Britt's Blog

These two novels demonstrate the classic early 70′s science fiction formula: laughably contrived gimick + naked people => Hugo Best Novel.

In the foreword to The Gods Themselves, Asimov explains how the novel originated in a conversation he had with Robert Silverberg about a mistake the latter made about a basic principle of nuclear physics, to whit, giving the atomic weight of an impossible isotope of Plutonium.

Sounds like a real page-turner already, doesn’t it?

For a book with such a mind-numbingly arcane premise and disproportional nuclear physics content, there’s a heck of a lot of hand-waving about the actual nuts and bolts of the process the plot revolves around. But, long story short, the author writes people acting in an irrational and stupid way, then mocks them and looks down on them for being irrational and stupid.

Then there’s a bit with extraterrestrials, which is actually extremely interesting and made the book less than a complete disaster.

Then we’re on the Moon, with people—indeed, naked people. Except that you’re told that Lunarites don’t wear clothes, and you’re picturing them naked, but then dropped into every scene is some casual reference to somebody’s trousers or shirt collar, and occasional grousing about having to wear clothes because of the “Earthies.” I mean, c’mon, it’s a novel. Just say they’re naked (no need to belabor the point) and let the reader get his/her jollies picturing everyone naked. Whats’ the point of this incessant fig-leafing?

The Moon-dwelling protagonists are mostly unappealing, unsympathetic jerks, and they save the world, and then there is implied sex. The End.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first novel of the Riverworld Saga by Philip Jose Farmer, has many, many more naked people, but lacks anything in the way of interesting ideas. There is much telling and little showing, and if there seems to be an interesting thought coming up, don’t worry, it will probably be derailed in short order by a brawl, or an attack by dudes with spears, or a war-party coming alongside in a canoe flinging incendiary devices. The prose and dialog is workmanlike and uninteresting, a fault made even more egregious by the fact that the main character us supposed to be the poet Richard Francis Burton.

The author and editor kindly warns us at the end of To Your Scattered Bodies Go that the main character of the second Riverworld novel is none other than Mark Twain. No doubt the wit and wisdom of the extraordinary wordwright Samuel Clemens is entirely absent from the volume, and I am grateful for the thoughtful warning which permits the traumatized reader to give wide berth to the inevitable travesty.

This 1968 Hugo Best Novel winner is eerily prescient ur-cyberpunk, touching on themes of race relations, overpopulation, eugenics and genetic manipulation, and the relationship between the West and the developing world. There are tentative steps toward the internet; citizens can call into a mainframe on the phone to get information from the computer, and a chapter of search engine results uncannily prefigures Google—right down to the targeted ads. In a foresight unusual in SF of this era, although the citizens enthusiastically abuse substances from designer hallucinogens to GM marijuana, tobacco cigarettes have been outlawed as too dangerous. There is a grimly familiar meatgrinder of a war, not with the Middle East but the Far East (against Communists—no surprise) where overthrowing a dictatorship is viewed by the US as an opportunity for a democratic toehold in the region. The style is replete with choppy jumps that remind me distinctly of MTV-style editing.

Stabbing insight is provided by social critic Chad Mulligan, the book’s Jubal Harshaw figure, whose wisdom serves as a counterpoint to the analysis of an idiot-savant supercomputer named Shalmaneser.

The book’s main theme is what human progress means; how we can become better than what we are, and what role technology can or should play. The enigmatic title refers to overpopulation; at the beginning of the book, the world’s entire population could stand within the borders of the nation of Zanzibar. At the end of the book, this is no longer possible. The central question of Stand on Zanzibar is whether the human race will find a way get along in a more and more crowded world.

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