The Songs Of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke

As a person of faith, a former atheist myself, I don’t have much beef with atheists. For me, atheism was a rational reaction to flawed theologies espoused by minds that should not be entrusted with a pulpit. My tolerance frays, however, when the atheist’s open mind becomes no less open than any other believer, becoming trapped in their own convictions and pride.

And thus, I come to reluctantly review The Songs of Distant Earth.

I wanted to like the book, I really did. I’ve read many atheists before, and respect their contempt of religion. After all, they do have many reasonable points. However, the central conceit of TSODE is that with all references to religion erased within the human culture of a colonized world, an unprecedented peace and prosperity has broken out on that planet, Thalassia.

I’ve heard this idea before, in high school and social media. It’s usually apparent that the proponents of this idea are teenage social justice warriors, blathering over the inhumanity of teaching religion to vulnerable minds. It’s the youth who espouse such ideas, of course, who don’t understand that superstition will erupt in any place it is allowed to fester. That bad things done in the name of religion don’t make the prophets guilty of what others have done in their names millennia later. That human nature can't be shaped by creation myths, and we can be nasty to one another even without using religion to justify it.

There are some interesting ideas in TSODE, such as colonization seed spaceships, the nature of human culture when our home star is set to implode, and making life on a water world. But these all play second fiddle, in Clarke’s mind, to the utopian notion that we’d all be living in paradise if all humans stopped believing in God.

It's hard to take Clarke's world-building seriously when you fundamentally alter the very fabric of human behaviour and replace it with universal angelic benevolence and lack of human personality. One native man’s wife has an affair with a visiting Earth officer and doesn’t get angry, and instead leaves blissfully for another island, leaving them to it. When she gets pregnant with the officer's child he happily comes back like a kicked puppy dog, once the officer leaves the planet. No trace of anger, no expectation that his life partner should be able to control herself around other men. And happily raises some other guy's child. Someone his wife loved more than him.

If this is Clarke's utopian vision of the future of relationships, no thank you.

It’s hard to take seriously. Clarke had a chance to ask harder questions, but fixated with Dawkins-like fervour on his dislike of religion. A better novel could have asked questions about the true nature of humanity. Such as, if we can only survive on a new planet, our DNA much change, and our behaviour becomes utterly foreign and incomprehensible to the Earthen visitors, whilst being impossibly attractive. As well as all being atheists. The visiting Earth survivors could then marvel at these new humans, which would in turn ask more compelling questions than the adolescent fantasy Clarke has so keenly promulgated.

Our jealousies and passions are what make us human. To deny them, to blame circumstances or birth for our flaws is naieve and shallow utopianism. Humanity wants hope as well as realism. To offer them The Songs of Distant Earth is to offer the same simplicity which has turned people away from 'the big three'. Let us hope that since 1985, the world has become more complex and demanding.

Despite all this, I heartily recommend the album of the same name that Mike Oldfield composed upon reading the novel.

To conclude. A talented author got side-tracked by a very simplistic and shallow idea, and ruined an interesting premise. The end result is still a good read, though irritating as it strains the bounds of intellectual credibility.

The Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton

Attempting to do any review of such a broad work is an act of futility if you're seeking to be thorough. So here is a general, impressionist review.

Hamilton's greatest accomplishment in TCS is not completely losing the reader in the vast smorgasbord of character, plot and setting. Though there are significant problems within.

The setting pieces are far too long. I suffered through page after page of needless detail about a woman's hang-gliding experience, simply to tell me that a planet gets bad storms. A main character does nothing but go on extended romps from planet to planet using a fairy pathway in his desperation to get home, picking up a stray human and a tag-along alien that adds nothing to the plot or character development.

Innumerable action sequences seem to think they are part of a movie and not a book, taking far too long for too little plot or character development. There was even an enormous court case on an unrelated matter that introduced three main characters in a stretch of time far longer than they needed.

Overall, definitely 25% could have been taken out of the Saga without the reader missing anything. But for all the unnecessary extreme bloat, he does a lot of things right.

The villains/antagonists of the piece were very well incepted and designed, and we had absolutely no idea who the enemy was until the exact right moment, when all the pieces fit together. It was brilliant when it happened, and I shook my head in admiration at Hamilton's patience in bringing the mystery to the correct place in time.

The characters were varied and their reactions to the technological settings were varied and complex, with few simplistic answers for how to live in a complex society such as the Commonwealth. Iain M Banks' Culture series could have learned much from Hamilton's realistic examination of human nature, which never ventures excessively into 'grimdark' nor dreamy utopianism.

The setting was the clear winner in the enjoyment sweepstakes. The transport wormholes, mental-command computing and virtual immortality asked and answered many complicated 'what if' and 'but then how' questions. Hamilton never shies away from difficult questions, and his answers, while not always complex as his questions, certainly satisfy the average speculative reader's curiosity.

I recommend the two books of the Saga, but with the firm caveat that one should expect to skip pages if they wish to maintain their heightened enjoyment of the series when they get to a point they find less entertaining.

The Lathe Of Heaven, by Ursula K Le Guin

Lathe, over forty years old, is a masterpiece I wish I'd been aware of years ago.

It perfectly builds character, magic system and plot in such bold but subtle masterful strokes that you are left humbled in the wake of a master writer.

So easily do you come to understand and sympathize, yet ultimately dislike the villain Haber. You are annoyed with, but are ultimately won over by the hapless protagonist, George Orr. And when the love interest comes into play, I genuinely did not see it coming until there was a romance.

Motifs of meetings in restaurants and Portland's nearby Mt. Hood crop up in every altered reality. They both remind us of the place we have come from and how the metaphors begin to shift in every new chapter and take on new meaning.

Most of all, it is a short book. Many writers today (especially myself) could take a well-needed lesson on how to write insightful poignancy with a compelling climax, without needing ridiculous subplots or an excess of technical explanations.

I felt something I rarely feel when reading this novel. Jealousy. Jealousy that someone could hone the craft with such precision that it remains a masterful piece of reading forty-three years later.

Well done, Ms Le Guin.

The Box Trolls

The Box Trolls works very well as a movie for many reasons, and many of those reasons are layers. Even though it's a kid's film, it's highly complex and visually unique. Unique in it's repulsiveness, and so much so that I deliberately kept my 3-year old daughter away from it. Unique in that it was repulsive in the way my 6-year old boy loved. You have to see it to understand.

There are many things happening in this film, put together with an uncommon sophistication.

• The town's obsession with cheese
• The town's obsession with social stratum, as exemplified by hats
• A heroic female lead that isn't sweet, but actually quite awful 
• The emphasis on fathers as role models, with a near absence of maternal mentions
• The villain's Achilles Heel is obvious to all except him
• The unbelievable oblivious nature of the adults, who literally cannot hear the children reveal the villain's dastardly plans
• The physical setting
• The Troll obsession with boxes

It all works together. The many detailed elements tie in to one another by way of character and plot so easily, it is difficult to see the genius of the film-makers at work.

An easy way out of decent film-making could have been to take this standard plot and run with it like some half-baked Dreamworks film. But all these elements come together to add more complexity to the film. More opportunities for humour, more chances to create double-layered symbolism for adults and children.

And it works. It's a technical masterpiece of film-making. Perhaps not for an 8-year-old looking for a thrill, but definitely for an adult looking to create something challenging for a child.

The Summer Tree

It's been so long since I last blogged because I was sorting out the last of my thesis. I guess I wait for half a year until I get the results back now. I'm not even certain who will be marking my thesis, yet.

But FireWall part one is complete. I'm no longer a student, now more a house husband and job seeker with a strange abundance of this thing called 'time'.

So, I'm back into reading eagerly, and decided to pounce on Guy Gavriel Kay's The Summer Tree. 

It was written in 1984, back in the post-Tolkien  period where fantasy authors were looking to re-create Grandpa Tolkien in slightly different ways. I found the book a fascinating read, not because of the content, but the state of the genre a generation ago.

First of all, it was a portal fantasy, a la Narnia or Harry Potter. That generally isn't done these days. I have not read a adult-marketed portal fantasy in quite some time. I can't even remember the name of the last one I read.

There were elves and dwarves and a dark lord in a fortress with a high tower to the far north. There were 'chosen ones' who knew nothing about the world they had been prophecised to save, put alongside kings and shamans who die unexpectedly, putting our heroes in charge. There was even a flaming mountain where the villain was contained.

Although splendidly written, The Summer Tree tells the fantasy reader of 2014 how far we've come as media consumers and global citizens. The 'white man as saviour and moral authority' trope has become cringeworthy, and black-and-white heroes and villains is decidedly passe.

Near the end, Kay seems to knowingly wink at the reader, as if to say 'I know what I've done, but at least I'm showing you I know,' when his white male 'prophecised saviour' character bawls out a king-to-be over myopic ethnocentrism.

It was an enjoyable sojourn in a comfortably familiar, heavily Tolkienesque universe. There were no surprises, though there were several moments of appealing humanity. I won't be reading the sequels, though Kay very much stepped up his game with Tigana, six short years later. Fantasy is a steadily advancing genre, and to think we have come so far in such a short time bears much hope for the future.

Reading the Final Edit Out Loud

I used to say to my students, I don't know how many times, 'read it out loud to catch the errors.' They never did, probably because they thought they might get 'teacher cooties' for doing something practical and useful, but the point is that I have been doing it. And it works.

My submission for FireWall has been complete for at least a month, with very little left to do other than fine-tune and finesse. There are no plot points that need to be written in, and I hope I have communicated my characters as best I can. There is nothing left, I think, but to make it pretty.

And so I have begun reading FireWall out loud.

For some reason, errors of logic and syntax leap off the page when I read it out loud, even sections I have gone over ten times. I'll find ways to say something much better than before, and even realise the narrative character would not see things in this way or even say things in a particular idiom.

What is frustrating, is that this is no where near the last time I'll go back over this. After I have put the book down for three months, I'll go back over it again and see what can be improved.

This is why so many authors say they cringe when they read their earliest work, because no book is ever ready.

Twenty-four. Twenty-four glorious days left.

Breaking the Seal

With one month until I submit my thesis, FireWall, I will no longer have anything to write on, obsessively.

It's probably time for a break from prose, and time for setting down my reactions to the art I consume. Time to write about my search for a job - any job - other than teaching High School.

I'll start my first blog post writing on what the last two years of my Master's Degree of Creative Writing has taught me.

• I can't write before 1p.m. if I have not had coffee.
• I am not a planner - as writers go. I make stuff up almost as I go, and then stop to improve it later in rewrites.
• Character is better than plot - every time. I had thought before beginning this course that writing plot would be necessary sometimes. But when I wrote plot to get a character from one place to another, the passage read like stinking offal. Write character every time.
• Make every sentence different and well-written. I mean to say I've learned I should do this, not that I have accomplished this.
• If it doesn't feel good as you write it, stop writing it and write something else.

There's more, of course. Much more, but I'd rather be brief and to-the-point than long and pedantic.