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owlfish at 08:19pm on 22/02/2007
owlfish at 08:19pm on 22/02/2007I don't often have a chance to read printed novels in their finished form a whole week before they're officially published, but that's exactly what happened with Linnea Sinclair's newest novel, Games of Command. It's being published in the U.S. next week, but Forbidden Planet London had stock in a good week-and-a-half early.
Sinclair's science fiction romance novels are what started me on my romance science fiction project this past fall. They operate squarely in both genres at the same time. Games of Command is a slice of space opera, the entanglements of multiple space-faring governments, telepaths, alternate non-dimensions, human machines, and the complications which necessary secrets bring to human relationships.
Overall, it was an engrossing book, with deep dark sides to balance the froth of flirtful repartee, and frequent minor resolutions to balance the tension of both romantic uncertainty and certain doom. Furzel-speak stopped being irritating rather quickly, to my relief, and parts of the ending were either pat or elegantly concise, depending on how you look at it. But there were still plenty of secondary loose ends left to give the universe life beyond its last page.
Observation: The first few pages of Games of Command were chock-full of science fictional terms, place names, technology names, nicknames, and organizations. Immersed as I've been in Heyer novels lately, I noticed that an initial barrage of space-related terminology is awfully similar to an initial barrage of getting to know a half-dozen characters, all of which have a name, a title, and a nickname, any one of which they may be referred to by.
P.S. Games of Command comes out on February 27th. If you'd like more actual concrete details about the book and its plot, there's a more extensive review of it here.
Sinclair's science fiction romance novels are what started me on my romance science fiction project this past fall. They operate squarely in both genres at the same time. Games of Command is a slice of space opera, the entanglements of multiple space-faring governments, telepaths, alternate non-dimensions, human machines, and the complications which necessary secrets bring to human relationships.
Overall, it was an engrossing book, with deep dark sides to balance the froth of flirtful repartee, and frequent minor resolutions to balance the tension of both romantic uncertainty and certain doom. Furzel-speak stopped being irritating rather quickly, to my relief, and parts of the ending were either pat or elegantly concise, depending on how you look at it. But there were still plenty of secondary loose ends left to give the universe life beyond its last page.
Observation: The first few pages of Games of Command were chock-full of science fictional terms, place names, technology names, nicknames, and organizations. Immersed as I've been in Heyer novels lately, I noticed that an initial barrage of space-related terminology is awfully similar to an initial barrage of getting to know a half-dozen characters, all of which have a name, a title, and a nickname, any one of which they may be referred to by.
P.S. Games of Command comes out on February 27th. If you'd like more actual concrete details about the book and its plot, there's a more extensive review of it here.
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It seems to me that first wave science fiction primarily dealt with technologies and scientific topics, and the possible extrapolation of future societies and future concerns based on those topics. In a lot of ways, the characterization was a sketch and the topic was the actual star. There was somewhat of a what-if aspect of it. Here I'm talking about the short stories that came out of Analog and Amazing...the Asimov/Heinlein crowd.
Second wave, on the other hand, dealt more with the social issues surrounding science fiction -- the LeGuin, Varley, etc. sort of stories. Still a what-if sort of situation, but now the characters were more important and rather than the scientific issue being the star, it is the situation and thus the characters have to react to that situation. What does it mean to live forever? To be able to change your gender at will? To really meet with the other?
The current crop, which Ringo and Weber seem to be at the top of, seem to be approaching it as setting, rather than situation or star. The real story could, with minor technological changes, be a fantasy story or a story of any group of soldiers.
By no means does that mean that any of these are wrong or bad, but it seems to me that the science fiction ideas of either a technological or societal bent are not what the story is really exploring. Instead, it's the relationships between the various military or civilian figures within the setting created by those technological or societal ideas.
Alternate history does this too to some extent, although to me the attraction there is always the juxtaposition of what is and was could have been. The what if aspect I like so much is there in spades. I know it's tangental, but I felt in writing this that I needed to explain why I enjoy Weber or Ringo (or Flint, with his 16XX series and Belisarius books) when they're writing alternate history but not as much when it's straight sci-fi. For my own sake, if not for the conversation.
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GoC has a military setting, even if somewhat in peacetime, but one of its central difficulties is the challenges facing a man wired to be emotionless, who finds himself in love despite the programming and psychological surveillance he regularly undergoes to ensure this. He's cyborg, a source of great power and great paranoia to him. Does that constitute placing the idea in the foreground? It's not the only thing happening in the foreground - there's a great deal of adventure as well.
It's funny you should identify action as being more a modern trait of SF when I loosely associate it with earlier decades. (Doyle's The Lost World; Burrough's Barsoom novels) Not that it can't be both in different ways.
I don't feel I'm very well-read with current SF, so hesitate to make generalizations myself. But I know plenty of people who study it, so, if they don't respond, I may ask them about their thoughts on current trends.
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Two days after that, I went to lunch with two of my SF scholars I know and asked them. They said that militaristic SF is more typical of American SF right now than anything else, but that there's a great many other things happening there too. In the UK currently, there isn't much of a trend in that direction.
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I had a tan then. And white-blonde hair. And still looked out of place on the beach. Miss the sailing, though.
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That's been one of the truly decadent things about this past year - I can read fiction again! And it's okay for me to do so, as long as I keep on top of my to-do list and get enough else done on a regular basis.
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