Not much new under the sun

Variable Star, R. A. Heinlein & Spider Robinson

Well, this was touted as a brand new story from Heinlein’s notes, brought to life by one of Heinlein’s greatest fans and a solid SF author in his own right, Spider Robinson.

What it actually was, I think, was a Spider Robinson pastiche of an idea that Heinlein had for one story but which he subsequently used as the basis for three or four of his other juveniles instead. I don’t dispute that they found an outline for a novel that Heinlein never wrote – in the exact same form as the outline, anyway – but the story has so many familiar plots, subplots and themes that I rather suspect that the main reason the Heinlein never turned this particular outline into a novel is because he decided (rightfully, I think) that he had too much going on in the outline for one novel and broke it up into several other books.

Seriously. If you’ve read Time for the Stars, you know about 75 percent of the plot. (It is worth noting, I think, that Time for the Stars was published in 1956, the year after Heinlein wrote and shelved this outline. The POV character is different, but the plot’s very similar. For the POV character, we have one of Heinlein’s dirt-poor farmboys headed to space to make his fortune.

One of the major themes of the outline, which is all about the corruption of wealth with an interstellar commerce backdrop, was probably part of the seed for Citizen of the Galaxy (which appeared in 1957).

The remaining part of the plot is a Heinlein staple – very young girl, preferably a genius, falls in love with older boy/young man , and spends the novel finding a way to make him realise he loves her/making him love her/waiting to grow up enough so that expressing his love for her isn’t statutory rape. In this case, it’s the time dilation effect that allows the young girl genius to magically become the same age as the initially much older protagonist by the end of the book. However, it’s worth noting that another book published in 1957 - The Door into Summer - also deals with finance and corruption, and features a young girl who manages to catch up to the older man she loves, this time thanks to his spending a few decades in cold sleep. The fact that in this outline, it was a rich little girl and a poor but worthy young man got re-used in Have space Suit Will Travel (published in 1958).

Incidentally, the outline was missing an ending, so Spider Robinson supplied one that is quite his own. But my gut says that the ending Heinlein intended to go with the “lost” outline ended up as the basis of the Dora interlude in Time Enough for Love - young girl, passionately in love with much older man, ends up homesteading on a colony world with him.

I wasn’t sorry I’d read it, because I do like Spider Robinson’s stuff, and I have a fondness for Heinlein’s juveniles, but it certainly wasn’t a brand spanking new Heinlein story, nor did it live up to the hype.

Resurrections

The Armageddon Rag, George R. R. Martin

I loved this book when I first read it. It was the mid-80s, and it was time for a long hard look at the 60s – the music, the dreams, the energy, the dark side, the enormous potential for change, for hope, for new ideas, but also for blind obedience and destruction. It was all there, balanced on the edge of a vibrating metal guitar string, and Martin brought it back in a book that defied genre and made it all so real you could hear the music and smell the sweat and the weed and feel the vibe in your blood and the rhythm in your bones. And it made you want it all again, and wonder where it all went, and then realise that you can’t bring back the dead and still keep moving forward, but you can keep the dream alive and growing and changing as long as you set the energy free.

Then earlier this year, Jo Walton gave the book a retrospective review over at tor.com and I knew it was time to read it again.

And it was everything I’d remembered.

More Green Riders

The High King’s Tomb, Kristen Britain

Britain surprised me with this. Rather than the last of a trilogy, which is what I’d always assumed the Green Riders series would be, it seems that there is still a long way to go in Green Rider Karigan G'ladheon’s struggle to save her homeland of Sacoridia from the long-dormant evil that has waited centuries for its time to strike.

This remains an enjoyable series, although there’s no question but that Britain is leading her characters across ground that’s, for the most part, well-trodden. Still, the familiar elements are arranged in a pleasing way, and the characters are interesting enough to keep me reading.

The stuff of heroes

Having quite enjoyed the first of David Gemmell’s Drenai books, Legend, I’ve been reading more of the Drenai, in The King Beyond the Gate and Waylander.

Gemmell’s Drenai books are not, in the strictest sense, a series, but rather a sequence of books set in the same place, but a different periods of time, with few recurring characters. It’s more a loose grouping of epic histories about a time and place that never was. What seems to tie them together so far is their examination of such questions as honour, courage, loyalty, glory, heroism, victory and what it means to be a legend, in a world that is often beset by wars, both internal and external. There’s a stripped-down quality to Gemmell’s writing, at least in the Drenai books, that pares away everything not essential to the study of these questions.

It’s an almost classical style and sensibility, one that would be at home in telling the story of the 300 at Thermopylae or Horatius at the bridge – stories that, not surprisingly, look at the same kinds of themes.

The people we'd rather not see

We So Seldom Look on Love, Barbara Gowdy

This collection of eight unsettling tales of life at the extremes of human existence, of love and longing and desire and damage, is not easy reading, but it is worthwhile reading. In these stories, the reader will meet people whose lives and circumstances, in lesser hands, would be tales of lurid sensationalism or gushing sentimentality. Instead, we meet these scarred and broken people head on, as real human being, with all their pain and all their potential, however warped by the experiences of living, for despair and desolation, joy and love.

I do not recommend reading all these stories at one sitting, but I do think that there’s a great deal to gain from reading them.

While I don’t often give specific recommendation, I think that anyone who enjoyed Jennifer Pelland’s collection Unwelcome Bodies would also find this volume of interest, and of course, the opposite would be true as well.