What I've Been Reading - 2010, part 2

Among my recent literary diversions was Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. This is a novel set in the Civil War and was the basis for a major Hollywood film a few years ago. The main characters are Inman, a Confederate soldier, and Ada, a woman who had only recently moved to the area Inman came from when the war broke out. The story switches between the two characters, alternating between the journey of Inman back toward home and Ada's struggle to survive and keep her farm near the titular mountain going. The story is apparently based in part on the story of an actual great-great uncle of Charles Frazier named William P. Inman. I wasn't really sure what to expect from this one, but it turned out to be reasonably gripping without being overly shallow. What I particularly appreciated (especially having read Gone With The Wind and being aware of the peculiar nostalgia with which many Southerners view the Civil War) was that despite being written by a North Carolinian and having two North Carolinians as protagonists, the tone of the novel is highly critical of the war, slavery, and the Southern elite who led their states to war, while not painting the Union soldiers as any better. The Civil War is, probably quite accurately, portrayed as an awful time full of desperate characters doing desperate deeds, and others just trying to survive. In fact, a major theme of the novel is how people cope with great hardships.

Having recently acquired two books which collect all of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories (The First Book of Lankhmar and The Second Book of Lankhmar), I decided to start working my way through these fantasy classics. For those who aren't familiar with them, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are two iconic sword and sorcery heroes, on a par with characters like Robert E. Howard's Conan. The two were created by Leiber and his friend Harry Fischer (who also wrote part of one of the stories), and based in part on them (Fafhrd on Leiber and the Gray Mouser on Fischer). Fafhrd is a hugely tall barbarian warrior from the frozen north, and the Gray Mouser is a small but very quick rogue who dresses in gray and occasionally dabbles in sorcery. The two live largely on work as mercenaries and out-and-out thievery and they indulge heavily in drinking and women, but at the same time they are generally decent and good-natured, never engaging in wanton cruelty. Both are intelligent and witty, with the Mouser particularly known for his sardonic humor, but they are also very human and occasionally get fooled. They were among the chief inspirations for the protagonists of Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, a novel I discussed a few months ago.

The Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories are set in the world of Nehwon, a world that bears some resemblance to Earth in ancient and medieval times, but that is also home to sorcerers, monsters, and other fantastic creatures. The greatest city of Nehwon is the large, decadent city of Lankhmar, where many of the stories take place, though the heroes also travel widely around Nehwon. The stories were mostly published as short stories beginning in 1939 (not all in order of their internal chronology) and only later collected into 7 books (the first four of which are included in The First Book of Lankhmar), so each book is essentially a collection of several separate stories, some more clearly linked than others and in some cases with gaps in terms of the characters' histories. I started the series with Swords and Deviltry and Swords Against Death, the first two books included in the omnibus The First Book of Lankhmar, and at the time I started writing this blog entry I was reading the third, Swords in the Mist [Update: I finished it a few days later]. Leiber's writing is generally quite vivid and has nice touches of humor. Due to the nature of his heroes (who are very much testosterone-driven), it is more likely to appeal to men than women. Leiber generally doesn't attempt to deal with any deep, serious themes, though in the Devourers that appear in "Bazaar of the Bizarre", extra-dimensional merchants who deceive their customers that they are selling wonderful things when it is actually all worthless trash, some might see an attack on unscrupulous businesspeople of our own world. Likewise, one might see the various foreign religions based on suffering martyrs in "Lean Times in Lankhmar" as something of a parody (though not a particularly hostile one) of Christianity, at least as it would have appeared to the average Roman in the early Roman Empire.

As I mentioned, both Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are imperfect heroes, not only in their sometimes shady and unethical deeds, but also in their occasional vulnerability to tricks and traps. In the above-mentioned story, the Gray Mouser is beguiled by the Devourers and has to be rescued by Fafhrd, and in other stories it is Fafhrd who has to be saved by the Gray Mouser. Both have a hard time resisting an adventure, though often it is one or the other who persuades his initially reluctant friend to go along. This thirst for adventure takes them all over the place. In one notable case (Adept's Gambit, included in Swords in the Mist), their journeying takes them (via the interdimensional caves of the sorcerer Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, patron of Fafhrd and counterpart and sometime rival of the Mouser's patron Sheelba of the Eyeless Face) all the way to Earth in Hellenistic times, though it is an Earth with real magic. They end up in the Phoenician city of Tyre[, though they later adventure to the east as well]. It's even possible to date their adventure more specifically, as there is a reference to Philip of Macedon's defeat by the Romans at Cynoscephalae (which took place in 197 BCE) and to Hannibal joining the court of Antiochus (which happened in 195 BCE). I found the latter reference, brief though it was, especially interesting, not only because Hannibal was my favorite figure from ancient history when I was young, but also as the book I had finished immediately prior to Swords in the Mist (which I'll describe below) had a much longer reference to Hannibal, despite being science fiction set in the far distant future.

After reading the first two books in the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser collection and before starting the third, I read the last book in a science fiction series by David Zindell, having finally acquired it while in the US (and I had to order it online to do so). I read the first of the books in this series, Neverness, several years ago, and then started on Zindell's follow-up trilogy, A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, including The Broken God, The Wild, and the book I just finished, War In Heaven. The novels are set in a far distant future when humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Neverness is narrated by Mallory Ringess, who belongs to a caste of pilots based on the icy planet Neverness who use complex mathematics to pilot their ships (known as lightships) through what amounts to shortcuts in space, allowing them to travel between the stars much faster than light. Mallory is a highly flawed protagonist; he is quick-tempered, violent and arrogant. In fact, Zindell has said he originally conceived Neverness as a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur, with Mallory as the Mordred character. But in the final version, Mallory not only overcomes his flaws to do good, but even transcends ordinary humanity. The book is a complex and deep tale, with a great deal of interesting commentary on human nature.

A Requiem for Homo Sapiens tells the story of Mallory's son Danlo. Danlo is born and raised in a primitive (essentially Neanderthal) society, as a result of events in Neverness, but goes on to become a pilot like his father, whose ultimate fate is one of several important questions Danlo seeks to answer in the course of the novels. The trilogy delves even deeper into questions of metaphysics, philosophy, the nature of identity and consciousness, the difference between living in the real world and living in a simulation, and ultimately the meaning of life itself. Danlo is a very unusual hero for a book of this sort, as early on he takes a vow of ahimsa, meaning that he seeks never to harm another, even in his thoughts. This includes non-human animals, which means that he becomes a vegetarian. Ultimately he finds his vow of ahimsa very difficult to hold to, and he is forced to break it on a few occasions, but he nevertheless shows remarkable restraint in many stressful situations (the suffering he is forced to undergo in the last novel is almost unbelievable). But while he is peaceful (mostly), thoughtful and highly philosophical, he is also sometimes almost wildly impulsive (hence his nickname, Danlo the Wild) and daring almost to the point of foolhardiness. One interesting feature he has is a scar (from a self-inflicted wound) on his forehead in the shape of a lightning bolt. Of course this should make most people think of a certain boy wizard from a recent fantasy series. I should note, however, that the book in which he acquires the scar (The Broken God) was published in 1992, so if anybody copied anybody, it was J.K. Rowling who copied Zindell (though more likely it is simply coincidence). Likewise, Zindell used the idea of execution by placing the victim in a Schrödinger's box (I won't explain what that is here, but readers can go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat) before Dan Simmons used it in the Hyperion Cantos.

Due in part to all the exploration of philosophical ideas and in part to Zindell's writing style, the books are not particularly quick or easy reads; in this respect, they are more akin to something by, say, Umberto Eco than most other science fiction novels. In fact it took me a while to really get into Neverness, and in all the books there were occasionally times where I got slightly impatient for the story to move along (though perhaps that is just an indication that my attention span, while better than most people's, is not what it should be). I also won't say that I agree with all of Zindell's (or at least Danlo's) conclusions about the nature of consciousness and life, though having recently read a bit about amino acids, proteins and DNA, I agree that is rather amazing, almost mystical, the way such complex molecules combine to create something that is self-replicating and in its higher forms self-aware. But while I don't agree with everything Zindell says, I enjoyed the books immensely, and if someone asked for evidence that science fiction can be as profound as any other type of literature, this series would be one I'd mention, along with works by Ursula LeGuin, Iain M. Banks, and Gene Wolfe. In fact there are a number of similarities between Zindell and Wolfe (who has praised Zindell's work), one being a use of a variety of unusual and archaic terms to describe people and objects in the far distant futures they describe, though their writing styles are distinct; for instance, Wolfe makes more use of allegory. Another difference is that while Wolfe's Book of the New Sun contains strong echoes of Christianity, the philosophy in Zindell's books owes much more to Hinduism and Buddhism.

Characterization is generally pretty good, with individuals such as Mallory, Danlo, Leopold Soli (Lord Pilot at the beginning of Neverness), Mallory's great friend Bardo, and Hanuman (Danlo's best friend and worst enemy) being fully realized. Even the goddess encountered by Mallory and Danlo (a number of entities in Zindell's galaxy, some originally human and some not, have become essentially gods and expanded to dominate large areas of space) has a distinct, if to some degree unfathomable, character. A few characters are more simplistic; Betram Jaspari, for instance, first encountered by Danlo in The Wild, is almost a caricature of a crazed fundamentalist religious fanatic, even down to "kill them all and let God sort them out", though I suspect Zindell may have done this deliberately. The plot generally holds together well, though a few plotlines are dealt with in what some might view as a slightly cursory manner. There was only one major point which to me seemed unresolved, and that had to do with how a certain event near the end of War in Heaven could be consistent with the identity of the apparent narrator of that book (I won't be more specific as I don't want to give too much away).

The books also contain a few minor but interesting (to me, at least) references. At one point in War in Heaven, Hanuman appears to quote Joni Mitchell; he says, "We are stardust, we are golden", which, while it is entirely appropriate to the theological point he is making (he has taken over as the head of a religion centered on Mallory Ringess), also happens to be a line from "Woodstock". This might have been unintentional if Zindell didn't know the song, but I think it was done on purpose. Also, at another point in the same novel, the commander of one of the warring forces of lightships and other space ships designs a battle plan based on that used by Hannibal at the battle of Cannae (here spelled Kannae, much as Jesus is referred to as Jesus the Kristoman). Zindell actually spends a whole page on Cannae and Hannibal's victory there, which I found particularly interesting since, as noted above, Hannibal was the figure from ancient history who most fascinated me when I was young, and I didn't expect even a reference to him in a novel set many thousands of years in the future, much less a whole page.

To sum up, I'd recommend any of the novels I've discussed, though they all appeal to different types of readers (or different tastes in the same reader). I hope the majority of the books I read in the months to come are as good.