Sunday, September 19, 2010

Vacation starts today

Technically, my vacation that I took from work doesn't start until Tuesday, but shut up. I know I haven't talked about this vacation on this blog, but no one reads this stuff anyway, so I don't feel the need to explain myself. Later today, I will be in the sky. And that is awesome. I probably won't be writing about much else besides this vacation for a while, so get used to it. Anyway, I don't leave yet. First I should sleep or something. That is all for now.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Book review: Spectrum 5 edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest

Another science fiction anthology purchased at one of the library book sales. I've had this one for several years. It was on the top of the tub of books that I have but have yet to read. The book was published in 1966, but all of the stories it contains were originally published in the 1950's in Astounding Science Fiction except for one which was published in Galaxy.

This is vintage science fiction. It's the sort of stuff that not everyone would appreciate, but that I find fascinating. It's usually not very good, but it's sort of a time capsule, a glimpse into the future of the past, or something. The fact that it's interesting from a literary or psychological point of view or whatever is good enough for me. But it can also, at times, be totally hilarious. In one of these stories, characters who arrive on a planet using faster-than-light travel do calculations using slide-rules. There's some kind of dilemma when writing a fiction story that takes place in the distant future. You can invent fantasy technologies and not describe them, but too much of that is, well, boring. You can add more detail and mix technologies that are theoretically possible but not yet worked out with real technology and with concepts that are purely imaginary, but the more detail you add, the greater the risk that things are going to look stupid later. Great science fiction writers typically try to strike a balance, from what I've seen. They don't always succeed at doing so, of course, that's because it's challenging and that's why pulling it off is an attribute of greatness.

This was a quick and altogether pleasant read. I don't know that I'd ever heard of any of these old-timey authors, but some of them I rather like. The editors, not so much. In the introduction, they attempted to be bold, which I appreciate, but once I'd read the whole thing, I thought they were really pretentious, which maybe worked out because it gave me low expectations for the anthology as a whole.

Student Body by F.L. Wallace: A classic example of bad science fiction. Humans land on alien planet and are unprepared for the native fauna. The science it butchers is biology, which leaves me wondering how much had to do with the ignorance of the individual author there and how much had to do with the state of the whole field or public understanding of it at that time.

Crucifixus Etiam by Walter M. Miller: A story about terraforming Mars. I didn't even know they had stories about terraforming Mars back in 1953, so I'm impressed. The story is hilariously dated in several ways, but is actually pretty good. I was annoyed that a few pages were ripped partially or entirely from the book here.

Noise Level by Raymond F. Jones: Reminded me of The Toynbee Convector. To be fair, this story was written way, way before The Toynbee Convector. But it's also far inferior. By the end, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. One page was missing here, so I didn't get to read part of the beginning, but the story goes something like this. The top scientists are brought to secret government project with military guys and one psychologist, where it is revealed that some random nobody demonstrated his anti-gravity device in a secret military demonstration, but it malfunctioned somehow in the second test and the inventor and the device were destroyed. The scientists are tasked with recreating the device before the Russians can invent anti-gravity themselves. The main character is a physicist who is good friends with the psychologist who is inexplicably working on this project and spends a lot of time talking to his friend. One of the scientists keeps trying to insist that anti-gravity is impossible (for a reason that doesn't actually make any scientific sense in the real world, but whatever), but the rest of them figure that since it was on video, it must have happened, and try to figure out how. The main character is out fishing with his psychologist friend and invents a new theory of gravity that would make such a device possible, so he begins working on it. Simultaneously, the guy who kept insisting that anti-gravity was impossible has news for everyone. He has meticulously gone over the labs and libraries of the supposed inventor of the device and has come to the conclusion that the whole thing is staged. The labs don't look like real labs that anyone has ever used and nothing about them makes sense. It's all some big hoax. No one listens to him and they insist he's had some sort of mental breakdown. Everyone teams up with the main character to build a device based on his brand new theory. It works. Yay, they did it. Then the psychologist reveals that yes, the original video and everything really was fake. It was a ruse to make the scientists think outside the box or something. Human beings can achieve anything if they get past the mental blocks that make them think things are impossible. I am not making this up.

Grandpa by James H. Schmitz: I guess in the 1950's it seemed totally plausible that if we could use faster-than-light travel, we'd find lots of worlds with nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres and water and plants and animals. The plants and animals evolved in different ways from ours, but somehow they'd be biochemically compatible so they could eat us and we could eat them and such. Still, this is a decent story.

Mother of Invention by Tom Godwin: I'm pretty sure that scientists did have a theory for ferromagnetism back in the 1950's and that this author just missed that somehow (in the story, magnets were some big mystery because even though everyone knew they worked, no on had a model explaining why they worked). Despite some annoying silliness with things like that, some of this is really cool. The character aren't threatened by man-eating aliens or anything like that. They discover a planet with seemingly benign biology. It's the geology that's the problem: the place is full of diamonds. Sandstorms are a lot more vicious when the sand is more diamond than quartz. Neat idea, even if parts of the story are just silly.

The Far Look by Theodore L. Thomas: A story about astronauts on the moon, but written long before there were ever really astronauts on the moon. Probably even worse in retrospect, but the whole concept is rather fanciful anyway. The idea is that the moon is just so harsh and barren and removed from the world the astronauts know that they'd completely lose their heads except they're sent in pairs, so they're able to rely on each other to remain sane. Once they come back home, reconnecting with the human race causes them to have some sort of super-wisdom and be total aces at whatever they choose to do.

Big Sword by Paul Ash: Another alien story, but I really like this one. Much better written than most of the stories here.

Commencement Night by Richard Ashby: Very, very silly. The nations of the world collaborate to build an island paradise on which to place infants who never have contact with anyone from outside so that they can form their own society and be spied on constantly. That way, we can learn about human nature and figure out how to prevent war. But aliens secretly communicate with the islanders, and the whole thing turns into one big hippie mess, except this story predates hippies by like a decade I think. Whatever.