FACT SF Reading Group

June 2008

June 2: Mainspring by Jay Lake

Ten people attended the discussion of Jay Lake's Mainspring. Everybody except 2 people started the book. 6 people finished it, 2 more were planning to finish. 8 people had read something by Jay Lake before.

Mainspring is set on a world that looks a lot like our Earth, except it's literally a clockwork mechanism. The gears along the Earth's equatorial wall mesh with those of the Earth's orbital track as the planet travels around the Sun. Inside the Earth a giant spring, Mainspring, keeps the planet rotating around its axis. But now the Mainspring is becoming unwound, and world is in danger. A young man named Hethor, a clockmaker's apprentice, is sent on a quest to find the Key Perilous for winding up the Mainspring.

Several people thought the notion of the world as a clockwork mechanism raises interesting points about religion, but they disagreed whether this novel did a good job exploring those religious implications. Hethor's enemies, who try to derail his quest, do so because of religious differences, but it's not clear that the inhabitants of this world have a lot of latitude in religious interpretation of their everyday experiences. As some readers pointed out, faith is a belief in things unseen, but in this world God's presence becomes apparent as soon as you look up. The orbital track could have only been made by a super-powerful designer. So faith, as we understand it, can't really exist here.

Another reader argued that characters' doubts concerning religion are nonetheless justified, because a mechanical universe does not necessarily imply a conventional kind of God. "Did the maker of all these gears put the gears in motion and then walked away? The fact that the creator put the gears in motion doesn't mean there's someone watching day-to-day and intervening," said the reader.

Two people noted that the book has a more religious tone than one would expect from the cover blurb. The blurb promises Monty Python, but the novel is anything but. It's not irreverent, funny, or amusing, said one reader, who saw Hethor as a Christ figure. The fact that the key for fixing the world fit in Hethor's heart only reinforced her impression of Mainspring as a very reverent, very religious book. Another person agreed with that impression, pointing out that all the villains were Rational Humanists and all the good people were religious. Yet he thought the view of a world as mechanism wouldn't make a case for religion. So he found the book to be internally inconsistent.

Internal consistency of the world described in Mainspring was a fodder for much discussion. For one thing, people weren't sure whether the story should be taken straightforwardly or as an allegory. If this is straightforward science fiction, then, as one reader pointed out, it wouldn't be possible to wind the gigantic Mainspring with a key small enough to fit in one's heart. Another reader saw the clockwork universe as an allegory, and the key as purely symbolic, so the task of winding up the Mainspring wasn't physical, he concluded. Others argued that it's hard to see the gears and springs as mere metaphors when descriptions of the mechanisms that move the Earth are so detailed and tangible. Yet another reader said the notion that the Earth is filled with gears is so nonsensical (in that case what keeps you glued to it? he asked) that he concluded from the very beginning this book should not be analyzed intellectually. So he took out his brain and enjoyed the adventure.

Hethor's adventures -- his travels on airships and encounters with exotic tribes -- were found enjoyable by most readers. In that sense they found Mainspring comparable to books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, or The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle. However, several people were bothered by magic that suddenly appeared in the final pages, after having been absent anywhere else in the book. Nothing in Mainspring's setting indicated there was magic in this world. One reader even said he wondered if the book changed overnight. Before the magic appeared, he didn't see how the character was going to achieve his goal in 30 pages, unless the story continued into the next book. He would have preferred that, instead of author pulling magic out of the hat.

There was also some confusion as to whether the people Hethor encountered in the Southern hemisphere were mechanisms or flesh-and-blood people. Hethor heard gears clicking in those people: does that mean they were, in fact, robots? Does that imply the people of the Northern hemisphere, including Hethor himself, were robots too, and they just haven't discovered that yet? Or was the clicking of the gears some kind of allegory, not to be taken literally? This was yet another confusing aspect of the book.

Yet a lot of people enjoyed the book despite the seeming inconsistencies: they chose whichever interpretation made the most sense to them.

Overall we agreed we were probably seeing more philosophical controversy in the novel than Jay Lake put into it. For example, one reader saw in Mainspring a parable for the pressing issues of today. "Here's a person who discovered that the world has a big problem; and there are people who don't believe in that problem and believe that God is going to come along and make it all OK. I wonder where Jay Lake got such an idea?" (he said sarcastically).

"So you think Al Gore inspired this book?" another reader asked.

"If so, a 12-year-old Al Gore inspired it," the first reader replied, "because it's way too naive."

Naivety and passivity were the main reasons why several people didn't like the protagonist, Hethor. Somebody said "He makes a couple of decisions in the 1st chapter, and then pretty much doesn't have any choices. He gets into situations that compel him to move in a certain direction. And then he doesn't make another decision until [halfway into the book]." Another reader commented: "I've never read a quest book where the hero had it so incredibly easy."

Others liked that while Hethor started out as a sheltered character, he learned a lot more about the world during his journey. One reader in particular liked Hethor's humor. Even when things are going horribly, he has a way of finding something darkly humorous about the events.

Everybody seemed to like several of the secondary characters, especially the librarian, who was the universal favorite. Arellya and the drover girl Darby were also thought to be interesting. Some people were disappointed that those characters disappeared quickly and for good.

Many people also liked the images in the novel, such as the image of Earth's brass orbital tracks, the vertical city on the equatorial wall, the airships. For some they were the best part of the novel, making up for its weaknesses.

June 17: Un Lun Dun by China Miéville

12 people attended the discussion of China Miéville's Un Lun Dun. 8 people had read China Miéville before. Everybody but one person started the book. 6 people finished it.

Un Lun Dun is a story of two young girls' adventures in an alternative London, called Un Lun Dun. It is inhabited by all sorts of strange and magical creatures, and it is built mostly out of MOIL ("Mildly Obsolete In London"), things and materials that were discarded by Londoners. It turns out that Un Lun Dun is in danger, and a prophecy names one of the girls as a "shwazzy", a chosen one who's supposed to save the city. The two friends set out to fulfill the shwazzy's mission, but things take an unexpected turn early on.

A few people thought the book started out slowly and took a while -- as many as 100 pages -- to get into. But when the story took off, most people enjoyed it. Some compared it to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere on steroids.

One reader was at first put off because the story started out with a common fantasy cliche of a fair-haired chosen one. She was later delighted to see the book do an about-face on fantasy cliches. The tongue-in-cheek treatment of fantasy formula endeared Un Lun Dun to many people. The schwazzy, a tall, blond and beautiful Zanna, gets bonked on the head and taken out of action early on; the true hero of the novel is the person who traditionally would be a sidekick -- the short, dark-skinned Deeba. Deeba decides she doesn't have time to find all 7 objects that the prophecy requires her to collect before she can confront the enemy; instead, she goes straight for the last one, the UnGun. She figures that's the only weapon she'll need anyway.

Another enjoyable moment of the book was what one reader called Miéville's "play with libraries". Deeba's climb through the library on a "storyladder" reminded a reader of Pratchett's L-space, where all libraries are connected. "He was doing some interesting things metaphorically to discuss the path to knowledge," said the reader.

A few people praised the way the book presents an environmental message. When speaking about those issues, especially to children, there's always a danger that a book would come off as preachy, but Un Lun Dun successfully avoided that. Instead, it cleverly showed how all those perfectly useable things that we routinely discard (called MOIL in the book) is a natural resource in a parallel world. A reader said Un Lun Dun did a good job showing why many environmental issues aren't easily fixed: they are political. The same reader calling this book "politically fascinating, because it is a very good tract of left socialist thought".

Two or three people in our group could not enjoy the story despite trying. One of them said he wished he had read the same book as the others did, because the group's positive impression of the book vastly diverged from his. He picked up Un Lun Dun every day for two weeks and lost interest in it each time after 5 pages. He said he could not build a mental model of what was going on. The two young girl protagonists were very boring. His head was hurting from the flying buses, etc., and he still wasn't into the story. Similarly, another reader said it took him 3 times as long as expected to read this book, because he had to reread each paragraph 2-3 times. Even after multiple rereadings he still could not extract information from the text. This reader did not quite understand what about China Miéville's writing made it so difficult to "build a movie" of the book in his head, but perhaps it was the sentence structure. Somebody else pointed out it could be because so much imagery in Un Lun Dun is based on wordplay, and wordplay doesn't work very well when speed-reading. Another person suggested some of the difficulty may have to do with China Miéville being "a sloppy plotter". "You don't see where he's going with the plot," said the reader. "I don't trust him to take me out of the swamp. But eventually he does."

On the average, more people in the group liked Un Lun Dun than didn't, and several people said they will look forward to reading China Miéville's future works.

--Elze Hamilton