Category Sci-Fi Writing and Comics

Becky Chambers is Getting Awesomer

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Becky Chambers is keenly aware of her past shortcomings and challenges herself to become a better and better writer with every new piece. It’s exciting to see her grow as an author and not get caught up in her own amazing success.

The Hugo-award winning author is growing more assured with every outing, and her themes and plots are becoming more mature and sophisticated, and ulitimately, I think and hope, more rewarding.

I was not a huge fan of her blockbuster explosion on the sci-fi scene, with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, the beginning of her much-loved Wayfarer series. I was disappointed in the corny space opera themes, the overly quirky characters, and the Star Trek aliens type exposition. But then she took some bold choices with her sequels, abandoning popular characters and changing focus bravely to other perspectives. In her writings and prefaces, I recall her self-deprecating acknowledgement of her weaknesses as a young, part-time writer, and the expressed desire to diverge from tired themes and past success.

Then I read To Be Taught If Fortunate and was impressed by the maturity and the hard sci-fi commitment in this novella. This despite the unfortunate, difficult to remember title.

And now I’ve ready just 3 or 4 pages of one of her latest series, A Psalm for The Wild Built and I’m instantly enthused. Like really enthused. The Monk and Robot themes hold a lot of promise. Let’s see how this goes. I’m rooting for her.

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The Godmakers by Frank Herbert

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I seem to have a soft spot for science fiction novels with the word “God” in the title. And Frank Herbert’s name has some resonance for me. Although I am not a huge Dune fan, I do admire the novel, and quote weird funny lines from the film every now and again, in conversation. So I gave this a try.

It’s just okay, I guess. There are some Big, Weighty Issues presented, but the way they are tackled is disjointed at times, with some chapters meant to be payoffs turning out to be flops after unwarranted build up. This feels like the sketch of a better book, highly episodic in nature.

Once thing I do like is the disgruntled snarkiness of the protagonist, Lewis Orne, and the combative relationship with his asshole boss, Stetson. Orne acts like a really sulky son-of-a-bitch when he’s first called out and criticized, and to be fair, Stetson really rips into him with ridiculously funny churlishness.

One of the phrases in the book is “Gods are made, not born.” This makes some sense, actually, in the way that religion fashions gods, and in the other way that true “creator of the universe”-type gods ought not to have an origin story. Oh, and in the third way that there are priests literally making gods out of thin air by sitting in a circle and chanting.

The casual sexism is amusing, as a capsule of its time. Our hero encounters not one, but two fiercely female-led societies, one open and the other secret. The first is an authoritarian witch-planet that nearly kills him, and the second is a vast conspiracy of wives bent on manipulating their husbands into positions of power. Cool.

All these episodes culminate in a ordeal, a trial for Orne. It’s sort of a vague cacophony of religious mumbo jumbo that strains to hang all the ideas together, but just treads water attempting to do so.  The final confrontation works pretty well, though, evoking some swelling sense of awe, before the whole thing ends quite perfunctorily.

I did like some of it. 

I give this book a rating of 2.5 Helmets out of 5.

 

 

Blogging in the Time of Pandemic

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So here we are in the thick of it, sequestered in our homes as COVID-19 spreads silently but surely through our communities. Terms we might remember from this time are “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” and “community spread”. I would imagine I’m not the only person returning to my half forgotten blog.

Another phrase I’ve heard a lot is that old adage “Perfect is the enemy of good”, which Google informs me is attributed to Voltaire. I might just go ahead and bust out a few blog entries without worrying about perfecting them, since they are mostly for me anyway.

Being home for now weeks on end with my wife and 2 year old son has been a blessing. What a wonderful time of his life to be so present in nearly every moment. It makes me also look forward to the day when he can read some of my favourite science fiction, and inspires me to record some of my thoughts on what I’m reading, and what I’ve recently read, in case that interests him at some point. Maybe he’ll discover some of these books in my library, or floating around in my Kindle cloud.

I use “recently” extremely loosely, as some of the most inspiring and affecting books I’ve read have been in these last 5 years or so. This past year I read The Disposessed, and finished the entire Expanse series. And before that The Starmaker blew my mind, and before that The Three-Body Problem series. These influences ought to figure prominently in my ever-germinating novel idea.

So here we go! Let’s do this thing.

Oh why the picture of Spam? I looked for a picture in my roll that suggested Pandemic, and nothing inspires you to buy and consume canned meat like seeing long lines to get into the grocery store.

The Bond

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Maybe it takes a female science fiction writer to get it right, but the most compelling, resonating description of what it is like to pair with another person for life is at the end of Chapter 6 of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Disposessed”.

In it, Takver tells Shevek, “I need the bond. The real one. Body and mind and all the years of life. Nothing else. Nothing less.”

The rest of that chapter is achingly good, matter of fact and true.

 

Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!

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I don’t read many books twice, but I recently pulled my worn paperback copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions off the old bookshelf and, flipping through the first few pages, I became convinced it was time to revisit it.

I love the quote in the title of this blog entry  from Vonnegut’s fictional alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, and it reminds me that I haven’t blogged in a good, long, time. Here’s to ideas, of which we have many! Let’s commit more of them to paper.