Worth Reading: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

August 14, 2008 at 1:02 pm | In Books, Reviews | 2 Comments
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Where Late the Sweet Birds SangImage via Wikipedia

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm (1976)

In this post-apocalyptic novel, civilization has been destroyed by some unspecified means involving environmental degradation, pandemics and famine. But one extended family, seeing the end coming, has used their wealth to isolate themselves in a well-protected valley and has constructed the hospital, labs and mill they will need to survive. Short on food, they develop cloning techniques to produce more livestock. When they find that most of them have become infertile, they start cloning themselves as well, with unforeseen consequences.

The story is told in three parts, each following a similar arc, each ending in a main character leaving the family’s compound. In the first section, a brilliant doctor helps develop the cloning process but is ousted by his own younger clones, who are already exhibiting disturbing behaviors, such as losing their individual identities. In the second part, a clone is separated from her sister clones when she goes on an expedition to look for supplies in the ruined cities. As a result, she develops an individual personality and an artistic vision that the other clones interpret as madness when she returns to the compound. She must flee to keep from living a life as a drugged-up “breeder.” In the final section, her son is being raised by the clones but clearly doesn’t belong among them. Only he has the ingenuity and creativity necessary for continued survival as the machines and systems set up by the original survivalists begin to break down.

What I thought about as I read this book was recent news stories about children so micro-managed by their “helicopter” parents that they have no ability to cope with the real world and break down as soon as they get to college. The young clones in the story reminded me of younger generations so coddled that they cannot make a decision on their own. How can we survive and advance as a species when we lose our individuality and cannot think for ourselves? is the question.

This is exactly the dilemma faced by the clones. They become so used to a life where they never have to think for themselves that they lose all of their creativity and problem-solving abilities. They become dependent on machines they don’t understand, and when those break down, they cannot come up with creative ways to fix them. So they are doomed. Only those who can establish an individual identity through isolation from the main group are able to learn how to survive.

It may seem on the surface that this novel is a somewhat dated horror story about cloning. But look deeper–the story brings up issues that are very relevant today. Wilhelm is raising a warning flag that we should safeguard our individuality and nurture our creativity if we want to survive.

Thanks to Bill the Sci-Fi Guy for turning me on to this book. Read his review.

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Worth Reading: Specimen Days

August 6, 2008 at 8:45 am | In Books, Reviews | No Comments
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Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham (2005)

5 stars!

Specimen Days is an unusual novel, beautifully written and gloriously strange — the best kind of novel, the kind that keeps you thinking and wondering long after the cover has been closed. The book is divided into three sections, each one connected by character, setting, iconic images and the poetry of Walt Whitman. In each section, the same three characters appear — a man, a woman and a deformed child — but each section is told from a different character’s point of view. Although it is never stated, I got the sense that reincarnation is at work, and each character in their new time is a continuation and evolution of who they were before.

The first section is set in Victorian New York, among sweatshops, ironworks and extreme poverty, in an age just beginning to become industrialized. The boy, so struck by Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (which he calls “the Book”) that he cannot help but recite lines from it at odd and inappropriate moments, has taken his dead brother’s job at a factory. He becomes convinced that ghosts haunt the machines around him and that the machines love the people who work them so much that they want to consume the people themselves. The boy feels compelled to save his brothers fiancee from such a fate.

The second section, set in present-day New York, follows a forensic psychologist for the NYC police department as she is caught up in a strange terrorist plot involving children blowing themselves and a randomly chosen stranger up in an effort to change the course of human history. The children, all unwanted and abandoned, were raised by a woman calling herself Walt Whitman in an apartment where the walls, floors and ceilings have been covered with pages from Leaves of Grass. For me, this was the most compelling section, although all three stories were fascinating.

The final story is set 150 years into the future. It begins in a New York that has devolved into an amusement park, but the story moves outside the confines of the city for the first time. The characters — an android who compulsively recites Whitman due to his “poetry chip,” an intelligent alien lizard and a deformed but wise young boy — go on a quest together that takes them across a ruined America to Denver and the promise of a more hopeful future. This was the strangest story of them all, but the common threads of character and theme keep it grounded.

Each story is ultimately about love: how it begins, how it can end and what it compels us to do for and to each other. But I think this novel is also a warning about how disconnected we are becoming from the Earth and nature — connection to nature is a strong theme in Leaves of Grass – and the inevitable consequences of that disconnect. Each time there is an attempt to reconnect, to alter the direction that society is going, and a failure to do so. But despite these failures, there is still hope — hope embodied in Whitman’s enduring words, in the persistence of love, in the continuing quest for a reunion with the natural world and the cosmos. The ultimate fate of that quest remains unknown as the novel ends, and there is hope in that too.

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Worth Reading: Octavia Butler’s Parables

July 26, 2008 at 3:55 pm | In Books, Reviews | 2 Comments
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Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (2000), Octavia Butler

Five stars!

Parable of the Sower Cover

A reread of Parable of the Sower reveals a dark vision of the near future that is eerily reminiscent of the pictures we all saw on TV following Hurricane Katrina, a frighteningly realistic portrayal of poverty and anarchy that is all too easy to imagine following on the heels of global warming’s devastation. The follow-up, Parable of the Talents, is even more grim and harrowing than its predecessor in its depiction of an America plunged into chaos. Butler deftly picks up the threads of the major issues facing us today — climate change, the widening gap between rich and poor, the privatization of education and social services — and follows them to the inevitably disastrous results if these problems aren’t addressed. Most frightening of all is the depiction of an America in the grips of Christian extremists who murder and enslave people and separate children from their parents, just because they do not hold the same beliefs.

Parable of the Talents Cover

But Butler’s story is one of hope too: of a prophet leading her people toward a better future, following a spiritual practice that makes more sense to me than most organized religions I know of, and of a goal — to sow the seeds of humanity throughout space — that I have always believed held the key to our survival as a species. God is change, indeed, but instead of fighting it or surrendering to it, just recognize it and use it to make your goals a reality. This message is contained within a work of fiction that paint a frightening picture of the future, but it rings very true to me.

If you’re interested in more Octavia Butler, here’s an essay she wrote about racism for NPR. (Thanks, Bill the Sci-Fi Guy.)

Worth Reading: Oryx and Crake

July 12, 2008 at 10:28 am | In Books, Reviews | 2 Comments
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Oryx and Crake CoverOryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood (2003)

The premise of this novel, and the details of the future world it depicts, are so outlandish that you must either accept them immediately or stop reading. I accepted them. I was instantly subsumed in the fascinating, disturbing world that Atwood has created.

The novel opens in a post-apocalyptic shore-side wilderness where the only survivor (presumably), Snowman, is barely surviving. He sleeps in a tree and spends his days in a hallucinatory stupor. The only breaks in the monotony are visits from children who turn out to be genetically engineered post-humans, with glowing green eyes and the ability to eat leaves.

Gradually, Snowman — whose pre-apocalypse name is Jimmy — reveals the events leading up to the disaster as he remembers them. He grew up in a corporate compound separated by walls and guards from the “pleeblands,” where the poor lived in crowded, polluted slums. His father worked for a powerful company conducting research in genetic engineering to come up with new products designed to relieve food shortages, prolong life and preserve beauty, resulting in such bizarre creations as the pigoon and the rakunk. As a teenager, Snowman befriends a brilliant but anti-social young man who calls himself Crake, whose genius enables him to attend a prestigious and luxurious university and then get a high-profile job conducting top-secret eugenics research. Crake brings his old friend into the compound where he works, and there Snowman learns that Crake has engineered a new race of people who don’t have many of the “problems” we do.

Also there is Oryx, the beautiful, victimized woman who both men love. Yes, this is a grand story about the downfall of the human race, but it is also the oldest story of all: a love triangle.

This book kept me fascinated and disturbed until the very end. There were so many outlandish details, but at the heart it explores some fundamental issues: the unchecked power of people wielding science, without regard for consequences; the calamitous effects of environmental abuse; the potential within us to destroy ourselves; the follies of playing god. The only criticism I have is that the ending is a bit unsatisfying. It just leaves us hanging. But overall, Atwood is a terrific writer exploring the science fiction themes of apocalypse and dystopia, and Oryx and Crake is a terrific contribution to this genre.

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Worth Reading: The Hobbit

June 19, 2008 at 10:22 am | In Books, Reviews | 4 Comments
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The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)

The Hobbit CoverMy first experience with this short prologue to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings epic was having it read aloud to me by my father, chapter by chapter, at bedtime every night. We always remember fondly the books we loved as children, but unlike many of them, The Hobbit withstands the test of growing up. Neither as long or as politically complex as LotR, The Hobbit is still a gripping adventure story filled with trolls, orcs, elves, giant spiders, battles and near escapes. Illustrated by Tolkien himself with detailed maps, it is a wonderful introduction to the world of Middle-Earth, to the fascinating characters of Bilbo, Gandalf and Gollum, and to the timeless realm of fantasy and adventure that we all need to continue to visit, even when we are no longer children.

You might have heard that the film adaptation of The Hobbit is under way. But why not read the book first?

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Worth Reading: Lilith’s Brood

June 10, 2008 at 1:19 pm | In Books, Reviews | 1 Comment
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Lilith’s Brood, Octavia Butler (2000)

Lilith's Brood CoverOctavia Butler’s Xenogenesis novels were first compiled into one volume in 1989, but that compilation is now out of print. As with Seed to Harvest, Grand Central Publishing has reissued the compilation in an attractive trade paperback to capture new readers. And I’m glad they did, because I probably wouldn’t have read these books otherwise.

When I finished Lilith’s Brood, I actually wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not, but I thought about it a great deal, which I think is a sign of a book worth reading. The underlying theme disturbed me, partly because I didn’t find much hope in it, partly because I found myself agreeing with the series’ assessment: that humankind is fated by our own biology to destroy ourselves.

Lilith’s Brood includes three novels: Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago, which comprise the Xenogenesis series. The story starts 250 years after a devastating nuclear war. The few human survivors have been picked up by an alien spacecraft and kept in stasis while the aliens, the Oankali, study them. Lilith is one of the first to be awakened and to be integrated into an Oankali family. She is being trained to awaken others, to introduce them to their new reality and their alien hosts, and to reveal the Oankali’s plan: to produce Oankali-human offspring, a brand-new hybrid species.

The Oankali are genetic engineers and reproduce by genetic manipulation. They have no disease or old age, and they can communicate with one another at the cellular level. They survive by traveling through space and finding species with promising genetic traits to mate with, such as humans. However, this means that humans can no longer reproduce with one another; the Oankalis have disabled their fertility. Also, when the Oankali leave, they will consume the remainder of Earth’s resources for the journey.

Of course, there is rebellion. Many humans choose to live long, childless lives rather than join with the Oankali. Lilith does not, because having been integrated with an Oankali family, she has become physically dependent on them. The next two books follow the lives of two of her children, as the Oankali-human interbreeding progresses. I don’t think I would have been compelled to keep reading the second novel if it were a separate sequel; each book on its own seems somewhat incomplete.

Throughout all three novels, the humans — living in primitive conditions on Earth — are portrayed as without hope, a species that, if allowed to reproduce, would attempt to destroy itself again within a few generations. Humans are hierarchical and competitive, unlike Oankali. As individuals, they can be intelligent and compassionate. But as a group, they are violent, destructive and territorial. Even when the aliens allow some humans to start a new colony on Mars and have children, the Oankali hold out no hope for their future.

That’s what makes this series so disturbing. The only hope posited is essentially that a greater power from the outside will find us, cure all our diseases and create with us a better people than we can ever hope to be. We are unable to cure ourselves, doomed by our own biology to always be fighting and murdering one another. I look at the news every day and feel that this is true. But I don’t want it to be true. I want humans to be capable of evolving past whatever impulse causes us to want to destroy one another. I want us to save ourselves, not look to some alien or god to save us.

But if I’m looking for that kind of resolution, I won’t find it in Lilith’s Brood. Still, I’m glad I read it. Even if I don’t ultimately agree with Butler’s conclusions, her writing made me think about and question some of my own assumptions.

Worth Reading: Seed to Harvest

June 2, 2008 at 8:59 am | In Books, Reviews | 1 Comment
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Seed to Harvest, Octavia Butler (2007)
Seed to Harvest Cover

Grand Central Publishing has been reissuing Octavia Butler’s novels in attractive trade paperbacks, which I think is a great thing. It enables readers — meaning me — to catch up on Butler’s work, particularly her series, which are each collected into one volume. Seed to Harvest is comprised of all of the novels in the Patternist series, including Butler’s first published novel, Mind of My Mind. The only Patternist novel that is omitted is Survivor, which Butler herself disowned.

The novels are all rather short, so it makes sense to read them through in one long volume. They are also presented in chronological order in the collection, rather than in the order in which they were originally published in the 1970s: Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark and Patternmaster.

I was already a fan of Butler’s when I picked up Seed to Harvest, and I found this series to be the weakest of her works, which makes sense, considering they were her earliest publications. Clay’s Ark, set in a near-future similar to that of Parable of the Sower, was my favorite of the lot: dark, violent and ultimately rather hopeless. Still, none of the novels felt really complete on its own. It was clear that Butler was honing her chops with these early efforts. All that being said, even her mediocre books are fast and entertaining reads, with lots of interesting concepts to chew on, and I can recommend them. I’m also glad that these reissues can bring Butler to the attention of a whole new generation of readers.

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Book Abandonment Is Not a Crime

May 15, 2008 at 3:54 pm | In Books, Reviews | 2 Comments
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When I was younger, I had a pathological need to finish every book I started, whether I was enjoying the book or not. Probably this compulsion helped me make it through some very long and quite possibly valuable books, such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Caine Mutiny and Moby Dick. But I’m sure it made me endure some real clunkers too, none of which I can recall right now (and with good reason, I’m sure).

But right around the time I turned 30, something changed. I did some mental math, taking into account the number of books that had ever been published plus the number of new books published each year times the number of years I was likely to live. Even assuming that only a small percentage of those books was worth reading, that still meant there were more good books out there than I could possibly read in my lifetime, even if I had copious amounts of free time.

The cost-benefit ratio of forcing myself to finish books that I did not like for the arbitrary reason that I had started reading the book no longer made sense to me. So I gave myself permission to abandon any book that wasn’t doing it for me. Granted, if I got past page 100, I would really try to stick it out to the end, but that wasn’t a hard and fast rule.

And I didn’t have to have a good reason for abandoning the book either. I could abandon National Book Award winners and potboilers indiscriminately. If the book and I didn’t hit it off by the first, second or third date, then I was moving on. No guilt involved.

This policy has served me well. Looking back through my book journal, I can see that the number of books I both finished and really liked has gone up as the number of books I have abandoned has increased. In other words, I’m finishing fewer books that I truly hate (although one or two does slip through on occasion). My reading time is time better spent.

I encourage you to mercilessly abandon books that aren’t doing it for you, as well. If you can’t bear the thought of giving up on a book you paid good money for, donate it to the library or send it out via BookMooch.

Here is a sampling of books I’ve abandoned over the past year and the reasons why:

If you need further encouragement/approval to abandon books I will leave you with these thoughts on book abandonment from Nick Hornby in his excellent reading journal, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt:

… And anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don’t mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that’s what you want to read, it’s fine by me, because here’s something else no one will ever tell you: if you don’t read the classics, or the novel that won this year’s Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can’t, it might not be your inadequacy that’s to blame. “Good” books can be pretty awful sometimes.

Worth Reading: Red Mars

May 1, 2008 at 4:07 pm | In Books, Reviews | 1 Comment
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RRed Mars Covered Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson (1993)

Kim Stanley Robinson is not an easy author to read or to love. Some of his novels can be counted among my favorites (The Years of Rice and Salt), and others (The Gold Coast, Forty Signs of Rain) I simply hated — or couldn’t even get through to the end (Fifty Degrees Below). Even the books I loved required a lot from me: they are thick, dense and epic, layered with so much hard science and social science that they can sometimes read like textbooks rather than novels. But with Robinson’s best books, the effort is worth it. Red Mars is a good example.

Robinson’s epic about the colonization of Mars (the first book in a trilogy on the subject) covers a lot of ground. Sure, it tackles the myriad technical problems involved in colonizing such a hostile planet, including how to build a space elevator for easier transport of settlers and exploitation of Mars’s resources. But from there, Robinson takes on even more weighty themes: the clash between those coming to Mars to try to create an entirely new way of life and those back on Earth who want to retain control; cultural conflicts among the various ethnic and religious groups spreading out to Mars; the discovery of an innovative medical procedure that greatly extends the human lifespan and the implications for an over-populated Earth; all climaxing in a planetary revolution propelled by all of these issues.

This is a ponderous book with a lot of big ideas. It may be a bit overlong — sometimes it seems as if all the characters do is drive around by themselves for great distances over the barren Martian landscape — but those sections may be excused by the action of the rest of the novel. Robinson actually helps us believe that living on Mars is something we can achieve, while showing us that these advances will probably only exacerbate our very human problems.

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Worth Reading: The Giver

April 25, 2008 at 12:16 pm | In Books, Reviews | No Comments
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The GiverImage via Wikipedia

The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)

It is true that most habitual readers acquire the habit when they are young. I have my father to blame for my addiction to books, who actually gave me an Isaac Asimov novel when I was in the fourth grade (from which I learned several choice curse words, although I was totally incapable of following the plot). In fact, if I do not get to read at least once a day, preferably before going to sleep, I suffer severe withdrawal symptoms such as insomnia and persistent moodiness. But I digress.

Like many young readers, I was hooked by the gateway drugs of science fiction and fantasy. My favorites when I was a pre-teen were the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, the Chronicles of Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander and A Wrinkle in TIme and its sequels by Madeleine L’Engle.

Unfortunately, I had long abandoned my childish ways by the time The Giver was published. I read it for the first time recently and realized that this was a book my younger self would have loved. It depicts a dystopian society where all choices have been eliminated. Everything from what your job is to who you marry is decided for you. But one person in the society, the “Receiver,” must be chosen as the keeper of the society’s collective memories. His job is to remember what life used to be like, with war, tragedy and pain, yes, but also with true emotions, extended family and even colors. Each new Receiver receives the memories from the previous Receiver, who thus becomes the “Giver” of the title. While a bit too simplistic for the adult reader, the novel provides a nice introduction to some weighty themes for younger readers. Think of it as a Brave New World or 1984 lite.

This is the first book in a trilogy. I haven’t read the other two in the series, but trilogies are the crack cocaine of science fiction — once you start, you can’t stop. (Or have I stretched this metaphor too thin?)

Practice a little subversion, and sneak a copy of The Giver to a young reader you know.

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