The Map of Time, by Felix J. Palma

Map of Time

I’m not sure how I’m going to write about Felix Palma’s The Map of Time without getting deep into spoiler territory. Normally, I can get away with a mostly vague summary of the plot(s), slap on my hypothesis about what I think the book is trying to say, and sign off with a recommendation about whether it’s worth reading or not. But the plots of this book are so inextricably bound up in what the book is about that I don’t think I can tease them apart without going into such detail about the plot that I will pretty much ruin the experience for anyone else who wants to read the book. Plus, I have some serious reservations about whether this is a good book or not and I am dying to criticize it (in more than the academic sense).

Let’s see how far I can get before I resort to the spoiler warnings. Anyone reading this should probably brace themselves anyway.

The Map of Time is divided into three unequal sections. All three are linked by characters and events. What changes is the perspective of the narrator–an omniscient character who repeatedly claims the ability to see everything, everywhere. This narrator pops up sporadically, and it’s easy to forget his presence until he announces himself again.

The first section of the book contains the story of Andrew Harrington, a rich somewhat dissolute man who has the misfortune (in more than one sense) to fall in love with Mary Kelly, a Whitechapel prostitute who is doomed to be one of Jack the Ripper’s victims. After her death, Harrington numbs himself with drugs and alcohol for eight years before deciding to try and kill himself. His cousin and friend, Charles Winslow, however, concocts a wild plan involving the writer H.G. Wells to help Harrington change history and save his lost love.

The second section involves a young woman who is so bored with her own time and the limitations of life for Victorian women that she convinces herself that she is in love with a romantic hero from the distant future. Wells gets involved again as the girl and the hero manage to tangle themselves up in their romance and the intricacies of time paradoxes. It’s kind of fun to watch them whip themselves into frenzy.

The third and smallest section of the book is, surprisingly and somewhat disappointingly, when the most interesting (at least for me) plot happens. This time, H.G. Wells takes center stage and finds himself fighting for his life (and the lives of fellow authors Henry James and Bram Stoker) and the future of his world as he knows it. If they entire book had consisted of this section, expanded to its full creative potential, I would have been a very happy reader. As it is, I am merely a thoughtful reader, mildly entertained.

I give up. I have to start spoiling the book. SPOILERS AHEAD.

*

*

*

When you read the inside jacket of the book, you expect a time travel novel. But in the first section, when Harrington ostensibly uses the time machine featured in Well’s novel, it turns out to be a fraud cooked up by Harrington’s cousin to shake him out of his suicidal funk. And in the section section, where the time travel apparently occurs through an act of magic, the whole show turns out to be a hoax as well. But in the third section, we finally get to see some “real” time travel. And that’s partly while I feel cheated. I had to read through nearly 500 pages to get to it and then it’s all over at just over the 600 page mark.

I try not to force my expectations on a book as I read it and let the author take me where they want to go. But I can’t help but feel mislead not only by the book jacket but also other reviews of the book I read. As I read The Map of Time, I was reminded of a story I’ve heard in several different versions where some tourists go into an attraction after paying a lot of money and, after realizing it’s a fraud, convince their friends to go too so that they don’t look like total rubes. The first two sections of this book are all smoke and mirrors, while the third section is over in a comparative flash. And I can’t excuse the book on the grounds of bad translation because what I’m disappointed about is the plot.

*

*

*

END SPOILERS

Okay, I feel a little better having gotten that out my system.

This is a hard book to sum up. I want to say the book is about fraud and deception and manipulation. But this book is also about time paradoxes and interconnectivity. Characters weave in and out of each others stories, making crucial cameos or revealing important information. It was, I’ll admit, a lot of fun to see the connections and see the stories behind the main story.

So, can I recommend this book to other readers? I’m still not sure because what you read on the inside book jacket is not what you get when you actually read the book. The book takes a long time to get going, so you’ll have to be prepared for a very slow burn before any action takes place. One other piece of advice, don’t be too tied to your expectations because this book will not by what you expect.

The Demi-Monde: Winter, by Rod Rees

The Demi-Monde: Winter

I’ve often compared fiction to a petri dish. It’s a fertile environment where you can put ideas and characters and situations and see what comes of it. Rod Rees applies my analogy a little more literally than I’m used to seeing in the opening book of his series, The Demi-Monde: Winter. The bulk of the book takes place inside of a computer simulation that was designed to train American soldiers for combat in asymmetrical warfare environments.  The simulation is peopled with the worst, most devious, most vicious figures from history: Reinhard Heydrich, Lavrentiy Beria, and Maximilien Robespierre among others. Then the creators of the simulator stacked the deck by increasing population densities and introducing intractable political, religious, and social beliefs among the inhabitants. The place is designed to be a powder keg. No, that’s not the right analogy because there is always someone fighting someone else. Maybe it’s more like one of those coal fires that can’t ever be put out and is wildly dangerous to even approach.

This idea fascinates me; it’s what drew me to the book in the first place. But I almost stopped reading the book before I’d even finished the prologue because of how it was written. Rees is very fond of short. Punchy. Sentences.

And one sentence paragraphs.

Both of these irritated me and I was glad that the stylistics seem to calm down as the book progresses. I suspect Rees just needed to get into the right tonal groove. It also took me a while to get used to Rees’s tricks with capitalization. A lot of those inflammatory political and religious beliefs programmed into the simulation have far too many capitalism and I had a hard time taking them seriously. Honestly, how are you supposed to take the vile philosophy of UnFunDaMentalism seriously? But I’m glad I stuck with the book because the pay off was completely worth a little writerly eccentricity. And, as I said, Rees does seem to calm down after a while.

So, to the plot. In the prologue, we meet Norma Williams, the President’s daughter, is trapped inside the simulation. Unless she can get to a Portal site, she can’t get back to her body in the Real World. The bulk of the book is narrated by Ella Thomas, the woman sent into the simulation–the Demi-Monde–to rescue Norma. If this were just a rescue mission, it would have been an exciting enough plot. But things quickly start to get weird.

The Demi-Monde exists inside of a powerful computer named ABBA. This computer appears to be so intelligent that it’s clearly got its own agenda, one that doesn’t jibe with its programmers’ agenda. Rees hints at all sorts of mysteries that the programmers aren’t aware of and definitely didn’t include in their original simulation. It gets downright supernatural after a while.

So there’s the rescue mission, the supernatural stuff, cyber-Nazis, and a cyber version of the Warsaw Uprising, all on top of one of the most fantastically interesting and dangerous settings I’ve seen in fiction. I am really looking forward to the next book in the series because this book doesn’t resolve itself at the end. This book is clearly setting up things for the next book. I can only hope that Rees keeps up the good work with his wildly inventive and provocative story.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash

Where to begin with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash? There’s so much to talk about with the premise and the plot that it’s hard to believe that Stephenson got it all in 438 pages–especially consider the length of the books he’s written subsequently.

The opening pages give the reader little hint of where the book is really going to end up. We meet Hiro Protagonist (it’s hard for me to read that character’s name without seeing the author winking at me) as he’s delivering pizzas in a California that is utterly unrecognizable from our current reality. America has fragmented into franchulates (franchise plus consulate), franchises that have the legal rights to act like micro nations. They can even offer citizenship and asylum to their residents. The United States itself has disintegrated and turned into a Stalinist paranoiac nightmare. (Employees have weekly polygraphs.) The Internet has evolved into a fully immersible alternate reality where you can wear whatever skin you chose. Hyperinflation and pollution are rampant. And yet, it all kind of works. It’s not pretty, but it works.

Back to Hiro and his pizza. Things quickly go wrong and Hiro ends up dumping his delivery car into a pool and losing his job. He retreats into the Metaverse (the grandson of the Internet) to collect information for the Central Intelligence Corporation (formerly the Central Intelligence Agency). Old acquaintances draw him into one of the most bizarre conspiracies I have ever seen committed to paper. Soon Hiro and his partner (a courier who helped him out with the pizza) find themselves chased by religious fanatics, the United States, the Mafia, a harpoon wielding Aleut, and hackers. The chase runs from Los Angeles to British Columbia and even out in the Pacific on a floating community of refugees with glossolalia.

When I picked up the book, I knew it was considered a classic of cyberpunk. But I wasn’t expecting that Stephenson would plumb the depths of linguistics, history, and religion to create his story. (If I’m honest, I will say that the information dumps towards the end of the book to cover all this material will make the book drag if you’re not particularly interested in those topics.) This confirms my theory that in order to become a classic, a book has to rise above the conventions of its genre. And what Stephenson does with these topics is truly incredible. I’m reluctant to say more for fear of giving away the crux of the conspiracy.

But I can’t resist the linguistic ideas that Stephenson plays around with. I think I can do this without giving everything away, so here goes. Linguists have observed over and over again that languages will start to change and diverge if one group of speakers is isolated from the rest of the speakers. This makes sense to me since the only thing language really has to do is transmit ideas from one speaker to another. If the speakers can understand each other, mission accomplished. The isolated speakers don’t necessarily have to communicate outside their community, so they’re free to create their own jargon, slang, and idioms and mess about their their grammar as much as they want. But Stephenson points out that as communities have come back together again, language should start to converge again. You can actually see it when fad words crop up. Think about the history of the concept of cool. The word for that concept changes every generation.

Stephenson takes it farther by playing around with the idea that once, a very long time ago, we all spoke the same language and that that language did not diverge if speakers were isolated from each other. This flies in the face of all the linguistic theory I learned about as an undergraduate, and even my own observations. Through this thought experiment, Stephenson shows that we need diversity. Diversity gives rise to innovation and competition, propelling science and art and a whole raft of other activities forward.

Snow Crash has so many ideas in it that I know I’m going to think about its implications for days.

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

The Forever War

Originally published in 1974, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is simultaneously a book of its time and this time. (This is not an original observation. I’ll be the first to admit that. Doesn’t make it any less true, though.) It’s clear from even the first paragraphs that it was meant as a satire of the Vietnam War. But anytime a country goes to war overseas for vague reasons, The Forever War becomes fresh again.

In the alternate history of this book, a war starts between Terrans in the mid-1990s with the first alien species they encounter. The United Nations Expeditionary Force quickly drafts the best and the brightest from around the world, sink a million dollars on each soldier’s training, and sends them off to meet the enemy. But because of the curious physics of interstellar travel in this universe, the soldiers experience only a few months or years of travel while back home Earth is experiencing decades and centuries. Periodically, our protagonist Mandella (his parents meant to name him Mandala but no one could spell it) gets news from home–but soon things on Earth start to sound more alien than the actual alien worlds he encounters.

The chronology of the novel unfolds over 1,100 years, but it’s a lightening fast read because Mandella spends so much time in stasis or being rebuilt from his last encounter with the enemy. His war really only lasts about a decade in his subjective experience. As Mandella hops across time, I was reminded more and more of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. In that novel, the protagonist jumps ever further in time. Before long, Earth is unrecognizable. Mandella finds that even after a decade or so in space (objective time, not subjective), he can no longer live on Earth. He can’t adjust to the society. The army is the only place that makes sense to him, just like prison makes sense to long-time prisoners.

To my mind, this is a direct analog of how hard it is for some returning veterans to adjust to a society that’s moved on in their absence. I can only imagine how much worse it is for veterans of wars like Vietnam or Iraq, ones where the reasons for going to war are murky, where veterans can’t count on public support because a portion of the civilian population thinks the war is a bad idea. In that way, The Forever War is a very sharp commentary on psychology and politics. I wonder why this book isn’t more widely read outside of the science fiction community. It should be up there with Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22.

Another thing that struck me about the book was the psychological manipulation the soldiers experience. It was disturbing to hear Mandella succumb to posthypnotic suggestions that cause him to kill every moving alien when he first encounters the enemy. The hypnosis those first troops had tried to turn them into berserkers. Even more disturbing is the conditioning that female soldiers get that makes them “open” to sex with their comrades in arms. As a female myself, that smacks of rape. This is alluded to only briefly by Mandella (a male character), which bothers me all the more.

This element isn’t enough to make me change my mind about how good the book is. It just means that I have to classify it as a guy’s book. It would have been very interesting if the main character had been female. But I have to remember that this book was written in 1974, by a guy. It’s almost in the ball park of having to forgive Mark Twain for using the n word in Huckleberry Finn.

A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge

A Fire Upon the Deep

In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge chucks his readers into the deep end of a universe that is a lot more complicated that we can imagine. For the first few chapters, I flailed around a bit trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I don’t want that to sound like a complaint. I like that about books. It  takes skill to ground readers in a science fiction novel without having to just tell us everything.

(On a side note, it was very interesting to read this essay while I was working my way through this book, especially their fourth point. (Yes, I linked to Cracked. Deal with it.))

The first chapter sets off the book like a short fuse. We meet a group of humans in deep space who are messing around with an archive. They wake up something, an intelligence that is bent on universe-wide domination. Within a few pages, the humans cook up a scheme to evacuate. One ship makes it to relative safety. The other brings the malignant intelligence back to their home planet.

At this point, the book splits into many different perspectives. (From here on, it seems like every time you might get bored with a character, the perspective switches.) And the perspectives are so different that it’s almost like reading two completely different books, at least until all the protagonists meet up at the end. Two of these perspectives are children who survived the mad dash to that relative safety I mentioned. These children, Jefri and Johanna, find themselves on a previously undiscovered planet inhabited by an ingeniously inventive race of sentient canids. These canids are small packs (each pack is an individual personality) that live in opposing kingdoms. The children are split between the camps. This part of the whole book is like a classic planetary exploration novel, but much better written. The other perspective, the space opera part of the book, is narrated by librarian Ravna Bergsndot.

The children’s plots, for most of the book, describe a war between the two canid camps. They would have been interesting enough on their own. But for me, it’s the Ravna chapters that really make the book because they raise the stakes, on the one hand, and on the other, they keep the reader rooted in the larger story of that malevolent intelligence taking over entire swathes of the inhabited galaxy. Further, Ravna’s perspective introduces the reader to the concepts of Powers (super intelligences that have transcended from “lower” civilizations) and the Zones. Ranging out from a central point, the Unthinking Depths, the universe in this novel is arranged in zones. The further away from the depths one goes, the more advanced the technology. The Beyond, for example, allows faster than light travel. In the Transcend, anything is possible.

Back to the plots. Jefri has fallen in with a group of Tines (the pack minded canids) who lie to him in order to gain a technological edge on their enemies. (The planet the children landed on is just over the border in the Slow Zone, where faster than light travel and whole host of other technologies just aren’t possible. Also, the Prime Directive doesn’t seem to exist in this universe.) He never discovers that this group are the ones that killed his parents. Johanna falls in with the other group, who are much more benign but who have been infiltrated by Jefri’s group. As the book rolls on, the children unknowingly find themselves on a collision course.

Ravna’s plot is a lot more intricate. First, her perspective allows us to follow the spread of that intelligence, known as the Blight. This part is supplemented by news posts (much like Usenet posts) that share legitimate news, wild theories, calls to action, and more. Second, her plot covers her attempt to rescue the children stranded in the Slow Zone and recover something (they’re not sure what) that will help them defeat the blight.

As I read, I had to admire Vinge’s sense of pacing. He’s got a planetary war brewing on one side and a galactic chase on the other. The whole second half of the book sets up the aforementioned collision course. When it all comes together, this book goes from great to spectacular.

A Fire Upon the Deep was written in the early 1990s. It’s only recently that Vinge published the sequel, The Children of the Sky. Fortunately, I know a library that has a copy.

When She Woke, by Hillary Jordan

When She Woke

I hate to say it, but Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke does not live up to its premise. There’s a blurb on the back that describes it as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter by way of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s pretty accurate in terms of the plot, but the writing style is not up to par to pull it off.

Let’s get the plot out of the way. Hannah Payne (e.g. Hester Prynne) is punished for having an abortion by having her skin turned red by a virus. As Hannah reflects on her punishment, we get more details about her world. It’s America in the future, after a disease destroyed women’s fertility. Evangelists and religious fundamentalists are in charge. Hannah grew up in a very religious home somewhere in Texas. Until she found herself having an affair with a married man and getting pregnant, she never questioned the rules or her beliefs. To protect her lover, she has an abortion and is almost immediately caught. When she refuses to name her lover or her doctor, she is sentences to 30 days in jail at 16 years of being red.

I have to admit it’s a pretty effective punishment. Different kinds of criminals are given different colors, so you can see what someone did on their face. Instead of locking them away, “Chromes” live in ghettos and try to get along as best they can. Once Hannah is released, her father tries to help her by getting her into a halfway house for female Reds. Hannah is almost immediately cast out when she objects to the psychological torture the nutty religious owners inflict on their charges. After that, Hannah falls into a network that can help her get to Canada and get her punishment reversed.

This could have been a very interesting book, even it if does rip off The Scarlet Letter and The Handmaid’s Tale. But there is no subtext to this book. Characters’ emotions and motives are explicitly explained, repeatedly. There’s very little left for the reader to puzzle about or ponder on. Secondly, the backstory is told in such a way that it comes off as a rant more often than not. If this book is meant as satire or allegory, it feels more like a smack upside the head about how religion is evil. Consequently, the people this book should reach will just get pissed off and not read it.

On the plus side, I didn’t take me long to read.

Flashback, by Dan Simmons

Flashback

Dan Simmons’ Flashback is a very angry book. I’m hard pressed to say whether it’s Simmons letting his anger at current events flood his book or if Simmons was experimenting. It was very hard not to try and psychoanalyze the writer as I read this book. Like China Miéville’s books, Flashback is packed with ideas. But unlike Miéille, it has a sympathetic and human character to anchor the chaos.

Nick Bottom is an unlike hero in a future America that, in my more pessimistic moods, seems all too likely to happen. The economy has collapsed and most people live hand to mouth in former malls and housing projects or are fighting for territory. Many people are hooked on flashback, a drug that lets them relive moments from their memory. Nick used to be a cop until his wife died and his drug abuse got out of control. We meet him several years after that, trying to convince a Japanese advisor to let him investigate the murder of the advisor’s son. Nick even tries to portray his addiction as an asset, since he can remember the case files while he’s under the influence. Simmons lets us sink into Nick’s world, picking up details about our possible future history while slowly building up the mystery plot.

There are two secondary plot threads that help us see just how dangerous the future America has become. In one of them, we meet Nick’s father-in-law, an aging academic who would like to write a Tolstoy-level epic about this new American society. Until the plot really gets moving, however, Leonard mostly seems bewildered. The other plot thread is narrated by Nick’s son, Val, a punk who is angry at the world but is reluctant to lash out against it.

Before long, it becomes clear to Nick that there is more going on to the mystery than he thought. To the reader, it becomes clear that the murder is not the center of this book. This is not a mystery; it’s a conspiracy. Nick travels back and forth from Denver to Boulder to Sante Fe (no longer a part of the United States) to Los Angeles and back. Leonard and Val flee Los Angeles as a war breaks out behind them. The pieces of the puzzle come together in the end, into an unexpected picture. Everything clicks into place in a deliciously satisfying way, in spite of the possibly ambiguous ending. Flashback has an ending that could be read as optimistic or pessimistic, depending on your mood when you read it. This is a tremendous book, and I’m still turning over it’s ideas almost a week after I finished it. This is one of the best dystopias I’ve read in a long time.

So why do I call this an angry book? Because it was all too easy for me to imagine a writer reading or watching the news and getting so angry at politicians and the media and terrorists and society that it had to come out somehow. The America that Simmons presents could not exist without our current society and government making some key mistakes. First, America is so broke that it hires out its army to fight for Japan in China. Second, September 11 is now celebrated as a holiday, rather than a day of mourning. Third, America has ceded its place as a world power and its population seems to have lost any will to regain that place. After all that, it’s easy to picture Simmons as an anti-Islamic conservative or libertarian.

And yet, this book has too much subtlety to dismiss it like that. This book is crammed with ideas, just waiting to spark discussion not only about its literary merits but also about the way our society might be headed. I finished this book right before the debt ceiling talks produced a plan, so it was very easy to think that Simmons’ predicted future was well on its way. This book is terrifying for that very reason.

This book deserves to be read widely, for its plot, its character, and especially for its ideas. I hope it wins a ton of awards so that more people will read it.

Embassytown, by China Mieville

Embassytown

China Mieville’s Embassytown is a book of ideas, more than anything else. While it has decent characters and an interesting plot, it’s clear they they exist simply to further develop Mieville’s fascinating take on first contact and language.

Our narrator, Avice Benner Cho, is a pilot of sorts. As a child, she wanted to leave her home town and planet, showing a classic case of wanderlust. She only returns later because her husband is fascinated by the language of the aliens that Avice grew up with, the Ariekei. The narrative wanders back and forth between the present of the story and Avice’s past, slowly building a picture of life on the Ariekei planet. Like historical first contacts, the Ariekei become infected. This time, they are infected by the human version of their Language. They become addicted, and life on their planet screeches to a halt. The only alternative the Ariekei can see is to destroy their ability to hear and then drive the humans off their planet. By the end of this book, there’s enough action and derring-do to make up for the meandering first half.

The Ariekei possess sophisticated biotechnology, but the most interesting thing about them–to the humans at least–is their language. Their language must be spoken simultaneously by two mouths, with a single consciousness behind them. To me, part of the book can be read this way. One thread of the story pushes it forward. The other doubles back to clarify. And the Ariekei cannot lie. More than that, they cannot create similes without acting them out first. They cannot say anything that is not demonstrably so. It’s difficult to imagine, given the virtuosity that is possible in English. It had never occurred to me, but something as simple as a simile or a metaphor or a hyperbole or an understatement are species of lies. But think of all the meaning they can impart, all the richness they can give our expressions.

The Ariekei want that richness. They hold Festivals of Lies where they take it in turns to attempt to lie. It’s not until halfway through the book that one manages it. Surl’s small lie and the addictive speech of an ambassador spark more than just a physical war. They also spark an existential war about Language that, at times, takes on religious tones.

Like I said, this book is more about ideas than plot. It’s supposed to make you ponder about the implications of the Ariekei Language. It requires a certain amount of patience to get through to the end. The only criticism I have is that the book seems hollow to me. The characters are serviceable, but I didn’t really feel like I knew them by the end–Avice in particular. I spent more than 300 pages in her company, but she was just as much a cipher at the end as she was at the beginning. I’ve noticed this in Mieville’s previous book, Kraken. He’s very interested in ideas, and plot and characterization take a back seat. Avice is a terrific example of this. Until very near the end, Avice is an observer, an outsider. Consequently, you get to see the larger plot from the periphery and it was difficult for me to get invested in it. But I enjoyed it as an exploration of the possibilities of language.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Neuromancer

William Gibson’s Neuromancer has been on my reading list for a long time. And now that I’ve read it, I’m not sure what to think of it. It’s full of wild ideas, exotic characters and settings, and intricate action. It’s hard to believe that it was written in 1983. It’s so forward-thinking. There are no wasted words in this book; you have to pay attention to everything.

Gibson dumps you into the middle of the action in dive bar in Chiba. The experience you get as a reader is like riding on the protagonist’s shoulder. You pick up everything from context–all the way through. Occasionally, you get some back story from the characters. But the whole picture remains intriguingly opaque until near the end. The protagonist, Case, is a washed up cowboy–who used to run hacks for hire until a Russian mycotoxin wiped out his ability to surf the evolved version of the internet. He’s stopped in the middle of his downward spiral towards overdose or assassination by an offer he barely considers refusing. In exchange for money and medical treatment for his poisoning, Case agrees to cowboy for the mysterious Armitage and the fascinating Molly.

Neuromancer is a curious blend of far-future technology and 1983 technology. There are some TRON-like elements such as the Internet being populated by a lot of geometric shapes and Case requiring a handset while he’s mentally online. Gibson had to extrapolate from current technology, so I have to wonder if he looks back on it now and thinks it’s dated. I think it’s held up rather well. Aside from the details of the technology, I could see the Earth in sixty or seventy years being a lot like the Earth of Neuromancer. The world is crowded and the super rich have fled to the ultimate suburbs–low Earth orbit. Drug use and crime are rampant and governments seem to have given up. Most people soldier on the best they can.

Case gets sucked in to Armitage’s scheme, but he’s smart enough to know that there’s more going on that he’s being told. He investigates Armitage and learns of an epic military cock-up named Screaming Fist. He also starts to get messages from Wintermute, an even more mysterious entity who turns out to be an AI with its own plot. The best character, as far as I’m concerned, is Molly. Described as a razorgirl, there doesn’t seem to be anything that the technologically enhanced Molly can’t do. While Case risks braindeath jacking into the Internet, Molly does all the dangerous work. She’s utterly self-sufficient. I got the impression that if Molly could do the net-work while simultaneously storming an actual castle, she would have.

As opposed to the clinical feel of most hard science fiction that I’ve read, Neuromancer has an organic feel. The world around Case and the team is a living breathing thing. But as the plot progresses, the book gets damn near surreal, so surreal that it’s hard to keep track of what’s happening where and who’s doing what to who. The plan, such as it is, goes to hell and Case and Molly have to improvise their way to their murky goal.

Neuromancer could stand a few more readings. I know that I missed things on this read through. I was too busy trying to get to what happened next and to find out who was really pulling the strings to stop and savor the text. From what I understand, some of Gibson’s other books take place in the same future. I have to get my hands on them.

Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart

Earth Abides

It’s strange to say, but George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides is a curiously hopeful post-apocalyptic novel. It’s also masterfully written, elegant and subtle as it takes you from disaster to survival. I don’t know what I was expecting from this book–probably just a good yarn with some sociology thrown in–but I ended up with a brilliant read.

The book starts with a snake bite. The protagonist, Isherwood “Ish” Williams, is collecting data for this thesis when he is bitten by a rattlesnake. He takes himself back to his cabin to recuperate. The next thing he knows, he’s apparently the last man alive. A newspaper tells him that a particularly virulent disease has killed millions. Lacking anything better to do, Ish travels across the country, meeting a few survivors and observing the changes to the environment. The language is clinical, scientific, modern. The first third of the bottle is about what you’d expect from a post-apocalyptic novel. As Ish takes stock of his new world, you can’t help but think about what will happen when the electricity fails, when the stocked up food will give out, when the few survivors decide to go Mad Max.

Eventually, Ish meets up with a few other survivors that he can band together with. He finds a wife and friends. Slowly, he builds up a community that, for lack of anything better, they call the Tribe. Years zip by. The novel ends up about 40 years after the plague (as far as I can tell). Ish is an old man, cared for by his great-grandchildren. The language by the end of the book is less objective. The science is gone. Ish has given up his ecological and anthropological observations. By the end of the book, when Ish asks if one of his great-grandson is happy, the answer is: “Yes, I am happy. Things are as they are, and I am part of them” (322*).

The change over the course of the book is subtle. At the beginning, as I said, it’s utterly depressing. You can’t help but wonder if, as Ish wonders, if this is it for humanity. Maybe too many people died. Maybe too many skills died out and the survivors won’t last long. But as Ish and the Tribe grow, I started to feel hopeful. Ish fears for the loss of knowledge as all but one of the children show a marked lack of interest the knowledge Ish tries to pass on. He wonders if his little tribe will survive beyond a couple of generations once the canned food runs out. (It’s rather surprising how long it does last.)

What I realized by the end of the book–as Ish does–is that humanity does carry on. The civilization that we know is gone. Ish’s Tribe becomes more tribal as time goes on. Sure, it’s sad that the knowledge of our world is lost, that the big university library will probably rot away with no one to read it. But there are still people. Humanity will go on.

Earth Abides is a terrific read. I’m very glad that I picked it up and I wish that more people would give it a chance. Unlike modern post-apocalyptic novels, this one doesn’t play up the horror. Instead, it’s a sober, philosophical medication on what might happen if humanity had to start over.

__

* Stewart, George R. Earth Abides. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006. Del Ray trade paperback edition.