Recent sci-fi reads and re-reads

Out of the blue, some sci-fi books I've read during the past year or so. It turns out I've missed quite a many classic works.


Fred Hoyle & John Elliot: A is for Andromeda (1962)

An adaptation of a now-extinct TV-series. Aliens send a coded message on how to build a supercomputer, which in turn helps build a biological entity, which in turn helps build a more complex, human-looking entity. Possibly an early example of this concept. No crossing the light speed barrier here!

Written at a time when sci-fi writers could fantasize about telepathic powers, transhumanist themes and super alien beings, but didn't know what it would mean to have a really powerful computer. Still, Hoyle is quite clever in proposing a vast 3D-matrix of connections that begins to resemble the neural activity of a brain.

There's also TV-like suspense and silly gender roles. The idea of a beautiful woman as an alien emissary does not quite scan the same way in a book as it does in a visual medium, it's an old-fashioned trope too.


Orson Scott Card: Ender's Game (1985)

After Dune, this was perhaps the most major and widely known sci-fi I still hadn't read. (Currently, this distinction is perhaps held by Larry Niven's Ringworld or Frederik Pohl's Gateway)

Children are reared and conscripted for a hypothetical war fought somewhere in faraway space, against an alien race that has only ever appeared once before. Most of the book-time is occupied with the kids' training, as they engage with zero-gravity sports with ever intensifying and more unfair rules, with some computer hacking and VR-like video games on the side.

As the novel was written in the 1980s the tech is fairly well projected. The turf wars and underlying brutality (and humanity) of children let loose at each other is rather nicely written. The twist ending was a bit guessable, which by no means takes away the impact of it.


Orson Scott Card: The Speaker for the Dead (1986)

The sequel to the Ender's Game continues with pacifist themes. Although a good read, somehow it's not quite as satisfying. The mystery of the ever-so-alien aliens serves as an allegory for the engagement with "other" cultures, a common theme in more anthropological sci-fi.


Joanna Russ: Picnic on Paradise (1968)

One of my re-reads, a short novel I recall I didn't particularly like when I read it as a teenager. Due to an outbreak of war, the tourist planet of Paradise suddenly becomes a very dangerous place. A time-agent is tasked with escorting a traveling rag-tag group to safety, a diverse bunch of tourists mostly unsuited for roughing it.

Here the main story is in the discord between the time-agent, who originates from ancient Earth times, and the people with future social mores, an extrapolation of our own times. Although surely a step forward for feminist sci-fi/fantasy, the heroine is perhaps no longer so unconventional. Yet what remains is still a sense of real physicality of the journey and the "dread from above".


Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man (1952)

Alfred Bester was quite unknown to me, despite being one of sci-fi cornerstones. All the ESP/Psi-themes ever written owe something to Bester (The TV Series Babylon 5 named a character after him). Notably Philip K. Dick's scenario of a future ESP squad in UBIK is very close to Bester's world.

Here the plot revolves around whether and how one could get away with murder in a telepathically equipped society. Turns out you need at least an earworm.


Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1957)

Humankind finds out teleportation is a possibility through willpower alone, but not everyone can do it and not everyone can do it extremely well. The repercussions of this for society are explored in somewhat same vein as the telepathy in the Demolished Man. The gap between haves and not-haves has risen, and corporations run rampant. Nascent cyberpunk themes. Also, drug and body implant-induced bullet time, anyone?

Although I perhaps liked the telepath-society of the Demolished Man better, the narrative drive is stronger here. I'm not a fan of "experimental writing" in sci-fi, it feels like an experiment on experiment, but I'll give it a pass here.


John Brunner: The Shockwave Rider (1975)

Supposedly a proto-cyberpunk novel that influenced Gibson and the like. Phone-hacking and the word "worm" for a computer virus is famously found here.

Some of the themes were interesting and indeed before their time, but the writing quality was not that appealing to me, filled with puns and telegraphed short chapters. There's a lot of pondering about an ideal society, voiced by the main characters, handily with no one around to critique them. At the end we meet a kind of hippie community which further dates the views presented in the book. There's a trace of the hacker ethos here too.

This book is hugely influenced by Alvin Toffler's almost-fiction The Future Shock (1970). One of Toffler's scenarios was that as the pace of life increases, we might go through various "lives" inside one lifetime. Here the main character goes through various different personas and identities given flesh and bone, by the telephone. Lift up the receiver and I'll make you a believer.


John Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)

Comparable to Ender's Game, but perhaps less grand scale sci-fi. The grunts are taken to faraway planets to fight twitch-and-die battles, but time dilation is no joke so the vets will find their home changed a bit after a campaign. Maybe better re-enlist. Before you even get to say "Vietnam-allegory!", I'd say the story works as a stand-in for any war, and this if anything helps make the book enduring.

The term "laser squad" comes up, and indeed while reading I felt this might have influenced the Rebelstar Raiders, Laser Squad and UFO/X-Com games.

Another book influenced by The Future Shock, Toffler even gets a name-drop. The sequence where the soldiers get back to Earth to see how everything has changed, has maybe not aged that well, but it's a necessary part of the story and the point gets across. The military sequences and the grand scale of time dilation become far more inspiring.


Ursula LeGuin: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

One of the books I read when much younger. The neat thing about sci-fi was I could be entertained with fantastic concepts while introduced to themes like philosophy, alternative social mores, gender equality and political systems, something that I might not have done otherwise. I guess LeGuin's grand achievement was in being able to smuggle in feminist themes to a genre read by young men :)

Two planets, Anarres and Urras, two clearly different political systems and cultures. The other is highly propertarian and capital-oriented, whereas the other has abolished property. Gee, what could it be an allegory of? LeGuin fleshes out the problems of the systems, although also siding with the more gender-equal, socialist Anarres.

For the younger me this was quite a difficult book. I'd like to now say it is a masterpiece, which it kind of is, but it isn't as light entertainment. Which is to say I admit I'm currently looking for sci-fi that has both high concept ideas but also works as stress relief and escapist literature. Or, to put it in another way, I'm currently not too keen to read about a scientist facing problems with publishing papers.