Connie Williams Part 2

To Say Nothing of the Dog: How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump

This is by far the most lighthearted of Connie Willis’ time travel stories.  It is based on Jerome K. Jerome’s semi autobiographic and comic novel “Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog” about three men and a dog who go on a boating vacation on the Thames.  In Willis’ story, the historians have been recruited by a rich benefactor to recreate Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed in the Blitz.  Ned Henry, a time traveler who is a 20^th century specialist, is sent to return items back to the late 19^th century because he is the only one available to fix a possible problem in continuity, but he is effected by time lag.  He meets up with two contemporaries and they go on a leisurely trip up the Thames along with a dog and the same time Jerome did in real life.  Eventually he meets another historian Verity Kimble and they have to solve the mystery of what happened to the Bishop’s bird stump, an item that was in the cathedral at some point, but which may have been destroyed in the blitz.

The book is a mix of comedy, romance, and mystery.  Ned gets dragged into repeated complicated misadventures involving pets and social demands.  There is a mystery full of clues as to what happened to the Bishop’s Bird stump, a very ugly iron vase that was donated to the church and which vanished for seemingly no obvious reason.  And several characters fall in love over the course of the story.  The main science fiction themes are the problems of determinism vs free will which crop up some in her other time travel stories along with thoughts on the space-time continuum.  Besides the time travel there is not that much other science fiction apart from a plague that killed all cats in the future, but this actually has relevance since historians take a cat into the future, which isn't supposed to be allowed by the laws of time travel.

All in all this is a novel appropriate for all ages and is a good choice for comedy, mystery or romance fans.

Connie Williams Part 1

Connie Williams best known stories focus on Time Travelling historians from the late 21st century in her novels and short stories.  While she has written other works, mostly her stories are soft science fiction that all follow a group of late Oxford historians who travel back in time to England disguised as contemporary people.

She has a simple set of rules in place that govern her universe. Deadlines: You can't be alive at the same time twice.  No altering past events: her time machine won't even send you back if you will alter major events or else it will send you back hours or days later.  This is called slippage and also works to send you to a slightly different time if someone could see you arrive.  You can't go to "divergent points" such as triggers for wars or other decisive events in history, where even a small action could have major consequences that history couldn't correct.  You can't take things or people back with you, especially if that would alter history.  You have to travel through "drop sites", which are certain specific locations where you can time travel and no one will notice you coming or going.

She is one of my favorite current writers and she tends to focus a lot more on plot, dialog, characters, and setting than most other science fiction writers.  She does a lot of detailed historical research before writing these stories and the science fiction details are mainly there to advance the usually fairly complex plot.  For the most part her books are fairly cheerful and fun (except for the end of Doomsday Book) even when she focuses on fairly serious matters like World War II.

Doomsday Book

This is the darkest and most depressing of her four historian novels, though the first two thirds are not particularly dark.  A historian named Kivrin travels back to oxford in 1320, but unknowingly arrives several decades after that.  There are two parallel plots involving disease, one a modern deadly strain of influenza that has infected both Kivrin and the technician who sent her back in time and another one with an outbreak of the plague in the 14th century that happens towards the end of the book. Kivrin becomes delusional from the influenza when she arrives in the past and can't remember her drop site, while the local contemporaries think she is a runaway nun since she can do things like read and write.  She becomes stranded in the past since the future time influenza outbreak means no one can come and rescue her for fear of spreading the disease.  Soon after becoming stranded the black death arrives in her village and wipes out the local population while she can do nothing to stop it.

Doomsday Book won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for best novel and was nominated for other awards.  It is fairly dramatic and presents a interesting description of 14th century English life.  It has several memorable characters and the disease story lines in particular are extremely tense.  Like some of her other work she includes some religious symbolism in her work, particularly when dealing with the priest of the local church.

For the most part its very appropriate for teenage and above audience and will appeal to people interested in the middle ages and history.  The only possibly disturbing parts of the book are the vivid descriptions of the plagues the infect the various characters.

Elizabeth Moon

Elizabeth Moon has a great name for a science fiction/fantasy writer and has written more than 2 dozen novels so far, both the science fiction and fantasy genres.   I have only read one of them so far, but she has several that have been nominated for major awards before.  She is best known for her military science fiction.

Remnant Population

This is the only one of her books that I have read yet and it had a very interesting premise.  It was nominated for a Hugo the year it came out.

An old woman named Ofelia has spent most of her life in a colony on another supposedly uninhabited planet that has just been deemed a failure and is to be abandoned.  Her age is not given, but it is implied she probably at least in her late 60's and came from a poor and uneducated background.  The people of the colony will be relocated to a new world, but she doesn't want to leave her home so she hides when the ship comes to take them away and they don't really care enough to look for her.  She likes living on her own and hears on the radio when a new colonizing group is attacked and destroyed as it lands on another part of her planet.  No one had seen any evidence of intelligent life on her planet before and eventually she befriends several members of the bird like species that soon come to investigate her home.  She has to protect them from possible revenge by

This was a very unique book in that it is mainly a character study of a very average person who then gets thrust into a position of first contact with an alien species.  Ofelia is old and tired and doesn't want to move or restart her life.  The colony gardens and supplies can take care of her and keep her busy, but she finds new meaning in her life when she has to get used to having all these very curious aliens who suddenly invade her hermetic living space.  She has to learn to communicate with them and then has to reintegrate into human society when people come back to her planet and serves as a go between and peacemaker for humans and the aliens.

All around a very pleasant read and unique take on a story that has been done many times before with stories like Avatar (which came out a decade after this book) and Dances With Wolves since it is not resolved with violence and the natives are not shown as superior nor the colonizers as evil.  Its appropriate for even early teens who I think will be able to relate to Ofelia just fine.

The Speed of Dark

I haven't got around to reading this yet, but it is generally considered one of her better novels and won a Nebula award.  It is about an autistic programmer who is under pressure to accept a cure for his autism.  It is supposedly another good character study and deals with ethical and identity issues.

H.G. Wells Part 2

Invisible Man

His fifth novel is another morality story involving a different mad scientist.  Plot is simple: scientist develops an process to make himself invisible and uses it on himself, but can't reverse it.  It has an interesting flash back narrative, where the scientist Griffin starts out invisible and covered in bandages and has to befriend someone after his invisibility is exposed to people in an inn and enlists the help of someone named Marvel.  Griffin also finds a former colleague named Kemp and recounts his story to him, but he has already turned to a life of crime and terror at this point and Kemp becomes his main target.

Having the protagonist also be an somewhat interesting, but generally unsympathetic villain is an interesting take that not many authors have tried before.  Partly the invisibility drove Griffin to his crimes since he could no longer live a normal life, but for the most part he seems like more of an arrogant jerk who was looking for an excuse to go bad.  The fact that the invisibility is permanent is a interesting variation compared to most fictional invisibility that came later, which normally is easier to control in most later fiction.  Griffin's character is also a good contrast to Kemp who is willing to sacrifice himself to stop Griffin terrorism even though none of this is Kemp's fault.  The novel also ends on a nice twist leaving the reader to wonder what the future consequences of this technology will be.

The novel has aged fairly well since it is mainly character and moral dilemma/temptation driven.  Its appropriate to teen readers and above and is probably his most generally accessible work out of these four novels.

War of the Worlds

His sixth and most famous novel (thanks in part to Orson Welles' famous radio play), this is an example of the invasion literature that was popular in England at the time with space aliens substituting for the usual German invaders.  Explosions are seen on Mars and soon after "meteors" land in England.  They contain tripod shaped alien machines that make quick work of the British military through heat rays and black smoke weapons.  The second half of the book deals with the aftermath with the martians collecting people with the tentacles and draining them of their blood for nourishment.  Eventually the main character gives up hope, when he realizes they have all died from bacteria.

It was considered a bit brutal at the time in its depictions of violence, but its fairly tame by today's standards. Its main problem is that it has been copied so much that it doesn't feel very fresh anymore and the ending is too much of a dues ex machina ending for most readers.  The martians are unstoppable for almost the entire book and then they just drop dead.  If you don't mind that, its still an entertaining read.

All four of these have been turned into feature films and have had many imitators in books and film.  All of them are appropriate for early teen readers, though the language may take a bit of getting used to unless they have read other Victorian era books beforehand.

H.G. Wells Part 1

Considered one of the fathers of science fiction, Wells wrote dozens of novels starting in the late 19th century as well as dozens more non-fiction books that often dealt with science, history, and socialism.  The novels sometimes come of as a bit dated today and the actual science is fairly week.  Even though Wells was fairly educated on scientific matters the science fiction is usually just an excuse to advance the plot, which was often a morality tale.  But they are still entertaining quick reads for the most part and are extremely influential with many films and other books based around the themes he first wrote about.  They popularized ideas like alien invasions and time travel, which have become staples of science fiction over the last century.

Time Machine 

His first novel is probably the weakest of the four I mention in these posts as far as plot goes, but it is a decent read and popularized the idea of time travel.  The basic plot is a man invents a time machine and travels over 800,000 thousand years into the future.   Mankind has been transformed into two races the lazy and peaceful Eloi and the brutal workers known as Morlocks.  The time traveler rescues an Eloi named Weena and they have to escape an attack from the Morlocks.  The time traveler escapes even further into the future and sees the earth as a dying planet rules by crab creatures.  He returns to the present to recount his adventure to his contemporaries and then goes further into the future never to return.

People are still using a lot of the themes from this book, but the book itself reads more like a simple socialist morality tale than a really interesting story.  The themes of a people losing their humanity because they are either idle or worked to hard is a bit heavy handed and is still being recycled in current movies like Elysium.  Most other time travel stories afterwards have dealt with more interesting themes like people going to try to change or observe the past or being fish out of waters in the future.  Its not a bad book, but it feels mostly dated and the point is the morality tale not the time travel.

Its appropriate for early teen readers and older, though they may find parts of it a bit boring.

Island of Dr Moreau

This was his third novel and of the four novels I have read by him I think this is easily the most interesting one.  The plot revolves around an English shipwreck victim named Prendick who arrives on a Pacific island run by Dr. Moreau.  Moreau it turns out has been performing painful experiments on animals like pumas and the result is an island filled with bizarre hybrids like human/pig, hyena/pig, and a bear/dog/horse named M'ling.  Moreau has been attempting to turn animals into humans, but they always revert back into the beastly natures despite the restrictions such as no walking on four legs that Moreau imposes on them.  Eventually Prendick becomes more used the creations over time, but Moreau is killed by one of his creations.  Prendick has to escape the island by raft after the supplies and boats are destroyed.  It has a wonderful ending where he arrives back in England and sees the people there reverting back to what he sees as their animal nature and is forced to leave civilization.

This is the most interesting of these novels since the plot is complex and original, there are several detailed characters instead of the bland ones he usually uses, the setting is memorable, and it has interesting moral issues that integrate into the whole story well.  He tackles themes of the morality of vivisection and animal experiments, what separates man from animals, how societies attempt to control behavior, and the morality of inflicting cruelty and pain on others in the goal of advancement of science and knowledge.  He didn't have any knowledge of modern genetic engineering, but this is an obvious source for future stories about that issue as well as the basic plot is a mad scientist manipulating the nature of living creatures to advance his ideas.

This novel is appropriate for teens though their is a good bit of violence and things like torture are mentioned frequently.  It will be interesting to most readers.

The next post will have reviews of Wells' The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds.

Mark Clifton

Mark Clifton was not that prominent of an author in the 1950's, but he did have one decent and fairly influential novel. Mostly he wrote about issues dealing with the upcoming computer revolution, artificial intelligence, and about telepathy.  He wrote a few popular short stories as well, notably What Have I Done? and Star Bright.

They'd Rather Be Right

This novel was originally serialized in Astounding,  was co-written with Frank Riley, was the second novel to win a Hugo, and also republished as The Forever Machine.  This is one of the earliest novels dealing with the issues of artificial intelligence and computers.  The plot is two scientists create an intelligent computer called Bossy that will solve any problem dispassionately and objectively when presented with enough correct information.  Bossy can be hooked up to a person's brain and will rejuvenate people's bodies and make them young again and practically immortal by removing conflicts in their mind.  But the price is you give up many of your previously held beliefs and understandings, hence the two titles.  Conflicts ensue as everybody (politicians, business leaders etc.) now wants Bossy for themselves or for no one to have it.

The novel and writing style was very dated when I read it years ago as was a lot of the technology and the writing itself is not that great, but the ideas were interesting enough.  Really most sci-fi novels like this dealing with computers and AI that were written decades ago (such as the similar novel When Harlie Was One) feel very dated when dealing with these issues even when they do bring up interesting concepts.  This is mostly worth reading since the ideas of the book were fairly new at the time and are influential for later writers.

Its appropriate for a older teen audience, but I am not sure how many would enjoy it. A lot of the anti-authority themes might be appealing to some readers and it has some thought provoking themes at the very least.

Max Brooks

Max Brooks has written two of the best selling science fiction books of the last decade, both of which cover the overdone subject of a zombie uprising.  The son of the director Mel Brooks has also written 2 graphic novels along with other comic books, has appeared in a few films and animated features as an actor, and was a writer for Saturday Night Live.

The Zombie Survival Guide
His first book was not a novel, but a satirical guide to surviving a zombie uprising or apocalypse.  It has various sections on how zombies came to exist, what to do in various situations like finding yourself trapped on the second story of a house with zombies below, what supplies to prepare ahead of time, and gives examples of past zombie attacks and what we can learn from them.  Some of the advice is actually practical and the main selling point of the book is that it keeps a straight serious tone throughout despite the subject matter and he goes into good detail on subjects like why you shouldn't use fire against zombies (it won't stop them and they will stumbling along setting other potential fires.)  These are for the most part traditional zombies with the slow walk, slow incubation period for the infection, and very low intelligence that can only be destroyed by destroying the brain.  An entertaining quick read for the most part, but not a huge amount of commentary or depth and if you don't care for survivalist or zombie tropes, you might not like it.

World War Z
This followup novel is written as an oral history after the world wide zombie wars have ended.  It is much deeper than the zombie survival guide, but that book is referenced as a creation of the narrator and it was used in the war as a training manual.  Each section is an interview of a different survivor, each from a unique setting and time period of the war:  from the first outbreak, the spread of the zombie virus across the world, the zombie victory, the push back against the zombies, and the clean up after the victory. Each story stands on its own, with my personal favorites of the Japanese man who is so tied to his computer he doesn't realize the uprising has destroyed his neighborhood and must now survive, the defense of Israel from the giant onslaught, and the battle of Yonkers, which ends up taking out a lot of celebrities.

There is a good mix of action, social commentary, plot twists, humor, horror, memorable characters, and a   epic scale of drama.  I enjoyed this book so much I read it twice, which is very rare for me.

For the most part these books are appropriate for high school age, but there is a lot of zombie violence so be prepared for that.  There was a decent feature film based extremely loosely on this book, but it lacks the humor and insight of the novel, has fast zombies, and is told as a singular story about one character that has a very different plot from the book.  It really should have been an HBO style miniseries instead and hopefully it will be remade as that someday.  A very similar title is Warday, which was a fictional oral history of a nuclear war set in the 1980s.  That is meant as more of a cautionary tale and the social commentary hasn't aged well, but is a decent story and I wouldn't be surprised if Brooks was inspired in part by it.  There are plenty of other zombie series out there, but two other fairly recent ones I would suggest if you like this are Monster Island (a dark humor story about zombies taking over New York)  and the best selling and very dark graphic novel series The Walking Dead, which is about life after the zombies have won.