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JoshuaZ comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong
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Okay, so....a confession.
In a fairly recent little-noticed comment, I let slip that I differ from many folks here in what some may regard as an important way: I was not raised on science fiction.
I'll be more specific here: I think I've seen one of the Star Wars films (the one about the kid who apparently grows up to become the villain in the other films). I have enough cursory familiarity with the Star Trek franchise to be able to use phrases like "Spock bias" and make the occasional reference to the Starship Enterprise (except I later found out that the reference in that post was wrong, since the Enterprise is actually supposed to travel faster than light -- oops), but little more. I recall having enjoyed the "Tripod" series, and maybe one or two other, similar books, when they were read aloud to me in elementary school. And of course I like Yudkowsky's parables, including "Three Worlds Collide", as much as the next LW reader.
But that's about the extent of my personal acquaintance with the genre.
Now, people keep telling me that I should read more science fiction; in fact, they're often quite surprised that I haven't. So maybe, while we're doing these New Year's Resolutions, I can "resolve" to perhaps, maybe, some time, actually do that (if I can ever manage to squeeze it in between actually doing work and procrastinating on the Internet).
Problem is, there seems to be a lot of it out there. How would a newcomer know where to start?
Well, what better place to ask than here, a place where many would cite this type of literature as formative with respect to developing their saner-and-more-interesting-than-average worldviews?
Alicorn recommended John Scalzi (thanks). What say others?
I wouldn't recommend Scalzi. Much of Scalzi is miltiary scifi with little realism and isn't a great introduction for scifi. I'd recommend Charlie Stross. "The Atrocity Archives", "Singularity Sky" and "Halting State" are all excellent. The third is very weird in that it is written in the second person, but is lots of fun. Other good authors to start with are Pournelle and Niven (Ringworld, The Mote in God's Eye, and King David's Spaceship are all excellent).
Am I somehow unusual for being seriously weirded out by the cultural undertones in Scalzi's Old Man's War books? I keep seeing people in generally enlightened forums gushing over his stuff, but the book read pretty nastily to me with its mix of very juvenile approach to science, psychology and pretty much everything it took on, and its glorification of genocidal war without alternatives. It brought up too much associations to telling kids who don't know better about the utter necessity of genocidal war in simple and exiting terms in real-world history, and seemed too little aware of this itself to be enjoyable.
Maybe it's a Heinlein thing. Heinlein is pretty obscure here in Europe, but seems to be woven into the nostalgia trigger gene in the American SF fan DNA, and I guess Scalzi was going for something of a Heinlein pastiche.
It's nice to know that I'm not the only person who hated Old Man's War, though our reasons might be different.
It's been a while since I've read it, but I think the character who came out in favor of an infrastructure attack (was that the genocidal war?) turned out to be wrong.
What I didn't like about the book was largely that it was science fiction lite-- the world building was weak and vague, and the viewpoint character was way too trusting. I've been told that more is explained in later books, but I had no desire to read them.
There's a profoundly anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist theme in Heinlein, but most Heinlein fans don't seem to pick up on it.
The most glaring SF-lite problem for me was that in both Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, the protagonist was basically written as a generic twenty-something Competent Man character, despite both books deliberately setting the protagonist up as very unusual compared to the archetype character. in Old Man's War, the protagonist is a 70-year old retiree in a retooled body, and in The Ghost Brigades something else entirely. Both of these instantly point to what I thought would have been the most interesting thing about the book, how does someone who's coming from a very different place psychologically approach stuff that's normally tackled by people in their twenties. And then pretty much nothing at all is done with this angle. Weird.
There was so much, so very much sf-lite about that book. Real military life is full of detail and jargon. OMW had something like two or three kinds of weapons.
There was the big sex scene near the beginning of the book, and then the characters pretty much forgot about sex.
It was intentionally written to be an intro to sf for people who don't usually read the stuff. Fortunately, even though the book was quite popular, that approach to writing science fiction hasn't caught on.
Come to think of it, I had a similar problem with James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear, which was about a colony world of in vitro grown humans raised by semi-intelligent robots without adult parents. I thought this would lead to some seriously weird and interesting social psychology with the colonists, when all sorts of difficult to codify cultural layers are lost in favor of subhuman machines as parental authorities and things to aspire to.
Turned out it was just a setup to lecture how anarchism with shooting people you don't like would lead to the perfect society if it weren't for those meddling history-perpetuating traditionalists, with the colonists of course being exemplars of psychological normalcy and wholesomeness as well as required by the lesson, and then I stopped reading the book.
Nor I - I've read Agent to the Stars, which was just as bad, so I have no expectation of improvement.
This isn't a Scalzi problem so much as a general problem with the military end of SF. See for example, Starship Troopers and Ender's Game. Ender's Game makes it more complicated, but there's still some definite sympathy with genocide (speciescide?).
I wonder how important what the characters say is compared to what they do-- and the importance may be in what the readers remember.
Card has an actual genocide.
In ST, Heinlein speaks in favor of crude "roll over the other guys so that your genes can survive" expansionism, but he portrays a society where racial/ethnic background doesn't matter for humans, and an ongoing war which won't necessarily end with the Bugs or the humans being wiped out.