Review: Patternmaster by Octavia Butler (1976)

The time is millennia in the future. The place is unnamed. (Although the flashy back cover of my copy proclaims ONCE THIS LAND WAS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, it’s not explicit in the book, and I’m more comfortable with the text’s assumption that our current geographic definitions are long gone.

Homo sapiens have evolved into three species: Patternists, mutes, and Clayarks. Patternists are the ruling elite, who possess powerful telepathic abilities and constantly vie for power. Mutes are humans just like you and me, who work hard, express themselves through ritual, and rely on their Patternist masters for protection. Clayarks are savage, gun-wielding mutants who constantly raid Patternist territory. Into this harsh world are united Coransee and Teray, blood brothers and sons of the immensely powerful Patternmaster whose power controls the whole civilized world. As the younger and more naïve brother, Teray must use all his wits to retain his life and his freedom from Coransee, who with all his being craves becoming the next Patternmaster and will stop at nothing to destroy his younger brother if his ambition becomes threatened.

From the very beginning, I appreciate Butler’s ability to have us meet the book on its own terms. Although every fiber of the setting is science fiction, the plot begins on page one and doesn’t stop for lengthy explanations. Yet even the most outlandish concepts were not convoluted enough to send me back to reread previous sections for illumination. This is one of the most important goals when writing speculative fiction, and probably the most difficult to achieve. It takes many skills, especially good pacing and solid, intelligible creative concepts. All the core creative concepts of Patternmaster are contained my short summary above; the rest is detail.

The story is somewhat more tortuous. Again, I don’t normally judge a book by its cover, but the ‘70’s pulp sci-fi cover on my copy screams out in illustration and capital letters that the main conflict will be between Teray and Coransee. They meet as soon as enough exposition has happened, but after some initial squabbling, their feud is left waiting just offstage for many, many pages. This is a nice touch in that it kept me turning pages while also surprising me with the emergence of smaller woes and struggles that befall Teray for more or less the whole book.

Finally, of course, I have a word on the politics. Butler speaks as a black woman in 1970’s California to me as a white man in 2010’s New York about many issues which we bemoan continuing to live with, but which are actually timeless. Consider the political structure of this Southern California: a small, elite class controls a large, less powerful class, and the two live together to protect themselves from a third, alien class. This skeletal archetype, devoid of ideological context, is reflected all throughout human history on many scales, and through Patternmaster Butler presents that it will still be the basis for societal interaction thousands of years hence.

I can’t help but compare Octavia Butler with Ursula K. Le Guin, who was also writing paperback science fiction on the West Coast around the same time, and whom I know much better. To Butler’s credit, she is worthy company to Le Guin. Where a woman writes original science fiction about human nature and society, you’ll find me on board.

Review: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1966)

In the year 2075 "Luna" is a penal colony for Earth, and revolution is brewing. Four conspirators decide to overthrow the Authority that rules them; Mannie, a Jack of all trades and third-generation "Loonie"; Wyoming Knott, a surrogate mother with a personal vendetta against the Authority; Professor de la Paz, an anarchist by profession; and Mike, a self-aware computer, the only one of his kind, who controls all the electrical systems on Luna. The foursome pool their skills to concoct a scheme that will forever change life on the moon and politics on Earth.

They don't give out the Hugo award for just anything; this book has a lot to say about human nature, politics, and power. Its stance on human nature is classically comedic: the characters have many flaws and trivial affairs, but there is hope for all of them. Heinlein makes the plot believable by combining these very human characters with intricate descriptions of physics and sociology; of all the science fiction books I've ever read, this is one of the few I half-expect to come true.

I'd like to spend some time on where the Lunar society intersects with our current social struggles. Despite being founded on a population of convicts, Luna is mostly a peaceful society where crime is low and war is impossible. However, there are instances which are commonplace there but shock visitors from Terra (Earth); the concept of "eliminating" wrongdoers, and the Loonie response to violence against themselves. Elimination is a certain kind of murder in which a group of Loonies forces someone out of an air lock and onto the vacuum of the moon's surface. There are no written laws on Luna, but everyone seems to know whether someone deserves to be eliminated. New conscripts often face this fate due to social blunders. Even more violently, there are several scenes in the book when agents of the Lunar Authority attack, and when this happens, Loonies of all ages drop whatever they're doing and fight with whatever they have at hand until every last offender is dead. Women literally tear rapists apart, and children fearlessly wield kitchen knives against intruders with laser guns. It's an interesting outcome of the setting's effect on social understanding, and I appreciate the fact that it doesn't seem to be driven by a political agenda.

This agenda's back seat to the story is somewhat opposite to what I have to criticize about Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (you knew I couldn't get too deep into science fiction without bringing her up). In fact, the setting itself is ideal, even metaphorical, for creating a politically clean slate upon which to see politics afresh, as though experimenting with a control group. The characters hail from every nation on Earth. Because of their polygamous family structure, it's impossible for most of them to be sure of their ancestry, in contrast with the ethnically segregated United States. Rather than taking a swing at a particular ideology or group, Heinlein suggests that we all share the blame for political oppression by showing that the Lunar Authority is made up of nationally diverse politicians. This suggestion is cemented by the scheming that begins among Loonies almost as soon as they begin to envision life without an Authority. These characters are as close as they can be to a political and physical vacuum, but they go on being political creatures just as they keep on breathing air.

Into this mix is a personal note: one of my biases toward the book is the fact that Prof, one of the best fleshed-out characters, shares my political views more than any fictional character I've ever read. He adheres to "rational anarchism," a term Heinlein apparently invented. Essentially, he believes that political systems are imaginary constructs, and that with each person lies his own responsibility for his own actions. This viewpoint reinforces three things: the Loonies' ability to envision a society with a different kind of government than what history has shown them; Earth's ability to set aside political differences when they believe their economy is threatened from above; and Heinlein's ability to imagine people accepting or rejecting an ideology even when doing so is the hard choice.

From the stance of science fiction, my fascination was drawn over and over to Mike the computer. His name is short for Mycroft, the brother of Sherlock Holmes, and his motivation for participating in the coup is to test the limits of his intelligence. We see him do various incredible things, such as divide his personality, invent CGI, and calculate probabilities for future, qualitative events. It is a credit to Heinlein's writing that these are described with such emotion and curiosity that we can believe they are happening for the first time in human history. Moreover, in many ways, Mike is the most sympathetic character in the book. The first scene details Mannie patiently, fraternally explaining humor to Mike one joke at a time; much later, when Mike has learned and practiced enough to control and calculate far more than anyone ever expected of him, he still longs for a simpler future when he and Mannie can go back to trading jokes.

Read this book! It's a wonderful monolith of science fiction, and you'll be sure to learn something about your own relationship with society.

Review: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)

Shevek is a physicist from the planet Anarres, which has a single society without government. Everybody is raised from infancy with the teaching that every individual must have freedom, but that nobody may own possessions or impose upon each other. Objects, food, ideas, and even sexual partners must be shared in order to prevent an imbalance in societal benefit. Thus Shevek is not just a physicist; he contributes whatever his society needs of him at the time. Yet when he arrives at a theory that could result in teleportation technology, he gradually realizes that the eternal bogeys of human nature, including envy and an instinct toward selfishness, cannot be eradicated. Although Shevek remains a faithful citizen, he encounters opponents who believe that his Principle of Simultaneity must be stifled in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the people of Urras, the twin planet of Anarres. On Urras, there are such things as nations, capitalists, communists, possessions, inequity, and war, all of which are antithetical to Anarres's society. Shevek, steadfast in his belief that all good things must be shared, resolves that if his own people will not use Simultaneity, he will deliver it to the Propertarians, as the Anarres call those on Urras. Thus does Shevek become the first of his kind in more than a century to visit Urras, but he quickly finds himself out of his depth, among people for whom manipulation is a way of life. Unable to comprehend the reality of social inequality, he must learn how to survive while standing for people who stand for nothing at all.

Although I haven't always agreed with Le Guin's arguments, I find myself coming back for more. So far, all of her work I've read, with the exception of one novella, falls between 1968 and 1972 (this includes the first three Earthsea books as well as The Left Hand of Darkness.) In the tradition of hate being a variation of love, I think I'm so attracted to her writing because it handles the touchier subjects I appreciate in almost exactly the way I would handle them. She's the most talented science-fiction writer I know, so why does she fall short by just an inch?

Good news: in The Dispossessed, I think she finally hits the bull's-eye. And it's not for lack of trying, or for shirking the juicy stuff; once you wrap economic policy, sexual values, and science in the same package, there's nobody who's uninterested. If anyone's playing with fire, it's this lady.

What first impressed me was the ambiguity with which each character is portrayed. Shevek's description is simple for a long time. His life, habits, and tastes are each human and objective, and they build to a whole that is not a symbol for anything. In fact, it could be this uncertainty that makes him a perfect candidate to go to Earth. Anarres is held together by a solid goal of survival; Shevek intends to share his discovery, but he doesn't know what he wants, which makes him an outsider in both worlds. Similarly, all of the inhabitants of Urras are established like humans we all know, which makes them indescribable and alien to Shevek. But since we've already learned to relate to our protagonist, it's like looking in a mirror for the first time, without any disguise or prejudice, and not knowing what to think.

It's also great to see the underlying instability of Anarres. The subtitle for this book is An Ambiguous Utopia, and it shows. At first everybody is cheerful and cooperative, and you might be tempted to hail the society as the success of socialism's giving spirit or to damn it if you're suspicious of socialist tyranny (that's before Shevek meets real-life socialists and can't tell them apart from capitalists). But he discovers, with some help, that the manipulation of information, especially concerning his theory, is only mankind's oldest demon wearing new makeup. Power is never equal; even a supreme effort to level the playing field only distances the arbiters from the people playing the game. It warms my heart to hear a dedicated liberal like Le Guin understand this principle; there's an uncontrollability of life that the majority of the twenty-something demographic can't understand. In a way it makes Shevek all the more noble, because he would rather face the unexpected than allow his principles of indefinite equality to destroy something that could do a world of good.

Review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

Genly Ai is an emissary to the planet Winter, which is covered in ice and whose inhabitants are all humanoid hermaphrodites. His mission is to befriend these people and persuade them to join the Ekumen, an alliance of planets designed for the sharing of culture and information. But his dubious position as an outsider keeps him on shaky ground, and when global politics repeatedly get the better of him, his only chance for survival comes in the form of Estraven, a former prime minister banished for treason. Together, these two exiles undertake an epic voyage across the ice that gives Genly a closer look than ever at the minds and values of these androgynous people.

If you've seen my selection of Le Guin's blog, you already know that while I respect her as one of the most insightful speculative fiction writers I've ever had the luck to read, her outlook frequently falls just short. This could be disappointing, but it's more important to look at the massive questions she does ask. This book is crammed with those.

The main issue raised in the novel is that of the differences between our visions of gender. Her foreword, which is a beautiful little piece about the use of fiction to frame real life, explains that science fiction and its cousins test our capacity for thought by contrasting what we think is impossible against what we cannot conceive at all. With a detailed explanation, it's easy to imagine someone who can transition between biological femaleness and biological maleness, and perhaps even exhibit both at once, but can you imagine someone who is psychologically a man and a woman at the same time? I don't know enough psychology to dispute which traits Le Guin identifies as feminine and which as masculine, but I give her all the credit I can for not pretending that women and men are the same people with different plumbing downstairs. I don't know about other parts of the world, but a lot of Americans have slurred this latter one together out of a strange need to justify civil rights. (Psst: Treating people well is not at all like treating them the same, and you don't need to make up an excuse to do so.)

Given a pretty good sense of what makes men and women different, Le Guin does quite a job of uniting these behind an alien mindset. This happens mostly because she shows it in the characters rather than describing it, for the most part. So while it's established here that competitiveness is primarily masculine and hospitality is primarily feminine, Genly the narrator cannot quite figure out what's motivating a Gethenian (as the aliens are called) in any given action. It's a function of Le Guin's subtlety that there's still an obvious, complex difference between Genly and the Gethenians that stems from the difference that while they are both male and female, he is only ever male.

Put The Left Hand of Darkness high on your list. It should be up there with Dune on the list of complex and intelligent science fiction creations.

The Problem

Since my main quarrel with this book is one of ideology, and didn't make me enjoy it any less, I'm separating it from my recommendation. If anything, it makes me like the book more for arousing the scrappy, perhaps competitive (heh) literary critic I wish I could be.

Taken as a whole, The Left Hand of Darkness turns into a panorama of wishful thinking. You may have read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which envisions the result of a profound problem with human civilization. The Gethen Le Guin creates here is a formal inverse of the dystopia; it's almost Edenic, but its circumstances are not what would really bring about paradise on Earth.

The two main features of Gethen are its ice-age climate and its inhabitants' bisexuality. Genly occasionally chronicles the differences that have arisen between Gethen's civilizations as a whole and that of his own Terra (Earth). For example, from fighting against such bitter weather conditions, Gethenians have cultivated the value of permanence rather than our 20th- and 21st-century preference of progress and innovation. But then Le Guin drops the fact that although Gethenians murder each other from time to time, the planet has never experienced a war in its several millennia of recorded history. This is partly, as she says, because the weather is already so good at killing them, but also has something to do with never having learned violence as a result of their androgynous physiology. Most importantly, it is physically impossible for one Gethenian to rape another. A large part of the plot deals with the fear that Gethen's first-ever war will break out soon, but that quickly fizzles, both in terms of the plot and of the narrative's interest.

It's all as if Le Guin is saying that there would be no violence, neither war nor rape, if we were all sexually equivalent and if our planet beat us back rather than vice versa. These ideas were fun at the dawn of the 70's, around the time of the book's publication, just as they are now. But the circumstances are impossible. And to pin strife on theories of gender and ecological destruction distracts from the reality that greed and selfishness are demons we all have to fight. Just as there doesn't need to be an excuse for selflessness, it can be harmful to disguise that its opposite is not also an inextricable piece of human nature.

Review: Embassytown by China Miéville (2011)

On the planet Arieka, Avice Benner Cho is a little girl who is called to assist the local people, aliens to her, in expanding their Language. The Ariekei are physically incapable of lying, so Avice acts out a story so that they can describe it. In doing so, she becomes a living simile, "the girl who ate what was given to her." Human beings can converse with Ariekei only with the help of genetically engineered Ambassadors: sets of human twins who can speak at the same time with the same intent, approximating the Ariekei's two mouths and harmonious consciousness.

After years of space travel, Avice returns to Embassytown. There, a radical Ariekei is trying to teach itself and its followers how to speak a lie. But a larger threat soon emerges: an Ambassador unlike any other, sent by the galactic government light-years away. This Ambassador contains two people who are not only unidentical, but who even dislike each other. The schism behind their words, the Ariekei's first glimpse of individual human consciousness, shatters the base of the symbiotic alien mind. What follows are war, inspiration about the ethics and origins of abstract thought, and a revolution of an angelic society into modern communication.



This is it: the book I meant to order when I accidentally picked up The City and the City. And though that goof-up was worth it, this book is a step even higher.

The odd structure is the first thing worth noting. The book is neither completely chronological nor completely jumps around. Instead, it begins by spinning the past and the future closer and closer together toward two important moments: the liar Ariekei's public attempt at lying, and the new Ambassador's first words to the Ariekei. Once both of these events have been achieved, the narrative switches to the present, which for a while is a period of timelessness, of agitated waiting. In my own writing, pacing is something on which I focus especially. Sometimes this includes going as slow as possible without making the story less interesting. That's what Miéville does here. I've never seen a portion of any other book in which so much suspense is drawn out before anything actually happens. And even better, it makes the moment of crisis that much more exciting.

As far as the sci-fi aspect can go, Miéville does about as good a job as anyone in my limited experience, with the possible exception of Frank Herbert. He places his gadgets and space jargon precisely rather than lose the reader in them, leaving more room for the story without giving the impression that he knows nothing about science. And the Ariekei are never totally described, making it all the more interesting to imagine them as giant centaur-beetles with wings for hands, based on the tidbits that are provided.

I caught only a few weaknesses. Some of the characters are not as strong as they should be. Unfortunately, this includes Avice. Despite the fact that she's the narrator, there's a portion of the book during which I forgot she was present, and when I remembered, I couldn't figure out why she was still there. This is perfectly acceptable if you want to portray a typical view of an event that's happening to thousands of people, as this does, but Avice turns out to be pretty important in the end. More early exposition of her personality would have helped to make this transition less jarring.

My love of speculative fiction was only one of my reasons for reading this book. The main reason was my exploration of language and its philosophic possibilities. In that and in many other ways, Embassytown delivers handily, proving both incredibly original and profound. I'd recommend it to anyone, especially if it's not in your niche. Authors like Miéville give sci-fi a better name.

Review: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)

Great Scott! Here I set a precedent for this blog: a review of a book you actually may have read (sorry, Christine).

I've heard mixed oral opinions of The Hunger Games for the past two years. I've been told it's the next Twilight or the next Harry Potter. Other people have had good things to say about it. The fact that it was made into a Hollywood movie means that everyone agrees that, at least, it's lucrative.

The Hunger Games follows the trials and tribulations of Katniss Everdeen (most of the names in this book are equally irritating), a sixteen year-old girl who lives in a dystopian future where most of Panem, a place that was once North America, is ruled by the rich, merciless Capitol. Panem is built rather like a game of Settlers of Catan, in which each geographic region produces exactly one resource for the Capitol to take and redistribute to everybody, keeping most for itself. The rest of the setting is unimportant, except for the Hunger Games themselves. In this event, which is mandatory viewing for every citizen of Panem, two teenagers from each district fight to the death in a giant, role-playing game-esque free-for-all. It's up to Katniss to find a way to survive the games at the same time as sticking it to the Capitol.

Because most of the hype pertained either to teenage romance or box office dollars, I was surprised by how good this book was. Of course, it's consciously a young adult book, so it's necessary to be more lenient with some of the awkward narration or times the moral is explicitly spelled out.

With this in mind, the dystopian world of Panem is surprisingly well established. The futuristic power relationships feel less traditional, like in Frank Herbert's Dune, than actually futuristic. I love the connection Collins made between the Colosseum games and reality TV, especially how she synthesized the real deaths in the former with the fake airs put on by the latter. For me, this was the best aspect of the book.

The worst aspect, other than the names, was the general shallowness of character. It sometimes bothers me when authors think it's okay to pass off one-dimensional characters because they're writing for children; Collins isn't nearly as guilty of this as some authors are, but she's far from perfect. Katniss is one of the best examples, fluctuating between cluelessness and total understanding of the system, as the narrative requires. Her personal connection to the action is somewhat too simple, considering she's the narrator. Of course, she cares about her family, doesn't want to fight to the death, hates the spoiled competitors, etc., but she comes out of the Hunger Games without a clear understanding of what she has gained from them. This may have been part of the message, but the message itself should have been clearer than "this kind of spectacle is evil."

Altogether, though, the plot held together quite nicely. I was particularly impressed by the details of the Games themselves; most of Katniss's survival skills and the conditions of wilderness existence were actually spot-on (except for shooting fireballs, but things like that were intentional). There was a nice balance on many counts of the plot of the Games: Katniss' strategy, the interaction of the characters' personalities, the actions of the game-makers, etc.

To cap it off, it was definitely a thrilling read for me. Although it hasn't been my favorite book of the summer, it kept my attention the best by far. Her narrative pace is perfect to keep the reader on edge, never quite sure when the next fight scene could break out. And the chapter cliffhangers, while overt, are all effective.

So: I'd recommend this book to nearly anybody, but especially to those who want to stay in the know about popular young adult fantasy and want somewhere to turn away from Harry Potter or Twilight. It's worth the time to read.

Review: Daughter of Regals & Other Tales by Stephen R. Donaldson (1984)

This will be the first in what will probably become the most common feature of this blog: my opinion of anything and everything I happen to read. I must first point out that my very favorite fantasy series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, are written by this same Stephen R. Donaldson. Although my opinion of Daughter of Regals stands on its own, the context can’t be ignored.

All this is a way to say that Daughter of Regals didn’t thrill me. 

The book is a collection of eight short stories, and so my opinion of it must be more complicated than “aye” or “nay.” The first two were actually quite good. “Daughter of Regals” is a political fantasy that’s both exciting and as intricate as a same-sized chunk of any of the Covenant books, meaning that every single detail is ultimately relevant to the story’s outcome. Other than a couple of ridiculous characters, it kept me interested for the whole ride. I couldn’t find any significant moral depth, but it was a good story.

“Gilden-Fire,” the second piece in the book, is an excerpt from The Illearth War, one of the Covenant books. Needless to say, it hooked me, but I can’t imagine approaching it without having read the First Chronicles. So I wouldn’t recommend it.

And the rest of the pieces were uninspired by comparison. To get an idea, they are as follows:

-"Mythological Beast" is set in a dystopian future where everyone has a job but nobody does any work. Every person is equipped with a "biomitter," a device built into the wrist that reads "You are OK" as long as he or she is "healthy." If you fall ill, the biomitter calls the hospital workers, who come and take you away. This doesn't work out very well when our main character begins to transform into a unicorn.

-"The Lady in White" is about an enchantress who captures, one by one, the men of a small village. This story's narrative style was uniquely obnoxious and difficult to read. I'll call it the worst of the set.

-"Animal Lover" is a pretty neat sci-fi story that involves cyborgs and genetic engineering. My favorite part is the fact that it's set in... well: "Here we were in the year 2011–men had walked on Mars, microwave stations were being built to transmit solar power, marijuana and car racing were so important they were subsidized by the government." All this is narrated by a gritty government agent with a laser cannon in his hand. I've been waiting for the day I could compare the present day to a sci-fi prediction (other than Nineteen Eighty-Four). In all honesty, the story succeeds in spite of this disconnection, making it one of my favorites. It's careful, complex, and energetic.

-"Unworthy of the Angel" has a story that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Donaldson, most of whose writing is rather atheistic, is attempting what he calls "religious fantasy," and it's apparent that he's outside of his comfort zone. However, he gets a lot of things right about the characterization of a guardian angel, and he hits many of the important points about the relationship between an artist and his work. I think the fantasy failed here but the philosophy held the story intact.

-"The Conqueror Worm" is a strange little horror story about what happens to a failing marriage when a large centipede attacks. I don't think I have to say any more.

-"Ser Visal's Tale" is about a fellow who becomes mixed up in the troubles of a witch who is abused by "The Temple." I tend to hate these kinds of stories for their obviousness and their attempts to be relevant and political. Of course we sympathize with the witch, because none of the other characters, especially the Templemen, are at all realistic as people. I'm also a little sour because the back cover told me this one "ends with a surprising twist." Surprise: it doesn't.

I suppose my lesson from this book is that mediocre fantasy is all over the place, and even the best writers can fall into it. A story, no matter what the genre, is made up of something to be said and a way of saying it. If these elements aren’t synchronized, the results are messy. If they are, then it’s a success. Genre isn’t something to be transcended; it’s always a means of reaching something that can’t be reached any other way.

Looking over my thoughts about this book, I've realized that it reflects, in a way, what I plan to do with this blog. It's a collection of short stories, not necessarily the author's best, all in one volume. The diversity makes it enjoyable, but there's also the reminder that even the cleverest writer has bad days. Years of constant practice are necessary just to produce one great book. When that happens, it shouldn't kill the writing spirit–as Donaldson explores early in Thomas Covenant's experience with leprosy–but it should be the peak in a process that is contained not only in the surviving text, but along the river of the author's life.