Fuzzy Nation

When I read that John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation was coming out, I had to find our copy of H. Beam Piper's The Fuzzy Papers so I could reread the original of the story that Scalzi has enlarged and updated.  Then the Piper book sat on my shelf until last week, when Cassandra Ammerman at Tor sent me a shiny, new hardback copy of Fuzzy Nation, and I had to hurry up and read one book right after the other, which turned out to be a fine thing to do, as Scalzi's story is an agreeable addition to Piper's, much more than just a re-hashing of some of the old issues.

The human meets alien story has so many conventions, at this point, that it's hard for an experienced reader of science fiction to go into any story about aliens without suspecting them of sentience. Heinlein's story The Star Beast was one of my formative experiences with this genre, so the phrase "raising John Thomases" always goes through my mind when a strange alien is introduced (the "star beast" was kept as a pet until its human owner, John Thomas, discovers it has been studying them for generations).  There's not much suspense at all about the sapience of these smart little "fuzzies," and Scalzi copes with that by having his narrator, Holloway, say things to them like "your evil mystic cuteness has no effect on me" when it obviously does, and by the humor in such things as the way the fuzzies interact with Holloway's dog.

Besides humor, though, the other way Scalzi copes with the lack of suspense about sapience is by making Holloway a clever lawyer and much of the second half of the novel some pretty riveting courtroom drama.  There will be surprises even for the person who has recently reread the Piper story--you may know the secret of how the fuzzies communicate, but the way it is revealed in Scalzi's fictional courtroom will still be delightful, partly due to Scalzi's inventiveness and partly due to the possibilities offered by updating the technology (Piper's humans had "vocowriters" and video phones, while Scalzi's are equipped with security cameras and ipads).

Even though Holloway claims, at the end of the novel, that "building a nation is not all parties and fireworks," he belies his own claim even as he says it, and the author belies it by making the building of this fictional nation so much fun.

Fuzzy Nation comes out tomorrow, and you don't have to have read any previous science fiction to enjoy it, although if you want to, that will add another dimension.  I like being reminded that in the 1950's, writers thought that "cocktail hour" was an immutable human custom and would be carried out to all the planets. It makes me wonder if the environmental concerns of our generation, reflected on Scalzi's fictional planet, will seem similarly transitory sixty years from now.

The Sagan Diary

Sometimes I bring in real, live authors (in person or via the internet) and give my class the chance to ask them questions. Oddly enough--or so it seems to me--the one they always ask is some version of "how did you get inspired to write this book we've been assigned?" And this is usually after at least five weeks of me working on them to think--and read--more critically. "Can't you think of some more interesting questions?" I ask. "Don't you want to know why Jack, in Lauren McLaughlin's Cycler, is emerging more often as the story progresses?" Or I think to myself "wouldn't you like to see who would crack first if John Scalzi's Consu face off against Joan Slonczewski's Sharers?" (By the way, this is an idea for Who's More Awesome if it could be done as well as some of the previous posts like Ferrets vs. Poseidon or Sasquatch vs. The Abominable Snowman).

For me, at least, knowing too much about an author's inspiration is a bit like watching Peter Jackson's special features on the DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring--Legolas and Arwen, in particular, looked and sounded enough like how I'd imagined them all my life that it was an unpleasant surprise to hear how the actors sounded without lines to read. Sometimes it's better not to know, because then you can continue to imagine.

But some of us just can't resist reading everything available by our favorite authors. And so I got a copy of The Sagan Diary for my birthday, and I read it. I expected it to be what a previous reviewer calls it, a "contrapuntal work" to the three novels in the Old Man's War series (Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, The Lost Colony). But there's nothing in it that I hadn't already inferred from reading those books. There's a section in the chapter entitled "Speaking" about Jane's relationship to language that doesn't go any farther towards explaining the point of view of one who was born able to communicate mind-to-mind than the novel that introduced the idea did. Why I thought the diary might be able to, I don't know--it's the age-old science fiction conundrum of how can you imagine an alien with no mouth? Or no eyes, etc. It's almost impossible not to have some substitute for eating or seeing, because even human language--most of our metaphors--is so wrapped around those methods of sensory experience.

Also I was disillusioned to find a sketch of the character Jane Sagan looking exactly like the photos of Scalzi's wife that he posts on his website from time to time. Too much information! I had my own picture of Jane, and she was smarter, stronger, faster, braver--and more mysterious--than any human woman in existence could ever be. Plus, I don't like the implication that the hero is based on the author, because the author has already succeeded in making him larger than life. Why poke a tiny hole in the Macy's parade balloon of "The Heroic John Perry" just to see if he'll start zooming around on his strings and making that amusing brrrrff noise?

I was entertained by the preface, in which a military analyst complains about how useless the diary is for her purposes. Very eighteenth-century, preface-reading. I'm always quite agreeably entertained when a modern writer makes good use of the tradition.

I was puzzled by the lengthy appendix, a list of names, none of which I recognized from the Old Man's War novels, until I discovered that they are the names of people who pre-ordered the first edition of The Sagan Diary. Okay, harmless enough, but why preserve that appendix in the mass-market edition?

Have you ever procured a copy of something supplemental to the main works of an author of whom you are extraordinary fond and been a bit disillusioned by it?

Agent to the Stars

It's been a while since I made my way through a novel laughing out loud every 50 pages or so, making my family wonder what I was reading, as I did this weekend. We had the right kind of Saturday for me to read John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars--one filled with kid activities, but no demands on me other than to chauffeur everyone here and there through the lovely spring day: Walker to soccer practice and then a rehearsal for a vocal concert, Eleanor to her final play performance and cast party. Agent to the Stars kept me in a pleasant mood while being kept inside a car for so much of the day.

Scalzi calls this one his "practice novel." It was posted on his web site in 1999, published as a very limited edition in 2005, and came out in paperback this winter. Basically, it's about friendly but unlovely-in-appearance aliens trying to find a way to introduce themselves to the human race, so they land outside LA and find an agent to help them spin the story. These are not your father's aliens; they realize that they can't just land on the White House lawn and take themselves to our leader. And like other fictional aliens in the last decade (most amusingly, the ones in Galaxy Quest), their knowledge of our culture comes largely from tv and movies, and they need some help differentiating between fiction and reality. The first place I laughed out loud, in fact, is on p. 32, when the aliens, who call themselves the Yherajk, have their contact, Joshua, tell the human they've picked to be their agent that they realize most humans will be repelled by their appearance:
"We look like snot," Joshua said. "And we smell like dead fish....We have seen The Blob and it is us."

The way the plot will be resolved is obvious from p. 89-90 of this 365-page novel, and the author has re-used a few of his favorite devices (aliens who fart a smell-language, also in his wonderfully funny The Android's Dream, for instance). But that really didn't detract from my pleasure in reading Agent to the Stars. It's not about the plot. It's about the way the characters talk to each other, and the sophistication of the Yherajk, who know they need an agent because, as one of them says, "The SETI program implies that your planet is actively seeking contact with other peoples, but your entertainments show you to be hostile to the idea, full of the fear that the peoples you encounter will try to subjugate your planet. Moreover, when you do show aliens as friendly or benevolent, they tend to be humanoid in appearance. When they are hostile or violent, they tend to appear like us. Obviously, this is very worrying."

Many of the human worries from old alien-monster movies (parodied so hilariously in Mars Attacks) are parodied as the action of this novel moves along. At the point when the alien, Joshua, takes over the body of a dog, the agent, Tom, says to him "You ate him, Joshua!" and while the alien explains the process at some length, including cultural taboos against taking over anyone's body against their will, the laugh line comes two pages later, when Joshua tells Tom
"eventually my cells will take the place of all his cells....It's more efficient, especially since I won't have all these damned specialized organs to deal with...."
"What happens to the old cells?" I asked.
"I digest them."
"Oh man," I said. You are eating him."

The climax of the novel is visible a long way off. If you miss the foreshadowing on p. 89-90, it's spelled out for you on p. 250, when a producer describes a scene in a film "where the alien overlord is trying to get control of Michelle's body--we were going to have the overlord stick his tentacles in her mouth and ears as a way to get to her brain. Really disgusting, of course--eyeballs popping and mouth really huge and all that." But since these are friendly aliens, what looks "really disgusting" is the subject of intense alien debate and is enacted, finally, with the best of motives (which, the aliens specifically point out, might not be a good enough basis for such action, so the climactic action is promised to be the subject of philosophical speculation by Yherajks for generations to come).

What a shame if you should miss the climax of the novel, though, because it's such fun to see the Yherajk take the stage at the Academy Awards Show and reveal that there is an alien among us:
"The fact that an alien had managed to sneak past humanity, pose as a superstar, and win the Best Acress Oscar had the desired effect of showing the world that the Yherajk were an essentially benign race--after all, if they had been a warlike people, they could have overrun us with their spaceships, or at the very least have fielded a football team and tried to win the Super Bowl instead. Winning the Best Actress Oscar was the most nonthreatening, yet high exposure, way to introduce one species to another."

This is a first novel, but it's more than just an "extra" for people who are already John Scalzi fans. It's for anyone who enjoys a new twist on hackneyed alien-from-outer-space images, and an entertaining story for a lazy spring or summer afternoon.

Are These Books Worth Mentioning?

Some books I read, I don't want to talk about, usually because they aren't worth mentioning, but occasionally because they're so good, there's just not that much to say besides "read this!"

The Last Colony, by John Scalzi, is a whiz-banger of an ending to the wonderful story begun in Old Man's War and continued in The Ghost Brigades. As late as the last fifty pages, I didn't see how he could resolve all the conflicts he'd set up. And then he resolved them in grand style, and I was highly gratified. It is a fitting end to a great series.

Then I read Zoe's Tale, which is the same story from the 16-year-old daughter's point of view. There were a couple of really interesting additions, but for the most part, I'd already read this story, so I didn't find it that compelling. I'll leave it around for my kids to discover, I think, despite the risk that it will spoil The Last Colony for them--they might as well read this one while it's fresh, because no kid wants a huge backlog of books that they "must" read.

I was sorry I'd read The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer and Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan because they didn't resolve the conflicts they set up, and they were bleak stories to begin with. Why immerse yourself in gloom when there won't be a resolution and the writing isn't especially enjoyable?

Amy's mom sent me Nora Robert's Tribute, and I enjoyed it. It's a good car book. (One of the important things about car books is that the plot is not so complicated that you can't pick up the book a week later and immerse yourself again in what was going on.)

The first part of The Dangerous Days of Daniel X, by the ever-prolific James Patterson, strikes me as so unpromising that I may just take it back to the library unread. If Walker picks it up and likes it, maybe I'll think again, since this is a book written to interest more boys in reading.

Beginnings

Scott Westerfeld (scottwesterfeld.com) has a recent post about beginnings, and SFP at Pages Turned has a recent post about endings. And they've gotten me thinking about how I choose books. Most often, of course, it's because I read the first paragraph and get hooked. When I started thinking about the beginnings that hooked me most quickly, I decided to share some of my favorites, the ones that stick in my memory:

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

William Goldman, The Princess Bride
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

John Scalzi, Old Man's War
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.

Roald Dahl, Matilda
It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.
Well, there is nothing very wrong with all this. It's the way of the world. It is only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring that we start shouting, "Bring us a basin! We're going to be sick!"

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle. Dad had been a colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn't know he had gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanding to know where and when he was.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.

Walker Percy, Love In the Ruins
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won't and I'm crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden
The best thing about my life up to here is, nobody believes it. I stopped trying to make people hear it long ago, and I'm nothing but a real middle-sized white woman that has kept on going with strong eyes and teeth for fifty-seven years. You can touch me; I answer. But it got to where I felt like the first woman landed from Pluto--people asking how I lasted through all I claimed and could still count to three, me telling the truth with an effort to smile and then watching them doubt it. So I've kept quiet for years.

These are some of my favorites, from memory (although I did look them up to get the words right). Tell me some of your favorite beginnings.

That's A Morte

We never did find a substitute caterpillar for our visiting six-year-old. My response to his heartbreak over leaving it on our deck in the former peanut butter jar with holes punched (by ice pick) in the plastic lid was to observe that even if we did find him a replacement, caterpillars are not long-lived creatures and the relationship was doomed to disappointment. Since then, I've been informed that the key to keeping a captive caterpillar is to feed them every hour or so, like newborns. If you know a six-year-old who is capable of that, I'd like to know about it!

We've been preparing Walker for the imminent demise of his replacement guinea pig. See, when he was 9, he wanted a guinea pig, and we got two so they could keep each other company. He picked out a cute little short-haired pig and named him Legolas, which led to many merry confusions in our household (the most memorable was when Walker commented "Legolas is ambidextrous" and the rest of us looked at him and said "how on earth can you tell?" only to see that Walker was looking at a LOTR movie book and reading about the Tolkien elf's knives). When Legolas was three, we found him dead in his cage one morning. The other pig, Lady Night Heart, was not visibly distraught, but the kids thought she needed another friend. She missed having someone to pick on and outsmart, they said. So we got the loan of a companion guinea pig who was left over when the main guinea pig had died. This one's name was Sandy, and Sandy was already a middle-aged pig. Well, now Sandy is getting old and having some physical troubles. We hauled her off to the vet last week and found out that she's not in terrible pain, but probably is not long for the world.

In a typical case of life dovetailing with art, I came across this passage while reading John Scalzi's The Android's Dream this week:

"Why do you only sell unmodified animals?" Creek asked. "I'm just curious."
"I've got a PetSmart one shopping center over," Robin said. "All their animals are genmod. I couldn't compete. But they hardly sell unmodified pets anymore because unmodified pets die too easy. Genmod pets are designed with six-year-old boys in mind, you know."
"I didn't know," Creek said.
"It's true," Robin said. "I think that's kind of like defining deviancy down. You should be teaching a six-year-old that you need to respect living things, rather than making pets so they can survive a mallet attack. So, economics and morals. That's why. People who come in here respect animals and teach their kids manners...."

Part of respecting living things is understanding that death is part of the deal, eventually. Walker has been dealing with the issue in his own way, making up verses to a continuing song:

When a dart hits your heart
and it then fails to start...
that's a morte...

When a bear starts to tear
and there's blood everywhere...
that's a morte...

Old Man's War

I'm late to the Scalzi party--it's a good one, and I've been missing it! My friend who reads more SF than I do had what I consider a minor quibble about John Scalzi's wonderful first book, Old Man's War, and so didn't recommend it to me. He has a weird philosophy about not wanting to read books other people recommend anyway, so I guess that's why he didn't bring me the book, press it into my hands, and demand that I start reading it right then. This is what I would do to all of you if I could. I press the book virtually into your hands right now.

What did I like most about Old Man's War? Well, it has stuff. You know, science fiction stuff that's described in just enough detail to make it interesting, like the "beanstalk" elevator that gets the main character, John Perry, to outer space. It also has aliens. And it doesn't just have one or two, and it doesn't just describe them physically. They have mysterious motivations and philosophies, and there's an entire universe of them! Most of all, it has this great idea that old people would make good soldiers, if they only had physical prowess to match their decades of experience.

I found the description of Perry's transformation into a physical being capable of soldiering to be accurate, if a bit speedy. The process has just taken place (note that I'm carefully not telling you exactly what the process is; it would be rude to steal the author's thunder in that way), and the old man steps out:

"I placed my right foot forward and staggered a little bit. Dr. Russell came up beside me and steadied me. 'Careful,' he said. 'You've been an older man for a while. It's going to take you a little bit of time to remember how to be in a young body.'
'What do you mean?' I said.
'Well,' he said. 'For one thing, you can straighten up.'
He was right. I was stooped slightly (kids, drink your milk). I straightened up, and took another step forward. And another. Good news, I remembered how to walk. I cracked a grin like a schoolboy as I paced in the room.

What took me about a month to learn--how to walk again after walking like an old person for some years--takes Perry about a minute, but hey, this is fiction. It's good enough fiction that it brought me back to the coaching I got on how to hit with the heel first and then roll the foot and bend the knee at the end, and the days when I had to think about stepping like that in order to be able to do it.

The stuff in this book includes Scalzi's version of the feed. He calls it a BrainPal. When Perry gets his, he names it Asshole:

Apparently, there was very little Asshole couldn't do. He could send messages to other recruits. He could download reports. He could play music or video. He could play games. He could call up any document on a system. He could store incredible amounts of data. He could perform complex calculations. He could diagnose physical ailments and provide suggestions for cures. He could create a local network among a chosen group of other BrainPal users. He could provide instantaneous translations of hundreds of human and alien languages. He could even provide field of vision information on any other BrainPal user.

The uses of the BrainPal get even more interesting in the sequel to Old Man's War, entitled The Ghost Brigades (I'm halfway through it). The kinds of philosophical questions raised by human use of technology get more interesting, too--and they start out pretty interesting in Old Man's War:

The next step of evolution is already happening. Just like the Earth, most of the colonies are isolated from each other. Nearly all people born on a colony stay there their entire lives. Humans also adapt to their new homes; it's already beginning culturally. Some of the oldest of the colony planets are beginning to show linguistic and cultural drift from their cultures and languages back on Earth....you've lived long enough to know that there's more to life than your own life. Most of you have raised families and have children and grandchildren and understand the value of doing something beyond your own selfish goals. Even if you never become colonists yourselves, you still recognize that human colonies are good for the human race, and worth fighting for. It's hard to drill that concept into the brain of a nineteen-year-old. But you know from experience. In this universe, experience counts.

When I finish The Ghost Brigades, I'm going on to read The Last Colony and then all the other Scalzi books I can find, probably starting with the one about Jane Sagan, even if it is only available in hardback, and the one about Jane and Perry's daughter Zoe, which is coming out this August. Not only that, but I'm joining the considerable party of readers who follow Scalzi's blog Whatever. It's like what Holden Caulfield imagined all those years ago--you finish a book, and you can virtually call up the author and talk to him about it. Everyone's invited, but you'll have more fun if you've read his books, and maybe the books of his friends... For mother's day, I got a trip to the bookstore to find some of the books on the list I keep. We have a credit card that gives us a book dollar for every thousand dollars we spend, or something like that, so I got a bunch of books I've been wanting to read, including The Ghost Brigades and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. It's a great week to be underemployed.

By the way, at the bookstore I went to, Borders, I found The Ghost Brigades in SF, Little Brother in YA, and Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic in the children's section.