July
19,
2004
When I’ve heard about James Blish’s A Case of Conscience
in the past, it’s usually been in comparison to Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. It’s fairly obvious why — both of them deal with a Jesuit on a first-contact mission to an alien planet that is not quite what it first appears — but beyond that (admittedly thorough) superficial resemblance, these are vastly different books.
For one thing, Blish’s book was written in the 1950s, which has
certain consequences. First, it’s short. People who grew up reading
novels of this length often bitch about modern novels being bloated
and padded, but I’ve more often felt that older, short novels don’t
have enough time to develop and consequently feel hurried. Happily,
A Case of Conscience is an exception to this rule — it feels
precisely as long as it needs to be, and makes The Sparrow feel
tediously padded in comparison.
The second effect of having been written long ago is that it’s
inevitably dated. I’m not a biologist, but the biology here sounds
screwy even to me (”recapitulation” as a serious theory, for
instance). Fortunately, this isn’t a novel where the science is front
and center, so having some oddly quaint theories tossed into the mix
adds period flavor rather than destroying the novel’s core. But what
is at the core of the novel is Catholic theology, and as the novel
predates Vatican II, its theology is perhaps even quainter than its
science.
It’s not so much the obsolete points of doctrine that stand out as
unmodern, it’s the entire religious worldview of the Jesuit
protagonist. Most sympathetic religious characters in modern fiction
(including Russell’s protagonist) have personal religions. They
agonize over their own belief and action, they worry about their own
salvation, they struggle against their own temptation. But Blish’s
Jesuit has a more tangible and outward-facing doctrine: When he needs
to make a decision on a government mission, he makes it solely on
religious grounds; his beliefs about the aliens are shaped entirely by
theology; and in general, he views the very framework of the universe
through an obtrusively religious lens. The net effect of this, oddly
enough, is to make him feel more plausibly like an inhabitant of a
strange future, because he’s not much like the people of today.
A Case of Conscience is certainly not a perfect book — it’s
got some plot flaws, its characters jump to plot-appropriate
conclusions too quickly, and some of the background is implausible
fifty years after it was written — but it’s a very good one, and
there’s precious little fifty-year-old SF about which that can be
said. This is a classic of the genre that holds up shockingly well
today, and deserves to be more widely read than it is.
| :::
July
18,
2004
Imagine for a moment that you’re reading a book where the protagonist stumbles across a gate in the back of his house, which opens onto an alternate world uninhabited by man and populated by mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Starting from that premise, which of the following plots sounds the most intriguing to you?
- An adventure story: The protagonist goes through the gate, and explores this mysterious new world, encountering peril and danger and perhaps unearthing deep mysteries.
- A gadget story: The protagonist studies the gate to find out how it works, encounters deep mysteries, and explores the ramifications of the technology in unexpected and novel ways.
- A logistics story: The protagonist incuriously decides that the best thing to do is exploit the new world for mining gold, and proceeds to plan out the complex-yet-dull details of doing so, holding forth on such fascinating details as where to get health insurance for his employees, the legal benefits of doing business as a limited-liability corporation, and the construction-related difficulties of setting up a base on the other side of the gate.
If you picked the third option, then a) I feel sorry for you, as modern literature has mostly ignored your tastes, and b) boy howdy, is Steven Gould’s Wildside
the book for you.
I picked up Wildside because I moderately enjoyed Gould’s Jumper, which is one of those ordinary-person-gets-magical-new-ability novels, and was interested in reading what I figured would be a light adventure story. I couldn’t reasonably have predicted how tedious Wildside would be — you’d think that if you had a portal to a savage and wild land, you could do something interesting with it, but for the first 100+ pages of this book, we see one interesting event, tops; the rest of that space is filled in with tedious logistical details.
It gets better at the end, thankfully. About halfway through, the characters finally start getting curious about things and engaging in interesting plot activities instead of time-killing filler; but it never gets good enough to make up for the tedium that preceded it. If you enjoy books that start out incredibly dull and get readable in the second half, you can throw Wildside on your pile of idiosyncratic favorites along with Robert Jordan’s Winter’s Heart; if you prefer your books to not-suck through their entire length, though, you can skip it.
| :::
July
14,
2004
Either you’ve read some David Sedaris essays or you haven’t. If you have, you’ll want to know how David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
compares to his other stuff; if you haven’t, you’ll want to know if it’s worth reading at all.
To the latter group, I have a simple answer: If you have a good sense of humor (by which I mean, as per standard usage, that you laugh at roughly the same things I do), yes. Sedaris is one of the funniest essayists I’ve read, and I’m frequently reduced to helpless laughter-spasms.
To the former group, I quibble a little bit. I think Me Talk Pretty One Day is better, largely because its essays are each longer. (Me Talk Pretty is also where I’d recommend starting for a new Sedaris reader, because it is his best stuff.) Other than that, though, Dress Your Family is right up there with the best of his stuff, and not a sign of incipient descent into unfunniness. So that’s good.
Parenthetically and only quasi-relatedly, I’ll add that this is the rare book that might be improved by being turned into an audio-book. Sedaris is a great comedic reader, whose use of tone, timing, and dialect make funny material into incredibly funny material. Given a choice between a written version and a spoken version, choose the latter.
| :::
July
11,
2004
Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion
picks up right where Quicksilver left off — or, at any rate, some amount of time after that point; Stephenson enjoys the skip-ahead-and-backfill technique, which is hell on forgetful readers like me. (”Should I recognize that happening, or is he remembering this for the first time?”) At any rate, though, it continues the adventures of Eliza, Waterhouse, Leibniz, and various Shaftoes; but where Quicksilver blew me away, The Confusion leaves me a bit more... well, confused.
I can’t point to any part of this book that’s clearly worse than the first, and some parts of it are arguably better (Jack’s adventures are more fun and string together as a more coherent globe-spanning narrative); but for whatever reason, reading The Confusion felt like a slog at times. Perhaps it’s just familiarity with Stephenson’s juxtaposition of historical fiction and modern touches; perhaps it’s because the history of science bits are much less prominent here, and those were my favorite parts of Quicksilver; perhaps it’s just because all the characters (and institutions) are older, jaded, and worn-down by time, so the youthful energy is missing.
Without the sense of manic energy and joyful discovery the first book provided, it starts to become uncomfortably apparent that I still don’t know what the plot of this brick collection is. Sure, Shaftoe’s adventures are fun to read about, and the machinations of Eliza and the scientists are intriguing — but to what end is this all going? I didn’t care while reading the first book, but by the end of the 1600th page, I’m a bit disconcerted by my inability to discern a larger structure.
Despite all my complaints, I did enjoy The Confusion and am still looking forward to the third book. Arguably, my slightly irritable take on this book is just due to reading it at the wrong time: It wasn’t really what I was in the mood for, but I figured I’d better read it before the third volume came out this fall; once I’d started it, I realized I really wasn’t in the mood for it, but knew that if I set it down, I’d take forever to pick it back up again, so forced myself to power through. I suspect if I’d just waited for a month or two until I actively wanted to read it, I’d’ve enjoyed the book far more.
| :::