FACT SF Reading Group

October 1999

October 5: The Alien Years by Robert Silverberg

Six people attended the discussion of The Alien Years. This is a near future science fiction novel in which aliens invade and conquer the earth. The aliens remain offstage, and the story concentrates on the people living on Earth during the alien occupation. We encounter people forced into alien service, people seeking to serve the aliens, and people trying to overthrow the aliens. A large portion of the book follows members of a family in California that is active in the resistance throughout several generations.

We felt that this book had an intriguing premise, and it was developed well. We liked reading about truly alien extraterrestrial beings that were omnipotent and impossible for humans to understand. The aliens did strange things such as disassembling Stonehenge and reassembling it in a new pattern, and there was no attempt made to explain their actions. All of the characters in the book who tried to understand the aliens failed completely. The aliens were so inscrutable that they were almost like forces of nature. Several people commented that this book read a lot more like Niven and Pournelle's disaster novel Lucifer's Hammer than their classical alien invasion novel Footfall. Silverberg's prose was polished and showed great mastery of expression, allowing the action to flow swiftly and smoothly.

The only complaint voiced about the book was that it didn’t show quite the level of imagination and invention of Silverberg's great novels of the 70s. The books written by Silverberg at his peak, including Dying Inside and Hawksbill Station, were so good that a merely excellent book seems a little bit of a letdown.

Overall we found The Alien Years to be an engaging new take on the alien invasion story. We were fascinated by the situation, cared about the characters, and found the book hard to put down.

October 19: Stardust by Neil Gaiman

The discussion of Stardust drew seven participants. Stardust is a fairy tale about a young man who sets on a quest in an attempt to impress a beautiful young woman and win her affections. Along the way he has adventures involving tricky witches, evil noblemen, gypsies, and fallen stars. Unusually, the book is available in two forms: a heavily illustrated version with paintings by Charles Vess, and a plain text version. All of us at the meeting had read the illustrated version, which offered all the words plus some gorgeous art for less cost than the plain text hardback.

We started off with a brief discussion of a comics convention in Austin the prior weekend. Several of us had met Charles Vess at the convention. He had brought many of the original paintings from Stardust with him to the convention, and we had ooh'ed and aah'ed over them. Vess had signed our copies of Stardust and drawn lovely sketches in our books.

Our group found Stardust to be a surprisingly well done fairy tale. It interweaves plot threads in the manner of the Brothers Grimm. The story is surprisingly sweet for Gaiman compared to his more hard-edged work in Sandman. Several of us could imagine Gaiman reading this story to his children. As in most good fantasy, actions have consequences in this story. The characters are more fleshed-out than is typical in a fairy tale.

Some people were vaguely dissatisfied. A few thought the ending was a letdown. One person felt that Gaiman's approach to updating fairy tales tended to "flatten them out." A couple of people felt that the plot was too much of a travelogue.

We found that Vess's paintings were an essential part of Stardust. The prose in this book is not terribly visual, so the paintings were a huge help at setting the atmosphere of the book and letting us know how the characters looked. We were reminded of John Barnes's One for the Morning Glory, another excellent fairy tale with a Vess cover that our group discussed a couple of years ago.

All of our group enjoyed Stardust, and we recommend it to young and old lovers of fairy tales.

-- A. T. Campbell, III