September 2018: Reading Thread

[Bick]

I’ve started Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski. All good so far.

 

[Randy M.]

Just finished Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys.

Not sure I liked this, since for better than half it's length it might be the most cynical s.f. novel I've ever read, but it is more sophisticated than most of the 1950s, early 1960s s.f. novels I've come across, and in a good way, running parallel story-lines that reflect on each other.

Ostensibly this story is about exploring an alien artifact on the dark side of the moon. Hawks and his crew have developed matter transmission in order to speed up the process and not tip the Russians (1950s, after all; and, I suppose, 20-teens, too) about what they've found and what they're doing.

Hawks has ethical qualms he can't quite suppress: Technically, nothing is transmitted from Earth but duplicated from materials on the moon, meaning you're killing the human you put in the transmitter and the person who appears at the other end isn't quite the same as the one duplicated -- the memories are in place, but to an extent this person is a highly accurate 3D printing. There's a brief but potent and useful psychic link between the duplicate on the Moon and one created in the lab (Budrys exercises verbal contortions avoiding claims of ESP) so they create two copies so the one in the lab can report to them what the moon duplicate sees in the alien artifact before being killed by it. Most of these die from the experience or go insane.

The personnel director -- for a time a third intersecting story-line -- finds Barker, an adventurer who never evades a challenge and so, arguably, suicidal. And he proves up to the task, but the physical toll leads to an emotional toll and a toll on his relationship with the woman who lives with him. In the meantime, he and Hawks have a mostly adversarial relationship.

If you look behind the plot, though, the focus is on the parallels between negotiating the alien artifact and negotiating a life, the social and emotional mazes we need to find our way through. What Budrys does is rather clever: Neither Hawks nor Barker, though the main characters, are Heinleinian competent men. What they are good at, they are good at, but they have limitations and especially in their dealings with others. Barker is tough and controlling, the King of his kingdom; Hawks is intellectually tough, but tentative and never sure he understands other people, and suspicious, wary and even frightened of emotional links when they form. The stuttering progression of the romance he has with someone he meets during the project eventually becomes rather sweet, enough so that the novel's ending is touchingly bittersweet.

Rogue Moon is still worth reading, just don't go in expecting can-do, optimistic 1950s s.f.


Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

Rogue Moon is one of a handful of my sf favorites and I always had my Intro to Literature students read it in our unit on sf.

I'm fairly well on board with what Rupert Sheldrake says about memory and excessive materialism of conventional science, so I am not too sure about the duplicate having all the memories, and I have other reservations too, but I'm happy to suspend doubt and disagreement when rereading this novel/novella.

 

[Vertigo]

Just finished Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys.

Not sure I liked this, since for better than half it's length it might be the most cynical s.f. novel I've ever read, but it is more sophisticated than most of the 1950s, early 1960s s.f. novels I've come across, and in a good way, running parallel story-lines that reflect on each other.

Ostensibly this story is about exploring an alien artifact on the dark side of the moon. Hawks and his crew have developed matter transmission in order to speed up the process and not tip the Russians (1950s, after all; and, I suppose, 20-teens, too) about what they've found and what they're doing.

Hawks has ethical qualms he can't quite suppress: Technically, nothing is transmitted from Earth but duplicated from materials on the moon, meaning you're killing the human you put in the transmitter and the person who appears at the other end isn't quite the same as the one duplicated -- the memories are in place, but to an extent this person is a highly accurate 3D printing. There's a brief but potent and useful psychic link between the duplicate on the Moon and one created in the lab (Budrys exercises verbal contortions avoiding claims of ESP) so they create two copies so the one in the lab can report to them what the moon duplicate sees in the alien artifact before being killed by it. Most of these die from the experience or go insane.

The personnel director -- for a time a third intersecting story-line -- finds Barker, an adventurer who never evades a challenge and so, arguably, suicidal. And he proves up to the task, but the physical toll leads to an emotional toll and a toll on his relationship with the woman who lives with him. In the meantime, he and Hawks have a mostly adversarial relationship.

If you look behind the plot, though, the focus is on the parallels between negotiating the alien artifact and negotiating a life, the social and emotional mazes we need to find our way through. What Budrys does is rather clever: Neither Hawks nor Barker, though the main characters, are Heinleinian competent men. What they are good at, they are good at, but they have limitations and especially in their dealings with others. Barker is tough and controlling, the King of his kingdom; Hawks is intellectually tough, but tentative and never sure he understands other people, and suspicious, wary and even frightened of emotional links when they form. The stuttering progression of the romance he has with someone he meets during the project eventually becomes rather sweet, enough so that the novel's ending is touchingly bittersweet.

Rogue Moon is still worth reading, just don't go in expecting can-do, optimistic 1950s s.f.


Randy M.

I think you were a little more forgiving than me. My thoughts are here:Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

 

[The Judge]

Gosh, that tiny font on your review there was hard on the eyes, Vertigo! It obviously got crushed when the changeover happened, so I've taken the liberty of increasing it to a size 12. I can make it a different font, too, if you'd prefer something a little more readable.

 

[dwndrgn]

Currently reading Katya's War by Jonathan Howard and Frost Burned by Patricia Briggs.

Katya's War seems to be a bit simplistic after the first book. So far it is a good story though it would have worked better as a novella instead of a full book as there isn't much to it. And if the last 3% of the book goes as I expect, the ending is simplistic as well.

This is my second time with Frost Burned, this time I'm listening to it on audio and there is one bit where I feel the author missed an opportunity but otherwise, I'm quite enjoying the revisit. The audio versions are really well done.

 

[Vertigo]

Gosh, that tiny font on your review there was hard on the eyes, Vertigo! It obviously got crushed when the changeover happened, so I've taken the liberty of increasing it to a size 12. I can make it a different font, too, if you'd prefer something a little more readable.

Please feel free, I'm not aware that I've ever selected anything other than the default, so, as you say, probably got modified in the changeover! And, yes, I got a bit of a shock when I looked at it.

Come to think of it I tend to copy and paste out of Word so maybe that had something to do with it.

 

[TWErvin2]

I half re-read, half listened to the audiobook version of Jurassic Park. I read it like 20 years ago and picked up the audiobook on sale. Enjoyed the travel down memory lane.

 

[The Judge]

Please feel free, I'm not aware that I've ever selected anything other than the default, so, as you say, probably got modified in the changeover! And, yes, I got a bit of a shock when I looked at it.

Changing the font to Verdana didn't help, though it should have done, and with the other fonts it was even smaller. Goodness knows what's going on there. I've taken it to size 15 instead, so we no longer all need magnifying glasses!

 

[Extollager]

Picked up & began reading Caroline Ticknor's Hawthorne and His Publisher (1913). It seems that Ticknor & Fields eventually was subsumed by Houghton Mifflin -- who became Tolkien's American publisher.

Ticknor said that he wanted his imprint on the title page to be the guarantee of a good book. He published a bunch of the notable New England authors of his day, and was a great advocate of copyright reform that would include the payment by American publishers of royalties to English authors -- an enlightened notion that wasn't always popular with other publishers. Ticknor was praised by (e.g.) Tennyson -- from whom a facsimile letter is included in the book.

This book should be quite interesting.

 

[Anthoney]

I’ve started Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski. All good so far.

I just bought the Witcher books but haven't read them yet.

 

[Randy M.]

I think you were a little more forgiving than me. My thoughts are here:Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

I think we disagree about the point of the book. It's not a SCIENCE fiction, it's a science FICTION. The puzzling nature of alien artifacts is of interest -- we cannot know what was behind the thinking of beings who made something as odd as this -- but it's also a crow bar into the puzzling nature of women who are also not easily deciphered. So it not only prefigured Star Trek, it prefigured The Big Bang Theory.

Really, though, that's too simple. The relationships between the men were just as fraught: Hawks/Baker, Hawks/Gersten, Hawks/pretty much everyone. Hawks is a scientist, and I think fairly convincingly portrayed as one with a conscience that doesn't rest easy given the science involved; but he also struck me as representative of most every male s.f. fan I met in the 1970s and '80s, including the one I saw daily in the mirror. He was too wrapped in his thoughts and interests to really empathize with anyone else emotionally, instead seeing everyone as a puzzle to solve.

The misogynistic passage you quote is cringe-worthy, but as I recall there is something following that which mitigates it somewhat.


Randy M.

 

[Vertigo]

I think we disagree about the point of the book. It's not a SCIENCE fiction, it's a science FICTION. The puzzling nature of alien artifacts is of interest -- we cannot know what was behind the thinking of beings who made something as odd as this -- but it's also a crow bar into the puzzling nature of women who are also not easily deciphered. So it not only prefigured Star Trek, it prefigured The Big Bang Theory.

Really, though, that's too simple. The relationships between the men were just as fraught: Hawks/Baker, Hawks/Gersten, Hawks/pretty much everyone. Hawks is a scientist, and I think fairly convincingly portrayed as one with a conscience that doesn't rest easy given the science involved; but he also struck me as representative of most every male s.f. fan I met in the 1970s and '80s, including the one I saw daily in the mirror. He was too wrapped in his thoughts and interests to really empathize with anyone else emotionally, instead seeing everyone as a puzzle to solve.

The misogynistic passage you quote is cringe-worthy, but as I recall there is something following that which mitigates it somewhat.


Randy M.

You might be right about the point of the book and I was certainly looking for science fiction and it seemed that what I got was a load of melodramatic relationships that just felt horrendously unrealistic to me; I was born in 1957 so I shouldn't have been too out of sync with it. Away from the science it just felt like a pilot for a bad soap opera. Don't get me wrong I don't have anything against books that focus on relationships but I need to feel those relationships are realistic and at no time did I feel that with this book.

 

[Randy M.]

Understood. There's an operatic quality of emotions heightened pretty near to unbelievable, but a lot of that comes off Barker because he tries so hard to be the Hemingway ideal. His personality, which Budrys tries to sell as the only kind fit to do this particular job, forces testesterone-fueled reactions even from a thinker like Hawks.

The one thing I forgot to add in my earlier posts is that this also leads to a lot of speechifying, which early on annoyed the heck out of me until it settled in this was Budrys' mode, at least for this book, rather than just badly written fiction. I think Budrys knew what he was doing, whether the reader would like it or not.


Randy M.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Finished the latest from Bryan Wigmore and really enjoyed it: Review: The Empyreus Proof by Bryan Wigmore

There's something definitely unique about his writing - and, as someone who hates the RPG magic that dominates fantasy, it's so refreshing to see something based on animist principles.

 

[HareBrain]

Finished the latest from Bryan Wigmore and really enjoyed it: Review: The Empyreus Proof by Bryan Wigmore

Thanks for that review, Brian. It's the first one I've seen, and it gave me a huge lift. It looks like the sequel did what I was hoping it would.

At last, after what felt (appropriately) like a long slog through soft sand, Dune has ramped up massively. The last 70 pages or so look like being a great read.

 

[Brian G Turner]

It's the first one I've seen

No worries, though I was really surprised, as I didn't think I was reading it very fast - but once I realized I might get the first review in, I ramped up my pace.

I didn't post too detail a review to Amazon, but I'm not sure people will read a long one - especially for a sequel, as they are either invested from reading the 1st book, or they aren't.

I really want to open a discussion thread about TEP, but I really don't want curious minds seeing spoilers. I'll wait for a few more people to catch up.

 

[Extollager]

Mostly, I take the characters in Rogue Moon to be distinct persons. Maybe other people could have been in that situation (the installation on the moon that must be sounded, etc.), but -- it was this group of people. They don't necessarily have to stand for groups of people or attitudes or whatever.

The ones in this story do seem "familiar" -- they are like some people were at around 1960. They don't seem like people from 1950 or 1970. That's a strength of the story -- you get the sense of a particular time. And of a particular place. Because, of course, of a bizarre alien artifact ever did become known, it wouldn't be a challenge to "humanity" -- it would be a challenge to the particular people who knew about it at a particular time and particular place. Budrys seems to me a notably intelligent sf writer, and one of the ways he shows that intelligence is (at some level of his awareness) knowing what I've just said. For me the story is pervaded by an "authenticity" that I don't usually associate with sf.

It probably helps that I'm in my sixties. The story might be more "alien" to someone in his or her thirties or younger.

Probably there's something of that kind of authenticity in some of PKD's stories, too, or in a favorite of mine that other people mostly don't seem to have read, Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun.

 

[Nozzle Velocity]

Rogue Moon is considerably better than Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People (1960) that absolutely drowns in the whole "cocktails and divorce" milieu of that period.

 

[Vertigo]

Mostly, I take the characters in Rogue Moon to be distinct persons. Maybe other people could have been in that situation (the installation on the moon that must be sounded, etc.), but -- it was this group of people. They don't necessarily have to stand for groups of people or attitudes or whatever.

The ones in this story do seem "familiar" -- they are like some people were at around 1960. They don't seem like people from 1950 or 1970. That's a strength of the story -- you get the sense of a particular time. And of a particular place. Because, of course, of a bizarre alien artifact ever did become known, it wouldn't be a challenge to "humanity" -- it would be a challenge to the particular people who knew about it at a particular time and particular place. Budrys seems to me a notably intelligent sf writer, and one of the ways he shows that intelligence is (at some level of his awareness) knowing what I've just said. For me the story is pervaded by an "authenticity" that I don't usually associate with sf.

It probably helps that I'm in my sixties. The story might be more "alien" to someone in his or her thirties or younger.

Probably there's something of that kind of authenticity in some of PKD's stories, too, or in a favorite of mine that other people mostly don't seem to have read, Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun.

Maybe it just didn't work for me as I found exactly the opposite; nothing about it felt authentic. Possibly if I looked at it as a satirical send up of certain styles of characters - ie. all of their traits grossly exaggerated - then maybe but looking at it for realism it just didn't convince me. And I'd add that I'm 61 so at the time the book was written I'd still have been a few years away from any sort of social awareness.