Category: Science Fiction

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine is the big bang origin of the science fiction universe.  I’ve read The Time Machine a couple times before in my life, but I never noticed that it was the origin of all science fiction, but then I haven’t spent the last decade rereading the classics of science fiction before either.  On this third reading, this time via audio book, it seemed quite obvious that The Time Machine is the first science fiction novel.

Now a lot of people are going to argue with my revelation, by bringing up Jules Verne, or Mary Shelley, or many other stories that have fantastic elements in them.  And I completely understand because those stories are a kind of science fiction too.  No, I’ve come to the conclusion there are two types of stories labeled science fiction.  There’s the all-purpose label that imprecisely gets slapped onto almost any kind of far-out tale, and a second type, that’s very rare, that’s illustrated by what H. G. Wells wrote with The Time Machine.

This truer version of science fiction was created by Wells as a method to use science to speculate about the future.  Many writers have written stories that extrapolated the future from present trends, but Wells uses what he learned from the sciences, evolution and cosmology, to write what is essentially the matching bookend to the biblical book of Genesis.

The Time Machine comes after Charles Darwin, but before Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble, but it’s message is just as thrilling and full of sense of wonder being read in 2009 as it was in 1895.  If you read this story as an adventure using a time machine, then you are seeing the book as generic science fiction.  If you read this book and realize that H. G. Wells is using his current day science to speculate about the evolution of man as a species, and the death of the Earth, then the term science fiction means something different.

H. G. Wells actually present three major speculative ideas for the readers of The Time Machine:

  • Time travel is the obvious idea that everyone talks about, but few people analyzes Wells theory for time travel.
  • Just a few decades after Darwin’s famous book, Wells suggests that mankind could branch into new species, and even species that aren’t as intelligent as home sapiens.
  • Finally, Wells paints a picture of the end of Earth after mankind is long gone.

H. G. Wells produces the essential elements of the science fiction novel out of these efforts.  Most people think inventing the concept of a time machine is the main science fiction element, but it’s not.  If the unnamed hero of this novel had traveled backwards in time, the time machine would only be a gimmick for writing historical fiction with a modern protagonist.  An absolute essential element of science fiction is its speculation about the future.

Many writers have suggested that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel, but I don’t think that’s true, because the story wasn’t about the future.  It’s a horror novel.  A novel about a monster.  After reading The War of the Worlds immediately after The Time Machine and I’m struck by the immense difference between the two.  The War of the Worlds is an exciting novel, with far out aspects, and even sense of wonder, but it doesn’t feel like The Time Machine, it doesn’t feel like a science fiction novel that The Time Machine was.  It’s not about the future.  It’s about monsters from space.  It’s another horror novel.

Now I understand why I never felt H. P. Lovecraft was a science fiction writer even when he wrote about invaders from space.  I don’t know why movies like The Thing, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them and all those other monster stories from the 1950s were considered classic science fiction films, putting them into same the genre as Forbidden Planet and 2001, A Space Odyssey.

When I start to think about this I see the term science fiction as a box for throwing all kinds of odds and ends into that are hard to classify.  Most people throw UFO or X-Files type stories into the science fiction box and I think that’s totally unfair.  Space travel doesn’t equal science fiction.  Aliens arriving in flying saucers is not science fiction, but just monsters from outer space.  ESP and all of that are just more monster stories.  The human race has a long list of monster stories, in fact most of the oldest stories, Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Beowulf, are about monsters.

The Time Machine gives us many clues to what real science fiction is about.  Another essential element is it’s speculation about seeing reality through scientific ideas.  When the Time Traveler visits the year 802,701 and our pinnacle of culture is forgotten, we are like Dorothy realizing we’re no longer in Kansas.  The difference between L. Frank Baum and H. G. Wells, is Wells uses scientific ideas in a different way than they were ever used before.  Instead of using science to understand the present and the past, he uses it to understand the future.

We will never know the future.  Science fiction isn’t about predicting the future.    Wells invented a kind of literature that tries to grok the future through scientific speculation.  By this measure Star Wars is not science fiction, but Star Trek sometimes is.  The War of the Worlds is science fiction, but not as much as The Time Machine.  Both novels are mostly fiction, but Wells weaves in concepts and speculation from the knowledge of 1895 science that he knew.  For instance, I’m trying to track down when astronomers first suggested the idea of the sun turning into a red giant.  It must be before 1895.

The odd thing about science fiction is you can’t learn science from science fiction.  You have to already know science to spot the science in science fiction.  It’s like jazz.  You can love jazz without understanding the concepts of music, but if you want to know what a jazz musician is doing, you have to understand music theory, even at a simple level.  Reading The Time Machine for me, was watching H. G. Wells take the science of 1895 and improvise speculative pictures of the future.

Most modern science fiction never even tries to do this.  Most science fiction is escapist adventure fiction.  Wells is working as a philosopher, using fiction with the lens of science, making science fiction a scientific instrument like the telescope, to show his readers something about the nature of reality and possible futures.  He’s pointing his finger at something, whereas most adventure science fiction doesn’t.  Real science fiction, as Wells invented it, points to a speculative concept.  It has something to say about reality, usually about the future.

But doesn’t all great literature point to something about reality?  The difference between fiction and science fiction is the science.  Most people study literary reality through lenses provided by culture, customs, upbringing, religion, and philosophy.  You have to study science to appreciate real science fiction, and few SF fans study scientific subjects.  Wells invented a kind of literature that many writers tried to copy, but few got it right.

And again, it’s not about predicting the future.  Time machines are extremely doubtful, and so are the Eloi and Morlocks.  Charles Darwin looks at nature and fossils and says, “Hey, there were probably other species of humans before us.”  Wells, takes that idea, and says, “Hey, maybe there will be others species of humans after us.”  That sounds very simple now, but try to do it yourself.  If you can, then you can write the kind of fiction I want to label science fiction.  If you take someone else’s speculative idea and turn it into fiction, for instance Star Wars, something I don’t want to call science fiction, then you aren’t doing what H. G. Wells did.

Yes, yes, I know I’m being very picky and splitting hairs, and probably sounding pretentious like those wine tasters who claim they detect all kinds of rare flavors when you can only taste alcohol.  Let me give you another analogy.  Watch the History Channel.  Can you tell when they are showing real history from made-up crap?  Many scholars would say The History Channel should be called the Science Fiction Channel.   I’m making two points here.  First, anything labeled History should be considered truly educational, and second, they are slamming The History Channel’s crap shows by using the label science fiction.

Can you see why I want to make a precise definition of science fiction?  One that will represent the best creative intentions of H. G. Wells, and not the one-size-fits-all box for weirdo ideas?

JWH – 6/24/9

Manned Space Flight – Is it even on your radar?

During the glory days of NASA, between President Kennedy’s great 1961 proclamation committing the United States to going to the Moon within a decade, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in July 1969, there were three great space programs:  Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.  Each manned rocket launch during those years was covered by all three television networks.  ABC, CBS and NBC would stop broadcasting game shows and soap operas and the missions would become  national events.  The 1960s represented a tremendous time for the public’s interest in the space program. 

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the Moon.  Popular interest in space exploration appears to have dwindled significantly ever since Apollo 11, with even Apollo 18, 19, and 20 being cancelled.  Our lunar exploration years only lasted from July 1969, through December 1972.  And when was the last time you took off from school or work to spend the day watching television of a space mission?  I would have taken vacation days to watch the recent Hubble repair mission if any of my damn 200 cable stations had covered it live.

Since 1982, the Space Shuttle has been our vehicle for traveling into space, but it’s scheduled to be retired next year.  The Space Shuttle never left low-earth orbit (LEO).  I wonder how many people know about our next manned space system that’s currently on the drawing boards?  It’s called the Constellation Program, that will use the Ares 1 rocket combined with the Orion space capsule, both in early design development.  It is a dramatic change from the 30 years of Shuttle flights, in that Orion will eventually leave LEO. 

The Constellation program was conceived officially in 2005, and scheduled to blast-off in 2015, with the exciting goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020.  How many Americans know about this, and do they care?

NASA plods on, year after year, with a decent budget that’s prone to suffer booms and busts depending on the political weather.  NASA goals are constantly up for debate.  NASA is a prestige agency for the United States.  Space flight has always been political, and the only real reason we rushed to the Moon was not for science, but as competition in the cold war.  The current Constellation plans probably came into being because of China’s new space program that’s aiming at the Moon, with India and Japan echoing Chinese ambitions. 

Like atomic bombs, manned space missions are the symbol of national pride.  Only the most elite of nations belong to the club.  Even though NASA doesn’t get a lot of public support, it’s budget will never be zeroed out because the President and Congress fear the United States would be seen as a declining world power if it did.  Within Congress and NASA the debate has always been how to get the biggest political and scientific bang for our buck.  There are two factions fighting for dollars:  those campaigning for exciting manned missions and those who advocate scientific robotic missions.  Robots have been our real space explorers, going where no man has gone before, or likely ever.

Many scientists, and maybe most of the public would be fine with letting robots have all the glory when it comes to space exploration.  Let’s be honest here.  The only real value of exploring space beyond thumping our nationalistic chests, is science, and it appears that the public has little interest in real scientific research.  NASA’s web site for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have had millions of unique visitors, showing the biggest peak of interest in space exploration since the 1960s, but how many people does that represent?  

Let’s say seven million.  There are nearly seven billion people on Earth.  Do the math.  1 million people is 1/1000 of a billion.  Let’s even say NASA has seven million hard core fans world-wide.  That would give them one tenth of one percent of popular support.  Probably more people spend time thinking about drinking beer than exploring space. (If NASA only had the money people spent on getting high.)  Seven million people seems like a big political block, but really it’s just a tiny sub-culture.

And are there really 7,000,000 people on Earth who actively spend a lot of their time thinking about space exploration?  That’s saying 1 person in a 1,000 has a serious interest in the final frontier.  These people would keep up with news on Space.com, read books about space exploration and technology, sign up for Twitter news feeds covering space vehicle development, and are members of one of the many space societies, like The Planetary Society, The Moon Society or the National Space Society.  But membership in The Planetary Society is only around 100,000.  What if the real figure is only 700,000, or .01%?

My guess that real world-wide space advocates number far less than seven million.  “Revision for Space Vision?” from MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, a blog by Alan Boyle, gives a listing of recent news articles about the Ares rocket that’s being built for the Constellation project, and other related news stories that would interest space advocates.  When I ask my friends if they knew there was space program in development to return men to the Moon, they say no.  For all I know, we could return to the Moon in 2020 and most of the people of the world won’t even notice this time.

Why is something as exciting as the universe get so little attention?  Why does the latest iPhone get more press than NASA’s latest lunar mission?  Did you even know about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that’s scheduled to reach the Moon on Tuesday?  Or about Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that will crash into the Moon in October hoping to discover water ice?  The orbiter will take photos so detailed they will be able to see the tracks left by the Apollo astronaut’s rovers.  A lot is happening on the Moon right now, with spacecraft from many nations exploring it remotely, or will be in the near future.  But how many people care?

Within the very small community of humans that are interested in space exploration, the Moon is becoming a hot destination.  There is even a web site, Moon Daily, for keeping up with all the activity.  Over at Asimov’s Science Fiction, James Patrick Kelly has an story in the current issue set on the Moon, “Going Deep,” which he reads for an MP3 audio edition, so the Moon is still of interest to science fiction writers and fans.  And NASA recently held an art contest called “The Moon: Back to the Future,” with a very nice gallery of winners.

Hopefully, between now and 2020, the public will take a fresh interest in lunar exploration, but is that being too hopeful on my part.  Most people consider learning about the Moon as exciting as studying rocks, and geology has never been one of the glamour sciences like astronomy and biology.   (And when was the last time you met someone at a party talking about those topics???)  The public is probably more than willing to let scientists play with the Moon as much as their little hearts want, as long as they aren’t asked to listen to any of the boring facts.

I’ve always cherished the assumption that space was the final frontier, and the manifest destiny of humanity was to explore the cosmos, but I’m starting to believe that is a false assumption on my part.  I’ve started writing a novel about colonists on the Moon, but I’m wondering about its potential audience.  If I want to make any money, I’d need to call it “Vampires on the Moon.”  Science fiction is very popular in pop culture, but interest in science fiction doesn’t translate into interest in space exploration.  I wonder if space exploration was as popular as rock music or professional sports, if humans would have already visited all the places our surrogate explorers, the robots, have reached?

JWH – 6/21/9

Better Than Television

Will there ever be a better invention than television?

Of course I hear all the young Internet dudes instantly reply, sex.  Really, and how many hours have you spent humping compared to boob tube dazing?  And by the way, I count video games and porn as byproducts of the invention of television.  Television is powerful.  It’s one hell of an addiction.  After air, water and food, I think I’d have to list television as the next necessity for life.

I want to do a quick look back at the history of television, but then move onto using my science fiction vision to see if I can picture something better than TV.  For the purposes of this essay I define television as a visual 2D screen with audio, so it doesn’t matter if the actual gadget is a Sears Roebuck cabinet with CRT from 1955, or iPhone from 2009, it’s still television to me.  If you can watch a live or recorded TV show on it, then I call it television, so something like the Kindle ebook doesn’t count, but an Asus netbook does.

What did people do before television?  I was born in 1951 and grew up with the glass teat, as Harlan Ellison named it.  As a child all the adults told me stories about life before television.  My mother’s mother, Nanny, was born in 1881.  She told me about life before cars, airplanes, radio and television.  The only way I could relate to my Nanny’s tales of old America, was through the westerns I grew up watching on TV – those shows showed life with no radios, cars, airplanes or televisions, like Dodge City, in Gunsmoke.  It hurt my little head to try imagine life without TV.

Last night I watched, “The Naked Time,” the fourth episode from the first season of Star Trek, which I first viewed on September 29, 1966.  Because I grew up thinking television was a new invention, it’s hard to believe that was 43 years ago, and that the first shows I remember seeing at age four, were 54 years ago.  That generation that raised me, the ones who knew a time before television, are dead now, or sleeping in line waiting to get into heaven.  I imagine rugrats today believing that television existed in the time of Jesus.  Television has so perfectly integrated into our minds, culture and life, that it’s almost impossible to imagine life without the TV screen, or its daddy, the movie screen.

Now, I’ve got to ask:  Is there a better invention than television waiting to be invented?  Some people are going to point to the computer, but I’m going to claim that what we love about the computer is the CRT/LCD screen, so that the Internet is really just a different kind of television show.  Ditto for video games.  I used computers before they were connected to TV screens, and although I found them fun, most people would have considered them boring with a capital B.

Television is a gestalt experience.  Forget about all that damn ESP mumbo-jumbo, television screens are our real sixth sense.  Until we get a neural jack in the back of the head, like Neo in The Matrix, the television screen is our information pie hole.  Up until the advent of the Internet, the screen was one-way.   Now, the screen is a two-way street to the hive mind.  As I type this, I’ve got Lala.com open in another window playing “Boom” by P.o.d.  If I wanted, I could open Netflix, Amazon Unbox or Hulu, and watch old-style TV shows.  Also, I wanted, I could use my webcam and send video back into the system.

But my question still remains:  Will there ever be a better invention than television as a communication’s tool?  When my Nanny was little, the newspaper was the only form of mass communication.  News from around the world was slow and sparse.  And it had no immediacy. 

By the time my mother was born in 1916, radio was beginning to replace the newspaper as the media of mass communication.  To obtain a glimmer of this mind-blowing this transformation was,  I can only recommend watching Empire of the Air, a Ken Burns documentary, which is easily found on Netflix.  But if you want a much deeper insight, find the out-of-print book by Tom Lewis that the show is based on.  The effort will be worth it.  Radio is really the audio portion of television, and network the world in the first half of the 20th century.

Television is older than most people think – the technology begun to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s, slowly gained success in the late 1940s, and then blasted-off into the Leave it to Beaver world of the 1950s.  Many people think of life before the 1960s as black and white, because of old movies and TV shows, and think it was the psychedelic sixties when reality took on Technicolor hues.  Now that we spy on reality in 1080p, I bet future writers will look on the second half of the 20th century as being the fuzzy years. 

Radio allowed millions of people to have a shared experience.  Now that’s leaving Kansas for Oz.  Television expanded on the power of radio, so routinely tens of millions, and on extreme occasions, hundreds of millions, have shared a single historical event.  What next invention can top that?

Cell phones are having their impact, now that they are becoming universal, and Apple and its iPhone are pushing the envelope by evolving its invention into a pocket television, because the iPhone is only another form of a TV screen.  And as humanity evolves towards those higher beings in WALL-E, sitting on their moving recliners with their faces glued to TV screens, seeing the world not with their eyes, but their television, I can imagine it as the ultimate addiction.

Writing, and its descendent, the book, was the asynchronous form of mass communication that took over the world.  Radio synchronized people’s lives.  Television brought that synchronized communication to our major sense organ, the eyes, and it has dominated the communication landscape ever since.  Can it be topped?  I suppose scientists could invent some kind of machine that could broadcast reality directly into our brains, bypassing the screen, but I tend to doubt it.  If they could, we could live like the billions in The Matrix, never knowing if we’d taken the red or blue pill.

Such inventions are a long way off, so what could geek science invent before then?  TV eye-glasses already exist.  The goal is to fool the eyes, but despite fantasy shows like Caprica, there are some major limitations to virtual reality.  As long as the viewer just watches we can create better and better ways to view distant reality.  But if the viewer wants to interact with virtual reality they quickly face limitations.  It’s like waking dreams, if you try to manipulate them, they fall apart.

We can create virtual worlds like Second Life, but no matter how sophisticated such worlds get, will they ever be better than televised views of our reality?  Think of the difference between ABC World News Tonight, the latest Star Trek film and Up, a current animated film.  One shows scenes from around the world, one shows real actors mixed into CGI scenery, and the last is total animation.  Cartoons have always been a staple of TV, but would you want to live inside one.  Well, hell yes, for short times.  So virtual reality is one candidate to supplant TV.

This means, in the decades to come, there will be kids growing up with virtual reality as part of their lives, and old farts like me will be telling them stories about life without virtual reality.  How significant will be their cultural paradigm shift?  What if every day you could walk through a different art museum from cities all over the world, but without taking any flights?  How close could virtual reality get at showing the details of each painting?  What if we had the technology to scan each canvas so it was equal to looking at it from 2 inches away with our eyes, with the choices of various wavelengths of light, and the choice of having the light source come from 8 different directions.  Would that beat standing in front of the actual masterpiece?

I’ve always wanted to see Paris, but a phobia against claustrophobic transatlantic flights keeps me from going.  What if I could wear a helmet, recline in my La-Z-Boy, and walk the streets of Paris every night for an hour.  That would be television too, unless I got beyond the sense of viewing reality through a 2D screen.

We have to think about the holistic nature of television.  Television means vision at a distance, with the implied implication we’ll also get sound.  Writing and books, were information at a distance too.  Photograph and movies were the precursor to television.  All are based on 2D transmission.  Something better than television will have to be 3D.  Thus if I use this new invention and feel like I’m sitting in a room at MIT hearing a lecture or walking on Mars, then that will be a major step forward over 2D television at a distance.

Science fiction has been exploring such ideas for decades, and it has  taken that speculation even further with the concept of downloading, which is recording our minds and putting them into computers.  How far will reality ever get to catching up with science fiction is open to debate, but I do think VR goggles or helmets will probably be common in the near future, maybe before I die, and I will play the role of Nanny when talking to children who spend most of their time with their heads in VR helmets.

But at a personal level, what do I want from television and its possible replacements?  This is where things get philosophically interesting.  We use television for entertainment, vicarious thrills and gathering information.  What that implies is our brains are bored with our existing location in time and space and we want to fool them into believing we are located in a different time and space.  For centuries books were the technology we applied to this simple quest.  Intellectuals will claim that reading Pride and Prejudice is superior to watching one of the many 2D screen versions, but the details of a televised version are so vastly richer to our senses.

I know lots of people who shun TV screens, either the broadcast kind or the computer kind.  They live among family, friends and pets, pursuing hobbies and enjoying nature.  They live in the now, like all good Zen monks teach, but I’m not one of those kinds of people.  I grew up on television that has conditioned my mind to want to constantly teleport via 2D screens to distant places, real and imaginary.  Is that good or bad?  A world without television is like being an ant and not knowing how big reality really is compared to the little environment in which I crawl.  Does knowing matter?  I think so.

Thus, I’m sure if a better invention than television came around, I’d jump on it, if it allowed me to teleport with more details.  But there are other things to consider.  I’ll put this into an analogy that horny young men will understand so clearly, and be just as obvious to people who aren’t horny young men.  Which is better, a real live naked woman, or a naked woman on HBO?

JWH – 6/13/9

Heinlein’s 13th Scribner’s Novel

There are legions of Robert A. Heinlein fans out there that grew up reading the 12 canonical Heinlein young adult novels published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in the 1940s and 1950s, that if we were ever given three magical wishes would use our first wish to get the 13th novel.  Many science fiction writers have tried to write that 13th Scribner’s novel hoping to pay it forward for the immense rewards they were given from reading the original 12 Heinlein juveniles, as they are now called.

In 2003 the Heinlein estate gave Spider Robinson the chance to write that 13th juvenile based on an outline and note cards Heinlein had developed in 1955.  In 2006 Variable Star came out with Robert A. Heinlein as the first author and Spider Robinson as the second printed boldly across the top of the cover.  I immediately bought the hardcover edition thinking I’d read it as soon as it arrived from Amazon, but I didn’t.  I wanted it to be the 13th Scribner’s, but feared it wouldn’t.   It’s taken me two and a half years to get ready.

Over the decades I have read many essays by all kinds of people explaining how their lives were affected and even shaped by reading the twelve Heinlein juveniles.  Spider Robinson wasn’t specifically tasked to write the 13th, and he even explains in the afterward that he was given leeway to write pretty much anything he wanted, but I feel from reading the results that he wanted to write another Heinlein juvenile.  Since Robinson includes profanity, sex and drugs, we know he wasn’t seriously writing a novel that Alice Dalgleish, Heinlein’s editor, would have accepted back in the 1950s.

On the other hand, there is so much Heinlein in Variable Star that it is obvious that Robinson does want to write a novel that Heinlein fans will love, and maybe even praise as a novel that Heinlein would have written.  This is a dangerous task to take on.  What if you were a writer and William Shakespeare’s estate asked you to write a new play that they could sell to the fans of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet?  I think Robinson intentionally hedged his bets and put enough of his known style and favorite topics into Variable Star so if reviews were really bad he could claim he wasn’t crazy enough to imitate Heinlein completely.  But this book is stuffed to gills with Heinlein cliches.

I am 57 years old and I still try to understand why those twelve Heinlein books imprinted so strongly on my adolescent psychology.  It is enticing to think about Heinlein’s formula.  And it would be a fun challenge to analyze those 1950s books and try and recreate updated versions of them for the 2010s.  So here’s a quick overview what I think were his essential ingredients:

  • All the books are about boys of high school age
  • In most of the stories the boys are free of parental control
  • Girls and romance are not part of the story
  • No sex or profanity
  • All the stories involve outer space travel
  • Most of the stories involve exotic aliens
  • Success depends on the boys and their talent
  • Science, math and engineering are of supreme importance
  • Violence is often a solution
  • Great things can happen to kids if they are ready

Robinson breaks several of these points in Variable Star.  Joel Johnston has finished junior college and wants to get married.  He drinks, gets high, has sex, and he and his friends cuss.  But if Robinson had jettison the insanely stupid romantic plot, cut the boozing, drugs and cussing, this book could have been very much like a Heinlein juvenile.  Robinson appears to be as romantically tone deaf as Heinlein.  Many of Heinlein’s later books had characters wanting to get married ten minutes after they meet, and Robinson’s writing follows later Heinlein in dealing with the same silly male and female relationships.  Both write romances that feel like they were written by eleven year old girls trying to write about sex and love.

Variable Star is not the 13th Scribner’s juvenile by Robert A. Heinlein.  Alice Dalgleish would have wanted to edit out Heinlein’s reproductive organs if he had submitted this novel to her back in 1955.  I will admit Variable Star had many of Heinlein’s pet ideas from the time period, and the novel is somewhat structured like a Heinlein juvenile, but it’s more of a structural copy of Starship Troopers, because both are essentially one long first person monologue.  I love Starship Troopers and have read it many times.  Heinlein was at his best talking straight to the reader with Starship Troopers.  It’s a very hard writing style to pull off, and he never got away with it again, at least in my opinion.  Sadly, it’s the number one fault of Variable Star.  Since I listened to the book on audio it was all too obvious how much the narrator told the reader information and how little came through real dramatic action.  I wished Robinson had copied the more restrained and dramatic first person style of Time for the Stars.

Heinlein was great on coming up with far out science fictional ideas, but he was a damn poor writer when it came to dramatic scenes and plot, and Robinson marches right along in his footsteps.  For all the wrath Heinlein fans give poor Alice Dalgleish, I feel she kept Heinlein from boring his readers.  Alice Dalgleish is an evil woman among Heinlein’s true fans for censoring the master’s words, but I don’t think she deserves their scorn, nor does she deserve the evil portrayal of her as Alice Dahl in Variable Star.  To me grumbling from the grave is just whining after you’re dead.  Google Alice Dalgleish, she’s rather obscure, but she had a major impact on children’s literature.  Heinlein fans should worship her for giving them twelve cherished books from the leading American literary publisher of the time, that won all kinds of awards for their children’s line, were these books were published.

Most of the juveniles are stories written in the first person, heavy with info dumps, but they were kept under control, probably by Alice, and in the juveniles the info dumps were just long enough to teach and inspire kids without sounding like lectures.  Later Heinlein and in Variable Star, all too often the story comes to a complete stop so the author can pontificate.

Variable Star should have been published with only Spider Robinson’s name on the cover.  Many of my criticisms of the book would have been removed if that had been the case.  Of course we’re all savvy enough to know that writers estate’s want to maximize their profits by pulling various literary gimmicks.  If Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name on the cover, but with an intro about how he was given the Heinlein outline and note cards in a forward I would have had much more respect for the estate.

Since I bought the book in hardcover and audio, I also feel cheated that neither edition contained the actual Heinlein outline and notes.  I would have had much more respect for the Heinlein estate if they allowed Robinson to publish that working outline and notes in the back of Variable Star.  The book is a gimmick, and we should be allowed to see how good Robinson was at playing the game.  Also, with Heinlein’s name on the cover, we should have gotten some actual Heinlein words.

Now if Variable Star had been published with only Robinson’s name, and no mention of Heinlein at all, and I read the book for its own merits then my judgment would be totally different.  I think the book has many serious literary flaws, but it also has some fantastic science fictional speculation.  If I had read Variable Star as a book with no link to Heinlein on the cover, or within, I still would have thought it was inspired by Heinlein and figured Robinson is one of his literary descendents.  And I would have called him out on several 1950s Heinlein ideas that I feel are invalid for science fiction written after the year 1988.

Using telepaths for ship to Earth communication on slower than light spaceships following all of Einstein’s rules was a far out idea when Heinlein did it in his book Time for the Stars.  And from what Robinson said about the various names Heinlein considered for Variable Star I’m guessing he didn’t use that outline because Time for the Stars is the book he wanted to write with those ideas.  Since science has thoroughly trashed the concept of telepathy in humans in the succeeding decades it’s rather silly to bring back the idea.  ESP is only suitable for fantasy stories, not modern science fiction.

Science has also killed many other Heinlein ideas from the 1950s, like farming on Ganymede, people being able to do astrogation calculations in their head, and faster than light travel.  For Robinson to have near light speed travel, much less FTL, he has to resort to mystical mumbo-jumbo of the silliest kind.  Now I don’t fault Spider Robinson too much on this though.

Diehard Heinlein true believers have total faith that FTL travel is possible even though they are reduced to counting the number of FTL drives that can fit on the head of a pin.  Their religious faith depends on science finding a way around all the physics we currently know today.  I’m willing to concede there may be a God, Heaven and Hell, life after death and faster than light travel, but the odds are about equal for all of them.  I try not to be too critical about people’s deepest desires, but if Robinson wanted to write a cutting edge 2006 science fiction novel he should have stuck to all the rules of known science today.

Now it might seem like I’m totally trashing this novel as unworthy of reading, and I don’t want to do that.  I think Variable Star does have some merits, some even equal to the sense of wonder of the 1950s Heinlein juveniles, but I can’t discuss them in detail without spoiling the story.  There is a core tragedy that if the novel had been written differently could have made this novel into a major SF classic.  This part of the novel made me feel totally satisfied with my purchase, even counting that I bought the book twice.  Sadly, I consider it a shame that these great elements were stuck inside a gimmick novel.

Robinson narrated the audio book and did a great job.  Usually I don’t like audio books read by their authors.  He also includes an afterwards that makes me really like him, so I hate to be critical.  We’re both lovers of Heinlein’s juveniles, which I consider a stronger bond than blood relationship.  However, I’m not like many of the spiritual children of Heinlein because I rebelled against the old man.  Many of my Heinlein brothers and sisters hate me for the things I say about Heinlein’s later books.

The true believers raise their hackles at any criticism of Heinlein.  I had a different take on the old man.  Heinlein preached science, and the lesson I learned from him is go with what’s logical and real.  Heinlein threw out many hypothetical ideas to research.  Most didn’t pan out, no big deal.  Science moves on.  Heinlein always believed mankind was the toughest varmint in this neck of the galaxy, and you can’t be tough living in your naval gazing on fantasies.

Variable Star’s many faults remind me of later Heinlein, and I can almost imagine a much older Heinlein writing Variable Star trying to recapture his glory days at Scribner’s.  I think Robinson missed the mark at writing the 13th juvenile but still came very close to writing a Heinlein like novel.  This can be seen as praise and insult, since I think later Heinlein is a bloated parody of younger Heinlein.  I truly hate stories like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls where Heinlein dredged up cherished characters I loved in adolescence turning them into silly kissy-kissy wife-swapping swingers.  I give Robinson great credit for not doing this.  Robinson is far more liberal than Heinlein, and I admired those liberal qualities in Variable Star, but I wonder what Heinlein would have thought though.

This is going to sound weird, but those twelve Heinlein juvenile novels from the 1950s are sacred to me.  As much as I would love to read another one I can’t.  The world of 2009 is too different.   Heinlein vastly improved my troubled childhood with his stories, and I will always love them, but I had to grow up.  I don’t think anyone can write the 13th 1950s Heinlein Scribner’s novel in 2009.  I think Alexei Panshin came closest with his 1968 novel Rite of Passage but that novel worked because I was still in my teens.  Maybe a 2009 teenager will find Variable Star just as magical as I found Time for the Stars all those years ago.  I think that’s possible.  But for us old Heinlein fans, I don’t know.

If I was going to write a series of young adult science fiction novels for the 2010s, that I hoped would be as inspirational as the 1950s Heinlein stories had been for me, I think they should include these elements:

  • The lead characters could be boys or girls
  • The main character would still be high school age kids who find some way to live independent of their parents
  • Science, math and engineering would still be vitally important
  • I would accept the importance of sex and romance in these stories because realistically sex and romance is a huge part of teenage life, but the primary subject of the story would be sense of wonder and the future
  • I’m not sure what role violence would play
  • I could skip profanity, although I think editors accept it now in young adult novels
  • Success of the plot would still depend on the kids
  • Nearly all the ideas Heinlein had about space travel have turned out to be wrong, so it would be vitally important to invent new realistic explorations of space that kids could evaluate

This is where Robinson really missed the boat with Variable Star.  By focusing on Heinlein’s peak ideas he seems to have forgotten they are over a half century old.  Heinlein speculated about many things that we’ve since come to realize as completely wrong.  Kids can’t built atomic rockets that take them to the Moon.  There is no intelligent life on Venus and Mars.  Just the radiation will keep us from farming Ganymede.  And all the forms of space travel Heinlein envisioned are no more realistic than Tinkerbell’s fairy dust as a mode of transportation.

Just because science has outpaced science fiction doesn’t mean those twelve Heinlein juveniles aren’t great stories, still readable today.  They have just migrated to the world of lovable childhood fantasy stories.  The job of the next Heinlein is to write speculative fiction based on the science we know today.  Like I said, there are some core elements of Variable Star that does this, unfortunately Robinson ruins it with a fantasy invention that fits in a plot that’s based on a sequence of way too many coincidences to be believable.  I’ve read that Robinson has gotten the go ahead to write three sequels to this book.  I would have loved to read those books if they were based on Variable Star’s core problem, and if the book from chapter 19 on had been different.

The idea of developing many colonized worlds through slower-than-light travel is excellent speculative matter for current science fiction.  Having the main event of chapter 17 affect those worlds is another great idea for science fiction to explore.  But the story needs to do it without telepathy or breaking the speed limits imposed on information.  That would be a far out story worthy of many books.

Finally, hey Spider, one mention that a door dilates is cool homage to Beyond This Horizon, mentioned over and over again is just story stopping agony.  One unbelievable coincidence in a novel is forgivable, but one per chapter is authorial suicide.

JWH – 4/25/9

Science Fiction Classics on Audible.com

I read hundreds of science fiction books during my teenage years growing up in the 1960s.  Adolescence, rock music and science fiction came together in a perfect storm during that epic time.  What’s even more far out is how much fun I’m having rereading those books again in my fifties, but this time around I’m listening to them as audio books.  I’ve discovered that you really don’t love a book unless you read it several times over a lifetime, and I can’t emphasize this enough, you can’t really appreciate a book until you’ve both read and listened to it.  Inputting words through the eyes and ears are completely different ways to boot your brain into experiencing the full potential of fiction.

Many people have told me they can’t listen to audio books.  Well, audio book listening takes practice, just like reading.  And if you are like me, getting too comfortable with eyeball reading can be dangerous because it’s all too easy to get into eye track ruts.

It’s taken many years for publishers to start cranking out science fiction on audio.  Steve Feldberg over at Audible.com has been doing a bang up job of getting new audio book science fiction titles for his company.  I look at Audible’s new releases every day anxiously awaiting to see what new titles will show up, especially books from the Classics of Science Fiction list.

Recently More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon hit the New Releases page and I’m listening to it now.  It’s nothing like what I remember reading 40+ years ago.  I now feel like Sturgeon is the Faulkner of science fiction.  I just finished The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov that I considered a mildly fun, but mostly boring robot novel as a teen.  This time around I’m stunned by how good it is.  Time travel has always been a staple of science fiction, but time traveling backwards through my reading life is almost as much fun as having a real time machine, I kid you not.

On the Classics of Science Fiction list, three books tie for the #1 spot, by being on 25 out of 28 recommended lists:

  • The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
  • Dune by Frank Herbert
  • More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

I’ll put the titles available on Audible.com in bold.  Dune is now out in its second audio book edition, so I’m mighty glad to see More Than Human, but I’m wondering when The Demolished Man will show up.

Four books share the #2 spot by being on 24 out of 28 lists.

  • The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
  • Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

Sadly, Audible only offers an old abridged version of Foundation, but I know that Books on Tape has all three books of the trilogy plus Prelude to Foundation and their titles do show up on Audible eventually.  The book I want to see most here is The Left Hand of Darkness, but Stand on Zanzibar and A Canticle for Leibowitz are books I’d buy immediately too.

There are three books tied for third (23 lists):

  • Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
  • The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
  • The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

Audible streaks through here.  I profoundly enjoyed listening Childhood’s End recently.

Only one title holds the 4th place (on 22 lists):

  • The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

At 5th place on 21 lists are:

  • The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
  • The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Ringworld by Larry Niven
  • The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth

I’m most anxious hear the Bester and Le Guin.  I read The Space Merchants last year and I was rather disappointed with it, so I’m not sure if it would sell well with an audio edition, although with the right reader, the satire and humor might jump out and make it more appealing.  Audible has 19 Le Guin audio books, just not her two most famous.

In 6th place on 20 lists are:

  • Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
  • The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • City by Clifford Simak

I can vouch for the Dick and Simak, both authors really shine through on audio.  In fact, listening to PKD’s weird imaginary worlds is the best way to do get PKDicked.  I can’t believe Hal Clement isn’t on audio.

Lucky seventh place brings in seven titles (19 lists):

  • The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
  • Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
  • To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer
  • The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  • Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • Gateway by Frederik Pohl

I’m hoping to listen to Rama and Scattered Bodies soon.  And I hope Steve Feldberg finds Gateway because it was the novel that brought me back to science fiction after I gafiated for a decade.

Coming in 8th place are three novels (18 lists):

  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
  • The World of Null-A by A. E. Van Vogt

Fahrenheit 451 is a beautiful novel for bookworms to read and it’s especially appropriate to listen to because it lets you imagine trying to memorize it.  I don’t have much hope for the other two books getting on audio because they have a reputation for being hard to get into, but audio book editions might make them more accessible.

In ninth place we get five more titles (17 lists):

  • The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss
  • A Case of Conscience by James Blish
  • The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  • Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg

Of these, I’m most looking forward to the Aldiss.  That’s one trippy novel.   I listened to A Case of Conscience over the Christmas holidays and enjoyed it.  It makes a great companion book to Childhood’s End, because they both deal with religion.

Rounding out 10th place with seven books bringing the grand total to the Top 40 (16 lists):

  • Timescape by Gregory Benford
  • A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  • Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch
  • Way Station by Clifford Simak
  • Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
  • Slan by A. E. Van Vogt
  • The Humanoids by Jack Vance

Timescape is an elegant quiet novel that works very well on audio.  Way Station’s moody pastoral setting also works well on audio.  Again, I’ll be surprised to ever hear an audio edition of Stapledon.  I’m looking forward to Slan, which I’ll probably listen to soon, it should be a nice companion listen to More Than Human.  I listened to The Humanoids years ago and was impressed.  Now that I’m on a robot kick I should relisten to it.  Both Clockwork and Concentration are bleak novels that I might not get into the mood to hear for years.  I think I prefer the positive sense of wonder SF of the 1950s and 1960s right now.

There are 153 more books on the Classics of SF list, many of which are on audio.  There are four Samuel R. Delany novels, none of which have had audio editions that I’d love to hear.  I’m reading Babel-17 for the fourth time and I really ache to hear it, and it’s companion short novel, Empire Star, but I’m also very anxious to hear Nova, The Einstein Intersection and Dhalgren.

Other books from Audible that’s on the Classics of Science Fiction list:

  • Frankenstein
  • Lord of Light
  • A Princess of Mars
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
  • Out of the Silent Planet
  • I, Robot
  • Starship Troopers
  • Ubik
  • Sirens of Titan
  • Slaughterhouse Five
  • Startide Rising
  • Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion
  • The Caves of Steal
  • Journey to the Center of the Earth
  • Double Star
  • Blood Music
  • Gray Lensmen
  • Ender’s Game
  • The Big Time
  • The Illustrated Man
  • Red Mars
  • Doomsday Book

And many many more.

Probably everyone has a favorite science fiction novel they’d love to hear on audio.  Be sure and join Audible and go to their Contact Us page and click on the content request link.  I put in 7 books in 2003 and just notice that I got 5 of my wishes over the years.

JWH – 3/10/9