ISSUE #273 May 2011Volume 23, No. 9 ISSN #1052-9438
ESSAYSSpyros A. Vretos: Towards an Explication of the Missing Text: The Lost Greek-American Pages of Philip K. Dick: 1
Gary Westfahl: Space Stations in Fact and Fiction: 6Michael Swanwick: Impossible Russias: 12
Victor Grech: Interdisciplinarity in Science Fiction: 14Nader Elhefnawy: A Revolution of Falling Expectations: Wither the Singularity?: 19
REVIEWSHello Hi There, concept and direction by Annie Dorsen, reviewed by Jen Gunnels: 1
Dancing with Bears: The Postutopian Adventures of Darger & Surplus by Michael Swanwick, reviewed by Henry Wessells: 11The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell, reviewed by Ernest Lilley: 16Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik, reviewed by Greg L Johnson: 18
Modern Times 2.0 (Outspoken Authors No. 5) by Michael Moorcock, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds: 20
PLUSPlus: David Drake, mythologer (5); questioning Hartwell (11); screed (23); and an editorial (24).
Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; David G. Hartwell, Reviews & Features Editor. Kevin J. Maroney, Managing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Associate Managing Editors.
Staff: Ambrose, Ann Crimmins, Alex Donald, Jen Gunnels, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni. Weekly Crew: Lisa Padol. Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.
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Karen Burnham, Paul Park, Cecelia Holland & Eileen Gunn Tom & Tania Dougherty
14 The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011
Referring to C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution is clichéd yet mandatory in any project that attempts to discuss interdisciplinarity and to identify affinities between, on the one hand, “science,” arguably the last metanarrative with any significant cachet in the post-postmodern condition, and, on the other hand, the humanities. It has been nearly 50 years since Snow famously lamented the lack of mutuality between the sciences and the humanities and especially the vagueness of practitioners in the latter about important and basic aspects of the former. And the situation has degenerated further in that it is perfectly obvious that we currently lack not only interdisciplinarity, but, more urgently, intradisciplinarity within either.
The present is the age of the specialist and the subspecialist, a form of superspecialist, such that one can no longer even utter the words science or the humanities with innocence or precision, and it is almost certain that no field within either of the camps demonstrates complete univocity or internal coherence. Thus, for instance, and to limit ourselves for the purposes of this example to “the humanities,” philosophy remains riven by polarities between logical positivism and Continental philosophy (which themselves permit, in turn, further subdivisions); the study of literature continues to be embroiled in the struggle “against itself”; and the study of culture, not least the very definition of culture, is highly contested. Gerald Graff contends that postmodern literature and critical theory has tended to be nihilistic, refusing to define or relate to external reality, a worldview that leads to self-trivialization and loss of referentiality, weakening literature’s claim to truth.
More and more, it seems that because of the vast amounts of knowledge that specialists accumulate, they tend to speak mostly among themselves, solely within the borderlines of their specificisms and hardly at all (and certainly with questionable authority, reliability, or purpose) to specialties other than their own. In his famous lecture, Snow, a well-known British physicist and novelist, somewhat simplistically blamed the communication breakdown between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities (“scientists” and “literary intellectuals”) as the major stumbling block to solving the world’s problems. Snow saw these as two diametrically opposed worldviews separated by intense suspicion and mutual incomprehension, outlooks that virtually eliminated the possibility of harnessing solutions that a combination of the two camps might bring about. This was not an original concept, as Snow himself admitted; even in 1798, Wordsworth, in The Tables Turned, wrote that the appreciation of nature was starkly different when approached as a poetic truth as opposed to a scientific quest conducted by the “meddling intellect” which “murders to dissect.”
Snow’s frequently overlooked second edition—The Two Cultures: And A Second Look (1963)—reexamined the divergence of these two camps and, indeed, the divergence of the specialities and subspecialties within each camp. Snow also wondered why this notion had raised such a storm at the time. He believed, rather naively in retrospect, that all could be solved by despecializing education in developed countries such that future scientists would have a strong grounding in the humanities, and future literary intellectuals would have a solid scientific background. Snow also thought that the material lot of poor nations could be solved simply by educating their populations. Snow’s perceptions were already somewhat dated in 1959 and have become more so with the passage of time, as even individual disciplines have become superspecialized. A particular notion that Snow attempted to introduce was the concept—or hope—of the emergence of a new third culture which would comprise individuals who could bridge the communications gap between the two camps.
Bare numbers will out the truth. Even back in 1987, it was estimated that there were more than 8,530 individually definable knowledge fields, and it is obvious that these multiple specificisms may categorize knowledge almost hermetically, making it inadvertently inaccessible to researchers in related fields. More reprehensibly, the inefficiencies and tensions that the trends of centralization of academic research and super-specialization inevitably bring about may be
amplified by territorial aspects of disciplinary knowledge and methods (Crane and Small 197). Multitalented inventors, such as Edison, Ford, and others, have not only captured our imagination but also served as inspirations for fictional characters, including in science fiction.
SF, in its typically positive and optimistic fashion, has repeatedly warned of indulgence in super-specialization and has depicted heroes who embody interdisciplinarity, seen as an ideal modus operandi whereby knowledge can somehow become greater than the sum of its parts. Such protagonists range from prolific boy inventors or adults of Edisonian forte all the way to true interdisciplinarians who have a wide range of knowledge that encompasses diverse disciplines. This paper will review sf’s depiction of some protagonists who have reified the interdisciplinary paradigm within sf and some lessons that may be learned from these narratives.
Interdisciplinarians in Science FictionOne of the earliest fictional interdisciplinary geniuses appeared
in Hugo Gernsback’s 1911 novel, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660. The protagonist was a truly Edisonian inventor, and this particular story predicted television, tape recording, microfilm, solar energy, atomic weapons, fluorescent lighting, plastics, synthetic fabrics, stainless steel, hydroponics, and juke boxes. It was by way of the cheap pulp magazines that sf “emerged as a self-conscious genre” (per the Encyclopædia Britannica), despite the repeatedly recycled series and clichéd stories, such as square-jawed heroes rescuing hysterical blonde damsels in distress, meretriciously attired in brass underwear while fleeing from bug-eyed monsters.
The Tom Swift boy-hero character has appeared in over 100 novels since 1910, ghostwritten under the corporate pseudonym of Victor Appleton or Victor Appleton II. Swift’s fantastic, hopelessly implausible, and veritably endless flood of inventions paralleled contemporary research or prefigured eventual technologies in all of the fields of science, such as diamond synthesis, the transmission of pictures via telephone, the portable movie camera, electric trains, and many others (Prager 74).
These early stories had a common allegorical thread: they portrayed science and technology as desirable and completely beneficial to the individual, to the race, and to the planet. The inventor was glamorized and worshipped as a hero, and perhaps because of his modesty and absence of hubris, tragedy did not befall the champion.
Later sf stories have abandoned this naiveté and have focused on cautionary tales that deal not only with the importance of interdisciplinarians but also with the consequences of unnecessary and exaggerated strictures that prevent specialists from benefiting from the splintered knowledge and techniques utilized in other disciplines, strictures that paradoxically may eventually prove to be necessary.
In addition to The Two Cultures, Snow is also known for his series of eleven related novels, the Strangers and Brothers series, which follow a lawyer from his training to his employment in an important position, while delineating changes in English life through the twentieth century. The Search (1934) contrasts a conventional scientist in the near future with a relatively new breed of almost universal synthesists who relate new discoveries to the existing body of knowledge and plan the next step and direction that new research must logically undertake for the sake of maximum efficiency.
A. E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939) details the adventures of a huge exploratory spaceship with an almost thousand-strong, all-male crew. The book is divided into four sections corresponding to the four original short stories on which it was based. The ship comes across several hostile individual aliens and entire alien civilizations and only manages to survive these encounters through the efforts of the main protagonist, the only “Nexialist” on board. Nexialism is the study of the merging of different fields of knowledge by integrating science and thought, allowing Nexialists to solve problems that specialists or military minds could not due to their narrow training. At one stage, the nexialist is even forced to take control of the ship using a combination of simple persuasion and psychology,
Victor GrechInterdisciplinarity in Science Fiction
*
The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011 15
along with coercive hypnotism and outright brainwashing, in order to prevent a particularly powerful alien from taking over the ship. Throughout the narrative, on-board revolutions and power struggles take place among the leaders of individual academic and military groups, both political and scientific.
Robert A. Heinlein’s van Vogtian equivalent in Beyond This Horizon (1942) was called an “encyclopedic synthesist,” the most important occupation in the world. Such an individual was said to be the master of all knowledge, one who stays abreast of all of the latest research, a person who can analyze the sum total of human knowledge for untapped potentials that might be missed by specialists. The main difference between van Vogt and Heinlein was that van Vogt emphasized holism, while Heinlein’s emphasis was on eidetic memory with perfect recall and command of knowledge, an admittedly crucial trait for such an occupation. The novel depicts an economic utopia that has utilized eugenics to improve health, longevity, and intelligence. The protagonist is the culmination of these efforts, an archetypal Übermensch with a superhuman physique, an intellect to match, and a life expectancy of centuries. However, his lack of eidetic memory disqualifies him from the occupation of encyclopedic synthesist, and he thus finds society pleasant but somehow meaningless. It is only when one of the synthesists seeks him out, in order to inquire whether or when he plans to continue his line by siring children, that he finds himself drawn into an adventure that eventually convinces him that his society is worth saving.
Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Dead Past” (1956) depicts draconian state control of scientific research using an extrapolation of the current twin trends towards the centralization of all academic research and its subspecialization with bureaucratic state control of both. Researchers are prohibited from working outside their individual, clearly demarcated, and very narrow fields of specialization. Postdoctorate researchers apply for grants after choosing a subspeciality that they would then pursue for the length of their career. Research planning and funding are completely centralized, and straying from one’s chosen course is branded as intellectual anarchy and actually unethical, inevitably leading to termination of all of one’s research funding. However, even in this dystopia, interdisciplinarians are tolerated, albeit with some degree of disdain, and actually do very well working as science writers, often without any degrees but knowing something about practically everything. They use this aptitude to shape highly technical research grant applications into documents that can be understood by nonspecialists for the purpose of obtaining funds to further research by specialists. Payment for such services is from grants thus obtained. This leads to situations where academics cannot benefit from the work and findings already carried out and freely available in other specialities. The protagonist, a professor of ancient history whose field is ancient Carthage, wishes to access the “chronoscope,” a device that allows the past to be viewed, but he is fobbed off time and again by the authorities. He is aided by a physics researcher and, more importantly, an unlicensed science writer whose admittedly superficial knowledge of many disciplines sets in motion the clandestine construction of a small and low-powered chronoscope that works using a new, better, and very different method than that of the cumbersome and power-demanding technology in current use. It transpires that the state’s suppression of chronoscopy was an attempt to prevent universal voyeurism with snooping into the immediate past by all and sundry. Thus, the protagonists unleash a dystopic future where privacy is nonexistent.
Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage (1968) pictures a dystopic future one hundred and fifty years after the wars that destroyed Earth, wars brought on by extreme overpopulation. Mankind survives precariously on a hundred rather hastily established colony planets and on the seven gigantic ships that had initially ferried mankind to these colonies. The ships roam between the colonies, acting as repositories of knowledge and skills which are traded with the colonies for raw materials. The ships test their adolescents’ mettle by casting them out to survive or die in a month of Trial in the wilds of a colony world. Panshin formally proposes a trinary divide for scholarly endeavor: researchers, who are “incredibly busy, incredibly messy, nearsighted people, all of whom are eccentric recluses”; “ordinologists,” who function principally as librarians, organizing knowledge in an orderly
manner; and “synthesists,” whose function is to recognize knowledge and research that can be applied across disciplines.
Alfred Bester’s marvelous satire of the military mind, the short story “Disappearing Act” (1953), explores the linked themes of time, space, dreaming, escape, and creativity. It portrays the United States of America in an atomic war with the protagonist, a political general, insisting on specialization as a necessary strategy to win the “War for the American Dream.” The general insists that every man and woman must become a specific tool for a specific job, hardened and sharpened by their training to win the fight for the American Dream. However, he is baffled by a ward of mental casualties who disappear at will back in time. He asks for a historian, and one is found serving a prison sentence of twenty years of hard labor for daring to question the war. The historian defends himself to the general by stating, “You’re fighting to preserve me . . . that’s what I’ve devoted my life to. And what do you do with me? Put me in jail.” This is a clear reference to Lytton Strachey’s resistance to World War I: when asked why he was enjoying the safety of England while brave young men were risking their lives to defend civilization, Strachey retorted, “I am the civilization for which you are fighting” (Hynes 244). The historian realizes that the casualties are fleeing the present back into a timeline of their own construction, in effect turning dreams into reality, and he urges the general to send for a poet to study this phenomenon so as to be able to explain these twin, miraculous, godlike abilities, creation and immortality. However, the search for a poet among all of the specialists in the United States is in vain, and the historian “laughed and laughed at this final, fatal disappearance.”
DiscussionIt is interesting to note that apart from the early, almost juvenile
stories, the other narratives mentioned follow the pattern of the cautionary tale set out by Mary Shelley in what is (per Aldiss) arguably the first sf story, Frankenstein (1818). Furthermore, like all narratives, these stories “are uniquely time-bound; they are reflections of the era . . . re-creations and representations of the events, attitudes, and concerns of the people and the times in which they are written” (Roberts 18), dealing with concerns, for example, about a possible atomic war, an extrapolation of the possible effects of increasing superspecialization, and fear of the unknown as in what might we encounter in our own exploration of the cosmos. All of the above narratives have also followed the basic, if unspoken, sf dictum, arguably instigated and inculcated by Campbell during his editorship of Astounding Science Fiction, that narratives “must not offend against what is known. Only in areas where nothing is known—or knowledge is uncertain—is it permissible to just ‘make it up.’ (Even then what is made up must be systematic, plausible, rigorously logical, and must avoid offending against what is known to be known)” (Russ, “Towards an Aesthetic”).
The trend to reflect the zeitgeist parallels the tendency for different stories to explore new avenues, extrapolating from the impact of changing technologies on the species, while consistently supporting sf’s penchant for dismissing humanity’s petty national and regional bickering, bigotry, and outright hostility to its own members. It is almost as if sf authors are continually attempting to inculcate in us the sheer insignificance and parochiality of such attitudes by the supposedly intelligent members of the human species. It is up to authors to continue to explore the potential impact of technological changes on the species, perhaps leading us to realize what sort of world we wish to live in and alerting us to possible and undesirable side-tracks that we may avoid along the way.
The import of interdisciplinarity, albeit not named as such, has been discussed outside the realm of fiction by noted sf authors such as Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein was a tremendous admirer of H. G . Wells, particularly of his sf work and his encyclopedic general knowledge. Heinlein mentioned this publicly in “The Discovery of the Future,” his Guest of Honor speech at the 1941 World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, alluding to Wells as a synthesist who had both a greater than average grasp of the whole and the ability to present a comprehensible picture of the whole.
Heinlein amplified this in 1950, even then declaiming that
the greatest crisis facing us is . . . in the organization and
1� The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011
accessibility of human knowledge . . . it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need. . . . We need a new “specialist” who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We need a new science to be the perfect secretary to all other sciences. (“Where To?”)
This concept of such a third culture was popularized by Brockman in The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1996), but unlike Snow, Brockman seemed to intend to replace literary intellectuals rather than to collaborate with them. He depicts them as superfluous and nonempirical, deliberately ignorant of scientific advances, utilizing jargon that is strictly limited to their specialities. Moreover, theirs is a jargon characterized by an ever-spiraling series of comments on comments, to the point where any vision of the real and empirical world is lost. Brockman therefore argues that the dichotomy between the two camps is disappearing not because a third culture is emerging but rather because scientists have transcended the divide by mastering the art of effective communication with the general public (18). This attitude does not foster any degree of cooperation between the two camps, and in no way does it afford any form of reconciliation or integration.
A superior approach is suggested by Joe Moran in Interdisciplinarity (2002). He posits that interdisciplinarity might be better served by probing the routes by which scientific ideas and advances reach beyond and into contemporary culture and their interaction with “non-science” (2), with both camps forming “part of a much broader philosophical questioning of the nature of reality itself” (157).
The extreme expression of this view is espoused by the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, who optimistically counsels “consilience,” a spirit of united efforts at knowledge. Wilson sanguinely believes that that the current fragmentation of knowledge is not a reflection of the real world (8).
I have inside knowledge of the medical field, and, to me, the most realistic view is advocated by Donald T. Campbell, who, while mindful of the disruptive effects of ethnocentric viewpoints between disciplines, suggests that the current situation is acceptable, with collective comprehensiveness through overlapping patterns of unique narrowness. Campbell uses the metaphor of a fish scale, with each subspeciality represented by a slightly different scale with a varying degree of overlap with neighboring and sometimes only slightly dissimilar disciplines, resulting in a continuum with local
integration. Interestingly, individuals who harness the exponential rise of computing power and the Internet (a technology that even sf failed to prefigure in all its implications, ramifications, and direct impact on society and on the individual) can also be viewed as a breakaway third culture in its own right, spawning both digital art and scientific models. It is these “nerdy” folks who grace the covers of international magazines, become heroes in movies, and epitomize that which is “cool.” This culture is accompanied by slang, jargon, and idiom that dictionaries find difficult to keep track of, to the point that “the culture of science, so long in the shadow of the culture of art, now has another orientation to contend with, one grown from its own rib” (Campbell 992–93).
Interdisciplinarity is arguably one of the main strengths of sf and the reason why fans enthuse and are passionate about the genre. In “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction,” Joanna Russ imagines
what C. P. Snow would have to say about this split between the two cultures. One thing he might say is that science fiction bridges the two cultures. It draws its beliefs, its material, its great organizing metaphors, its very attitudes, from a culture that could not exist before the Industrial Revolution, before science became both an autonomous activity and a way of looking at the world. In short, science fiction is not derived from traditional Western literary culture.
And this is precisely what this paper has attempted to do, to demonstrate how sf has tried to bridge the two cultures using interdisciplinarians within its narratives, while being itself the literary genre that is arguably the best suited for such a deserving role. The following statement from Russ in “Toward an Aesthetic of Science Fiction” seems curiously dated when she states that “it is unlikely that science fiction will ever become a major form of literature” because “life-as-it-is (however glamorized or falsified) is more interesting to most people than the science-fictional life-as-it-might-be.”
SF’s perspicacity may also assist us by preparing us for the potentially profound and fundamental transformations that our environment and our society may be forced to undertake due to the ever-increasing impact of science and technology on everyday life. (The Internet, as mentioned above, is only one example of such technologies). In “Teaching Science Fiction,” James Gunn says the genre is particularly versatile and supple and therefore marvelously suited to this purpose since it has no specific
The last thing I expected from a post-zombie-apocalypse novel was a book both literary and enthralling, but that’s what The Reapers Are the Angels delivers. The writing is excellent and the characters well developed, rooting around through the ruins of our civilization, looking for something more than survival, but playing the hands they’re dealt in the meantime.
Temple, the young girl the story follows, has ghosts to bury that are all too zombielike, refusing to lie down and die, but her will to survive and her ability to find beauty in the darkest places make her a match for the worst life throws at her. The story is more disturbing than delightful, but so it goes in the land of grownups.
Temple is a post-zombie-apocalypse teenager, but this is no YA title. Born after things changed, she’s never lived in a world where shambling undead corpses didn’t roam the streets looking for their traditional diet. Raised in an orphanage and now traveling randomly across an America populated sparsely by survivors and less so by the ever present “slugs,” Temple has lived too much for her fifteen years, carries too many ghosts around inside her, and knows with a deep conviction that she’s committed unforgivable sins:
How old are you? he asks.
The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden BellNew York: Holt, 2010; $15.00 tpb; 240 pages
reviewed by Ernest Lilley*
Fifteen, she says, taking a chance on the truth and the fatherly instincts of the man in the cap. Fifteen! You’re too young to be wanderin the countryside. Too young by a mile. I tried to be older, she says. But it’s somethin that’s hard to force. He chuckles and rubs his eyes and looks out over the shrubby verge to the river below and then back at her. What you got behind your back? he asks. She reveals the gurkha knife, holding it up to show him. What were you planning on doin with that? If you turned out to be trouble, I was gonna kill you with it. The old man looks at her with eyes still as toad ponds in the aftermath of a storm when the air is gluey with ozone. Then he begins to laugh.
Speaking of sin, Christianity is as omnipresent in The Reapers Are the Angels as it is absent in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which rings true. Not a Bible-thumping, crusading Christianity but one just part of the fabric of folks’ lives, there to offer a reference point for those trying to carry on after the dead began to rise from their slumber and
The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011 17
identifying action or place . . . defining event or setting . . . science fiction can incorporate other genres; we can have a science-fiction detective story, a science-fiction western, a science-fiction gothic, a science-fiction love story, or, most likely of all, a science-fiction adventure story.
SF studies are also being taught, with several hundred courses available worldwide. Moreover, Gunn says, because of its interdisciplinary nature, there are many “kinds of subjects that can be taught through science fiction . . . all the social and physical sciences, history, ideas, futurology, religion, morality, ecology, reading skills, and many others” (ibid.). Conversely, Stephen Hawking, arguably the greatest living physicist, would like to make “real science as exciting as science fiction” in order to increase interest in the sciences and in how the cosmos works (qtd. in France-Presse). Hawking also believes that “science fiction is useful both for stimulating the imagination and for diffusing fear of the future” (qtd. in “Science Fiction and Pseudoscience”). The recompense of sf has thus been recognized not only by fans and critics but also by scientists (including this author) as aptly put by Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of Technology Review: “Most of us came to technology through science fiction.” Our imaginations remain secretly moved by science-fictional ideas, and perhaps the quotation that best encapsulates all this is by the celebrated theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson who mused that “science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams” (9).
In conclusion, this paper has shown how sf, with its penchant for predicting future trends, prefigured the importance that would be associated with interdisciplinarity as early as the 1940s. Furthermore, in typical optimistic, idealistic, and guileless sf fashion, the genre has attempted to convince us that interdisciplinarians will rise to span specialities and facilitate mankind’s lot, along with cautionary tales as to the negative impact if such individuals are not heeded or allowed to function.
This optimism may be unfounded. While information technology helps academics immensely through databases and the Web itself to a degree that sf did not imagine, the proliferation of knowledge and of new specialities has balanced or even negated the benefits of these tools. The concept of a “universal synthesist” is clearly dated and is probably impossible in practice, given the total and ever-increasing amount of knowledge and information available. Other approaches will be necessary, and science fiction should explore new approaches. *
Victor Grech teaches at Mater Dei Hospital, Tal-Qroqq, Malta.
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the old world ground to a halt.Most zombie stories take place during or soon after the emergence
of the hordes, but the basic paradigm has now become sufficiently entrenched in our culture that movies like Zombieland and Book of Eli can begin to address the longer view, which is what this book gives us. We never find out what caused the change, but since the story isn’t about how we’re going to reverse it or engineer a way out of the crisis, including the cause would have just undermined the reader’s belief in the world author Bell has created.
Temple comes from the first post-change generation, and as folks are reluctant to bring children into a world where the dead won’t stay down, she possesses rare qualities, youth and beauty among them. The first is only skin-deep, and the second of no great value to her, since she’s a determined loner. Unfortunately it makes her a magnet for the wrong sort of person, and she winds up killing a would-be rapist at an enclave she thinks she might have liked staying at for a while. That option no longer likely, she helps herself to some of their weapons cache, takes a car from their yard, and heads out on her own again.
Trouble takes after her in the form of Moses Todd, brother of the man she’d killed, determined to settle a blood score even though he figures his brother had it coming. This theme of commitment to the forms of moral action in the face of a world that no longer keeps score makes the reader wonder who the real zombies are, the pathetic slugs or the hopeless humans? For Temple’s part, she knows that her life is without meaning, having failed at the one mission that might have given it form, but she’s wired for survival, and the thought of
giving in to despair never occurs to her.The main characters here are Temple and Moses, though
along the way Temple acquires a traveling companion, a “dummy” named Maury who she meets on the road and takes in tow. Maury is a stand-in for the brother she lost, and though she’d like to hand him off to someone else, some part of her recognizes a chance at redemption and won’t let go.
Trying to deliver Maury to relatives—whose address is scribbled on a paper she can’t read in his pocket—takes her on a ramble through the deep South and over to Texas, which explains some of the Christian overtones in the book. Moses dogs her heels everywhere she goes, but accepting his judgment and retribution isn’t something she’s eager for, though her moral sense informs her that she has it coming.
In the world here, the lights are mostly on, but there’s pretty much nobody home. Those who managed to keep from becoming zombie fare or shambling undead themselves live off the stockpiled resources of a nation of Walmarts, and unlike stories following biosphere collapse or atomic war, the cost of survival is little more than keeping in motion, one step ahead of the undead. That the inexorable march of the meatskins will overrun them seems the expected future for most, but while there’s life there’s a need for something, not quite hope, that keeps the survivors moving and readers turning the pages until the end. *
Ernest Lilley lives in Arlington, Virginia.
18 The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011
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Time to return with Naomi Novik to those thrilling days of the nineteenth century, when the British Navy ruled the waves, men were men, and dragons were dragons. That is the spirit of Tongues of Serpents, the sixth volume in Novik’s series recounting the adventures of the dragon Temeraire and his captain, Will Laurence.
To a newcomer to the series, it’s evident that there are already some well-established conventions in the story. The changes to command structure, logistics, and tactics brought on by the existence of an aerial corps composed of dragons and humans are taken for granted by this time and fit well into the usual jealousies and politics of a military establishment engaged in a global war. Especially in the early days of military aviation, flyers were regarded as unconventional individualists, so it should come as no big surprise that as Tongues of Serpents opens, Laurence and Temeraire have in effect been exiled to Australia due to past transgressions against the chain of command.
This poses a problem for the story. The war against Napoleon has blossomed into a true worldwide conflict, with the scene of conflict expanding from Europe to Africa and South America. With the setting moved to Australia’s Botany Bay, Laurence and Temeraire are in effect removed from that action. Instead, they find themselves confronted with what are basically side issues involving relations between the colonial government and the “colonists” in their charge and the need to protect and hatch three dragon eggs placed in their care.
When one of the eggs is stolen, the story basically becomes one long chase scene across the continent. It’s also where the novel drags. The problem is that for an adventure story, the long chase isn’t all that exciting and adventurous. There are a few problems dealing with the local flora and fauna, but for the most part the journey is one of tedium and coping with the various personality conflicts amongst the crew and officers, most of which come off as fairly petty and immature. Two incidents, by contrast, show just how good Novik’s writing can be when circumstances allow. The first occurs near the beginning of the chase, as the dragons fly into a fierce thunderstorm; the second when, at the end of the journey, a battle erupts between a British naval vessel and the Chinese, who are attempting to establish a trading
colony. In each case, the descriptions of the action are vibrant and compelling; Novik is particularly good at conveying the excitement, fear, confusion, and reactions of the characters as they whirl through the air in unexpected ways or find themselves in a battle that does not go the way anyone had expected.
Still, all that would make Tongues of Serpents a fairly routine adventure novel. What sets it apart and what is undoubtedly the reason that readers in great numbers keep returning to the series is the character and personality of the dragon Temeraire and his relationship with Laurence. In many ways, Temeraire is a typical dragon with all the usual lusts and desires for power and material wealth. But there is an overlay of civilization within him; Temeraire is a very British dragon with the sensibilities of an upper-class Englishman of his times. Those aspects of Temeraire’s personality come out most in the interactions between him and Laurence, where Temeraire’s first impulses are mediated by Laurence’s grasp of the larger consequences. Their relationship is a never-ending tug of war played around Temeraire’s inner reluctance to act in a socially approved manner and Laurence’s own internal feelings that sometimes the dragon is right and they should just go ahead and lash out against anyone they disagree with.
The complexity of Temeraire’s behavior and motivations is set out in contrast with two new dragons who are introduced into the story. Caesar is a young dragon who often comes off as a petulant whiner, dedicated to going his own way despite the consequences. Kulingile is the embodiment of unrestrained appetite, a dragon whose very presence threatens to rid the countryside of all available food sources. They are both extreme examples of what Temeraire could have been, and their presence in the story couldn’t do a better job of conveying just how different and interesting a character Temeraire has become.
Tongues of Serpents is a transitional novel. Temporarily, at least, removed from the hot spots of Britain’s global ambitions, the novel serves both to establish its characters in a new setting and to open the future to new scenarios. Temeraire and Laurence may feel that they are now outside the British military establishment, but there are hints
Tongues of Serpents by Naomi NovikNew York: Del Rey, 2010; $25.00 hc; 288 pages
