SF Book Project: April
May 6, 2010
We're already up to April for Ed's Science Fiction Book Project. One of the few science fiction book Ed liked was Forever War, so this month I'm also sending him
Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman. Despite the title's similarity, this is not a sequel to The Forever War. The actual sequel is called "Forever Free." However, Forever Peace also deals with soldiers in the future. I usually tell people that if The Forever War is about the Vietnam War, then Forever Peace is about the first Gulf War and wars between first and third world countries in general. The main feature of war in Forever Peace is a technology called "Soldier Boys" where weekend warriors teleoperate a squadron of robotic soldiers from the safety of their own communities. Battles are heavily asymmetrical. The soldier boys are tasked with protecting civilians, performing good works projects for the communities they are fighting in, and preventing terrorism. They are nearly invincible when it comes to actual combat with the poorly armed insurgent forces, but the real battle is in the media and for the hearts and minds of the people. Of course, this is where the true weakness of robotic soldiers becomes apparent. For the operators of the Soldier Boys, the telepathic link they share with the other members of their squadron leads them to ever-increasing levels of empathy, which eventually destroys their minds as they continue to kill and maim other humans. Perhaps it is just my age, since I was born after the Vietnam War ended, but with today's Predator drones, "Big Dog" robotic soldiers, and automatic bomb disposal devices, Forever Peace deals more with the problems of future and current wars than The Forever War did.
Accelerando by Charles Stross. Stross is another one of those writers whose novels are great, but whose blog is even better. Accelerando is a portrait of the technological singularity as seen by those of us living today. The protagonist is a philanthropic venture capitalist who seems to have a knack for identifying and promoting socially disruptive technologies. The rate of technological change accelerates throughout the novel until both the reader and the characters are in a constant state of total future shock. In the end, natural humans are relegated to some backwater of the solar system where historical figures are reincarnated. The inner solar system is populated by sentient pyramid schemes and 529 scams. Stross does a good job portraying the unpredictable, even while acknowledging that he is attempting the impossible.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agencyby Douglas Adams. Less well-known than his popular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this novel is nevertheless my favorite. I love stories where seemingly unrelated events are tied together in a neat package in the end, and this novel is perhaps the best example of that kind of story in the English language. Nevertheless, it is still comedy and shouldn't be taken too seriously. Reading to the end to see how everything is wrapped up is definitely worth it.
Tea with the Black Dragon by R.A. MacAvoy. I love reading about the early days of the personal computer industry. I also love dragons as major characters. Therefore it is no surprise that I would like this novel. Due to the mysterious disappearance of her daughter, who is a graduate student in Computer Science at Stanford, a woman from the East Coast takes a trip to the Bay Area. She meets an elderly Asian gentleman in the hotel lobby and he sympathizes and helps her with her problem.
Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge, edited by Lou Anders. One of my favorite formats for enjoying science fiction is the short story. Science fiction is particularly suited to the format since it allows an author to explore simple ideas and settings that might not be worth an entire novel, but are provocative. Short stories are also the perfect domain for the "twist ending," and the wide range of ideas can set up some astounding twists. I chose this collection partly because I own it, but also because it showcases a number of new authors and a wide range of ideas. One of my favorites in this collection is Pauk di Fillippo's "Wikiworld" which explores the new world of Internet subcultures when they are forced to interact in the real world. Another is Pamela Sargent's "A Smaller Government," a political satire in which the US Government is literally shrunken to 1000x its actual size.