Category Archives: Science Fiction

Please don’t talk to me, middle seat person. I’m reading.

by Kinsey

I spent the last two weeks traveling on business, which meant that I was too exhausted at the end of the day to put two words together for a post, but I got LOTS of reading done in airports, on airplanes, and in hotel rooms and lobbies. While I will spare you descriptions of the many in-flight magazines and celebrity tabloids I read during the enforced no-electronics portions of my flights, here are quick summaries of the books that kept me sane as I criss-crossed the country:

The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides
This was fine, I guess? I was interested in all the characters and I wanted to find out what happened, so it was compelling reading. On the other hand, it was really long and nothing much actually happened and there was almost no resolution of any sort and just because I was interested in the characters didn’t mean I liked them. In fact, pretty much everyone in the book was extremely unpleasant or shallow, so it was a bit like watching a very long, slow train wreck as these characters messed up their lives over and over. I had initially written here that I wanted to warn people about an unflattering portrayal of a character with a mental illness, but all of the characters were portrayed in unflattering ways so the manic depressive actually came out pretty well, comparatively speaking. I loved The Virgin Suicides, so Eugenides has credit in the bank with me, but while The Virgin Suicides felt airy and impressionistic, this dense, heavy, weighty novel feels like it was written by someone else entirely. English majors might like it though, since it seems to feature a lot of inside jokes about literary criticism.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Remember how back in the 1970s a French guy strung a tightrope between the two World Trade Center towers and walked back and forth between the buildings, a hundred floors up with no safety net? This novel describes what was happening in the lives of a number of New York residents on that day, and how they were all connected to the wire walker and to each other. Although it does feature the walker (in real life, his name was Philippe Petit and you can watch an amazing documentary about his walk called Man on Wire), the story isn’t really about him at all. It’s really about New York, and America, in the 1970s–Vietnam, crime in the cities, race, immigration, and how all these things play out in the life a few individuals. As a general rule, I don’t like books that follow multiple characters connected only by the thinnest of threads. However, in this book each character is beautiful and heart-breaking and I found that they all looped together in really satisfying ways. Sad, but lovely.

The Thrift Book by India Knight
I think I’ve explained here before that I want India Knight to be my best friend, so I adored this book, even though it is basically just a list of fairly obvious ways to save money. You know, cook at home, make Christmas presents, grow your own herbs, don’t be fooled by fancy skin creams. Knight puts a fun spin on it by focusing not on getting out of debt or being as cheap as possible, but by talking about all the ways her strategies make you feel (to sound English about it) posher and more glamorous by not trying to hard or getting caught up spending on foolish thing. Plus, she’s funny. At one point she refers to playing Scrabble online as her “ongoing Alzheimer’s prevention project,” which is exactly how I think of Words with Friends. However, if you are not trying to befriend or become India Knight, it’s probably not necessary to read this.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Really fun, and absolutely perfect airplane reading. A sci-fi story that manages to be both a puzzle/treasure hunt and a celebration of 80s pop culture. I think is truly aimed at folks a few years older than I am who spent much more time in video arcades, but I loved it and was so absorbed I was able to read it in even the loudest terminals and restaurants.

The Martian Chronicles

by Anna

Whew, barely made it for Banned Books Week! I did not care for Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and this is a  lengthy review of me thrashing around for a reason.

The Martian Chronicles was published over 60 years ago, in 1950, and it reads like it. Ray Bradbury imagined amazing technology, but the social norms feel very grounded in mid 20th century to the point where I struggled to even understand, let alone empathize, with any of the characters. Every female character is either resignedly submissive to an overbearing husband or an innocent child even in adulthood (or sometimes both—I’m looking at you, Ylla).

Photo: The Martian Chronicles Book CoverThere is greater variety in the male characters, but they too seem outdated. They all feel like characters from old TV shows, either the stern but kind father figure, the intelligent and care-worn authority figure, or the brutish and ignorant everyman.

The technology is an extension of what was cutting edge in the 1950s—robotic houses and people and rockets. Which, of course, we still don’t have today, but that isn’t the direction technology went. There is no way Bradbury could have anticipated the microchip and then the Internet, but those inventions changed how our entire society thinks about technology. To way oversimplify, we’ve gone smaller, not bigger, and into intangible information-sharing realms, not large metal structures. So, it reads a bit like looking down a path we didn’t take as a society, but less interesting.

And then, even more pervasive but harder to describe, there is the overall messages of the book. The United States had dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and the Cold War was brewing. People were starting to think about and be terrified by the power of destruction we as a society held. Sadly, at this point, this is all pretty old hat. Sure, we all have the power to blow each other up; it probably won’t happen, but if it does, well, that’s life, right? I think previous all-consuming fear has turned into mild concern but mostly apathy for today’s population, and that early panic feels melodramatic and a bit naïve.

As with Lord of the Flies, I wondered how I would have felt about this book if I’d read it in high school 20 years ago. The book starts in the year 1999, and concentrates mostly in the early 2000s, so it would have still been set in the (very near) future. 20 years ago, our space program was still thriving, and our idea of the cutting edge of technology was still concerned with the idea of androids instead of nanorobotics.

I was commenting to a friend how disjointed the book reads, and he told me that it was a compilation of short stories that Ray Bradbury had previously published individually in magazines. That helped me understand the structure of the book somewhat better, but it made me wonder if perhaps Bradbury had shoehorned short stories into a Mars setting that had previously nothing to do with Mars?

My favorite section, the recreation of Poe’s House of Usher as an automated haunted house, had very little to do with colonizing Mars, and was much more a Catch-22-like commentary on out-of-control bureaucracy. Maybe I liked that part so much because that’s one aspect of our society that hasn’t changed a bit.

I think that’s both the positive and the negative of The Martian Chronicles; it doesn’t read like one complete book, so it shifts in tone, characters and plot wildly. That means if you don’t like one section, there’s a good chance you’ll like another one.

(I should cut Bradbury some slack; this review is even more scattered than The Martian Chronicles! I will call it an homage.)