The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Leguin

The Word for the World is Forest was originally (1972) published in Again, Dangerous Visions. Le Guin developed it into a 1976 novel of the same name, but the copy I read has only a 1972 copyright, so I guess it must be a reprint of the novella version.

The story revolves around the colony world of Athshe, where Earth humans (one of several human races in Le Guin’s Ekumen) are exploiting the native human people and forest resources; disguising their avarice and brutality behind a facade of standard procedures and official protocols.

Roughly every third chapter is told from the point of view of Davidson, one of the most brutal of the human colonists. He refuses to recognize the natives as human, and wishes his commanders would simply recognize what he sees as “reality” and give him a free hand to use whatever means or methods can most efficiently harvest the timber the colony is meant to return to Earth. These chapters read today as somewhat heavy-handed in their depiction of the military-industrial mindset. But to me they had more interest as what looks a lot like a direct attack on the practical hyper-competent hero of golden age SF.

From the title, I had expected the book to dwell more on ecological issues. But, while ecological destruction by the colonists is a major issue, its just one of several conflicts going on in the story. I had also expected a more downbeat ending, probably with ecological impacts spiraling out of control, something the colonists ought to have expected if they had only reflected on the quirks of the native language. Thankfully, instead of pushing through with the plotline implied in the title, the story took a direction and came to a conclusion I hadn’t anticipated.

Another point of interest here is that the story does something that is surprisingly rare in SF, and shows a culture in the midst of a major technological upheaval. A major plot element is the introduction of the ansible, a means of instant communication across interstellar distances, eliminating the light speed barrier to communication. Rather than take the new technology as established, Le Guin shows it being introduced for the first time to the colony world, where some colonists disbelieve it, others pretend they can ignore it, and some fall right into line with the instructions coming to them from Earth over the ansible link. Unfortunately the introduction of the ansible points out what is possibly the the one critically unbelievable aspect of the whole story: the idea of a colony seperated from its homeworld by a 27 year lightspeed gulf continuing to follow any orders at all from back home.

Even with these few faults, its clear why the story was so well received in the early 70′s, and the story can still be read as an important comment on its time (and on the SF of the time), even if it doesn’t have the ageless quality that would maintain its relevance today.

Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany

Continuing what has turned into a recent tour of the New Wave, I come to Babel-17. This novel first appeared in 1966. It won the Nebula in ’66 and was short-listed for the Hugo award in 1967.

Robert at The Valve was dissappointed by this novel; he writes that this book is representative of award winners that represent the mediocre mainstream rather than the greatest potential of art. I can’t support this argument. Considering that Babel-17 was in contention against a Heinlein novel, in only the second year of the Nebula awards, it shows a substantial bias towards art over popularity that the Nebula voters chose the Delany novel (in a tie with Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon).

It’s true that the novel has dated itself somewhat. Its main theme is an exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see Wikipedia) that language strongly limits thought. More recent linguistic thought has all but rejected Sapir-Whorf, more or less nullifying the premise of Babel-17. But remember, the premise could be recast with the word “language” replaced by “memes” and it would have seemed current into the ’90′s.

And anyway, the novel does still have something to offer. For one, the first half or so of the book is a long sequence in which the heroine, Rydra Wong, is searching out a crew for her starship amongst the Transport community, who’s habits are somewhat wild, to say the least. She’s accompanied by a Customs officer, clearly representing mainstream and “straight” (in every sense) culture. The interaction is a direct comment on what 1960′s mainstream American culture had to learn from the various peripheral subcultures around it, and it’s still valid today.

The second half of the book brings the Sapir-Whorf premise more into play, as Wong takes her starship and crew out to find the source of a mysterious language that has been recorded in radio transmissions preceding various attacks on the Alliance government. This section also reflects a bit of the 1960′s SF’s romantic infatuation with the aristocracy, another feature that dates the novel. Nonetheless, the later part of the book does develop an action-oriented plot, without sacrificing Delany’s poetic writing style.

Given Delany’s style, and apt social commentary, Babel-17 is still well worth reading, even if other aspects of the book have aged in the 43 years since the original publication.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

Somehow I never managed to pick up this classic story until now.

Genly Ai is the envoy of the Ekumen (an interstellar affiliation of planets) to the planet Gethen. What makes Gethen unique (aside from its ice-age climate) is that its people are ambisexual, not divided into two sexes. Gethenians are basically asexual (or only latently sexual) for most of each month, until they enter kemmer. In kemmer, a Gethenian might take either the male or female role in sexual relations and childbearing.

Ai is trying to get either of the two main powers on the main continent to agree to join the Ekumen. Karhide might be described as feudal, but Le Guin carefully shows how non-sexual psychology modifies feudal political relationships. The description of Orgoreyn, on the other hand, reads like a gloss of The Gulag Archipelago, although in fact this book predated the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s by four years, and again there are differences from the Stalinist model due to the Gethenian psychology.

If the heart of SF is literature that takes a technological premise and explores its ramifications, The Left Hand of Darkness might be considered the quitessential SF novel. Even in the final chapters, new facets of the Gethenian psychology and society, derived from their unique biology, are still being revealed. This is not just a chapter or two of scientific or technical premise tacked on to the front of a long action story, but a speculative exploration from front to back, and that is what really made the book shine for me.

Driftglass, Samuel R. Delany (Part 2)

To wrap up my review of this collection, begun here.

“Driftglass” Cal Svenson is a former depth gauger for International Aquatic Corp, adapted with gills and webbed digits to work underwater. His career ended years ago in a major accident in the Slash, an underwater trench. He’s living as something of a beachcomber in a tropical fishing village near the Slash, when he runs into a younger Aquatic who tells him about new plans to explore the Slash.

The story explores themes of generational torch-passing and of living in the world as it is and not how it might ideally be. Its as poetically and dramatically told as any other in the collection.

Driftglass, Samuel R. Delany (Part 1)

Driftglass collects Samuel R. Delany’s first 10 published short stories. These stories were originally published in a four-year period from 1966 to 1970. Before any of these stories appeared, Delany had already written eight novels, but when he wrote the last of them he was still aged in his 20′s. I read a 1977 facsimile of the 1971 Signet edition. According to Wikipedia, all of these stories are also available in the 2003 collection Aye, and Gomorrah, and Other Stories.

The collection shows why Delany is often ranked with the likes of Gene Wolfe as one of the foremost literary stylists in science fiction. In a few cases, Delany’s style has suffered from age, for example when he uses contemporary slang, like “rumble” for fight. Otherwise, his prose is as evocative and compelling as any author in SF.

The Star Pit This story pretty much hits you right in the nose with its theme, which is our reaction to human limitations. The story starts with the narrator, Vyme’s, recollection of an ant farm he had as a child, and the central premise is that most people die if they attempt to leave our home galaxy. Only a limited few, known as golden, have the psychological make-up needed to survive travel to other galaxies. The flip side is that golden are all more-or-less psychotic, uninterested in the feelings of others.

Vyme lives at the Star Pit, a waystation on the edge of the galaxy, compelled to push the limits of his containment. There he encounters a variety of other societal misfits, some of whom turn out to be golden. Finally the golden discover aliens who can travel to places the golden cannot, and they too must face the limits of their containment.

Knowing Delany is one of very few African-American SF writers, its hard not to draw a parallel with the black experience in America. In the ’60′s even more than today, blacks faced constraints and limits that did not affect the whites around them. And whites by-and-large must have seemed as callous toward blacks as golden toward normal humans in the story. Realizing that whites face their own social limitations must be small consolation to those who were (or are) stuck in some narrow role dictated not by their own will but by uncontrollable forces.

And there’s much more to the story than just human limits. There’s Vyme’s lost family and others scarred by war; and there’s Vyme’s fatherly adoption of various young riff-raff of the Star Pit. There’s really as many intertwined themes here as you’d normally find filling out a novel. This is truly a fantastic piece of science fiction.

J. G. Ballard, War Fever

War Fever is an anthology of J. G. Ballard‘s short fiction from roughly 1975 to 1989. I’d been wanting to read some more Ballard for a while, having heard of him as one of the premiere figures of the “literary” branch of SF writing. Indeed, I only found this book in the library shelved under literature, not with other SF. And the stories here do straddle the line between literature and genre writing, even crossing so far into the world of “literature” as to lose my interest in a couple of cases.

One immediately obvious feature of this collection is Ballard’s experiments with non-narrative formats in his writing. One of the most extreme examples is “Answers to a Questionnaire”, which is exactly what it sounds like: A series of answers to unseen questions, from which we have to piece together a story. The story in “Answers” does come together cleanly and effectively. More extreme in form and less effective in storytelling is “The Index”, which is putatively the index to a lost biography, of one of the greatest hidden actors of the 20th century, someone who has a hand in every historical development, though the public rarely hears his name. While its momentarily interesting to try to piece together a story from the various index entries, the need to order the entries alphabetically makes the piece unnatural, as Ballard has pushed, for example, entries meant to convey a picture of the subject’s love life, toward the front of the alphabet, and entries that indicate his political mechanations to the middle of the alphabet, etc. Other stories in the collection are presented as reports, recorded voice memos, and even a set of footnotes to an otherwise missing manuscript.

If anything holds the book together, though, its a theme of distortions of time and space. In “Report on an Unidentified Space Station”, a group of space travelers explore an abandoned station, which seems to grow in size with every dispatched report. In “The Enormous Space”, a man responds to the setbacks of his life by isolating himself in his house, which again seems to expand over time as the narrator’s isolation from the outside world is deepened. And in “Memories of the Space Age”, a curious disease has infested Florida, causing time to stretch around its sufferers. The protagonist’s search for a cure for the disease, if that is in fact his goal in exploring the affected region, is eventually lost as he is separated from reality by his disconnected sense of time.

Ballard’s narrative voice in these stories is generally distanced from his subjects, and in some cases is outright detached, as in “The Largest Theme Park in the World”, where the presentation is in a form reminiscent of an encyclopedia or news magazine article. In the stories of disconnection and disassociation from reality, the distant authorial voice feels appropriate, but in other stories it becomes a distraction from the plot and characters.

In addition to “Memories of the Space Age”, there are a couple of other standout stories. “Love in a Colder Climate” is an interesting look at the consequences of a second sexual revolution, and “Dream Cargoes” is the story of a boathand who becomes captain of a ship carrying a cargo that could change the world, again picking up the theme of isolation from society and disconnection from time.

The collection is certainly worthwhile reading, but its probably best to be careful about the pace of reading it. Taken too quickly, the distant disconnected narratives might start to run together; while read over a long period of time, the thematic connections between the stories could be lost.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

This is the book built from the story that began Gene Wolfe’s tenure as one of the greatest stylists of SF for the last 37 years. It might also be one of the most widely critically examined works in all of SF, so probably this won’t add much new to what’s already been said about it.

The structure is unusual, three related stories, revolving around the history of the neighboring planets Saint Croix and Saint Anne, and the fate of their natives (if there ever were natives) following colonization. The stories are presented as separate novellas, told from three points of view. In each case, we have an unreliable narrator to compound the mysteries of the story. In the final segment, its not even obvious whether the narrator is the off-planet scientist he claims to be, or whether it is a doppelgaenger who has replaced the scientist.

Like Wolfe’s later work, Fifth Head gives the impression of so much finely intertwined detail that mere mortals can’t hope to discover all of the interconnections; which hasn’t stopped the internet hive mind from trying. I don’t myself try to unthread all of the detail, but the fact that its there gives the book a satisfying feeling of completeness, and allows it to be mysterious without being simply mystifying.

This book also shows the characteristic Wolfe style of veiling SF elements behind archaic language and brutal social conditions; that is, presenting technology as his characters see it, just one more mysterious aspect of their world. In this, the book is probably even more reflective of today than of the time when it was written. Then, an average car nut, for example, could expect to understand how to rebuild his carburetor; today, a car nut has little chance of repairing a computerized fuel injection system, and millions of people use Facebook without having or needing much understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the internet.

All in all, a fantastic book, and one that hasn’t lost any of its presence or mystery with age.