FACT SF Reading Group

June 2007

June 4: The Last Mimzy by Henry Kuttner

Eight of us of us gathered at the North Village library for this meeting, and another submitted comments by email. Our topic was The Last Mimzy, a collection of classic short science fiction and fantasy by Henry Kuttner. This is a reissue of the earlier book The Best of Henry Kuttner, retitled to tie in with the recent film The Last Mimzy, adapted from one of its stories. About half of us had read Kuttner previously. Everyone started the book, and four finished.

The book starts with “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” the basis for the recent film. It involves bright children finding toys from the future. The Lewis Carroll thread that imparts the title to the story is well-done. One person was impressed that such a good story could be inspired by a few silly sentences from Jabberwocky. Those of us who saw the movie were pleased by how well the basic concept of the story is maintained, yet the movie is clearly updated to the present. A few people complained about the poor characterization of children of the story. They felt that Kuttner did not understand children at all, and were not surprised to learn that he was not a parent.

This book is full of strong stories. We all liked “The Twonky,” a story about a home-entertainment device from the future that does a lot more than its owners expect. “The Voice of the Lobster,” about a conman on a spaceship, was fun both for the plot and the third wall-breaking writing style. “Two-Handed Engine,” a paranoid horror story, reminded some of us of Philip K. Dick. The only true fantasy in the book is “Gnome There Was,” a humorous examination of labor relations among fantastic creatures. We were delighted with “Nothing But Gingerbread Left,” a WWII-era story that proposed a musical solution to defeating the Nazis. “Or Else” is a wonderful and low-key first contact story. The book concludes with “Absalom”, a tale of a parent and a brilliant child that suitably bookends “Mimsy.”

A few people commented that some of these stories seemed like episodes of The Twilight Zone. It turned out that the story “What You Need” had been adapted for this classic show in 1959.

We liked Kuttner’s writing style a great deal. His clean prose and efficient storytelling made the stories easy to read. We felt he had great respect for the reader. We appreciate the variety of topics he explored, and the care his editor took in choosing stories for this collection.

Surprisingly for sf written 50 years ago, the technology in these stories does not seem dated. Kuttner does not go into much technical detail, but just describes objects as they are used. All the devices either exist now or are plausible.

What does date the stories is that many of them rely on the protagonists getting drunk. “The Proud Robot” and other stories of Gallagher, a recurring Kuttner character, involve a guy constructing a sophisticated robot, getting stinking drunk, and forgetting the robot's purpose. Drunkenness is a device use solely for humor. As society's attitude toward drinking has evolved, this storytelling device is rarely used.

One person who originally read these stories in the Sixties commented that they were written at a time when no sf novels were being published. He also noted that several New Age writers were influenced by Kuttner.

Overall we enjoyed this book, and everyone was glad we picked it. A latecomer arrived just as we were finishing the discussion, to join us for dinner. We had a nice meal at Conan’s.

--A. T. Campbell, III

June 19: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

Eleven members attended the discussion of Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. One reader emailed their comments. All but one member had read Vernor Vinge before. Everybody started the book. All but 2 people finished it, and the rest were planning to finish.

Overall people thought it was a multilayered book, even though (to quote one reader) when you read it it does not feel like a book with layers. The majority of the group felt the story was entertaining. However, everyone seems to have taken something different away from it.

Some people did not think that the technology portrayed in the book brought up any unique concepts, but others were impressed how convincingly Vernor Vinge extrapolated from existing technological trends. One reader said he had just read in the news that Google and Linden Labs are collaborating on "something like that" (he didn't clarify ;-)) Several readers noted that the technologies Vinge describes seemed familiar to them from Vinge's earlier novel A Deepness in the Sky. The ubiquitous nodes that store information about the physical world around them, are a milder version of localizer dust; the You-Gotta-Believe-Me technology is a milder version of Focus.

A fun read or food for thought?

Some people thought Rainbows End was mostly a spy / mystery thriller, a fun read without a significant science-fictional aspect; on the contrary, a minority said it was an intellectually worthwhile book to read, but the story did not "pull them along". Of those who were hooked by the story, several complained that the plot hit a major snag at the library battle scene. The battle, which draws out over a hundred pages or more, snarls the flow of the story, more so because the particulars of it aren't really important to the plot. (To be fair, one reader loved the library battle scene. He felt as if watching a group of inhabitants of the World Of Warcraft universe battle the inhabitants of the Discworld universe for supremacy of their environment.)

Yet other group members said the book was both a pleasure to read and provided food for thought. They noted that the book attempts to describe what it's like to be in the bend of the technological progress curve going off into the Singularity, and debated whether Vernor Vinge was more successful at it than Charles Stross in Accelerando. Regardless, a few readers acknowledged that the author did an impressive job of showing the coming of the Singularity from the inside, so transparently you don't even understand how it happens. He showed it from several perspectives: there were kids in the book who have really mastered the "wearing" (a catch-all term for using the augmented reality technologies via devices built into the clothing and contact lenses); there were kids who were struggling with it; and then there were the "retreads" -- people who grew up in the pre-wearing era, and who needed to be taught this from scratch; there were even people who rebelled against the augmented reality, like the guy who, instead of wearing his computers, carried a laptop.

An "Alice in Wonderland"-like tour of the future

To make the "brave new world" comprehensible to us, the author had to show it through the eyes of one of our contemporaries, which explains the choice of the viewpoint character as Robert Gu, a retread. The readers observed that if Vinge chose a point of view character who was "native" to the new technologies, we wouldn't understand at all what was happening in the story. To quote a reader, Robert Gu was an equivalent of a shipwrecked English sailor in the medieval Japan.

This leads us to the question of what the Rabbit was. Even though it's not clear from the book (beyond some educated guesses), what kind of entity the Rabbit is, a reader observed that Rabbit's role is essentially that of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. He further said Rainbows End is essentially an "Alice in Wonderland" kind of story, the Wonderland in this case being the high-tech future Robert Gu is touring. Hence Gu is kind of an Alice. (Not to be confused with a Rainbows End character named Alice. One of the more mysterious characters in the novel, she left some readers wanting more. They thought that for the importance of the role she played, the author should have told us more about her.)

Speaking of characterization, though this group considers it be one of Vernor Vinge's lesser strengths, most people thought that Vinge did a good job with Robert Gu. (Personally I wasn't impressed with Robert Gu's transformation from a world class jerk to a caring person, since it seemed externally, not internally motivated. His Alzheimer's treatment gave him a whole new personality, taking away his ability to see deeply into people and push their buttons, so he wasn't able to hurt people as well as he used to.) But most people in the group found Gu's character growth convincing.

The political aspect of the book

One reader said all these things discussed so far were irrelevant to what Vinge wanted to do. The reader thought Rainbows End was one of the best political novels written of late, relevant to our current time when the country's administration doesn't live in a reality-based world. He liked that Vinge did not take a stance on whether the high-tech world he described was utopia or dystopia. It can be either, since the ubiquitous computing devices that enrich one's perception of reality can also be used for surveillance of the wearers. But the author did not push one view or the other; instead he showed good and bad implications of the whole series of things that are going on now, such as department of homeland security, or interesting unintended consequences of Alzheimer's treatment.

Another reader was intrigued with the political aspect of the book that was left hidden behind the scenes. There are hints in the book that the near future world is going to be far more dangerous and violent than what we have experienced so far. Vinge offhandedly mentions that Alice's family was from Chicago and "none of them survived". Or that the counter-terrorist measures were mostly working, because "they haven't lost a major city in almost 5 years". Apparently, minor cities were lost more often than that.

Several prominent science fiction writers had written novels that were their response to 9/11, and it may be fair to say that Rainbows End was Vernor Vinge's reaction to that event (somewhat belated, but not if you keep in mind that this writer produces 1-2 novels a decade). To quote a reader, "He's been writing as fast as he could." :-)

--Elze Hamilton