Potted science fiction reviews
Something I posted a while back.
Jane Austen:
Price and Prejudice
One of the classic works of the genre. Austen is a master of the
time-travel novel. Her particular strong point is background research:
her settings are filled with innumerable titbits and little touches of
detail that really contribute to the feeling that we are really there in
the England of the 18th century. As with her previous works
Emma and
Sense and Sensibility the plot is nothing to write home about, the
characters stereotyped and the dialogue rather long-winded; but the
sense of _being there_ is what puts this story into the forefront of
modern SF. A test: can you spot anything that appears even the slightest
bit incongruous; or is not authentically 18th century? No, you can't,
can you? QED. Watch for the film adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow,
Emma Thompson and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Darcy.
Clifford Stoll:
The Cuckoo's Egg
This story purports to be a near-future cyberpunk thriller about a
global ring of crackers. Unfortunately, the book demonstrates only that
Stoll clearly has no idea about the genre. The strongest drug he
mentions in the book, for instance, is _caffeine_: the anonymous
protagonist and narrator has a liking for tea. Every aspiring cyberpunk
writer knows that one of the mainstays of the genre, along with
mirrorshades and cybernetic augmentation, is oodles and oodles of
narcotics. And the descriptions of netrunning are tedious in the
extreme, so much so that you have to wonder why anyone would bother.
Stoll should do more research on computers and cyber-culture in general;
until then, his work will remain resolutely B-grade.
Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie:
The C Programming Language
An ambitious attempt to combine cyberpunk SF with the cutting edge of
postmodern literature, it's the story of a
deus ex machina that
conquers the world. You'll see lots of trendy jargon, bizarre bizarre
grammatical constructs, strange spelling conventions, and comical names
like 'foo' and 'bar'. But in the end it's just too much work to try to
understand sentences like
Code:
[color=white]
main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)";(!!c)[*c]&&
(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c));**c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);}
[/color]
Certainly not in the same class as Wirth's elegant "Pascal" series, and
the Wintermute AI in
Neuromancer is far more believable.
Leo Tolstoy:
War and Peace
This is a large scale work about dynastic struggles against a backdrop
of war and civil strife. I found it rather long for one volume though --
this is definitely a book that should have been split out into a
trilogy. This would also give him the chance to explore and develop many
more potentially intriguing sub-plots than he does. As it is, you'll
leave this book with a sense of wasted opportunities; there's just so
much more he could have done. If you want a rollicking yarn that will
take you months to finish, Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series is
still better value for money.
Richard Wagner:
The Ring Cycle
A work in four parts, this is a love story involving a young Germanic
warrior and a mutant pegasus-riding Amazon. In a story clearly
influenced by post-feminist thinking, Brunnhilde is smart, sassy and
nobody's fool -- until she falls for the quiet, sensitive new-age guy
Siegfried. However, this series really is far too long. Wagner should
ditch the tedious bits at the start involving dwarfs, nymphs, giants and
other cliched elements of the fantasy genre. Similarly, the apocalyptic
conclusion involving the death of the gods is telegraphed miles down the
track. Simply put, this plotline has been done many, many times, by far
better authors -- take the "Dragonlance" series, for example. Slimmed
down to novella form, this could form a nice, satisfying read when
you're in the mood for something romantic, but as it is, it's just
bloated and self-indulgent.
Stephen Hawking:
A Brief History of Time
This is a rather brief, chatty tale about a Cambridge professor's
journey of self-discovery. The human drama is powerfully developed, with
the protagonist finding out he has Lou Gehrig's disease, which drives
him to complete his work before succumbing. The science is rather
slipshod and far-fetched, unfortunately, with bizarre tales about
evaporating black holes, arrows of time reversing, and phase transitions
in the early universe. Newton and Galileo make cameo appearances toward
the end of the book, although their integration into the story is
clumsy. Overall, a creditable first effort, but one hopes that for his
next feature, Hawking will take the trouble to read a physics textbook.
Maurice Kendall:
The Advanced Theory of Statistics
It appears that this book is a translation from the Greek original,
although this is not mentioned anywhere in the introduction. For some
reason -- lack of money? -- the translation seems to be incomplete:
large slabs of text remain encrusted with incomprehensible Greek
symbols. From what little I could make out, the story is about the
struggle between conformity and individualism; hence the references to
"normal distributions", "standard deviations", "outliers" and so forth.
Recommended as long as you have a dictionary or a classical scholar
handy.
