Sunday, January 16, 2011

Insanity and Happy Frankensteins

Things are ticking along pretty well over at the Locus Blog. We've had some good posts and comments already, and there's even more interesting stuff developing behind the scenes. So I thought I'd come up for air and toss off some impressions about more stories from the SFWA Hall of Fame Volume I, edited by Robert Silverberg. I talked about the first two stories back in November, "A Martian Odyssey" and "Twilight."

The next two are "Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey and "Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon (skipping "The Roads Must Roll" by Heinlein since I had read it several times before). "Helen O'Loy" is a story I had read about but never read before. It's usually mentioned, as in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, as "One very obvious example of early sf's masculinist orientation..." Can't really argue with that. This guy builds the 'perfect woman' robot. He eventually falls in love with her, runs away with her, and lives out his life happily with her. At the end of his life, she kills herself so that no one will ever know she wasn't real. To say that this hasn't aged well is an understatement. A woman who literally exists for no other reason than to love and care for a man, where this is presented (mostly) as a positive, is just really creepy. Also, there's an aspect of what I'll call 'easy insanity' in this story as in many others from this period. The narrator suspects that towards the end, Helen's husband had simply forgotten that she wasn't human, and the narrator helps her keep up the illusion of aging. I might add that lots of people go conveniently and interestingly insane in these stories--I feel like that trope isn't quite so common these days.

"Microcosmic God" (1941) is one of the stories that will really stick with me from this anthology. When contrasted with Greg Egan's "Crystal Nights" (2008) it is especially chilling. The protagonist of Sturgeon's story is James Kidder, a self-made multi-millionaire who is good at everything he does. He goes to live on a private island to develop whatever sci-tech niftiness he sees fit. Eventually his banker (and only connection to the rest of the world) gets greedy and goes gunning for the golden goose. Kidder has been evolving a species of intelligent beings. He keeps them contained and forces them to evolve by presenting them with threats. He occasionally kills off some of them randomly to keep them from getting complacent. He makes sure that they can never survive in Earth's normal environment. When he gets attacked by the banker's forces (let's not think about that too closely), he directs the colony to invent an impenetrable force field, which they do. He is able to live out his life entirely in isolation after that.

I kept waiting for the colony to tell him to shove it and use their epic problem solving skills to escape and leave him hanging out to dry. Because that's pretty much what the beings did in Egan's story. Egan also has a self-made billionaire creating artificial life, only these are in a computer simulation. He also is using them to solve problems, although he wants them to investigate more about the nature of the universe. He also tortures them to get them to evolve: especially when he realizes that pain makes them evolve faster. In the end, hearkening back to sf's gothic roots (Frankenstein), they turn on him in a very satisfying way. To have Sturgeon's Kidder and Helen O'Loy's creator avoid the fate of all those other Dr. Frankensteins was jarring and quite disturbing. It seemed like some sort of ultra-colonialist hubris. Perhaps it's an indication of just how cocky and confident the Golden Age writers were that they thought that heroes could do things like this and not suffer any consequences for it. No wonder some people got all huffy when the New Wave came along and reminded them that the world isn't usually quite so accommodating.

That's not to say that the Sturgeon story isn't well written, I should mention. I'd put it in the top tier of stories here when judged by writing style (a tier in which I'd also include Heinlein, Blish, Keyes, and Cordwainer Smith). I also thought that this story was thoroughly thought-out and coherently executed in a way that "Baby is Three," the Sturgeon story in Volume IIa of the same series, wasn't.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Early Hugo Thoughts

So the nomination period for the Hugos is open, and already folks are talking about what's eligible, what's good, etc. As usual, I am woefully behind on my reading-of-novels-that-were-published-in-2010. I am not so ill-informed when it comes to short fiction, and my picks for the Hugo noms in the short categories will get a separate post later. But when it comes to novels, I think that my strategy will be to nominate books that I really want to read, so that I'll have an excuse to read them when they're nominated. (I'm usually very good at reading all the nominees between April and June.) So right now, my list looks something like this:

  • Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor
  • Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi
  • Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay
  • The Dervish House, Ian MacDonald
  • How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu
Or something along those lines.

I'm also wondering if I can't raise Niall Harrison's profile a smidge and help maybe get him nominated for Best Fan Writer. He got 22 votes last year, only 7 below the cut-off for the category, and I dare say that his 2010 work on Torque Control should easily convince anyone that he's a worthy nominee. Also, as he'll probably be moving more firmly into the Editor camp in 2011, having taken over as editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons, it may be that 2010 is the best possible year to get him a nod for Fan Writer. So I just want to remind anyone with a Hugo nominating ballot to consider him as one of your nominees, thanks!