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Pursuing the thought that the last shall be first,
the Beamers came up behind our latest book, "Federations", a collection
of stories about galaxy-spanning societies edited by John Joseph Adams,
by looking at the final story, "Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy" by
Catherynne Valente. Of course, having an open bottle of wine may have
inspired us, but since the story inspired the wine, it seemed fair all
around. Not that we proceeded to be too closely tied to any one story
or theme as we talked over this anthology, preferring to let the
conversation lead where it will, whether taking in William Shirer's
"Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" or Byzantine theology. "Vast.
Epic. Interstellar.", proclaimed our book's front cover blurb, a
description that proved more true of our discussion than of the book
itself, showing that a Beamer book can please us twice, once in the
reading and once in the telling.
Jon, our selector, did try to provide us a structure, having read and rated all the stories, though he only requested a minority to be read for discussion purposes. Of course, he also warned us off from the Harry Turtledove story, "Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy", and actually thought that we would heed his caution. To his credit, we did decide that any story whose purpose was to deliver a pun that needed longer to explain than to read was probably a failed piece of fiction. More successful was Orson Scott Card's "Mazer in Prison", a prequel to the Battle School setting of "Ender's Game". One point which piqued my interest was the strong split in military sf, seen in this story, between the glories of military service and the denigration of the time-servers and apple polishers who fill the upper ranks. Tom thought that the canvass of war was itself so broad that it made its subject appear in both whiter and blacker tones than they might possess in reality. Life-and-death decisions tend to inflate both the virtues and vices of the decision makers, the Beamers felt. On the opposite end, I pushed for "Aftermaths" by Lois McMaster Bujold, a tale of the work on the battlefield after the battle performed by the Graves Registration troopers. It was a nice corrective to the many stirring sagas of vanquishing the vile Enemy, letting us watch instead a medtech tenderly gather and prepare corpses, friend and foe, for honorable burial. Not that the pre-war diplomacy was ignored, as "Carthago Delanda Est" by Genevieve Valentine had us arguing over how the unending nature of its diplomatic maneuvering while waiting for a foretold First Contact was preventing any number of wars from breaking out. And the stirring tragedy of war was represented by "Twilight of the Gods" by John C. Wright, a self-proclaimed retelling of the final opera in Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle. The outsized nature of the characters made this tale a clear fantasy to most of us, even as it was couched in sf terminologies, and the climax had us (well, me) singing the launch sequence as an aria (with multiple voices adding a "Kill the wabbit!" chorus). More quietly, we dissected some of the tales of assimilation into galactic polities, given one author's taunt about what, if anything, separates the Borg from the United Federation of Planets. The assimilation tales ("The Culture Archivist" by Jerome Tolbert, "Eskhara" by Trent Hergenrader) tended to take the side of the locals instead of the intruding aliens, a position of sticking up for the underdog with which we agreed, but which seemed to be portrayed as futile in the former story and so close to current events in Iraq and Afghanistan in the latter that its sf elements added nothing to our understanding of the situation. And K. Tempest Bradford's "Different Day" was able in just three pages to highlight the whole problem with trusting those advanced aliens and their claims of high-tech for the taking, making us laugh in the process. A little humor went a long way in this collection, providing us with both some of the best ("The One with the Interstellar Group Consciousnesses" by James Alan Gardner, a romantic-comedy of entire societies on blind dates) and worst (cf. Turtledove) in the volume. Some humor was debatably too broad ("Pardon Our Conquest" by Alan Dean Foster, which could have been an episode of the animated sf comedy "Futurama", not that every Beamer was upset with that thought). Some was debatably too dry ("Terra-Exulta" by S. L. Gilbow, a cautionary story of euphemisms replacing morality). On the other hand, the pieces devoid of any humor often proved heavy going, particularly when the tone slid into horror ("Symbiont" by Robert Silverberg, concerning a vet carrying an alien parasite, or "Like They Always Been Free" by Georgina Li, whose ending did not save it from shudders from Linda, sole representative of the Tri-Lindi collective). Some pieces split us over the nature of their resolution, like "My She" by Mary Rosenblum, which difficulty was augmented by the story's first-person viewpoint that put us into an alien perspective without reservation or crib notes. Still, it may be better for a story to make us argue as opposed to everyone finding Anne McCaffrey's "The Ship Who Returned" to be plainly told but painfully obvious and at length. Or "The Shoulders of Giants" by Robert J. Sawyer, which opened with a killer sentence ("It seemed like only yesterday when I'd died, but, of course, it was almost certainly centuries ago.") to which the rest of the story could not live up. Or Allan Steele's "The Other Side of Jordan", which proved to be a Western about a ranch hand in love with the rancher's daughter (although we did discuss the popularity of sf/Western crossovers, particularly Joss Whedon's "Firefly" - but that took us away from instead of into this story). Which brings us back 'round to "Golubash", the story on which we finished the meeting, and again one that brought generally favorable reactions from its loving depiction of a small family winery on the run from planet to planet while trying to preserve its traditions, which Jon found to be closer to fanatic than to familial for comfort, even as the rest of us liked the idea of "terroir" that talks back. Well, he is entitled to his opinions and we did not even stint him refills of the wine. Overall, the judgement was favorable on "Federations", with more good points than bad. I was the only one who would not recommend the book, feeling that it was less than the sum of its parts, since it did seem to live up to the editor's invocations of "Star Trek" and "Star Wars", "Dune" and the Foundation series, for yarns spun against star-spangled backdrops. For the rest, it was a decent collection that illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of sf anthologies, with something for everyone, if not every choice a winner. For December, we will be reading the first Company novel, "In the Garden of Iden" by Kage Baker. When 2010 rolls around with January chills, we will move to Iberian climes with "Beggars in Spain" by Nancy Kress. - Eugene, believing that, no matter the quality of the writing, all sf story collections are better with wine and chocolate-chip cookies ... |
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