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rushthatspeaksI'm back from my funeral-going (happily, earlier than I expected) and hope to catch up on these reviews within the next couple of days. The books I read for this review were read on September ninth, tenth, and eleventh.
As part of my travel, I found myself in my father's basement, which is full of books. He is a Golden Age SF fan and something of a collector in a small way, and I wanted some of the books of my childhood as comfort reading for the rest of the trip. I looked over the Andre Norton and discovered something I had not expected. Half of them I'd read about seventy-three times each-- all my old favorites were there, the ones I didn't steal when I moved out-- and the other half I had never read at all and had no memory of my father even owning. I know they must have been there when I was growing up because the last time my dad bought anything in genre was 1972, and also these are all paperback original first-run from the fifties and sixties with my father's Very First Address Labels from when he was in high school carefully glued into some of them. (I wonder whether a first of Witch World in very fine is worth anything, now?)
Then I went and looked over the Heinlein, and there was one I hadn't read there, also. Over the next three days I read Sargasso in Space, by Andre Norton; Rocket Ship Galileo, by Robert Heinlein; and Star Gate, by Norton again. It was a very good run of books surrounding a funeral, because they took about half an hour each when I was very tired, and had that known-author nature where one pretty much knows what to expect. Then I spent some while pondering the mystery of why I'd never read any of them previously, because I was a voracious reader then as now and it seemed odd.
I can only conclude that it must be the titles.
Sargasso in Space, for instance, is the onerachelmanija mentioned the last time I read Norton, where people bid for tickets to planets they know nothing about. It's the first of the Solar Queen series, which I'd heard of though I'd never read any. It was terribly, terribly proofread (at least in the first printing) and therefore so typo-laden that it was actively painful, but the book itself is a not actively bad early Norton sf suspense novel involving ancient artifacts and organized banditry. I enjoyed it, though I'd have enjoyed it much more if she hadn't rewritten it with great fidelity in the later Exiles of the Stars, which does exactly the same plot only with ancient Egyptians, tighter prose, and characters I already know and like.
Why hadn't I read it? I do remember seeing it around as a kid, and it's an interesting example of associations dating. You see, I gather that the Sargasso Sea used to have all sorts of legends of ghost ships and pirate associations and it was this mysterious place where nobody knew quite what it was and so on? Well, we had it in school, and it was described to me as a whole bunch of seaweed in this definite place in the Caribbean, full of ecological interest, liable to get your rudder snarled, and oh, yeah, people used to have all these legends about it when they didn't know what it was. And I remember thinking, when I saw the book as a kid, I don't particularly want to read about ecology and being stuck in a dead calm with nothing to do right now. That's not fun. The entire thrill of the title, the long tradition of adventure novels that Norton is invoking there, went totally and entirely over my head. Even now I can only see it by inference and having read some about folklore.
And Rocket Ship Galileo-- when we had Galileo in elementary school, we didn't have him as an astronomer, or, well, the astronomy was secondary and I don't recall the moons of Jupiter being mentioned. We had him as an advocate of Copernicus and an example of standing up to authority and being right. We had him as the great defender of science and truth against dogma. Which led kid-me to assume that the book was, as with another Heinlein I had read (If This Goes On...), a standing-up-against-a-repressive-religious-dictatorship book, which is almost never a genre I read voluntarily in those years (too depressing, back then; not now). Heinlein was thinking of the great discoveries, the telescope, that first clear look out. I get all that the second I look at the book, now, it's a title that almost makes me tear up, having read Galileo's notebooks, because while I still think Apollo is the perfect name for the moon rocket Galileo would have been a damn fine and valid choice. As a kid, none of that. Is this me, or is this how they teach Galileo now standardly, or is it having gone to a Catholic elementary school full of emigrated Nonconformist Anglo-Catholics and ex-nun teachers?
The book itself is cute. It was Heinlein's first juvenile (1948) and you can tell: I would not have been at all surprised to find myself reading something pretty much exactly like this in my father's piles of old Boy's Life. The attraction to a current reader is very days-of-future-past, the fact that this is so very much the future of the late nineteen-forties and not the one we got. And yet there are, as there usually are, resonances to the one we got-- this is a future with monetary prizes sponsored by governments and corporations for private scientific achievement, and I thought instantly of how happy I was at the winning of the Ansari X Prize, and about the ongoing attempts at the Google Lunar. The plot centers around a nuclear scientist who winds up taking a crew of teenage boys to the Moon on what they think is the first moon shot, and if you ever want a beautiful and precise illustration of the ways in which science fiction and fantasy traditionally (though not always in practice) think differently, compare this to Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, which has in many ways the same plot and was written only seven years later. Galileo is full of ballistics and gyroscopes and political and media considerations, and is a sense-of-wonder-but-pay-attention-to-the-practicalities adventure, with psychological realism about things like getting permission from everyone's parents; Mushroom Planet is a sense-of-wonder-never-mind-the-practicalities adventure with psychological realism about the sheer strangeness of other worlds, the deep time, the sense of numinous. In Galileo they go out to New Mexico, near the green glass sea, to do all their testing and shipbuilding with dangerous fissionable materials and in Mushroom Planet they build the ship on the beach behind their houses and have to worry about it being swept out by the tides.
The thing is, I can't tell which book I find more believable-- not in terms of science, but of the fictional real, the suspension of my disbelief. They're both wildly outdated and there aren't really any women in either and the future is fifties America-- there are so many problems in terms of gender, race, etc. in much Golden Age stuff, I know you all know that, this is not that essay-- but they're still both books I enjoy with a dash of annoyance and thinking about them together is very interesting.
Now Star Gate, which was my other Norton, has a separate title problem entirely. It's so generic. I had to write down that the book is called Star Gate, or I wouldn't have remembered that to write this review, and I suspect that my eye skipped over the book on the shelf for years. When I picked it up, I thought I must have read it and it took starting to read the book to be sure that I hadn't. Norton must have fifty books in which devices exist that you could classify as star gates. It just continues to bounce off.
What convinced me I hadn't read it was the opening introductory essay, which sent me into whoops of laughter. Norton explains the parallel-world hypothesis, in a couple of paragraphs, as something the reader may have heard of, and then, and this is where I started laughing, very earnestly explains that it is unheard of in fiction to date, of course, but that there is no reason why you shouldn't have a book using the parallel-world hypothesis set on another world. Which isn't Earth. In any way. But that doesn't mean you can't have as complex a history as Earth does! All of this would, of course, have been obvious from chapter one. At least, to me, and nowadays. Oh, the fifties. I've seen several of this sort of essay in early Nortons. Does anyone know whether anybody actually needed them?
The book's a good one, with both an unhuman protagonist whose differences from humanity are neither glossed over nor considered odd and an interesting view of humans-as-colonizers from outside. The humans landed on the protagonist's planet generations ago, thoroughly changed the tech level, interbred with the existing intelligent species, and then thought oh, whoops, maybe we have done some harm here and after a nasty war among themselves decided to leave the planet to straighten itself out. The protagonist, who has human ancestry, follows some of them as they leave through a dimensional portal and lands on a version of his world where the humans totally enslaved his people and everything went as nastily as possible. Of course, they start a revolution. I've never seen a Norton consider questions of colonialism and race before and while this is not the world's most nuanced portrayal it is fascinating to see how it shakes down. I really wish that the protagonist had stopped referring to all humans as 'Lord' or 'Lady' automatically as that was very twitchy and I don't think it was supposed to be, and I wish there'd been some mention as to what the protagonist's race on his original planet thought about the humans leaving (there was probably no hope of getting more than one faction's perspective, but I would have liked at least one). Still, this was not remotely Norton's usual material and it is nice to see her thinking about this sort of thing.
A question in conclusion: did you have problems getting references in titles as a kid? Do you think book titles age out of being interesting?
As part of my travel, I found myself in my father's basement, which is full of books. He is a Golden Age SF fan and something of a collector in a small way, and I wanted some of the books of my childhood as comfort reading for the rest of the trip. I looked over the Andre Norton and discovered something I had not expected. Half of them I'd read about seventy-three times each-- all my old favorites were there, the ones I didn't steal when I moved out-- and the other half I had never read at all and had no memory of my father even owning. I know they must have been there when I was growing up because the last time my dad bought anything in genre was 1972, and also these are all paperback original first-run from the fifties and sixties with my father's Very First Address Labels from when he was in high school carefully glued into some of them. (I wonder whether a first of Witch World in very fine is worth anything, now?)
Then I went and looked over the Heinlein, and there was one I hadn't read there, also. Over the next three days I read Sargasso in Space, by Andre Norton; Rocket Ship Galileo, by Robert Heinlein; and Star Gate, by Norton again. It was a very good run of books surrounding a funeral, because they took about half an hour each when I was very tired, and had that known-author nature where one pretty much knows what to expect. Then I spent some while pondering the mystery of why I'd never read any of them previously, because I was a voracious reader then as now and it seemed odd.
I can only conclude that it must be the titles.
Sargasso in Space, for instance, is the one
rachelmanija mentioned the last time I read Norton, where people bid for tickets to planets they know nothing about. It's the first of the Solar Queen series, which I'd heard of though I'd never read any. It was terribly, terribly proofread (at least in the first printing) and therefore so typo-laden that it was actively painful, but the book itself is a not actively bad early Norton sf suspense novel involving ancient artifacts and organized banditry. I enjoyed it, though I'd have enjoyed it much more if she hadn't rewritten it with great fidelity in the later Exiles of the Stars, which does exactly the same plot only with ancient Egyptians, tighter prose, and characters I already know and like. Why hadn't I read it? I do remember seeing it around as a kid, and it's an interesting example of associations dating. You see, I gather that the Sargasso Sea used to have all sorts of legends of ghost ships and pirate associations and it was this mysterious place where nobody knew quite what it was and so on? Well, we had it in school, and it was described to me as a whole bunch of seaweed in this definite place in the Caribbean, full of ecological interest, liable to get your rudder snarled, and oh, yeah, people used to have all these legends about it when they didn't know what it was. And I remember thinking, when I saw the book as a kid, I don't particularly want to read about ecology and being stuck in a dead calm with nothing to do right now. That's not fun. The entire thrill of the title, the long tradition of adventure novels that Norton is invoking there, went totally and entirely over my head. Even now I can only see it by inference and having read some about folklore.
And Rocket Ship Galileo-- when we had Galileo in elementary school, we didn't have him as an astronomer, or, well, the astronomy was secondary and I don't recall the moons of Jupiter being mentioned. We had him as an advocate of Copernicus and an example of standing up to authority and being right. We had him as the great defender of science and truth against dogma. Which led kid-me to assume that the book was, as with another Heinlein I had read (If This Goes On...), a standing-up-against-a-repressive-religious-dictatorship book, which is almost never a genre I read voluntarily in those years (too depressing, back then; not now). Heinlein was thinking of the great discoveries, the telescope, that first clear look out. I get all that the second I look at the book, now, it's a title that almost makes me tear up, having read Galileo's notebooks, because while I still think Apollo is the perfect name for the moon rocket Galileo would have been a damn fine and valid choice. As a kid, none of that. Is this me, or is this how they teach Galileo now standardly, or is it having gone to a Catholic elementary school full of emigrated Nonconformist Anglo-Catholics and ex-nun teachers?
The book itself is cute. It was Heinlein's first juvenile (1948) and you can tell: I would not have been at all surprised to find myself reading something pretty much exactly like this in my father's piles of old Boy's Life. The attraction to a current reader is very days-of-future-past, the fact that this is so very much the future of the late nineteen-forties and not the one we got. And yet there are, as there usually are, resonances to the one we got-- this is a future with monetary prizes sponsored by governments and corporations for private scientific achievement, and I thought instantly of how happy I was at the winning of the Ansari X Prize, and about the ongoing attempts at the Google Lunar. The plot centers around a nuclear scientist who winds up taking a crew of teenage boys to the Moon on what they think is the first moon shot, and if you ever want a beautiful and precise illustration of the ways in which science fiction and fantasy traditionally (though not always in practice) think differently, compare this to Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, which has in many ways the same plot and was written only seven years later. Galileo is full of ballistics and gyroscopes and political and media considerations, and is a sense-of-wonder-but-pay-attention-to-the-practicalities adventure, with psychological realism about things like getting permission from everyone's parents; Mushroom Planet is a sense-of-wonder-never-mind-the-practicalities adventure with psychological realism about the sheer strangeness of other worlds, the deep time, the sense of numinous. In Galileo they go out to New Mexico, near the green glass sea, to do all their testing and shipbuilding with dangerous fissionable materials and in Mushroom Planet they build the ship on the beach behind their houses and have to worry about it being swept out by the tides.
The thing is, I can't tell which book I find more believable-- not in terms of science, but of the fictional real, the suspension of my disbelief. They're both wildly outdated and there aren't really any women in either and the future is fifties America-- there are so many problems in terms of gender, race, etc. in much Golden Age stuff, I know you all know that, this is not that essay-- but they're still both books I enjoy with a dash of annoyance and thinking about them together is very interesting.
Now Star Gate, which was my other Norton, has a separate title problem entirely. It's so generic. I had to write down that the book is called Star Gate, or I wouldn't have remembered that to write this review, and I suspect that my eye skipped over the book on the shelf for years. When I picked it up, I thought I must have read it and it took starting to read the book to be sure that I hadn't. Norton must have fifty books in which devices exist that you could classify as star gates. It just continues to bounce off.
What convinced me I hadn't read it was the opening introductory essay, which sent me into whoops of laughter. Norton explains the parallel-world hypothesis, in a couple of paragraphs, as something the reader may have heard of, and then, and this is where I started laughing, very earnestly explains that it is unheard of in fiction to date, of course, but that there is no reason why you shouldn't have a book using the parallel-world hypothesis set on another world. Which isn't Earth. In any way. But that doesn't mean you can't have as complex a history as Earth does! All of this would, of course, have been obvious from chapter one. At least, to me, and nowadays. Oh, the fifties. I've seen several of this sort of essay in early Nortons. Does anyone know whether anybody actually needed them?
The book's a good one, with both an unhuman protagonist whose differences from humanity are neither glossed over nor considered odd and an interesting view of humans-as-colonizers from outside. The humans landed on the protagonist's planet generations ago, thoroughly changed the tech level, interbred with the existing intelligent species, and then thought oh, whoops, maybe we have done some harm here and after a nasty war among themselves decided to leave the planet to straighten itself out. The protagonist, who has human ancestry, follows some of them as they leave through a dimensional portal and lands on a version of his world where the humans totally enslaved his people and everything went as nastily as possible. Of course, they start a revolution. I've never seen a Norton consider questions of colonialism and race before and while this is not the world's most nuanced portrayal it is fascinating to see how it shakes down. I really wish that the protagonist had stopped referring to all humans as 'Lord' or 'Lady' automatically as that was very twitchy and I don't think it was supposed to be, and I wish there'd been some mention as to what the protagonist's race on his original planet thought about the humans leaving (there was probably no hope of getting more than one faction's perspective, but I would have liked at least one). Still, this was not remotely Norton's usual material and it is nice to see her thinking about this sort of thing.
A question in conclusion: did you have problems getting references in titles as a kid? Do you think book titles age out of being interesting?
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Date: 2010-09-15 09:35 pm (UTC)Ahh, fond memories of Rocket Ship Galileo. 4th Grade, just the right age for it. I made a board game based on the events of book, where everyone race to the moon. It was ridiculously lethal. I think we bothered getting to the end only once, otherwise it was a never ending return-to-start.
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Date: 2010-09-15 11:12 pm (UTC)Rocket Ship Galileo could make a very good board game. There should be more race-to-the-moon board games.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-15 09:19 pm (UTC)A neighbor induced me to read it by saying the main character is a girl who was a total reject at school. At age 12, just into the maw of junior high, this was instantly interesting--and I couldn't put it down.
I also totally avoided "The Hobbit" for the same reason. The friend who was recommending LOTR (we were fourteen) insisted I read it, and so I did--and liked it okay, but before then I passed it for several years, assuming it was a cute dressed up animal story.
I avoided a bunch of sf for similar reasons as yours.
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Date: 2010-09-15 10:50 pm (UTC)The Hobbit was also read to me at a young age but I would probably have read it anyway as my reaction to most made-up-word book titles is to read the book to find out what they mean.
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Date: 2010-09-15 11:28 pm (UTC)Dell Yearling with the literal rainbow for wings, or whichever the other one is with the giant green face-in-a-bubble down right?
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Date: 2010-09-16 06:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-15 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-15 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-15 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-16 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-16 04:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-15 10:52 pm (UTC)I still haven't-- I bounced off it hard-- but it was obvious from page one that it wasn't the sort of book I'd thought it was.
I should probably try it again. Cherryh works so randomly with me, though, I can never tell with her.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-16 04:58 am (UTC)There is a female main/leading character whose machinations basically drive the plot. When I first read the book in high school, I was also pleased by the inclusion of a canonically not quite straight male lead, although it bothered me that he was also the most obviously messed up main character (his partner balanced this a little by being one of the most stable).
There are some plausibility issues. There are interesting political structures. There is much worldbuilding material, which I enjoyed. There are also some aspects of the world and the story that scare me or are somehow problematic, that Cyteen only deals some with, but my memory is hazy as it has been a bit over a year since my last reading, so I can't pin down what they were (although they weren't as bad as in the sequel).
For what it's worth, each reading was quick mainly because I could not stop once I got past the introduction. Also, it won the 1989 Hugo for best novel.
I hope you find this comment useful.
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Date: 2010-09-16 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-16 06:43 am (UTC)*Although in fairness to the person interpretation, it is true that the central characters are teenagers for significant chunks of the book, and it is also true that cybernetics—systems of control, term not used in the book to my memory—play a central role. This probably was mostly unintentional, but I haven't read the earlier books set in that universe.
P.S.
Date: 2010-09-16 06:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-15 09:38 pm (UTC)My husband was looking at how, in the nineteenth century, as the format and content of pulp reading books in Edo Japan changed, in some instances (well, at least one), the author included instructions on how to read the book. Sort of like how, if you get English-language Shonen Jump here in the United States, it'll explain to you about reading from right to left.
... The essays in the Norton book are more about content, but it's the same idea of teaching the reader so as to improve (or make possible) the reading experience.
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Date: 2010-09-15 10:57 pm (UTC)That's fascinating about Edo books. I wonder how long the instructions went? This essay was like three whole pages, as are most of the other Norton essays of this sort I've seen, and I know that Shonen Jump has one page or sometimes just an arrow.
The funniest of the Norton essays I've seen so far is the one in the front of Forerunner Foray where she explains to you very earnestly that psychometry will someday be recognized as an emerging science.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-15 09:48 pm (UTC)If Star Gate was published in 1958, then she was right on the cutting edge with the many-worlds interpretation (then called the relative state formulation) of quantum mechanics; Hugh Everett III published his thesis in 1957. It would remain mostly obscure for over a decade; it didn't pick up its current name until Bryce DeWitt really started pushing the theory in the early 1970's. Nowadays we all know what Terry Pratchett means by the Trousers of Time, but Norton's audience might well have needed the short course.
No idea about the others, though.
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Date: 2010-09-15 11:07 pm (UTC)The thing is, though, there is a perfectly good explanation in-text-- in fact, the protagonist has it very carefully explained to him at some length quite early on in the book (though in historical terms, not quantum-mechanical terms). She may, now that I think on it, have been using the essay to try to assure the reader of the existence of a technical background instead of it being merely a plot device, so the essay does make one more likely to read the book as sf. On the other hand, it has the usual Norton magic/psychic powers, which to me are a clear genre marker for fantasy. I don't know, I guess the essay does make me see it as more slipstream?
The other essays of this sort I've seen from her have been things like 'psychometry is a science no really really really' and 'there is no reason not to believe in past-life regression' and 'maybe we should all keep an open mind about astrology', which makes them... odd to read.
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Date: 2010-09-15 11:33 pm (UTC)Does science fantasy exist as a genre anymore?
The other essays of this sort I've seen from her have been things like 'psychometry is a science no really really really' and 'there is no reason not to believe in past-life regression' and 'maybe we should all keep an open mind about astrology', which makes them... odd to read.
I believe Wraiths of Time (1976) has one of those; the present-day protagonist winds up pulled across worlds to a nuclear-tech alternate Meroë, taking the place of her double who died opening the gate. Someone at some point explains why, seriously, this works.
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Date: 2010-09-16 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-15 09:51 pm (UTC)I read all of Asimov's Norby the Mixed-Up Robot books, so I confess that there must have been something very wrong with my taste at the time.
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Date: 2010-09-15 11:09 pm (UTC)The Heinlein juvenile titles mostly worked pretty well on me. I mean, Star Beast, Space Cadet, you knew what you were getting. I remain annoyed that he did not better differentiate Farmer in the Sky and Tunnel in the Sky because I still get them confused, and some of the other ones are pretty generic, but Rocket Ship Galileo is the only one that actively kept me from reading the book.
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Date: 2010-09-15 11:35 pm (UTC)I read Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn (1958).
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Date: 2010-09-16 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-16 05:21 pm (UTC)I did know of the myth of the Sargasso Sea thanks to reading Charles Berlitz at about the same time. And if you've never read Berlitz, I recommend him - complete crackpot combined with evocative and spooky stories recounted as truth, which should be nicely entertaining. I especially love how he interpreted a distress call which, IIRC, was actually something along the lines of "We are entering thick fog. Visibility is extremely poor," as "Danger like a dagger now! Come quickly! We cannot escape!"
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Date: 2010-09-16 09:57 pm (UTC)For "Galileo" I definitely had a different experience from yours, maybe due to my rabidly pro-science father. He doesn't read much (dyslexia), but we watched public TV science documentaries all the time and I'm sure Galileo figured prominently in the astronomy ones.