Larry Niven – One Thousand And One Parsecs

How I Would Vote Now: 1974 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The People of the Wind by Poul Anderson

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold

Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

Protector by Larry Niven

The Actual Results

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
Protector by Larry Niven

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold
The People of the Wind by Poul Anderson

How I Would Have Voted

Protector by Larry Niven
No Award
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
The People of the Wind by Poul Anderson

Explanation

I really enjoyed Protector. It was a great sci-fi space opera novel, with interesting characters, fun worldbuilding, an intriguing premise, a deep sense of wonder, lots of suspense, and some really unexpected twists and turns. It was also a very good hard SF novel, where the rigorous scientific accuracy actually drove the story and made it even stronger. That can be a very difficult thing to pull off, since in the hands of an unskilled author, the harder the science fiction elements become, the more dry and cerebral the story tends to become as well, but Larry Niven is a very skilled author and he pulled it off quite well in this one. In particular, the long-distance space battle that covered the last hundred pages or so had me thrilled right through to the end.

In contrast, Rendezvous with Rama was the kind of hard SF that tends to bore me. There was nothing wrong or objectionable about the story, but it was kind of slow, and didn’t build up very much suspense, aside from the central premise, which was basically “ooh, an abandoned alien starship—and we get to go inside!” I should probably try to read it again, though, because Arthur C. Clarke is definitely not an unskilled author, and Rama is one of the classics.

Poul Anderson, though… I don’t know what it is, but reading his books is like trying to walk through a brick wall. The parts that I have the most questions about, he doesn’t explain at all, and the aspects of his stories that I care about the last (particularly the worldbuilding elements) he explains in soporific detail. His characters all feel like wooden marionettes, and whenever they move, they seem off or contorted in some way, doing and saying things in ways that I would least expect.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m beginning to think that Poul Anderson just isn’t a very good writer, and his success was mostly due to the good fortune he had to be writing in a time when any book with a rocketship on the cover was guaranteed to be snapped up by hungry science fiction fans. I’ll try a couple more times to read him, but at this point I’m just about ready to give up on this author.

I did not even try to read Time Enough for Love. I’ve been burned enough by Heinlein to know that anything of his that 1) is longer than his juveniles, or 2) has a half-naked (or in this case, fully naked) woman on the cover is guaranteed to turn me off. Time Enough for Love fails both of those counts, so it got a hard skip.

I know that a lot of people love Heinlein, especially the kind of science fiction reader who otherwise aligns with my own reading tastes. But my own experience with Heinlein is all over the map: some of his books, like Farnham’s Freehold and Citizen of the Galaxy, I absolutely loved, and even count as major influences on my own writing. Others, however, like Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I just couldn’t stand at all. With some, like Double Star, I was glued to the page all the way through, while others, like Have Space Suit, Will Travel, never really hooked me at all (if I weren’t listening to that one on audio, I don’t think I ever would have finished it). So at this point, I’ve more or less decided to limit my reading of Heinlein to his juveniles, unless it comes with a strong recommendation.

Which brings me to The Man Who Folded Himself, which is one of the most disgusting Hugo-nominated books I have ever DNFed, and the main reason why I put No Award on the ballot for this year. A better title would be The Man Who Fucked Himself, since that is both more memorable and more accurate to the story. It starts out as a delightful little time travel novel, but soon turns into a homo- / mono-erotic sexual fantasy. I quit just before the money shot, but I am 100% convinced that Gerrold is a pederast, if not an outright pedophile. Disgusting!

In fact, I had such a horrible experience with The Man Who F***ed Himself that I have started a ChatGPT thread specifically for the purpose of screening these Hugo-nominated books for woke and explicit content. If ChatGPT gives me a synopsis that doesn’t pass my smell test, I’m going to pre-emptively skip it, since I don’t want to expose myself to anything like The Man Who F***ed Himself again. Any book that I skip in this way will get ranked below No Award, and I’ll include ChatGPT’s synopsis in the review.

On the plus side, that probably means I’ll get through this How I Would Vote Now blog series a lot faster.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

Retro sci-fi cover fails

Back a few years ago when indie publishing was a new thing, I remember there was a blog that would take the worst self-published covers and make fun of them. It was a popular site for a while, though a lot of the indies whose covers were shamed didn’t think it was all that fun.

Thing is, it’s not just self-published books that have horrible covers. In fact, some of the worst covers probably came out of traditional publishing, partially because tradpub has simply been around longer, and partially because in tradpub, cover design is often done by a committee, as opposed to just one guy. And while it’s true that some people have a unique talent for creating some truly hideous art, the IQ of a committe is the lowest common denominator of all of its members, and if one of them happens to have that talent, God bless the poor author who got stuck with that cover art.

If you go back 50-60 years, you can find some truly hideous covers, especially in science fiction. Such as:

Ah, Farnham’s Freehold. Such an awesome book—one of my all-time favorite Heinlein novels—but such a terrible, terrible cover. What is that? A giant egg with some Salvador Dali clocks, and Polynesian war chief holding court in the lobby of the hotel from The Shining? Also, why is everything a hideous tint of fuchsia? And of course, you’ve gotta have a random 60s chick in a summer dress (though to be fair, that might be one of the actual characters).

But the thing that really gets me is how dark everything is. Seriously, if you pick this book up in a used bookstore, it’s usually so faded and time-weathered that you can barely make out any of the details at all. That was certainly true of the copy that I read, back when I was working delivery for the BYU Bookstore and snatching a couple of pages here and there between drops. Good memories, seriously.

Believe it or not, this actually isn’t the worst cover of this book. I’m so glad I picked up a copy with this cover, because the cover of the Baen edition gives away the ending! It’s not even subtle about it, either! The Baen edition features the sign to the entrance of Farnham’s Freehold at the end, and it’s totally full of spoilers for the whole book. Seriously, what kind of an idiot thought that was a good idea? See my comment about the IQ of committees up above.

I recently picked up A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows by Poul Anderson from the library and DNFed it: too much opera, not enough space. But the cover… it takes the meaning of “hideous” to an entirely new level. In fact, this was the cover that gave me the idea of writing this blog post.

So what have we got here? There’s a psychadelic 70s chick with some hair that makes her look like Princess Leia’s grandmother, and a creepy little goblin dude in a spacesuit with random owl wings, who looks like he wants to peep on her. Also, some weird sci-fi cityscape in the background, I guess? It’s difficult to tell, because elsewhere the background looks like one of my Mom’s first-grade art projects. And of course, if that didn’t make it dated enough, you’ve got the funky 70s typography that died along with disco.

I picked up this book because 1. it was a Poul Anderson book that was at my local library, and 2. it made the Locus recommended reading list for 1975 without being nominated for the Hugo or the Nebula. Many of the other covers are surprisingly NSFW, because apparently Princess Leia’s grandmother is a futuristic sex slave—and yet, I found even the parts with her in it to be surprisingly dull. Like I said, too much opera, not enough space.

Speaking of mildly NSFW book covers that make reading in public super awkward, here is the cover of the copy of Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin that was at the BYU Library, of all places. It’s not the cover above: I was going to post it, then thought better because it’s uncomfortably pornographic—especially when you consider that the main character is a minor. Yech. When my wife saw it, she said: “that’s a weird looking spaceship… oh wait, that’s not a spaceship!”

But even more hideous than that one (though perhaps not as terrible as this one), the cover above makes me think of nothing so much as the fact that communism ruins everything. Seriously, this cover has all the charm and aesthetic appeal of a Kruschev-era Soviet housing project in Eastern Ukraine, or maybe a ruined bus stop somewhere in the Kazakh steppes.

Seriously, when I lived in Georgia (the country, not the state), we would see old public art pieces from the communist era all over the place, in the soul-destroying style of socialist realism. This particular cover brings back a lot of memories of the Tbilisi subway. Which isn’t too surprising, because from reading this book, I’m pretty sure that Panshin was a socialist. In fact, it was right around this time that the entire science fiction genre swung super hard to the left, and with a few notable exceptions (David Weber, John Ringo, Larry Correia), it’s never really swung back.

…and looking at Alexei Panshin’s Wikipedia entry, it appears that he passed away less than a month ago. RIP. Fortunately, he got at least one good cover for Rite of Passage before he died.

My wife recently read Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and she really enjoyed it. Based on her recommendation, I picked up a copy (not this one, thank goodness!) and I’m reading it now. It’s pretty good, but what the heck is going on with this cover? Seriously, it’s like someone puked up a mummy on the blue screen of death from Windows XP, except without any text. And what’s with the two monks standing on the mummy’s belly? Like, who saw the preliminary sketches of this cover art and thought “yup, that’s going to attract the right kind of reader and sell a bunch of books.” Thankfully, the book sold reall well in spite of this cover, not because of it.

So much for retro cover fails. What are some of your personal favorites that still stand out after all these years?

Reading Resolution Update: Before 2022

My 2022 Reading Resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

I was going to keep track of my reading resolution this year by mentioning each book and what I liked or didn’t like about it, why I DNFed it if I did, etc… and then I thought about it a little more and realized that that’s a terrible idea. Perhaps if I weren’t an author myself, I could risk bringing down the wrath of the internet by broadcasting everything that I really think about these books, but that’s still a really stupid thing to do—not to mention, a great way to burn a bunch of bridges that, as a writer, I really shouldn’t burn.

Instead, I’m going to post a monthly update where I list all of the books that I read and want to acquire, all the books that I read and probably won’t acquire, and all of the books that I DNFed, without any book-specific commentary. I do think that having some public accountability will help me to keep this resolution, and I do intend to keep it. But because I anticipate DNFing a lot of books that have very, um, merciless fans, this seems like a better way to do it.

So here is how things stood on the morning of January 1st, 2022:

Books that I read and want to / have already acquired:

Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein (1956 Hugo)
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (1960 Hugo)
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (1961 Hugo)
The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick (1963 Hugo)
Dune by Frank Herbert (1966 Hugo and Nebula)
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1970 Hugo and Nebula)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1975 Hugo and Nebula)
Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh (1982 Hugo)
Neuromancer by William Gibson (1985 Hugo and Nebula)
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1986 Hugo and Nebula)
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (1987 Hugo and Nebula)
Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold (1992 Hugo)
Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold (1995 Hugo)
The Mule (included in Foundation and Empire) by Isaac Asimov (1946 Retro Hugo, awarded in 1996)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (2001 Hugo)
Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein (1951 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2001)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1954 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2004)
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2006 Hugo)
The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White (1939 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2014)
Network Effect by Martha Wells (2021 Hugo and Nebula)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (1952 Hugo)
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1975 Hugo and Nebula)
Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977 Hugo and Nebula)
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1993 Nebula)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2001 Hugo)

Books that I did not finish:

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1966 Hugo)
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (1966 Nebula)
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1967 Hugo)
Ringworld by Larry Niven (1970 Hugo and Nebula)
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1973 Hugo and Nebula)
Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1993 Hugo)
Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1996 Hugo)
Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman (1997 Hugo, 1998 Nebula)
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015 Hugo)
The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin (2016 Hugo)
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (2017 Hugo and Nebula)

S is for Space Station

downbelow_station Planets are not the only setting for science fiction stories–space stations are common as well. From the Death Star (“that’s no moon…”) to Downbelow Station, the Venus Equilateral to ISPV 7 to the Battle School in Ender’s Game, space stations are a major staple of any space-centered science fiction.

The reasons for this should be fairly obvious. Before we can go to the planets and the stars, we need to have a permanent presence outside of this massive gravity well we call Earth. The easiest and most logical place to expand first is to orbit, where supplies can be ferried up without too much difficulty and astronauts can escape in case of an emergency. Indeed, with the International Space Station, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now.

In science fiction, of course, space stations go much further than they do in real life. They’re often giant orbital cities, with thousands of people living and working there permanently. Often, they feature some sort of rotating toroidal structure in order to simulate gravity. If there are settlements on the planet below, the station often serves as a major hub for commerce, serving as a waypoint for interstellar merchants and wholesalers who ferry their wares up to orbit. And if the planet is still being colonized, then the space station often serves as an important umbilical to the outside universe.

They can also have strategic value in the event of a war. Battleships need to be serviced too, after all, and a station’s position in orbit can provide an excellent platform from which to bombard or lay siege to the planet. Alternately, outposts at more distant locations like the Lagrange points can serve as a staging ground for future attacks–a sort of astronomical “high ground,” if you will. If nothing else, abandoned stations may contain supply caches that can aid a fleeing starship, or provide shelter behind enemy lines, as was the case with the first Halo game.

Stations can come in all sorts of different flavors, from the puny to the magnificent. The most eye-popping station of all is probably the Ringworld from Larry Niven’s series of the same name. As the name would imply, the station is a giant ring–so huge, its circumference is the orbit of a habitable planet, with the sun at its center! Gravity is provided by rotation, and night and day by giant orbiting panels that block out the sun at regular intervals.

My favorite stations, though, are the more realistic ones–the ones that I can imagine myself living on someday. That was one of the things I enjoyed about Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh–her depiction of human expansion into space is eminently believable, and her stations are a natural extension of that. I also really enjoyed her focus on the social dynamics of living on a giant station, and what it would be like to live in such a society.

The Battle School from Ender’s Game is another huge favorite of mine. One of the advantages of building a structure in space is that gravity becomes malleable, so that some parts of the structure can simulate Earth-surface gravity while others leave people completely weightless. The Battle School uses that to its advantage, with the main training room a zero-g laser tag battle arena, where the students have to learn how to stop thinking in terms of the planar dimensions, where “up” and “down” have any meaning. It’s really quite fascinating.

It should come as no surprise that space stations pepper my own works. They’re especially common in the Star Wanderers series, where few worlds have been terraformed and orbital platforms make up the majority of human living space (at least in the Outworlds). In Sholpan and Bringing Stella Home, James, Ben, and Stella are all from a space station–a distinction that is especially useful for Stella, since her Hameji captors despise the “planetborn.” Genesis Earth takes that a step further, as spaceborn Michael and Terra have never been to the surface of a planet before until midway through the novel. Just as going into space is paradigm shifting for us, the experience of walking on a planet proves just as transformative for them.

Why I love Robert Charles Wilson

From Mysterium, which I plan to review here soon:

“Do you ever wonder, Howard, about the questions we can’t ask?
“Can’t answer, you mean?
“No. Can’t ask.”
“I don’t understand.”
Stern leaned back in his deck chair and folded his hands over his gaunt, ascetic frame. His glasses were opaque in the porch light. The crickets seemed suddenly loud.
“Think about a dog,” he said. “Think about your dog–what’s his name?”
“Albert.”
“Yes. Think about Albert. He’s a healthy dog, is he not?”
“Yes.”
“Intelligent?”
“Sure.”
“He functions in every way normally, then, within the parameters of dogness. He’s an exemplar of his species. And he has the ability to learn, yes? He can do tricks? Learn from his experience? And he’s awarer of his surroundings; he can distinguish between you and your mother, for instance? H’es not unconscious or impaired?”
“Right.”
“But despite all that, there’s a limit on his understanding. Obviously so. If we talk about gravitons or Fourier transforms, he can’t follow the conversation. We’re speaking a language he doesn’t know and cannot know. The concepts can’t be translated; his mental universe simply won’t contain them.”
“Granted,” Howard said. “Am I missing the point?”
“We’re sitting here,” Stern said, “asking spectacular questions, you and I. About the universe and how it began. About everything that exists. And if we can ask a question, probably, sooner or later, we can answer it. So we assume there’s no limit to knowledge. But maybe your dog makes the same mistake! He doesn’t know what lies beyond the neighborhood, but if he found himself in a strange place he would approach it with the tools of comprehension available to him, and soon he would understand it–dog-fashion, by sight and smell and so on. There are no limits to his comprehensions, Howard, except the limits he does not and cannot ever experience.
“So how different are we? We’re mammals within the same broad compass of evolution, after all. Our forebrains are bigger, but the difference amounts to a few ounces. We can ask many, many more questions than your dog. And we can answer them. But if there are real limits on our comprehension, they would be as invisible to us as they are to Albert. So: Is there anything in the universe we simply cannot know? Is there a question we can’t ask? And would we ever encounter some hint of it, some intimation of the mystery? Or is it permanently beyond our grasp?”

This is the kind of science fiction that I love: the kind that brings me right up to the limits of human knowledge and makes me feel naked in the face of the unknown. The kind where the aliens truly feel alien, not like an unusually bizarre race of human beings. I want the aliens to surprise me–I want to feel that there’s something about them that is completely beyond my comprehension. Something sublime, something romantic.

In all of his books that I’ve read, Robert Charles Wilson captures this feeling spectacularly. So does Arthur C. Clarke, C. J. Cherryh, and Orson Scott Card. Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, John Scalzi and Alastair Reynolds are excellent writers, and I’ve genuinely enjoyed their books, but their aliens are too…understandable. Too clear cut, too defined. After a while, you don’t feel that there’s anything left to surprise you, anything that is so alien it’s beyond your grasp.

In some ways, I think this boils down to the author’s worldview. Those with a more positivist worldview believe that the world is fundamentally understandable, and that every phenomenon can be modeled and predicted, provided that we have a sophisticated enough understanding of natural law. The interpretivist worldview, on the other hand, posits that while truth may exist, there are limits to our understanding–that some things are inherently unpredictable and impossible to model.

I used to think that I was a positivist. Then I took Poli Sci 310 with Goodliffe, and it turned my world upside down. Genesis Earth is, in some ways, a product of that personal worldview shift. I don’t think I’m anywhere near on par with my aliens as Wilson, Clarke, and Card are with theirs, but I hope I’m on my way.