Flanagan – Gould’s Book of Fish

Posted on by September 5, 2015
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Goulds Fish2

This is a very enjoyable read, although it makes no sense whatsoever, which is how I often feel about reading Faulkner, someone who I believe Flanagan had in mind here, along with the poet, Rimbaud.

The story is structured roughly like Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, opening with a fairly sane, ordinary person discovering a book from the 19th century describing a journey into a hallucinogenic hell, death, and transformation. For Flanagan’s character, Hammett (later Gould), the POV slides so that Hammett, the reader of the book becomes Gould, the character narrating the found book. And in that story, what does Gould do?  He writes a book, of course, (involving fish), which turns out to be, you guessed it, the very book that Hammett found in the beginning. This hall of mirrors structure accentuates the madness that envelops the characters, and contributes an extra layer of light-hearted fun.

And humor is needed in this novel to leaven the relentless emphasis on filth, squalor, torture, and human degradation. Every conceivable body product, solid, liquid, and gas, is described, expressed, and publicly displayed in detail, as are those of many animals, including rats, pigs, birds, and fish. Naked bodies, male and female, black and white, are mutilated, crushed, cannibalized, shot, beheaded, gutted, drowned, burned, skinned, and slashed. Add to this mayhem  layers of fire, water, mud, slime, mold, rotten food, and insects, especially lice. A lot of lice in this book. What fun.

And that’s why the main character’s humorous, self-effacing tone is both necessary and enjoyable, as are other zany narrative voices and descriptions. That contrast is what makes the book work.

The book is highly episodic, perhaps closest to a picaresque in form. Whatever story throughline is present is obscured by nearly all of the characters being barking mad. The reader is left to enjoy individual episodes for their sheer creativity and lyricism. Several times, Flanagan mentions Faulkner’s famous one-line chapter in As I Lay Dying: “My mother is a fish.”  In this tall tale, the main character actually becomes a fish (why not?).

There are serious thematic points to be explored, but none is well-developed or easy to extract. They are of the kind, “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose,” and “We’d all be better off as fish, without language and thought.” Perhaps the most interesting is the juxtaposition of reality, fictional reality, and fantasy. And I should mention that in the trade edition anyway, the illustrations (of fish) are quite lovely and add significant value.

Some random examples of Flanagan’s very enjoyable language and style:

“It is difficult, looking back on it, to believe that Billy Gould could be privileged to know so much flesh & still remain unmoved. I would not insult Mrs Gottliebsen who was in so many ways a nice woman & most attractive, apart from her face, but then who looks at the mantelpiece when they are stoking the fire? Except I couldn’t have lit a candle, far less got a fire up & racing” (p. 169).

“Even by the ugly standards of that ugly island, Jorgen Jorgensen – in spite of his affectations – was a miserable looking piece of pelican shit, all elongated & sharp angles, a coat hanger of a body trying to remember the coat that years before had fallen off.” (p. 146).

“I care not to paint pretend pictures of long views which blur the particular & insult the living, those landscapes so beloved of the Pobjoys, those landscapes that trash the truth as they reach ever upwards into the sky, as though we only know somewhere or somebody from a distance…while the truth is never far away but up close in the dirt, in the vile details of slime & scale & filth along with the Devil, along with the angels & all snared within the earth and us, all embodied in a single pulse of a heart…” (p. 93).

Flanagan, Richard (2001). Gould’s Book of Fish. New York: Grove (404 pp).

Families R Us

Posted on by September 4, 2015
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FamilyA friend was horrified to read the first writing assignment in her just-started class. It read, “Write a story about a 20-something telling his/her parents, who are having their own marital problems, about an impending marriage to a much older partner.”

My friend’s initial reaction: “What the flying fuck?”

I agree with her sense of horror and outrage, but not with the embedded tone of confusion. I’m not surprised by the assignment, because such stories are exactly what most people want to read.

Family, family, family! If it’s not about family dynamics then the characters are “not well-developed.” Birth, ageing, sickness and death; marriage and its failure, sex in all its vicissitudes, and kinship relations – especially, who is your real father/mother?  It’s as if that’s all we humans have on our minds. And mostly, that is correct, judging from current popular fiction, both stories and novels. But nothing could be more banal than these topics.

There are so many interesting topics to explore beyond the family. Love, for example, and its frustration. Remains of the Day is a masterpiece of psychological exploration. Regret: Mrs. Dalloway comes to mind. Loss of meaning – The Sheltering Sky. Otherness is huge, and here I think of Coetzee’s Barbarian. These are just random examples off the top of my head of gripping human stories that do not involve the question, “Who was the real father?”

When it comes to sci-fi, the stories are all about the idea. Very left-brain. (If you have to be reminded which is which, the answer is that yours is “right.”)  Sci-fi focuses on development of ideas – about space, time, and gravity;  technology, war, ethics, and a hundred others. The psychology in sci-fi doesn’t go very deep. It’s often cliché. Mystery and thriller genres are similar in that regard. But at least they do not revolve around the question of who was the real father. For god’s sake!

I think writing teachers like to focus on family dynamics, especially for college students, because that’s what the students have experienced so far. Many college students are barely out of childhood, barely escaped from their families. Yet it does them a disservice to focus on that context. Even adolescents and youth have some thoughts about courage, friendship, idealism, sacrifice, loss, and even world affairs. Maybe not to Shakespearean levels, considering the tender age, but why make them wallow in the muck of family relations?

Because the “real stuff” is in that muck, the writing teacher would say. The deep emotions that are difficult to confront, you must find, in order to write something honest and develop your true voice. Well I say hogwash to that. For many of us, family memories and their emotions are unpleasant even after they are all sorted out. Moreover they’re not subtle, not novel, and not interesting. To me.

I went to a lecture on human immunology last night and I found it vastly more interesting and exciting than knowing who anyone’s father is. I think I’d enjoy a story from the point of view of a cytokine.

But then, I’m half-android and people often say they can’t “connect” with my characters. Well, I think I know how to fix that.

Thematically Trumped!

Posted on by September 1, 2015
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PreemptiveStrikeI’ve heard about this happening to other writers. You’re almost at the end of your masterwork when a book comes out with great fanfare and it’s the book you’re just completing.

I’m within ten thousand words of finishing my android sequel, when I read in the New York Times Book Review that a new book, “Speak, by Louisa Hall, is a “meditation on robots, artificial intelligence, fairy tales, and the human spirit.”

It involves five voices discussing a core of philosophical questions exploring “the nature of memory, the borders of personhood; how words can illumine and obscure and hoodwink and rescue.”

Unlike my clunky tale, which is a straightforward chronological adventure, Hall’s jumps around in time and space, so that Alan Turing himself makes an appearance, reflecting on the meanings in Alice in Wonderland.

A computer scientist, Karl, writes an operating system called MARY that animates talking dolls, making them into AI devices. Shoot! That’s so much better than my humdrum software bots.

And to top it off, Hall is represented as a poet, and the book is described as lyrical, quizzical, and uplifting. I can lay no claim to lyrical language. I wrote a sestina once that I thought was pretty good, but beyond that, I tend to write descriptive language in a scientific style, the curse of a lifetime of academic writing.

Naturally I immediately ordered Hall’s book. Meanwhile, my reactions are mixed. On the one hand, I am discouraged to have been trumped, even though I already realize that this book is only tangentially related to mine, but a similar theme is definitely there. It is not so easy to write a non-dystopian android story. At the same time, I’m happy that androids are “in the air.”  I believe androids are the new vampires. They have a lot of life left in them. So I should be grateful to Hall for plowing the field.

Any writer who has had the experience of seeing “their” book come out in print before the manuscript is finished will understand my distress. I have to believe, however, that my writing is what makes my work unique – my understanding of how things are, and my way of saying so.  If a book is so generic that only the thematic idea distinguishes it, then it’s probably not worth writing or reading anyway.  Right. And the grapes are sour, too.

Cranking it Backwards

Posted on by September 1, 2015
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Scientific IntrospectionI was listening to a lecture on linguistics and the subject was Proto-Indo-European, (PIE) the prehistoric ancestor of English and many other languages. Words in the PIE language are derived from comparative analysis of all known existing and historical languages in a certain  family, including Old English, Old German, Late West Saxon, Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Ancient Persian, Lithuanian, and many other languages.  PIE was spoken sometime between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago and may have originated somewhere around eastern Ukraine. The idea is speculative, of course, but based on solid linguistic and archeological evidence.

It was interesting to learn, for example that “bher” was a word in PIE, from which many other ancient and modern words are derived, such as bear (as in to bear a load, bear a child), to carry, to suffer, a barrow, a basket, and many others.

What’s most fascinating however is how these PIE roots are discovered. Linguists study how basic words, like “man,” “woman,” “horse,” “blood,” and “plow” appear in a wide selection of languages, ancient to modern, and combine that information with known processes of how languages evolve, split from each other, and combine, over long periods of time. Working those processes backwards, they can deduce what the original PIE word must have been.

For example, our word, “sister” is “swistar” in Gothic (350 CE), “soror” in Latin, “svasar” in Sanskrit, “sestra” in Slavic, “siur” in Celtic, and so on. Knowing how languages evolve, linguists deduce that the PIE word for sister was “swesor” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary).

My thought, listening to this lecture while driving through some hills with dramatic geological formations, was that this process of analysis and then running the data backwards through theoretical principles, such as those in plate tectonics, is exactly similar. You look at a strange geography and ask, “How did this landscape come to be this way?” You crank the processes backwards and realize that these spikey rocks were once sediments at the bottom of a lake. You can reconstruct the original landscape from the present-day data and some known theoretical principles.

Then I realized that same process is used in many sciences, such as astronomy and cosmology, to derive the Big Bang, for example.  You have observed data and known processes of change that you can run in reverse, to get a fairly compelling account of how things used to be. Biology is the same way, from the classification of species to the understanding of cellular structures and even DNA itself.

But one field of study where that method is not used is my chosen field of psychology. For some reason (historical reasons), we are fixated on explaining today’s psychological phenomena in terms of persistent childhood events, such as trauma, or in terms of some direct causal lineage, such as stages of development.  Psychological explanations are deterministic and linear. Psychologists do not use the methods of the other sciences, or of linguistics, to carefully unfold the many, many convolutions, splittings, and combinings of history. We are committed to simplistic, billiard-ball explanations:  “A causes B.”  Why?

It could be that psychological phenomena are unique and not susceptible to the kind of reverse-evolutionary analysis that other fields use. Or, more likely, it’s that we have very poor observational data to start with, due to the perverse history of the field that discounts introspective and phenomenological observation and insists on a primitive, outdated positivism. (See my full rant on this topic, “Scientific Introspection” bit.ly/scientific-introspection ).

Psychology’s problem might also be that we have few explanatory principles about how psychological phenomena evolve over time. Without those, we don’t have machinery we can crank backwards to see where today’s observed phenomena might have come from.

If I were younger, I would systematically re-think everything I know about psychological phenomena, looking for, not simple “A causes B” explanations, but subtle processes of evolution such as processes that fold back on themselves, split, combine and recombine. Explanations that look more like how the brain itself looks. It would be a different, potentially productive way to look at the field afresh.

58,000 Words: Pffft!

Posted on by August 27, 2015
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Backup-disasterYou never think it will happen, but it happened to me. I just finished a chapter for my new novel, I’m reading it over, and bink! the screen goes black. The computer is dead as a stone. I push the power button as if it were a pump. I unplug the device and try it in other sockets. I shake it. I let it sit undisturbed for an hour. Finally I have to admit: “He daid!”

Immediately I begin moving through the five Kubler-Ross stages of grieving, beginning with denial. No! It’s not possible! This can’t be happening. I metaphorically slap myself in the face. “Snap out of it! Do you have a backup?”

Ah, interesting question. It’s like insurance. You think you have it, but you don’t really know until you try to use it. Then you find out.

I start up my alternate computer, a rickety HP from 2006 with a broken keyboard. I plug in an external USB keyboard, and the external USB hard drive which I deeply, sincerely believe contains backup copies of my work.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. Supposedly, my backup software makes continuous backups every 30 seconds for any file that changes. I have, in the past, checked to see if files really were being backed up. You can’t assume. They were, so I believed all was well, even though I never had the need to retrieve a file.

I can’t see anything on the backup drive though. My old HP has an outdated version of the backup software, so even if my files are out there, I can’t get to them. So I go to the Rebit web site and deduce that what I need is “Rebit Pro,” though it was called Version 6 on my dead computer. Close enough, I hope. Why they would deliberately make something as basic as the version into a mystery, I don’t know.

I download a thirty-day free trial (on the assumption that my dead computer will be resuscitated within that time frame), and spend the rest of the afternoon installing it and fiddling with it, to no avail. It is unresponsive. So I go back to the web site and get the phone number of customer support, which is in Colorado. They’re closed. So I go to a lecture at the university and try to keep my mind off the possibility that I just wasted the last three months of my life and much of my future as well.

Next morning, I pick up my phone to call customer support, but no, I am unable to make any calls because Verizon, in its infinite wisdom, has decided my phone needs a software update at just that moment and the phone will be disabled for 15 minutes. Normally I do not curse. I make a pot of coffee and wait a little longer to find out if life is worth living.

I finally reach customer support and they talk me through some undocumented tricks for getting access to my backup hard drive. Left click on this, right click on that, choose this other thing and scroll down to “yo’ mama.” Unlikely as it seems, my backup files magically appear, many different versions of each one.

I spend a while trying to understand how the files are organized and how to choose the ones that were backed up closest to the time of the failure. I copy those over to the old HP and look at them. The last chapter I wrote is about half there. The top five pages are written, followed by several pages of scene sketches. I’ll have to rewrite the rest of the chapter. Clearly, the “backs up every 30 seconds!” promise of the software is overstated.

I realize at that moment that every single word of fiction is written at great cost of cognition. And I realize that a hundred decisions lie behind each word and every sentence.  To rewrite the rest of that chapter is to roll my brain back in time and re-live a few hours of my life. I can’t do it.

There’s a good chance the dead computer suffered a failure of the power supply. That’s what it looked like to me. Replacing the power supply should not harm the data, so in the best of worlds, when that machine comes back in ten days, the full, complete finished chapter will be on it. I’ll wait and see.

My strategy is to write on, forget the missing half of that last chapter and forge ahead with the next. I’m also going to be making manual copies of anything I write over the next ten days into the cloud (e.g., OneDrive), because I’m already confused about how I would restore the stuff I’m writing now to a computer that’s been out of service for a while.

And I’m thinking that after I am whole again, I will subscribe to a cloud backup service, for about $70 a year. Yes, it’s extortionate, but I have been harrowed by fiddling with backup software for two days, wondering if my life is over.  Also, I realize that if my house was burglarized, the bad guys would take the backup drive along with the computer, and I’d be left with zilch.

Backups: You think you have them, but you don’t really know until you need them.

Anderson – The Corridors of Time

Posted on by August 26, 2015
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Corridors of Time_

In this classic sci-fi adventure from the 1960’s, two warring groups, the Rangers and the Wardens, fight each other in various places and times over the centuries. Time tunnels were built in some distant future that allowed these tribes to travel into the past where they try to kill each other, presumably to affect their prospects for wealth and power in the future. We learn, for example, that the Rangers were responsible for Cromwell’s rise, but the Wardens led the Restoration during the English revolution.

Much of the battling in the past seems to center around Denmark, the North Sea, and Southern England, with much of the action in Neolithic times, the Bronze Age, and the Middle ages. In the later periods, raiding Vikings and marauding pirates were ever a hazard.

A modern-day homeboy from Pennsylvania is attracted by a mysterious woman and  follows her back to the Neolithic period where she, a Warden, has to lie low for a while, as she has just narrowly escaped a Ranger attack in the Middle Ages. Or some such nonsense. He becomes sort of her bodyguard and inevitably falls in love with her.

Battles are waged with flint knives and axes, later on with swords, except that the head Ranger and the head Warden have ray guns, so there’s that to watch out for. The implicit hero, our plain ol’ farm boy (who speaks with dropped g’s), comes to doubt the “goodness” of his Warden leader and wonders if he should switch sides to the Rangers, although for the reader, the two sides are indiscriminable and it is never clear what’s at stake anyway.

Our hero rescues a fair maiden from Neolithic times and eventually resettles her in the bronze age as his wife. The maiden adapts well, as nothing much seems to have changed for her, whereas he becomes contemplative. He never returns to modern times.

The writing is remarkably good. Well-wrought descriptions are vivid and I found it interesting to note how English vocabulary and usage have changed in the past half-century. For example, people “smote” each other in the 1960’s, not so much today. In the context of the story, the main characters wear magical hearing aids that let them understand and speak any ambient language. What wouldn’t we give for one of those in today’s world?

As a sci-fi tale, it is fantasy-adventure, with no real scientific component. As an idea piece, which I am increasingly coming to understand is the main point of all sci-fi literature, this one is stimulating. What if interest groups did go back in time to try to influence present-day events? That might seem an attractive, if hazardous option. Assassinate Hitler? Reinforce the armies of Robert E. Lee? Thwart James Earl Ray? Provide counseling to Virgina Woolf?

It’s fun to imagine alternative histories and ideas about determinism and destiny. In this novel, nobody dares travel to the future, ahead of their “natural” time, because, it is said, once you know the future, you become paralyzed by the notion of destiny and are afraid to act.  Interesting stuff, and I can see why Anderson was one of the great founders of the genre.

Anderson, Poul (1965/1978). The Corridors of Time. New York: Berkeley/Medallion, 186 pp.

Rewarding Words

Posted on by August 25, 2015
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Cowboy hats

Pathetic though it is, my favorite part of the day is to check my log of words written on my current novel. I don’t count words written on emails, book reviews, blog posts, edits, and miscellaneous sketches that I write in a day. The novel has the priority, and since it’s an enormous undertaking spanning many months, the word count feels reassuring as an unwavering metric.

Why is that pathetic? Because it’s about the least germane measure of accomplishment I could use. Counting words. That’s like counting grains of sand on the beach, or dust bunnies in my house.

How do I know the words I’ve written are good words?  What if they’re inane? What does counting them measure? I should be measuring plot points executed, or character developments achieved, or artistic themes unfurled. Except I don’t know how to measure that stuff. I can measure words and that sustains the illusion that I’m accomplishing something.

I’ve got 56,000 of the little buggers to date. That puts me within about 25,000 of the end, or 10 to 12 chapters. That could be six to eight weeks, which would be a world’s record for me, since the earliest sketches were only made in June. First drafts usually take a year.

What about the larger question of where am I going? That’s where the word count metric is silent. Right now I’m trying to wrap up a middle-section complication that turned out to be way more complicated than I had foreseen. That will take a couple more chapters.

I also have doubts about my characters. I’ve lost track of the main character. I’ve got five significant characters who do all the talking. The two androids and their creator have a lot to say to each other, as you might imagine. Then I have a brother-sister team as reaction characters. I killed off one other central character early on. I don’t seem to have one main character anymore who is burning with desire for X and thwarted by Mr. Antagonist who is finally overcome, ta-da.

But I like the shape this story is taking. I get tired of white hat vs. black hat. That never happens in real life anyway. I’ve got a group of people here trying to do something, and they cooperate, have setbacks, squabble, learn things about each other. I like it, but I fear I’m drifting.

A couple of villains are out there but they’ve been lying low since the early chapters. I guess they should come back soon and get their noses punched.

I think I’m glimpsing the outline of the rewrite already. But that’s premature.  First I’ve got to get to the end. No looking back!

DeSalvo – Virginia Woolf

Posted on by August 24, 2015
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Woolf DeSalvo

I was convinced by this biographical and literary study, of three things. One, Virginia Woolf was sexually abused by her half-brother, George Duckworth, and two, that her alleged madness was a depressed and confused reaction to that childhood trauma (along with medications and social isolation). Her suicide was an understandable consequence of the trauma. And three, I became convinced that much of Woolf’s fiction was driven by her attempts to come to terms with her trauma, in the absence of any one to help her, since such matters could not be discussed.

I was also convinced by the description of her childhood household, a patriarchal Victorian house of horrors that severely oppressed girls, deprived them of education and tolerated their sexual abuse, but that was not new information. That kind of sociocultural analysis is widely available.

Scholars and readers who object to DeSalvo’s conclusions (and methods, and thesis) generally argue that the evidence is not clear and that the argument is speculative. This gets down to what counts as evidence. Facts are, by definition, propositions that are generally accepted in a consensus community as true. They need no defense because they have already been agreed to. For example, if Woolf had written in her diary that she had been sexually abused by George Duckworth, then that would be a fact.

Actually, she did write that, so DeSalvo’s fundamental thesis is fact-based. Details, we do not have written in Woolf’s hand: how badly was she abused, in what exact ways, how many times, how roughly; what did they talk about, and so on. Details, details. We don’t have them.

DeSalvo draws forth many of those details by implication from Woolf’s diaries, letters, and fiction, and concludes that George and brother Gerald repeatedly abused both Virginia and her sister Vanessa. Critics object to such inferences, saying they are not factual. I found them completely reasonable and compelling.

Except to the most extreme positivist, facts do not have to be declarations written out in longhand. Since the time of John Locke it has been accepted that facts can be inferred by reason from observational data, and I found DeSalvo’s reasoning to be conservative and convincing. For example, she compares accounts of contemporary female sexual abuse survivors to passages in Woolf’s diaries and fiction and shows startling similarities. In my way of thinking, that counts as evidence.

Having worked with sexually abused children for over a decade, everything I read in DeSalvo’s thesis was consistent with my experience. Also the pictures were valuable, especially the one of Virginia standing next to George Duckworth – it is creepy in a spine-shuddering way for anyone who knows how to “read” pictures.

The one area where my skeptical hackles went up was when DeSalvo indulged in psychoanalytic interpretations of certain passages from Woolf. That really is flimsy speculation. However, even there, it is a fact that Woolf read Freud (as part of her quest for self-healing, DeSalvo says), so a psychoanalytic commentary is not totally inappropriate.

A peeve I cannot resist mentioning is that there is no consideration of Woolf’s novel, Orlando, which I was particularly interested in, and which does appear in the index, but is utterly missing from the text. That would be some editor’s error. Other Woolf novels are analyzed in considerable detail to support the author’s thesis.

Overall, this book gave me plenty of fresh insight into Virginia Woolf and her works and I found it valuable, well-written, accessible, and completely believable.

DeSalvo, Louise, (1989). Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work. New York: Ballantine, 375 pp.

Coates – Between the World and Me

Posted on by August 23, 2015
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Coates

Between the World and Me is a brief autobiography, from the author’s early childhood to present-day adulthood, although it is marketed as a series of letters to his fifteen-year-old son about race in America.  That’s a brilliant device, for it allows Coates to describe things about race (such as the legacy of slavery) that are thumpingly obvious, without seeming to condescend to ignorant readers. I think that’s one reason the book has caught the public imagination as well as it has.

However, as an autobiography, especially one this short, it is hardly filled with gripping drama. Coates was deeply influenced, as I was, by The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But Coates is not Malcolm X and did not live that sort of life in times like those. Coates is an ordinary guy who has a poet’s way with words, a courageous honesty, and a meditative temperament, but he is not a guy who has led a particularly extraordinary life. Nevertheless, the story of his life-experience will be revelatory for those who believe they are white and who have never read James Baldwin, Malcolm X, or Claude Brown, and for that insight alone the book is a must-read and deserves every ounce of praise it has received.

America’s racial history and the black experience, as described by Coates, is heartbreaking for anyone with a heart, and deeply frustrating for anyone with a conscience. As a heartfelt wail, this book is moving.

The opening of the book, the first 25 pages or so, is stunning in its poetic reflections on race. The last 25 pages, lamenting our destruction of the planet, are compelling but off point. The middle is a mildly interesting account of Coates’ life, which contains many gems worth panning for.

Some examples:

“The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant ‘government of the people’ but what our country has, throughout its history taken the political term ‘people’ to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean me.”

“But race is the child of racism, not the father.”

“Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible – this is the new idea at the heart…”

“And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body….The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.”

“In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live – specifically, how do I live free in this black body?”

Coates, Ta-Nehisi (2015). Between the World and Me. New York: Penguin/Random-Spiegel & Grau, 176 pp.

Bear – Eon

Posted on by August 21, 2015
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Eon_Book_CoverI haven’t read any sci-fi since the 1960’s. After high school, I focused on non-fiction for 40 years to support my career. Now I’m exploring the genre again and Eon was one of the “catch-up” books on my list of hard sci-fi.

I was entertained by Eon, especially the first third. It made me remember how much fun it had been in the early days to imagine unfamiliar environments, both physical and social. In this tale, an enormous stone asteroid is in orbit around the Earth, and investigation has revealed that it’s hollow inside, containing the remnants of now-deserted Earthlike cities and agricultural lands. I was quite interested in how such a self-sustaining biosphere could be built and maintained, and curious about what happened to the original inhabitants.

But my interests were never quite satisfied.  The author does a lot of hand-waving to account for things, all of it imaginative, none of it compelling. Randomly selected examples:

“’…we don’t know whether the controls are built-in, static, or whether machines are still hard at work someplace.’ In the shadowy halls beyond the light strips on the second floor, she saw man-sized metallic cylinders arranged in rows, marching off into obscurity… ‘I feel like I’m on the Mary Celeste.’ ‘The comparison’s been made,’ Lanier said.” (p. 52)

Cylinders marching off into obscurity?  Is that simply the visual perspective effect, or is it supposed to be something else? What are the cylinders for? No explanation is offered, although the author is obsessed with cylindricality throughout the novel.

Later, we find that one of the interior spaces is far larger than the exterior structure, a mathematical puzzle of spatial geometry that is never explained, perhaps because no explanation is possible (the main character is a geometrical mathematician). So again, while the concept is interesting, a container bigger on the inside than on the outside, what’s the point of introducing it without explanation, except for a  ‘golly-gee-whiz’ effect?

I found the same superficiality of description to be frustrating even in small things. For example, the main character approaches a chair but finds…”There was something unusual about the chair. A small cylinder was mounted horizontally in the middle of the seat, fitting with some discomfort between her buttocks. There might have been cushions at one time covering the cylinder – or perhaps the chair created its own cushion when powered up.” (p. 53).

Knowing what I do about human buttocks, I simply cannot visualize this chair or how one might sit on it, magical self-created cushions or not. There is no followup on the chair. It has no importance in the scene or the story and I can’t understand why it was ever mentioned. The whole book is like that.

Characters are described with about the same degree of care. Mostly stereotypes, all very similar, their mentality seems universally adolescent and dialog does nothing to develop them. Virtually all dialog performs only narrative exposition, people declaring to each other facts and backstory.

What about dramatic development? There is some, but most of it is derived from cold war politics that prevailed when the book was written (1980’s). The Russian scientists are duplicitous and belligerent and eventually take over the scientific project. Why? Because they’re Russians. No other reason.

Inside the deserted library of the deserted asteroid world, the main character discovers (by waltzing in on her first day and selecting just the right book), that the asteroid is from the future, and that future history says there will be a cataclysmic nuclear war on earth in only two weeks. Nobody saw that coming. Can our heroine use her advanced spatial-geometric mathematics to change the course of history and save the earth? The question is risible.

But even the end is not the end. The story goes on and on and on, with random events, unmotivated actions, unexplained phenomena, twisting and turning until you can’t even remember who the cast members are or what the story line was supposed to be. At least that was my reaction.

This is, or was, a very popular example of hard sci-fi, in which the author stays close to believable or plausible reality as we know it. Credulity can be stretched, as it was severely in this case, but no fairies or dragons are allowed. Cosmological wormholes were all the rage back in the 1980’s so that’s probably why they substitute for magic in this tale.

It was kind of fun to imagine a counterfactual world, but only for a couple of hours. Neither the writing, nor the story itself, were strong enough to justify why I might care about this world. I came away surprised that this is an example of successful hard sci-fi. Of course it is only one book on a long list and maybe not the best choice to start with. Still, I have to say, it isn’t what I expected.

Bear, Greg, (1985). Eon. New York: Doherty, 503 pp.