The Gormenghast Trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone) by Mervyn Peake

I first read part of the Gormenghast when I was a teenager, in the early 1970. Fresh from Tolkien and Eddison, I was looking for more of the kind, and I was thus drawn to what promised to be another epic fantasy. But I ran into something very different, and at the time it was somewhat off putting. At the time I only made it through the first volume, Titus Groan. While fascinated by bits of the story and by some of the images (Lord Groan driven mad by the burning of his library and deciding that he was the death owl particularly struck me), overall I felt a bit let down. This wasn’t The Lord of the Rings or The Worm Ouroborus, which at the time defined fantasy for me. It took me a few years to get around to the second volume, and until now – 30 years or so later – to read the third book.

One thing that lead me back to Gormenghast was knowing that my own tastes have changed over the years. As a teenager, I read primarily for story and plot (and maybe character), but didn’t as much appreciate prose for its own sake, wit and humor (at least not anything subtler than Get Smart novelizations), and quirky characters. I had yet to spend much time with Dickens, who I grew to love in my twenties and thirties. I had yet to learn that sometimes one wants to deliberately slow down one’s reading, to better appreciate the texture of a work. But now, I think, I’ve learned those lessons, and so, still remembering parts of Gormenghast (far better than books I’d read far more recently and liked more than I remembered liking Peake’s work), I decided to re-read the series (or, in the case of the final volume to finally read it).

This time, I found the series – the first two books, at least – to be a marvel. Filled with beautiful prose, ripe with incredible imagery and memorable characters, it truly was a work to be savored. I read slowly, enjoying the sentences, thinking about the characters, appreciating the trip. It’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. Those who think that all prose should be “transparent,” that the models of writing are Hemingway or Heinlein, will not like this. Peake is for fans of Dickens (or, more recently, Mieville) and readers of poetry, who want complex prose that is noticeable for itself, not just for what it says.

The trilogy tells the story of the seventy-seventh Lord of Gormenghast, Titus Groan. Or rather Titus is the common character of the three volumes, and as the trilogy goes on more of it centers on him. But he is only a minor character in the first novel and one of several focal points in the second. The real focus of the first two books is Gormengast itself, the great, monstrously large castle, ruled for centuries by the Groans, a place of ritual where “change” is synonymous with “treason.” It is people by a strange, quirky, sometimes repellent, but occasionally likeable characters (and in fact some characters who start as simply quirky grow in our affection as we move through the novels).

Titus Groan start with the birth of Titus, but that’s not really the pivotal event of the series. Very early on, as Flay, the angular man servant of Lord Sepulchrave, Flay, whose knees click as he moves, enters the domain of his nemesis – Swelter the cook. One of Swelter’s kitchen boys, Steerpike, ambitious and without conscience, sneaks out, following Flay. Flay catches him, and locks him in a room, but Steerpike escapes across the roofs of Gormenghast. Everything that happens, all the dire events in violence that follow, flow either directly or indirectly from this event. It is Steerpike who sets in motion the events that result in the destruction of the library and the deaths of several people. It is Flay’s unease of Steerpike’s escape that causes him in irritation to strike out at Swelter, setting in motion another set of events that lead to violence and death. It is thus Steerpike, not Titus, that is the driving force behind the first two novels. Even Titus’s coming to prominence is a result of his setting himself up in response to and in opposition of Titus.

But although the novels revolve around Steerpike and Titus, there are many other memorable and often engaging or infuriating (or both) characters. Most prominent is Titus’s mother, the Lady Gertrude Groan. Early on, all she thinks of are the birds and the white cats that she loves and cares for. She asks that Titus be taken away from her at his birth and only brought back when he is five. Yet, when crisis strikes, her brain, after years of slumber, awakes, and she becomes one of the most potent forces imaginable, as she leads the search for Steerpike when he is uncovered as a murderer while also directing the castle’s response to a massive flood.

Dr. Prunsquallor starts out as a merely a strange, quirky doctor, but he is one of the characters you grown close to, both because Peake gives you glimpses of this thought but also his actions, whether it’s doing the best for his insufferable and dim sister Irma or his affection for Titus’s sister, Fuchsia (who herself is both the most engaging and most tragic character in the series).

And no one who reads the books can forget Lord Groan’s two sisters – the dim-witted Cora and Clarice. Living alone in a deserted part of the castle, the sulk, convinced that the power they deserve has gone to their sister in law. They are thus easy to manipulate, and Steerpike does so, convincing them to burn Sepulchrave’s library. They eventually go mad, and starve to death when Steerpike locks them away. Their insane ramblings, their way of talking to one another and those around them, are almost hypnotic and certainly aren’t easily forgotten.

Nominally, the first two books are the story of Titus coming of age – from birth, to triumph over Streerpike, to heading out on his own. But as one reads the books, Titus is secondary to Gormenghast itself. The great castle is so real. Peake rivals Tolkien in creating something that is so well imagined, so well described, that it feels like a real world (though of course it’s a world far smaller than Tolkien’s).

The third book of the trilogy – Titus Alone – is a strange beast. It is so different from the first two books in the series that in some ways it’s better to view the series as a duology, followed by a single book. For although it follows soon after the close of Gormenghast – which saw Titus setting off on his own – it is a very different kind of book. The first two books had a sense of realism. Gormenghast was so real, so present, that it grounded the book. As you read the first two books, you see, smell, and feel the world around you. The prose is rich and luscious, and I found myself re-reading paragraphs just to savor the description. Not so the third book. Gone is the realism of Gormenghast, replaced by several very strange locales. Titus, lost, pursued by a pair of men wearing strange helmets, enters a city, though we never get a feel for it, only for a few of its strange inhabitants. Moreover, the timeless nature of Gormenghast is replaced by the twentieth century – with cars, planes, and even flying surveillance devices. It’s Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka and The Prisoner, with touches of other twentieth century novelist thrown in.

The third book is a mildly interesting fantasy in its own right, yet it’s very much of a letdown after the power of the first two books. In the end, the Gormenghast trilogy really stands on the strength of the first two novels, which remain powerful, memorable novels. I normally try to stay away from judging a book based on where I wanted it to go rather than where the author took it, but I can’t help wishing that we’d have spent more time in Gormenghast, with Doctor Prune and the others, rather than following Titus into the strange world beyond its borders.

Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd

A conventional digital computer uses bits – things that can have one of two values, conventionally 0 and 1 – to encode instructions and data. In physics terms, this is a classical concept – items have one of two exact values. But on the smallest scale, the universe is more complex than that, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics. The quantum mechanical equivalent of a bit – a qubit – is a superposition of 0 and 1; not until it is observed does it take one of those values. Until then, it can be considered as 0 and 1 at the same time. Likewise, while two bits can at one time have only one of four possible states – 00, 01, 10, 11 – two quibits are the superposition of all four. And so on, with the number of simultaneous states for quibits rapidly increasing with the number of bits.

Now image that a bit represents an instruction for a computer (in a real computer, it’s a byte or bytes, but the argument is still basically the same). Say 0 means “add 1 and 3” and 1 means “add 2 and 2.” A standard digital computer can do one or the other, depending upon whether that bit is 0 or 1. What does a quantum computer, using qubits instead of bits do? Both at once. Thus, a quantum computer – made up of even a relatively modest number of qubits – can perform an incredible number of instructions at once. To date, we’ve only managed to use up to 20 quibits, but we’ll increase this over time. The end result is that in the not to distant future (within 20 years, most likely), we’ll, for example, be able to factor very large numbers. Those who know cryptography know that this means that our current secure encryption schemes can then be cracked.

But this is only a starting point for exploring quantum computing. Seth Lloyd does a great job of looking at the many aspects of quantum computation in Programming the Universe. He starts with information theory, exploring how the second law of thermodynamics (that entropy increases) can also be viewed as involving information theory – entropy is really the hidden information of the system. On the most fundamental level, the universe is processing information. Moreover, as information shows, a quantum computer the size of the universe would be able to simulate the universe: the universe and a quantum computer are thus interchangeable, and the universe can be viewed as a quantum computer.

When this is first stated the typical reaction is “what does this mean, and what do we gain in our understanding by looking at things this way?” That was certainly my reaction. But this paradigm can yield some interesting breakthroughs in understanding. For example, quantum computing points toward a possible theory of quantum gravity – one that may do a better job of addressing this most fundamental problem of physics than string theory does (though we’re not there yet). Information theory and quantum computing also manages to address another very basic question: why is the universe we see around us so complex?

The universe at the time of the big bang was very simple. There were no complex structures. How did complexity come about? (I won’t try to define “complexity” here, though Lloyd addresses this in his book.) Some have used the “monkeys trying to type Shakespeare” analogy: a million monkeys, typing for long enough, will produce Shakespeare’s plays. But, as Lloyd points out, this doesn’t work. Even if a monkey typed the first act of Hamlet, chances are the next letter it types won’t be the first letter of act two. In a classical world, chances are that things will stay random. But, Lloyd note, information theory and the view of the universe as a computational machine addresses that. Picture instead the monkeys typing into a computer. What’s the chance that they will type the first ten million digits of pi? Very, very slim. But, what’s the chance they will type a simple computer program to generate pi. The program (pick your computer language) is much shorter than ten million characters. So the chance of the monkeys producing complexity (pi, e, fractals, etc.) in a computational universe is much greater than their doing so in where computation doesn’t happen. It’s a fascinating way to view the evolution of the universe.

This is a very good book – both well written and mind bending. It’s one of those science books that alters the way you look at and think about the universe. While I’ve read quite a few physics books over the years, this was my first on the topic of quantum computing, and it’s given me a new perspective –on what we might accomplish in computer science in the coming decades and, more importantly, on how the universe works. And I’m also ready to back and re-read several Greg Egan novels.

Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder

Sun of Suns introduced the worlds of Virga, a huge (planet size) artificial structure, filled with air, worlds/nations (generally wheels or cylinders), and artificial suns (including the central sun of suns). The level of technology has been deliberately suppressed, as the creators had decided they wanted reality, not the virtual artificial nature that humans see over the rest of their universe (see some of Schroeder’s earlier novels). The result is a world where wooden ships and bicycles travel through “space” (an air-filled albeit gravity-less space in this case) between worlds and where weapons technology is, by and large, at about the level of the 18^th century. That is, it’s the perfect environment for an old fashioned swashbuckler. Or you can look at it as the modern equivalent of something out of Planet Stories, but in this case set in a world where the settings and the science are done right.

The first book told the story of how one group of people traveled to across their world, first to obtain a cache of treasure which contained one of the keys of candesce – a key to the sun of suns – and then traveled to the sun of suns itself to temporarily disable the technology suppression field that it generates. This enabled radio to work for a brief time, which enabled their home fleet to beat back a sneak attack. The story comes to a satisfying conclusion, but it also leaves several loose ends, including the fate of Venera Fanning, the wife of the expedition’s commander and a skillful leader (and at times a ruthless powerbroker) in her own right. Queen of Candesce picks up Venera’s story.

Venera lands on the ancient world of Spyre – the largest existing cylinder in Virga. It is made up of a mishmash of small nations – some as small as a modern office complex – all with complicated rules of interaction, many paranoid and turned inward, and all trying to keep anyone from leaving Spyre or even traveling without permission to less Spyre – the inner wheel/nations within the cylinder of greater Spyre. A group of preservationists – also eccentric and hostile to those outside the group – build railroads across Spyre, not for transportation but to literally preserve Spyre. Spyre is old and decaying, and some parts have broken loose and been flung off into space. The preservationists are trying to balance the rotation by moving heavy objects to the right location, even if it means they must pass through a sometimes hostile sovereign state. Schroeder has done a great job of creating a world that feels like something Jack Vance could have created at his peak. Spyre and the story of Venara’s treck across it is comparable to some of Vance’s most imaginative creation (though Schroeder’s style in describing it is his own).

The story starts with Venera falling to Spyre. She is found by Garth Diamandis, a self described aging gigolo. It follows her and Garth as she ascends from outcast to position of power – a position she needs if she is ever going to be able to go home and payback those who have wronged her and created the situation that presumably killed her husband (last heard of when his ship was destroyed with all hands in the previous book). Along the way, she encounters several strange societies and makes both allies and enemies; the latter includes the nation of Sacrus, who figures out who she is and what she is carrying (the Key of Candesce). The key, which can be used as a political weapon since who holds it also has power over the central sun, becomes a focal point in their struggle.

Eventually, she and Garth come to the last remains of the kingdom of Buridan: a solitary, decaying tower. Venera manages to use this as a way to power, masquerading as the heir to the lost nation and thereby giving her a seat on Spyre’s council. She brilliantly manipulates the council to accept her claim, even though many have their doubts, and alter uses this position in her back and forth with Sacrus.

But Venera’s journey is more than simply of an outcast coming to power. It’s also one of personal growth. As the book opens, she is not only cold blooded but sharply focused on her own ends. She needs to get home and take revenge; nothing else matters, and she’ll do anything and betray anyone to get their. But as the book progresses, she becomes more and more entwined with Garth around her, and picks up more and more obligations to the people she is leading. She finds that she can no longer simply abandon them to pursue her own ends.

Like Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce brings its main story – Venera’s power stuggle on Spyre and her rise to power there – to a satisfying conclusion. And like the previous book, it still leaves the next step – Venera’s return home – to the next volume. This is another fine novel by Schroeder. I only wish we didn’t have to wait another year for the next part.

First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

I love to read, and tend to read widely. While I read a lot of science fiction, I also read mysteries, historical fiction, some contemporary fiction, and a number of the classics, from Austen and Dickens through Joyce and Faulkner. So I really fell for Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, the first of his novels about Thursday Next, literary detective. “Literary detective” is meant literally here. Thursday lives in a world similar to ours but where books are a far more important part of ordinary life, and the literary detectives deal with crimes involving literature. In The Eyre Affair, this becomes even more literal when Jane Eyre is kidnapped out of the first edition of her novel and held for ransom. Thursday must rescue Jane and defeat the villain – which of course she does. Thursday returned in several more books – Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, and Something Wicked – in which we find our more about the world inside of books as Thursday must solve more literary crimes. All are good books, though the latter two seem to lose their way a bit; they’re fun, but not really up to the level of the first two books in the series (in part because the universe Fforde created was getting so complicated that it threatened to tie itself into a knots). First Among Sequels, the latest in the series, is a step up toward the level of the earlier books in the series – fun, witty, and exciting.

The book starts years after Something Rotten. Thursday is now in hear early fifties, married, and with children: one a genius, another apparently destined to invent the time machine and lead the ChronoGuard (though he’s showing no signs of doing anything other than being a lazy teenager who likes to sleep past noon and listen to heavy metal bands). SpecOps has been disbanded, and Thursday works for Acme Carpet, which is secretly a freelance SpecOps (paid for both by installing carpet and by Thursday's elicit cheese smuggling).

Thursday is still heavily involved in the book world, where the Council of Genres is having to deal with such pending crisis as the potential border war between the genres of Racy Novel, Feminism, and Ecclesiastical Literature. Racy Novel, having been declared a part of the “Axis of Unreadable,” claims to have developed a “dirty bomb,” which if exploded will hurtle obscene phrases into other novels. Meanwhile, “read rates” are going down across the board, causing another crisis of sorts, as more and more people stop reading and instead watch such popular reality TV shows as Samaritan Kidney Swap and Britian’s Funniest Chainsaw Mishaps.

To complicate things for Thursday, she winds up with first one apprentice, then two. Over the years, of course, Thursday’s adventures have been turned into books (with titles They Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, etc.). So of course, since all characters in books exist in the book world, so does the character of Thursday next. Thursday had been unhappy with how the first four books turned out – too full of sex and violence, so she had pushed for a different type of fifth book, and The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco had featured a kinder, gentler, very new-agey Thursday Next (and sales tanked). So Thursday is saddled first with Thursday5 (the kinder, gentler Thursday), then also with Thursday1-4, who is brash and obnoxious.

In the midst of all of this, Thursday is trying to figure out why read rates are dropping, who is trying to kill her, what the ghost of her Uncle Mycroft was trying to tell her, what strange conspiracy was underway in the book world, and why the Goliath Corporation was now acting nicely toward her. By book’s end, she must save all of English Literature from being destroyed and turned into bad reality TV. (If that were to happen in our world, the books would still be there; we could ignore the bad TV versions. Not so in Thursday’s world.) Along the way, we get plenty of amusing literary references and cameos (from the whole cast of Pride and Prejudice to Dr. Temperance Brennan) and some great jokes. Fforde is clearly widely read himself, and has a great fondness and appreciation for the classics. (If you haven’t read Fforde, take my word for it that all this seemingly overly complicated stuff does fit together (mostly) in amusing ways. Pick up The Eyre Affair and you’ll see what I mean.)

The whole thing comes to a pretty satisfying conclusion in the next to the last chapter, before that last chapter takes the couple of lose ends still left and sets up the next book. Fforde’s Web site indicates that the sequel is planned for 2009. I can’t wait!

Pushing Ice by Alistair Reynolds

The last fifteen years or so have seen a resurgence in space opera. Moreover, space opera is not just prevalent but mush of what is being written is very good indeed. In fact, by most standards – ranging from breadth of ideas to complexity and inventivenss of the created universes to characterization to writing quality – modern space opera stands and head and shoulders above its ancestors of the 1930s and 1940s.

Numerous writers – Iain Banks, Vernor Vinge, Stephen Baxter, and others – have been major contributors to the new space opera. (I’d recommend Hartwell and Cramer’s The Space Opera Renaissance to anyone who wants a comprehensive overview.) But perhaps no one has done a better job of combining old fashioned sense of wonder with hard science and modern sensibilities, all within the scope of marvelous adventure stories, than Alastair Reynolds. Reynolds burst on the scene with Revelation Space, and followed that with three more novels in that universe. He also has produced a number of good short stories and a stand-alone novel. Pushing Ice is also a standalone novel, not related to the Revelation Space universe. Yet, like his earlier novels, it’s marvelously inventive.

The story starts in the relatively near future and first looks to be an adventure story set in the solar system. But, in a series of steps, Reynolds leaps further and further into the future, at each step unveiling more wonders. The Rockhopper is a ship of miners who push ice – that is, mine icy comets. As the novel starts, though, a spectacular event causes them to abandon the comet they are working on. Saturn’s moon Janus suddenly left its orbit and is in the processing of leaving the solar system. Rockhopper is the only ship in position for a flyby – mankind’s only chance to get a good look at whatever alien technology is driving Janus. At this point, the novel seems to be a B.D.O. (big dumb object) story, akin to Rendezvous with Rama. But that all changes when Rockhopper is caught in Janus’s wake, pulled along with it out of the solar system at a speed very close to that of light toward Spica, where astronomers, pointing their telescopes, have detected a massive artificial object in orbit. This, apparently, is Janus’s destination.

From here though, the novel continues to defy expectations. At every point when it seems it is going to settle down – whether as a B.D.O story or as the story of human’s rebuilding society on Janus – it changes gear, heading in a new direction and revealing new wonders. Reynolds deftly moves from one spectacular happening to the next, one-upping himself time after time.

The two major characters of the novel are Bella Lind and Svetlana Barseghian. Sometimes friends, often rivals, sometimes enemies. Bella is the captain of Rockhopper who makes the decision to stay with Janus, rather than making a risky attempt to escape its influence and remain in the solar system. Svetlana is an engineer who Bella overrules at several key instances; she thus blames Bella (with some justification) for their predicament. Both are stubborn to the point of mulishness and capable of holding grudges that last for decades. Both, though especially Svetlana, can be unlikable and frustrating – to the point that you want to grab them and shake them. Yet the tension between the two – mediated by Svetlana’s husband Parry Boyce – helps to center and ground the novel amidst all the spectacle of the universe around them. And every time I found myself thinking “nobody could possibly carry on a grudge for that long,” I just have to look at the news and remember that there are parts of the world where people still hold grudges over what happened centuries ago. (Or, closer to home, remember how some SF fans held grudges for decades over who was or was not excluded from the first Worldcon.)

This is a very enjoyable novel, a skillful mix of sense of wonder, adventure, and character, with a believable (if strange and wonderful) background. It comes to a satisfying conclusion (though Reynolds does leave room for a sequel, should he decide to write one). Reynolds continues to be a major force of the new space opera, and I hope to see much more from him.

The Wellstone by Wil McCarthy

I group of teenage boys at summer camp, feeling that their parents are never going to treat them like adults and are always going to hold them down make a break for it. They escape the camp, traveling quite a long way. Some of the boys fight with one another; others make up often obscene songs they all sing to pass the time. They have interesting adventures and meet some interesting characters. Sounds like a boys adventure book? Well, in this case, summer camp is on a small artificial planetoid in the Kuiper belt. The kids feel put down because they see that their immortal parents will never clear out of the way. They escape in a spaceship made from a log cabin and powered by a solar sail. Along the way, they encounter a group of stowaways on a huge barge harvesting material to create compressed matter. And, oh yes, the leader of the group is the son of the king and queen of the solar system.

There is a lot to like in Wil McCarthy’s rich and imaginative novel The Wellstone, a sequel of sorts to his Collapsium. In the earlier novel, Bruno de Towaji, favorite and sometime lover of the Queen, had saved the solar system. This book is set several hundred years later, when the heir, Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui – sometimes brilliant, often bratty or obnoxious – has been sent to summer camp the Kuiper belt. There, he first leads an escape back to Earth – to Denver, one of earth’s cities that has a large population of children – to lead a riot. They are caught, but Bruno leads another escape, this time in a cobbled together space ship.

This is a novel filled with marvelous gadgets. “Faxes” act like both replicators and transporters. They can disassemble people, send the information anywhere at the speed of light, and reassemble them. They can repair what is wrong (which is why people are now immortal) and store backups. They can even make extra copies and then reassemble them and integrate their experiences of the copies so that the person has the memories and experiences of several versions of him/herself. I thought the latter was stretching it a bit, carrying the magic a bit too far, but it’s all great fun. Wellstone is the artificial material from which the fax gates can make other things. It is programmable matter, and thus matter programmers can turn it into other substances. Even smart teenagers – including several in our crew of camp escapees – can do so.

Most of the novel follows the small crew of boys – and one girl who tagged along with them as the travel from the Kuiper belt, toward a neutronium barge, which presumably will have fax gates back to earth. While there is some focus on the science fictional elements here, for much of the trip the focus is more on the dynamics of the situation, the hierarchies that develop, and how the various kids cope.

The main character – or at least the focal point character, and the one we most sympathize with – is Conrad Mursk. Conrad is a smart boy – at least in the subjects he likes – who has been sent to summer camp, like most of the other boys, for disciplinary reasons. While at times friends with Bascal, the boy prince, he, more than anyone, is both the voice of reason and the conscience of the crew (even though they – particularly Bascal – ignore him when they don’t like what he has to say). He is more staid, more restrained than the others, and more mature. He is also more likeable.

Bascal, on the other hand, while at times charming, is more often annoying than note. Convinced of the importance of his mission – to act as an example to help free the young people of the solar system – and of his right to rule, he is often callous and reckless. He uses people, often giving important positions to people simply for backing him (including the thuggish Ho, who acts as his enforcer for much of the novel). He’s believable in most ways, but not likeable.

While much of the book is quite good, there are aspects of it that I couldn’t believe or didn’t like. The biggest is something that he continues from Collapsium: the assertion that people really want a monarchy, that we are hard-wired to be happier when we have someone at the top taking responsibility. This is the case of the king and queen, and it is the case with Bascal. He at one point lectures Conrad on this topic, pointing out that he is likely to be right and be accepted because he was raised to be the eventual ruler. And in the end, everyone (including people who should not) except Conrad view him that way. But I don’t buy it. Some people perhaps want to live in a monarchy, but frankly history doesn’t back the sweeping generalization McCarthy makes for the book. Perhaps I’m particularly sensitive to this point because the other book I’m now reading is a long biography of Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson (and Adams, Madison, Franklin, etc.) certainly did not have some hereditary need for a monarch.

In a few places in the novel, he says that most people no longer exercise or even walk around. Several characters express astonishment that anyone would ever want to. Why bother when you can go through a fax and it can restore your body in tip-top shape? Again, I don’t buy this for most people. Sure, some people really don’t like to walk. But many people – me included – walk not only to try to keep somewhat fit but because we enjoy the activity. The good brisk walk is invigorating; it feels good. I can’t imagine people would give up such activities just because they no longer needed to do so to keep their bodies fit.

Beyond this, the novel’s biggest flaw is that McCarthy decided to use the first and last chapter as a framing story, set well in the future of the novel. The indication is that the future, in the aftermath of the novel’s true conclusion a chapter earlier, is not going to be what we might expect or hope. Clearly, he’s setting up another novel to explore this. But the frame isn’t needed for this, since what should have been the final chapter set up a sequel on its own. The frame is both a bit confusing as your read it, and is something you almost forget as you read the novel proper. It would have been a better novel without it.

Despite these misgivings, this was an enjoyable book. McCarthy’s future and the technology in it are fascinating, and the majority of the novel is well done. I note that there is a sequel, which I’ll have to look for.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

I first read Stranger in a Strange Land sometime in the early 1970s. At that point, I’d read perhaps a dozen of Heinlein’s novels and several collections of short stories, and was finally getting around to what was often billed as his major novel. I was looking forward to it, because at the time Heinlein was one of my favorite writers (his best works still rank high on my list). I came away disappointed. While the first half of the book was good, the second half (after Mike leaves Jubal) seemed to spin out of control. It was a half good (or half bad) novel, and certainly not Heinlein’s best (or even one of his half dozen or so best).

I’ve re-read a lot of Heinlein over the years. I greatly enjoy and have reread multiple times Citizen of the Galaxy, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Double Star, The Star Beast, and a number of the short stories. I even re-read Time Enough for Love once; it’s a flawed, very overwritten novel, but there are several very good novellas buried in it. But I never re-read Stranger. But our local Barnes and Noble has an SF reading group, and Stranger is the novel for July, so I decided to re-read it. Besides, I thought, my tastes have changed a lot in 30+ years. I’ve read a lot of different kinds of things (ranging from more SF to Jane Austen to James Joyce to Leo Tolstoy), and I’ve like some things that I’ve reread far more than I liked them as a teenager, noticing more levels or appreciating that there is more to a book than an interesting plot.

Unfortunately, my opinion of Stranger hasn’t change. If anything, the second half bothered me more than it did all those years ago, and I think I can say more of why I didn’t like. I’m going to talk about that a bit here. This “review” really isn’t something that someone who hasn’t read the novel may relate too, since I presume some knowledge of the book on the part of the reader.

When I first read it, the point where I thought the novel went down hill was when Mike left Jubal. I felt that Jubal had kept things under control. That was part of it, but there is more to it than that. The big change actually happens about a chapter earlier. The Mike of the first half of the book is learning what it means to be human. He doesn’t understand much, and thus his views are an interesting glimpse at our customs from the outside. Mike in the second half has grown up, and now seems to understand everything. He is a less interesting character (and we actually see less of him), but more importantly his knowing everything makes the social commentary less pointed.

Moreover, the first part of the novel is structured around Mike’s coming to earth, his imprisonment, his escape, and the negotiations that essentially save him and establish his rights. There’s a lot of interesting story in the midst of the social commentary, and it’s only occasionally broken up by speeches by Jubal. The second half is drowned in the speech making. Everyone pontificates at great length. Nobody can have a simple conversation without it turning into a several-page-long lecture.

The novel as a whole but especially the second half is also a textbook example of one of Heinlein’s most annoying traits in some of his later books. The viewpoints of his main characters are right, by definition, no questions asked, and the events of the book are structured to show that they are right. Mike groks rightness and wrongness, and, by definition, he’s right. We aren’t supposed to question him, and neither are the other characters. He’s even right when he kills (transports into another dimension) a burglar in the church. After all, Mike knows he’s right so why should he, for example, simply transport the burglar, naked, outside (something he can do) rather than killing him? Mike doesn’t question it, and neither does anyone else. But of course, at this point everyone else – our main characters – have all learned Martian, and once you can think in Martian you know there is life after death, what’s right and what’s wrong, and so on. . Near the very end – before he discorporates – Mike murders (“discorporates,” to use his term) about 450 criminals. Again, since he is, by definition, right (and since he also knows that there is life after death), this is presented as being quite OK. Frankly, it made me more uncomfortable than most of the things Heinlein included to make his readers uncomfortable.

Mike’s superpowers are also too much. He can do anything. James Blish in his essay “Cathedrals in Space,” summed it up:

He can control his metabolism to the point where any outside observer can judge him to be dead; he can read minds; he is a telekinetic; he can throw objects (or people) permanently away into the fourth dimension by a pure effort of will, so easily that he uses the stunt often simply to undress; he practices astral projection as easily as he undresses, on one occasion leaving his body on the bottom of a swimming pool while he disposes of about thirty-five cops and almost as many heavily armored helicopters; he can heal his own wounds almost instantly; he can mentally analyze inanimate matter, well enough to know instantly that a corpse he has just encountered died by poisoning years ago; levitation, crepitation, intermittent claudication, you name it, he’s got it—and besides, he’s awfully good in bed.

Near the books end, it’s even noted that he could destroy the planet if he wanted to. It’s all too much, and we’re supposed to take it all as a given (or as a result of being able to think in Martian).

There are good things here. There is good social satire – both biting and at times funny. Some of the sidetracks and speeches are interesting in their own right. I’ve always enjoyed Jubal’s sidetrack on Rodin and representational art. But these good moments do not a good book make. I really wanted to like this book more this time than last. I really went into hoping that my broadened tastes would let me appreciate it. But, I’m sorry. I can’t. This is a flawed book, and in the end its flaws overwhelm it.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

One a panel at a convention a while back, Patrick Nielsen Hayden talked about the difference between “plot” and “story.” I won’t try to give his denition here – this was a while ago and I don’t remember all the details – but instead give my approximation. Plot is the structured storyline, leading to a definition end, and often having a form that English teachers like to draw in class. Story is all the incidents that happen. Some very good novels – Don Quixote comes to mind – have very little plot but lots of story. Patrick Rothfuss’s first novel, The Name of the Wind, is likewise full of story, but with little structured plot.

The story is told as a story within a story. Kvothe, pronounced like “quothe,” somewhat of a legendary character (perhaps a hero, perhaps not), has retired and is now living in hiding as an innkeeper. Only he and his servant Bast know who he is. But he’s tracked down by a traveling scribe who wants to know his story. Kvothe promises to tell him his story over several days. The Name of the Wind (subtitled The Kingkiller Chronicles: Day One) comprises the first day of Kvothe’s storytelling.

Kvothe starts the story with his childhood. As a young boy, he had been part of a wandering group of entertainers. He had a tutor who taught him, among other things, artificing (essentially magic). His father is a singer. One day, when Kvothe comes home from wandering in the woods, he finds that his whole troupe has been slaughtered. The Chandrian, a fairy folk, have killed everyone, apparently because a song his father had been writing told of them. This event becomes the driving motivation in Kvothe’s life.

The young Kvothe finds his way to the nearest large city, where, homeless, he lives by his wits (and petty theft). Yet his aim is to make his way to the university, to get access to the great library, and learn more about the Chandrian. Eventually, he makes his way there, and using courage, bravado, and some keen thinking not only passes the entrance interview but convinces the faculty to charge him a negative tuition for the first term.

He becomes a very good student, though he makes enemies of some of the faculty – and of one of the rich kids on campus. But behind everything is his desire to learn more about the Chandrian. And he does get one more shot before this volume ends.

Weaved throughout the story is his romantic attraction for the beautiful, smart, but flighty Denna (though at times she calls herself several variants of this). He first encountered her on his carriage trip as he headed for university, but he finds her again several times later, and their stories become intertwined. They become close – or as close as she will allow anyone to get to her. There is more here, perhaps, to be told in the next book.

Also weaved throughout the story of Kvothe’s life is music. He learned early to play the lute, and when his parents died, he taught himself to do amazing things with it. His love of music is perhaps the only thing in his life that drives him as much as his desire to learn more about the Chandrian. His ability as a player and his public performances also are important at key elements at major points in the novel.

One strength of The Name of the Wind is that the magic feels real. It’s consistent and it has a cost. There is a low of conservation of energy at work: to heat something up by sympathetic magic requires heat to be drawn from somewhere else. An unwary artificer who tries to draw too much heat from himself rather than an external heat source can cause his body temperature to drop, perhaps fatally. Kvothe makes a mistake early on, and it nearly kills him. Contrast this, say, with the Harry Potter universe, where magic is everywhere, and is used for the most trivial things (e.g., washing dishes) with no real drain on the practitioners. Moreover, in the Potter universe, magic doesn’t seem to have a consistent, defined basis. Rowling invents new things as her plots require them. This makes for an interesting, inventive universe, but one that doesn’t quite feel real. Rothfuss’s universe does feel real, and the magic seems to be bound by a set of rules (and is not overused).

Likewise, the non-magical parts of Rothfuss’s world are well constructed. The city and its underbelly where Kvothe lives on the street are very real, as is the university. At school, students don’t just study artificing, but basic subjects one would expect in school. (By contrast, one wonders how Harry Potter and friends ever learn basic arithmetic, geography, etc. – or even how the muggle world works – when all they ever study are potions, defense against the dark arts, etc.) [A side note: Don’t let my nit-picking about a few things in the Potter universe lead you to believe I don’t like Rowling’s books. I do; all are fun, and a couple are major fantasy novels. But they are not without their flaws.]

The characters – especially Kvothe, who we learn a lot about – are well drawn also, though both Kvothe and Bast still have mysteries behind them that we’ll need to wait for later books to resolve. Kvothe seems very human and very (at risk of overusing this word) real – something that’s very important in a fantasy novel, where we need grounding in reality if we are going to accept the fantastic.

After finishing this review, I looked for other reviews of the novel. I found a number of positive ones, but one I particularly liked was in Strange Horizons by Hannah Storm-Martin (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2007/06/the_name_of_the.shtml). She calls The Name of the Wind, the David Copperfield of fantasy. I thought that comparison summed up so much about the book that I borrow it here. There are many aspects about the plot, the characters, and even the style that are a bit Dickensian that I thought this a very apt observation. My earlier comment about “plot” vs. “story” also applies here. While some Dickens novels had plot, plot was often overwhelmed by story, and David Copperfield is a good example of that.

I look forward to the next installment, hoping that it can live up to the promise of the first.