All of this has happened before, #2
We went back to the survivors of the Cylon attack just as the Chief and friends are getting into Ragnar Anchorage, to get the stored munitions… and they find someone there ahead of them. Surprise!
Spoilers
Again, this second half of the mini series reinforced the emotional power and extreme detail that I’d been reminded of in the first half. Roslyn impressed me this time around more than I remember from the first time; she is so self-contained – in public at least – and already we see the cost that she personally pays for making the hard decisions: leave thousands to certain death to ensure that some of them survive. Who would ever want to be responsible for that? But she takes it in her stride and just does it. And her encounter with Commander Adama is wonderful too. That she asks straight out whether he plans on a military coup, and then he seems to ignore her but only a few minutes later is repeating her words and realises she’s right… it really does set their relationship up for the rest of the series.
A couple of other things that struck me in this half: first, the aesthetic. Having recently been made aware of corridors in sf movies/tv, I was hyper aware of them here. Some are claustrophobic, some are large and airy, but on the Galactica at least they’re all – at this stage – very samey. This makes sense, of course, but it contributes to the feeling of being in a maze and being lost – much like the situation they find themselves in. The other thing is that in the beginning, everything was so controlled: it’s organised, and neat, and orderly, and everyone basically knows where they should be and what they’re doing. Over the mini series, things slowly get more chaotic and untidy, and from memory this is something that continues inexorably. It’s a really nice aspect and is indicative of the care given to details in the whole show.
What else? Starbuck being Starbuck – that awesome move to save Apollo really sets the tone for her character, even more than her biff with Tigh (do we ever learn his call sign? I don’t think we do). Baltar began to grate on me already in this section, the self-serving, arrogant, little twit, but I enjoyed Six more than last time: I think Helfer is actually a really good actress, and I’m looking forward to seeing her in her other roles – although that will also be painful. And Adama lying about Earth?? Outrageous, and yet… so noble, in an odd sort of way. The revelation of Earth as the thirteenth colony obviously didn’t do anything for me this time, but last time – what a clever, clever idea.
And there are the cylons. I love, love love the final scene, and the revelation that Boomer is a cylon. I don’t remember how I reacted when I first saw it, but what a gut-tearing discovery. There’s been so much effort to build Boomer up as a character: having to abandon Helo on Caprica, her illicit love affair with Chief, being nice to that annoying kid… and then BAM. Ow my heart. Damn you Larsen et al.
All of this has happened before
Spoilers
J has been at me for a good 18 months to do a Battlestar Galactica rewatch. I’ve been putting it off because… well… it just HURT the first time around. A lot. But he has proposed that we watch the entire thing over the whole year – so rather than watching a disk a night, which we may have been known to do (erm… a lot…), we’re going to treat it more like actual TV. Spread the load around. Rip the bandaid off slowly, you might say.
Anyway, we started by watching half of the mini series tonight, and the first thing that struck me was how young they all looked. The Chief was positively sveldt! Starbuck was mischievous and young! Above all, Adama and Roslin without four years of command? Not children by any means, but not haggard either.
The second thing that struck me was the familiarity of all those faces. Gaita! Tigh! Helo! Dee! Billy (whom I’d totally forgotten)!… and Baltar, Boomer, Apollo, Six, and *sigh* Starbuck. It felt just a little bit like a reunion. So silly, but true.
I’d forgotten a fair bit of the detail of what happens in the mini series. The actual start, with Six sauntering in and distracting the Colonial officer while he’s being blown up; Roslin being told about her cancer; the tension between Commander and Captain Adama. I had forgotten that ‘Head Six’ appears to Baltar almost immediately (in that dress), and the tension between civil and military rule already appearing – and Apollo siding with Roslin. I’m not sure I ever noticed before that spooling up the FTL was a dangerous move, and that Chief nearly KOs the XO because of the people who die in the decompression.
There is so much going on. So much that we decided to break the mini series when the Galactic arrives at Ragnok because we needed the breathing space. But, for all that I had visions of the deaths of most of these characters from later in the series, I’m glad we’re watching it again. I look forward to catching the hints I missed the first time, and focussing on detail because I won’t have to focus quite so much on plot.
I also enjoyed yelping “CYLON!” when I saw that nasty little PR type. Boo hiss.
Starting the Book Club: Tiptree
Over at Dreams and Speculations, the first of the year’s book club discussions is up and running. TJ has done a very clever thing by having not only one novel a month, but introducing a mid-month discussion on a couple of James Tiptree’s short stories from Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. This month, it’s “The Last Flight of Dr Ain” and “The Screwfly Solution.” I managed to be the second commenter, hurrah! … because she’s in America and has, I presume, automated the initial post to go up at midnight. Which means I’ll be waaaay behind on the conversation, but at least I got to say something early on 😀 . Essentially, while I liked “Ain” and it was certainly an interesting story for 1969, “Screwfly” was brilliant with all sorts of crunchy things to say about gender relations and sexuality and religious fanaticism.
The post is chock-full of spoilers, of course, but if you’ve read them or are interested in Tiptree’s work, it would be worth reading it and the comments.
Surface Detail
I got Surface Detail from my brother for Christmas; that is, I bought it, and he gets less $$ than he was going to for his Christmas/birthday present (it’s a long story). I wrapped it up and wrote the nicest note from him to me and everything, which apparently was a bit weird, according to the rest of the family (he wasn’t there)….
Anyway, I was very excited to finally have it in my hands. A new Culture novel! The world should rejoice! And this is one of the biggest ones yet, I think, at 627 pages. I’m way too much of a fangirl to give this a particularly critical review, but…
I have a really bad memory but I think this is one of the bigger casts that Banks has followed in detail, which contributes to its size. There are certainly some privileged characters, but most of those introduced do get some detail and resolution. They’re a good mix, too; mostly pan-human, but a few not, and to my utter delight a seriously warped AI whose avatar goes by name of Demeisen and whose attitude towards war, while reprehensible, was one of such unfeigned delight that I couldn’t help but adore him. In a reproving manner of course. I think the AIs, and the ships they’re encased in, are by and large my favourite part of any Culture novel. Not that Banks appears to feel any restrictions with his human characters, but with the AIs there are really no limits to the craziness he can put out there, and does. I think my other favourite character is the one who, if any deserve the name, is the main protagonist: Lededje Y’breq. She dies in the first chapter. Then, of course, she comes back.
Dying is, in fact, the focus of this entire book. I think someone who later becomes a main character is dead or dying in each of the first four chapters, and it kinda keeps happening. That’s because Banks decided to address one of the oldest issues in this book: whether there is a heaven or a hell. And the answer is, definitively, Yes There Is: because we made them. As virtual environments. Now the question becomes, should there be hells (heavens seem to be fine)? When it’s people just like us making them and deciding you go there? … which, in a place like the galaxy Banks gives us, naturally leads to war. That’s right people, war is hell and hell means war. Or something.
It is, of course, an awesome book. The scale is enormous; there have been a few Culture novels mostly restricted to one planet, but this is not one of them – it zooms all over the galaxy, faster than the speed of light. The plot, as mentioned, follows several different people or groups, some of whom end up tangling together and some of whom stay separate; the plot has an appropriate number of twists and surprises that I really didn’t see coming, such that I stayed utterly glued to the page the whole way through. And the language – well, it’s just swoon-worthy in parts. The speech from that dreadful avatar about why it likes war? Majestic. The descriptions of places? Concise yet evocative; I almost couldn’t read the descriptions of Hell.
Read it! You know you want to!
Fireship/Mother and Child
I love the idea of the novella double. Twelfth Planet Press is doing ones in the style of the old Ace doubles – different authors, back to back and upside down – and I really enjoyed the Tiptree/Russ double I read a few months ago. This one is different because it has two novellas by the same author, both of which had previously appeared in different venues. And the two stories are really quite different.
“Fireship” has the feel of a proto-cyberpunk story, to me, in that its emphasis is on a man/machine meld, and the action revolves around hacking a computer. The secondary characters are, sadly, largely two-dimensional and boring; they are there for plot resolution and really that’s it. The main character though… he is fascinating. MILD SPOILER! Ethan Ring is a gestalt: his personality is only created when a very ordinary man jacks into a superlogical supercomputer. Vinge posits the result as being entirely human in reactions and emotions, but lifted up by the computer’s abilities. Perhaps the most interesting dialogue is the internal, when human/machine/gestalt very occasionally interact. This is a really interesting take on the cyborg, and one that I’m not sure has been explored as much as it could be (if I’m wrong, tell me in the comments!). The other wonderful aspect of the story is the setting, Mars. We get intriguing glimpses of what it’s like to be on the colonised world – and it’s definitely got the feel of a colony – and some touching moments, like when the rains come and people rejoice. Additionally, there are some hints of some really interesting politics. Written in the late 1970s, it imagines politics basically being split between the US and “the Arabic states,” with Russia and China largely out of the picture.
Overall, “Fireship” is a quick read, with a fairly basic plot and ordinary characters. It’s worth reading to think about Ethan and what Vinge is saying about cyborg possibilities.
“Mother and Child” is an entirely different proposition. In three stages, the story is gradually told of a world struck by a terrible plague and suffering the consequences. The point of view gradually gets broader: at first, we see from a village smith’s perspective; then from a king’s; then, eventually – SPOILER! – from the point of view of an alien, tasked with dealing with the world and its inhabitants (reminiscent of le Guin’s Hainish cycle and Iain M Banks’ Culture, to an extent).
I’m somewhat conflicted about how it represents the main female character. On the one hand, the narrative is never from her point of view: it’s from that of her husband and then two abductors. On the other hand, she is entirely central – as the title points out – and is certainly shown as having agency: she picks her husband, and she actively decides on the fate of her child, and ultimately the fate of her world.
One of the most fascinating things about the story is its emphasis on the body. The plague has changed people, and it took me a while to realise just how much; revealing it would be too much of a spoiler, so I’ll just say that when they talk about having second sight, it’s not what you immediately think – and probably not what you thought just then, either.
I think “Mother and Child” is better written than “Fireship” and stays interesting more consistently. It certainly has better pace, perhaps because the three sections were really quite different from one another. I think I will read more Vinge, although I don’t think I will be racing out to get my hands on all her stuff.
The Killing Thing
I went looking for The Clewiston Test at my local secondhand shop, but the only Kate Wilhelm I found was this one. It was short, and inexpensive, so I decided to give it a go.
On the face of it, this is a story about a man and a robot, the latter trying to kill the former, on a desert planet. At the start I thought it was going to be one of those novels that would have worked better as a short story – even at only 142 pages, I wasn’t sure the whole being-chased thing was going to have legs (ha, ha). That was before the man, Trace, started having flashbacks… and everything changed. The flashbacks filled in his own back story and that of the robot, giving a much larger context than I had anticipated. Interestingly, Wilhelm also gives the robot its own flashbacks, which disrupts the readers’ instinct to identify solely with the human protagonist. This is a brilliantly written piece : sparse details, appropriate to the subject matter, with Wilhelm deftly conveying the increasingly feverish experiences of Trace frighteningly well. She also does a fascinating thing in creating layers throughout the book: Trace revisits several key moments several times, and each time some new nuance is revealed to the reader, eventually building up to a full understanding of just what is going on.
The emphasis throughout the book is on the robot as a ‘logic box’ – its portrayal throughout is quite a different one from those found more recently, I think. The narrative only skirts around the issue of whether the robot is sentient, and what might be done if it is. Rather than dealing with this — and this is a slight SPOILER — Wilhelm is more interested in slowly, subtly, and cunningly making the reader aware of the fact that, being the well-trained soldier that he is, Trace himself can more than adequately be described as nothing more than a logic box. When I finally realised what Wilhelm was doing there, I both couldn’t believe I hadn’t picked up on it sooner and was terribly impressed with how skilfully she’d pulled it together.
The other really fascinating thing going on in this novel is its discussion of colonisation and the attitudes that colonisers bring to new places. In this case, it’s on a galactic scale, but the attitudes and issues and words and problems are all completely identifiable from the last century or two right here – and I do mean here, in Australia, as well as in the wider world. Some of the words she puts into the colonised’s mouths are uncomfortably familiar, which I’m sure is the point, and impressed me given the time at which it was written; I hadn’t thought those sorts of things were being articulated in the 1960s.
I had initially worried that the book would glorify war and the military, and it seems to indicate such a stance in the first few pages. However, by the end the book it’s clear that Wilhelm is indicting both war and the apparatus that supports militaristic attitudes, and when I realised that it was written in 1967 – well, it seems clear to me that this is an anti-war, anti-Vietnam piece. Perhaps that accounts for its lack of awards; I find it hard to believe it didn’t get any. This is a really, really, really good book.
Galactic Suburbia 23!
This is my 1000th post! And it’s a Galactic Suburbia one!
In which we greet a brand new year with discussion about digital media, awards, books, feminism, feedback, more books, anti-heroes, gender roles and take a look at what to look forward to in 2011. We can be downloaded or streamed from Galactic Suburbia, or from iTunes.
News
Follow up on the Jewish fantasy discussion by Rachel Swirsky.
Locus to go digital with issue #600.
Launch of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, new critical zine with focus on women’s work.
The i09 Power List: 20 people who rocked SF & Fantasy in 2010.
Carl Brandon Awards: Hiromi Goto and Justine Larbalestier.
Hugo nominations open – last year’s members of Aussiecon 4, don’t forget you’re eligible to nominate!
Feedback: Kaia, Kathryn & Thoraiya
What Culture Have we Consumed? [AND what culture are you most looking forward to consuming in 2011?]
Alisa: Fringe Season 3, Dexter Season 4, Being Erica (ep 1), Nurse Jackie, How I Met Your Mother, reading Managing Death (Trent Jamieson)
Looking forward to: LSS 2011
Alex: Zombies vs Unicorns, ed. Larbalestier and Black; Factotum, book 3 of Monster Blood Tattoo, by DM Cornish; Dervish House, by Ian McDonald; The Killing Thing, by Kate Wilhelm; Surface Detail, by Iain M Banks.
Looking forward to: Blue Remembered Earth (probably), by Alastair Reynolds; books 2&3 of The Creature Court, Tansy Rayner Roberts; the 2011 Women in SF Book Club; Bold as Love sequence (Gwyneth Jones); Twelve Planets (from Twelfth Planet Press).
Tansy: Wiped, Richard Molesworth; The Doctor Who Christmas Special! The Gene Thieves & the Norma; Ascendant, Diana Peterfreund; Big Finish Podcast
Looking forward to: Doctor Who and Fringe (SHOCK, I know), Sherlock, Torchwood, The Demon’s Surrender by Sarah Rees Brennan, Burn Bright by M. de Pierres.
Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!
Belated: Boxing Day Mega Podcast
So I’m a bit behind the times, but I thought it worth mentioning that on Boxing Day, a bunch of Aussie sf podcasters (and one from Chicago) connected via Skype to record a mega podcast! Tansy and Alisa, my fellow Galactic Suburbanites, phoned in; there was Jonathan and Gary (for whom it was still Christmas!) from Coode St, Grant from Bad Film Diaries, and Ian from The Writer and the Critic. We talked about what we’d enjoyed about 2010 and what we’re looking forward to in 2011, and – amazingly – with seven people, we managed to record the shorted podcast any of the seven of us had ever been involved in! (As far as I could tell. I may be wrong.)
Jonathan Strahan, eminent editor and podcaster, was our recorder and producer, so you can get it from his website or download it via his podcast (The Coode St Podcast) on iTunes.
Galactic Suburbia 22
You can download or stream the episode from Galactic Suburbia, or get us from iTunes.
In which we have run out of our supply of feminist ire for 2010 and are reduced to being happy bunnies with rainbows and vanilla sprinkles. Also, we discuss re-reading, re-watching, and our (apparently unhealthy) emotional attachment to beloved books. With zombies. BONUS: see if you can pick how many times yours truly screwed up the recording because my stooopid Skype crashed. Is fixed now.
News
Black Quill nominations.
Best of 2010 Tables of Contents, Rich Horton & Jonathan Strahan (Niall Harrison tweeted about online percentage, 14/29 stories in Strahan – and 16/28 in Horton. Last year JS had 4/29 and Rich had 7/30).
Torque Control’s Week of Women & SF (also here).
Swancon invited guests announced.
Pet Subject
On re-reading. Did you re-read books as a teen? Do you re-read now, or would you if you had the time and the publishing industry stopped for a year (or three)? Why/not… (on re-reading The Belgariad).
What Culture Have we Consumed?
Alisa – Fringe Season 1 and half of Season 2
Tansy – Feed, by Mira Grant, The Five Doctors easter egg commentary
Alex – Quantum Thief (Hannu Rajaniemi), Zima Blue (Alastair Reynolds)
Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!
Zima Blue
Published in the UK in I think 2009, this is a collection of some of Alastair Reynolds’ short stories from 1991 through to 2007. I’d read a couple, but not many, so I enjoyed it immensely, even though there were a few stories that didn’t really rock my world. I won’t give a complete review here; suffice to say that I don’t think there are any Revelation Space stories here; there are some very near-future as well as some awesomely far-distant future stories; and mostly they’re great. Three stories in particular caught my attention, not least because they revolve around the same character: Merlin.
The stories are (in narrative chronological order) “Hideaway,” “Minla’s Flowers,” and “Merlin’s Gun.” I’d read the second, because it was written for Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois’ most awesome anthology The New Space Opera. It remains my favourite; having the additional background provided by “Hideaway” makes it all the more fascinating. The sequence is one of Reynolds’ very, very far future histories. It begins with a group of humans in an enormous spaceship attempting to escape the Huskers, who have been systematically wiping humans from the galaxy. The group ends up hiding in a solar system, making various discoveries, and ultimately taking a drastic decision to escape annihilation. All except Merlin, who goes on and – in “Minla’s Flowers” – lands on a planet divided between two factions, and whose sun is (cosmologically speaking) going to be blown up any moment. Merlin gets involved, and the story follows the consequences of that. Finally, in “Merlin’s Gun,” Merlin finds the weapon he’s been seeking that will allow the humans to combat the Huskers, hopefully stopping the genocide. Of course, things are never quite that simple, and all sorts of interesting things are revealed.
I love the plots of these three stories, and my precis here does not do them justice. However, more than just the plots, it’s the ideas that I was intrigued by. Firstly, the vision Reynolds presents of galactic civilisation is a fascinating one. There are any number of far-future stories that imagine a basically unbroken chain of human existence, where humans just keep on building on what they already know, with few hiccups along the way. More rarely, someone writes of a pangalactic spread of humanity that hasn’t managed that continuity – as suggested by Isaac Asimov in Foundation, for example. In those sorts of stories, humans sometimes have an understanding of what they’ve lost, and sometimes not. The former is the case here, and is most vividly demonstrated by the fact that Merlin and his companions have no idea how to use the Waynet: a system of nearly-faster than light tunnels traversing the galaxy. This suggestion of galactic ups and downs is a really fascinating one. (Taken to extremes you get cargo-cult stories, which can be well done or can be painful.) I think it’s the most likely outcome, really. It does suggest a pessimism about human nature, of course, because usually the ‘downs’ are caused by wars.
Secondly, “Minla’s Flowers” deals really interestingly with issues of colonialism and the oft-accompanying attitude of paternalism. Merlin has a century to get Minla’s people up to speed on how to escape their doomed planet. But he doesn’t make them anything, or even give them all the answers. He provides what were probably intensely annoying, vague suggestions that lead to the development of atomic power. Merlin sleeps away most of the time, waking every couple of decades to provide further tidbits of information. Now, partly he acts this way because he himself doesn’t understand all of the technology he uses, for the reason outlined above. But partly he does it because he thinks that the people ought to do things for themselves. In general I’m in favour of that idea, I think, although it’s problematic when it would be easy enough to simply provide technology and supplies and instantly make things better. Both approaches have their problems, of course.
Finally, the character of Minla is a fascinating study in power. Meeting Merlin as a young girl, over the years she becomes the leader of her people and is shown as responsible for the actions they undertake. In the author notes, Reynolds says he was inspired in writing her by “a certain grocer’s daughter with ambitions to high office,” and it’s clear he had things like the Falklands War in mind when writing about her. The decisions she takes, particularly in relation to how the opposing faction is dealt with, are never suggested to be inevitable. Rather, they are precisely that: decisions, made deliberately, not forced by circumstances. I like that sort of dedication to your character, and I like that although she started off admirably she went downhill terribly – yet with a sort of terrible dignity.
The anthology in general is awesome. These stories are in the middle, and form a nice centrepiece.
Randomly Yours, Alex 