All reviews copyright 1984-2024 Evelyn C. Leeper.
SCIENCE FICTION by Adam Roberts:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/06/2006]
SCIENCE FICTION by Adam Roberts (ISBN 0-415-19205-6) is in Routledge's "The New Critical Idiom" series. It seems to be attempting to be a serious academic study of science fiction, with a ten-page glossary, a six-page bibliography, sentences like "That is what these nova [*] symbolise: the linkage and coherence of intertextuality itself, the web of quotation and illusion in which all texts are located." ([*] "Nova" is Dark Suvin's coined word for "the new things that distinguish the SF tale from a conventional literature.") I would find this pose of seriousness more convincing were it not marred by poor editing (or proofreading): John Campbell is referred to as "Joseph Campbell" at least once (page 75), Isaac Asimov's "Hari Seldon" is spelled "Sheldon" every time after the first mention, and Olaf Stapledon's name is spelled "Stapleton", both in the text and in the index. (Thomas M. Disch also makes the latter error in THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF.) I would be more willing to slog through the academic language if I did not have the nagging feeling that maybe some of it is rendered incorrectly also.
SWIFTLY by Adam Roberts:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/17/2009]
SWIFTLY by Adam Roberts (ISBN-13 978-0-575-08234-2, ISBN-10 0-575-08234-8) is an expansion of two stories which appeared earlier, one in a book titled "Swiftly: Stories". Alas, the expansion does not serve it well--the middle part seems unnecessarily padded and dragged out. In addition, Roberts draws not only on Swift's GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (the premise is that Gulliver's account was true), but also from several other authors for concepts and images.
As one example, consider the following passage: "On the Great North Road, a great worm of humanity pulsed slowly away to the horizon, people walking, trudging, hurrying or staggering, handcarts and horse-carts, men hauling packs stacked yards high with clinking pots and rolled cloth, women carrying children, animals on tight tethers." All that is missing is the phrase "the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind."
Roberts also makes several annoying errors. He writes, "Each patch of dirt was delineated from clear glass by a hyperbolic line running from bottom left to top right, as, Bates thought, x equals y squared." (page 2) First of all, x equals y squared is parabolic, not hyperbolic. Second, it is parabolic in the wrong direction (bulging up rather than down). And third, there is a bottom half of the parabola that Bates (or Roberts) completely ignores.
Again, Roberts labels a diary enter 11 Nov [1848] and then has someone say it was Thursday. No, it was Saturday. On page 37 a character uses the term "zero-sum"; this was not coined until a hundred years later. And on page 315, a character writes, "Whilst a new Nero arose and cried aloud 'If only all Rome had but one neck...'" Sorry, but that was Caligula.
I will note that of Roberts's non-fiction book SCIENCE FICTION, I said that it needed better proofreading: John Campbell was referred to as "Joseph Campbell" at least once (page 75), Isaac Asimov's "Hari Seldon" was spelled "Sheldon" every time after the first mention, and Olaf Stapledon's name was spelled "Stapleton", both in the text and in the index. (I note that MS Word's spell checking seems to think the former is a misspelling, while the latter is not flagged.) Roberts clearly needs to find better proofreaders.
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: IMAGINARY HISTORY FROM TWELVE LEADING HISTORIANS edited by Andrew Roberts:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/30/2004]
Another British book that if we're lucky will come to the United States is WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: IMAGINARY HISTORY FROM TWELVE LEADING HISTORIANS edited by Andrew Roberts (ISBN 0-297-84877-1). (Of course, there may be a title change--there has already been a series of anthologies with the name "What Might Have Been" edited by Gregory Benford.) Roberts's book is on a somewhat higher level than most, as is clear from his introduction, in which he for example, says, "The Whig and Marxist theories of history should have long ago been replaced by a more believable one, in which What Ifs can play an important role by reminding us that no route is predestined. In this view of the world, Man is a fallen, Originally Sinful being, who strives to do better than previous generations by trying to learn from them, but is ever conscious of the abysses below, and is as familiar with a knowable past as he is suspicious of plans to get to a necessarily unmappable future utopia." (The Marxist theory is the inevitable "withering away of the state" into a workers' commune, and the Whig view is of the inevitability of liberal democracy and the "Brotherhood of Man".)
The stories, alas, cover some of the more common or obvious points of divergence:
Most are well thought-out, if dry, counterfactuals. I use that term rather than "alternate histories" because the latter need to have some plot other than a dry recounting of historical (or ahistorical) events. It's not enough to say Napoleon triumphs in Russia--one must have a Russian character reacting to this, or a French character in Russia, or someone. The most current of the counterfactuals (David Frum's "The Chads Fall Off in Florida"), however, while achieving some level of characterization and hence being an actual alternate history, is either just silly or a satire, neither of which is in keeping with the rest. (Sample: "[Gore] issued an executive order the day after [his] Inaugural requiring that all proposed military operations undergo environmental review.") Upon reading the biography of David Frum, I discover that he is a former speech writer and special assistant to President George W. Bush and a well-known conservative, which explains this. But while as a stand-alone or with other less academic works this story would almost definitely have seemed clever, here it suffers by appearing to be ill thought-out. It's like being the only one in jogging clothes at a formal dinner.
EVERY LIVING THING: THE GREAT AND DEADLY RACE TO KNOW ALL LIFE by Jason Roberts:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/02/24]
EVERY LIVING THING: THE GREAT AND DEADLY RACE TO KNOW ALL LIFE by Jason Roberts (Penguin Random House, ISBN 978-1-9848-5520-6) covers the conflicting attempts of Carl Linnaeus and George-Louis de Bouffon (and those who came after them) to categorize all living (and in Linnaeus's case, non-living) things. In some sense, they were the Cope and Marsh of taxonomy, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh being rivals in the search for dinosaur bones in the 19th century.
Linnaeus is the better known because his approach caught on, but the man himself had some serious flaws, and his categorization of humans in four "races", complete with positive traits for the Caucasian, and increasingly negative traits for the Asian, Amerindian, and finally African, began a long trail of "scientific" racism that persists to this day. This was only reinforced by his insistence that all official names must be in Latin--or possibly Greek, so long as the Latin alphabet was used. He also started with a particular set of categories and defining features in mind, and seemed unwilling to change them. (After he died, others made Linnaeus himself--a northern European male--the type specimen for Homo sapiens, which is also a bit biased.)
In addition, Linnaeus sent several "apostles" on excursions to gather samples from around the world. Only one came back, hence the "deadly" part. And he refused to educate his daughters, expressing the belief that it would be wasted on them. (Perhaps ironically, all of his descendants are through his daughters.)
Bouffon, on the other hand, seemed more willing to go where his observations led him (which is not to see that he also didn't have some fixed ideas that he wouldn't change. He also made his knowledge--and knowledge in general--available to all, opening the Jardin du Roi to all with entrance fees, and allowing anyone to attend lectures given there, again with no fee.
Both of them--and those who followed them--had to deal with difficult questions. Pre-Darwin (and pre-James-Hutton and his concept of geologic time) European biologists had to fit everything into a framework that said everything was created by God six thousand years ago and unchanged since then. (For that matter, at the time there was no word "biology", and "science" had a very different meaning.)
Another question was which characteristics were important in distinguishing species (or genera, or families) and which were not. The coloration and patterns on a butterfly's wings are important; those on a cow or dog are not. A naive approach of look-and-guess would put wolves and Alaskan Huskies in the same category, separate from chihuahuas and whippets. And when it comes to cougars, pumas, mountain lions, panthers, jaguars, and leopards, it becomes even more confusing. (And the fact that the Florida panther is not actually a panther emphasizes this.)
A lot of the philosophical dispute was over the "Problem of Universals": are properties that items have in common (such as color or shape) real outside of those objects? Roberts gives the example of Vermont: "As an entity of reason, [Vermont] exists. As a fact of nature, it does not."
As Roberts brings the science of taxonomy up to the present, he emphasizes that whenever we think we have a solution to all the problems, new problems arise; there will never be a perfect system. The best we can hope for is a system that is an improvement over the previous one.
Our book discussion group this month read "The Flowering of a Strange Orchid" by H. G. Wells and "The Reluctant Orchid" by Arthur C, Clarke in conjunction with THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960). This was particularly apt, because the characters in "The Flowering of a Strange Orchid" talk about how dangerous the search for orchids and other rare plants is. There is also a discussion of varieties of orchids. And "The Reluctant Orchid" references "The Flowering of a Strange Orchid" explicitly.
THE SEVEN HILLS by John Maddox Roberts:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/10/2006]
THE SEVEN HILLS by John Maddox Roberts (ISBN 0-441-01245-0) is the middle book of a trilogy in which Carthage has defeated Rome in the First Punic War, but Rome has withdrawn to north of the Alps, regrouped, and is now returning to re-take its lands, and Carthage as well. Even though it is a middle book, it reads pretty well by itself, although since I did read the first book (HANNIBAL'S CHILDREN last year I may not be an impartial judge. I do think, though, that there are some problems with Roberts's description of Judea, which he describes as having the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The problem is that the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E., the Kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C.E., and neither was restored in our timeline. The First Punic War was not until 264-241 B.C.E. I suppose one could argue that without a strong Rome, the Maccabee Revolt in 168 B.C.E. might have led to the restorations, but if so, that is left unexplained. Still, it is a minor point, and Roberts has lots of detail on Roman and Carthaginian customs and military matters to keep the reader interested. (Note: There are those who claim that Roberts's descriptions of the Carthaginians are based on what was written in our timeline by the Romans, their enemies, and is not really accurate.)
(Shame on Ace Books for not indicating anywhere that this is indeed a middle book of a series. Yes, it can probably be read on its own, but it is not an entirely self-contained work.)