Cynical Monkey

Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction classic.  For me it is an example of the rich introspective social consciousness that is exemplary of the best science fiction.  Fahrenheit 451 is such great science fiction that most people don’t even realize that it is science fiction.

The first time I read this novel was in high school, back then I was not able to fully appreciate the message.  I read Fahrenheit 451 again, last month, right after reading some Camus (Resistance Rebellion and Death) and I was struck by the similarities between the two authors.  Both Bradbury and Camus seem very afraid of the social consequences of mass politics and mob-ocracy.  Camus saw his fears articulated in the spread of communism as a humanitarian solution.  Bradbury was alarmed by the spread of an offend-nobody-mentality, and it’s ability to destroy critical thinking and intellectual inquiry.  Both authors saw culture, society, and freedoms being boiled down to lowest common denominators in an effort to protect everybody from the possibility of being marginalized.  Both saw this slow march toward totalitarianism beginning as a popular sentiment to protect the weak.  This sentiment is institutionalized either slowly through humanist mass politics that sacrifice freedom for equality or explosively through popular revolution.

Maybe I’m a bit too optimistic, but I don’t think we will be burning books any time in the near future.  But, even if we are not burning books, censorship is a real issue.  In Guy Montag’s world they didn’t start by burning books they began by shunning controversy and socially persecuting intellectualism.  They began by only seeking ideas that supported their existing popular beliefs.  They confused happiness with freedom, and then confused security with happiness; slowly they gave up freedom and, thinking that they were happier, didn’t realize what was lost.  Dangerous and controversial ideas threatened people perception of security and those ideas became a public threat.  The censorship in Fahrenheit 451 was born out this popular humanistic desire to protect society.

Protecting people from dangerous ideas, that’s the more dangerous idea of all.

I have been reading my way through the Hugo award winning novels for the past 3 years. Cyteen was a novel I was always apprehensive about reading because of its length. After reading Downbelow Station and encountering Cherryh’s writing style I became even more concerned. Cyteen was everything I feared but it was also something more than I expected.

Cherryh’s writing style makes me angry, there is something about the way she mutilates a sentence that makes no sense to me. I don’t understand how a decent editor could overlook the low quality of this writing. Two quick examples, “You or I don’t have to have done anything.”, “They’re not a hell of a lot careful.” Although these sentences are not completely devoid of meaning they both really break my flow when I’m reading. To compound the prose problem, the novel was long and drawn out with many undeveloped and unnecessary side plots and confusing details that didn’t seem to contribute to the story.

Cyteen’s story was a very slow starter for me. I was more than 300 pages into reading it before I felt consistently motivated to pick the book up, but after that I was seldom without the novel. I thought that although the book made a decent political thriller it fell a bit short in the science fiction category. I don’t understand why tt took a setting at a distant star system 300 years in the future to conceive of a political thriller based around cloning. Why go so far when all you need is Earth 10 years from now, and then you would have a story with much more urgent and relevant underpinnings.

In the end I was quite captivated by the story, the way it build slowly and never slows until it all resolves in the final few paragraphs was truly enjoyable story telling. Adding up all of it flaws and flourishes I give it a decent 3/5.

Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge was my first enjoyable space-opera this year. Fire Upon the Deep first made it on my reading list by way of it’s Hugo status. I have a goal of reading all the Hugo award novels. Among the Hugos winners I have read it stood out near the top of the space-opera sub-genre. I found the story really drew me in and it never felt tedious.

“Zones of thought” was a very novel concept. The idea of separate cosmic layers with different physical properties is at once both fantastic, and oddly plausible. I really like the way “zones of thought” acts as a plot device for exploring omnipotence in a finite universe, and the idea of entities operating at a level of complexity that is physically beyond our level of understanding. It’s kind of like Pointland, Flatland, Spaceland (Flatland 1884) are all adjacent and one simply has to travel a bit to observe radical changes in the physicality of the universe.

I also like the Tines alien race. It was the first instance of a collaborative intelligence that I can remember encountering in my reading. I would expect a Professor of computer science to envisage a sentient intelligence that operated in such a decentralized way.  I really see potential to develop this concept more in future novels set in the universe.

Overall this book was a 4.5/5. A very enjoyable read that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys good space-opera type science fiction. I’m really looking forward to reading more of Vinge’s work.