Archive for the ‘history’ Category
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1981
History is a pageant of changes, recorded both in the events that create and drive those changes, and in the lives of the people caught up in them. Some of the changes are cyclic, and some are one and done; some of those can break the cycles. I’m a sometime student of history, and one of my favorite nonfiction genres is narrative history. A good narrative history details the events recorded and the changes that come in their wake, but goes further by depicting in detail the lives of those associated with the events. These are stories of people who are in equal measure caught up in and driving the events that we call history. I find such narratives compelling.
This interest in the cycles of history may explain why The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge held my attention as strongly as it did. A novel, and definitely not a future narrative history, it still detailed a story of changes, both cyclic and a one-off event destined to alter that cycle. Strongly character-driven, the tale is centered on the people coping with changes, some of them devastating, in a world as clearly realized as any depiction of our own world you might find in a narrative history. In much the same way as a well-told narrative history, I found this novel to be a compelling read. Of the Hugo Award winners I’ve read so far, this one really stands out.
Set on a world called Tiamat, a world with more ocean than land (the name is that of a sea goddess from Babylonian mythology), the story is of a cyclic change that occurs every century and a half. Other worlds have access to Tiamat through a stargate created by a black hole. When Tiamat’s star system is positioned just right, the gate works, and this access exists for 150 years. Following this period is one of equal length during which the world is lost to the rest of interstellar civilization. Two human cultures exist on Tiamat: the technology-dependent Winters, who control things when the planet is open to the off-world visitors who provide the technology, and the low-tech Summers, who according to tradition take over when access is cut off. To maintain control of Tiamat and its resources when that world is next open to them, the off-worlders have rigged the tech tools they provide to essentially self-destruct during the time the Summers rule. The change from Winter to Summer rule involves an ancient ritual, involving the sacrifice of the Winter queen to the sea when her Summer counterpart ascends.
The current queen intends to change this cycle, seeking a way to keep the technological tools running and herself on the throne – and among the living. That plan becomes ensnared in schemes involving interstellar smugglers, a belief system among Summers regarding their goddess, people called sybils who are flesh-and-blood data delivery systems, and a native species that is harvested for its blood. A drug is refined from the bodily fluids of these creatures that can extend a human’s life almost indefinitely. The drug is at the heart of all the character motivations, one way or another. Few things are as they seem, and if they are, they don’t stay that way for long. And just when you think things couldn’t get worse for the protagonists, they do. I was guessing at where this was all going down to the last handful of chapters, and when I had it figured out, I wasn’t quite right.
The Snow Queen is a wonderful example of what, in science fiction and fantasy writing, we call world building. As measured in terms of depth and detail, it’s right there with Frank Herbert’s Dune. There is a large cast of characters from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, with both characters and cultures clearly developed and believable. The ocean-dominated world of Tiamat, much like the world-encompassing deserts of Arrakis, is very much a character in its own right.
Like the world they inhabit, the characters in the story have depth and complexity that make them believable, however extraordinary their circumstances. There are no clear stereotypes. The heroes are ordinary mortals, flawed without always being actually dysfunctional. And the chief villain isn’t exactly a truly evil person, incapable of love or compassion, but someone caught between the contradictory motives of preserving her culture and saving her own life. The combination of pacing, world building, and character-driven plot makes this a story that deserves to be a classic of the genre. The ending satisfies, even if it puts a chill up your spine at times. And while there are enough questions unresolved at the end to justify the sequel Vinge wrote, I didn’t feel as if the ending dangled there, awaiting a true resolution.
It all adds up to a story that I will pick up and reread someday, after I’ve read its sequels. I’ve read Hugo winners that had me wondering “What were they thinking, voting for this one?” But not this time. Had I been given a vote to cast in 1981, I would quite likely have cast it for this book. I can say that in all honesty, having read the other nominees for that year. All were very good. The Snow Queen was extraordinary.
People often ask me to name the writers who have influenced my own work. It’s a question writers of fiction are asked almost as often as “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s an easier question to answer, believe me. When you’re focused on a given genre, science fiction and fantasy in my case, the question tends to be asked by fans of that genre, and they expect to hear familiar names. More often than not, they do hear them, from me, at least. Committed writers of science fiction and fantasy are readers of the same. To tell such tales well and honestly, you need a lot of experience reading stories written by others. That familiarity with a genre is necessary, if you want to produce anything new in it that fans of science fiction and fantasy will want to read. A long familiarity allows you to do this without producing work likely to be branded as derivative, since you will generally recognize when something sounds just a little too familiar.
So when I’m asked that question, recognizable names come readily to mind. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. LeGuin, J.R.R. Tolkien, David Brin, Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, C.J. Cherryh, Anne McCaffrey – I could fill many pages with nameable influences on my development as a story teller, but by now you surely get the point. But whichever recognizable names come quickly to mind in a conversation of this sort, I invariably add other authors names that in most cases do not provoke a nod of recognition. Authors of work lumped under the broad heading of nonfiction have had as much of, and as long-lasting, an influence on me as a writer as most of the fiction I’ve enjoyed over the years. The historian Page Smith, Isaac Asimov (again), naturalist Edwin Way Teale, Annie Dillard, John McPhee, and Stephen Jay Gould, among a great many others, have altered my way of perceiving and thinking about the world time and time again. There’s no way I can talk about the multitude of influences on my own writing, that have come to me through reading, without mentioning authors such as these. It’s all storytelling, after all.
Because I’m a writer, anything that has directly influenced me as a writer assumes great importance in any discussion of my work. But the influence of things read, be they books or shorter works, can and does affect how a person lives in a more general sense. I grew up reading various works of science fiction aimed at younger audiences: the Tom Swift Jr. adventures and certain works by Heinlein come immediately to mind. These set a lifelong habit of reading fantastical things firmly in place, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1973, when I first read Dune by Frank Herbert and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, that I realized that good fiction could do more than provide a few hours of escape from the pressures of so-called real life. It could be said that those books changed me as a reader of fiction, encouraging me to read more and more widely, and in that change opening me up to endless possibilities. You could say those books changed my life.
You could say that, but to be honest, a change in reading habits would be the equivalent, for most people, of a side hustle. Real life – whatever the hell that really means – can go on, with all its cares and concerns largely unaffected by altered tastes in literature. That might well have been the case for me, all other things being equal, but because I cast a wider net at that time, I found myself including short story anthologies in my reading, something I hadn’t done until then. And because of such inclusions, ended up reading a book that literally changed my life.
I may have been given a copy of this book, or may have purchased it myself; I can no longer remember clearly how I came to read it. But I read this collection of short fiction and the autobiographical anecdotes included by the author, and my love of writing changed from a pastime to a career goal. The book – especially the autobiographical material – made me realize that being a writer in the professional sense was an achievable goal, and one well worth pursuing. It might take a long time (Oh, I had no idea!), but it was doable. This anthology provided an example of how it might work, and inspired me to give it a try.
The book in question is The Early Asimov or, Eleven Years of Trying by, of course, Isaac Asimov. These are his first published stories, accompanied by the stories of his life in those time, and how all of that led to the stories being written and published. And I was, indeed, inspired to give writing a try as a profession because of this book. Would I have gone on to be a writer anyway? There’s no way to know, and the question is moot in any case. I did read this book, and it did prompt me to type up my first ever short story and send it off to a magazine. What followed took considerably more than eleven years, along with a technological revolution of truly sci-fi proportions into the bargain, but here I am at last placing my work out there in view of the reading public, and acquiring readers.
One book made me decide to give this a try, and that life-long effort to produce worthwhile stories and find a viable means for their distribution, has shaped or influenced almost every aspect of my life ever since. Everything that has happened to me since then has happened because where I was and what I was doing at that time was influenced, to some degree, by that decision to make writing the focus of my life. Every major decision has been made with writing added to one side or another of the balance. This is no exaggeration. My life decisions have all been made with thought given to how they might influence the writing I did at that time. Even my ill-advised decision to quit writing fits this pattern, since there would be no need to contemplate defeat if I hadn’t been in the fight in the first place. The Early Asimov actually changed the path my life followed. It was the trigger, and provides proof a single book – almost any book – can alter the trajectory of a life with profound consequences.
That’s my book, the one that set it all in motion.
What’s yours?
Musings Prompted by Rereading The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1976
(Mild spoiler warning.)
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman was not a book I picked up in a timely fashion, and it was already considered a classic of modern science fiction when I first read it in the mid-1980s. The 60s and early 70s were still relatively recent history for me, then, and so I had no trouble drawing the connections between this story and the Vietnam War so many, including the author, have pointed out. Having witnessed first-hand the consequences of PTSD in a Vietnam veteran I once knew, these connections resonated more strongly than might otherwise have been the case.
The story is told from the point of view (first person) of a man conscripted to serve in an elite military force meant to defend the human species from a hostile alien life form. Contact with that other species did not go well, although the recruits are a little unclear as to how and why it went wrong. Chosen for their unusually high intelligence, they are put through a basic military training that is as brutal as it is dangerous. Mistakes and mishaps can be immediately lethal, and casualties are all too common. Their first engagement with the enemy turns out to be a battle with a largely defenseless foe, and becomes an uncontrolled massacre. The enemy responds by upping the proverbial ante with lethal consequences for humanity as the war spreads. After surviving the required tour of duty, the narrator returns to an Earth so changed by the passage of time that he and his comrades simply cannot fit in. They are used as propaganda tools and then rejected by the society they fought to protect. Unable to navigate through a strange new world, the narrator and his closest comrade and lover re-enlist. Sent on separate missions, they are lost to each other due to the same temporal displacements that put them so out of touch with the Earth. (These displacements are caused by the style of space travel employed.) The narrator becomes a man out of synch with the times in which he lives, and cannot relate to the people he now commands in any effective way. The conflict in which he and the others are trapped alternately escalates and then stalemates, and even though the plot is complicated by the sci-fi trope of the relativistic consequences of interstellar travel, it all sounds horribly familiar.
As a story in its own right, The Forever War deserves its status as a classic. It’s a powerfully human story, full of the sort of speculations and imaginings that make science fiction what it is, a genre of ideas generated by the iconic question, “What if…?” The big what if question raised by this book, it seems to me, is what if we leave the confines of this world before we learn from the mistakes we’ve made here? What might the consequences be? The potential answer presented in The Forever War is all too easy to believe.
Many of us who grew up when I did, and more to the point, those somewhat older than me who were directly caught up in the Vietnam War, see the parallels here between fiction and reality all too clearly, from the false assumptions that led to the conflict all the way through to the dislocation and rejection of the veterans of that war. The Forever War is a mirror held up to our recent history, one that reflects it all too clearly.
Rereading The Forever War for this essay, I was at first quite surprised by how well it had “aged.” It still seems so relevant, even today. Then I realized I shouldn’t be surprised, not really. We are a society that places little value on history, our own or others, preferring mythologized versions of the events that made us what we are today to the truth, with its blemishes and all too frequent contradictions of dearly held beliefs. Because of this we are, again as a society, very slow to learn the lessons of even the recent past. There’s an old saying, that those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat that history. This is all too true, and although the bells and whistles and the power of the bombs may change, the song remains eerily familiar. It’s also said that those who do come to understand the lessons of history are doomed to watch humanity reiterate its mistakes, often feeling powerless to prevent the repeated cycles, even as they listen to the echoes of their own recent past.
Under Desert Stars 