The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

read by Scott Brick

This book interested me because I heard that it featured a triad—a stable romantic partnership involving three individuals. It was one of a handful of examples of polyamorous relationships in science fiction that a group of friends on Facebook were able to come up with. Since I also enjoy dipping into the odd New Wave hard sci fi novel, and Asimov is of course one of the greats, I decided to give this one a go. 

It doesn’t start in a promising way. Basically a cadre of in-fighting, nerdishly vicious, and highly competitive white-guy scientists discover a source of infinite free energy, and they fight and fight and fight about it. Who really discovered it, who gets how much credit, whether it’s dangerous in any way and how shall we discredit and ruin the career of anyone who dares to ask that question, and so on. This, and the discovery that the energy source is actually a parallel universe with slightly different laws of physics than our own and that this may cause the sun to blow up, take up the first third of the book.

In the next third of the novel, we get to visit the alternate universe. This is where, for me, the book gets interesting. The species that has initiated the energy transfer (which goes two ways and thus benefits the civilization utilizing it in each universe) consists, in its immature form, of three genders: Rational, Emotional, and Parental. Every relationship consists of a triad including one individual of each gender, and they blend their essences to produce exactly three children, one of each gender. After that, they go on to the next phase of their existence.

All of this is interesting enough in theory. But what hooked me was Asimov’s gritty, unsentimental but not unsympathetic depiction of the everyday reality of these beings. He paints a vivid picture of the way their society is shaped by being comprised of three genders with very distinct roles and personality types, how that affects relationships and thought patterns, what this kind of relationship feels to someone who is in it and how that differs by gender. 

The day-to-day happinesses and compromises and failures to communicate and generosities of any romantic partnership, as transformed by the triune nature of relationships in this society, don’t have to be imagined by the reader. Asimov shows us both the differences and the similarities between that form of relationship and the two-person sort that most of us are more accustomed to and he does it with a very… I can’t say human touch here, can I? With a portrait painter’s eye for the homely, telling detail.

In the third part of the book we get on with the business of saving the universe, and for me it becomes somewhat less interesting. I mean, of course I’m all for the universe being saved, especially when saving it means flipping a highly humiliating bird at the forces of greed and egotism that got us in that mess in the first place. The pacing, once you figure out who’s who and what their agendas are, is good. The characters are interesting, the lunar society depicted is interesting, and there’s even a well-written central female character. It’s a good story and a fine final third. But for my taste, Part 2 is what this book is all about.

Verdict: read it! Just be prepared to do some eye rolling for the first hundred pages or so. Your patience will be rewarded.

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 Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Narrated by George Guidall

This is the 1969 novel that won both the Hugo and the Nebula and made Ursula K. Le Guin’s reputation as a science fiction author. It asks a simple question--What if people were neither male nor female?--and a number of corollary questions, including What sort of society might that lead to?, and How would such individuals view us?

The setting is the planet Gethen, which was originally settled by humans who, for reasons long lost in the mists of time, decided to run a genetic experiment and create human beings who were neither male nor female. Gethenians are neuter most of the time, but every 26 days they briefly go into a state called kemmer, when they experience sexual desire and become either male or female, depending on who else is nearby in kemmer and how their kemmer is manifesting. At that point they are fertile and can either fertilize an egg or produce one and become pregnant.

The protagonist who sees all of this is Genly Ai, a lone emissary from a loose confederation of worlds called the Ekumen. Genly’s task is to convince the Gethenians to join the Ekumen--but he must do so without any show of military or technological might (because that would be coercive), and indeed without any companionship of his own kind at all, or any really convincing proof that the Ekumen actually exists. He’s completely on his own.

On Gethen he’s also considered a deviant, a perverted sort of freak, because he is always, by their lights, in kemmer. And he has a great deal of difficulty understanding Gethenians and their culture, because, as he says to the one friend he makes on that planet, he grew up in a society where one’s sex is, in many ways, the most important thing about a person, defining or strongly influencing what sort of person one is, one’s capabilities, one’s point of view, and even one’s ethics. On a planet where there is no gender and sex is fluid, persisting in thinking of neuter individuals as either male or female seriously handicaps Genly’s ability to get any real grasp on the culture, on whom to trust, on how people are actually reacting to him and how to influence that.

So, plenty of strikes against poor Genly, and of course things go south. Badly. Fortunately he has, in spite of himself, made one friend, though it takes him a very long time to realize it. The question is whether that will be enough--to save his life, and, more importantly, to accomplish his mission.

Le Guin does a lot of exploring in this book that may seem old hat to us now--and more that we still haven’t done much of yet in our culture. As with any science fiction book, it’s as fascinating a picture of the society the writer lived in at the time as of the society it depicts. With Le Guin’s keen and curious intellect behind it, it’s no wonder that this What If tale caught so many people’s imagination. It first caught mine when I was in my teens, and thirty-odd years later, it still doesn’t disappoint.