August 2011

I’m sensing a pattern in Gateways.  One really good story, followed by a bad one, followed by a good one, and so on and so forth.  Larry Niven’s “Gates” is one of those bad ones.  Split between two perspectives — a science fiction writer talking about the singularity/Bill Gates and Bill Gates making the decision to create a virtual world in which he is filthy rich — “Gates” lacks anything resembling plot or character development.  In fact, beyond presenting a gimmick, I’m not sure if the story has a point. Is it a story that wants us to buy its premise that the world we live in is a virtual world a la Second Life in which all but Bill Gates and his friends are intelligent programs?  If so, Niven has failed to provide a coherent “world” within which we can come to that conclusion.  Or is the singularity / Bill Gates section a fictionalized account of the tech icon’s rise to “power” written by the science fiction writer of that previous section?  That might be interesting, but beyond the fact that the science fiction writer talks about Bill Gates (from which the title obviously comes), the connection is loose. Then again, perhaps we’re supposed to think of this story as a couple of alternate histories about old Bill.  But each “vision” lacks depth.  The characters are cardboard cutouts — people we’ve seen before.  The stories themselves, if you could call them that (vignettes might be a more appropriate term), go nowhere; we never see the worlds these different characters are talking about, or learn anything about the characters to give us a sense of who they are and what they’ve done to get here.  Maybe that’s the point, but there are writers who have approached similar themes more effectively.  This story, however, is one I would recommend skipping. ——————————————————————- The above is the continuation of my story-by-story review of Gateways edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull.   Below are the reviews of other stories in the collection (which will be updated as reviews become available): “Shoresteading” by David Brin “Von Neuman’s Bug” by Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein “Sleeping Dogs” by Joe Haldeman “Gates (Variations)” by Larry Niven

Haldeman’s addition to Gateways is, thus far, one of the best stories in the lot (granted, by this point, I’ve only read three).  “Sleeping Dogs” is another military-related science fiction story set some time after an interstellar war.  Flann Spivey is an ex-soldier-turned-futuristic-psychiatrist whose job is to aid people who have essentially become immortal on their journey towards ending life.  In particular, he serves other ex-military by helping them recover lost memories — memories, we learn, that were taken away from them at the end of the war.  Spivey, however, has also lost memories, and has decided to return to a mining world on which he believes he once fought in order to recover them. I don’t want to say anything else about the story, because, in true Haldeman fashion, nothing is as it seems when it comes to the military.  I have long since been a fan of The Forever War, having just taught it in my first college-level literature course, but “Sleeping Dogs” makes clear that Haldeman has a heck of a lot more to say about the military, soldiers, and militarized society — even in his ripe old age.  In many ways, I see “Sleeping Dogs” as a mixture of The Forever War and an allegory of U.S. involvement in Central and South America.  The Latin flavor to the story and the culture within it attest to this fact.  But the most compelling part of the story is Haldeman’s continued reflection on humanity’s pension for warfare and its consequences. “Sleeping Dogs,”  provides an afterwards-view of the soldier:  Who do they become when the war is over?  What do they do with themselves?  And what do they do about what was taken from them?  The memory loss, consequentially, serves both as a disturbing “evil” that allows us to sympathize with Flann, but it is also a small mercy.  Soldiers today go to war and come back with the incomplete scars of things they remember in full, half remember, or have thrust upon them in flashbacks (PTSD).  But Haldeman’s vision is both more sinister and reasonable:  soldiers return with their scars, but without the memories to go along with them; instead, the best they can hope to find without deep medicated psychotherapy are their military records, which, we are led to assume, are intentionally made inaccurate.  The mercy is made readily apparent:  only those who have grown tired of exceedingly prolonged life (hundreds of years) might want to know what they really did all those centuries ago in those long-forgotten wars.  All this is packed into a single short story, which I found thrilling precisely because it made me think and ask questions. The only thing that bothered me about “Sleeping Dogs” was the fact that Flann Spivey and the world/universe in which he lives are begging for a novel length treatment.  Perhaps we will never see that novel, in part because it would be unfairly compared to The Forever War, but after reading “Sleeping Dogs,” I couldn’t help wanting to know more.  I wanted to learn about what happened to Spivey after his discovery and the other folks who suffered similar fates. And when we get right down to it, maybe my desire for more is really a good thing after all.  “Sleeping Dogs” is one of the best short stories I’ve read in a while.  If you don’t have it, get Gateways and read it.  It’s good stuff.  Real good stuff. ——————————————————————- The above is the continuation of my story-by-story review of Gateways edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull. Below are the reviews of other stories in the collection (which will be updated as reviews become available): “Shoresteading” by David Brin “Von Neuman’s Bug” by Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein “Sleeping Dogs” by Joe Haldeman “Gates (Variations)” by Larry Niven

“Von Neumann’s Bug” (VNB) is occupied with a trope familiar to science fiction fans:  the self-replicating machine.  In this case, the machine is an alien search drone named Bert who terrorizes a small, middle-class family in an attempt to rebuild itself and escape Earth’s gravity to resume its mission.  And it does so by inconspicuously tearing apart a man’s most prized possession:  his car. In all honesty, I didn’t much care for VNB.  As a humorous take on the Von Neumann concept, it lacked a certain kick that Brin’s preceding story, “Shoresteading,” brought to the anthology.  The problem, I think, stems from the fact that the story offers no surprises.  Everything the main character doesn’t know are things we do know because we are also presented with Bert’s perspective (and a third character — a military super computer).  Even the attempts to paint the main character as mad fall short since nothing of note happens to him; in the end, Bert gets the materials he needs and escapes Earth, leaving the human character to pretend like nothing ever happened.  VNB is the kind of story that might have done just fine 80 years ago when the idea was fresh and new, but as a new story (first published in Gateways), it’s little more than a repetition. And that’s really what kills any short story for me:  if you’re dealing with a familiar concept, then you have to give me something else to latch onto.  Because I have already seen the Von Neumann idea used a dozen times before, I was hoping for character development from the human character.  But I never got that.  Instead, the story ends with a few minor changes (the neighbors don’t talk to him anymore and he has to fix his car), but overall nothing new. That pretty sums up how I feel about this particular story.  Thankfully, the Haldeman short that follows is much better.  But you’ll have to wait for a review for that until later. ——————————————————————- The above is the continuation of my story-by-story review of Gateways edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull. Below are the reviews of other stories in the collection (which will be updated as reviews become available): “Shoresteading” by David Brin “Von Neuman’s Bug” by Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein “Sleeping Dogs” by Joe Haldeman “Gates (Variations)” by Larry Niven