Memory (Book)

Harra Csurik* had been almost right. It wasn’t your life again you found, going on. It was your life anew. And it wasn’t at all what he’d been expecting.

Miles. Memory. Milestone. Mystery. Melding. In Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold chronicles a turning point in the life of Miles Vorkosigan. Miles turns 30. After mishandling his seizure condition, he is forced to leave the Barrayaran military as well as the Dendarii Mercenaries. He is at loose ends and possibly dangerous to himself. --Although, he does manage to accidentally find Emperor Gregor a wife during this time-- When Simon Illyan, the long suffering and Miles-abused head of Imperial Security, suffers damage to the memory chip implanted in his brain, Miles feels compelled to help. Soon, Miles is drawn into a mystery. In order to solve it, he must combine his personas of Lord Miles Vorkosigan and Admiral Naismith.

Memory is the tenth book in the Vorkosigan Saga. It was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Science Fiction awards. While not actually winning any awards, I believe it is tremendously rewarding for those who have been following the saga. The story contains the usual humor, some deep moments, and a healthy dose of mystery. It draws on many of the plot lines from earlier stories, looking at them from a more mature Miles perspective. And, as always, it is nice to catch up with old “friends.”

*Harra Csurik is the woman whose baby was murdered in Border’s of Infinity. Miles visits her a decade later in Memory.

A Fire Upon the Deep (Book)

What I most admire about Vernor Vinge is his ability to create interesting worlds—planets and galaxies—and alien species. In A Deepness in the Sky he describes the Spiders. In the 1993 Hugo Award winner, A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor describes a number of interesting species, including the Tines. For me they are what make the book worth reading. The Tines look like odd shaped dogs, but each pack shares one consciousness. They can’t function as singletons, and at times may need to add new members in order to be fully functional. The consciousness of one individual, the Woodcarver, has survived for over 500 years, despite losing individual members. When a human and Tine interacts, Vinge not only has to describe what the Tine is saying, but also what various members are doing. Despite the Tines being doglike, Vinge stays away from anything that is cutesy or cartoonish.

Briefly, a human colony experimenting with ancient technology accidentally releases an entity, the Blight. Before the Blight destroys the colony, one spaceship escapes. It carries a family, over a hundred children in deep-sleep, and a countermeasure that may possibly destroy the Blight. The spaceship crash-lands on Tines, a medieval planet inhabited by the Tines, a dog-like species. The two parents are murdered. Their two children are rescued/captured by opposite factions in a war. In the meantime the Blight begins to wipe out thousands of worlds. A group of two humans and two plant-like aliens tries to find the ship with the countermeasure and rescue the children.

I admit that I again got bogged down in reading A Fire Upon the Deep as I did with A Deepness in the Sky. I am not sure whether I wasn’t emotionally invested enough in the characters or if the plot's peaks and valleys don’t match the rhythm I like in a book. Intellectually I found it very interesting. The book is highly rated on a number of websites.

This book marks my completion of reading the Hugo Award winners from 1958 through 2010. Yeah!!! I still plan to read two more Hugo Award winners, books published before the Hugo awards were given out annually. I also plan to read this year’s nominees, which requires that I catch up on Bujold’s Vorkosigan series. After that, I want to choose my reading-list a little bit more organically. I enjoy quirky books with warm characters and interesting science or, sometimes, history.

I Need Somebody to Love (Reflections)

I need somebody to love when I read a novel. As I finish up reading the Hugo Winners from 1958 to the present, I have been reflecting on my experience. I enjoy and feel rewarded by novels where I can learn more about science. I appreciate and admire an original setting. Quick pacing or witty narrative can make a book more fun. But the deal breaker for me is character development. Looking at the ratings on Worlds Without End, my local library’s website, and the listing of awards, I can see that is not true for all science fiction and fantasy readers.

I need characters for whom I can feel significantly empathetic in order to feel motivated to keep reading a book. Otherwise finishing the book is more of a chore for me and less of a pleasure. I like my characters fully fleshed out and four-dimensional. I want to know their quirks and flaws, their aspirations, and their fears. I like to know a little bit about their back-stories. The Civil War veteran Enoch Wallace in Way Station by Clifford D. Simak and Ender in Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card especially moved me. The novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell created a unique experience for me. A number of times while reading the book I caught myself wondering whether Mr. Norrell was a good, likeable person. In retrospect, I think that he is so much of a curmudgeon that he gets a free pass.

I enjoy books where I relate so much to the characters that I begin to experience my own world from their viewpoints. When I was walking to my local library a few days ago, after I finished reading Paladin of Souls, I noticed black smoke coming from the local funeral home; obviously someone was being cremated. What fascinated me was that I saw the scene out of Ista’s eyes. I felt her feelings. I heard in my heart words that seemed like they would have come from her. Bujold’s writing, when it is at its best, does that to me. Similar experiences have happened to me after reading numerous other Hugo Winners. Sometimes this gets a bit weird. After reading the books in The Neanderthal Parallax trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer—Hominids won a Hugo Award—I experienced my world from the viewpoint of an evolved Neanderthal. Similarly after reading David Brin’s Startide Rising and Uplift War, I experienced the world from the viewpoints of a neo-dolphin and a new-chimpanzee.

All the Hugo Award winners—with perhaps an exception or two—are good or great books. But, for me, they were not all enjoyable books. Orson Scott Card, in the introduction to Ender's Game, talks about what we as readers bring to the experience of reading a book. I realize I bring a longing to have someone take me by the hand and share their world and life experiences with me. Each reader of a book, including a Hugo Award winning novel, will bring a different set of desires and experiences.

Paladin of Souls (Book)

Tch, tch, tch, look at yourself, bittersweet Ista. Saint, sorceress, dowager royina of all Chalion-Ibra, converses with gods, when not cursing them…

I believe that the reason Paladin of Souls won the 2004 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Fantasy awards goes beyond Lois McMaster Bujold’s usual masterful storytelling. The story resonates with something deep inside many readers. It is an example of the hero’s journey, an archetypal experience that leads to wholeness. The book speaks to our internal questioning about our purpose in life, as well as our struggles to communicate with the Divine—in the world of Chalion, the five gods. Don’t get me wrong, this is also a fun, relatively fast-paced adventure.

Bujold first introduces Ista, in The Curse of Chalion, as Teidez and Iselle mother, a woman made mad by a curse put on the kingdom and by the guilt of accidentally murdering her husband’s male lover. By the time Paladin of Souls takes place, Ista has recovered, but her family and servants are still overprotective of her. Ista runs away from home in the guise of taking a spiritual pilgrimage, accompanied by a spiritual adviser and a minimum of servants. (Her lady-in-waiting is a courier who knows more about horses than royal ladies.) After being attacked by raiders, Ista is rescued by a patrol from Castle Porifors. But, something more sinister is going on than just an expected attack from a rival kingdom. In addition, at Castle Porifors Ista comes to realize that she is the answer to someone else’s prayers. As the plot unfolds, she slowly becomes a paladin—a champion or hero—to souls.

Paladin of Souls is the second book of the three book Chalion Series. My guess is that many people could easily read it as a stand-alone novel. It is one of my favorite Hugo Award winning novels.

The Curse of Chalion (Book)

Welcome to sainthood, Cazaril. By the gods’ blessings, you get to host miracles! The catch is, you don’t get to choose what they are…

The Curse of Chalion is yet another example of Lois McMaster Bujold’s wonderful storytelling ability. At the beginning of the book, Cazaril is a broken man. He has been betrayed, physically and emotionally assaulted, and falsely accused. Like some of the main characters in Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, Cazaril is also a man of high moral integrity and honor. He goes back to the castle where he served in his youth. There he is appointed to the roles of secretary and tutor to a young woman. The rest of the story involves his attempts to teach and protect her.

I admire Bujold’s ability to tug at my heartstrings. I stayed up way too late last night so that I could find out what finally happens to Cazaril. The Curse of Chalion was nominated for a number of awards and is the prequel to Paladin of Souls, a Hugo winner.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Book)

Theoretical, Practical, & Street Magicians. Fairies. Prophecies. Enchantment. Kings. Servants. Rogues. Napoleon.

The winner of the 2005 Hugo and British Fantasy Society awards, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, is a (somewhat) grown-up fairy tale. Although it is a rather long book, the wry humor of the narration and the plot twists and turns make it a fun read.

In the early 1800s, when the people of England think magic is a thing of the past, Mr. Norrell presents himself as a practicing magician. Early on in the story he brings back a woman from the dead, partially as a way of proving his abilities. Unfortunately he uses the services of a fairy, which leads to some unexpected and unpleasant consequences as the story unfolds. Norrell soon finds that he is not the only practicing magician. The young man Jonathan Strange also decides to take up magic and finds that he is quite good at it. Norrell is proud and bases everything on information from his huge library of books, which he tries to keep from aspiring magicians. Strange is much more free and experiential. Their relationship threads its way throughout the book. At different times within the story they are student and teacher, rivals, friends, and colleagues. Also winding its way throughout the book is a prophecy given by a supposed huckster and street magician foretelling the fates of the magicians and a “nameless slave.”

While Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is primarily good entertainment, Clarke is also mindful of the issues of classism, racism, and sexism, which were even more prevalent in the early 1800s. Clarke also seems to allude to other ideas, using magic as a metaphor. In one exchange Arabella, Strange’s wife tells him, “I thought you meant to be a magician not an explorer!” Strange answers, “It is the same thing. An explorer cannot stay at home reading maps other men have made. A magician cannot increase the stock of magic by reading other men’s books.” In my opinion, the world needs more well-read explorers.

A Deepness in the Sky (Book)

A sun that turns on and off. A spider race. Folk heroes in disguise. Brilliant slaves. People in cold sleep. Nanotechnology. Deceptions. Exploitation.

I found the 2000 Hugo award and Campbell award winning novel, Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge, brilliant and thought provoking, but I did not enjoy reading it. For me it was too long, too dark, didn’t have enough warm, and didn’t have enough science to keep my attention. Perhaps the bad guys were just too evil for me. Yet, the premise is fascinating.

An inhabited planet encircles a sun that goes on and off—almost like a furnace—every two hundred and fifty years. The planet has a very hot period, an inhabitable period, and a frigid period when the inhabitants must be in a type of hibernation underground: in the deepness. The inhabitants are a spider-like species. During each inhabitable period, the Spiders must rebuild what has been lost to the cold and relighting of the sun and then further their technology with the time they have left. Two human races go to the planet just before the relighting the sun. One is a merchant race, the Qeng Ho. The other is an opportunist race, the Emergents. The Emergents have found that by using a virus and magnetic wave technology they can create a group of slaves so focused that they are almost machinelike—think someone with Asperger syndrome but many times more focused. The Qeng Ho and Emergents briefly go to war, and the Emergents come out the winner, but their resources are seriously depleted. Along with the captured Qeng Ho, they wait for the Spiders to achieve enough technological knowledge so that they can help rebuild the Emergent ships. The Emergents monitor the Spider technology and then infiltrate and corrupt it.

I was fascinated by the concept that all civilizations rise and fall, gaining and then losing technological ability. Another interesting idea—not explored enough—was human’s ability to relate to a totally alien species. A third concept was the right to control one's own destiny.

A Deepness in the Sky is the prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, the 1993 Hugo award winner.