Here’s my draft preview of the contenders for the Hugo best novel award, some bits of which have appeared here previously. Comments much appreciated.

Update Thanks for some useful comments, which I’ve tried to take into account in the revision
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Old Man’s War by John Scalzi.

I’ve been reading the Hugo nominees for best novel, and this was the last one. The blurb states “

Though a lot of SF writers are more or less efficiently continuing the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein, Scalzi’s astonishingly proficient first novel reads like an original work by the late grand master

Since my taste runs more to Bill, the Galactic Hero, I’m not exactly the target market. On the other hand, having read Starman Jones to the point where I could recite the text when I was 14, I’m not totally ignorant of Heinlein either.

In terms of the standard features, Scalzi doesn’t do a bad job. We get the recruiting office, a pretty good drill sergeant from Hell, the usual battle scenes and the inculcation of a military ethos, along with a recognition that “War is Hell”. Heinlein fans will love all this. And there’s the twist in the title. The colonial defence forces only recruit 75-year olds, for reasons that are explained a few chapters into the book. {The later appearance of the Ghost Brigades (I’ll avoid a spoiler on this), seems to me to undermine the rationale, but maybe this will be explained in the subsequent eponymous book.}

Where the book fails, in my view, is as hard science fiction. As you’d expect from the genre the underlying view is what might be called interstellar realism; the galaxy is a tough place and there are a lot of species out there eager to seize our planets and eat us. But Scalzi gives no answer to the Fermi problem: how come the neighbours haven’t already dropped in for dinner, instead of waiting for us to go out to meet them. And even when the book is set, Earth is mysteriously immune from external attack, despite the absence of any of the defence forces that are needed everywhere else.

Then there’s Earth itself. The book is set at least a couple of hundred years after Earth has developed an interstellar space drive, but apart from that it could be set in 1990 (in fact, apart from a passing reference to an office computer, it could be set in the 1950s). The hero is a retired advertising agent, and his companions have similarly 20th century jobs. He produces a driving license as ID, signs up in a strip mall and takes a plane to the spaceport.

I know you’re supposed to suspend disbelief, but all this goes beyond my capacity, I’m afraid.

Mark Steyn has a way with words. Particularly other people’s. (via Bitch PhD).

[For an earlier instance, scroll to the bottom of this post].

I’ve been reading a fair bit of science fiction lately, and thinking about doing another preview of the contenders for the Hugos for best novel. Of those I’ve read so far, Accelerando by Charles Stross is definitely the pick. It’s the ultimate Singularity novel (at least assuming it’s a novel). It’s super-evolved lobsters and feral abaci make for something that’s much more readable and, paradoxically, more convincing than Kurzweil’s book on the topic, which I reviewed a while back.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is also based on the Singularity, but much more of a traditional hard SF novel in form. The earth is mysteriously sealed off from the rest of the universe by a barrier within which the passage of time is drastically slowed. I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t stand up to comparison with Accelerando.

A Feast for Crows is Volume 4 in the epic fantasy sequence A Ring of Ice and Fire. I started gamely enough, and the opening chapters held my interest, but after 100 pages nothing had happened except conversations between various characters about events that had presumably taken place in Volume 3. I cheered up when I noticed that there was a dramatis personae at the back, but then realised that the list itself ran for many pages and included hundreds of characters I hadn’t yet encountered. The style is engaging, and the series has a lot of fans, but it’s clear that if you want to tackle it, you have to start at the beginning of the series. And, just as any long book has some necessary slow bits where the various threads are gathered, so any multi-volume epic has some slow moving volumes. Nothing wrong with that, but the result is not, in my view, a candidate for a Hugo award – maybe a separate category is needed.

The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. This will be coming out soon from Yale University Press and I have an advance copy for a seminar to be run at Crooked Timber. The book deals with the implications of networking, social production and similar issues that I’ve been excited about for some time.

On the viewing front, now that The West Wing has come to the ABC and is on at a reasonable hour, I’m watching it, though the episodes must be quite a few years old. It’s rather like a parallel universe, but one in which the White House is in the same universe, instead of, as in reality, two parallel universes.

Just in case anyone’s forgotten how it goes. From Dick Gaughan who sang it at the National Folk Festival, but I’ve changed some words back to the original.
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