Very Hard Choices

I was reading Spider Robinson's Very Hard Choices on the airplane home from our Christmas trip, and it was entertaining enough to get me through the travails of broken luggage wheels, strange women demanding to look down the front of my pants, and snow delays.

This novel is a follow-up to his previous Very Bad Deaths, and it will increase your enjoyment if you've read that one, although it's not essential. Very Bad Deaths told the story of how a physically frail old hippie and a young Canadian cop work together to help a friend of theirs and how the friend ends up saving them from a fate far worse than death. The story is narrated by the old hippie, Russell, who (as usual in Robinson's writing) talks a lot about how much he loves coffee and marijuana and is a Person To Look Up To because of how tolerant he is. At one point, the cop, Nika, clarifies Russell's moral quandry about what to do next by telling him that something bad is about to happen and that "The rest of your life, you'll either be someone who tried to stop it, or someone who didn't." Our hero. But the fun of the story is aptly summarized by Russell's description of Nika's face, at one point: "her eyes lit up with excitement at the same time that her eyebrows frowned in skepticism."

In Very Hard Choices, the story is complicated by the presence of Russell's estranged son and by a plot that hinges more on the right way to live than on how to avoid death. Russell's friend, the one who previously saved his life, is a telepath, and there is an evil government agent out to catch him and make him use his abilities for evil--or so they all think. The government agent, at the very end, turns out to have a few surprises of his own.

My favorite part is when, after two pages of Russell browbeating himself about what he didn't do, his friend, Zudie, loses patience:
"Listen to me. You're absolutely right: the cartoon superheroes in the adventure fiction you love to read would all be disgusted with you. At this very moment, Jack Reacher is curling his lip, Hawk is saying something ironic about you to Spenser, and Travis McGee thinks you're helpless as Meyer. Okay? You're a total failure as Superman. The Saint would be ashamed of you. Parker thinks you're a pussy. Accept that. Deal with it on your own time. Right now, you're in the real world: work the problem."

The other part I enjoyed most is the typical Robinson message about where our hope lies, which is why reading this book was such a good antidote to my recent reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. This is what Robinson's government agent says when the characters finally stop running from him and start listening:
"We have a century or so, tops, to get this stupid planet organized, to build the kind of wise benign compassionate Terran Federation you see in so many science fiction movies, to start making the world fair, and get it self-sustaining. If we haven't gotten at least that far by then, the resources necessary to develop and build and maintain the necessary space-based technology will be gone, pissed away in pointless squabbles. Then everything falls to shit, and the future holds only tribal anarchy and progressive decay....
On the evening of September 10, 2001, the United States was closer than any other nation in history has ever come to being widely trusted. That's not very close, granted. Many people despised us. Quite a few just disliked us. But deep down, most people trusted us, on that day, at least a little. No other nation every had a better shot at persuading and cajoling all the nations of the world to come together and work together to save ourselves before it's too late.
And ever since the next morning, we've been blowing it. Setting fire to a century of built-up good will, frightening half the planet and offending the rest."

Trust me that the rest of the story is so fun that you'll hardly notice serious parts like that, at least not consciously, while you're trying to get to the end. It's the best kind of fiction, if you ask me--with an agenda, but only on the side.

Variable Star

I just reread Spider Robinson's book Variable Star, created from Robert Heinlein's outline. It's a curious way to write a book, to be sure, and the first time I read it, I was surprised at how much I liked it. Most of the book is Spider. There's the occasional homage pun (her eyes were Hazel, stones, rolling), and he pays lip service to Heinlein's stock in trade, like briefly mentioning that one of the main character's girlfriends has decided to enter into a group marriage. The plot, though, does seem to me to be one that Heinlein could have written. Details about the planet that the characters are headed towards are incredible and detailed, and the starship drives are mysterious in their workings, which is (oddly) appropriate to this particular book. Some of my favorite parts are when the characters talk about history:

"Webb was an idiot. His analysis presumed that if other life did exist, it could not be more intelligent than him. It was the characteristic flaw of the entire PreCollapse millennium: the assumption of vastly more knowledge than they actually possessed." He closed his eyes and rubbed them. "Over and over like a recurring flu they developed the imbecile idea that they understood nearly everything, in all but the finest details. They had no slightest idea what lightning was, how it worked. They had absolutely no clue how moisture got farther than about ten meters up a tree--the highest that capillary action can push it Fifty years after the splitting of the atom, they accidentally noticed for the first time that hurricanes emit gamma rays. There were quite a few large, significant phenomena they could 'explain,' often elegantly...over and over again...and had to, because the explanations began falling apart at the first hard data-push. Things like he Tunguska Event, gamma ray bursts, why an airplane wing generated lift, what ninety percent of our DNA was doing there...yet they were solemnly convinced they basically understood the universe, except for some details out in the tenth decimal place.
"They somehow managed to persuade themselves that computer models constitute data. That very complicated guesses become facts. They made themselves believe they had the power to accurately model, not merely something as inconceivably complex as, say, a single zygote...but a national economy, a weather system, a planetary ecosphere, a multiplanet society--even a universe. They made solemn pronouncements about conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, on the basis of computer models which they had produced with computers not even bright enough to talk, let alone understand speech. They were unlike all the generations before theirs in several ways, but chiefly in that they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were. Previous ages had usually had a pretty good handle on that."
"Things got worse in that direction soon."
"Sure. Scientists were claiming godlike knowledge, and couldn't deliver. It go to where even the average citizen could sense they were bluffing. They could go on for literally days on what happened in the first five minutes of creation, without ever saying a single thing that meant anything, did anybody any good. They wouldn't even discuss what happened when you died, let alone how random chance produced life. No wonder the citizens decided to go back to a different kind of omniscience, that came with omnipotence and omnibenevolence thrown in at no extra charge. Twentieth-century science handed the world over to Nehemia Scudder, on a plate. No wonder some people preferred 'intelligent design' to evolution. At least it put intelligence somewhere in the mix."

A very Spider-like rant, isn't it? But I find it strangely compelling, especially in company with a later explanation of what caused the "Terror Wars," a smug Canadian-type analysis of the actions of the US after 9/11, but ending with this description of Americans:

"They were some of the most intelligent and humane people in the history of the planet: what could they have been thinking?"
"Of course they were not. They were feeling."

I like science fiction that not only shows us a possible way to go, but provides a bit of road map for how people could get there. Variable Star does that, in the best Heinlein tradition.