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I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (SEPTEMBER 2020 EDITION)
This month: Golden Age SF vs Modern SF!
Northwest of Earth by C.L. Moore
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
There are lots of Golden Age SF/F writers I haven’t read, or in some cases never even heard of – until recently, C.L. Moore was both. Her most famous creation is Northwest Smith, an outlaw from Earth who spends time on Venus and Mars doing shady things. This book collects all of the Northwest Smith stories, starting with the most famous one, “Shambleau”, in which Smith protects a strange-looking woman on the run from a mob, and later finds out the hard way just why they were trying to kill her.
It’s a pretty good story, but it went downhill quickly for me after that. I could blame the back cover blurb for setting up my expectations of Smith as a sort of Han Solo-type anti-hero outlaw adventurer – in these stories, he does very little overt lawbreaking or adventuring, and mostly finds himself encountering deadly alien women with god-like powers, after which mind-bending things happen. That’s fine, but the mind-bending madness parts go on for 10-12 pages at a time. Maybe it’s better when you read them separately in pulp magazines, but when you read them all in one place, it gets tiresome – at least for me.
Credit where it’s due – as pulp SF/F goes, Moore was a much better writer than many of her bigger-name contemporaries, with more emotional depth and a focus on character rather than science and two-fisted action (indeed, there is precious little science or action here). And I appreciate that she’s doing something fairly subversive here in the sense that she’s writing about strong powerful women that are a threat to the masculine tough-guy protagonist – which was something you didn’t see much of in 1930s SF/F pulp. Still, all of the ancient-gods weirdness just goes on and on and gets tedious after a while. I gather it’s the result of pulp magazines paying by the word, and fair enough. Either way, it’s not really my thing.
Redshirts by John Scalzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Star Trek fans noticed a long time ago that random ensigns (i.e. the ones wearing red-shirted uniforms) tended to be assigned to away teams on routine missions for the apparent express purpose of being the poor schmoe who gets killed instead of the main cast when the mission turns unexpectedly sour. Leave it to John Scalzi to write a whole novel about this trope, with a twist: suppose there was an actual reason for this?
Despite the title, Redshirts doesn’t take place in the Star Trek universe, but one remarkably like it. Fresh recruit Andy Dahl is assigned to the starship Intrepid, the flagship of the Universal Union, along with four other ensigns. It doesn’t take Dahl long to figure out that there is weirdness onboard the Intrepid – not only does science seem to work differently from real life, but also away missions have an unusually high casualty rate exclusively for random ensigns. Dahl also notices that the rest of the crew (apart from Captain Abernathy, Science Officer Q’eeg, Doctor Hartnell, Chief Engineer West and Lieutenant Keresky) seems to be keenly aware of this. Dahl and his friends try to figure out why, if only to make sure they’re not the next redshirt to get killed.
Part Star Trek satire and part manifesto against lazy and bad writing in SF (especially TV shows and films), Redshirts is a typical Scalzi outing in that it’s breezy, funny and clever, and also has something to say about the genre that Scalzi loves. It’s also typical in that everyone talks in snappy banter and the characterization is a bit shallow, although the three epilogues featuring minor characters are a nice touch. I haven't yet decided how I feel about the fact that he glosses over how his eventual explanation actually works (and the reactions of some of the characters confronted with it) – it’s almost the sort of thing he’s making fun of in the novel, but then again it works within the narrative of the universe he’s created here. Anyway, it’s good fun, so it's hard to complain.
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Northwest of Earth by C.L. MooreMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
There are lots of Golden Age SF/F writers I haven’t read, or in some cases never even heard of – until recently, C.L. Moore was both. Her most famous creation is Northwest Smith, an outlaw from Earth who spends time on Venus and Mars doing shady things. This book collects all of the Northwest Smith stories, starting with the most famous one, “Shambleau”, in which Smith protects a strange-looking woman on the run from a mob, and later finds out the hard way just why they were trying to kill her.
It’s a pretty good story, but it went downhill quickly for me after that. I could blame the back cover blurb for setting up my expectations of Smith as a sort of Han Solo-type anti-hero outlaw adventurer – in these stories, he does very little overt lawbreaking or adventuring, and mostly finds himself encountering deadly alien women with god-like powers, after which mind-bending things happen. That’s fine, but the mind-bending madness parts go on for 10-12 pages at a time. Maybe it’s better when you read them separately in pulp magazines, but when you read them all in one place, it gets tiresome – at least for me.
Credit where it’s due – as pulp SF/F goes, Moore was a much better writer than many of her bigger-name contemporaries, with more emotional depth and a focus on character rather than science and two-fisted action (indeed, there is precious little science or action here). And I appreciate that she’s doing something fairly subversive here in the sense that she’s writing about strong powerful women that are a threat to the masculine tough-guy protagonist – which was something you didn’t see much of in 1930s SF/F pulp. Still, all of the ancient-gods weirdness just goes on and on and gets tedious after a while. I gather it’s the result of pulp magazines paying by the word, and fair enough. Either way, it’s not really my thing.
Redshirts by John ScalziMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Star Trek fans noticed a long time ago that random ensigns (i.e. the ones wearing red-shirted uniforms) tended to be assigned to away teams on routine missions for the apparent express purpose of being the poor schmoe who gets killed instead of the main cast when the mission turns unexpectedly sour. Leave it to John Scalzi to write a whole novel about this trope, with a twist: suppose there was an actual reason for this?
Despite the title, Redshirts doesn’t take place in the Star Trek universe, but one remarkably like it. Fresh recruit Andy Dahl is assigned to the starship Intrepid, the flagship of the Universal Union, along with four other ensigns. It doesn’t take Dahl long to figure out that there is weirdness onboard the Intrepid – not only does science seem to work differently from real life, but also away missions have an unusually high casualty rate exclusively for random ensigns. Dahl also notices that the rest of the crew (apart from Captain Abernathy, Science Officer Q’eeg, Doctor Hartnell, Chief Engineer West and Lieutenant Keresky) seems to be keenly aware of this. Dahl and his friends try to figure out why, if only to make sure they’re not the next redshirt to get killed.
Part Star Trek satire and part manifesto against lazy and bad writing in SF (especially TV shows and films), Redshirts is a typical Scalzi outing in that it’s breezy, funny and clever, and also has something to say about the genre that Scalzi loves. It’s also typical in that everyone talks in snappy banter and the characterization is a bit shallow, although the three epilogues featuring minor characters are a nice touch. I haven't yet decided how I feel about the fact that he glosses over how his eventual explanation actually works (and the reactions of some of the characters confronted with it) – it’s almost the sort of thing he’s making fun of in the novel, but then again it works within the narrative of the universe he’s created here. Anyway, it’s good fun, so it's hard to complain.
View all my reviews
Make it so,
This is dF