SF Book Project: February
March 1, 2010
It is time for month 2 of the Science Fiction Book Project. This month is probably a little heavy on award-winners and recent novels, but it does maintain a balance between fantasy and science fiction.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union: A detective story set in an alternate history where the new state of Israel lost the 1948 war and the Jewish settlers relocated to Sitka, Alaska. Unfortunately, their lease on the territory with the US government is running out and a chess prodigy was recently murdered. Michael Chabon is better known for his Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but this novel is more explicitly science fiction. The story covers ground in international politics, police investigation, and Jewish mythology. It also contains the best description of donuts ever to see print.
The Riddle-Master of Hed: Originally published as a trilogy, this series is collected here in one volume. I remember it took me a little while to get past some of the initial disorientation due to the strange culture and jargon at the beginning, but once I did I was completely hooked. McKillip produces a fresh mythology for these novels, drawing heavily on riddles and shape-shifting to flesh out her world. I don't want to give away much, but I should mention that there are significant plot twists at the conclusion of each book, but unlike many authors these make sense.
The Dispossessed: A strong undercurrent of dualism permeates all of LeGuin's work, and this book is no exception. Here she contrasts two societies. The first is an anarcho-communist world with poor resources and an oppressive, sometimes uncaring bureaucracy. The other is a capitalist, resource-rich oligarchy. The protagonist, Shevek, is a physicist dis-satisfied with the reception his ideas have received in his own world and becomes the first person from his communist society to visit the primary world in 175 years. Through his lens, LeGuin shows us the fallibility in all human societies.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: If you take a Jane Austen novel and infuse it with English folklore sufficient to impress even Neil Gaiman, you'd get something like this. This is a tale of two rival magicians each striving to bring back the glories of English Magic. Mr. Norrell is a bookish, scholarly magician more interested in theory than practice whose skills were earned over long years of study. Jonathan Strange instead stumbled upon his magical powers without, it seems, much work at all. They each attempt to gain favor with the King by using their powers in the aid of the war against Napoleon. However, as the novel progresses both magicians must confront the true powers behind the magic.
A Fire Upon The Deep: Vernor Vinge is best known for novels which take the idea of the technological singularity into account. In this novel, he examines the singularity by spreading it out in space, rather than time. The farther you are from the galactic core, or "Great Slowness," the less physics behaves as we are used to and more and more singularity-type technologies are present, including faster-than-light travel, near-omniscient species, and beyond that, the realm of "Great Powers" who appear to be transcended races. Most of the story takes place on a world in the slowness on which a pair of young humans has crashed along with the cure to a plague which threatens to wipe out humanity. Inhabiting this planet is a species of intelligent dog packs who are at a roughly medieval level of technological advancement. The two children become involved in local politics while elsewhere in the galaxy aliens are plotting the extermination of humans everywhere. Vinge's presentation of alien races is superb, truly exploring what an alien culture of sentient dog packs would be like.