Science Fiction

[breepf]

At the risk of typing into the void, I gotta say that I enjoyed the Varley novel. Nerds often describe M John Harrison's The Centauri Device as the novel that deconstructed space opera, though I don't think it was entirely successful. In any case, Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline has that same deconstructive vibe vis-a-vis first contact-style stories and, I think, it more squarely hits its targets.

Much to my shame, I've picked up a well-recommended Warhammer 40k novel. I'm not really into military sci-fi as a genre, but I appreciate the (sometimes overwrought) efforts at worldbuilding and machismo.

It is with a deep and abiding shame that I say that I mostly enjoyed the first Warhammer 40k novel that I read. Granted, it's my understanding that it's one of the most highly recommended Warhammer novels. In sum: military sci-fi that valorizes the martial virtues; self-conscious pretenses to granting war the grandeur and dignity of Homeric epic, though this comes at the expense of three-dimensional characters as well as the political and social intrigue that should accompany a galaxy-spanning war machine. I think it would be worthwhile to think about these novels as modern-day pulps.

I am reading a second Warhammer novel by a different author--it is also different type of story set in a different time period--that I'm enjoying much less.

 

[BubbaOtis]

No love for Greensboro's Orson Scott Card?
For a book based on work he did in 1977, I thought "Ender's Game" was prescient re: the rise of video war games, drone technology and the surrounding ethics.

 

[breepf]

Here's a reading update that no one asked for:

1. My second Warhammer 40k novel--part of a different series--was not nearly as entertaining as the first. It turns out that I don't give a shit about pseudo-philosophical banter in a torture chamber. That being said, the two Warhammer novels that I've read seem very influenced by the Iraq War--torture, embedded journalists, macho empire. Quite a departure for the more pleasant 'end-of-history' liberalism on offer in, say, an Iain M. Banks Culture novel.

2. Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack. I read this because William Gibson likes Womack. I hate novels that use 'dialect'--in this case, the sort of future patois that we might associate with A Clockwork Orange. Otherwise, I appreciate the normalizing of a slowburn dystopia.

3. Manifold Time by Stephen Baxter. This novel is from the 90s, but it's got a quasi-Elon Musk character who has to knock down bureaucratic Big Space (i.e. NASA) to do it. In the Olaf Stapleton tradition, Baxter likes to write stories that span millions or billions of years and that ask us to accept fundamental transformations to how we think about life, time, etc. Will read the next in the series, though I understand that book 3 is garbage.

4. Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis. Yes, that CS Lewis. I'm interested in how sci-fi uses the sublime as a sort of substitute for religion--see Asimov's Copernican Revolution story, whose name I forget. This novel is kinda boring--it name-checks Wells, which makes sense because Lewis is offering a sort of Christian counterpoint to the future class dystopia in The Time Machine. A few nice passages that try to reclaim an idea of "the heavens" from the material nihilism of "space." Won't be reading the rest of this trilogy.

5. Murderbot: All Systems Red by Martha Wells. Like Dennis Taylor's Bobiverse novels, the first of which includes a sci-fi convention, this book strikes me as a very self-conscious effort to inject a contemporary lonely nerd into a sci-fi milieu as its murderous protagonist. Yes, the murderbot murders, but what it really wants is to belong! Fun nonetheless.