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October 31, 2013

Filed under: fiction»litcrit

Endgame

It is never a bad time to remember that Orson Scott Card is a terrible person. But this week, as millions of people will go to theaters to see a movie based on his most famed work (sorry, Lost Boys), it is good to also remind ourselves: Ender's Game is not a good book. It's barely even a bad one. Consider the following three essays, ranked in descending order of plausibility:

  • Creating the Innocent Killer, by John Kessel, is a comprehensive debunking of the book's "morality." Kessel details how Card stacks the deck, again and again, so that Ender can do the most incredibly awful things but still be a "good" person.
  • Kessel mentions Sympathy for the Superman, by Elaine Radford, which notes a wide range of similarities between Ender and Hitler, and theorizes that the original trilogy was meant to be a "gotcha" on his audience.
  • Finally, Roger Williams writes a conspiracy theory of his own: that Card didn't even write the original books.

Williams' story is unlikely, I think, but it's too much fun not to mention (and for a long time, his account was the only place you could read about the Nazi connection). Radford makes a stronger case, but chances are much of Ender's similarity to Hitler is just coincidence: Ender ends up on a planet of Brazilians because Card is a hack who went on Mormon mission to Brazil as a young adult, he's a misogynist because his author is one, and he justifies his genocide with a lot of blather about "intention" because Card chickened out on the clear implication of the first book: that his protagonist really was a psychopath that wiped out an entire civilization based on an elaborate self-deception.

It's Kessel's essay that's been the most quoted over the years, and for good reason. It's a brutal deconstruction of the tropes used to build Ender's Game, and ends in a deft examination of why the book remains so popular:

It offers revenge without guilt. If you ever as a child felt unloved, if you ever feared that at some level you might deserve any abuse you suffered, Ender’s story tells you that you do not. In your soul, you are good. You are specially gifted, and better than anyone else. Your mistreatment is the evidence of your gifts. You are morally superior. Your turn will come, and then you may severely punish others, yet remain blameless. You are the hero.

Ender never loses a single battle, even when every circumstance is stacked against him. And in the end, as he wanders the lonely universe dispensing compassion for the undeserving who think him evil, he can feel sorry for himself at the same time he knows he is twice over a savior of the entire human race.

God, how I would have loved this book in seventh grade! It’s almost as good as having a nuclear device.

Like a lot of people, I did have this book in seventh grade (or earlier — I'm pretty sure I read it while attending junior high in Indiana). And I did love it as a kid, for most of the reasons that Kessel states: I was a bright kid who didn't have a lot of friends, felt persecuted and misunderstood, and struggled to find a way to express those feelings. Eventually, I grew up. Looking back on it, Ender's Game didn't really do any harm — like a lot of kids, I wasn't actually reading that critically. It's just kind of embarrassing now, and I definitely don't want to go to a theater and relive it.

Feeling embarrassed by your childhood reading material is a common rite of passage for many people, and science fiction readers probably more than others. Jo Walton refers to this as the Suck Fairy. It's tempting, when this happens, to wish we could go back in time and take these books off the shelves — or stop readers now from encountering them in the first place — but it's probably a better idea to foster discussion (a happy side effect of an active adult readership for "young adult" titles) or have alternatives ready on hand.

Recently I re-read another beloved book from my childhood: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. If you haven't taken a look at it lately, you really should. Apart from the titles, the two books have aged in radically different ways — in fact, it's probably better now than it was then. I remember reading it mostly as a puzzle: first to solve it, and then again to appreciate the little clues that Raskin works in. But as for the warmth, the sympathetic characterization, and most of all the humor (seriously, it's an uproariously funny book): I missed out on all of these things when I was a precocious youngster identifying with Turtle and her shin-kicking ways, just like I missed Ender's fascist tendencies.

And so ultimately, I'm not worried about young people reading Ender's Game and being influenced for the worse, because I suspect that what they take from it is not what Card actually wants them. It's sometimes difficult — but also crucial — to remember that the reader creates the story while reading, almost as much as the author does. Should we speak out against hateful works, and try not to give money to hatemongers? Sure. Will I be going to see Ender's Game at the local cinema? Definitely not. But I'll always understand people who have a soft spot for it anyway. Despite my bravado, despite the fact that I dislike everything it has come to stand for, I'm one of them, and I'm not going to let Card make me feel bad about that.

April 8, 2013

Filed under: fiction»litcrit

An Iain Banks Primer

Last week, Iain Banks announced that he has terminal cancer, with probably a year remaining to live. He'll hopefully see the publication of one more book, Quarry, before he goes.

Banks has long been one of my favorite authors, to the point that our living room bookshelves have several units devoted entirely to his work. I even had Belle bring me back paperbacks of his literary fiction from a trip to England, since those are still hard to find on this side of the pond. I'm tremendously saddened that he's doing so poorly, and I hope his plans to enjoy his remaining time as much as possible are a success.

If you've never really read any of Banks' work, and you'd like to see what the fuss is about now, where should you start? The answer seems to be fairly personal--especially within the science fiction genre, opinions often differ wildly on which books are better. This is my take, sorted between the two genres (literary and SF) that Banks called home.

Literary

  • The Wasp Factory: His debut novel, this very much introduces two common elements of Banks' fiction: twist endings, and sympathy for characters who are very much unsympathetic. The Wasp Factory centers on a young sociopath living in a Scottish village, who ritually tortures insects as a method of self-therapy. It's better than it sounds, but don't start here.
  • The Business: This is a better place for first-time readers. Banks uses this book to gently satirize capitalism, with its main character being a senior manager for the shadow company that runs most of the world behind the scenes, and would now like to buy its own country for tax purposes. It's a little fluffy, but also tremendously fun.
  • Walking on Glass: Published soon after The Wasp Factory, many of the same tics are present, but this time the story is told from multiple perspectives--one of which is entirely fanciful. I think this is the first of Banks' novels that I read, and it blew me away, but didn't hold up nearly as well on a second reading.
  • The Bridge: Is this science fiction, or literary? The bridge sees Banks learning how to combine the techniques from his previous two books, but leave off the twist ending in favor of more character development and discovery. I also love the chapters written in full-Scottish brogue as a parody of Conan-esque barbarian tales. This'll always be one of my favorites, and is a great place to jump in.
  • Dead Air: Of the literary side, this is the only title I'd actively skip. Banks can be a bit of a polemicist, which doesn't normally bother me, but in this book about a shock jock he lets the character rail on a bit more than is really justified. If you want a book about character redemption, you're better off with Espedair Street or The Crow Road.

Science Fiction

  • Player of Games: Generally considered the best intro to the Culture books, which is probably about right. It has all the elements of a great Culture yarn: huge set pieces, likeable characters who are dissatisfied with their utopian society, and the manipulations of the Mind AIs that actually run the Culture as a whole. It also serves as a fun, slightly-stacked argument in favor of Banks' socialist, post-scarcity future, with the capitalist aliens serving as skeptical audience stand-ins.
  • Use of Weapons: If The Bridge was just on the literary side of things but had a number of science-fictional elements, Use of Weapons is its counterpart. This is definitely SF, but it has elements of cruelty and experimentation that could easily have come from Walking on Glass. It also has a fascinating structure, since the chapters alternate between two different parts of the main character's life as a Culture mercenary, each shedding light and leaving clues for the other, until they merge together for a devastating conclusion. It also begins Banks' habit of showing how the Culture's utopian surface actually hides a number of much less savory choices being made for the greater good.
  • Against a Dark Background: One of my favorites from outside the Culture books. AADB follows a former soldier named Sharrow who is hired to find one of the Lazy Guns--demented superweapons that destroy their targets with sudden, completely random flights of whimsy. Since there's no continuity to worry about, Banks has a great deal of fun with one-off jokes, like the gang of solipsists that wander in and out, each convinced that everyone else is just a hallucination. It's also a merciless book when it comes to its characters, but not without reason.

In addition to these older titles, you may be interested in my reviews of Banks' newer work, including The Hydrogen Sonata, Surface Detail, Matter, and Transition.

May 10, 2011

Filed under: fiction»litcrit

Crashdown

While I re-read Dune once every couple years, I realized while we were on vacation that there's another favorite sci-fi novel that I haven't read in forever: Snow Crash. Due to reprints issued when Neal Stephenson hit the Baroque Cycle lottery, you can't get a new copy of Snow Crash for less than $10 ($13 for the trade paperback), which I regard as highway robbery, but a used bookstore in Seattle had it for $7, and I quickly found myself buried in it again.

Given that I've hated everything that Stephenson's done since this book, I was frankly worried that it would turn out to be another case of memories tinted by nostalgia, but Snow Crash is actually still pretty good. In fact, I think it's probably still the best thing he's written, and one of the better books of the 90's.

What did Stephenson get right with Snow Crash that he hasn't managed since?

  • There's an female character (a protagonist, no less!) who behaves in ways that are identifiably human.
  • It wouldn't be a Neal Stephenson book without pages and pages of infodump, but they're spaced out and reasonably interesting, instead of being 40 pages on the history of 14th century lending.
  • Characters have (barely) distinct narrative voices--i.e., Y.T. is written in a slightly different dialect than, say, Hiro or the Rat Thing. It's not The Sound and the Fury or anything, but it's at least a cursory effort at a prose style.
  • Unlike Cryptonomicon and Anathem, Snow Crash does not read like a barely-fictionalized series of alt.cypherpunks posts, or as a screed against the hippie who apparently kicked the author's dog.
  • It doesn't take itself too seriously. The main character is named Hiro Protagonist, after all. It's a lot easier to tolerate the book's failings since it's not claiming to be the complete saga of Enlightenment science or anything.
It's easy for Snow Crash to avoid an excess of seriousness because it's basically a satire, and a fairly even-handed one at that. It's a long riff on libertarianism, of course, with its fast-food franchise model of society and accompanying triumph of outsourced globalization. And yet it also takes potshots at big-government bureaucracy (the infamous toilet paper pool memo), at religion (Rev. Wayne's Pearly Gates franchise), and at the worst parts of American consumer culture. Not all of these age well (the Fedland section probably overlabors the point a bit), but the ones that are good are really, really good.

There's an old saying that good science fiction contains one big crazy idea--any more, and it detracts from the story, as the writer struggles to fit in story and readers try to keep up. Snow Crash is the glorious exception to that rule. It's just stuffed with great throwaway ideas and scenes: the Rat Things, Raft Pirates, smart-wheeled skateboards, a kayak-riding killer wielding micron-thick glass knives... Despite being satire, and wild satire at that, a lot of the ideas in Snow Crash are remarkably prescient (especially if you give it a little Nostradamus-like leeway): most notably Google Earth, but its depiction of Internet culture and tribalism is pretty dead-on. Its prediction of network consolidation (via phone companies and cable networks) to form a globe-spanning computer network is not that far off. A gargoyle is just a smartphone user without the fancy goggles. And of course, there's that line about globalization:

When it gets down to it-talking trade balances here-once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
...which sometimes these days sounds about right.

And yet, most impressive of all, it doesn't feel particularly cluttered. It feels fast. Stephenson charges through the story at a tremendous clip. It is, and I mean this in the best possible sense, cyberpunk by way of Michael Bay. Yes, the ending is still terrible. Yes, it still spends too much time rehashing ancient Sumerian myths. True, the toilet paper memo is really only funny the first time. But none of that honestly matters in the end. After the final page, what you remember are the explosions.

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