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Babel-17 is about a new language created to be used interstellar warfare, and as I read the book of the same name, I indeed felt I was reading something written in another language. This terse Nebula winner is more a novella than a novel, and only offers tantalizing glimpses of the world Delany has built and the interesting characters that populate it.

I don’t have much to offer on this book. I found it difficult to get through, even knowing the conceit, having read the Wikipedia article simply to orient myself. Written in 1966. science fiction was opening up to new horizons, even more existential yet hallucinogenic horizons. Rydra Wong is a telepath, much like many of the characters we’ve seen in novels coming from the 1950s and early 60s. But Babel-17 seems to fall more along the lines of the sexual revolution and drug culture that the late 1960s fully embraced, as it is a language that offers wonderful glimpses of a new world, much like a hallucinogen might. The only downside if the drug cum language turns its speakers into saboteurs. Also, the dichotomy between Rydra’s allies and the enemy Invaders mimics the bipolar system of conflict set up by the Cold War during this period.

It’s surprising that the center of Delany’s novel is a young woman who is presented as competent, intelligent, strong, and capable. She’s not asexual but she’s also not oversexualized. This is a triumph for a science fiction novel of any period, not to mention one written in 1966.

I can’t really recommend or not recommend this book, as I found it slipping through my mind like water. I’ve read some of Delany’s short stories and enjoyed them, and he has another Nebula winner from the year immediately proceeding this one, so I’ll get to try again with him at a later date. Until then, I’ll let you all judge Babel-17.

So this is it, my last sci-fi review for a while. The school year starts up again on Monday, which means I’ll only have time for grading papers and reading big, fat monographs on important historical events. If I can swing using sci-fi as a primary source then maybe more reviews will pop up, but that possibility remains to be seen. Feel free to keep tuned into the blog, though, as I hope to continue posting here about my various academic exploits. Topics this semester include African-American women in the antebellum period, war and remembrance, and the history of mass/popular culture. Lots of fun stuff.

For my last book review of the summer season I chose to read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. Apparently when this book won the Hugo there was a bit of a kerfuffle, as some consider this novel to be more a work of fantasy than one of science fiction. It’s easy to see why that argument can be made. Written in an extremely lyrical style, Lord of Light reads very much like the Hindu mythology that inspired it. That this the novel is more than a creative retelling of this mythology is only hinted at, the most direct discussions coming at the very end of the book. Many of the major events in the book are outright fantastical, seeming to break the laws of the physical universe with no scientific explanation behind them, a faux pas that is considered one of the biggest lines between sci-fi and fantasy.

Kerfuffle aside, Zelazny doesn’t really have much to actively say. It took me a while to slog through this thin book, and every time I picked it up I mentally referred to it as The Most Boring Book in the World. Zelazny is thick on descriptive prose that belabors his narrative, and while he creates an intriguing premise that explores the nature of religion and technology, he gets bogged down in unenlightening character studies of his unique version of the Hindu pantheon.

By the mid-1960s, American culture blossomed along all fronts. The Summer of Love loomed near, civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements all demanded reform and equality, and counterculture eschewed the domestic and consumerist obsessions of postwar America. Exploring Eastern religion fit very neatly into this dynamic of change and exploration, as was most memorably dramatized in a recent episode of Mad Men, when the Hare Krishna made a noteworthy and startling appearance. So it makes perfect sense that Zelazny would write a novel steeped in Hinduism in the 1960s. Science fiction has long led the way in exploring foreign cultures in the present on Earth, and is also a genre ever ready to tackle Big Questions like the nature of technology and religion. In Lord of Light Zelazny combines all of these elements in his sleepy search for enlightenment through science fiction.

Despite its rambling chapters, there’s not really much of a plot to Lord of Light. Ostensibly the book is a story about a war between the Hindu pantheon and a former god who comes to be known as Buddha in one of his incarnations. But slowly the real motivation for the war is drawn out of Zelazny’s mythological trappings: years ago those who became known as gods (men?) came to this planet and used their incredible technological powers to take over and turn themselves into gods, styled after the Hindu pantheon. Their technology not only gave them incredible power, but it also allowed them to reincarnate themselves endlessly by transplanting their personal energy patterns into new bodies. Whether the people that populate the planet are colonists unlucky enough to have missed out on gaining god-like powers or are remnants of the native population isn’t clear. They do, however, live enthralled by their overseers, seeking their own right to incarnation.

The plot centers around a war between Sam, also known as the Buddha among his many incarnations, his followers, and the other gods of the Hindu pantheon. Sam is what is known as an Accelerationist – he believes that all the non-gods on their planet should be given technology so that they can advance society. His enemies believe that the people on the planet should be denied technology so that the gods can maintain their control over them. This disagreement is enough to cause huge and widespread warfare, which also involves legions of zombies, for those of you who are into that sort of thing. The gods prance around and pontificate while a lot of mortals are mowed down with nary a blink.

Lord of Light prompts a lot of important and fascinating questions about the nature of God and religion. For example: what happens when a God doesn’t believe in himself anymore? Where do we draw the line between humanity and God? Can godhood be created with incredibly powerful technology? If there is a God for mankind, is he/she/it just another being hoarding all the good gadgets for themselves? Do scientific advances bring us closer to god? Do we create our own gods? IS immortality possible and if so what does it look like? Is there life after death?

This aspect of the novel really tickled me, and it’s why I kept reading. One review I read online said the “science fiction” aspect would become more apparent toward the end of the novel, and while this plot device did become more prominent, I still put the book down thinking it was The Most Boring Book in the World. There’s absolutely nothing offensive about it, it simply read like an overlong folktale with some veiled technobabble thrown in for good measure. Though it has some timeless ideas, I do think it is also quite a book of its time. I’ll also add that I wish I’d been reading this book with someone, so we could have discussed it together. I feel that Lord of Light is meant to be provocative, but subtly so. Without anyone to bounce my ideas off of, it felt like something was lost on me. The book definitely has a communal, almost oral aspect to is, just the like myths and folktales its style apes. Maybe, like enlightenment, it takes more than one try to thoroughly understand exactly what it is that Lord of Light has to offer.

Gotta love a plug from the Las Vegas Review Journal.

When I first wrote a review of Clifford D. Simak’s A Choice of Gods back in May 2011, I found myself quite captivated by Simak’s deft exploration of the nature of man’s technological and spiritual development in a far future dystopia. My interest in dystopia is what made me pick up the book in the first place, and many of Simak’s novels reach into the future, sometimes near, sometimes far, sometimes both, in order to explore man’s relation to technology and a search for a higher self, usually through some sort of spiritual and/or intellectual transcendence. Science is not necessarily the enemy, but man’s relentless drive for technological innovation is often the reason for the downfall or ruin of humankind.

Way Station is the story of Enoch Wallace, a Civil War veteran born in 1840 who is still alive in roughly 1964, when the novel is set. Enoch is still living in his boyhood home in rural Wisconsin, the pastoral setting being a constant motif in Simak’s work. While neighbors know there is something strange about Enoch, Simak explains that their backwater sense of community leads them all to leave the nature of his existence unexplored. Unfortunately for Enoch, the US government, tangled in the treacherous throws of the Cold War, has caught wind of Enoch’s agelessness, and their investigation into the true nature of Enoch’s being and home leads to major revelations about humankind’s place in the universe.

For Enoch is not an ordinary Rip van Winkle, but is actually the keeper of an intergalactic way station placed on Earth by a consortium of far-advanced alien species called the galactic federation. These aliens have discovered a means of faster-than-light transport that operates something like a transporter does on Star Trek (though, in a more gruesome manifestation of the technology, each traveler’s material body is left dead at its original location, while a new one is materialized for the traveler’s consciousness upon arrival; in Simak’s world, bodies are simply material things, containers). The patterns associated with traveler’s bodies tend to break up when they encounter certain kinds of space junk, so stations like the one on Earth are established to ensure safe passage. Most of Enoch’s visitors are vacationers, as the galactic federation’s mission is again, Star Trek-like in its intent to explore space for a higher purpose rather than simple economic gain, at least originally.

Enoch’s position as the station keeper creates a great deal of cognitive dissonance for our protagonist that leads to lots of contemplating what make a “Man” a “Man.” Enoch lives a double life, both of Earth and of the stars, and, in a way, of the aliens. This split manifests physically in his immortality – as long as he stays in his boyhood home, which has been transformed by alien technology into the impenetrable way station, he doesn’t age. When he leaves the house, as he does daily to walk through his rural property and retrieve the mail, his ability to age is restored to him for that brief time.

Simak has been called a pastoral author, and his descriptions of the Wisconsin countryside are vivid and beautiful. Enoch’s daily walks through nature are one of the strongest ties to the part of “Man” that is Earth Man – a direct link to Earth’s own physical body. Conversely, the station links him to the transcendent nature of the aliens he safeguards, and represents the possibility that “Man” might also severe the link with the other defining factor of our “race,” violence.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Way Station lies in the way Simak investigates what it means to be “Man,” or in a less-limiting, gender and species neutral term, sentient. First there is the aspect of violence, which Simak explores on multiple levels. Enoch is a Civil War veteran and has witnessed firsthand the futility of war, which makes him (uniquely) placed to see the similar futility of impending nuclear war. For Simak, this tendency toward group violence, driven by fear, is an intrinsic part of “Man’s” nature that will drive the species to utter destruction if left unchecked. Integrally linked to apocalyptic future is man’s drive to develop technology, which in this case means more destructive ways of obliterating ourselves. When the aliens offer a solution to MAD, it comes in the form of removing all knowledge of how to operate technological devices of any kind from all humans, driving us back into a dark age and essentially rebooting our intelligence in hopes that the next time it won’t work against us.

There is also the role of personal violence. Enoch’s rifle is always close at hand – he takes all his daily walks with it cradled in his arm and leaves it within careful reach every time he is in the house. The one thing he asked the aliens to install for him to keep him entertained for all eternity is a firing range. Despite having witnessed the insanity of violence firsthand as a solider, and now as a terrified onlooker during the Cold War (and all those intervening wars as well), the rifle is still an integral part of Enoch’s life, representing the violence that still drives him as a “Man.” Even though he never fires it in direct confrontation, he can’t separate himself from it.

Initially the aliens of the galactic federation are posited as the opposite of “Man,” because they have put all petty squabbles and futile violence behind them in the name of peacefully exploring the galaxy. Enoch’s ability to see this peace creates his cognitive dissonance, however, as the novel progresses Simak reveals that the aliens themselves have not transcended their own desire for violence and greed, but have found an intermediary force that allows their benevolent and peaceful sides to win out. And that force is God.

Yes, in Simak’s worlds, nothing is every completely black and white. Out there somewhere an alien invented a machine that allowed sentient beings to communicate with God, proving its existence and, as Simak eventually reveals, creating peace for all who have experienced the presence of the Talisman and its keeper. For you see, the machine works kind of like the Oracle at Delphi, it needs a special operator or “sensitive” (Simak’s terms for psychic) to channel the device and communicate with God. An intermediary. These oracles are rare birds, too, and the only creatures that can make this device work.

It turns out this Talisman has gone missing, which is causing violence and greed to stir in the whole galaxy, not just on Earth. The inevitable conflict in the stars appears to be the force that will finally lead Enoch to choose between his identity as a violent Earth man, and that of the more far seeing alien liaison. But, thank god for deus ex machina (in this case quite literally), Enoch has to choose neither and both. The Talisman shows up on Earth, and Enoch uses his skill with the rifle, the integral violent part of his being, to kill the alien who’s stolen it. Then the Talisman brings peace to both Earth and the galaxy and we end not just with the peaceful resolution of the Cold War, but with Earth being prepared for induction into the galactic federation.

The most interesting part of this solution is the role of Lucy Fisher, Enoch’s deaf-mute neighbor who’s played the role of fey fairy savior throughout the novel, a woman literally struck dumb who can commune with nature but not really people except for Enoch, our divided hero. She stands in as a symbol for mother earth and as the psychic needed to communicate with and activate the Talisman. She is more in touch with the purity of her emotions than any other character in the book, but this also makes her more intellectually simple and simultaneously, more pure. Being a symbol of nature is not an unusual one for a woman, but her literal deafness and dumbness is quire representative of Simak’s inability or unwillingness to create actual, human women. Women aren’t “Man” in this novel, and therefore they’re not human. Lucy is fey and the only other female, Mary, is a ghost that Enoch created using some alien equation. She doesn’t even have physical substance, and her only reason for existence is to be trapped in her unrealized prison of love for him. Women are otherworldly, mysteries, they cannot be controlled, they are part of another universe and foreign others. And here they lack the integral dual nature, specifically the violence, that makes man “Man.” Simak’s women are often props – witches outright, if not oddities, and Lucy Fisher is no exception. She is an asexual Earth angel, a woman who can transcend “Man’s” violence to communicate with God and save the universe.

Also of note is that there simply are no minorities in this book. In A Choice of Gods, Native Americans had largely re-taken the depopulated Earth, an interesting plot twist that hinges on the assumption that Native Americans are more in touch with nature but are not part of the rest of the human race because they’re not down with technology or psychicness. Though included, they are still the Other. In this novel, “Man” is white. The other, when not female, is so outrageous that He is literally Alien. And He is a deliberate choice – we meet no female aliens, nor do we even hear about them.

Finding the historical context for Simak’s novel is fairly simple in many cases. Published in 1963, this novel came right on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world ever came to plunging into nuclear war. In Way Station, that sense of crisis and impending doom is ever present, and this time it takes the help of God to stop the escalation, not sheer luck and sensibility.

This was also the age of the space race, and technology is not always the demon in this scenario. Instead, for Simak it is the type of technology that man is developing which is the problem. It may be God and a psychic angel-woman who save the day, but they do it with the help of the Talisman, a machine which has proved the existence of a higher power through the “correct” use of technology. Simak’s suggestion here seems to be that warring over religion may be a root cause of man’s violent tendencies, or that only finding something as transcendent as a God machine can save us, though he doesn’t necessarily state this idea outright.

Also, Enoch knows that the answer is in the stars, as Simak’s novels often look to expansion of the human race into space as the solution to our earthly woes. Interestingly, this exploration of space is most often achieved through psychic and not technological means. Whatever the alternate scenario, Simak seemed to think that in the actual one we were going about it all wrong.

As for his treatment of gender and race, I don’t think there’s anything extraordinary to say other than this book is exemplary of many of the racist and sexist assumptions of the times. We’re still a bit early in the 1960s here, and science fiction at this point was a white boy’s club. The deconstruction of his identity creation that I’m presenting is largely a reading of well-trodden subtext. Tracing Simak’s use of women and minorities in his novels over time might prove interesting, as his work spans several decades, but that is a project for another time.

Simak as an author of science fiction is an enjoyable read, and I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of his catalog. I would recommend him to fans of Philip K. Dick, as both authors share similar concerns. Dick’s futures are much more bleak and thoughtful, and much more inventive. But Simak is a good writer in the sense that he is writerly – his prose is beautiful. He is constantly asking questions about technology. Approaching technology as a problem is not necessarily unique, but the solutions Simak offers to that problem often are. Finally, Simak is actually quite deft at using science fiction to explore what it is that makes us human. His definition of human may be limited, but noticing and exploring the reasons for those limitations is another exercise in enjoyable reading.

Sadly, most of his books are out of print, but you can find copies very cheaply on amazon.com, or at your local used bookstore (trust me, you will find tons). I encourage you to try Simak out!