Category: Audio Books

Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein

Red Planet was the first Robert A. Heinlein novel I discovered back in 1964, and with the first reading of that book I turned into a life-long fan of Heinlein’s work.  From 1964 through 1966 I read Heinlein’s backlog of books, some several times, so after a four year dry spell of no new books I was mentally demolished when in 1970 I read I Will Fear No Evil and hated it.  Somehow my literary hero wrote a clinker, at least in my eyes.  After The Moon is a Harsh Mistress Heinlein (1966), Heinlein never wrote another book I liked.

I still love rereading Heinlein, and usually reread a few of his novels every year.  In the last decade I’ve been listening to audio book editions of his books.  Red Planet just came out on unabridged audio from Full Cast Audio, a company that publishes audio books for young people.  Full cast audio means each character gets their own actor performing the lines.  This works extremely well for young adult novels, and Red Planet comes off wonderful in this format, making each character dramatically stand out.  I’m not sure what authors think about this technique, because the actors get to emotively interpret their character.  In this edition I think they all stay well within the cues Heinlein gave his readers.

This edition of Red Planet from Full Cast Audio uses the restored unedited edition from Del Rey published after Heinlein’s death.  For more information on that, read “Red Planet – Blue Pencil.”

Red-planet-cover

Over the years I’ve struggled with why I don’t like the Heinlein books that came out after 1969.  Why was that such a turning point?  As I got older, I also discovered that his novels after 1959 were different, and they had many elements I didn’t like too.  Before 1969, most of the novels I read were science fiction, but after that my reading tastes broaden.  I was constantly changing from 1969 through 2008, so it’s understandable that my reaction to the books would change too.

Listening to Red Planet gave me an interesting new insight.  Up till now I thought Heinlein became a different person sometime in the 1960s, but in his 1949 story, Red Planet, I found all the elements of later Heinlein hidden away.  The reality is, no matter how much we all feel like we’ve changed and matured, we’re still the same person all our lives.  I’ve long figured that editors influenced what Heinlein wrote, especially before his move to Putnam in 1959 with Starship Troopers.

redplanet2

There’s a strong dichotomy of opinion about Heinlein.  Most of his fans are extremely loyal, if not rabid. There are many people who try to read Heinlein and can’t stand him.  I’m in this middle zone, both loving his work, and despising it, and it’s a very weird position to hold.  I often piss-off other Heinlein fans when I express my doubts, but I seldom meet people who read, reread and study his work like I do.  If I had the time, I’d love to write an analysis of his writing, which I think might end up being a psychological study of myself.

But back to Red Planet.  I’m quite confident that this time was at least my fourth time through the book, and I was amazed by parts I didn’t remember.  It wasn’t until after I finished the story that I discovered I had listened to the revised edition.  Memory is such a fascinating subject.  At one level, I only remembered the book vaguely.  If I had tried to write down what the book was about before I listened to it, I would have given a skimpy plot outline, and then a general impression of several cherished scenes.  When I started listening to the book much of it came back to me, so I could predict just before it happened what would happen.  I call that movie déjà vu because I often feel that when seeing a movie I had watched decades earlier and forgotten.   It’s the weird feeling of knowing what will happen just before the event unfolds.

The revealing part on listening to Red Planet this time, was all the stuff I had completely forgotten since my last reading in 1989.  You’d think after four reading there would be very little I wouldn’t remember at some level.  That wasn’t true.  What’s even more revealing, and I imagine astute readers of this essay will guess, the unfamiliar parts were more like the Heinlein I disliked.  But I hadn’t forgotten.  I was tricked by the new restored edition.

Heinlein had even written Alice Dalgleish, his 1949 Scribner’s editor, “I have made great effort to remove my viewpoint from the book and to incorporate yours, convincingly – but in so doing I have been writing from reasons of economic necessity something that I do not believe.”  I have long theorized that Heinlein’s personal opinions ruined his later stories, and that the reason why I liked the earlier books better were due to editorial censorship.

Story elements that Heinlein would later fixate on are now here in Red Planet, but in shorter, and still restrained form.  Listening to Red Planet showed me I could probably build a list of Heinlein themes that probably exist to some degree in all of his books, either subtly hidden away by editors, revealed by restored editions, or just blaring in later books.

Heinlein explored a wide range of science fictional frontiers, but in the end he often repeated himself thematically.  There is a quality in art that I call the “Beatles Effect.”  I believe a large part of the Beatles success in the 1960s was due to the Fab Four working hard to make every song different.  Mediocre artists tend to create work that has a sameness to it.  Heinlein’s most distinctive individualistic work was all done before 1969, and in particular, before 1959.  During the 1950s, Robert A. Heinlein was The Beatles of science fiction.  Those books are still in print half a century later.  Red Planet has its 60th anniversary next year.

1949 was the year that Red Planet and “Gulf” came out, two stories that anticipated Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein’s breakout novel from 1961, that first revealed the true Heinlein, even though Putnam forced him to cut out 60,000 words of that novel.   (Those words were later restored in an uncut edition decades later.)  Listening to the uncut version of Red Planet made it very clear that Heinlein hadn’t changed at different points in his career, but merely, more of his personality had been revealed.

There are two Heinlein aspects that we’re dealing with here.  The first, is a fascinating man that was very opinionated.  The second is a story teller.  As a kid, I imprinted on the storytelling aspect.  As an adult I rebelled against the author’s personality poking through the illusion of the storytelling.

Even in the restored edition, Red Planet is a very slight novel.  It’s overwhelming charm is due to the mysterious Martians and Willis, an engaging talking Martian animal.  What captured me as a 12-year-old was the sense of wonder of humans colonizing Mars, something that would fuel my personal fantasies for decades.  I was also charmed and amused by the antics of Willis.  Heinlein’s juvenile novels often had wondrous alien creatures in them.  And the book was fast paced, and full of adventure for boys.

Red Planet is a good book, but it doesn’t compare well with the dazzling creativity of Heinlein’s later juveniles, Have Space Suit-Will Travel and Tunnel in the Sky.  The ancient culture of the Martians, used in both Red Planet and Stranger in a Strange Land, is an impressive creative achievement on first encounter, but doesn’t hold up to long term scrutiny.  The old Martians are like Australian aborigines.  Their culture is exotic, mysterious and mystic, but after the initial wow, few people would want to follow their lifestyle.   We’re a high-tech species, a species that likes to build and expand.

The super-wise Martians that Heinlein created do not wear clothes or even appear to use tools and they do wonders with thoughts alone.  This appears to conflict with Heinlein’s blaster-toting, rocket-riding humans out to colonize every piece of rock in the universe.  And this is further complicated by Heinlein’s constant promotion of revolution, where bold exploring characters sneer at the corruption of law and order stay-put stick-in-the-mud characters.

Now that the revised version of Red Planet is fresh in my mind, I can easily see how its author will come to write Stranger in a Strange Land in the following decade, and eventually evolve into the man who writes The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.  The disturbing thing is to contemplate which themes will come to dominate.  From 1949 to 1985 Heinlein seems mostly concerned with who deserves to die, and nudity.  This is grossly unfair to the stories, but I think it’s true.

In the restored edition of Red Planet, 1949 Heinlein portrays his colonists of Mars as wearing little clothes when not needing their pressure suits for outside excursions.  In 1961, one focus of Stranger in Strange Land is shedding of clothes.  And in 1985, Heinlein has all his former favorite characters getting naked together.

Even more disturbing is the theme of who deserves to die.  Heinlein’s characters are often preoccupied with who to kill.  Sometimes, it’s individuals, sometimes it’s groups of people, and sometimes it’s whole planets.  As a kid, this motive for story action was no different from the westerns I loved to watch on TV, but now as a person in late middle age, I find very disturbing.

The hated headmaster Howe is “disappeared” by the Martians, but his only real offense was being a strict school administrator and taking a strange pet away from a student.  Heinlein revered his time at the Navy academy, an institution known for strict rules and administrators, so why make such a straw man of boy’s school principal?  Beecher, a colonial administrator is also a man executed by the Martians whose crime was trying to force the colonists to winter in a harsh climate to save the company money.  Not exactly a capital crime in our capitalistic society.  For being known as a conservative, Heinlein seems to love mob rule when it appears to be revolutionary and led by a pseudo-Patrick Henry.  But not every rebellious horde of unhappy armed men equal the American revolution.

The restored political parts of Red Planet make the story more offensive to me, at least as an adult.  As a kid, I would have just skimmed over the boring bits, and all the exotic Mars life and adventure of skating down Martian canals would made me forget them.  So which is the better edition?  I think Heinlein’s original unedited story is better because of the way he handles what happens to Willis.  Ditto for Podkayne of Mars.  Heinlein’s harsher more realistic endings are better, even for kids.  And I have to accept Heinlein as a whole person, even though I don’t like parts of that whole.

It would be interesting if I could read Red Planet at 56 and not be influenced by over forty years of nostalgia.  If I could, I would savage it.  And not just because we know there’s no life on Mars now, but because so much of the story isn’t logical at all.  Jim and Frank wear plastic pressure suits with only jockey shorts underneath and then skate all day on the canals.  Logic tells me the legs of their suits would have pooled up with sweat, and their skin would have been rubbed raw.  And there was no mention of oxygen bottles, or any kind of consumables to power their suits.

Furthermore, there is no, and I mean none, discussion of adapting to living on Mars.  It’s really like living on Earth, but with less oxygen and air pressure.  They have to kill the Mars equivalent of rattle snakes with blasters instead of six-guns.   The boys attend a boarding school, and the only difference is they wear minimal clothes while inside the pressurized areas.  That isn’t about Mars so much as it’s about Heinlein picturing a future where people don’t wear clothes.

What we need is a boys book as exciting as Heinlein’s juvenile novels about what realistic life would be like for future colonists on Mars.  Heinlein was enchanted with the concept but didn’t want to explore the details.  I can’t blame him for wanting to create exotic intelligent life on Mars back in 1949.  That’s what I admired when I first read the story just about the time the first Mariner space missions flew past Mars and showed that Mars was a dead world like the Moon.  Red Planet remains a simple story about a boy and his pet Martian, and it is charming and entertaining.  Time has hurt the speculation, but not the story.

I tend to think twelve year-olds today discovering this story might still be well entertained, but I hope they would be savvy enough about our knowledge of Mars to know that it’s all a fantasy.  I’d bet that they would ignore the silly trumped-up revolutionary politics, and not even think about whether the rest of the story is realistic.  Only the kids who love to read about real space exploration would have an inkling about how complex a pressure suit would have to be, and silly it would be to live on cold Mars and only wear shorts while inside.  Or how silly it would be to have a revolution with Earth that supplies and pays for all the necessities of life.

Like I said, reading Heinlein for me, is more about studying myself.  As a kid I wanted to run away and live on Mars.  It was my Never-Never Land.  What us fans of classic science fiction must ask ourselves is:  Was science fiction just the fairy tales for 20th century children, or was science fiction meant to be more than that?  Heinlein always said he wrote to pay the mortgage.  Were his Scribner’s books just entertaining stories for mid-century boys that helped him pay his liquor bill?

I took his stories as inspiration about exploring space.  So did a lot of other people.  The red planet is still up there, waiting for us.  There are ancient alien life forms waiting for us to discover them.  To me, the real critical question is:  Will humans ever live on Mars.  Heinlein returned to Mars in story after story.  I study what NASA finds with its robots on Mars, but I keep rereading Heinlein.  Why?

JWH – 11/1/8

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is an old fashion novel of super-science that won the Hugo award in 2006.  It reminds me of War of the Worlds, but not because the stories are alike, but because of their sense of wonder impact.  I really do not want to say anything about what happens in the story, hoping you’ll just try it sight unseen.  I’d even advice you not to read the blurbs on the book.  If you want the story spoiled, follow the title link to Wikipedia, it explains everything.  I’ve read two other books by Wilson, Memory Wire, and Darwinia, and enjoyed them both.

Of course, this puts me in a quandary, because how do I recommend a novel without giving some juicy tidbits to get you hooked?  If you can imagine how readers in 1898 felt after reading War of the Worlds, then think about what an alien invasion of 2005 would be like, except that it’s a totally new take on alien invasions, and with luck you might feel awe like H.G.’s readers at the end of the 19th century.  The scope of Spin also reminds me of the epoch spanning ideas of Olaf Stapledon.  If you’ve happen to have read Greg Egan’s Quarantine, you might think that Spin is less original, but I found it unique enough to admire it’s vast gee-whiz sense of wondrousness.  However, these two novels do need a name for their new sub-genre of alien invasion types.

Science fiction has a reputation for poor characterization, and science fiction writers are often accused by literary types of producing pawns for their plots, and that’s essentially what Wilson has done here, but I have to give him great credit because Tyler Dupree, the first person narrator, is very engaging, even though he is still a plot pawn.  The trouble is science fiction writers think up ideas first, and then figure out what characters would best show off the ideas dramatically.  It’s probably very difficult to create characters in a SF story that don’t feel like straight men setting up gags for the science fictional funny man.  [That would make a great blog entry – a discussion of SF characters that stand on their own.]

In Spin, Wilson has created a story around three children and then follows their very long lives.  Jason and Diane Lawton are twins, but identical they are not.  Jason represents science and Diane religion, while Tyler plays the reporter of their stories, even though he eventually becomes a doctor.  Jason and Diane are rich, and Tyler is poor, and like the plot of Brideshead Revisited, Tyler loves their big house, admires Jason and falls in love with Diane.   If you subtracted the science fiction, you’d have mediocre love story that would make an entertaining potboiler, but since we’re reading a fantastic tale that John W. Campbell would have loved, that doesn’t matter too much, because when it comes down to it, it’s the super science that dazzles.  The characterization is far better than most pulp fiction, and Wilson does a pretty good job developing the family dynamics of the three children and their three parents.

What Robert Charles Wilson has done is imagine science fiction on a big scale, an evolutionary scale of astronomical time, and then invented a gimmick to make it all work in the short life-time of his very human characters.  That’s one pretty fancy writing trick.  Spin is a very satisfying modern SF novel, that well deserves it’s Hugo award.  I recommend it to all science fiction fans.

JWH 10-20-08

Further Adventures with eReader on the iPod touch

For some reason I’m getting more hits on the iPod touch eReader eBook post than anything else I’ve written lately, so I must assume that the iPod touch and eReader are a hit combination.  Since I wrote that post, eReader has come out with version 1.2 that offers many nifty new features and they’re promising 1.3 real soon now.  Also, the eReader.com site, a spin-off from fictionwise.com, seems to be expanding daily, which implies another kind of success.  eReader software isn’t just for the iPod, there’s also versions for Palm, PocketPC, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Windows, Macintosh and OQO systems.

When the Kindle came out stories about it on the blogosphere were more common than stories about Sarah Palin today.  Using the iPod touch and iPhone for an ebook reader hasn’t garnered that much notice.  I prefer the larger screen of the Kindle, but never wanted to carry it around.  The touch/iPhone is designed to commute wherever you go, and wherever you go you can now read your book when you get there.  That’s pretty cool.

The screen of the touch/iPhone is better than PDAs and most other smart phones, so for a portable reading device it does very well in the visual department.  The screen is physically about one fourth to one third the size of a paperback book page, but the number of words varies because you have several font size settings.  Even though the screen is smaller than the Kindle, it’s brighter and sharper.  Overall though, the Kindle’s screen is much nicer to read from because of it’s perfect size.

Flipping pages is much nicer with eReader on the touch/iPhone than with the Kindle or the eBookman I used to have.  You can set eReader to swipe or tap for page turning.  I set mine to tap, so I just touch the right side of the screen to page forward, and the left to go back.  Having a touch screen greatly reduces the need for buttons.

My 1st generation touch has 2 buttons, and the newly released 2nd generation touch has three, adding a volume control and tiny speaker, something I wanted.  I’m quite anxious for another button though, an on/off switch for the Wi-Fi for the iPod touch.  The wireless system drains the battery fast.  My touch will drain in 1-2 days even doing nothing if the wireless is on.  I now have to go through several taps to turn the wireless on or off.  An even more sophisticated solution would be software that turned the wireless on when I sent a request out on the Internet and turned it off after a set period of time.

The iPod touch is about four times heavier than a Nano, and much bigger, so it’s more of an effort to carry around, but still just 4 ounces, or 120 grams.  It fits in my shirt pocket like the Nano, but its very noticeable there, whereas the Nano is unfelt.  I’ve started carrying my touch some, but I’ve got to admit I’d rather carry the Nano.  Whether I carry the touch all the time will depend if I get completely hooked on it.  99% of my use is for listening to audio books, so unless I start using the touch more, I might go back to my Nano.  I think I’ll need several months to grow into the iPod touch, to know if I regularly need all of its features.

The frequent low battery message is what keeps me switching back to the Nano.  I can get a lot more time if I shut off the Wi-Fi, but that’s annoying to keep up with.  Another way to improve battery life is shut off the screen.  This is only good for listening to music and audio books, but eReader does have a feature for showing white text on a black background.  I wonder if that saves energy.  The claimed battery life improvements in the 2nd Generation iPod touch makes me wished I had waited a month to buy a new iPod.  I certainly wouldn’t buy a 1st generation touch now unless it was very cheap.

One way to adapt to the touch’s battery weakness is to buy a cradle and leave it on it whenever I’m not using it, but with the battery supposedly only good for 400-500 full cycles of charging, would that be good for it?   The iPod touch loses it’s charge so fast when the Wi-Fi is on that I’m thinking mine is either defective or it has a serious flaw.  The Kindle, even with the broadband on lasts four or five days.

The iPod touch also does not seem as robust as the Nano.  Upgrading to iTunes 8.0 crashed it completely and I had to do a restore, which took a bit of fiddling to get done.  I kept wondering why the touch was always backing itself up, well now I’m glad it had.  The restore loaded my upgrades, settings, eReader books, and extra applications, but not my music and audio books.

I bought the iPod touch because I wanted walk-around access to the Internet.  I was also thinking of buying the Asus Eee PC for the same reason.  After a few weeks of ownership I’ve learned that I don’t actually need to access the Internet that often when I’m away from my work or home computer.  It is fun to play with the touch while reclining in my La-Z-Boy, but weirdly the best function I’ve found for those idle moments is cleaning out old email.  Browsing the web on the touch’s 3.5″ screen is the coolest I’ve seen on a small device, but it’s not any fun in practicality.  Good for emergency searches.

When it comes down to it, the real use I have for an iPod is audio books.  I spend hours and hours every week listening to audio books, and the Nano is far superior for that task.  The best thing I love about eReader is getting free classic books, but not to read.  When you listen to books you never know how many names and words are spelled.  Having the text on eReader makes a great supplement to audio books.  It’s not something I use often, but it’s very nice.

Audio books have ruined me for reading printed books, so when I do read with my eyes it’s mainly email, RSS feeds and the web pages.  That makes the touch good for email and RSS feeds if they are nearly all text.  HTML email is better read on a big screen.

The iPod touch is a novelty that I may or may not get addicted to carrying around.  Buying it made me glad I didn’t rush out and buy the iPhone.  I love the Internet as seen through my 22″ Samsung LCD.  But anyone who grew up carrying a Gameboy around will probably find the touch a fantastic device.

Jim

Has Reading With My Ears Ruined My Desire To Read With My Eyes?

I have hundreds of unread books sitting on my shelves wagging their tales anxious to be read, but of the 28 books I “read” so far this year, only one was read with my eyes.  And that one, Marsbound by Joe Haldeman, was read as a magazine serial.  Had it been available on audio at the time, like it is now, I wouldn’t have read any printed books this year.  Of the 39 books I read last year, only two were printed.  Before I discovered audio books on digital players through Audible.com in 2002, I read on average 6-12 books a year.  After digital audio, I’m reading 35-55 books each year.

I read more audio books now because, one, I can multitask reading with walking, driving, doing the dishes, eating alone, and other quiet mindless activities.  Second, I listen to more books than I read because I’m enjoying them more.  When I was kid I was a real bookworm, often reading a book a day for weeks at a time.  I discovered a lot of fun books back then, but I have since reread some of those books on audio and discovered I missed a lot from reading too fast and poorly.  Third, audio books got me out of my science fiction rut and into a wider range of literature because listening gives me the patience to read books with my ears that I would never take the time to read with my eyes.  Fourth, and this is the most important, I think I experience books better through audio because I’ve discovered I’m not a very good reader, and the quality of audio book narrators have constantly improved in recent years and I flat out prefer listening to a great reader than doing a botched up job myself.

Now, the the question is:  Has reading with my ears destroyed my desire to read with my eyes?  When the seventh Harry Potter book came out last year I raced through it like everyone else, so I know I can still enjoy eyeball reading, but the whole time I wished I had waited for the audio edition to arrive from Amazon. 

To force myself to read a book with my eyes, I bought Incandescence, a new novel by Greg Egan.  I was in the mood for some cutting edge science fiction and it wasn’t available on audio.  And, I am enjoying reading it.  I read slower than I used to – that’s something listening has taught me.  But as I go through the sentences I can’t help but think this book would sparkle far greater if I was hearing it read by a fine reader.

So, have audio books become a crutch?  Or have I just discovered a better way of experiencing books and have become addicted?  If EMP killed off all the iPods in the world I think I’d want to try and recreate audio books in the old fashion way.  I’d want someone to read to me, or I’d want to learn how to read aloud and try to dramatically present stories like the narrators I love so much to hear.

Yet, if this return-to-the-19th-century catastrophe happened I might end up reading more books because all the computers and televisions would be out of commission too.  I started reading like crazy in junior high school when I outgrew Gilligan’s Island and I wanted to break away from my family unit.  I had lots of time and even though I had plenty to do, I preferred the laziness of reading.

In our society, literacy is a virtue, but being a kid gorging himself on science fiction does not confer a lot of social status.  It was plain old escapism.  If iPods and Audible had been invented in 1965 I would have grown up listening to books, and I would have listened to better books than I had been reading.

I’m currently listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.  That’s one book I would never read with my eyes, but if I had read it and The Age of Innocence at 13, I would have had a much better understanding of those scary junior high girls.  I think I’m a much better person at 56 for reading Wharton.  That wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for audio books, and I was an English major during my college years.  I had a hard time reading classic novels – I kept hoping they’d assign fun modern novels, but they didn’t.  If I had gotten to hear the classics back then I would have been a much better literature student.  I know this is true because when I took three Shakespeare classes I listened to the plays on LPs and aced my exams, plus I admired the writing so much more.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not suggesting you should give up reading with your eyes.  I think many people are better than I am at reading.  I just discovered late in life, at around 50, that I was a lousy-ass reader.  When I do read now, I do try harder try to hear what I’m seeing.  That requires reading slower and thinking about the dramatic quality of the sentences in front of me.  I wish I could read like Jeff Woodman or Jim Dale, but I don’t.

Last night I pulled down several novels that I’ve been meaning to read and read a few pages from each.  I admired the writing but I realized I would never read them.  Middlemarch, Vanity Fair and Call It Sleep are just too dense for me to read with my eyes.  I brought them to work today and put them on our book give-away table.  They disappeared in a few minutes and I hope they have found good homes.

Audio books have greatly enriched my life.  I truly don’t think they have ruined my urge to read with my eyes, because that urge was already fading.  Without audio books I’d probably continue reading 6-12 books a year for the rest of my life.  Before I turned fifty I was thinking I might only read another 200 books before I died, and wondered why I owned 1,200 and was buying more all the time.  I’ve already listened to more than that planned 200, so audio books have already expanded my reading lifetime. 

My desire to “read” books is greater than any other time in my life, but strangely I’m going to stop buying books, ones printed on paper, that is, because they will sit on my shelves, unread, and I’m feeling way too guilty to add any more lonely unread pages.

Jim

For Connoisseurs of 4th Dimensional Travel

The Little Book by Selden Edwards is a new classic time travel novel for those who love contemplating traveling in the 4th dimension.  It’s right up there with my all-time favorite time travel adventures:

Now don’t jump over to Google and start reading reviews of The Little Book – too many reviewers have given way too much away, and I’ll work hard not to do that here.  This is a first novel for Selden Edwards and it took him thirty years to write.  I highly recommend buying the audio book edition narrated by Jeff Woodman to get the full affect of this dazzling yarn.  Listening will keep you from reading too fast and rushing through the story, and Woodman gives excellent voice and feelings to the characters.

The Little Book is about travel to Vienna in 1897, and if you are up on your history you might guess what famous historical personages make guest appearances.  After reading this novel I hunger to to read about Vienna and many of its famous citizens, and even research some of the books and people that I assume are products of Edwards imagination, but feel so real in the story.  I want to believe that Arnauld Esterhazy, the prep school history teacher, was at least based on someone real.

Like The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Little Book is a love story, about a man, Wheeler from 1988 who falls for a 1897 lady, Weezie.  Unlike the Niffenegger book, Edwards style is less serious, if not zany, which leads to the major weakness of the novel.  The story is meant to be deadly serious and realistic, but sometimes the sparkling prose comes across too light, making it seem more like a fable or tall tale, giving the feeling that Edwards is highly amused as he manipulates us readers.

If I had written this book I would have had all the main characters narrate their stories in the first person, switching between each in a round robin style that conveyed the cyclic nature of time travel.

But I am nitpicking here.  Selden Edwards writes in a unique voice that is entertaining and full of fascinating details.  He constructs his characters so they go through numerous changes that surprised me the reader.  I especially loved the cross generational communications because Edwards really does make us feel that each generation has a different voice and mindset.  Jumping back to 1897 Vienna goes to explain how Freud changed our awareness of the inner landscape of our minds.  Characters before Freud need to be mentally different.

The Little Book is a little book and goes much too quickly.  I don’t like getting trapped in long books, but this one could have been two, three or even four times the length and I think I’d still hate for it to end.  Edwards stays close to the core plot and characters, whereas he could have meandered though 1897 more, and when you come to the end, you might be like me and wished the story was longer, giving all the details between 1897 and 1988.

I love geometric plots, and this one is supposed to be a Möbius strip, but in the end, Edwards cuts the loop leaving the plot linear.  I would have jumbled scenes so the narrator juggled the plot, like Niffenegger played with her storyline.  Edwards focuses on building literary characters rather than designing literary plots, but I think time travel seems to beg for twisty elements.

I don’t think The Little Book is a great novel, but it’s very entertaining, and adds to the evolution of time travel stories.  I’m pretty sure if you loved Time and Again or The Time Traveler’s Wife, you will probably love The Little Book.  Time travel novels tend to be short, so I’m wondering when someone will write the Lord of the Rings epic size time travel fantasy.  I know romantic novelists like Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series are epic in size, but I haven’t read it.  It appears less about time travel and more historical romance to me.  Not my cup of tea, although most good time travel stories involve romances.

There are plenty of science fiction series built around time travel, but they are mostly adventures.  The books in my list above play with time philosophically.   Books that explore changing the paths of events are less interesting now than books that use time travel to change the development of characters.  Few stories about time travel reflects the true inner impact that I think time traveling would have on a person.  I think Heinlein and Niffenegger went the furthest with this, but I expect new writers to go further.

Jim