Month: February 2015

“THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE” – Niven & Pournelle (1974)

A thief was on trial before the Sultan and sentenced to death. He asked the Sultan to spare his life.
“You don’t know it, but I am the greatest teacher in your land. If you spare my life, I promise to teach your horse to sing hymns.”
The Sultan smirked but accepted the offer. “You have a year, and if the horse cannot sing, you will be killed.”
Daily, after that, the thief spent his time singing hymns to the horse. His friends laughed as they saw him and asked what he hoped to accomplish.
“Many things can happen in a year,” the thief told them. “The Sultan may die, the horse may die, I may even die. Or, maybe the horse will learn how to sing.”

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by Thomas Scott Holland

“A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ” – W.M. Miller Jr (1960)

canticle (from the Latin canticulum, a diminutive of canticum, “song”) is a hymn, psalm or other song of praise taken from biblical texts other than the Psalms.

The divide of Church vs State has been around since approximately forty-five seconds after the rise of churches and/or states (whichever came latter), and to this day remains a touchy subject in a realm of touchy subjects. Don’t talk about politics or religion over the dinner table, someone’s parents have echoed throughout time, but Walter M. Miller’s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ doesn’t so much focus on the aggressive dichotomy so much as it broadens the scope to tell how each shapes the other in turn, and how the results become neither and both. As each side tries to co-opt the discovery of articles relating to Saint Leibowitz (an engineer in the time immediately proceeding the Great Flame Deluge/Third World War of Atomics) Miller looks at the ways that various sociopolitical factions approach information and fact, and tailor it to their own agendas as humanity first crawls out of a new Dark Age to a new technological Renaissance and in doing so reawakens knowledge of destructive power so vast that it threatens to break the cycle of societal/historical recurrence and technological progress/regress to eradicate mankind altogether. Mostly set within the development of the Order of Saint Leibowitz, traditional religion is forefront – much language being derived from the Latin employed by the Roman Catholic Church – though for the most part they are portrayed as more centrist-atheistic and institutionally focussed in practice. Primarily, this is divided into three sections of the book, each a little over a half-millennium apart:

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by Thomas Scott Holland

“SNOW CRASH” – Neal Stephenson (1992)

It’s hard to look at anything based on cyberpunk ethos and not immediately draw comparisons to William Gibson, but I’ll be damned if Neal Stephenson hasn’t written the finest Gibson novel Gibson never wrote. SNOW CRASH is the quintessential 90s imagining of The Future complete with tech skateboards ridden by young Kouriers delivering data packages for the mafia, street-punk lingo, katana-wielding pizza deliverymen, Moby Dick references, a fantastic antagonist, hard-wired physical technology and detailed descriptions of “The Metaverse” – that is, The Internet That Is Still Yet To Come. I really love the optimism of the 80s/90s cyberpunk authors in the timing of evolving technology, they always expect fantastical things to arrive much sooner than real-world development actually manages but more often than not their predicitvity is more hit than miss. For one thing, this novel came out three years before the ACTUAL rise of the internet and it’s this prophetic imagination that really draws me into science-fiction. In fact, the very nature of futurist writing comes itself to inform a lot of the ways that technology is understood and grown within a society, often working as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy (again, Gibson comes up a LOT in this area, essentially precursing the entirety of the online culture and technology in 1984’s NEUROMANCER), and SNOW CRASH is absolutely exceptional in its true realm of investigation: the correlation between the “hardware” of a human mind and the “software” of language that functions as a kind of BIOS (built-in operating system), and that of the computers we are creating and connecting ourselves to in more and more complex ways. Predicted elements include online avatars, Google Earth, cyberterrorism and personal data hacking.

Side note: Hiro Protagonist is the bestworst lead character name time of all time.

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by Thomas Scott Holland

“THE FOREVER WAR” – Joe Haldeman (1974)

One of the small concessions of the day job I’m currently working to save for overseas is the ability to keep an earbud piping things into my brain for the five or six hours of repetitive labour. Currently, the weapon of choice is a number of audiobook titles in the Top 100 Science Fiction Novels of All Time that I haven’t yet had time to get to reading, so the exercise is turning out to be an immensely satisfying two-birds-one-stone kind of venture. Over the Xmas period I managed to get through the entirety of Frank Herbert’s millennia-spanning DUNE series, Stephen King’s magnum opus THE DARK TOWER (the final/middle book read by the author himself), and Thomas Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW. Each of these is a lengthy dissection in itself, and I may yet wheel around for them but I wanted to open on something fresh. For those who have yet to read any of the titles I’ll do in this fashion, I’ll endeavour to stick to themes, context and concept in discussion in order to spare the gratifying twists in plot in all but necessary strokes that a reader/listener would want to experience first hand. So, “review” is perhaps inaccurate, especially considering all of these are widely regarded already as being masterpieces and the world doesn’t need one more arrogant blogger throwing around his spare change on the matter.

First up, Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel “THE FOREVER WAR”, listed as #21.

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by Thomas Scott Holland