The books available on Project Gutenberg are all public domain
works, which include a wealth of riches for those of us spelunking in the mines
of the Burroughsian, Howardian, and E.E. Doc Smithian pulps. The quality of the human read audio recordings ranges from great to fine. (The robot read stories aren't worth your time.) The list of available works is short, but well worth a look for any fan
of audiobooks.
The local library branch on the other hand…
My local branch has 350 audiobooks available in the sci-fi
category, most of which consist of teen books in the vein of the Hunger Games or worse, Hugo Award winner
aspirants – and I mean that in the most pejorative sense possible. Just about anything not written for angsty
teens is written for fans of either gimmicky pseudo-intellectual posturing or Oprah-style
relationship drama dressed up in a silver spandex suit and parading around the
bridge of a planet busting spacecraft.
There are bright spots. A
smattering of Burroughs’ titles are on the list, but these are generally books
that sit, well worn, on my shelf. My
most recent listen, Out of Time’s Abyss is
a fun little romp if not quite up to Burroughs’ finest. Aside from the few diamonds in the rough, for
the most part it’s the same dreary literary chaff one finds on the shelves of
the big box book stores.
What can man do in the face of such tedium?
How about taking a deep breath, opening up your mind, and giving
some recent work a shot? A collection of
short stories called The New Space Opera
presents an excellent opportunity to dip one’s toe into the relatively current
state of fantasy and sci-fi. After all,
if you never experience what the current market has to offer, how can you
complain about it? And so it was with
some trepidation that I gave some modern sci-fi a listen.
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| Some of us just never learn. |
The book opens with an introduction by the editor, Gardner Dozois,
which discusses the origins and evolution of ‘space opera’. It starts out great, name checking some
undeservedly obscure authors like A.E. Van Vogt, E. E. Doc Smith, and Jack
Vance, and even admits that science fiction as a whole abandoned its rollicking
good fun and aspirational value in the 1960s in favor of chasing the approval
of social engineers and ivory tower literary critics. Unfortunately, he presents this change as a
good thing, and barrels straight on into the standard self-congratulatory praise
of modern sci-fi as a clear cut improvement over its predecessors. He even goes so far as to mention that
disgusting pervert Samuel R. Delaney in a positive light. That’s a deal breaker right there, but with
traffic snarled and the essay over, we can get to the stories themselves.
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| Photoshopped for more accurate portrayal. |
Second up, Verthandi is Rising, by Ian McDonald, also left me bored. It starts out with an intergalactic war fought over millennia by soldiers grappling with time dilation, but the meat of the conflict is just set dressing for the real tale. That story features two members of a three person crew searching for the third member of their triad. That third member went awol in order to allow the galactic empire’s defeated enemy to flee through a wormhole to a parallel universe, in order to spare them from genocide.
Let me borrow a quote from Travel by Thought,
“At first blush, the tone and style of “Verthandi’s Ring” take some getting
used to, primarily because McDonald aims for the atmosphere and cadence of
poetry.” He definitely succeeds in an
atmosphere of cadence and poetry. His
prose is definitely lyrical. Shame it takes
such an effort to penetrate his prose to determine what the heck is going on in
the story. Again, from Travel by
Thought, “Verthandi’s Ring is one of
those stories that needs a second reading. That is when the pieces fall more
securely into place, the narrative becomes clearer, and its artistry unfolds
like a flower opening up to the morning sunlight.” He says that as though impenetrable
prose is a good thing. It’s not. I did understand it the first time, but the
effort to do so killed the fun of it.
The whole story left my with an irritated feeling of, why didn’t you
just say so?
Again, this is a writer more enamored of literary tricks and
poetic license than he is with presenting a story. The MFA students and professors might lap
this up while on the clock, but there’s nothing appealing about it for casual
readers looking for an enjoyable slice of entertainment. Strike two.
Finally, Hatch, by Robert
Reed, in which the author plays games with flashbacks and dribbles out
information so slowly reading the story is like eating an onion, you slowly
peel back the layers and consume them one at a time, always hoping this is the
last one and knowing that in the end all you’ll be left with is a bad taste in
your mouth. The backdrop to this boring
tale is a planet-sized generation ship whose engines were knocked out of
commission during a long war against a sentient space-blob.
Let me say that again. This
is a story about a planet-sized generation ship. It’s engines were knocked out. During a war. With a sentient space-blob. Robert Reed made that boring.
Now that is quite the
literary accomplishment.
Let me give you one example of how Robert Reed stuffs great ideas
into the background in order to focus on tedious relationship drama. The main protagonist and best friend meet in
a vaguely described location. It sounds
pretty epic, some form of massive cliff overhanging a cloud of space-blob
remnants that contain the rare earth metals and ooze-encrusted machinery that
allows the small refugee settlement that survived the Space-Blob War to survive,
or on the cusp of a city-sized dead thruster?
It’s not entirely clear, but it sounds like it might be awesome. Reed glosses over it to get to the important
thing – the friendship of a young man and his mentor. That mentor, we learn after reading two full
conversations with him, is actually an ancient trilobite-like alien. Reed doesn’t just bury that lede, he forces
it to drive itself out into the desert, dig its own grave, and then shoot
itself in the head. And that’s just one example out of many. Strike three.
With that third strike, The
New Space Opera lost its place on my hard drive. All three stories are clearly written for
critics, and not for readers. Ironic,
given that this reader has nothing to offer but criticism. The top priority for these three stories is signaling
to other writers that they possess a supreme command of the English language –
that they have mastered the use of tone, metaphor, mood, and prose. Unfortunately for the reader (or listener as
the case may be), all three put the story and the reader’s enjoyment near the
bottom of the list.
Bear in mind, this is not to say that these stories am too smart
for me simple brain. Quite the contrary,
these stories are far too clever for their own good. They fall all over themselves engaging in
high-brow literary signaling that they forget the point of the exercise – to tell
an evocative story. They are like the
guy who successfully signals his wealth by buying a high maintenance and flashy
sports car that he can’t drive in the rain.
Yeah, everyone knows he’s rich, but he can’t go anywhere – he forgot
that the whole point of a car is to get you from one place to another, in much
the same way that the authors of these stories forgot that the point of a story
is to tell a story.
You know who could tell a hell of a story? H. Beam Piper. That man could tell a story. Think I’ll go download a few short stories of his.