Tag: Science Fiction

Damn you, Altered Carbon

I wanted to like you so much. You were supposed to be the best thing since Neuromancer.

Altered Carbon is a clever William Gibson/Raymond Chandler hybrid, with a brilliantly imagined future world, but this book suffers from the core flaw I find in nearly all of the sci-fi I’ve been reading lately: an amazing core idea is left barely developed. In the case of Altered Carbon, although the author struggled mightily, nothing in this book developed naturally: not the plot (excessively convoluted, contrived, and in the end unconvincing), not the characters (the characters, except for superficialities, are largely interchangeable, and there is no genuine psychological development), and certainly not the larger social and philosophical themes. A philosopher from the hero’s home planet is fequently quoted, but this philosopher is neither poetic nor profound. Altered Carbon is clearly inspired by The Big Sleep, but unlike Philip Marlowe, Takeshi Kovacs is not convincingly tormented by being a man of honor and conscience in a world without either. Kovacs is more like John McClane (or any other kick-ass John like John Rambo or John Connor, but we can at least give Morgan credit for not naming his character John Kovacs) than he is like Philip Marlowe, and, in spite of their unquestioned awesomeness, the main characters of Rambo and Die Hard would be completely out of place in hard-boiled noir. They work by blowing shit up, and so does Takeshi Kovacs. Continue reading “Damn you, Altered Carbon”

Sci-fi’s clumsy, mawkish Golden Age

Author Jonathan Lethem has an apt description of science fiction in the 40’s and 50’s (PDF):

At the time [Philip Dick] entered the field, science fiction was preoccupied with genuine scientific developments, space exploration boosterism, and a super- rational cognition. Where everyone else was writing about extrapolation and thinking hard about real possibilities, Dick was attuned to the unconscious, the irrational, the paranoiac, the impulsive. His stories had a wildly hallucinatory nature that he treated as if it were rational.

Now, the stories of the other science fiction writers were not as rational as they claim. They were quite in the grip of a fabulating imagination or wish fulfillment. They were writing fairy tales more than they acknowledge. But Dick engaged in the most direct and distinctive way with the undertow of terror and the irrational in contemporary technological society. That’s why science fiction was important to begin with, because it addressed the fact that we were living in a technocratic age when traditional arts, literary and otherwise, didn’t have much to say on this and didn’t find a lot of vocabulary for acknowledging the increasing rate of change and what it did to the experience of ordinary life. Science fiction in its clumsy, mawkish, embarrassing way was taking the bull by the horns.

This is along the lines of what I was getting at in my post on John Wyndham.
Continue reading “Sci-fi’s clumsy, mawkish Golden Age”

Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

The much-revered writers of the Golden Age of science fiction can be quite rough around the edges, even downright embarrassing on occasion. The writing is hurried, the plots of plot-driven books are disturbingly inconsistent, and the characters are primarily stock types and authorial mouthpieces. To top it off, many of these novels are ambitious, earnestly offered as novels of big ideas. These ideas are usually sympathetic (tolerance, freedom, racial equality, escape from religious tyranny), but generally reduced to platitudes expressed in long, somnolent sermons by the your standard pointy-headed philosopher-scientist.

So why bother to read these books? Continue reading “Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic”

Apocalypse 1958: The Tide Went Out

A Nuclear Eco-Catastrophe

Fans of British apocalypse novels a la Wyndham and John Christopher ought to enjoy Chalres Eric Maine’s The Tide Went Out, another story focused the catastrophic disintegration of British society in the context of a world-wide disaster. Journalist Philip Wade writes a speculative story about the potential adverse geological effects of nuclear testing, and inadvertently almost reveals a tightly held state secret. The recent nuclear tests of ‘Operation Nutcracker’ have busted open the earth’s crust, and the oceans are draining away into the earth’s interior. Wade has his story pulled at the last minute by mysterious government officials. But oddities offer clues: frequent earthquakes trouble seismically mild Britain, and the tide steadily decreases. Soon shipping is impossible, and Britain (and the rest of the world) goes into crisis as the world dries out – no clouds, no rain, no crops, etc.. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1958: The Tide Went Out”

Apocalypse 1953: Homicidal Alien Blobs

Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End was my main pick for 1953 in our survey of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but John Wyndham’s Kraken Wakes is another great apocalypse novel from the same year. (It was published as Out of the Deeps in the US. Apparently Americans weren’t expected to know what Kraken means, until the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, because now China Mieville can publish a novel just called Kraken and people purchase it.)

Kraken Wakes is much like The Day of the Triffids in style and development. It’s an apocalypse that develops slowly at first, and then suddenly there’s a tipping point and civilization as we know it could end. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1953: Homicidal Alien Blobs”