My life in books

Spider Robinson: The Deathkiller trilogy, aka The Lifehouse trilogy
Mindkiller
Time Pressure
Lifehouse

To begin with, I have to say that I have a complicated relationship with the works of Spider Robinson. He’s a writer who has a tendency to frequently use, and sometimes overuse, some very specific and highly recognisable themes, motifs, habits, re-cycled character types. Some of these I don’t mind until it gets really bad – such as his love of puns and his tendency toward chucks of heinleinesque first-person narrator exposition, and his willingness to openly use Canada as a setting for some of his books. Some of his other writing tics I tire of more quickly. Also, I find his works to range widely in quality, from the very good, to the downright awful; generally, the more self-indulgent hes being, the weaker the book seems to be.

And in the end, there is definitely such a thing as too much Spider at any given time.

Just so you know where I’m coming from.

I’d read the first two books in this trilogy a long time ago, but since it had indeed been a long time ago, I decided to re-read them before proceeding to the third book. So, here are my thoughts on the trilogy and its individual volumes.

Overall, it’s an interesting experiment – to write three novels about a scientific development that will completely and totally change not just human society but human nature itself forever, without ever actually showing us more than the tiniest glimpse of what human life and society will be like, or how it got to be that way – we never see inhabitants of this brave new world living in the future, and we see very little of the people who make the discoveries on which it depends, and who bring this new world into being. In a sense, Robinson is showing us his vision by negative example – here are the things it is not – and be inference – here are its effects on people who are not part of it.

Since Robinson’s future vision in this trilogy is in many ways analogous to the visions of religious mystics concerning life after death, or outside of time and space as we know it, this approach makes a certain kind of sense. How can he realistically describe things that no human can experience outside of the mystical state that has been called, among other things, satori, or the beatific vision? Instead of trying to do so, Robinson shows us this future through sideways glances, through the hopes of those who live before the change, and the second-hand tales of travellers from the transcendent future.

Great ideas, but like Robinson’s oeuvre in general, the quality of the individual volumes is highly uneven.

Mindkiller, the first volume in the series, is in my opinion the best. The structure is interesting – two interesting protagonists, in two timelines separated by six years, propelled by circumstances, embark on dangerous quests that have strong emotional appeal to draw in the reader. At first, you wonder what is the connection. Then, as you engage with the protagonists, you forget to ask that question any more, and finally, the clues start falling and you see how it all fits together. A good science fiction novel by any standard.

Time Pressure is difficult for me to look at objectively, because Robinson sets this volume right in the middle of a time, place and culture that I know only too well. In fact, odds are that I know some of the people who were inspirational models for some of the characters, because it’s a very small and somewhat insular setting and both Robinson and I were part of it at the same time. (Aside: and yes, I met Robinson on several occasions totally unrelated to SF while we were both a part of this setting. See, one of the women in the commune I lived in was dating one of the dancers in Jeanne Robinson’s troupe, and in a small community, that’s enough of a connection to make meeting each other inevitable. I remember him well, because he was already a well-known SF author. I doubt very much that he remembers me at all.)

So for me, the setting predominates my responses to this book, as I deal with both extreme familiarity and the disconcerting effects of seeing the hippie culture of the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley, nova Scotia, which was my culture for almost a decade, through the eyes of someone who also lived through it, but from a different perspective – again, inevitable, as Robinson is an ex-pat American and I’m a native Nova Scotian. We couldn’t ever have seen the that place in that decade in the same way. But I will make one factual correction to his narrative for anyone who’s read the book: the North Mountain hippies were not, as Robinson suggests, largely ex-pat Americans. A few of the many communes that flourished during the 70s had a lot of Americans, especially the Rajneeshi commune. Many had a couple of Americans among them. There were some very prominent members of the wider hippie community throughout Nova Scotia who were American. But most of the folks who were year-round, settled members of the community were Canadian, and most of those were from the Maritimes. The commune I was a part of had no Americans among its core group. The summer hippies were a different story, but after around 73 or 74, they hardly counted anyway.

What I can say about the book aside from my highly personal engagement with it is that I think it’s a fairly decent SF story about time travel from the perspective of the ones travelled among, and not the ones travelling. I do think that Robinson has used the “male musician who has become spiritually stagnant over guilt because he thinks the accidental deaths of his partner and their children were all his fault” protagonist a little too often, and that’s one of the things that bugs me about the book. And, reminiscent of the two seemingly unrelated plot lines in Mindkiller, it takes a while before you see how it relates to the previous book in the series.

The last book, Lifehouse, is, alas, an example of what happens when Robinson gets way too self-indulgent. First of all, the book is completely unnecessary. We know at the end of Time Pressure that something along the general lines of the Lifehouse set-up is going to happen, and that incidents like the one that forms the novel’s plot are going to happen and will have to be dealt with.

Second, the book is far too narrowly focused with respect to its connection to the overall, barely seen future. While the storylines of two previous novels, like this one, are tightly focused on the protagonists – even though this volume has a lot more key protagonists – their contribution to our understanding of the off-stage developments that lead to this massive change in human existence is to illuminate crucial and far-reaching aspects of that obscured narrative. Lifehouse gives us nothing more about the future beyond a few administrative details.

And third, it’s too cliched, overly complicated, way too full of in-jokes, too much of the plot hinges on coincidences, some of them of the most unlikely order. Making almost half of the key characters science fiction fans is kind of a death knell. It sort of boils down to “look how naive and gullible and yet how clever and resourceful SF fans are because they think about impossibly weird stuff every day” (there’s some of this in Time Pressure, but not nearly as much).

In my opinion, of course, it’s an example of Robinson at his worst.

And with that, I think I’ve had enough of Spider Robinson for some time to come.