Sunday, April 21, 2013

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (3.5 stars)

This was the perfect story for its 1974 publication date. It's a deeply critical anti-war book that presents the futility of war, it's impact on society, the struggles veterans have re-integrating, and the dubious motivations for conflict in the first place. While it is a well-written, strong novel, I doubt if it was published today it would have had a chance of creating the same deep resonance with readers or sweeping the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards as it did in 1975/1976.

Haldeman's world where the intellectual elite are forced into military service in a war with little relevance to the general population, apart from economic stimulus and justification for martial law, is a great contrast to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
But this war...the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional - more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth's economy would collapse.
Haldeman also applies relativity in interesting ways. Imagine sending ships into space to travel a massive distance at close to the speed of light, then faster than light through a collapsar Stargate, then spend a few weeks at 2 gravities decelerating to the battlefield. By the time the starship gets to the enemy, they may have had hundreds of years to develop their technology and prepare defences. But the same applies in reverse if they want to attack a human base.
You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference.
You could imagine the social disconnect of returning to Earth after several hundred years have passed. Haldeman uses relativity to create an exaggerated allegory to the disconnect Vietnam vets felt on returning to the US as it was undergoing a period of significant social change.
Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.
It's a powerful novel with a theme that will probably continue to be relevant forever, sadly. Haldeman could easily be talking about the war in Iraq in this passage:
You couldn't blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans' having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored. The fact was, Earth's economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unity humanity rather than dividing it.
3.5 stars.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (3 stars)

Slaughterhouse Five is a Sci-Fi classic: it was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula and often appears on top 100 novels lists. Its plot is non-linear. Billy Pilgrim has 'come unstuck in time' and jumps randomly around in his own lifetime. Vonnegut draws on his own personal experience of the Dresden bombings to write an absurdist, satirical account from Pigrim's point of view as an American POW in Dresden at the time of the bombings.

So you might be thinking that apart from the time travel, this doesn't sound very sci-fi. But don't worry, Billy is kidnapped by aliens from Tralfamadore and spends his days having sex with a similarly-kidnapped porn star, which is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. The sex seems to be the most commonly cited reason for it being in the top 100 banned and challenged novels of the 20th century.

Is it funny? It actually is, and there are a lot of quotable quotes. Stylistically it felt a lot like Catch-22, but not as clever, and not as razor sharp with the satire. It's a short novel, written in simple language but touching on complex ideas, which means it is a part of the syllabus for many high-schools.

Honestly I was fairly underwhelmed. Perhaps the non-linear timeline was revolutionary in 1969, but there are plenty of modern novels that have used this device in more compelling ways. Vonnegut may have been trying to use Billy's inability to control his place in time as allegory for our ability to avoid all wars:
Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
So definitely some credit for making me think. I'd place Slaughterhouse Five somewhere between Catch-22 and a Gene Wolfe novel. Not clearly anti-war, not clearly batshit insane.

I also watched the movie, which I'm frankly amazed got made in the first place.  I think some of the abrupt time flips work better in the movie than they do in the book, but I think almost all of the comedic value was lost in translation.  I bet most people watching the movie didn't even realise it was supposed to be a comedy.

I'll leave you with some of the great lines from the book.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
...
All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet.
...
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

And so it goes. 3 stars.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Nexus by Ramez Naam (3.5 stars)

Ramez Naam is an ex-Microsoft project manager who has written a non-fiction book about the possibilities of biotechnology and brain-computer interfaces, and extended those ideas even further into the future as a fictional account in Nexus. The ideas are fascinating.

In his authors@google talk, Naam talks about the requirements for 'Google in your brain': data in, data out, encoding/decoding, multiple data types, safe/secure/deployable. He makes a convincing case that we have very primitive forms of data i/o, encoding/decoding and multiple data types (audio, video) today in the form of medical devices like the Cochlear implant and primitive computer-assisted vision for the blind. Advances in computing power, miniaturisation, and communications are going to enable even more powerful functionality in the future.

Naam explores the possibilities of networked, customisable human brains from many different angles. There's the cyberpunk crowd that wants to have raves where you experience the emotions of everyone around you, the Buddists who meditate for hours as a single focused mind, various governments who want to limit access to the technology but also use it to boost the capabilities of their soldiers and armies, cults whose leaders use it as a form of mind control, and all manner of other criminal/illegal/unethical things that are possible when you can control someone else's mind.

So the ideas are brilliant, the science is great, and Naam's technology background is present everywhere: I certainly can't think of another novel where 'stack trace' was used correctly, or a compiler hack described complete with a Ken Thompson reference.

Unfortunately the novel is weakened by an over-abundance of action fight scenes, guns, explosions, and just general Michael Bay-ness. The opening sequence when Kade uses a pick-up line program followed by a pornstar program was ridiculous, and read like a teenage programmer's fantasy: if only I could write a program to get girls! Just need some sleazy lines and some porno moves! I was more convinced by the Bruce Lee program as a sort-of crude predecessor to Keanu's "I know Kung-Fu" moment in the matrix in the more distant fictional future.

As a Bay Area resident I liked the local references, and the party in Hangar 3 at Moffett. The ability of multiple cooperating governments to suppress important information despite the massive connectivity and diversity of the Internet was also an interesting case study for the future.
Broad dissemination and individual choice turn most technologies into a plus. If only the elites have access, it's a dystopia.
If you like action novels, you'll probably love this. Personally, I'd rather Naam and China MiƩville took some Nexus 5, joined their minds, and re-wrote this as a dark techno underground thriller :)

3.5 stars