August 2008 Archives

Stranger in a Strange Land is a classic of early 1960s American science fiction, and a game-changer for the genre's sexual politics, so long relegated to a weird ghetto of three-breasted Martian babes and earnest blondes defiled by tentacled monsters. It's hard to overestimate this book's influence: it was the catalyst for a neopagan religion, was adopted as a kind of manifesto for 60s counterculture, spawned a few neologisms, and accurately predicted the moral and religious trends of the decades to come, namely the birth of the evangelical corporate megachurch. It also, apparently, includes the first description of the waterbed, which did not yet exist in 1961.

As a side note, I've often read that Robert Heinlein is part of the holy trinity ("The Big Three") of popular sci-fi authors, along with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asmiov, a commendation that I find, post-Foundation, to be absolutely ridiculous. Yes, he's as wry with his social commentary as any sci-fi great should be, but he's so obviously better, and patently sexier, than Asimov, who is a grand old bore, or Clarke, who has a nefarious tendency to keep the juicy stuff to his personal life. Of course, this is based on the reading of just one novel, one which made Heinlein an unlikely pied piper of hippie liberalism, when in reality his own views on the subject, although much-scrutinized, are definitely unclear, especially since he penned Starship Troopers, considered by many to be a fundamentally conservative novel, around the same time.

Anyway, the "stranger" of the title is actually a human man, and the "strange land" is Earth: not exactly an epic set-up for a book proclaimed to be, according to the cover of my edition, "the greatest science fiction fantasy of all time." However, the man in question is Valentine Michael Smith, an orphaned human raised on Mars, by Martians, and returned to Earth in his mid-20s with all the psychic wisdom of his Martian forebears and absolutely no clue about human society, language, or mores -- a kind of infant superman. Through the eyes of a creature who is biologically but not psychologically human, we see our most hallowed institutions -- religion, money, monogamy, and the fear of death -- as they perhaps really are, which is to say, absurd. His ignorance is almost psychedelic: he takes rapturous, baffled joy in swimming pools, considering the practice of bathing in water to be a religious experience of high merit. Mike is, culturally, a blank slate, but with his typically Martian sincerity, not to mention his abilities (telepathy, telekinesis, and the willing "discorporation" of self and enemies), he wields a strangely mystical authority, giving Heinlein a quasi-legitimate voice for guilt-free hippie grandstanding. With his combination of loving sincerity and transcendent force, the Martian named Smith "preaches" a universal message of spiritual polygamy, cosmic patience, non-mainstream family structures, and social libertarianism. Without the aura of outer space, he could just as easily be a religious messiah. In truth, he becomes one, and singlehandedly rewrites history.

Stranger is a lovely, powerful book, one which has no illusions about its intentions (broad, clever satire) nor a lick of self-consciousness: Heinlein, through the mouthpiece of Mike and other characters, namely Jubal Harshaw, a curmudgeonly bon-vivant with an appetite for long-winded speeches on everything from Rodin to cannibalism, lambasts his chosen targets without prudishness, and with commendable intellectual zeal. Sure, there's some arguable stuff, like a brief, confused foray into homophobia and old-fashioned sexist patronizing, but it mostly reflects the time and the hesitant puritanism of some of the novels' characters; surely, compared to most science fiction books dating from the early sixties, Heinlein is practically Betty Freidan.

On the whole, I found Stranger In A Strange Land both funny and thought-provoking, and in a way, reading it is like going back to the fountainhead of decades of liberal thought, making hippie counterculture seem fresh again -- it did more to revise my opinions on polyamory than the entire "free love" movement. Of course, I'm not about to run off and join the Church Of All Worlds yet, but we would certainly not be remiss in adopting the worldview of Valentine Michael Smith, at least occasionally. In fact, it could be a formidable exercise for us all to wake up in the morning and approach everything in the world as a powerful Martian might: with sincerity, fascination, and one finger solidly squared on the "annihilate" button.

NEXT BOOK: NEBULA AWARD STORIES FOUR.

Foundation is a trilogy of Isaac Asimov novels that was honored with a special Hugo award for "Best All-Time" series. It beat out some heavy hitters for the title, including Lord of the Rings. After reading the first book of the trilogy, I can understand the semantics that make this award relevant: it's, like, the Best series about All Time, not the Best Series of All Time.

That's a joke. See, Foundation takes place on a massive time scale, chronicling the rise of a civilization over the course of centuries. No characters are around for long, as the story outlives them all.

The premise: a great psycho-historian named Hari Seldon uses a mixture of statistics and sociology to predict the fall of the Galactic empire. To prevent the inevitable eons of barbarism between this drama and the rise of the next great civilization, he sets up a couple of insurance policies for humanity: two isolated planet-colonies stocked with all the available knowledge of art, science, and technology. The primary colony, Terminus, is destined to become the seat of the next empire, and Seldon plots out its entire political future on a long-distance time scale peppered with so-called Seldon Crises, moments at which necessary and unavoidable political actions change the course of history.

The first book in the ludicrously expansive Foundation series takes us from the time of Hari Seldon to about 200 years of Terminus' history, beginning with scientists and encyclopedists, and finishing with merchant-princes and traders. It heralds the beginning of its own empire, the profitable novel series, which spawned some nine sequels and prequels, not all penned by Asimov, over the course of half a century. The books are evidently much-beloved, and I would be loath to dismiss them, particularly as there isn't anything especially offensive about them. I generally love books that span such huge time scales; Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, obviously an influence here, and Frank Herbert's Dune, which probably cribs a little from Foundation, both come to mind. Still, there is something remiss about this one: Asimov's style is so dry and concise that it lacks, to me, the pathos of such a generational story. Knowing the premise, I expected the sweat and tears of an entire race to parade before me, to witness the triumph of knowledge over savagery, some really epic, opening-ceremony-of-the-Olympics sort of stuff. Instead, it's men making plans, men making deals with other men, just another oligarchy in outer space.

Am I the only person to be disappointed by this? Given the freeing lack of constraints presented by science fiction, I was surprised to find intergalactic rulers in a universe millennia in the future doing business as usual, screwing each other out of resources and comparing the sizes of their atomic weapons like it's the Cold War. I think Foundation is supposed to be uplifting -- humanity, so strong, rebuilding itself through science -- but it comes off as a dry extrapolation of the present on a bigger scale. It's a novel about political machinations that wouldn't be out of place in United Nations back rooms, but seem pedestrian and silly in the context of a galactic empire.

Hence this joke, an alternate title for Isaac Asimov's Foundation: White Men Make Up History.

NEXT BOOK: EITHER BOOK TWO OF FOUNDATION OR ROBERT A. HEINLEIN'S STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

The Invisible Man is a fine modern tragedy.

In it Griffin, a young optical physicist, in an ill-timed fit of desperation stemming from his hope for scientific recognition and his inability to cope with people, renders himself invisible. He does this by lowering the refractive index of his body, bleaching his blood, and undergoing a painful and undefined process. His invisibility is total, but it is also a product of science, not magic, and hence is incredibly literal. Undigested food remains visible in Griffin's body, appearing as a floating murk in the air. The snow and dirt settling on his shoulders make his outline visible again, and he can only be invisible while naked, as clothes cloak his form. The reality of his trick is brutal: naked, cold, terrified of leaving a trace anywhere, Griffin cowers in the streets of London, homeless and totally alone. He is driven mad by the irreversibility of his predicament.

While other writers of his time might have made The Invisible Man into an adventure story, a slapstick romp of illusion, H.G. Wells saw a life of invisibility as it really might be. To be invisible is to be completely cast away from the most fundamental, underlying commonalities between all people: being, onus, and self. Griffin is, by virtue of being unseen, no longer human. And, faced with the hysterical reaction of regular folk to his predicament, he certainly acts accordingly: stealing, verbally abusing people, using fear to overpower the weak, and, near the end, dreaming of a reign of terror, of murder.

In the preface to my edition, George P. Wells (H.G's son), details the scientifically burgeoning era of his father's writing. After all, the late 1880s saw the invention of the lightbulb, the radio, the automobile; people could light and heat their homes at the touch of a button, all things that might have seemed like magical fantasies a few decades previous, and things which probably retained a little aura of the magical for many people. There really was a sense of unabashed optimism about science, about technology's potential to unveil new comforts and wonders for the everyman. Still, Wells saw the darkness. His son writes, "the scientific worker strives continually to give man a greater power to shape his destiny; the individual finds more and more than he holds the power of life over death, only as a power of death over life." Yikes.

"Why," said Huxter suddenly, "that's not a man at all. It's just empty clothes. Look! You can see down his collar and the linings of his clothes. I could put my arm --"

It's exactly these kind of juxtapositions -- between the commoner and the physicist, the glowing promise of science and its hard-edged underbelly -- though, that makes The Invisible Man so potent. Like all of Wells' early novels, it's set in the most brass-tacks landscape possible: a provincial England, populated by innkeepers and constables, ordinary folk, gossiping amongst one another as they experience the extraordinary. Wells uses specific, dry language, and it's a particularity of his style that when he shows us the unbelievable, it's through the unbelieving eyes of a common bystander ("No 'ed, I tell ye!"), whose attempts to remain objective in the face of unimaginable horror make the events far more chilling. I can't help but think of Clarke's third law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And magic has no being, like an invisible man.

NEXT BOOK: ISAAC ASIMOV'S FOUNDATION