FACT SF Reading Group

March 2000

March 1: Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb

Ten people attended this discussion. Ship of Magic is the first in a fantasy trilogy about a seafaring society where a few rich families have magical "liveships." Liveships are special because their figureheads are intelligent and can talk, and the ships are made of a special wood that enables them to travel in waters where other ships can't go. The book begins when a liveship captain dies and his family has to pick a new captain and get the family finances in order. The main characters are the captain's family, several members of the crew, and a pirate who hopes to capture a liveship. The story features sailing adventure, sea serpents, rebellious teenagers, and slave revolts.

Despite a length of over 800 pages, we all had no trouble finishing the book. We found it to be a gripping yarn. We loved the concept of the liveships. It was obvious that the author knows sailing and has a passion for it. The characters are vividly drawn, and we all found that we liked certain characters and loathed others. The author puts her characters through drastic and irrevocable changes, including breaking family ties, weird marriage contracts, and crippling injuries. The ships themselves are important characters, and we were all touched by the story of Paragon, the ship who went insane due to the death of his family. The book contains a great deal of foreshadowing, both for events later in this book and for events in subsequent volumes. Even those who don't normally read fantasy liked this book.

We did find a few drawbacks. Some of us felt that the story took too long to get moving, since the first hundred pages are a slow-paced introduction to the large cast. Some also felt that the number of viewpoint characters was too large.

Overall we liked Ship of Magic a lot, and we'd recommend it to lovers of sea adventure and fantasy. The second book in the series, Mad Ship, arrived in paperback three days after this discussion; it sold out immediately, primarily to members of the Reading Group. Robin Hobb has gotten us hooked on her Liveship Saga.

March 21: Diaspora by Greg Egan

Eight people attended this discussion, and one submitted comments by e-mail. Diaspora is set in the far future when humanity has changed greatly. Few people have traditional human bodies. Most of the rest have downloaded their minds either into giant robots or into computers. The people in the computers have a complex society filled with downloaded personalities, their "offspring," and artificial intelligences. Early in the story, a cosmological event threatens all life on Earth. The computer societies send explorers throughout the galaxy in search of more information about this event and a way to survive it. Along the way Egan fills the story with a lot of advanced material about mathematics, physics, and artificial intelligence.

This book turned out to be too much of a "hard SF" novel for most of our group. Half of the group didn't even try to read it, and just showed up to socialize. A couple of people read about 50% of the book. Only three people finished the book, including the one who participated by e-mail.

Those of us did finish the book (including me) generally liked it. We appreciated Egan's many Big Ideas. We were impressed with a book where none of the main characters were traditional humans, yet we still managed to care about them. The societal clashes between the downloaded personalities and the traditional humans were interesting and believable. We liked the technical material and found it augmented the story, and as far as we could tell it was accurate. Some of us visited Egan's web site to see diagrams and animations illustrating some of the mathematical and cosmological principles in Diaspora.

Those who didn't finish the book (and even some who did) found some problems with it. Most of us found that the novel started slowly. Many felt that the amount of technical material was too much to maintain the narrative. One person felt the book read like a collection of articles from Scientific American rather than a novel. Some found the non-gender-specific pronouns used for the computerized characters (ver, ve, etc.) to be distracting.

Overall we found Diaspora to be a challenging reading experience. A couple of us liked the book a lot, but it is obviously not for all readers. We all admire Egan's daring in writing such an ambitious novel.

-- A. T. Campbell, III