January 7th, 2019.

If you don’t think science fiction is the best genre, you’d be wrong.

Ahem, excuse me – I’m doing that modern thing – let me go back to when we were civil and let you know that…

IT IS MY OPINION that if you don’t think science fiction is the best genre, you’d be WRONG!

Since I’ve been sick for the past week + it means I’ve spent a lot of time with my nose buried in a book. Three books to be specific. Well, more than that, but up to three at a time, and by “book” at least in three instances I also mean “electronic reading device”, generally my phone.

Who’d have thunk I’d ever take to reading on my phone?

Before we get into the specifics of my above statement, I’ll just give you the run down: on the extremely fluffy side I read Timothy Zahn’s “THRAWN”, a Star Wars book that revisits Zahn’s previously de-canonized post-original-trilogy Imperial military genius Grand Admiral Thrawn.

Oh he of the blue skin and the red eyes, always one step ahead of all opponents – Thrawn was de-canonized with the Disney Purchase, re-canonized in the cartoons of Rebels (though his post original-trilogy exploits remain in the category of “Legends” – or fan-Loved-non-canon, his pre-original-trilogy-timeline existence is now as emblazoned on the “real” Star Wars timeline as anything CAN be in a fictional galaxy long, long ago and far, far away.

By now I’m on to the second book of this series, THRAWN : ALLIANCES – which continues our exploration of, if not Thrawn’s character, then at least his exploits and history. As is typical of Zahn’s writing, there are low-grade mysteries to be solved and cliches to be spun. Whereas his previous Thrawn trilogy suffered from moments of dialog that simply seemed cut and pasted from the Original Trilogy, with Luke, Leia and Han seeming to simply be written reiterating lines from the movies, now Zahn writes further afield and with less characterization – with Padme and Anakin speaking completely out-of-character as they puppet through Zahn’s romps to the extent that if you try to actually visualize the words coming out of either Hayden Christensen’s eternally sullen glower or Natalie Portman’s plastic, phoned-in princess – well, the universe breaks and the characters seem even MORE shallow.

Ahem.

But you know? Sometimes we just like reading fluff. I mean, I’m a LITTLE curious about the Chiss, I’m sort of interested in the Sherlockian machinations of Mitth’raw’nuruodo, and I enjoy just adding to my nerd knowledge, but saying all of the above, even *I* kind of wonder why. I guess I liked the original Thrawn trilogy (post pre Original Trilogy, Disney de-canonized) because it was literally the ONLY NEW STAR WARS around back in 1991 and the newer stuff is pleasantly nostalgic.

SO – that’s the fluff. Decidedly less fluffy : Dan Simmons’ “A Winter Haunting”. This isn’t really sci fi, but Dan Simmons has churned out some of my favourite sci fi universes in the form of “Hyperion” and “Olympos”. He writes broad, beautiful, moody universes with hinted at technologies and dark mythologies, tinged by Catholic horrors and, as I’ve gotten older and a little more aware of such things, no small amount of misogyny, Islamophobia and Semitophilia.

“A Winter Haunting” seems to give the last two a miss (generally these are played out in vast future wars where the eternally suffering Jews are finally saved from the dead-hand time travelling / bioengineer plague dealing / black hole bomb threatening Muslim caliphate – for all that I Love his future tales, the idea that this holy war is still going on hundreds, if not thousands of years in the future of ALL his perceived universes makes me tired) and hews close to the things I Love most. Terrifying imagery and a clinging mood that means that, though I’ve restarted this book a number of times over the years, I STILL haven’t completed it! This and “The Terror” have been sitting on my shelves for a long, long time and I always seem to put them back. I Love them, but they’re incompatible with trying to get a good night’s sleep.

Back to sci fi. I picked up Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s book “The Long Earth” back when it came out five years ago and hungrily consumed it. It suffered a bit from Terry’s Alzheimer’s storytelling mode that sort of meandered, a plot progression that seemed to mirror it’s actual characters’ journey. Staying in place physically, moving forward slowly temporally, but skipping laterally across universes only slowly accruing depth and change. I didn’t leave the book with a lasting impression, but for Christmas this year I was given “The Long Utopia” – I dove into it hungrily but rapidly realized I was totally missing something – looking back at the cover, this is NOT the sequel to the half-remembered Long Earth, but the fourth book in the series. So – I re-read “The Long Earth” and am now working my way through “The Long War”… they don’t have the lilt and joy of Terry’s earlier writing, but upon reading “The Long Earth” again, there’s a tired cynicism that I understand better and I fear where it will lead.

Last but not least, I’m also re-reading “Starship Troopers” by Robert Heinlein and it’s THIS book that got me to thinking about the genre.

I don’t remember how many times I’ve read and re-read this 1959 novel, but it’s a classic for a reason. I’ve had several copies over the years, but this is a 60 year-old paperback reprint in close-to-mint condition that I picked up in a genre bookstore in Memphis, TN complete with an advertisement for a sci fi book club (fold this into a coin purse on the dotted lines, send us 10 cents and we’ll send you these two hardback books with stories from all of today’s best writers…! sigh).

I Love the books of this era, with their tightly-packed typefaces and stiff pages, strange cover illustrations of glowing oils and almost Impressionistic brushwork – and I Love reading them.

But this book is more than a beautiful object – it’s a reminder that in this tiny package of fiction, Heinlein lays out truly subversive, theoretical thinking about politics that couldn’t have been published in 1950’s America in almost any other way. It would’ve been fascist propaganda, or Anti-American theory, or whatever – but in this context, well, he seems oddly prescient as the United States seems to crumble under the weight of its own under-valued and scattered democratic ideals.

As public education falters and people’s “rights” steadily seem to supplant their concept of responsibility in 2019 America – well, reading popular criticisms of the book – they seem more symptomatic of those things that Heinlein is criticizing than actual intelligent responses to the book.

This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted… and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.”

Jean V. Dubois. Lt.-Col., Mobile Infantry (“Starship Troopers” by Robert Heinlein)

He’s not attacking democracy in this book where only those who have served in the military can vote – he’s VALUING democracy in a way that we as “my vote doesn’t matter” Americans no longer do, and he’s theorizing a structure in which that can be corrected. It’s the furthest thing from a call for Fascism, he lays out a basis for value and then puts democracy right at the top of that scale.

After my current run I’ll be piling through a couple more Heinlein books. I don’t approve of everything he lays out, but at least he makes you think – and not just about bad relationships or shitty day jobs or cop dramas, but about how we got to this place where Democrats voted Obama into office and then sat back thinking he was going to solve all of their problems – and Republicans sought a new messiah in Trump willfully ignoring his small-minded self-centered hypocrisy – all thinking that that vote was the end-all and be-all, that that was where the work ended and that someone else would get on with the heavy lifting…

Yeah, once I wrap my current piles of fluff and non-fluff, I think I’ll be reading more Heinlein. Hell, maybe he’ll teach me something about our cat.

Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.

Robert Heinlein,
” The Cat Who Walks Through Walls”