The Blog Of A Bookowl

To review this book, the second in a series, I have to say something about the first.

“To Your Scattered Bodies Go” is an intriguingly titled, somewhat elderly science fiction novel I discovered and read last year. You might have noticed I tend not to read brand new fiction – this is half economics, half my conviction there’s a lot of old stuff worth reading too. This book by Philip Jose Farmer (who I’d never heard of) proved this ten times over.

The idea behind the series is possibly the most unique I’ve ever heard. Some time in the future – we don’t know how distant – every single member of homo sapiens who ever lived (and died) on earth is resurrected on a strange planet. A vast river snakes around this planet, issuing from (and ending at) the polar cap. The river is cordoned by impassable mountains, creating a continuous valley you can go up or down, but not over or under.

Brought back from the dead in 25-year-old bodies, all of humanity struggles with the practical and metaphysical implications of The Riverworld. Is it salvation? An experiment? Or something darker still?

In the first volume, we follow Richard Burton (explorer extraordinaire) and the group he gathers to him, as he decides to find the source of The River. Along the way he’s recruited by a shadowy stranger, seemingly one of the beings responsible for humanity’s resurrection. Burton’s told he must help to stop the “plan” from going ahead, and the mystery behind The Riverworld deepens.

The Fabulous Riverboat doesn’t quite pick up where this first book left off, but it does deliver in terms of concept development and intrigue. It’s also a neat stand-alone story in its own right. In this book, Sam Clemens decides to build the biggest, most impressive riverboat the world has ever seen, and sail it to the source of The River. The “shadowy stranger” is around to help, causing a meteor to hit the Riverworld and thus provide metals for Sam’s endeavour.

It’s not all plain sailing…King John of England is an uneasy ally and Clemen’s state of Parolando is perpetually on the brink of war with its neighbours. Some brave themes are explored, from the neighbouring king (a 20th century American) who wants an all-black state and hates white people, to the general attitude of men in this book that women are only really useful as hutmates.

Burton’s story didn’t seem so misogynistic, but The Fabulous Riverboat feels inherently sexist. It’s interesting, because this is explored to death in the third book in the series (which I’m currently reading). The author writes as if he believes these kinds of attitudes…his characters certainly do. If this is a conceit it’s a good one. Women in Burton’s story were treated far more fairly, so I think the misogyny in The Fabulous Riverboat is just an exploration of what would happen – given that the majority of women who’ve ever lived weren’t exactly “liberated”.

Sexism aside, this is a satisfying continuation of The Riverworld series. Threads are drawn together, and more questions are raised. I absolutely love the idea and a five-book treatment (the core of the series) probably isn’t enough. I guess I’ll see when I get to the end

Being an internet-type in my day job, I’m pretty familiar with Cory Doctorow. I like his stance on copyright laws and I like how he’s used Creative Commons to licence his books. I’ve never actually *read* any of his work before though, so I, Robot is my first foray into Doctorow’s imagination.

The first thing I’ll mention is the style. Doctorow has an easy, unreflective style of writing that makes I, Robot not just a pleasure to read, but believable. The world is ever-so-slightly removed from our own – what ours would be if a few laws were passed and we slipped down the slope just a little. Some authors take a long time justifying their setting – Doctorow’s world is just there and it makes sense.

It explores Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but not in the way you might think. The protagonist lives in a society where robots are governed by them. (This looks a bit like Britain circa 2020, where you can only watch the BBC and you can’t blow your nose without paying tax on it.) There’s a war with Eurasia, which has non-Three-Law robots but a strangely moral, utopian society. It’s a refreshing change from the usual “robots are going to kill us all!” mentality.

I grew up on Asimov and the Foundation Series is still my keystone for judging the sci-fi I read now, so I’m inclined to judge derivative works harshly. Like I said above though, Doctorow’s world is believable. The Three Laws are slotted into this nanny-state framework, and the story plays on our normal fears and reactions. The protagonist, like us, is a law-abiding citizen. Like us, he finds humanoid robots pretty creepy. Like us, he sometimes wishes the government would bugger off.

I, Robot sticks to one theme, follows it through to an interesting conclusion, and is altogether a great short story. It also taught me what the hell Dentifrice was, so bonus points for that.

The story is part of a collection called Overclocked, which no doubt I’ll be reading shortly. There’s no Amazon link this time – you can download I, Robot and all the other Overclocked short stories from Doctorow’s Site, for free

Wow, Ray Bradbury likes rockets. Written in 1951, this little book is at the same time dated and true to modern life. Science fiction writers don’t care about rockets any more – they’re certainly not *called* rockets anyway, and we’ve looked beyond the solar system for adventures. Many of the short stories in The Illustrated Man are set on Venus or Mars, which are habitable in Bradbury’s world. Strains of Fahrenheit 451 run through the narrative – “The Concrete Mixer” for example, where a Martian is forced to join an army set on invading earth, and the very first story “The Veldt”, where a family live in the eerie “safety” of a fully-automatic house.

Despite the incongruous settings, the complete disregard for physics, the stories work. This is because the science-fiction is just a vehicle for something else – the exploration of the human psyche. Unsurprisingly for 50’s sci-fi, the main characters are men. Women are only picked up as background issues – a shrieking wife, a painted temptation, a memory of something you used to be able to get on earth. The men have thoughts, perform actions, snap under the pressure of their situations.

There’s a lot of darkness in these stories, but a lot of surprises too. The characters are always driven by outside forces, unfair circumstances they can’t control, but their reactions push against the grain. Each self-contained tale gives you something to think about.

The setting of these stories brings us back to reality. They’re the dreamlike-theatre covering a tattooed man, premonitions of things happened and things to come. He too is the victim of outside forces and the link between the tales. Why were these things drawn onto his skin – why not others?

My only criticism of this book? Too many rockets