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Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
August 31, 2003
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.
Writing Reviews, Initiate Brother, and Freedom
For several years I wrote a regular book review column for The Magazine
of Fantasy and Science Fiction (aka F&SF), in which I called attention to books
that I thought were worth reading.
I wrote almost exclusively positive reviews for the very good reason that
the cruelest review is silence.
This is because readers, as they browse in the bookstore, don't remember
much of the content of a review. Instead, they notice a book on the shelf and,
if the title has been made familiar -- whether in a rave review or a butchery job
-- they'll pick it up and say, silently or aloud, "Hmmm. I've heard something
about this one."
I also avoid writing really nasty reviews -- most of the time -- because I
have had several occasions to discover my own fallibility. For instance, as a
callow newcomer to the field of science fiction back in the late 1970s, I
reviewed a new book by a writer I had much admired. I had been deeply
disappointed by the thinness of the story, the almost perfunctory
characterization.
So I wrote a clever little hatchet job that made me sound oh so superior
to this older writer.
The editor of the review magazine published the review. But he also
wrote me a note, saying that I was probably right about the novel -- but it was,
after all, a young adult novel, and the author was a very old man who had
never been well rewarded, financially, and perhaps he had lost some of his
powers as a writer but it would be a shame if he could no longer make a living
in his old age.
I looked again at the book and realized that I had judged it unfairly. As a
young adult novel, the thinness was not important compared to the energy and
excitement of the story.
And this was one of the great writers of the field, the author of books that
had meant a great deal to me in my early teens. How shameful for a young
upstart like me to take a cleaver to his reputation, when I owed him more than
I could repay.
I vowed then and there that I would not review a book unless I saw some
virtue in it. I have only violated that rule with books and movies that have
received so much acclaim that my review will make no difference, except
perhaps to offer some comfort to those who find the same flaws as I do. Thus I
have no feelings of guilt about taking after movies like The Hours and About
Schmidt, or books like The Collections.
But unpretentious books that don't appeal to me are not targets of my
wrath, first of all because there is no point in giving attention to books that
might best be left alone, and second because I might be quite wrong and
misread a book that is better than I gave it credit for.
Often the worst thing I can say about a book is that I am simply not in
the natural audience for it. And that says more about me than about the book,
doesn't it?
So there I was, for all those years, writing generally nice reviews for F&SF
about books I admired to one degree or another, until something quite awful
happened.
I burned out on science fiction.
Today I'm unlikely to burn out because my column title allows me to
review anything at all. If I'm tired of talking about one thing, I'll review
something else.
But in the pages of F&SF, it really wasn't a good thing when I started
reviewing more mystery novels than sci-fi or fantasy books.
And so I not only resigned from the column (to be replaced by the
inimitable and admirable Charles de Lint, so that no one missed me a bit), I
also stopped reading science fiction at all.
For more than ten years, I read only a couple of sci-fi novels out of
dozens that were sent to me for cover quotes. (I don't give cover quotes for
books I haven't read, and I don't lie -- though some publishers choose to use
only a portion of the blurb I sent them.)
I found with most of the books I was sent that within a few pages I was
saying, "Oh, no, he's doing one of these and why did he choose to do that when
he could have done this?"
In other words, I was like a tailor who can't see the suit for the seams. I
had become a truly terrible reader of science fiction.
So except for a handful of atypical books -- Jack Whyte's Arthurian
novels, for instance, and anything by Dave Wolverton -- I was away from the
field completely. I didn't attend conventions, I quietly dropped out of the
Science Fiction Writers of America ... I was gone.
And all my opinions about most authors were based on their works prior
to the 1990s.
In the past few years, however, I have been drawn back into the field
through another path -- the new trend of fantasies that are written with the
accuracy and depth of good science fiction.
One of the writers I recently discovered that way, Sean Russell, I have
recently reviewed here. But I had put off reading his first fantasy series, the
two-volume The Initiate Brother and Gatherer of Clouds.
I avoided them first because everyone told me that they were by far
Russell's best books. I always hate it when writers' early works are reputed to
be their best, and so I make it a point to read the later works -- usually to
discover that the later books are, in fact, better.
The other reason I avoided them was because they were about a
Japanese Buddhist monk who is good at martial arts.
Nothing puts me to sleep faster than books and movies that get all
mystical and religious about fancy ways of kicking and punching people. I had
to overcome an enormous aversion in order to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon. I only read Shogun because I already trusted Clavell as the author of
King Rat.
But when I finished all of Russell's other books, I found myself, for the
first time in my life, unable to read anything by anyone else. I had been so
taken by his storytelling that, despite my irritation with his inability to
conjugate lay and lie, every other fiction book I picked up seemed pale and
shallow by comparison.
I turned to nonfiction, of course -- my usual cure -- but eventually I
succumbed to the inevitable and picked up the Buddhist kick-boxing fantasy,
as I had categorized it in my mind.
Wrong! So, so wrong.
Russell has created an imaginary land where Japanese names are
imposed on a Chinese landscape and a mixed Japanese-Chinese culture; and
while the pseudo-Buddhist "Botahist" monastic orders are very important in
the story, it is not really about the religion. Rather it is the quintessential
imaginary kingdom story, in which we are caught up in great events, with
fascinating characters who impose their will on history even as history shapes
their lives, often in tragic ways.
The two books, combined, are about 1200 pages of extraordinarily rich
storytelling. There is considerably more action and intrigue in this work than
in Sean Russell's later novels -- hence the assertion by some readers that this
first opus is his best. The later works are more ambitious and take on harder
projects which, even when successful, have more limited audience appeal.
But this first work, too, is ambitious. The delights are too many to list;
let me point out only my favorite. One of Russell's motifs is that we are shown
a key decision from the point of view of the person making the choice. We
know exactly why the decision was made. Then we switch to someone else's
viewpoint and watch them completely misinterpret the other person's motives,
almost always in the direction of suspecting them of having a darker and
cleverer purpose.
So even the characters we admire most are constantly misjudging other
people. And yet somehow things work out, so that by the end most of the
characters have ended in a way befitting their actions and choices along the
way.
And, best of all, while conjuring up a world as lush as Tolkien's Middle
Earth, Russell manages to end his book, not with something as arbitrary as
casting a magical ring into a sea of molten rock, but rather with something far
more like the real world, as a great invasion dashes against the rock of human
nature.
Now, having plunged wholeheartedly into the best of contemporary
fantasy, I dared to pick up science fiction again.
I happened to be sitting in the Greensboro airport, waiting for a flight,
when I noticed that the young man sitting next to me was reading what looked
to be a sci-fi novel.
Because I hate people who interrupt my reading to ask me what I'm
reading -- as if quietly reading a book were a plea to converse with strangers;
as if their lives would somehow be changed by knowing, right this minute, what
book it is that I prefer to their conversation -- I waited, reading my own
magazines, until he set down the book himself to take a stretch.
Then I pounced.
The book he was reading was Freedom's Choice, by Anne McCaffrey.
I knew McCaffrey as the author of the perennially popular Pern novels, in
which science-fictionally-explained dragons figure prominently. I also knew
her as one of the kindest, most generous people in the field of science fiction,
always welcoming to new writers.
The young man's review was excellent. The series had been pushed on
him by friends, but he was happy they had gotten him to read it.
So in the Atlanta airport, I was happy to find the first book in the series,
Freedom's Landing, and I can affirm that this is indeed a fascinating and
enjoyable series. Freedom's Choice is second, followed by Freedom's
Challenge and Freedom's Ransom.
The premise is that our contemporary world is suddenly visited by a race
of devastatingly powerful aliens, the Catteni, who announce their arrival by
scooping up the entire population of fifty cities around the world. Their
captives are taken into slavery -- and the rest of Earth is put under Catteni
rule.
All that is background; the story actually begins when a group of human
slaves already in service on another planet are rounded up and dumped onto
an unsettled world. Apparently this is the way Catteni colonize new planets --
they keep dumping slaves there and, when the some of them have managed to
survive and subdue the place, they come in and start to govern.
So the story is about the resourceful way that humans organize
themselves to make the best of the world they've found.
Thus far we're in Heinlein territory. McCaffrey's spin is that her main
point of view character gets involved with the one Catteni who has been
stranded on this new world with a bunch of humans and other enslaved aliens,
and manages to save his life. With his inside knowledge, the humans learn
that the Catteni are themselves slaves to a vile race of overlords who use the
Catteni to do their dirty work.
The planet they have been dumped onto is also not what it seemed --
apparently it is a farming planet used by a distant race of beings
technologically superior even to the Catteni and their rulers. So the human
colonists begin the dangerous game of trying to get this distant race of Farmers
to intervene to help free humans --and all the other enslaved species -- from
the overlords.
But why am I telling you all this? Science fiction plots always sound
vaguely dumb when you tell them simply like this, because what makes them
work is the wealth of detail that surrounds them. Because by definition you're
writing something contrary to reality, it's going to sound bizarre; but when you
unfold the story bit by bit, it is perfectly believable.
Anyway, I'm back to reading science fiction now and then, and I'm
delighted to tell you that despite her gathering years, Anne McCaffrey remains
one of sci-fi's best storytellers, and the Freedom series are the kind of story
that got me reading science fiction in the first place.
(For parents, however, you need to be aware that while there is nothing
explicit and the language is mostly quite clean, there is a degree of candor
about adult activities that may make you give these books something of a PG-13 rating.)
*
For those who are dying to try Fiji Water, which is the best bottled water
in America, you can find it now at Fresh Market in Greensboro. It's also
showing up all over America. The square bottle doesn't fit easily inside
cupholders in cars -- but then, when you drop them on their side, they don't
roll away.
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