Tag: Robert Charles Wilson

Is Genesis Earth for You?

Genesis Earth is an introspective, awe-driven, charactor-anchored YA science fiction novel. It’s not a laser-blasting space opera; rather, it’s a quiet, psychological odyssey through the cosmos, through the eyes of a lonely young explorer haunted by the memory of Earth. Through this book, readers will experience the loneliness of deep space, the mystery of first contact, and the fragile human connection between two young scientists flung far from home.

What Kind of Reader Will Love Genesis Earth?

This book is perfect for readers who:

  • Love hard SF stories of space exploration rooted in both plausible science and human emotion,
  • Enjoy classic SF from authors like Clarke and Asimov—thoughtful, concept-driven, but with relatable, human characters,
  • Appreciate slow-burn tension and stories that make them think, long after they set the book down,
  • Are fascinated by themes of first contact, isolation, coming-of-age, and the psychological cost of human exploration, and
  • Crave science fiction that feels possible, where the sense of wonder comes from realism, not fantasy.

If any of that describes you, then you should definitely give Genesis Earth a try!

What You’ll Find Inside

Genesis Earth follows a young scientist, Michael Anderson, and his mission partner Terra as they explore a dangerous anomaly on the far side of a wormhole, that could either threaten or hold the key to humanity’s future. The result is an immersive and contemplative book that starts as a psychological drama and turns into a story of discovery, both cosmic and personal: what it means to be human when Earth is a ghost and “home” is light-years away.

What Makes Genesis Earth Different

Fans of classic science fiction will recognize the trope of the lonely astronaut or scientist setting out to explore the unknown, but where most protagonists in classic hard SF are seasoned professionals, the explorers in Genesis Earth are barely adults, raised in isolation on board a space colony, and psychologically unprepared for what awaits them. The story explores beyond the question “can humanity survive?” and asks “what happens to the human soul when it’s untethered from home?”

Distinctive features include:

  • Psychological depth: The fraught relationship between Michael and Terra gives the story an undercurrent of tension and unease that’s rare in classic hard SF.
  • Tone: Quiet, human, and melancholic—more existential wonder than space adventure.
  • Perspective: Told through a deeply personal first-person lens, with an almost diary-like immediacy.
  • Balance: Seamlessly blends scientific authenticity (cryonics, wormholes, planetary science) with literary emotion.

What You Won’t Find

This book is not for readers seeking:

  • Fast-paced, action-heavy sci-fi with constant battles, explosions, or villains.
  • Romantasy or sexually explicit romance plots — while there is emotional tension, it’s subtle and cerebral, not sensual or melodramatic.
  • Soft or mythic sci-fi full of alien empires or space wizards — the story stays grounded in realism.
  • Hard nihilism or grimdark — while introspective and serious, the book is ultimately hopeful, not bleak or cynical.
  • Readers who dislike slow builds or introspective narration.

If you’re looking for Star Wars, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for Arthur C. Clarke’s emotional heir, you’ve found it.

Why I Think You Might Love Genesis Earth

I wrote Genesis Earth when I was a lonely, single young college student trying to find my place in the world. That personal struggle in my own life definitely affected the conflict and themes of the book. I read a lot of classic SF in this time, including books by Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Charles Wilson, and Orson Scott Card, and I wanted to create something that was just as awe-inspiring and thought-provoking as the great books by those classic authors.

If you’re looking for a book that sticks with you long after you’ve read it, and helps you to find your own place in the world, you should definitely give Genesis Earth a try!

Where to Get Genesis Earth

Related Posts and Pages

Explore the series index for the Genesis Earth Trilogy.

Visit the book page for Genesis Earth for more details.

Discover the meaning of home in Genesis Earth.

See all of my books in series order.

July reading recap

Books that I finished

Boomerang by Michael Lewis

The Iron Marshall by Louis L’Amour

Surprise, Kill, Vanish by Annie Jacobsen

The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson

Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobsen

On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray

The Man from Skibbereen by Louis L’Amour

Writing for Impact by Bill Birchard

Seven Things You Can’t Say About China by Tom Cotton

The Greatest Comeback Ever by Joe Concha

Books That I DNFed

  • Genesis by Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie, & Eric Schmidt
  • Minifarming by Brett L. Markham
  • Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • An ABundance of Caution by David Zveig
  • The Cancel Culture Panic by Adrian Daub
  • AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee & Chen Qiufan
  • Resolute by Benjamin Hall
  • Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

How I would vote now: 2006 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Learning the World by Ken MacLeod

A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

The Actual Results

  1. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  2. Accelerando by Charles Stross
  3. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  4. Learning the World by Ken MacLeod
  5. A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  2. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  3. No Award
  4. Learning the World by Ken MacLeod

Explanation

This is going to be controversial, but I don’t think any of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books should have been nominated for the Hugo Award. In the first place, those books are pure fantasy, and while the line between fantasy and science fiction can become blurry at times, with everyone drawing it in a slightly different place (Dragonriders of Pern, for example), I do think it’s important to draw that line somewhere, because each of us as readers draws that line somewhere. Some readers read only fantasy, some read only science fiction, and even among readers who read both, they scratch very different itches.

(As a side note, A Dance With Dragons came out right when I was indie publishing my first few books, and I remember being super annoyed that it was monopolizing all of the top spots on the Amazon bestseller charts for subgenres like science fiction > action & adventure, even though it was very clearly not a science fiction book. That annoyed me as both a writer and a reader.)

More than that, though… how do I say this? I know that a lot of people are (or were) huge fans of Game of Thrones, that it had a huge and lasting cultural impact, and that the writing quality of both the books and the miniseries was quite excellent, at least for the first few books/seasons… but to what end? The HBO series itself is blatantly pornographic, and the books are even worse, glorifying the immorality and horrific violence that characterizes the series. Worse, there is no good or evil in this world: only power. This means that there are no heroes, only victims and victimizers.

I’m not sure how much Game of Thrones is responsible for shaping our current cultural decay, and how much it was simply a reflection of the culture in which it was created, but this obsession with power and the victim-victimizer complex lies at the heart of all of the social pathologies currently driving the West to cultural and spiritual suicide. It’s the force driving our own modern Game of Thrones, between the MAGA disciples of orange Jesus and the machinations of our Big Tech and Deep State overlords, with their hordes of hypnotized NPC zombies protesting in behalf of [current thing], all while remaining carefully masked. It turns out that when you embrace Martin’s paradigm, rejecting good and evil for the pure pursuit of power, and define everyone by their victimhood status, it leads to the death of everything in your culture that is good, true, and beautiful.

And even laying all of that aside, the fact that Martin hasn’t finished the damned series yet has done more to destroy the epic fantasy genre than all the other things that his career has otherwise accomplished. If you’re a new fantasy writer and you have a great idea for an epic fantasy series, you’d better have a good day job or a sugar daddy/momma, because most readers won’t give your series a chance until after you’ve finished the last book. But can we honestly blame the readers for this, when Martin ran off with their money and left them all burned?

Back when Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire was still ascendant, fans and readers were all mesmerized by how skillfully George R.R. Martin could subvert their expectations and pull off twists that no one had foreseen. It turns out that the biggest expectation that Martin ever subverted was the expectation that he would finish the damned series.

Anyways, that’s enough ranting about George R.R. Martin and the pathological effect that I believe he’s had on the culture. I read A Game of Thrones back in 2010 and decided to skip the rest of the series. The writing was fantastic, but I hated all of the characters and could tell that things were going to get way too dark and way too graphic in the later books. And now, I wish I lived in a world where George R.R. Martin was still a mostly unknown midlist author, with a small cult following but not a lot of influence on the culture overall. It would be a much better world.

I skipped Accelerando, because I’ve read enough Charles Stross to know that his particular brand of grungy cyberpunk nihilism rubs me the wrong way. Learning the World wasn’t terrible, but I DNFed it because I got bored, though I could be persuaded to try it again. It was just too much of an idea book, without enough story to really hook me.

Old Man’s War… my thoughts on that one are complicated. I cannot stand Scalzi as either an author or a human being. He’s basically an obnoxious internet influencer who made it big back in the days of the blogosphere, before “influencer” was a job title. Of course, to be an influencer, you have to either 1) be an extremely attractive woman, or 2) be off your rocker somehow, and that definitely describes Scalzi. He is an obnoxious blowhard who likes to argue with people on the internet for fun and profit, except he’s apparently not as good at social media as he was at blogging, so he’s pivoted to writing science fiction and playing the SFWA mean girls game instead.

But most of that happened after Old Man’s War, so it’s not exactly fair to judge the book on all of that. And I have to admit, I enjoyed it back in 2008 when I read it. It’s basically a retelling of Starship Troopers and The Forever War, but without all of the nihilism and politics—and since the nihilism and the politics are the things that got me hung up on both books (though I actually enjoyed the politics of Starship Troopers; the part that slightly annoyed me was getting a lengthy treatise on human sociology instead of an adventure novel), Old Man’s War was basically a retelling with all of the good parts and less of the bad parts. So I’ll grudgingly give Scalzi his due and admit that his first book is good enough to deserve an affirmative vote.

But Robert Charle’s Wilson’s Spin is easily the best book on the ballot from this year, and possibly the best Hugo-nominated book that I’ve read from this whole decade. It’s fantastic. One of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read. The rest of the trilogy is just as good, too. In fact, Spin and its sequel Axis were a huge influence on my own Genesis Earth, though it may not be obvious at first glance. I read Spin when I was studying overseas in Amman, Jordan, while I was still working on the first draft of Genesis Earth. The next year, I read a whole bunch of Robert Charles Wilson’s other books, and I have to say that I have yet to read a book he wrote that I didn’t enjoy. His books have had as much influence on me as Ursula K. Le Guin, and largely scratch the same itch.

So that’s how the 2006 Hugos shape up for me: three books that I didn’t like, and two that I did—and one of those books is one of my all-time favorites.

How I Would Vote Now: All 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)

Y is for Yesteryear

Star_wars_oldThey say that the golden age of science fiction is about twelve years old.  That’s definitely true for me.

My first exposure to the genre was Star Wars: A New Hope.  I saw it when I was seven, right around the height of my dinosaur phase.  Everything about the movie completely blew me away, from the Jawas and Sand People of Tatooine to the stormtrooper gunfights and lightsaber duels.  After watching Luke blow up the Death Star, I spent the next few hours running around the yard pretending to fly my own starfighter.

In a lot of ways, I’ve never really stopped.

My parents made me wait until I was nine to watch The Empire Strikes back, because it was rated PG.  Without any exaggeration, I can say that those were the longest two years of my life.  I was literally counting down days by the end, and to pass the time without going crazy, I read up on all the books about space that I could possibly find.

My father bought the original X-wing flight simulator game somewhere around then, and I soon became totally engrossed in it.  Since the 386 was our only entertainment system (no Super Nintendo–I had to visit a friend’s house for that), X-wing became the defining game of my childhood.  I spent hours and hours on that game, to the point where I knew exactly which simulated missions the characters from the books were flying and how to complete them faster and easier.

I thought The Empire Strikes Back was a little slow the first time I saw it, but it’s since grown on me, to the point where now it’s my favorite film in the whole series.  Thankfully, my parents let me watch Return of the Jedi the next day, and for the next few months my life felt utterly complete.

Around this time I discovered the Star Wars novels and soon immersed myself in them.  The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton soon became one of my favorites, as well as the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn and the X-wing series by Michael A. Stackpole.

But it was Roger Allen McBride who first introduced me to a different flavor of science fiction with his Corellia trilogy.  As I mentioned in V is for Vast, those books had just enough of a touch of hard science to intrigue me about the other possibilities of the genre.  That was the last Star Wars series that I read before branching out into other works of science fiction.

The Tripod trilogy by John Christopher was my first introduction to the dystopian / post-apocalyptic genre, depicting an enslaved humanity after an alien invasion.  Those books really captured my imagination for a while.  The Giver was also quite interesting and thought provoking, though since it didn’t involve spaceships or aliens it wasn’t nearly as compelling.

I read a lot of fantasy in my early high school years, including Tracy Hickman, Lloyd Alexander, and (of course) J.R.R. Tolkien.  While I enjoyed those books and immersed myself in them for a while, my true love was still science fiction.  For almost a year, I watched Star Trek: Voyager religiously with my dad.  And every now and again, I’d pick out a science fiction book from the local town library and give it a try.  That’s how I discovered Frank Herbert’s Dune.

In eleventh grade, my English teacher had us choose an author and focus our term papers solely on their books for the entire year.  She suggested I choose Orson Scott Card, but I chose Cormac McCarthy instead.  I’m not sure if that was the worst decision of my high school career, or the best decision, since assigned high school reading tends to make any book feel like it sucks.  I discovered Ender’s Game the following summer, and finished it in a delirious rush at 3am the morning after checking it out from the local library.

More than any other book, Ender’s Game cemented my love for the genre, and showed me just how powerful and moving the genre could be.  It opened so many insights into the world and human nature, reading that book made me feel like I’d opened a pair of eyes that I didn’t even know I’d had.  Looking back, that was probably the moment when I knew I would be a science fiction writer.  I’d known I was going to be a writer ever since I read A Wrinkle in Time at age eight, but to be a science fiction writer specifically, that goal was probably cemented by reading Orson Scott Card.

After high school, I served a two year mission for my church, during which I didn’t read any novels or watch any TV or movies.  When I came back, though, Orson Scott Card and Madeline L’Engle helped me to ease through the awkwardness of adjusting back to normal civilian life.  When I left for college, I expanded my horizons even further, starting with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Edgar Rice Burrough’s Princess of Mars.

When I discovered Pioneer Books in downtown Provo, I knew I’d found my favorite bookstore in Utah Valley.  I have so many fond memories sitting cross-legged on the floor in the science fiction section, browsing through the musty used books for hours at a time.  That’s where I discovered C.J. Cherryh, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and numerous other authors who are among my favorites today.

When I discovered Spin, Robert Charles Wilson soon became one of my favorites.  I picked up that novel as a free PDF from Tor, and read it over the summer while studying abroad in Jordan.  Once again, that same hard sf sensibility I’d gotten from Roger Allen McBride touched me in an unforgettable way.  But it was the human element of that book that really moved me–in fact, it’s always been about the human element.  The world building in Downbelow Station was great and all, but the romance of Merchanter’s Luck had a much more lasting impact.  Starship Troopers had some good ideas, but it was Mandella’s personal journey in The Forever War that moved me almost to tears.  The intrigue of the Ender’s Shadow series was quite entertaining, but it was Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead that really taught me what it means to be human.

I finished my first novel, Genesis Earth, shortly after returning from that study abroad, and tried to capture the same sensibility from Spin as well as the intimately human element.  Since then, I’ve written several more sci-fi novels, some of them tragic, some triumphant, but in all of them I’ve tried to get as close as I can to the personal lives of the characters.  I don’t know if I’ll ever write a character portrait so intimate as Shevek’s in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but I certainly hope to someday.

For me, science fiction started out as a wonderfully exciting entertainment and turned into something much more meaningful.  If there’s anything the genre has taught me, though, it’s that the two aren’t mutually exclusive–that you can have your adventure and learn what it means to be human as well.  Indeed, the more imaginative the adventure, the greater the truths I’ve taken from it.

Because of that, even though I’m almost in my thirties now, I can’t possibly foresee a time when science fiction isn’t a major part of my life.  It’s a love affair that’s grown just as much as I have, and continues to grow with each new author I discover and each new book I write.  When I’m old and grizzled and pushing eighty, I’m sure there will still be a part of that twelve year old boy in me, still running around the yard flying his starship.

Continue reading Y is for Yesteryear

A is for Aliens

cantinaAlien races–what would science fiction be without them?  They’re as fundamental to the genre as elves and dwarves are to fantasy.  If you’re reading a book and an alien being from another planet shows up on the page, that in itself is usually enough to make the story science fiction.

My first exposure to aliens came from Star Wars IV: A New Hope, which I saw as a kid sometime back in the early nineties.  The cantina scene with the weird, catchy music and all the frighteningly creatures both scared and fascinated me.  Here were a bunch of humans, mingling with these things that looked like monsters as if nothing were strange or unusual.  In fact, it soon became clear that these weren’t monsters at all, but regular people–that is, as regular as you can be without being human.

I think the main reason for including aliens in a space opera story is that it makes the setting feel more exotic and otherworldly.  It can also add all sorts of interesting possibilities for plot and character, depending on the different capabilities of the various alien races and the way their culture shapes them.  Babylon 5 is a great example of this, with the characters from each alien race interacting with each other in ways unique to their various cultures.

One way to think of science fictional aliens is to put them on a spectrum with two extremes.  On the one side, you have the more familiar aliens–the races from Star Trek, for example, which are basically human-like except with weird skin or bone ridges to physically distinguish them.  On the other side, you have the truly bizarre–the kinds of aliens that are so different from us, we cannot possibly conceive their thoughts or the way they see the world.

The main advantage of the more familiar alien types is that they’re easy to understand and relate to.  Yeah, they may look weird, but they don’t think or act much differently than the Russians, or the Arabs, or whatever human culture they roughly parallel.  In fact, it’s not uncommon in fiction of this type for the aliens to be less “alien” than the Japanese (at least, in Western fiction–obviously, it’s different in manga and anime).  This, in turn, is the main weakness with aliens of this type: they are so readily understandable that it’s easy to lose that sense of otherness.

The main advantage of the more extreme kind of alien is that it can make a much stronger impact, which makes for a more compelling and thought-provoking story.  For example, the Hypotheticals in Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin trilogy are so fascinating because we know so little about them.  They have the power to shape entire worlds, manipulating space and time itself, and yet none of the reasons behind what they’re doing make sense–if indeed there’s any reason behind it at all.  Or in Octavia Butler’s Xenogensis trilogy, it’s not too hard to figure out what the aliens are trying to do, but the way in which they do it, impregnating the main character through their tri-sexual biological capabilities makes for a profoundly disturbing story.

The disadvantage, of course, is that aliens of this kind are much more difficult for readers to relate to.  If the aliens are so advanced that their thoughts transcend our own, or if their sensory organs are so different that we cannot possibly conceive of how they see the world, then it’s very difficult for us to get inside of their heads.  For this reason, aliens of this kind tend to become more of a force of nature than actual characters–or characters in the aggregate, in the way that humanity is the main character of most of Arthur C. Clarke’s books.

Personally, I’m more of a fan of the extreme alien type.  The universe is so vast, and our understanding of it is so lacking, that it rings a lot truer to me.  The odds that we are alone in the universe are so infinitesimally small that refusing to believe in the existence of aliens would be akin to believing in 1492 that the Earth is flat, and yet if/when we ever make contact, I can’t help but wonder how different from us they’ll be.  So much of what we take for granted is just a fluke of our particular circumstances here on this planet–the chance combination of so many variables that changing any one of them would completely rewrite the story of how our species evolved, much less our civilization.

There is a place for the more familiar aliens of space opera, though. They make for some very entertaining stories, provide a fun escape from this world when that’s what we need.  They also give us a chance to look at ourselves through a lens that strips away our stereotypes and prejudices.  We might have some very strong opinions about immigrants, for example, or people of a different race or color, but none of us are prejudiced against Sand People, or Klingons, or Androsynth.  In space opera, most alien races are loosely based on real-world cultures, so it’s possible to draw parallels without all the cultural and historical baggage.

In a sense, all fiction is just the culture speaking to itself, so when we read about aliens we are really reading about ourselves.  Encountering the Other in a non-threatening fictional world enables us to face the real-world Other with understanding and compassion.

I haven’t written very many alien stories yet, but I have a couple cooking in the back of my mind.  Genesis Earth has an alien encounter with a bit of a twist to it, but the characters in my Star Wanderers and Gaia Nova series are all human (well, mostly).  If/when I do introduce an alien race, I plan to do it right, which will almost certainly involve a first contact story.  But that’s for Saturday’s blog post, not today’s.

Continue reading A is for Aliens

Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson

Almost seventy years ago, the mysterious alien beings known as the Hypotheticals encased Earth in a force field and built a network of giant arches facilitating overland travel to other habitable planets.  With access to the fossil fuel resources of half a dozen worlds, humanity is slowly killing its homeworld, even as it expands to other stars.

All of this matters little to Sandra Cole, however.  A psychologist at the State Care facility in Texas, it’s all she can do to endure another day.  But all of that starts to change when a police officer brings in a mysterious boy–a boy with a message from the future.

This is the third and final book in Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin trilogy, and it brings the series to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion.  The first book introduced the Hypotheticals and hinted at some greater scheme that they were involved in, the second book further explored the universe while raising more questions about the Hypotheticals, and the last book follows the Hypotheticals to the end of time, answering these questions while taking nothing from the truly alien grandeur of it all.

However, like the other books, the story itself is not about the aliens, but the people who make contact with them.  The high-concept science fiction goodness is all in there, but it’s framed by characters who are both human and relatable.  I wasn’t as invested in these characters as the ones in Spin, but I was still very interested in seeing what happened with them.

The structure of the book is a lot like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, with alternating chapters telling two stories that don’t connect until the very end.  I finished the last half of it in practically one sitting, and the last chapter in a breathless sprint–much like Spin and Axis.  The way everything came together, not only for this book but the entire series, was awesome.

I was really happy to see this series finish well, because the first book was a major influence for me in writing Genesis Earth.  As I said in an earlier post, I don’t think anymore that this is the kind of science fiction I’ll write very often, but I sure love reading it.  I wouldn’t recommend starting with this book, but if you like science fiction that makes you stand back and blink at the sheer magnificence of the universe, this is a series you should definitely check out.

The interior designer’s approach to story

I recently read a fascinating post on John Brown’s blog with an interesting exercise for analyzing the kinds of stories you most like to read.  By finding out what really turns you on in a story, you can have a much better idea what to write, and how to make your own stories better.

He prefaced the exercise with a story about the interior designer who helped them to decorate their house.  The designer spread out a number of home magazines in front of them, and told them to go through and tear out the pictures that most turned them on.  After doing this, they analyzed the pictures to see what they had in common, and thus discovered how to best decorate their house.

The exercise works much the same way.  First, pick out five books you really like that immediately come to mind.  Mine are:

As many of you know, these are some of my favorite books of all time.  I’ve reread three of them, and I intend to reread the other two at some point.

Next, pick out the elements that these books have in common.  Here’s what I came up with:

1) Set in a different time and place.

Not all these books are science fiction, but the all take place in a world far removed from our own.  Only Spin takes place largely on Earth, but the events of the story transform the world as we know it so much that by the end of the novel, it’s completely different. SPOILER (highlight to see) Besides, at the very end, the two main characters leave Earth by going through the giant portal to another planet, so the novel is arguably about escaping the world as we know it.

2) Stakes that are much more personal than global.

This was interesting, and highlights something I realized when I compared Merchanter’s Luck with Downbelow Station.  In all of these stories, the central driving conflicts are extremely intimate and personal.

To be sure, many of these stories also have an epic backdrop; Mistborn certainly does.  However, I was much more interested in Vin’s growth and development than I was in how the Ska would overthrow the Lord Ruler–in fact, Mistborn is my favorite book in the trilogy for that very reason.

3) Encourages deep introspection.

This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise if you’ve followed this blog for a while, but I love love LOVE stories that make me see the world in a new way.  Thrillers and adventures are all fun and good, but if it doesn’t make me think, I’m usually like “meh” at the end.

4) Female characters who aren’t weak or passive.

This one might be a bit more controversial, but in all of these stories, I’ve noticed that the female characters are pretty strong, even if they aren’t all kick-butt Katniss wannabes (ugh…I hate Katniss).  Even in Legend, which is largely dominated by men, you still have the earl’s daughter, who is one heck of a spirited woman.

5) Life and death conflicts.

This is interesting: in all of these books, the threat of death is immanently real.  Some of them, such as Legend and On My Way to Paradise, are among the most violent books I’ve ever read.  I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something about life and death struggles that really draws me.

6) Romantic in a broad sense.

I’m using Tracy Hickman’s definition here, in which romance is all about teaching us to feel and bringing us in touch with our deepest feelings.  That’s the central theme of On My Way to Paradise: learning how to be a man of passion after witnessing some of the worst atrocities of war.

All of these books not only make me feel, they are about the feelings that they inspire.  In other words, the emotional elements of the story are both a part of and deeply embedded in the story’s central theme.

The exercises isn’t complete after this, though.  For the last part, take another five books and analyze them to see how they compare.  My second list includes:

So how does the list stack up?  Let’s see…

  1. Definitely true.  NONE of these stories take place in the world as we know it–and that’s awesome.
  2. A Canticle for Leibowitz might seem like an exception, since it follows the broad rise and fall of human civilization after the nuclear apocalypse.  But the things that really drew me to the story were the more personal elements: the novice who makes the illuminated manuscript of the electrical diagram, for example, or the abbot at the very end who SPOILER tries desperately to convince the single mother not to take her baby to the mercy killing station after the bomb fatally irradiates them.  In any case, it’s telling that A Canticle for Leibowitz made this list, whereas none of Arthur. C. Clarke’s books even came to my mind.
  3. Definitely true.  Even Citizen of the Galaxy, which is more adventure fiction than high concept sf, features a fascinating society of interstellar traders that really made me sit back and think about the way we structure our society.  Heinlein has a really awesome way of doing that with everything he writes.
  4. The only possible exception here might again be Heinlein, who had some very extremist views of women (putting it lightly).  However, if I recall, Citizen of the Galaxy has a female character at the end who helps pull out the main character from his indigent circumstances and helps him to come into his own.  Again, they might not all be kick-butt tramp-stamp vampire slayers, but they certainly aren’t weak.
  5. Less true of The Neverending Story and The Dispossessed, but while the central conflicts might not be about life and death, the threat of death (or a total loss of identity) certainly comes into play.
  6. Definitely true.  Few books have taught me to feel more deeply than The Neverending Story.  An absolutely magnificent piece of literature.

So there you have it.  According to this exercise, I should write books set in another time and place, where strong female characters face life and death decisions that personally impact the people in their lives and make the readers think and feel.  Interestingly enough, that is a PERFECT description of Bringing Stella Home, as well as Desert Stars and Into the Nebulous Deep.

Cool stuff.  Makes me want to write.  So on that note, I think I will.

NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy

In case you didn’t know, NPR just put together a list of the Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of all time.  The list had a panel of judges who vetted nominations, but the voting was public and turnout–over 60,000–was pretty high.

I usually don’t like top 100 lists, but this one did a pretty good job representing the genre.  I recognized about 2/3rds of the titles, and most of my own personal favorites were included.

There were a few notable exceptions, however.  David Gemmell wasn’t represented at all–a travesty of the highest proportions.  Neither was C.J. Cherryh, which I find very surprising.  Robert Charles Wilson has certainly written some books worthy of the list, and Dave Wolverton’s On My Way to Paradise–which, I would argue, is one of the best science fiction novels ever written–was notably absent.

Also, a few of the titles were further down on the list than I would have put them.  The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin came in at #78, while I would have put it at least in the top 20.  A Canticle for Leibowitz did better at #35, but was it really an inferior book to The Handmaid’s Tale?  Come on, people.

One thing I don’t think this list represents well (or top 100 lists in general) is the way in which sf&f fandom has split into dozens of communities and tribes, almost like Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands.  Before science fiction went mainstream, it was possible to follow all the various titles and developments.  Now, however, there’s so much out there that it’s impossible to be fully cognizant of everything.

I think fandom has split into some very distinct communities clustered around the popular authors and sub-genres, and there’s not a whole lot of overlap between them.  None of them are large enough to spawn an entirely new genre (with the possible exception of paranormal romance), but lumping them all into science fiction & fantasy can be a bit problematic.

That said, I think this is a pretty good list.  What do you think?

A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson

Travis Fisher is an outsider in most places, but nowhere more than the small midwestern town of Haute Montagne.  But when his mother dies, leaving him parentless and jobless in the midst of the Great Depression, his stern aunt and uncle are the only ones who will take him in.

When Travis falls in love with Nancy Wilcox, the rebellious daughter of the Baptist Ladies Association president, things become worse.  With murderous transients roaming the countryside, Haute Montagne closes ranks, casting them out.

In this moment of distress, a mysterious yet hauntingly beautiful woman reaches out to them with a cry for help.  Stranded in the small midwestern town, she is a being from another world, and she is dying.  Only the two young lovers can help her, but to do so, they must find her dark, masculine half–and in so doing, confront the demons that threaten to tear them apart.

This is one of Robert Charles Wilson’s earlier novels, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  It’s very short, yet well crafted and beautifully written.  Wilson’s prose is extremely evocative, and his descriptions of Haute Montagne brought back childhood memories from when I lived in the Midwest.  The story was also done well, and had a very satisfying ending.

While this is a good book, though, I wouldn’t say that it’s Wilson’s best.  His characters were interesting, but not nearly as compelling as those in Spin. The baptists were a little too villainous, though Travis’s aunt and uncle were individually more complex.

In spite of all this, however, the story was structured so well that the poignance of it largely overcame these flaws.  As a writer, that’s what I found most interesting about this book–how the masterful way the story was constructed made the whole greater than the sum of the parts.  Call it the monomyth, the hero’s journey, or whatever else, but something about this story made it reverberate in a powerful way.

I suppose that this is what all great stories do: echo some greater, universal story that is in all of us.  It’s the same echo that I felt when I read Spin, or Ender’s Game, or The Neverending Story, albeit a little softer.  It’s something that I hope my own stories evoke, this sense of clarity and wholeness, of returning to some great truth that we lost somewhere between birth and adulthood.

I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but those are my thoughts.  It’s a short read, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.  If you can find it, it’s a good one to pick up.