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All of our authors this week tackle the changing cultural landscape of turn-of-the-century America, which witnesses the emergence of a mass culture that often superseded older cultural forms. In particular, each author is concerned with whether or not these changes in the way culture was produced and consumed were democratic in nature. Larry Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, sees a transformation from the heterogeneous audiences of American theater in the 19^th century to the tightly controlled highbrow entertainments of the elites, saying, “Art was becoming a one-way process: the artist communicating and the audience receiving” (195). No longer did audiences participate in the performances of material such as Shakespeare or operas, but instead, as dictated by elite tastes, sat in silent reverence to watch inflexible performances of these now-dubbed classics. For Levine, the elites responded to the disorder of urbanization and massive immigration by placing strict controls on cultural forms.

            But culture and art did not transform into a one-way process of creation and reception as Levine claims. It’s true that cultural categories are contingent upon their historical context, and Levine does a convincing jobs of tracing the movement of cultural forms from one category to another. But culture did not completely lose its democratic nature, and other authors trace the dialectic between cultural forms and cultural receivers by studying the new forms of mass amusement that emerged at the turn-of-the-century. Most interesting is the tension between Progressive reformers’ impulse to educate the immigrant and working classes and these same group’s wholesale embrace of new cultural forms. In his study of Coney Island, Amusing the Island: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, John Kasson begins by examining the City Beautiful Movement and the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. Planners intended Central Park and the White City to pastoralize and instill awe in their visitors, but the Midway Plaisance, harbinger of Coney Island, overflowed with visitors.

Indeed, these new amusements, like Coney Island, brought heterogeneous groups of Americans together at the same time that Levine observes a cultural bifurcation. Mass amusements may have controlled and guided visitors through the walls of their amusement parks and the mores of social behavior, but Americans, especially the working class, voted with their pockets and their feet as to which cultural forms they enjoyed most. Further, Coney Island and other new public spaces of amusement allowed Americans to mix with each other and create new heterosocial spaces. The argument can validly be made that vendors programmed leisure time just as readily as employers programmed work time, but at least the illusion of choice existed for those seeking pleasure in Coney Island and other public amusements.

Kathy Piess captures the dichotomy between freedom of choice and oppression in her book Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York. As wage earners, working class (immigrant) women found themselves with the capital to participate in the new culture of mass amusements and mass production. Women used their newfound economic freedom (or semi-freedom, depending on whether or not part of their wages went to their families) to purchase fashionable clothing or take part in new social amusements, like dance halls and movies. This allowed them a new freedom in leisure time, a relative social autonomy that they had not experienced when cultural and economic norms dictated they work and socialize in the private sphere. The so-called freedom came with a price, however, as the ability to participate in these new social forms did not prove to be as affordable as at first appeared. Often women starved themselves to save enough money to enjoy leisure time and, even more predominantly, a system of treating arose where men paid women’s way in exchange for sexual favors. This system created a delicate balancing act for women, who had to reciprocate to men without tarnishing their honor.

Even as old cultural forms bifurcated into low and high, new cultural forms emerged to fill the vacuum, creating new standards of behavior, freedom of choice, and instances of oppression. Every mechanized reproduction meant that cultural forms lost their aura as cultural products moved further from the original. Like Theodor Adorno, elites tried to preserve the aura of cultural artifacts they deemed genuine and classic by isolating them from the rowdy masses and dictating to those who participated how they should imbibe things like Shakespeare, opera, and art pieces. But as observed by Benjamin, mass culture allowed a new class consciousness to arise. It may not have been revolutionary, but the working class and immigrants, especially young people like young women, emerged as demographic markets to be both catered to and taken advantage of. Culture remained a highly contested place one of newfound choice and carefully calculated limitation.

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.

The preface to my 2009 edition of this Nebula winning classic does my work for me in historicizing this novel. Silverberg writes that A Time of Changes came about as a response to America’s transition from the straight-laced conformity of the 1950s to the counterculture and free love of the 1960s and 1970s. A Time of Changes stands as an allegory for that transition set on a far distant world in a distant future, where men have depleted the resources of Earth and colonized the stars.

Settled by a taciturn, religious (almost puritanical) people, on Borthan it is illegal to break the scared Covenant, a religious doctrine that prohibits the use of the pronouns “I” or “me” and isolates people emotionally from themselves and others. Kinnall, our protagonist and a prince of Sulla, one of the provinces on Northern continent where most people reside, narrates the reader through his own journey of self-discovery, guided by an Earthman and realized with the help of a hallucinogenic drug that lays bare the souls of those who take it in a basic orgy of emotional sharing. Emerging from this stupor, the first impulse is to say, “I love you,” which is also the ultimate crime on Borthan, as it breaks down barriers between the self and others.

A Time of Changes presents astute world-building, and remains dedicated to the strict social rules set for its characters, but doubting these rules is an integral part of the journey for the characters and the reader. Just as the reader is questioning why Borthan’s residents remain so strongly dedicated to the Covenant, Kinnall is wondering it himself, writing a desperate manifesto meant to convince Borthanians that the way of rightful existing is through self love and love of others, the two most taboo indulgences on Borthan. In this way A Time of Changes is not just a stand in for the counterculture or the drug culture that grew out of the 1960s, but is an exploration of religion itself. The Earthman, Schweiz, takes the drug because he is trying to experience God. He envies the Borthanian’s easy dedication to religion, and nothing in his wandering of the stars has convinced him God exists. Scheiwz thinks he might find God through complete and unfettered connection with others. For Kinnall, the drug brings him closer to God by tearing apart his own religious beliefs. God is self love and the love of others, he finds.

A Time of Changes doesn’t have much to hide in its allegorical story of one man’s transformation from conformity to a belief in free love. It’s easy to read this book onto the historical narrative of the counterculture and the 1960s and 70s. The treatment of women in this novel also dates it – all women are sex objects, pure and simple, even Kinnall’s bondsister, who he is supposed to feel only platonic feelings for. It is their only function. During the free love period in the 1960s, women found that free love often meant their objectification, as they were merely sex objects for the men practicing open sexual mores upon their bodies. This objectification is one of the experiences that drove feminism and women’s quest for sexual equality. Silverberg is unable to grant any of the women in his novel agency – their bodies exist purely for the pleasure of his protagonist. Sadly, as some of the more recent science fiction novels I have reviewed demonstrate, this is still the case in many texts.

A Time of Changes is an interesting read. It forces us to ask ourselves how much our own culture mirrors the Borthanian culture of isolation and mistrust. It also asks us to examine the value of sharing love and emotional experience with those around us. I oftentimes felt that Silverberg spent more time telling the reader about Borthanian mores than he did demonstrating them, so that the impact of Kinnall’s ultimate martyrdom felt less destructive than it should have. But the settings in the book were lovely and the allegory intriguing. Even after 30 some odd years, this book provides valuable insight into the way we view ourselves and each other.

It’s hard to know where to begin in dissecting this out-of-print Nebula winner. It’s another time travel story, and as we’ve already established with historical fiction and alternate histories, using such a device allows the author carte blanche when constructing a plot around their unique timeline. No Enemy but Time uses this latitude to create a novel that rewrites our understanding of our distant past. Whether this journey 2,000,000 years into Earth’s past is successful enough for the reader is up for debate.

No Enemy but Time is really two stories about one character told in a twined narrative as the author moves forward through Joshua Kampa’s past being raised by his foster parents, and his future, where he travels backwards in time to Plieistocene Africa in the the fictional country of Zarakal. He goes because he has been dreaming of living there, in this same far-distant time period, his whole life, and somehow the time travel technology in this novel revolves around the vivid dreams Kampa has had since he was a small child. Only one who has “spirit traveled” can actually go back in time using the time travel device, White Sphinx. Kampa qualifies, and so he is sent back in time to observe the fictionalized proto-humans, Homo zarakalenis (referred to as Minids). The rest of this time travel part of the story focuses on Kampa’s adventures with the tribe of proto-humans he eventually becomes a part of. An intriguing premise, No Enemy but Time fails to reach the heights worthy of a Nebula.

The plot of No Enemy but Time is hard to summarize intelligently, as may be apparent from the first two paragraphs of this review. The book is long and winding, and while its two stories are connected through the shared character of Joshua Kampa, it’s hard to pin down why the story of his childhood and maturation is necessary, even if these chapters are the best written of the book. But what is most frustrating and banal is the way Bishop treats Kampa’s time in the past. The book reads like an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel without the excitement, and with a black protagonist. As Kampa successfully joins the Minids band, he becomes the all-powerful outsider, just as good, if not better, at practicing the tasks of hunting and gathering that his Minid companions are both evolutionarily and experientially more suitable for.

Even more problematic is the nature of gender and sexuality in this book. The Minid society is divided along gender lines, with the men doing the hunting and protecting and the females doing the gathering and the nurturing. They also pair bond monogamously along gender lines, implying that heteronormative standards reigned supreme in humans’ distant ancestors. That is, of course, until Kampa falls in love with one of the female Minids that he names Helen, a loner, physically larger than the other woman, who most often acts like a male of the tribe. But this is an uneasy role – Helen is shunned by the females and often takes to stealing other animals’ children in an attempt to play mother. In Bishop’s Pleistocene era, the key to true acceptance in society for a woman is still tied closely to her reproductive capabilities and her role in a heteronormative couple.

That’s right. If you haven’t guessed it by now, Kampa and Helen pair bond, have sex, and produce a child. Putting aside the possible scientific impossibility of this procreation (it is a novel about time travel based on dreaming, after all), I was quite put off by the sexualization of Helen, who I read to be basically an animal in comparison to Kampa. Their love scene read like lurid bestiality, and though I could see the relationship coming from miles away, that didn’t lead me to be any more disappointed in the author. The love scene and sexual bond between Kampa and Helen served no purpose in the plot other than to situate both Kampa and Helen in a monogamous, heteronormative relationship.

This book was published in 1982, during the rise of the New Right with a backlash against the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. It’s hard to know if Bishop’s interest in pair bonding Kampa and Helen related to this backlash, but one of the most striking features of this novel is that Joshua Kampa is black. Further, he encounters prejudice and discrimination based on his skin color in scenes that are convincing enough such that they are uncomfortable to read. If Bishop was unwilling to relinquish heternormative relationships, he did explore the color barrier.

Also, the novel is set in Africa, an Africa that Bishop envisions as forward thinking scientifically, and that in the end gets its own space program. It is not a simple backdrop for a story about time travel, but instead is a character in its own right, as are the African politicians who play and support Kampa along the way.

As I said at the beginning of the review, this novel has an extremely interesting premise, I just wish it had been executed better. Kampa’s sexual relationship with Helen was a disturbing plot point that I couldn’t move beyond, and it was hard to feel immersed in the minutiae of the Minids society when most of their time was spent looking for food – realistic perhaps, but it didn’t make for riveting reading. Then Bishop glossed over one of the most interesting parts of the story – his return to the present with his hybrid daughter. Perhaps unwilling to imagine the prejudice she might face, or the mental handicaps she might have to overcome, she appears as perfectly normal in the final chapter, absconding to chase her own dreams of the future.

No Enemy but Time is lean on material where it should be thick, and dwells too much on seemingly mundane episodes. Further, it is hard not to feel disturbed by the eroticization of an animal. Poor females are always sex objects, even if they’re almost of a different species. This book is a romance novel for men disguised as a technical manual for wilderness survival disguised as a coming of age story. Follow your dreams, Bishop extorts his reader, they will lead your on wilder and more inappropriate adventures than you ever imagined.

When I worked at Half Price Books in Berkeley, Red Mars was one of those books that we sold out of regularly. Being two blocks from UC Berkeley, college students interested in buying and selling their books made up a large portion of our customers. Somewhere along the line we’d acquired the knowledge that Red Mars is required reading for students up at Cal, which always excited me: science fiction on a syllabus! So, one day, as I helped a girl find a copy of Red Mars, I asked her which class she was reading the book for. I expected her to name some upper level English course focused on science fiction, but what came out of her mouth was a long string of large scientific and technical words, astrobiology being one of them. I felt incredibly impressed by this young woman. Turns out they read Red Mars in upper level science classes (hard science classes!) at UC Berkeley to learn about what terraforming a planet might be like. That’s right, this work of fiction is used to teach actual science.

If that knowledge didn’t clue you into the fact that Red Mars is a masterpiece of hard science fiction, then I will state it outright. Robinson goes to amazing lengths to create a story that depicts what the terraformation of Mars would look like if we could ever get off our terrible, ignorant asses and actually try to do something so bold and amazing. But ignoring the hard science that makes this book required reading for actual scientists, Red Mars is truly an opus about space exploration and colonization. Kim Stanley Robinson has found a new frontier in this western in space, not only in science, but in human societal relationships. Just as the colonists must deal with the nuts and bolts of getting to Mars and building a livable human habit on a foreign planet, they must also struggle to create or recreate human society on Mars. Expanding Red Mars beyond scientific discovery to explorations of cultural, societal, and interpersonal relationships is what makes this book such an important contribution to the field: Robinson remembers the human element. Beyond the amazing science in the book, Robinson’s attention to the human species is another reason those undergraduates are required to read this book: they’re not just learning physics and biology, they’re reading about how the human dimension of space colonization might look.

Red Mars won a Nebula but it did not win a Hugo, though its two sequels, Green Mars and Blue Mars did win Hugos. It’s entirely understandable why this book is so acclaimed and is considered to be a standard text not only in science fiction, but among actual scientists. Robinson clearly did his homework, and at times this book reads like a textbook. At 572 pages, most of the book is detailed description of the scientific nuances of terraforming a planet or, less frequently but with just as much pedantry, long bits of narrative minutely detailing the political and cultural situation on the planet.

At this point I’m going to admit that I did a whole lot of skimming as I read this book. The science I found to be fascinating but as it went on and on I lost interest. That’s not fault of the author – I think someone more interested in that nuance than I am would be lost in a dream of realistic speculation. I am simply not so inclined. So, for readers like me, that made this book very slow in a lot of places. Normally this is where I’d say that Robinson needed a better editor to rein him in (I’m looking at you, George R.R. Martin), but in this case I think all of the scientific detail Robinson has included is not only necessary, it’s incredibly compelling. The book’s reception in the scientific community confirms this, but if you’re not a lover of science textbooks guised as sci-fi novels, this book might not be for you. That said, I think this is probably the best hard sci-fi book I’ve ever read. Though packed with information that can go on for pages without advancing the plot, the science stuff never seems long-winded or out of place. It is necessary for Robinson’s project. And it’s well written, so that when I felt like tuning in I found myself both interested and able to understand the scientific language.

That said, I do have real issues with Robinson’s attempt to weave politics and interpersonal relationships into the story. Yes, colonizing Mars would have a huge political dimension to it, and I think it’s a good thing that Robinson included that reality in the novel. Exploring the way Mars and Earth, as well as the colonists, would interact with each other, and further, the ways in which nations would attempt to redraw their boundaries (or not) on Mars, enriched the novel beyond the simple wonder of postulating how science might allow us to live on Mars. Robinson also goes out of his way to create a cast of characters who have differing visions as to what Mars should look like, from the extreme environmental conservasionist, Ann, to the terraformer, Sax, to the utopian revolutionary, Arkady, to the two idealistic American leaders Frank and John, who are just trying to bring everyone together, to Nadia, the engineer who doesn’t give a fuck about anything other than her machines, and so many other characters I could list. And that’s not even getting into the competing cultures that emerge as new groups of settlers arrive.

Refreshingly, Robinson’s Mars is multi-national and multi-ethnic. Everyone has their own vision for Mars and takes sides in the developing factions that arise as more Terrans emigrate from Earth and corporations try to take over operations on the planet to take advantage of natural resources. There remains a unique bond among the first 100 colonists, all scientists who share the same basic belief that Mars should be its own governing entity, free of any mercantilist system with Earth. Beyond that they do disagree on what a Martin government should look like. And so the explicit parallels are drawn between the mercantile relationship between imperial England and the American colonies and the subsequent revolutionary war, where the colonists in both American and on Mars resort to revolution to overthrow the mother country/planet in order to form a more perfect union. Red Mars shows us the colonization and revolutionary phase of this struggle, whereas I assume Green Mars and Blue Mars go a bit further into setting up the new Martin government.

The way Robinson writes about politics tends to remind me of Ayn Rand. I’m not accusing him of being an Objectivist. I don’t think he is at all. My comparison is stylistic. He tends to use the same literary devices to get his political views across: long, rambling monologues or debates between characters that are really just vehicles to get his ideology out there or explain positions or events to the reader in detail that characters in the book already know about. I’m not honestly sure what Robinson’s ideology is, which may be a point in Robinson’s favor. At the end of Red Mars , violent revolution hasn’t worked to drive out the unwanted interlopers from Earth, but the corporations and the UN are still enemies of the first 100 and Mars itself, both physically and socially (the physical and social landscape/well-being are always explicitly linked in the book). The true path to political and physical salvation may be revealed in the book’s sequels. Robinson does enough of a song and dance that the differing political views he offers seem to be a genuine exploration by the author of how competing viewpoints might come about and be expressed. But obviously he favors one, it’s just in trying to ferret out which one that is.

Then there are the interpersonal relationships among the first 100, specifically between Maya, John, and Frank, a love triangle that spans the book. I have to admit, this is my second time attempting to read Red Mars. The first time I got to the part where Maya fucks Frank then turns around and falls in love with John, the man Frank hates, and I just put the book down. I wasn’t interested in reading a 572 page book about a love triangle. The way Robinson writes about Maya is truly disappointing. Ostensibly she is the leader of the Russian delegation to Mars, but her only purpose in the novel is to serve as a sexual object for Frank and John, and for the author as well. Thankfully this book did not turn out to be a romance novel, but Maya’s only purpose whenever she was present was to have sex with one of those two men, or to make Frank resent that she wasn’t having sex with him to the point that it helped motivate him to murder John. The relationship between the three of them was really annoying, and I just couldn’t understand why Maya’s plotline had to exist when the rest of the book was so rich in characters. Another nice thread of science fiction romance for men, featuring the objectification of a sexually manipulative and therefore crazy woman, woven into to a densely factual novel.

I’m not reading into subtext here either. Robinson states more than once that Maya gained her position of power through using her sexuality to manipulate men. She is described by other characters and herself as purposefully playing Frank and John against each other. She is openly depicted as becoming crazed as a result of her mercurial feelings of “love,” which only ever manifest in sex. Her actions annoy the other characters, though only hers, never those of the male members of her trio. Taking a step backwards toward Maya’s sexual manipulation of men, this characterization actually extends to all of Russian society. Apparently, by 2026 Russian women turned the double burden on its head by making sexuality a weapon against men in order to gain positions of power. If you can’t beat the sexist system, join it? Or, there is a demographic imbalance of women vs. men in Russia so women use sex to take over the country? I don’t know. It’s a very strange reading of Russian history combined with a very sad understanding of women’s sexuality.

This book was published in 1993, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so that may have something to do with the strange femme fatale imagery. Hiroko, an Asian woman, is also highly sexualized and eroticized. Her only real role in the book is to have orgies and pop out babies. That’s her contribution to the revolution. Apparently that in and of itself is a revolution. Procreation is not #1 on any of the first 100’s lists except for Hiroko and her followers. In fact, population problems plaguing Earth are one of the key threats to stability on Mars. Despite the sexualization of Maya and Hiroko, two other female characters, Ann and Nadia are scientists and engineers before they are lovers and women. It is a very strange balance, but in Nadia Robinson crafts a character who is both a competent and brave worker as well as loving and sexual. Ann herself is tough as nail, a brilliant scientist, and also capable of emotion. Neither of these female characters is punished for being smart and capable – in fact, they are, in Robinson’s world, to be admired for who they are as individuals. Robinson’s creation of these strong, human female characters just makes Maya’s character seem even further strange,  unnecessary, and a little insulting.

What’s really at issue here is Robinson’s social and political critique of the Blue planet, Earth, as it stood in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union had just fallen, but as reflected in Red Mars, the ability of the UN to keep any sort of peace was a joke. Robinson explores the dangers of outsourcing government scientific projects to multi-national corporations but then asks, who else will provide funding? The importance of Arab settlers on Mars seems to bizarrely presage the post 9-11 world, down to an open debate about Women’s rights and Islam between the American Frank Chalmers, and the Arabic caravan that is hosting him as they wander the Martin desert. Perhaps most pressingly, beyond the blatant colonial metaphors, Robinson is concerned that the nation-states of Earth do not have the proper apparatuses in place to face the rising threats of overpopulation, depleted resources, and global warming. For Robinson, on Earth and on Mars, nation-states and nationalism are no longer the answer. Earth is lost, but Mars is the alien terrain that provides the setting for a rebirth of human civilization, and a dawning of a new system of governance not corrupted by nationalistic politicians and their corporate backers. Watching these dynamics play out through the spectacle of the colonization of Mars is what makes this book required reading not only for those looking to the stars, but back to Earth. Unlike the few lucky thousands who make it to the red planet in Red Mars, we’re still stuck her on our own on this dusty rock, but we’re facing all the same problems with even fewer answers.

Because there are two sequels to this book that, as I mentioned, both won Hugos, I’m going to reserve some judgment here. Storylines are clearly unfinished, and sometimes in sequential books the weaknesses those loose ends leave are tied up quite satisfyingly in subsequent volumes. That said, I still think the portrayal of Maya was ridiculous and her storyline distracting and unnecessary. Otherwise this book is a great addition to the genre. There’s a lot to be digested in this book from all fields of study, and there’s some amazing prose to go along with that great scientific research. I’m going to take a break before I read the next two because the level of detail is just so intense and the plot is plodding as a result that I need a break from the kind of reading Red Mars demands – it’s almost like reading a dense, dusty historical monograph. That said, I do look forward to seeing what happens after the revolution.

I am a sucker for Falling Skies, the post-alien-invasion-show currently in its second season on TNT. I don’t know why I feel so compelled to watch this show, because it is full of problems. Butt loads. I guess it’s because I always feel compelled to investigate media and entertainment centering on dystopia, be it print, film, or, most rarely, television. And Falling Skies is certainly dystopic.

But it’s also incredibly problematic, beyond commonplace technical problems such as good writing. Too often dystopias look all too familiar to the world we’re already living in, just maybe throw in some alien overlords and nuclear waste. And when I say they “look” familiar, I’m not talking about physical landscapes, I’m talking about social constructs, or, the way the surviving society looks. Sometimes that means physically how society looks, not just the way it is constructed.

Falling Skies obviously has problems with race and gender. It’s a male-centric show focused on reinforcing current day definitions of masculinity. It appeals to a boarder audiences by focusing on plots that are family-oriented, or center around attempts to maintain and/or rebuild “normal” human families in the face of a catastrophic event. Come hell or high water, the American family will persevere, it will serve as something to protect and fight for, is the comforting message Falling Skies sends to its viewers. Even in the middle of the apocalypse, this will not change. Through the institution of the family, order lives on, as do the rest of us, even if we actually die.

It’s nationalism garbed in the robes of science fiction, but the producers make no secret of linking American exceptionalism and the myths of the American revolutionary spirit to the survivors’ attempts to outlive and destroy the superior firepower of the aliens. Survivors have organized themselves into militias and named themselves after the militias that fought in the revolutionary war. They are lead by real military commanders, bringing one of the most patriotic symbols, the army, to the forefront of the show. Though Tom is not military, he is a professor of  military history, a specialty that, when combined with his masculine bearing (stoicism, the ability to be an efficient killer, and a firm position as the physical protector of his family) automatically makes him the second ranking officer, according to the show’s logic. He is the civilian conscience of a militarized revolution, but his academic past works for him instead of against him because he studied a masculine, violent subject that echoes the gendered values Falling Skies upholds. The values the characters fight for are not only domestic values, they are American values, with the two being so inextricably intertwined that the link isn’t remarked upon often in the show, which is stunning considering how corny and awkward some of the dialog can be.

Noah Wyle’s character, Tom, is, as described, a military professor turned resistance leader. He’s wracked with guilt over the death of his wife, which he feels he could have prevented. Failure as a man number one. Now he’s left to be a father to his three sons, and really, to the hundreds of survivors he’s supposed to protect, help lead, and watch over. The show revolves around his relationships with his sons, who he must also raise to be proper men through modelling appropriate masculine behavior. In this show men are stoic, they are (very competently) violent (when necessary – because they are real, honorable men, they don’t act wantonly unless that trait are specifically written into their character bio), they are honorable, and they are also paternal, but mostly when it comes to instilling values of manhood. Their job is as protectors.

Interestingly, the role of the doctor is played by one of the show’s few female leads. You could say her occupation is a victory for feminism, but actually casting her as the doctor places her in a nurturing position. Constructed gender roles often dictate that women are inherently nurturers. The doctor here is not even a prestigious surgeon, but a pediatrician turned field medic. Her pre-attack job was to take care of children. Again, sexist logic: women are biologically childbarers and caregivers. And guess what, her son died in the invasion. Failure as a woman/mother number one. She is punished by her unending grief and this fact being her the only bit of backstory given to her character. She is defined by her motherhood, by her failure as a mother, and by her current job: to play mother to all the survivors, especially Tom (Noah Wyle) and the Second Mass’s leader, Weaver by mending their bodies and providing and emotional shoulder for them to lean on. She also becomes Tom’s sexual partner and emotional outlet. Tom can be soft around a woman. So she nurtures and has sex. That’s it.

The other female lead, Maggie, is a bad ass militia scout. Again, points for placing a woman in an aggressive role, right? Whoa there buddy. This position, by default, makes her a failure as a woman. She is given a complicated back story of sickness, rape, and crime, all punishments for her attempt to break out of the show – and society’s – dictated domesticated role. This form of punishment for bold, masculinized women is an old, old story in all kinds of media. And, another old story, Maggie is trying to find redemption through the love of Tom’s oldest son, Hal, who can validate her as a woman and therefore as moral by forgiving her for her past sins. Hal also acts as her protector, and when she tries to protect him, at least in one instance, she get’s beaten half to death. Oh, and did I mention it was during a catfight with Hal’s old girlfriend, another (blond) masculinized female who is also punished for stepping outside a domestic role by being abducted then physically and mentally altered by the aliens? Poor Maggie (and Karen). She deserves better.

And then there’s race. It seems that the white people on Earth did an exponentially better job of surviving the alien invasion than any of the other minority races. This racial superiority is doubtless an outgrowth of the discriminatory casting of current day Hollywood and the inherent white superiority complex in our dominant cultural narrative. Our society is not post-racial, and though Falling Skies makes tries to take a stab at it, it does not depict a post-racial dystopia. African, Asian American, and Latino characters play supporting roles and tend to end up dead. Another familiar trope. Oops.

I have spent a lot of time studying the history of civil defense engineering in our country. For those not familiar with the term, civil defense most often refers to things like bomb and fallout shelters or protection systems set up during the Cold War meant to help American citizens survive catastrophic nuclear attacks. Officials also developed plans to rebuild society afterward. Historian David Monteyne recently published Fallout Shelter, an excellent book that explores the racial dimension of civil defense planning (many other works explore the thoroughly gendered dimension of civil defense, as does Monteyne).

After studying an amazing array of primary sources detailing how civil defense was planned and imagined by civilian and government experts, he found that these officials created plans that turned out to be inherently racist and sexist. In the future envisioned by these white men, those who survived nuclear attacks would be suburban, middle-class whites, and these men and women of the domestic ideal would work to recreate the domestic ideal of the 1950s and 60s in order to rebuild society following nuclear catastrophe. Sitting through just a few of the civil defense PSAs the government in the 1950s and 60s is enough to convince you of Monteyne’s point. This projecting of a present ideal onto the future is exactly what the survivors in Falling Skies are doing – upholding families as the key to human survival and attempting to recreate traditional looking families by reforming old ones or creating new ones in the ideal’s image. To make matters more complicated, the aliens are stealing human children, therefore undermining family structure even more. This is supposed to be the most horrifying aspect of the invasion, and drives the desire to reconstruct and rebuild families. The show is obsessed with this idea, from the macro level of the Second Mass (an army) being a family, down to Tom and his sons (one of whom was taken by the aliens).

But back to Fallout Shelter and race. Most interestingly, Montenye points out that civil defense officials assumed Americans living in the suburbs would survive any attacks, because they assumed city centers would no doubt be targets of any nuclear attacks, such as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This assumption made civil defense plans inherently racist – most suburban populations are white, and the targeted inner cities are defined by the large population of poor minorities forced by discriminatory policies to live where there was/is affordable housing. Russian bombs would do the job of whitewashing America.

So maybe something similar is happening in Falling Skies, this assumption that those who die will be those in the cities, and that the (often invisible) residents of these cities will be minorities. The survivors in the Second Mass are all suburbanites, after all. Maybe this subconscious but easy assumption explains the lack of minorities among the survivors. If you asked the show’s creators they would most likely say that is absolutely not the case. They would defend casting choices. The would point to the doctor, Moon Bloodgold’s, half-Korean ethnicity, which creates a interracial romance worth Tom that is worth remarking upon; I’m sure the producers would cite her as one example to counter my argument. Still, the future remains predominantly white. And that’s the thing about cultural norms and subtext – we are raised by society to think and act in a certain way, conditioned to receive certain messages, whether outright or subconsciously, that tell us how we should act based on how we look, what set of genitalia we have, etc. These ideas and beliefs are encoded within us, so often without our knowledge, and we embed them in all the things we create, that we do, say, and think, intentionally or not, because they are a part of us. And it takes work to break them down and strip them away. If the producers of this show are imaging the future as white, it is most likely because 1) the system of casting in Hollywood is racist and 2) we have all been fed images like this for so long that it takes conscious effort to realize the blinders we are wearing, and then we must make the effort to correct our mistakes.

Because these culture values are so firmly and often subconsciously embedded, we must ask, especially of those who are envisioning the future: why are our cultural creators still assuming that it’s only whites who will survive catastrophic events? Why do we believe these “visionaries” when they depict minorities as returning to savagery or gang rule, or don’t even give them a place in the future at all? Why don’t we question these current day racialized and sexualized images of ourselves  that are constantly projected into the future?

Perhaps that’s what is so compelling about dystopia, at least for some: the reassurance that even after annihilation, gender and racial norms will survive, institutions like the idealized traditional family, which has never actually existed, will survive, will be renewed, and so will one unfortunate definition of society and stability.

But that’s not for me, and that’s why I’m so disappointed with Falling Skies. I prefer my dystopia much more foreign and challenging.

 

Edit to Add: I just realized that I forgot to do any analysis of sexuality on the show. As far as I can tell, everyone is thoroughly straight, further supporting that the show’s narrative attempts to depict and uphold the heterosexual component of the 1950s/60s domestic ideal.

The idea that the disappearance or removal of all technology and nuclear weapons might be the only way to save the human race is not new to science fiction. Clifford D. Simak made exploring the pros and cons of this scenario the center of many of his works, including the great City. Vernor Vinge, another decorated author, is more known for his far future Hugo winning space operas than post-Cold War dystopias. In The Peace War, however, written in 1984, a time when President Regan built up the US army as the USSR began to collapse under the strain of rot from within, Vinge’s near-future exploration of technology, morals, and war proved compelling enough to garner him a Hugo nomination.

The Peace War is the first in a string of nominees that I will be reading in place of the actual Hugo winners from their year. Why I’m skipping certain books varies on a case by case basis, and that doesn’t mean they won’t pop up later in the project. In this case I’m choosing to ignore William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Skip down to the end of the review for my explanation of why.

I’ll be forthright when I say that I love Vinge’s Hugo winners, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, and I look forward to reading Vinge’s other near-future winner, Rainbows End. At his best, Vinge is a modern master, blending hard sci-fi and far future plots to create incredible universes that leave the reader both convinced and in awe. His books are also quite riveting page turners, and I generally tend to dislike books overly driven by plot. But no, in Vinge’s universes the reader is treated to vivid and surprising characters that are just as alive and captivating as his harrowing plots.

The Peace War is interesting, but it is certainly not Vinge at his best. It is mired in Cold War not-so-sub-text, set in a world in which the Peacers have disabled every nuclear and military complex and weapon on earth, bringing “peace” to a world teetering on the brink of catastrophic, violent collapse. The Peacers, are not a governmental body but a private corporation who created a technique called bobbling. Using this technique the Peacers surrounded all military weapons and installations in impenetrable silver spheres – referred to as bobbles – therefore incapacitating all world governments by rendering their armies useless.

But in this new, demilitarized world, the Peacers are the enemies. Disallowing not only military but other forms of advanced technology that might lead to military development, the Peacers have plunged the world back into what Vinge repeatedly refers to as a feudal society, though Vinge only gives us glimpses of a ravaged Southern California ruled by what might be some sort of feudal government. Mostly the world seems to be populated with gangs, tribes, traders, and our heroes, the Tinkers: men and women who continue to develop advanced technology. Hiding from the Peacers, they hope to one day overthrow the authoritarian entity and let the United States flourish again.

There are a lot of things going on in The Peace War, most of them very thinly fleshed out in favor of advancing action, a weakness that Vinge put aside in later works. One reason dystopias are so captivating is because of the world building that occurs in such familiar places. The disaster has already happened – what does like look like for the surivors? Literally, what does it looks like? These questions, and Vinge’s world invites many of them, go largely unanswered.

On the micro level, Vinge is obviously trying to explore the way race and social status would be constructed following such a catastrophe. The main character, Wili, is black, something that Vinge reminds us of over and over again, especially every time he is introduced to new characters. But the meaning of this blackness is unclear; several times Vinge alludes or states that other characters might be surprised to take orders from Wili or to learn that he is a genius, but why this characterization in relation to Wili’s blackness is so important is made unclear. No racial tension is ever actively demonstrated. Interestingly, Vinge again alludes that Southern California is no longer angelo, but boosts a majority Spanish population, though in the caste system is still seems English speakers are on top. Confusion abounds. Does this mean whites are still in control here? Is there a difference between language and race? Wili grew up in Southern California but is fluidly bilingual, further compounding this problem. Then there are groups of people that are only referred to by made-up tribal names. Wili is always black in relation to them while their own racial identities remain unclear.

This issue of Wili’s blackness is worth bringing up because Vinge makes it such a glaring point of description but refuses or overlooks explaining to the reader how race works in this dystopic society. His oversight is really a shame, as dystopias provide an interesting setting to explore social constructs like race. Though Vinge seemed to sense these possibilities, his novel is much more interested in exploring the technological marvels he creates in the form of the bobbles and cerebrally interactive computer networks than how humans might interact following a devastating event.

His strange half-exploration of post-apocalyptic social constructs extends to women as well. The antagonist of the novel, Della Lu, is an Asian woman. Her race is mentioned as constantly as Wili’s, with just as little exploration of what that racial identity means to Lu, and to the other characters she reacts with. A bit more fleshed out is her characterization as a woman. Like with Wili, Lu is constantly aware that all the men around her are surprised and resentful that they must take orders for a woman, even though she is more competent than they are. Unlike Wili, Lu at times even has to listen to men denigrate her femaleness, whereas Wili’s blackness if never openly addressed.

Lu isn’t very sympathetic, she’s through and through a killer, bent on destroying the Tinkers because, well, who knows why, really. It seems every story needs and enemy. At one point she has sex with Mike Rosas, a Tinker turned turncoat turned Tinker again, only for the reason that she is trying to shut him up. The sexual encounter sticks out like a sore thumb in the context of the novel, as if Vinge threw it in there simply to spice up the narrative. Women in this book are always sexual objects, including Jill, a computer program created to resemble lead Tinker Paul Hohler’s lost love. Vinge also assumes that a return to the “feudal” structure (a word I’m not sure he even understands) automatically means a return to extremely restricted gender roles – all the peripheral female characters are expected to be domestic and silent. This is a post-feminist novel written during the rise of the New Right, perhaps grasping at the disintegrated domestic ideal. Women can have agency, but in the case of Lu, if they step outside the domestic norm they are heartless bitches who use their bodies to manipulate men and are punished for their sins by death. A familiar trope. Vinge does allow one female character, Allison, to have agency, even though she takes on a non-masculine role in the storyline. Allison, however, has literally been objectified by Paul Hohler, who created the computer program Jill in her image.

Overall The Peace War’s most interesting contribution to the field is its examination of Cold War tensions through a dystopic lens. On a geopolitical level, the three remaining powers in the novel are France, China, and America (all under control of the Peacers), with nary a mention of the USSR. This trio of powers is a wonderful imagining of what might have grown from the alliance made between the French and the Chinese. In 1984 the Soviet Union was collapsing, and in The Peace War there’s nothing left of it. Instead, the unstoppable behemoth, China; France, the rebel of Europe; and the USA have taken over control of most of the world. Interestingly, Africa, always a problem for the first world, remains largely uncontrolled, though it lacks the technological resources of Tinkers elsewhere in the world and is therefore not as much of a threat of Peacer technology. Vinge created a fascinating reading of contemporary geopolitical structures in his dystopic future, and this is yet another point of interest that it would have enriched the novel if only it had been fleshed out.

A product of the 1980s, in The Peace War, Vinge explores a lot of familiar technology, like sophisticated spy satellites and computer networks that looks suspiciously like the internet. The book also reveals that fears of nuclear war and the escalating development of technology didn’t die with détente – they continued to suffuse people’s lives and minds, driving their actions and influencing their fears. The Peace War doesn’t find peace in removing technology. As the title of the novel suggests, the attempt to remove technology simply led to a war to bring it back, almost leading us again to the conclusion that violence is inherent to Man. Vinge’s characters believe that peace is possible, but only if technology is used correctly, and is put in the right hands. What “correct” use is and whose hands should be in control remains unexplained, along with most of the dystopic world Vinge created.

 * * *

During the course of this project I will skipping at least a few of the actual award winners, each for varying reasons. In the interests of fair play, I’ll try to explain why I’m skipping each one. This year’s winner that I’ve chosen to exclude was Neuromancer, by William Gibson. I know that Neuromancer is considered one of the game changers of modern science fiction, that it is much, if not obsessively beloved. The thing is I don’t like it. I’ve tried to get through it many times and never once have I been able to finish it. I find it to be dense, boring, and unreadable. To be fair, I am not a fan of cyberpunk in general. Also, I have actually read quite a lot of William Gibson’s work. I didn’t like any of those books either. While less dense than Neuromancer, I found his plots to be repetitive and all of his endings to be terribly anti-climactic, so much so that they ruined the premise of each book that I read – and some of them had really good premises! Those disappointments combined with my inability to make it through Neuromancer even once left me feeling rather disinclined to try reading it again, especially since I’m doing this project for fun. I’m sure there are many really wonderful places both online and in print that you can go to read about how great or shitty Neuromancer is. For now this won’t be one of them.

When I ran the sci-fi section at HPB in Berkeley, my consumption of science fiction accelerated at an exponential rate. Berkeley and Oakland are sci-fi towns, and have produced many famous authors, including Philip K. Dick (who worked right down the street from me on Shattuck during his own retail days) and Ursula K. Le Guin, among other. It is a veritable mecca for sci-fi fans of all stripes, and being in charge of the sci-fi section in a heavily trafficked used bookstore in a sci-fi town meant I had to know my fucking stuff. Running that section is actually where my quest to work my way through all the Hugo winners began, and it only deepened my love and knowledge of a genre I was raised to adore.

HPB is also where I began to refer to science fiction books as romance novels for men. No matter how awe inspiring the plot of many of the books might otherwise be, they almost always involved some wild romantic or sexual fantasy, usually about women. Sometimes even the science fiction premise wasn’t enough to detract from what was really a veiled romance novel. Just like romance novels use conventions of their genre to explore the limits of gender norms and fantasies about the way couples should behave and act, male and female authors alike graft romantic and sexual tropes onto science fiction ones, consciously or unconsciously hoping to hide their fantasies about love and sex amidst fantasies about other, more fantastical worlds. I’ve already had a look at historical fiction disguised as sci-fi, and in Vonda N. McIntyre’s Nebula winning The Moon and the Sun I’ve managed find to a romance novel couched as alternate history, science fiction style.

Alternate history is always a tricky way to approach science fiction. I think it is extremely hard to do well, as most often it falls into the fan boy category, where the author is enamored of the time period they picked and gets lost in the fantasy of creating alternate storylines without offering anything really interesting to say in terms of historical commentary, if there’s any commentary at all. That being said, alternate histories, when written well, can be simply stunning. Philip K. Dick’s own Hugo winner, The Man in the High Castle, immediately leaps to mind, and fellow winner Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee has its moments. But both these novels explore alternate histories in order to say something remarkable, if not extraordinary, about history that already was. Further, they demonstrate just how tenuous the hands of fate or chance can be, in each case boldly displaying what disaster we may have averted or invited. Like all good science fiction, these authors use the convention of alternative history to teach us about ourselves.

The Moon and the Sun makes no such contribution to our understanding of our own history, past or present. In the interest of full disclosure, the last time I had a thorough history Louis XIV, at whose Versailles court this book takes place, I was a freshman in high school, and that was in 1999. When interacting with works of historical fiction I tend to think that ignorance is bliss – if I know little to nothing about the time period in question I don’t spend the whole time enraged by mistakes and inaccuracies (unless I’m watching Mad Men, which tends to hit every note pitch perfect, which sends me into a spiral of ecstasy). McIntyre supposedly painfully researched this book to recreate the court accurately, and I have no doubt that she tried her best, however, I think her focus on the details of chivalry and fashion are a great detriment to the book. The endless litany of minor noble characters is both confusing and distracting, and the amount of time McIntyre spends describing her protagonist, Marie-Josephe’s, outfits and other accoutrements, to say nothing of the rest of the court, is a ridiculous waste of time. The setting is sumptuous and rich and serves absolutely no purpose. In a way, McIntyre has written a love story about the unimaginable opulence of Versailles.

The twist in McIntyre’s presentation of the past is that sea monsters, creatures that resemble grotesque mermaids, actually exist in this timeline. Humans have been hunting and killing them for centuries, almost to extinction, believing them to be beasts and demons when really they are only peace loving, sentient beings. The crux of the novel hinges on the relationship that develops being Marie-Josephe and the female sea monster, Sherzad, that Louis captures and brings to Versailles, believing that if he eats the creature he will win immortal life. It’s up to Marie-Josephe to convince the god-like sovereign that to do so would be murder.

I don’t usually read reviews of books before I write my own because I like to let my own brain juices flow without plundering other people’s thoughts. This time I found myself seeking out reviews before I’d even finished reading the book, so fed up with descriptions of ball gowns and period wigs that I needed to know what, exactly, Nebula voters found so compelling about this book. Where was the science fiction? The fantasy? One review interestingly described this book as a first contact story between humans and an “alien” species, only set in the past. I really love that assessment, but I’m not sure McIntyre lives up to the wonderful determination the reviewer bestowed upon the book.

The action of the book centers not around the sea creature, though she is a crucial part of the plot, but around Marie-Josephe and her struggle to find her place in Louis XIV’s court while maintaining her personality as a curious, intelligent, talented, virtuous, and obnoxiously perfect woman. Just as Sherzad is trapped by the King’s desire for immortality, Marie-Josephe is trapped by the cultural norms of 17^th century France which demand a woman be silent and demure instead of outspoken, inquisitive, and demonstrative. Marie-Josephe wants nothing more than to study mathematics, aid her Jesuit brother in his pursuit of natural sciences, compose extraordinary music on her harpsicorde, create beautiful artistic and scientific drawings to be presented to the king, and ride perfectly to the hunt on a spirited Arabian lent to her by a friend and protector at court, Lucien. When Marie-Josephe went from riding astride to side saddle without a second thought I lost all interest in the character – for me this small detail pushed my willingness to suspend disbelief too far. It may seem a little thing, but on the very balance of it was just how perfect a character McIntyre created – a perfect feminist construct trapped in the past who must prove the sea monster’s personhood to prove her own personhood as a human woman, and therefore free them both from the tyrannical men around them who would consume and abuse them and treat them as beasts.

The thing about alternate histories is that, again, the author is given carte blanche to create any scenario they wish because this is not actual history. If this book had appeared in the age of fan fiction, I think we would deem Marie-Josephe a Mary Sue. Ignoring the fact that the king doesn’t lop off her head or send her to a nunnery, she is a virtuoso at absolutely everything she does. But, conversely, she is also devoutly Catholic and incredibly virginal to the point of being prude. She knows absolutely nothing about sex and believes that it is an act god created to punish women for original sin. Then, she just happens to fall in love with a dwarf (Lucien) who only finds respite from the pain in his back caused by his skeletal structure when he’s having sex with women. You read that right. Fucking is the only thing that makes his back feel better.

McIntyre spends a great deal of time meditating on Marie-Josephe’s innocence, upholding it as desirable and incorruptible even though the book seems to also tell the tale of Marie-Josephe’s sexual liberation. The sea monster, an openly sexual being who sends Marie-Josephe a musical orgasm to get her attention, also represents the key to Marie-Josephe’s freedom from fear of sexual pleasure. But, in another strange twist, this only comes after she marries Lucien, who will hopefully forever find a cure for his back pain while he sleeps with his wife. The formerly notorious philanderer is tamed in marriage, just as Marie-Josephe is allowed to find sexual liberation behind its safe bonds. Here we see the norm of sex being contained within the family, a distinctly 1950s ideal recreated in this novel from the 1990s that tells the tale of a woman’s sexual liberation. It’s all very confusing, at least to me.

This love story, not the discovery and investigation of the sea monsters and their culture, is the true heart of The Moon and the Sun, and it’s why I would call this book a romance novel guised as sci-fi or, perhaps even more appropriately, fantasy. In the end traditional marriage safely contains sexual passion. Our princess finds her prince.

I find it difficult to see past the romantic conventions of this book. As I’ve said before, it seems to me Sherzad only exists as a conduit to Marie-Josephe’s own freedom. The history of sea monster and human interaction if laced with religious overtones – religion is the antagonist here, threatening Sherzad’s life and aiming to silence and control Marie-Josephe’s body and spirit. While I found the idea that humans would simply slaughter the sea monsters, intelligent or not, to be incredibly plausible (we have a poor track record with murdering each other, after all; we could see the sea monsters standing in as indigenous races wiped out during colonialism, a d-plot in this novel), the book simply felt too thin on exploring the fantastical situation McIntyre created, and too thick on making sure Marie-Josephe and Lucien fell in love and properly ended up naked together at the end of the novel.

There is no doubt at all that McIntyre has a talent for description, and as I said, I believe that she must have spent a considerable amount of time researching Louis XIV’s court. But it seems to me at times she became too enamored of recreating the actual historical trappings of Versailles and neglected to fully investigate the intriguing 17^th century first contact scenario she created. Making Marie-Josephe defiant and forward thinking in every way except for her desire to adhere strictly to the tenants of the religion that so damaged and betrayed her (a betrayal she was conscious of), and her absolute need to fall in love and marry sends very mixed messages. I suppose one can be a powerful woman and have all of those things, though the belief in a church that demands women be both silent and dumb seems to be the most discordant of her traits. Whatever the mixed and tangled messages about the meaning of being a woman – which McIntyre does firmly demonstrate is NOT something to be ashamed of – the fault at the heart of this novel is it’s too perfect heroine and it’s too predictable love story that unfortunately distracts from the true marvel of alien cousins waiting to meet us in the depths of our own oceans. Plunked down in the setting when modern science was just awakening, this book had a chance to explore the crossroads in reasoning using a fantastic cast of characters, but instead of it chose to focus on making sure the heroine and her hero ended up rich and happily married. In the end, The Sun and the Moon is a run of the mill exploration of the past with some alien spice thrown in.

 

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!