The New Mastersounds

John Scalzi novels. Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades.

Here's some places you can find things I like.

http://www.last.fm/user/entropyman/
http://mog.com/entropyman/
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/entropyman

OK, so a while back, I wrote about the things that nag at me when I'm reading fantasy. This time I'll mention the things that I think science fiction does well. This is prompted by my current reading of We, which Grady recommended a while back. We is a 1920's look at a dystopic, totalitarian future. We was apparently a big influence on 1984, so that will give you some idea of what it's about.

So, there is certainly crappy SF out there (See my previous post for two examples.), but good SF can be intellectually stimulating. The thing that good SF does best is extrapolate the present and guess at what kinds of impacts present trends will have on the future. And the best ones don't even really focus on technology for technology's sake. David Brin's Kiln People and Charles Stross' works look at what society will look like when cameras are everywhere, personal information is more or less freely available, and privacy as we know it today is pretty much dead. Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather is set against a backdrop of global warming as having come to full fruition, while Distraction has China and India crippling the US technology market by flooding cheap tech onto the market.

Also, SF can shape how we bring the future into being. How many software developers haven't read Neuromancer and Snow Crash and not been influenced in how they see and shape the web?

Obviously, these are only extrapolations and whatever scenarios the authors come up with are guesses, but these guesses help make us aware of choices we face and the consequences of these choices. If we get lucky, we can even use some of these guesses as signposts of things to avoid, and even though it's a banal point, I would have said that until 2001, 1984 served as just such a signpost of a society that we'd like to avoid.

So, I've read some pretty bad SF, and I got to wondering what (SF) books you've read that are so bad that if you saw one of your friends even contemplating reading them, you'd immediately tell them to stop.

For me, it's L Ron Hubbard's Invasion Earth series. A combination of youth and obsessive inability to put down a series made me finish these books. These books are so bad that if they're even still on stores' shelves, I'm pretty sure they make you dumber just by looking at the titles. Awful, awful, awful.

I'm pretty sure that series is the absolute bottom of the barrel and should get its own category of bad because nothing else could even compete with them, so I'll nominate another series. Stephen Donaldson's Gap Into Whatever series. I like Donaldson, but these books were so bad that I never finished the series. They're supposed to be the Ring of the Nibelungen in space. Not knowing the Ring story, it might have hindered my enjoyment of the books, but I don't think so. You can only get so much entertainment out of continually raping the main female character who becomes more and more spineless as the series goes on. There was absolutely nothing of interest in any of the characters, even the ones who Donaldson may have intended as anti-heroes. Avoid these at all costs.

And now it's your turn.

When I was younger, I read a lot of fantasy novels. Eventually, I got bored with the genre and didn't really read much fantasy until I found Robert Jordan in about 98 or 99 and George RR Martin shortly thereafter. (And for what it's worth Martin is much more enjoyable, but that's a separate topic.) And while I wouldn't say that I read a lot of fantasy novels, I do read more than I did for a long time.

Fantasy can be a fun, entertaining read, but it's not without its issues, and one of those is what this post is about. One of the things that nags at me when I read fantasy novels these days concerns the whole underpinnings of the genre. Almost all fantasy novels seem to be set in a static, feudal, agrarian culture that has been around for thousands of years. And this bugs me for a couple of related reasons. The authors don't seem to take into account the fact that people are going to try and make their lives easier which can lead to rapid technological change. I mean, if you start during the feudal period of western Europe which is the basis for these novels, it only took a few hundred years, plus or minus depending on when you start counting, to reach the industrial revolution. Why hasn't that happened in these novels? Yes, I know, if that happened then the novels wouldn't be fantasy novels any more. I understand that there are rules that have to be abided by.

The other, related, issue I have is this. If magic exists in these worlds and can be used to make one's life easier, why hasn't it taken the place of technology and led to a magical industrial revolution? If I've got magic powers, why am I still shitting in a bucket and using horses to plow my fields? I'm going to use it to create indoor plumbing and tractors. I can't think of any novels that follow that potential development in fantasy novels, but I'd like to think that a decent author could write an interesting novel exploring such a world.

So neither of those are really enough to stop my reading fantasy novels, but they do make it harder to suspend disbelief at times. And now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to Furies of Calderon, which, so far, is very entertaining. (Oh, and if you haven't read Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden books, you should. I even hooked Susan on them.)

[update]
So thinking about this a little more there is one author I've read who does work some of this magic as technology into his fantasy novels: China Mieville. Perdido Street Station and The Scar are both set in a world where magic functions as technology, and it's not some "feudalism lite" world as he's described genre fantasy in interviews. He may have been the one who really got me thinking about this after reading an interview with him about genre fantasy and Tolkien. Of course, I can't find this interview now.

OK, just so you don't think that The Devil in the White City is just wacky 19th century medical advice, it's a really good history of both the Chicago World's Fair and arguably one of America's first serial killers.

Larson does a really good job of developing the parallel, yet opposite, creation of the White City and Holmes' castle of horrors. And the fair itself is pretty impressive. I'm always fascinated with the scale with which Victorians built things, and this fair was no exception. The first Ferris Wheel was unveiled at the fair, and it was 250 feet tall with railroad cars carrying passengers. It held something like 2000 people at a time. I can't even wrap my head around the enormity of that thing.

If you haven't read this, it's worth it.

I just finished reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. How have I managed to go so long without reading this book? It's pure insanity.

It seems that lately, I've been on a classical Greek and Roman (and related) reading spree. I've recently read The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. I also started reading the SPQR series. (That link goes to the first book in the series since I can't seem to find a link for the whole series.)

These SPQR books are pretty entertaining. They're mystery/detective novels set at the end of the Roman Republic just before Julius Caesar and up through the time of Augustus. John Maddox Roberts wrote one of my favorite books, Cestus Dei. While it may not be high lit, it's certainly a fun read, and I go back every couple of years and reread it. It's a good way to spend a weekend.

I'm also currently reading, Ilium, which is set in the future and on the plains of Ilium during the Trojan War. So far it's good, and having recently read the Iliad certainly helps catching some of plot references in one main thread.

And in other news, today was my bi-annual car washing and waxing day. I think I was using it to avoid doing the work I brought home because I sure hate washing and waxing my car.