SF author S.M. Stirling wrote the Nantucket trilogy about how the island of Nantucket was sent back to 1200 BC. The people on the island spent some time trying to figure out how and why it happened but never got an answer (nor did the reader).
Now Stirling has started another series with the novel Dies the Fire. This series is explicitly set in the same world as the earlier trilogy, except it tells what was happening to the rest of the world when Nantucket disappeared. Basically, all advanced technological operations (electricity, gunpowder, even steam engines) no longer work. Again no answer is given why this happened but the characters assume it was done by some advanced alien race that was either worried about humans becoming too advanced or is just performing some kind of experiment.
Stirling has one of the characters use the term “alien space bats” at one point. For those who don’t know, this is a common term from alternate history and science fiction message boards which can broadly be defined as “any incredibly advanced power that can essentially do anything they want, do not have any apparent reason for doing these things, generally never appear in the book, and whose main purpose is to let a writer create whatever situations he or she wants without having to justify its plausibility.” In other words, if you want to write a story where everybody on the planet Earth woke up one morning shrunk down to the height of one inch but don’t want to waste a lot of pages explaining how it happened, you just say the alien space bats did it and get on with the story.
So my question is - do you think Stirling plans on leaving it at that and is just going to discuss the consequences of what happened without worrying about the reasons for it? Or do you think Stirling has a master plan and is going to eventually reveal why the ASB’s sent one island back in time and turned off the power for everybody else? And defying the alien space bat code, is there any plausible reason why an advance race would do what they did? If the purpose was to prevent humanity from advancing technologically, why send one group back into the past and give Earth a three thousand year headstart?
I hope that it will be explained, eventually. With the first series, there is no way those back in 1200B.C. can even find out what’s going on in their future/past - the 20th century. In the new series, at least people are around in the same era to figure it out.
But in Conquistador, Sterling took an unusual phenomena and used it, without ever explaining how and why it occured. So it wouldn’t be without precedent if it’s not explained. But I want to know what it could be. I’m thinking a concerted stream of tachyons going through the Earth like a nail through an orange, with the effects visible in Nantucket on one end, and somewhere in the Pacific on the other. Which would set us up for a thrid series - sone Japanese fisherman get transported to the distant past, and make absolutely no impact on the course of human history.
<rant>Stirling, like many authors, is weak on the whole ‘plot’ thing. Conquistador read like less of a novel and more like a ‘Hey, I came up with this great world idea! Let’s tour around it!’
Ugh.
And I got the same feel from the Nantucket books, too. He’s more interested in the ‘world’ than in the characters and the story.
</rant>
:dubious: And what’s wrong with that? This is SF! Ideas and worlds are essential; plotting and characterization are luxuries.
Besides, I can’t fathom how you formed that assessment. Stirling is one of the most exciting storytellers in SF today. I feel a much better connection to any of his characters than, say, Larry Niven’s or Bruce Sterling’s or Allen Steele’s, and he writes the most vivid combat scenes I’ve ever read; puts all other “military SF” writers to shame. And as an alternate-history writer he far outshines the so-called “Dean of AH,” Harry Turtledove – at least as a storyteller. Turtledove’s writing style is tedious, plodding, clotted with details. He really needs an editor, preferably a veteran of Reader’s Digest. Stirling’s thickest tomes read like the wind.
I happen to know for a fact that he will explain it.
How do I know that?
Because if he doesn’t, I will personally hunt him down and beat him over the head with a copy of Against the Tide of Years dipped in cast iron until he explains it to me, then I will forward that explanation on to the rest of you.
By the way, preview chapters from the sequel to Dies The Fire are up on his website. (smstirling.com)
Obviously the purpose of the change is to get people back to using swords and reinstating the feudal system and manly/womanly individualism and/or interdependence, and reverting to cannibalism and sex slavery. Clearly these are Stirling’s favorite themes (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Any “whys” would be post-hoc rationalizations.
If you want an explanation, the “the ASBs don’t want us to develop into a threat” will do perfectly. The whole point of explicitly mentioning ASBs is that the real cause of the change is the author’s whim.
That is so utterly, f*cking wrong that I can’t even begin to describe it. You want pure ideas? Subscribe to Scientific American or something.
But to suggest off the top that such things as plotting and quality writing are ‘luxuries’ betrays the very idea of what writing should be. It cheapens it beyond words.
<Janeane Garofalo>
And that perpetuates the cycle of mediocrity. And that’s evil.
</JG>
Jonathan, I have to disagree with your statement that Stirling ignores plot and characters. I find his book are generally rich with both (and I’ll concede this is often not the case in science fiction). I do have reservation about Stirling - I find lengthy passages of military actions tedious, he tends to re-use some plot elements too often, and he’s a dogmatic Stratfordian. But I love his fiction and enjoy re-reading his books.
Mediocrity? Olaf Stapledon was no mediocrity. He was one of the greats of early SF. But nobody would call him a good storyteller. Same with Hugo Gernsback, and (blush) E.E. “Doc” Smith, and a great many others. This is first and foremost a genre of ideas!
