FACT SF Reading Group

April 2007

April 2: Learning the World by Ken MacLeod

Seven people showed up at the North Village library to discuss this recent Hugo-nominated novel, and another submitted comments by email. The far-future story is about a group of humans who undertake a long space voyage to reach a planet they plan to settle, only to discover that it is already inhabited. The story weaves between the story of the settlers and of the bat-like inhabitants of the planet, who gradually realize something is going on. All of us had read MacLeod before, and all but one had started and finished Learning the World.

The human society on the spaceship is well-developed. There is a complex culture involving three classes: founders, crews, and the ship generation, and there are viewpoint characters from each class to showcase the classes' differences and interactions. The human settlers had great names: Atomic Discourse, Horrocks Mathematical, Synchronic Narrative Storm, and more. They even wrote and read their own science fiction, which they called "engineering tales."

Most of us found the story of the bat people on the planet more interesting. The technical level of their culture resembles that of 20^th Century Earth. We liked the viewpoint characters Darvin and Orro. Their daily lives are portrayed with enough detail that you can see they are alien, yet they are understandable. We appreciate how intelligently they detected the coming of the settlers and the scientific approach they took toward learning more.

We discussed MacLeod's writing style. A couple of people commented that they "love the way he writes." Another person enjoyed this book tremendously and said he felt this book was "MacLeod's first comedy." Yet another person observed that the book had been unusually hard for him to get into, and he never got totally engaged in the story.

We enjoyed reading a First Contact story for the first time in quite a while. We liked the philosophical discussions about the issues of meeting another culture. The story briefly addresses the Fermi Paradox ("if there is life on other planets, why haven't we encountered it?"), but several of us found MacLeod's argument flawed. A couple of people complained that the end was preachy; another person, who'd read most of MacLeod's work, said it was less preachy than most of the author's work.

Overall we liked Learning the World for its fresh take on a traditional science fiction situation. After the meeting, several of us had a nice dinner at Houston's.

-- A. T. Campbell, III

April 17: A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park

11 people attended the discussion. Everybody had started the book. Only 5 or so finished the book, but the rest were going to finish it. Only 2 people read Paul Park before. One of them had also read two sequels of A Princess of Roumania, and his comments gave an impression that A Princess of Roumania is a lot more enjoyable in retrospective, once you know what happened next, as the events in the sequels explain a lot of things in the first book. Eventually others had to restrain him from revealing plot snippets from the sequels, although he was doing it only to be helpful. :-)

The majority of the group liked this book. Some of the group members derive a lot of their enjoyment of a book from its literary and political references. One of those people found a treasure trove of such references in A Princess of Roumania. He thought the magic (which was based, he said, on Gypsy tradition), was interesting, and the political situation in the alternative Europe, where Roumania is a major power, fascinating. He was also intrigued by the gnostic undercurrents in Paul Park's writing and an unusual version of Christianity that exists in the parallel world of the novel -- it's not the Christianity we know.

In contrast, another reader thought the alternative Roumania was not so fascinating as to intrigue somebody who knew very little about the actual Romania. "I don't know much about Romania," said a reader. "An alternate history of a country I don't know much about doesn't do much for me. [The author] didn't pull it off for me. He didn't make me interested in Romania"

People gave Paul Park credit for attempting an ambitious story ("He's trying to marry a children's adventure story that kind of reminds me of Philip Pulman, with alternate history stuff, and I think it's an interesting idea," said a reader) and breaking fantasy stereotypes. "This is not Tolkien," said another reader who praised A Princess of Roumania as one of the best fantasy works he has ever read. "Tolkien created the stereotypes we follow, and I wish more people broke out of stereotypes like Paul Park has. The thing that fascinates me about this story is that it is talking about what happens to real life people when they do their best given the information they have. And the world is out there with a response that's based on a different set of information." Indeed, the plans of some of the main characters are continuously stymied, since they act on incomplete information.

Everybody "liked" the Baroness. Not that they found her a likeable character in a conventional sense (she certainly is not), but most people found her interesting to read about. On one hand she is a sociopath who kills casually, almost spontaneously, when her plans are thwarted, and considers herself to be above the rest of the humanity; on the other hand, she is miserable and full of self-hatred. Readers thought her conflicted psyche made her human.

There were some criticisms voiced by one or more members of the group:

• Readers felt distanced from the characters. Several people mentioned they did not find a character to root for or to become attached to.
• The sudden shifts of viewpoint were confusing. Sometimes it wasn't immediately obvious which character is the viewpoint character in a particular chapter.
• One person did not think the characters' behavior was credible. "One of my issues with either fantasy or SF where someone is taken from our world, and maybe I'm just way too egocentric, but it would take me pages and pages of my own mental dialogues to say, why me? I didn't feel they were incredulous enough in that situation." he said.
• One person thought the beginning of the story, where we meet Miranda's parents, held false promise, as it was shaping up to be a story about kids who live in a college town and whose parents work at the university. He was disappointed to find out it wasn't the case. "I thought their parents were very interesting characters, only they don't appear further in the book."
• Several readers remarked that the story was rather slow. "His pacing is very pedestrian," said one reader. "Very slow. He just doesn't get on with it, even three quarters into the book. His writing style is not bad, and his prose is fairly good, but his storytelling is, for me, pedestrian. It's very hard to keep going because he doesn't progress anything."

It doesn't help that the blurbs in the book compare Paul Park to famous contributors to the alternate history genre, such as Roger Zelazny. The comparison was found unwarranted by some people. "As far as alternate history I will admit that there were some really good books I read, [Charles Stross's] Family Trade and [Roger Zelazny's] Nine Princes of Amber, and the first chapter of Nine Princes of Amber had more cool things than this book. Certainly more action than this whole book. Paul Park is a good writer, but he's not at Zelazny's level yet. He's being compared to Zelazny, but maybe it's because if you write a robot novel, you would be compared to Asimov," said another reader.

Other people, while agreeing the pace was kind of slow, thought it may have been adequate for the kind of story Paul Park is telling. "Nothing he writes is action adventure. It's intellectual puzzles," said a reader. Despite the slowness, most people found the story good enough to enjoy, and many were planning to read the sequels.

Still, some people felt the novel did not quite live up to the expectations raised by the glowing blurbs. For the second time in the recent history of the reading group, the discussion of a book ended up with a meta-discussion of why that book was so highly praised by famous writers (in this case, Ursula Le Guin and John Crowley). Some people also didn't think A Princess of Roumania was outstanding enough to be nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2006. A reader suggested this book may have been considered deserving of a nomination for the following reasons: "It's trying to be literary, it has downtrodden people in Eastern Europe, and it was written by a college professor."

-- Elze Hamilton