you spend your precious reading time on, and you think hard before going back to something you are already thoroughly familiar with. So, I gradually lost my annual Dune habit. In fact, when my stepson became interested in Dune earlier this year, I realized that it had been at least 15 years since I’d read it—maybe more; I think the last time was around the time the TV miniseries came out in 2000.

It was time to revisit Arrakis.

For anyone who has not read Dune (and also, I hope, not seen any of the screen adaptations—all of them so far are hugely problematic in my opinion and I would be sad to think that they were your first experience of this universe, though if you’re already a fan they’re worth watching)—for anyone not already familiar with this work, the incredible thing, the thing that impressed the hell out of everyone back in 1965 when it was originally published and still impresses new readers today, is the world-building. Nobody had attempted anything like it before, and damn few have succeeded since.

In Herbert’s universe, humanity has spread to the stars and their interstellar civilization is still recovering from a cataclysmic war, the Butlerian Jihad, which resulted in a universal ban on “thinking machines” (basically any computer at all). Humanity, partly as a result of the jihad, has attained amount and degree of diversity that is unimaginable by today’s standards. Some people, even some entire peoples, have been genetically modified and/or deeply, intensively trained to take the place of the thinking machines that previously made an interplanetary civilization possible.

All of these people are knit together in a neo-feudal empire ruled by a theoretically absolute ruler, Emperor Shaddam IV. He holds the Landsraad (a political entity composed of all the noble houses under Shaddam’s rule) and CHOAM (the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles, an organization that controls all above-board trade in the known universe) in his imperial pockets. However, his power is balanced by that of the Spacing Guild, who hold an absolute monopoly on all interstellar travel, and a shadowy sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, whose motivations are hard to discern and whose members are everywhere.

All of these organizations are completely dependent on a highly addictive substance called melange, or more often, simply “spice.” Spice confers health and longevity in small doses and a variety of utterly necessary mental powers (no computers, remember? But interstellar civilization) in large doses.

And this spice, it turns out, can’t be synthesized. It can only be mined, and only on one planet: Arrakis, nicknamed “Dune” because the entire planet is a deep-desert ecosystem, aside from small habitable areas near the poles. Mining spice is incredibly dangerous; special mobile factories must be flown into the deep desert, where they face constant danger from the planet’s “wild” inhabitants, the Fremen; immense, unpredictable, and astonishingly destructive coriolis storms; and, most of all, the planet’s signature lifeform, the sandworms.

Sandworms vary in size from merely half a dozen meters to large enough to swallow an entire spice factory in one gulp. And swallow them they do, given the opportunity; the sandworms protect the spice sands. Always, without exception, a sandworm will appear at any excavation site. The question is when, and whether a given worm is sighted early enough for the mining machinery and personnel to be safely evacuated.

Arrakis, then, is existentially important to the Empire, and also extremely difficult to govern. As the story begins, Duke Leto Atreides has just won Dune as a fiefdom from his enemy, the morally and physically disgusting Baron Harkonnen. Leto, his Bene Gesserit concubine, Jessica, and their 15-year-old son, Paul, all must leave their beautiful homeworld to take possession of this incredibly tough nut. Of course it’s a trap; Leto and his family are slated for betrayal and assassination. The noble duke nevertheless does his best to successfully govern Arrakis in spite of his powerful enemy’s plots.

He fails, of course. (It would only be a mildly interesting story if he succeeded.) But his son and concubine survive, spirited away to the deep desert, which turns out to be more inhabited than anyone but the inhabitants realized—and it turns out they have plans of their own for their planet. The destiny of the entire human universe will hinge on one fifteen-year-old boy and the fallout from an evil baron’s petty machinations.

This is a book that contains a vast civilization, a carefully-thought-out planetary ecosystem, and a fascinating array of characters. For me, though, it’s a book of moments. I can thumb through these moments in my mind as easily, and almost as meaningfully, as my own memories. There’s the moment when Jessica is overseeing the unpacking in their new home and trying to decide whether she can get away with not displaying the portrait of her duke’s father and the taxidermed head of the bull that killed him in the dining room. The moment when Paul uses a compass, a few precious drops of water, and some real Boy Scout ingenuity to save his and his mother’s life when they are buried in sand. The moment when Paul and Chani meet and he recognizes her from his dreams.

There are a thousand such moments in this book. Reading it is like dipping my hand into a chest full of pearls and coming up holding a strand where one perfect orb follows another, and another, and another, each one deeply lustrous, and each following the next because how could it be otherwise? I honestly can’t tell to what degree the vividness, clarity, and (once you’ve read them) inevitability-in-retrospect of all the moments is a function of how well-written the book is, and to what degree I feel that way because I read it repeatedly at an impressionable age. I do know that inevitability is a large part of what the book is about, and that Herbert won both the Hugo and the Nebula for it in large part because he had created such a believable universe. It’s considered a classic for a reason.

If you’ve never read this book, read it. If you haven’t read it in a while, revisit it. It stands up to the test of time.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman: #tbt review

Full disclosure: I love this series so much that I'm planning to get an alethiometer tattoo when I'm feeling a little more flush. (After the scarlet A and the Deathly Hallows symbol, that is.) My second time through the series (I've read it three times now) was on audio CDs in my car when my kid was 5 years old, and even though it was far too advanced for them at the time, they fell in love with it too. I wrote this review after my second reading but before the third, and long before the prequel was published.

So:

In this alternate universe where people’s souls have a physical reality and manifest themselves outside people’s bodies as animal-shaped “daemons,” and the Magisterium (think of the Catholic Church during the days of the Inquisition) rules politics, morality, and, as far as possible, people's minds, Lyra is an orphan who lives at Jordan College, Oxford. She is being raised haphazardly amid the benign neglect of the professors there and has a good, if chaotic, life.

Then a mysterious relative appears and Lyra saves his life; she ends up with a unique artifact called an alethiometer (the eponymous Golden Compass), in her possession; her friend Roger is disappeared by the much-feared Gobblers; and she is taken to live with the beautiful, self-willed Mrs. Coulter, whom the Jordan scholars obviously fear. Now Lyra needs to learn the nature of the relationship between all of these events, and what they have to do with Dust, a substance whose very existence is inimical to the Magisterium, and which nobody is supposed to know about--least of all a half-wild young girl.

This is an incredibly beautiful metaphysical work (I can't just call it a work of fantasy, though it is that) about the nature of truth and the soul, along the lines of the best C. S. Lewis books--but written by someone with a deep distrust of organized religion and of anybody who withholds important truths in order to control people.

The protagonist, Lyra, is a liar, a teller of tales, and the product of a society based on lies, brought up not knowing the most basic facts of her existence. But she is also intelligent, resourceful, intensely curious, and deeply loyal to her friends. This gets her into trouble, of course, but it may also be, along with her boundless ability to love and her fierce determination to find her disappeared friend, what ultimately saves her and her world.

Five out of five stars. At least.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Narrated by Mark Bramhall

This book was strongly recommended to me by someone who knows my taste in literature pretty well and called it “Harry Potter for grownups.”

The comparison is obvious, and fairly apt. Our hero, a kid who is about to graduate from high school in modern-day Brooklyn, discovers and is accepted at Brakebills, a highly exclusive school for magicians—real-magic magicians, that is, not stage magic. It’s a college in upstate New York, not an English boarding school for middle- and high-schoolers, though. And since the students are all college-aged, they do all the stuff you expect college students to do. In addition to learning to manipulate the fabric of reality, that is.

The novel spends a *lot* of time on Quentin’s college years—all five of them—before getting to what I feel is the meat of the story. Don’t get me wrong, Grossman’s take on how magic works is interesting, and his descriptions of various events in Quentin’s school years—especially the episode of the wild geese—can be enthralling. And it certainly gets the reader invested in the central characters, who are definitely three-dimensional. But I kept waiting for the other thing that was described on the book jacket to happen: his discovery that a land from his favorite fantasy series actually exists, and his travels there.

Grossman drops a hint about the magical land of Fillory (a very thinly-veiled analog of Narnia, with a smidgen of Middle Earth thrown in) in the first chapter—then drops the subject completely until well into the second half of the book. Eventually, however, and well after graduation, Quentin and his former classmates do learn that it really exists and that they can really travel there. Travel they do—and, naturally enough, disaster ensues, which, naturally, brings out both the best and the worst in them. Though, again, it takes much longer than I would have expected for things to go truly wrong.

The characters are interesting—even Quentin, who starts out very callow and manages to remain more or less incapable of seeing other people’s point of view throughout the book, gains depth and becomes a protagonist one can root for. The universe the Brakebills students live in is one that I could wish to live in. This a good book and I recommend it. Be prepared, though, for the pacing to be rather… odd. I understand there’s a TV series based on the series of books now; I plan to check it out.

Have Spacesuit—Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein: #tbt review

Kip’s dream of going to the moon turns into a nightmare when evil aliens kidnap him and a little girl and take them there. How will he escape—and moreover, how will he justify humanity’s existence when it’s put on trial?

One of the golden-age Master of Science Fiction’s many “juveniles,” Have Space Suit—Will Travel has stood the test of time better than most. Kip is a high school senior who dreams of traveling to the Moon. He makes it there, but by a surprising route: he’s kidnapped, along with a little girl named Peewee and an alien he calls the Mother Thing, by a malignantly aggressive species Kip calls Wormfaces. Eventually the three work together and escape, but that’s not the end of the story: now the fate of all humanity is on Kip and Peewee’s shoulders as their species is put on trial before an interplanetary court.

As with the protagonists in Heinlein's other juveniles, the teens in this story will seem oddly young in some ways to modern readers, and their characters too good to be true. This is partly a function of the era in which the book was written—things really were different then—and of what was considered appropriate material for young adults to read at the time. But that also makes this book a fascinating glimpse into the culture of the 1950s.

A ripping yarn. Read!

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Narrated by Robin Miles

You know that old saw, you can never go home again? That’s definitely going to be true for our protagonist, Binti, when or if she ever does go back to Earth. She’s the first member of her community to go to university, and it’s going to change her in ways that even other folks who have also traveled off-planet for school couldn’t have predicted. Her trip to Oomza University is also going have a bigger effect on interspecies relations than anybody could have imagined.

This compact little Hugo- and Nebula-winning novella—an easy one-afternoon read—packs a lot into not very many pages. The central idea is that diverse peoples and individuals all have their own unique gifts to bring to the world (or worlds!), and that there can be terrible danger in ignoring that, and in behaving in a colonialist fashion. Binti is super smart and brave, going out to study at university in spite of her family’s (and her technologically savvy but highly insular community’s) displeasure at her departure and perceived disloyalty.

Binti is nothing if not loyal, though--to her father and the skills he taught her, to her community’s traditions, to the new friends she makes, to the university that has accepted her, and even to the agreement she makes with the warlike aliens that attack her transport. And being Binti, a highly skilled harmonizer, she finds a way to make potentially divided loyalties not divide her at all, but instead… well, I’ll stop right there or I might give away too much.

This is a good read. If you’re not used to novellas, the pacing is a little odd--far too much backstory and setup for a short story, but the resolution is much too fast for a novel. It reminded me of the pacing of a children’s book, though the content is definitely not for children. Then again, if you’re not used to novellas, maybe it’s time you tried one! This would be a fine place to start. Also a fine place to start with afrofuturism, if you’re not familiar with it.

(What? You haven’t seen Black Panther? Go out and watch that, too!  Speaking of which, if you liked Black Panther and you like this book, you’ll be pleased to know that Ms. Okorafor co-wrote a recent installment of the Black Panther comic series with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Which makes a lot of sense: Binti reminds me of a younger, less-self-assured Shuri.)

And speaking of trying things, do listen to the audiobook version if possible; Robin Miles does an incredible job narrating.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Narrated by Polly Stone

This is the story of two sisters in Vichy France during World War II. The older sister, Viann, is a school teacher and a young mother in a small village; having been more or less orphaned at age 14, she has found love and a life that she loves for herself and wants nothing more than to live that life, quiet and safe. The younger, Isabelle, is a rebellious girl who keeps getting kicked out of the various boarding schools their father, a Great War veteran and a coldly distant father, keeps sending her to. She's not willing to accept anything life hands her if it doesn't meet her standards, and doesn't see why she should be quiet about it. When the Germans invade France, each sister copes in her own way.

Viann’s husband goes off to fight in the war, so she is left taking care of their children, and teaching at the local school, and keeping up the house, with its orchard and vegetable garden. With all of these responsibilities, and with the husband she adores and relies on far away, her response to the Germans is to keep her head down and just survive, and keep her children alive, the best she can. As time goes on, though, she finds herself compelled by her own conscience to extend what protection she can offer not just to her own children, but to the son of her best friend, who is Jewish, and then to other Jewish children whose parents have been deported to the concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Isabelle is far too outspoken for her own good. After Paris is occupied, she ends up living with her sister. But she can’t bring herself to be polite to the German officer billeted at her sister’s house, or to hold her tongue when she sees atrocities being committed. Apparently she never heard of discretion being the better part of valor. When a villager catches her defacing Nazi signs, he recruits her into the local resistance. At first she just distributes pamphlets, but eventually she rescues a downed English pilot by guiding him, on foot, through the Pyrennes mountains to Spain. Having done this once, she sets up a route and does it repeatedly, under the code name "The Nightingale" and earning the irate and abiding interest of the SS.

I have my quibbles with this book. There are a couple of places near the beginning where the timeline just seems wonky and people behave as if things have been going on for weeks and months that have only been happening for a few days at most; a good editor would have corrected that. Isabelle is far too loose a cannon to be an effective member of a resistance that has to fly under the radar at all times, and Viann’s difficulties and losses feel overly sentimentalized—Isabelle’s, too, toward the end of the book. Not that they aren’t horrific difficulties and losses, but that being the case, they should stand on their own and not be sentimentalized, played to jerk tears out of the reader.

Nevertheless it’s a good read. Knowing about the way the Nazis treated the French in order to break them, and the degree to which they succeeded, is one thing; living it vicariously through an absorbing story is something else again. The author paints a vivid, complex portrait of life in a country brought to its knees, not neglecting either the humanity or the inhumanity of the invaders, nor the strengths or weaknesses of the invaded.

Recommend—especially if you plan to see the movie, which I understand will be released next year.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer: #tbt review

The human era has ended. An alien species who call themselves the Souls have taken over the Earth and no humans who are still human remain, aside from a few ragged, very hunted bands. Wanderer, a member of this alien species, survives parasitically by taking over other the bodies of individuals of other species—destroying their minds in the process.

But there’s something wrong with Wanderer’s host, Mel. Her feelings are too strong and her mind refuses to go away. Now Wanderer isn’t just a Soul anymore: she's an abomination to her own species, a combination of minds in one body. 

The other Souls mustn’t know that Mel’s mind still exists; they'd destroy Mel's body and Wanderer with it. At the same time, Wanderer's very existence is inimical to all humanity—so there's no hope to be found there. She must find a way to work with Mel if she is to survive on a planet where she doesn’t belong anywhere and everybody wants her dead.

This is a fascinating piece of speculative fiction that gets into the mind and the motivations of a member of a species that any rational human would consider intrinsically evil. This species exists by invading the bodies and destroying the minds of other species—and doesn’t consider itself evil, any more than any predator does. The speculation extends to the nature of memory (how much of it exists in the physical brain? Do we have souls?), the mind/body dichotomy, and the power of love and forgiveness.

Don't let this author's other books scare you away from this one; there are no vampires, sparkly or otherwise, to be found. This is good, meaty sci fi. Highly recommend.

Teen Angst? Naaah...: A Quasi-Autobiography: #tbt review

Smart-alec urban nerd Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a Funny Story) wrote a lot of anecdotes about junior high and high school and got them published while he was under 18. This collection of marvelously self-deprecating pieces will feel familiar to anybody who has ever been a teenager.

Vizzini was a nerdy Magic-playing teenager in New York City in the 1990s, and wrote about it. A lot of those anecdotes got published, and they’re all here, from the day he first played Nintendo in middle school to getting into the best public school in NYC to coming home drunk for the very first time to falling in love. The sum total of his anecdotes is a thoughtful and eloquent memoir of an adolescence, told from the point of view of someone who was still there at the time.

These are engaging little vignettes that show the author’s progress from late childhood to late adolescence, somewhere between awkwardness and grace. This is a young man who is privileged to be white and smart and financially secure in a city where many teens are anything but; he’s well aware of this. At the same time, he has faced social and emotional handicaps that form the basis of his self-deprecating sense of humor. This is a very real account of life in the big city for a teenager who may not be exactly typical but who faces many of the same problems that other teens face.