Thoughts during my science fiction novel discussion group.

The BBQ Pit
1

The scene: Barnes and Noble, Knoxville TN, 7:00pm this last Thursday. Meeting about David Brin’s Earth.

M starts to speak.

Oh, great: you only read five pages. You’ll be able to offer a lot of insight tonight… Oh! All novels just get 5 pages - if you don’t like it by then, it automatically sucks and you don’t finish it. You know, that would’ve saved me a lot of time throughout my life… Great! You want me to summarize the book that you were supposed to read before the meeting! Didn’t this happen last time?

I speak. M replies.

Yes, I can understand why you didn’t get the point of the first two pages - you didn’t read the freakin’ book, you moron!.. Wait, you don’t buy that we can control black holes in the novel Earth because you didn’t like how the concept was used in the film Event Horizon? And that aided your decision not to continue the novel?.. Wow. Even after I verified that you do realize that the novel and the movie are two totally different entities, you are still sticking to your guns. He doesn’t like the tech in one because he didn’t like it in the other… Un-friggin-believable.

S speaks after coming in 20 minutes late.

Well, glad you can squeeze in that whole 100 pages, S! Let’s see if she needs a recap… yup.

I speak, trying to draw out more comments. H (who has actually read the book) makes the following comment, her entire contribution to the hour-long meeting:

“I was really struck by the imagery of having no more mailmen, that all of our mail would be sent over email.”

That’s it? 627 pages of the birth of a planetary overmind, Gaia theory, and the destruction of the environment, and all you can think of are the damn mailmen who don’t even make an appearance in the book? WTF is wrong with you?

M speaks.

Well, it took just 27 minutes for you to start talking about TV this time. Yes, I’m sure you’re excited about the finale of Farscape - especially since you always talk about the damn thing. Let’s see if I can salvage this by turning the conversation to Brin in general… Yes! You’ve read Brin! Great!.. The Postman?.. and that’s it?.. and you didn’t even finish it? Why am I not surprised? I do have to ask if you got more than 5 pages through it though…

S speaks.

Well, I can handle talking about Dune for a bit… Yeah, God: Emp and Children were my two faves… No, M. You are wrong on that point… No, actually I’ve read the books a number of times and I can recall at least three instances where Leto says… No, according to how the sandfish are supposed to work, Leto can’t just crawl off into the sand… You see, it had to happen that way for the Bene Gesserit to be able to… oh, I see. You read the books 6 years ago, don’t remember them all that well, and yet still saw fit to argue a minor point against a self-confessed Dune-geek… OMG, M just nominated that we read Timothy Zahn next month!!! Better quash that, and quick!

But seriously, these people just don’t know how to read. If their books don’t approach them like their movies and TV shows do, they are just not interested. Fuckwits.

2

And my question is why are you attending book club meetings with these folks, knowing that they aren’t going to contribute much that is substantive to the discussion? Can you find another group?

3

The Barnes and Ignoble in my area tried to start a Science Fiction Discussion Group, and assigned the task to a poor clerk that didn’t know jack. At the first meeting he told us that the only “Sigh Fi” book he knew about was the one he was forced to read in school-The Illustrated Man. When I explained to him that the book was allagorical fantasy, not science fiction, he asked the other four members of the group what they wanted to start with. Their answers were:
“Star Wars!!!”
“Star Track!!”
“Can we just watch Sci-Fi movies? I like the Terminator!”
“I don’t really read-where is the Sci-Fi section?”

When I left them, they were diging through the Star Trek paperbacks. :frowning:

4

Dune*?

I couldn’t get past page five of that book.

:smiley:

5

Oy, I love the Star Wars novels, but I wouldn’t even consider bringing them into a Sci-Fi discussion group. Maybe a Space Opera discussion group.

If you want real good sci-fi kicks, go find some of the Culture books by Iain M. Banks.

6

God Emperor is one of your favorite Dune books!?

7

Well, hell, let’s try it here.

In all honest, JohnT, seeing someone get captured by the lack of postmen in Earth is pretty understandable. Brin wrote the novel in such a way that it gives a strong feel for both the similarities and the differences that life in 2038 will have to 1988 (God, I can’t believe we’re 14 years down the road).

There are a number of other things. The ‘Emily Post’ program that monitors politeness on user groups (and couldn’t we use that one sometimes!), the use of modified animals (goats, in this case) to do non-native species control, the establishment of ‘nature zones’ with human self-appointed watchdog groups to monitor human ‘intrusion’.

Many of the so-called ‘old masters’ said that writing SF is noticing a trend and extrapolating that trend to it’s logical (or not-so) end result.

I particularly liked the changing value of goods to services. With better education and software, Brin’s world of 2038 has Lawyers being middle class service providers (or legal consultation by software!) and goods being for the rich (i.e. a ream of paper cosing $200).

An excellent book. I’ve often held it up as being the greatest SF book of the 1990s. Brin is a great (though glacially slow) writer. He has much to be proud of with Earth.

8

So, your science fiction novel discussion group was full of socially-inept misfits? Wow, that’s really weird…

9

I read Earth. It took about 8 months, but I read it. Am I a slow reader? Nope. The book bored me to tears. Still, the plot interested me enough to finish. It was not worth the effort. I have never anything else by Mr. Brin. Hopefully, the rest of the body of his work isn’t this bad. Apparently, the concept of editing didn’t occur to him.

And I thought Stephen King went on and on.

10

No, it was full of Science-Fictionally inept misfits. That’s much, much worse.

11

I re-read the OP and failed to see anything which would indicate that the members of the reading group were “socially-inept misfits” - I might have said ill-prepared or semi-literate - so I can only presume that you are referring to the usual stereotypes about science fiction readers.

Smile when you say that, buddy.:smiley:

12

What got me wasn’t that they didn’t know what they were talking about, but that they thought they did.

13

People who go to a science fiction book discussion group to argue about books they haven’t read, before directing the conversation to “Farscape” and “Event Horizon” (note: not books) aren’t socially-inept…how?

Anyway, don’t be offended LurkMeister. I’m a geek myself. Part of doing geeky things is the high percentage of people with no social skills. I’m so far beyond being surprised by it that the OP made me laugh, is all.

[hijack]
Did anyone else read “Crytonomicon”, by Neal Stephenson? I just re-read it, in the hopes that I’d misremembered how bad it was. It starts out well, and then just gets worse and worse. I loved “Snow Crash” and “Diamond Age”, so I was sorely disappointed by this. Sigh…
[/hijack]

14

No offense taken Giraffe. I’ve always taken “socially-inept” to be a reference to such things as questionable hygiene, lack of social skills or generally geeky behavior. And I’d certainly never question that these things exist in SF fandom; not after what I’ve seen in over 25 years of attending SF cons. But it’s like the old George Carlin line, “It’s OK to make fun of your own people.”

15

I honestly didn’t think I’d get past page 5, either, but since I was reading it to fall asleep, I figured, WTF, and kept reading.

It took till page 250 or so to get into it, and the day I finished it, I placed an order with Amazon.com for the next two. :smiley:

Sam

16

Far and away, Stephenson’s best book. I took it as an airplane book for my trip to England, ended up wasting an entire day of my terribly, terribly limited time there just to finish it. The scenes with MacArthur made me laugh my ass off. When Bobby Shaftoe finally reunited with his Philipina girlfriend (Glory?), I choked up. I mean, I knew it would be bad, but not that bad. Wonderful, wonderful novel. Not even romotely sf, so I’m not sure what it has to do with this thread, but still, wonderful book.

Of course, I never finished The Diamond Age. Just got bored about a quarter of the way through. Just didn’t care about any of the characters, and I was tired of waiting for the plot to show up. So, apparently, YMMV.

17

Sorry for ranting and running - 14 hour days at work will do that to a man.

M… he is the sort of sci-fi geek who rarely cracks a book, but can give you the lowdown on the canonical timeline to all the B5 stories. And the rest of the people in the group have no grasp of literary theory, no understanding of subtlety and understatement, and frankly, they just keep on missing the freakin’ points of all these books - it’s just amazing. From Hal Clement’s Half-Life to Donaldson’s Gap series to Earth, they keep on missing the point… they never figured out that the Clement was a study in sociology, they never figured out that the Donaldson books were largely about structure and technique, meticulous attention to plot, they never even freakin’ read Earth…

The Clement meeting was especially disappointing. I was thrilled with the novel, finding it to be a fascinating story of the problems of regimented thought even when (especially if?) the rules are supposed to encourage debate and speculation. None of the other people got it. Not one. All they did was bitch about how technical it was and how they all got bored reading descriptions of how some jet flew. As far as I could tell, they were all bored with this story of how a bunch of terminally ill men and women flew to Titan to help try to save the Earth, where the populations of all the higher orders of animals were “decreasing at a rate almost perfectly described by a 69.2-year half-life.”

Yes, Alessan, God: Emperor is one of my favorite Dune books. Wanna make something of it? :wink:

Jonathan. Where were you last Thursday? :wink:

I think that calling Earth the greatest science fiction novel of the 90’s is going a bit far, but it is one of the premiere works of the past decade.

One of my main objections to the Uplift series (and Brin in general) is how he has developed this huge, vastly intricate civilization, and then kept on placing the focus’ (foci?) of his novels on insignificant backwater planets with no allowable means of communications with the larger Universe. Its the literary equivalent of being boarded up in a 3 room apartment in a Manhattan highrise, never allowed outside. When I got to the second series (Brightness Reef, etc) and found that it was set on an ecological haven, supposedly barred from human habitation, and that the colonists were forbidden from ever contacting the 5 Galaxies, for fear of being destroyed, I threw the damn book away. Picked it up a week later, found out that the main protagonists were children, and threw it away again.

Earth was different. You dealt from the start with the movers and shakers, with the people who’s decisions were going to actually matter. Yeah, some of the science is more than a bit hokey (the point of the book is the birth of a planetary overmind using the Gaia hypothesis), but if it is written well, that’s ok. He doesn’t exactly bring it off for all people (a strong suspension of disbelief is required to swallow the conclusion), but he did for me. Of all the Brin novels I’ve read (and I’ve caught most of them), Earth is the one I recommend the most. But everybody else seems to like the Uplift books better.

18

Hey, that’s not nice to say about Timothy Zahn, either. I will confess to never having read his Star Wars novels, but I rather liked Spinneret, and the Cobra novels weren’t that bad either.

I will admit to a severe bias against genre novels. Dunno why, because I enjoyed various shared-world anthologies (Liavek, Thieves’ World, Man-Kzin Wars,). But the only Star Dreck novel I read and enjoyed was the one Vonda McIntyre wrote. The rest of it is pretty much crap I could’ve churned out in tenth grade.

19

I read Zahn’s Icarus Hunt and it was the most boring piece of strung-together cliches that I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading.

20
  1. No problem, ** JohnT**, mon petit fromage. God Emperor is slow, dull and virtually plotless; what storeypoint there are are visible parsecs away. The world-building is the worst of the whole series (for some reason, everything seems small, as if there are only a couple of hundred people in the universe) and the characters - from the bland and predictable Siona to the cringe-worthy buffoon Duncan and that pompous ass worm Leto - are completely devoid of interest.

But maybe that’s just me - after all, I’m a fantasy geek at heart, and the first Dune had this great bizzarro-future vibe to it, similar to Wolfe’s New Sun books or Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness which I just loved, and which disappeared completely by book 4. The following two didn’t have it, either, but at least they were competently written.

  1. I’ve always thought of the Gap Cycle as first and foremost a character study. You?

  2. The best science fiction book of the nineties was of course Dan Simmon’s Hyperion. I am not willing to debate this.

  3. Alessan’s First Rule of SF: never read an author who’s too lazy to invent his own world. That goes for Zahn, Salvatore and all those other hacks.