My life in books

I've been reading science fiction (and what was, in my youth, its upstart cousin, fantasy) for going on half a century now - the first book I can remember buying off the grocery store paperback carousel was James Schmitz's Agent of Vega (The PermaBooks 1962 edition - I can still see the cover in my mind), and odds are that was not the first science fiction book I'd read.

In that time, I've built and sold or given away at least a dozen complete libraries of SFF titles - my life was for many years an unsettled one. But now that I've become a home owner, and have many walls that can be lined with books, it's my ambition to recreate all the libraries I've owned - or at least, all the best parts of them.

So I've given my partner a long list of SFF books I want to own once more, and every once in a while he finds himself in a used bookstore and buys several of the titles off that list.

AS it happens, there's been some of these re-acquired books hanging around in the to-be-read pile, and this past week I decided it was time to read them all.


Double Star, Robert Heinlein

This has always been one of my favourite Heinlein novels - probably because of the combination of the craft of acting displayed by the main character and the plot focusing on political intrigue. To me, there's still something profoundly engaging - and yet, upon re-reading, profoundly disturbing - about this portrayal of how one person comes to surrender not only his future, but his identity, for a cause. It's an interesting mediation on the idea of personal sacrifice for the common good and the processes that lead one to commit to such sacrifices.

We see Lorenzo as a tragic hero, because Heinlein presents the cause he comes to champion as a just one. But one must also look at the process Lorenzo undergoes here - a traumatic separation from everyday life, enforced isolation from everything familiar, deep immersion in a specific political viewpoint, being surrounded with people who strongly espouse this viewpoint and stress the importance of the task he has been recruited for in such a problematical way... it's the same set of techniques used in cults, in military basic training camps, in fundamentalist madrasas, in all sorts of places where one breaks down personal identity and replaces it with devotion to a cause or an organisation.

And in the end, Lorenzo has vanished and the person he has become doesn't even think all that highly of who he once was, satisfied that the ends have more than justified the means.


Beyond This Horizon, Robert Heinlein

One of Heinlein's quirkiest and least focused novels, I've always thought. We have some of the classic and contradictory elements of a Heinlein future - societies where the libertarian idea of arming everyone and allowing private duels to settle personal conflicts co-exists with the profound degree of social control necessary for the acceptance of a world-wide genetic breeding program. We have an attempted revolution by Luddite-inspired neo-facists (complete with plans to eliminate the inferior races - in this case, people who have not been part of the government breeding program), a love story between a man who doesn't want to further his carefully designed genetic heritage and the woman chosen by the agents of the state as his ideal genetic counterpart, numerous paeans to rationality and the wonders of science, a quest for the truth behind paranormal ideas such as reincarnation and telepathy, and a seemingly socialist political and economic system in which a well-run centralised state produces higher and higher citizen living allowances and excess production that can be used for just about any hair-brained scheme that comes to mind, as long as it can be argued to be in the interests of science, the people, or something else noble and iconic.

It's fun to re-read, but I still have no clue, after all these years, of what Heinlein might have been trying to say on this novel. Maybe that no one ideology has a hard-and-fast hold on utopian ideas, or that no matter how utopic a civilisation my seem, there will always be people who aren't content - some who will want to destroy, and some who will want to grow in new directions? Who knows. And Heinlein isn't around to tell us.


A Case of Conscience, James Blish

Another classic that leaves me with unanswered questions, even after re-reading it again after so many years. The novel is in two parts. In the first part, a team of scientists from Earth evaluate Lithia, a newly discovered planet which is home to a technological but pre-space flight alien civilisation to determine what kind of relationship should exist between it and Earth. One of the scientists, a physicist, wants to turn the planet into a physics weapons lab because of its wealth of fissionable materials. Two others want to open it up for mutual trade. And the fourth, a Jesuit priest and biologist, has decided that it is a Satanic trap for the human conscience, a planet where all adults of the dominant species behave in the most moral of fashions even though they have no religion, no god, no revelation, no experience of sin and grace.

In the second part, the scientists return to Earth, carrying with the a gift - the carefully stored embryo of one of the Lithians. The alien grows rapidly to adulthood and, cut off from his culture, deliberately becomes a focal point for the frustrations and discontents of a vast underclass of human beings, sparking riots and threatening to create fractures in human society. Eventually he is taken prisoner and sent on his way back to Lithia. Meanwhile, the priest has come under severe criticism within the church because in his assessment of Lithia, he has fallen into the heresy of manicheanism, in granting Satan the ability to create of his own accord - an ability that must be reserved for God. However, the Pope himself suggests a way out - Satan can create illusion, which, once exorcised, will vanish. At the same time, the physicist has been given the go-ahead to create his weapons research lab on Lithia.

The climax leaves the reader with no resolution to this case of conscience. Through the offices of a convenient advance in technology, a group of scientists - including the conscience-tormented priest, watch Lithia in real time as they wait for the physicist to begin a dangerous experiment that one of the scientists on Earth has predicted will destroy the planet. As he watches, the priest decides that he must try to carry out the Pope's recommendation and begins his exorcism. The experiment, as feared, fails with devastating consequences.

Has God chosen to destroy Satan's illusion via the material tool of a scientific experiment gone awry? Or has the theological issue been a red herring all along, and the real sin here the way that a arrogant physicist has been given the opportunity to destroy an entire planet of sentient beings? Blish clearly wanted his readers to think about the interrelationships of science and religion, and the effect they have on society, for themselves.


Slan, A. E. Van Vogt

One of the classic stories about the emergence of a super race, their persecution by "ordinary" humans, and their struggle for survival and plans for and/or success in achieving benign control over all of humanity, mutant and otherwise, for the greater good of all. Scratch the surface and it's a particularly ugly justification for a fascist utopia, but at the same time, it's such a deep-seated nerdly wish fulfilment fantasy that, as a nerd myself, I can't help identifying with the orphaned slan Jommy Cross and his search for the secret slan organisation that, he believes, must exist, so that he can give them the benefit of his father's scientific discoveries in their goal of preparing to take over the world.

Fantasy is, after all, one of the places where we can imagine the things we would never want to really do.


Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Ah yes. The classic anti-censorship novel, which interpretation Bradbury recently repudiated, insisting that it's all about how bad television is for you. Well, I won't deny that there's a profound critique of the ways in which North American society has, for quite some time now, been creating dumber and dumber forms of public entertainment (it's fascinating to compare the "families" the Montag's wife is so enthralled by with the most recent forms of entertainment to hit the public airwaves, the participatory reality show where viewers can influence what happens on the show), and the effects that this may be having on society.

But if censorship is control of what people are allowed to see, then this is clearly about censorship, and what happens to people in censored societies when they realise what is being kept from them.


October Country, Ray Bradbury

In re-reading this collection of short stories, I was reminded both of how good a writer of the short form Bradbury is, and of how truly grotesque and disturbing his vision could be. There is a great deal of death and decay in these stories - suitable for the season where the weather turns cold and living things die and many cultures have their festivals of the dead. Bradbury was a master of may genres, from science fiction to horror, and this is certainly a collection of some of his finest examples of the latter.

The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury

One of several re-reading projects I've been meaning to get around to is the short fiction of Ray Bradbury. This is the first collection I've gone back to, and after two, maybe even three decades since my last reading, it's amazing how many of these stories are ones I remember, and at the same time, ones that I get thrills and chills about all over again as if I'd never read them before.

It's a powerful collection, containing such stories as: "The Veldt" (children turn on their parents using the technology of a simulated playground), "The Other Foot" (the reaction of a Martian colony of black people driven off earth to the news that most of the remaining white people on earth have died in a world war and the survivors desperately need their help), "The Rocket Man" (a child and his mother deal with the danders faced by his father's career as a 'rocket man'), and "The Exiles" (what happens to the spirits of books and their creators when all the books are destroyed?), to mention just a few of the 18 classic short stories in this collection.

Bradbury's gift was to be able to write just enough, no more and no less, that each story was complete and full to the brim - nothing wasted, nothing missing - and to tell in this way a simple story that somehow had meaning and relevance far beyond the basic plot of the tale. A master storyteller.