Where It's More Science than Fiction

From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is not a very good book. In fact, I would argue it's not really a novel.

Not because it's short. It is a little short, but it's longer than many pulp novels.

It's that it doesn't contain many of the attributes of a novel. The characters are almost dispensed with for about half of the book--we are instead given calculations and science as if it's textbook.

[skim or skip, by all means]:

But, in order that the moon should reach the zenith of a given place, it is necessary that the place should not exceed in latitude the declination of the luminary; in other words, it must be comprised within the degrees 0º and 28° of lat. N. or S. In every other spot the fire must necessarily be oblique, which would seriously militate against the success of the experiment.

As to the sixth question, "What place will the moon occupy in the heavens at the moment of the projectile's departure?"
Answer.— At the moment when the projectile shall be discharged into space, the moon, which travels daily forward 13° 10' 35", will be distant from the zenith point by four times that quantity, i.e. by 52° 41' 20", a space which corresponds to the path which she will describe during the entire journey of the projectile. But, inasmuch as it is equally necessary to take into account the deviation which the rotary motion of the earth will impart to the shot, and as the shot cannot reach the moon until after a deviation equal to 16 radii of the earth, which, calculated upon the moon's orbit, are equal to...

There are pages and pages like this, describing the motion of the moon, the stresses put on the cannon, the type of gunpowder needed to create a certain kind of explosion, the kind of explosion necessary to move an object of a particular size, the size necessary to make it big enough to see it with a telescope, and the kind of telescope that would needed to do the job... and so on. The text fetishizes numbers and calculations, reveling in them, as if inundating the reader with math and jargon would make us forget how foolish it all is. That's fine. But he forgot a plot. Really, the plot is just planning it and building it and firing it, and much of that happens in a remote way, by unseen hands, and there's virtually no tension or interest anywhere.

The characters are rudimentary and given almost nothing to do except narrate like professors. (There's a tiny bit of personal conflict between the MC and his rival, but that fizzles.) The story reads more like a documentary, or maybe an HGTV renovation show, where it just shows how a job gets done. Except those shows have more humanity in them than this book.

The conflict--"we must build a giant cannon to shoot something to the moon"--is a legitimate conflict, potentially, but it's not given to humans to solve; it's given to physics. The only real obstacle was solving for x. There was a tiny bit of fundraising, but it also amounted to nothing.

Really, this book is what you get when a documentary and a physics textbook love each other very, very much.

And no conclusion, really. The cannon is shot, so you can claim it as a sort of climax, but we know nothing of the three men inside the projectile. Do they survive the initial firing? Does their science work well enough to provide air while they're in there? Do they fight? Are they scared? If he had told the story from their perspective, it would be a lot closer to a novel. Instead, like the crowd gathered to watch the projectile launched into space, we see it fired from the cannon and then... we just wander off, none too sure what, if anything, has been accomplished.

This could have been a very cool short story, and still could be, if we chopped about 80% of it.

Anyway, I didn't hate it, despite my rant. It was interesting as an example of the origins of science fiction. He was aiming for hard science, like Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke, Liu Cixin or Andy Weir, and it needed to start somewhere. It reminded me of Robinson Crusoe, the way that book also focused on specific, tiny, scientific details--building a home with poor tools, husbanding crops, solving all the problems of survival alone on a desert island--and the through-line from Robinson Crusoe to this to The Martian is pretty clear. I found it worth reading even if just for those insights.

Not much recommended. But who knows? You might like it.

View all my reviews

Where Humans Are the New Kids on the Block

Sundiver by David Brin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(This is a reread.)

I like David Brin a lot, and this is the first thing I read by him about 40 years ago. I thought I loved this book a little more on the first read than I probably did. I forgot that it's sluggish at times and has a couple problems, as far as I'm concerned. But it's still fun to read, mostly, and deserves a 4 at least for ideas.

The ideas:

The idea of a ship that can survive the heat and turbulence and gravity of the sun long enough to visit the surface to do science is very cool. The idea of long-lived beings existing on the surface of our sun is also very cool. The idea of a galaxy-spanning library is very cool. And the coolest idea behind the novel, that every sentient race in the universe was uplifted sometime in the past by another race (except maybe humans), is super cool. Younger races are clients of older races, and on earth, chimps and dolphins are being lifted to sentience in a similar way. That uplifting is the basis of the rest of the series, and it's the one that makes this SF setting so exciting. However, it's not the main idea here. The uplift stuff *matters* in this book, but it simmers in the background more than I remembered.

The ending is also a bit off for me. It's okay; I like how the characters come out pretty well. But some of the action amounts to a crime that needs to solved, and the solution doesn't really make sense, and has to be explained to us like Sherlock working through the details for Watson and Scotland Yard. It's clunky, IMO. It's as if he wrote the book, racking his brains till the end for a reason certain characters would do certain inexplicable things...

Anyway, the book is still a good read with interesting ideas. Maybe a 3.5, if you give half-points and don't wanna round up. But it kicks off a series that is better than that, and I'm glad after so long to be getting into it again. I traded all the books in long ago, but that's okay--part of the fun is hunting them all down again.

Recommended for hard science readers. David Brin knows his physics. And he's astute about politics. Worth it just for that.

View all my reviews

Where I Shoulda Stopped Reading

The Goliath Stone by Larry Niven
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm giving this three stars because it was, I have to say, kind of fun to read, (though it is hard to believe), with fun science and a breezy style. I did finish reading it, and giving a 3 to such books is my general rule. But in most ways this was bad. The people giving it 1 or 2--they're not wrong.

It has a great premise: Some men researching nanobots (nanites?) have sent a bunch of them up to intercept an asteroid that has some chance of hitting earth in the future, and now decades after they lost contact, an even bigger asteroid is headed to earth, apparently driven by those lost creatures. That's fun. And it starts okay. One of the guys responsible for that mission gets tracked down where he's hiding in Europe and gets whisked to safety just ahead of law enforcement. Now it's time to figure out what's going on and solve the problem.

After that, it's all about some weird wish-fulfillment from the authors, remaking the world using nanites and hubris in a way that would shock Thanos.

You expect some cat-and-mouse between the researchers and government agents, and there's a little of that about 90% through the book, but really not much, and there's almost zero tension. In fact, almost nothing actually happens. Most of the middle is made up of the main characters sitting around, piecing together all the crazy stuff that nanites have done behind the scenes for them and the world over the last 25 years or so, things they're just figuring out. They're basically googling for half the book, saying, "Oh, here's another thing." It's a lot of silly conversations with pointless inside jokes, references, and allusions, especially to Heinlein and other SF writers, interspersed with endless double-entendres that they all laugh at way too hard. The characters constantly fawn over each other in ways that make no sense to the reader.

Also, the love for all things libertarian is jarring and annoying.

And there are frequent references to the global warming scam (as this is set somewhat in our future) in such a way that it's clear that the authors, despite using pretty impressive hard science, here in the real world really don't believe in *that* bit of science, and in the process they destroyed what suspension of disbelief I had left. (I should have DNFed. Truly.)

But the worst are the hideous and weird revelations that come out about what has already done, secretly, unilaterally. Using nanites spread by viruses, Connors, the scientist behind most of the things happening in the book, has made decisions for the whole world in such a glib, light way that any sensible person should be horrified. Apparently, millions of bad guys died (fevers and stuff) when the nanites secretly infecting everyone judged them as too violent to allow to continue. Decent people were healed or rejuvenated, and it was engineered so that babies could be conceived only in cases when the woman climaxed during procreation, cutting the birth rate way way down. Stuff like that--just imagine the weirdo political extremist that you knew in high school making life-and-death decisions for the rest of the world, changing humanity and society in ways that could never be undone.

Remaking the world like a grandiose Dr. Jekyll with a god complex and a juvenile sense of humor.

It gave me the creeps in the same way as a borrowed book I once read about preppers, a novel where they make America safe for guns and god and Christian Nationalism. This one tied that one for most horrible, skewed world view I've ever read.

Oh, yeah, wait--in the midst of this, the scientist behind it all is using his nanite-perfected physique to win all the events at the olympics. Why? Why?

Man, I swear, this book really seemed like it was gonna be cool.

Not recommended.

View all my reviews