Recommendation: Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun

Long books are nearly impossible to use in college courses because they eat up too much time.  They need a class all their own.  They certainly can't fit into a survey class well.

Given that, the glaring omission from this semester's science fiction survey class is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, an 800-page experience.

I'd like to recommend it not by describing the work as a whole, but by describing it from a reader's new experience of Wolfe's best book.  Most of Wolfe's writing is unsummarizable anyway, and an almost indescribable experience.

The Book of the New Sun takes place millions of years in the future, on Earth, called "Urth" in the book.  At the outset of the novel, it appears that human civilization has regressed to a medieval world of swords, guilds and monarchs. The narrator, Severian, is a member of the torturer's guild. He seems to have no scientific knowledge, but possesses a deeply theological worldview.  In the early pages, Severian hints that he is writing as the "Autarch," the quasi-monarch of a realm in the Southern hemisphere.  This talk of guilds and monarchy, plus torture, swordplay, and theology, makes Wolfe's work seem more like fantasy than science fiction.  Perhaps humanity used up Earth's resources at some point, and has ever since been living in a quasi-medieval state?

And then thirty pages in, Severian mentions that the moon is covered with green forests.  He wonders what it once looked like, eons ago, when it is said that the moon was once bare rock.

Here the reader (okay, me) is led to consider an important question.  If the technology to terraform the moon once existed, then does it exist in Severian's world?

The answer is yes, but Severian is somewhat ignorant of the technological "magic" of generations past and present. He may also be deceiving the reader about what exactly he knows, as he is clearly an unreliable narrator.

What makes Wolfe's work so fantastic is the effortless blend of fantasy tropes and science fiction.  At times the work seems like fantasy--indeed to Severian it does--yet a casual reader of sci-fi will recognize all manner of sci-fi elements in the book, coded by Severian's ellusive, ambiguous language.  There are spaceships, aliens, androids, time travelers, black holes, telepathy, and much much more in this book.  But if you do not read closely, though, you might not know it.

Consequently, about every fifty pages or so, Wolfe reveals some major clue about the setting and/or the history of Earth that greatly affects the plot and forces us readers to reconsider everything we've already read.  Severian has a habit of revealing a key moment from a scene pages or chapters after he's already told us seemingly everything about the scene.  For example, Severian meets his only friend, Jonas, who appears to have an artificial hand.  Only when Jonas exits the book do we discover that Jonas is actually a robot, who had skin and flesh grafted onto his face and chest after his spaceship crash-landed.  We are then left, after the fact, to re-evaluate everything we know about Jonas.

Do I need to tell you that there are several major secrets about Severian the narrator?  Two are revealed in the book's last seventy pages, and they change everything.

Yet the dozens of deep mysteries in the book -- including the sci-fi elements of the setting, the history of "Urth" -- are actually backdrops to a pretty powerful Bildungsroman as well as a forced meditation on human nature.  I say "forced" because, given Wolfe's setting, whatever he says about humanity is what he thinks is permanent about it.  After all, if he posits a humanity millions of years in the future, he is constantly comparing his audience in the present to his fictional future humans.

For Christian readers, Wolfe is fairly friendly.  He converted to Catholicism while writing the novel, and theologically charged observations pepper the book.   Severian is constantly thinking about the prophecy of the "New Sun," a deliberate double entendre, a prophecy that hints about both a renewal of the dying sun (whose light is gradually diminishing as its hydrogen runs out) and the return of the "Conciliator."  The Conciliator was a man, some say, a powerful prophet who predicted and taught about the New Sun.  Some believe the New Sun will be the Conciliator returned.  Severian also meditates often on the workings of the "Increate," something analogous to the Holy Spirit, a being above all beings who indwells in them and in nature.  So it's no surprise when Severian, as the plot unfolds, becomes an antitype of Christ in many ways. And Severian himself may have something to do with inaugurating the New Sun.

This book is highly challenging, but incredibly rewarding.  It did take 250 pages for me to fully invest in the novel.  While that's slow going for most, just know that this may be the greatest science fiction novel yet written.

Five Great Audiobooks

Audiobooks are a new spin on an old medium.  Long ago just about every story was transmitted orally, sometimes transmitted that way for centuries, before being written down.  That includes parts of the Bible, Homer's epics, and just about every native legend around the world.  So stories, many stories, are made to be read aloud and to be listened to.  Stories don't have to have a book and a reader, but they do need a storyteller and an audience.

The audiobook hasn't been around long, but it has changed the relationship between reader and text.  If you listen to many audiobooks, you quickly figure out that the narrator makes all the difference.  A bad narrator ruins everything.  I couldn't make it through one version of Graham Greene's The Quiet American because the British narrator could not come close to speaking an American accent correctly.  With another book, a Robert Heinlein novel, the narrator paused for a half-second after every sentence, a pause so long that the narrative had no flow and it became progressively irritating to listen to. So with audiobooks, not only must the book be good, but the narrator's performance has to make the book interesting.  And some books, frankly, are not written to be read aloud.

(As an aside, a great reading practice is to read a book/poem/play aloud to yourself if you cannot understand it or find it dull.  This practice can dramatically change the reading experience and may help you understand what you are reading in ways you can't imagine. It also might help you to like a book.)

Audiobooks were extremely burdensome before IPods.  Until the IPod--eons ago--you had to lug around a 6 CD set of one book, and that was only for a book of 200 pages.  Now I can carry around dozens of books on my IPod, or hundreds of hours worth of audiobooks.  So I expect the audiobook medium to improve, hopefully, given that the technological convenience of owning and transporting audiobooks has greatly improved in the past few years. 

I present here five great audiobooks.  I've listened to dozens of them, most okay, some terrible, a few excellent.  Here are some of the best.

Treasure Island. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Read by Alfred Molina.

This is perhaps the best audiobook yet made.  First, Stevenson's story was made to be read aloud. It was also made to be exciting, interesting, captivating--and as it turns out, it is all of those for all ages.  Alfred Molina reads this pitch-perfectly.  Molina is a Shakespearean actor, best known probably as Dr. Octopus in Spiderman 2.  This book won an Audie Award for audiobook of the year.

The Last Battle. By C.S. Lewis. Read by Patrick Stewart.



Serious audiophiles should be aware that, in the mid-2000s, HarperAudio released all seven books in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series. This series was expensive, I assume, because of the voice talent hired to read the books, which includes Kenneth Branagh, Lynn Redgrave, Jeremy Northam, and Derek Jacobi.  I think this is the best of the Narnia audiobook series.  That's partly because I think this is Lewis' best Narnia book, but also because Patrick Stewart does a fine job of reading it while not sounding too much like Jean-Luc Picard. 

Heart of Darkness. By Joseph Conrad.  Read by Kenneth Branagh.

I admire Branagh for a lot of things, but his dedication to audiobooks is near the top of the list.  He's overqualified to read audiobooks, but he does it anyway. What follows are two of his best efforts.  This one is from Audible's Signature series, which Audible commissioned early in 2011 but discontinued pretty quickly. I assume that this series wasn't even close to profitable. The idea behind it was that Audible would hire B-list actors to read literary "classics."  Thus Elijah Wood reads Huck Finn, and Branagh reads Heart of Darkness.  Conrad's famous book is almost all monologue, which is perfect for Branagh, who reads every word in character as if he's been studying the book for years.  This is a performance, a great performance, unlike many audiobooks, which are just simply someone reading words.


The Captain and the Enemy. By Graham Greene. Read by Kenneth Branagh.

One more Branagh narration.  This one is Greene's last novel, one of his five best and his most underrated.  Most readers are intrigued by the first half of the story, in which the narrator, a young boy, is won at gambling by a  mysterious man called "The Captain."  As usual in Greene's later work, there is international espionage combined with meditations on love and justice in the modern world.  This book also features the best use of the "King Kong" story.

Bellwether. By Connie Willis. Read by Kate Reading.

The last of my five, and I feel compelled to include a few ladies, since I have not yet done so.  Willis is a well-known science fiction author, a no-nonsense type who is skeptical of most modern ideologies.  She ably combines the screwball comedy plots of 1930s films with science fiction tropes.  That's an interesting, unusual combo.  This short novel features a female scientist who tries to discover where and how fads originate, and who gets caught up in and amongst blossoming fads herself.  There's a love story and plenty of critiques of modern pop culture.  A fun listen.

Yale Open Courses

If you're interested in self-education, Yale Open Courses is a useful tool.  From what I can tell, all of the classes have online video lectures, plus course texts and exams.  Here Yale gives us the opportunity to experience the hallowed Ivy League, albeit without a grader.  I won't vouch for the excellence of any of these courses, except the one on Dante.  

The course on the history of epidemic diseases is pretty interesting, though dry.  Lecture 13 is particularly fascinating.  Prior to the germ theory of disease, the major debate among the experts was whether diseases were transmitted by people to objects and then back to people (contagion theory), or whether people caught diseases because of negative environmental and social factors (such as bad air, or miasma).  Interestingly, popular culture favored the contagion theory, while the majority of experts  were anti-contagionists.  Shows what the experts knew! The lecture argues that there were multiple ironies in the anti-contagionists' theory, practice, and results.  While they were ultimately wrong about how disease was transmitted, they were "splendidly wrong," enacting positive, helpful social reforms based on erroneous theory.  Some of these reforms included the construction of new sanitation structures, including sewers and rebuilt cities (Paris was partly rebuilt and Naples was totally rebuilt).  The anti-contagionists were trying to get rid of all "filth," such as decaying animal and plant matter, which supposedly contaminated the air and the ground.  They were wrong, but they saved thousands, perhaps millions, of lives -- so the lecture argues.

An interesting part of this story is that Max von Pettenkoffer, an anti-contagonist, bet Robert Koch that the bacterium that causes cholera did not actually cause cholera.  Pettenkoffer thought that the bacterium was inert until it got into each city's water table and fermented the organic material under the city (hence the need for waterways that drained the water away from cities).  So Koch sent Pettenkoffer a concoction of the cholera bacteria, which Pettenkoffer drank to prove that he was right!  Interestingly, Pettenkoffer did not get sick, so he continued to believe in his own wrong theory.

Another interesting tidbit.  Lecture 14 briefly makes the argument that Bram Stoker's Dracula is an allegory of contagious disease.  Like cholera, Count Dracula travels from eastern Europe to London, via the port cities and railroads that infectious disease always followed.  Dracula arrives in London during the summer, just as cholera would've, attempting to ravage the population.  And who fights against Dracula?  Well, of course, medical doctors.

The Cultural Role of Science Fiction

The common stereotype of the science fiction fan is the four-eyed computer nerd, a social category that many of us try hard to avoid. However, as Brooks Landon argues in Science Fiction After 1900, cultural involvement with science fiction is totally unavoidable. Everyone is involved with SF, like it or not, as all media forms have incorporated SF tropes and issues. Those armies of teenagers at multiplexes, texting in the land of virtual reality on their pocket computers, while watching the latest superhero/alien invasion/Transformer/Hunger Games movie, understand this at least implicitly.

While some SF still has negative cultural cache, I note that the highest-grossing movies from 2000-2010 are pretty much all SF and fantasy. Take out the animated movies and you have to go to #38 before you spot a movie that doesn't have SF/fantasy elements. The 1990s were similar, with the Terminator series, Jurassic Park, Men in Black, and Independence Day among the highest-grossing movies. I suspect the same is true for the best-selling video games throughout the history of video games.  And then there's comicbooks.

But Landon one-ups all this: "The 20th century, in which science fiction was first codified as a genre and -- perhaps more importantly -- as a publishing category, has seen that genre develop through distinct stages, mutate in innumerable and unpredictable directions, and finally overflow the limits of genre to become a meta-genre so broad and so pervasive as to be a concept and force quite outside the boundaries of fiction, and of art itself. As modes of science fiction have more and more become the new realism of technological society, the world itself has grown science fictional" (xiii).

So the hamburger in my refrigerator comes from a cloned cow who ate mutant corn (i.e., "genetically modified"), which I eat while the President speaks on my quasi-holographic (3D) TV, whose cable signal is received from space, while I surf the Internet on my IPad, connected to my wireless router, which I purchased online and which transmits data throughout my house while securing me from cybercrime and identity theft (because I can be robbed and erased without anything physically happening to me). 


Arguably, SF's spread into all media forms is one major example of a literary genre literally changing the world.

Prometheus (2012) -- Criticism

 (Contains Spoilers throughout.  Oh well.)

I'm not sure what's significant about the fact that the History Channel features a show called Ancient Aliens, but it can't mean much good.  These ancient aliens are in vogue now.  They've purportedly built the Pyramids and Stonehenge, revealed themselves to the Hebrews and the Mayans, and, for all I know, may be responsible for crop circles and cow mutilations.

According to Prometheus, ancient aliens created life on Earth. Yes, this is a movie about intelligent design.  It's not the kind of intelligent design anybody's looking for, though.  These aliens, directly linked genetically to humans, aren't all that kind.  Perhaps that explains the source of all of humanity's woes, since our creators are just as flawed as we are.  Next time you experience feelings of guilt or depression, tell your therapist that the ancient aliens are to blame.

The story gets too complicated by the third act, but the movie can be explained by a simple plot equation.  Prometheus = Alien + Aliens + Ancient Aliens.  Essentially two scientists find evidence on Earth of ancient aliens, so a giant corporation headed by a dying mogul funds an outer-space expedition to find the aliens on a distant moon far beyond the solar system.  The scientists quickly find something on the moon, evidence of advanced civilization, though -- and if you watch enough sci-fi you know this before it's already happened -- what they find can't be beneficial or healthy.  Meanwhile, just like in Alien, they explore a mysterious vessel with a bad android tagging along. 

This movie is the kitchen sink of sci-fi.  It begins with the origins of human life, then throws in galatic journeys, holograms, first contact sequences, androids, genetic engineering, bio weapons, zombies, and a self-automated pod that will perform any surgery you like, provided that you are male.  At one point, a giant alien squid attacks one member of the cast while somewhere else a zombie attacks all the rest.  By the end, I was disappointed that we didn't see time travel or vampires, whose trade union is sure to strike in protest.

Because of the inclusion of all this material, Prometheus preys on just about every modern fear imaginable.  Here is another list.  It worries us with problems of bioterror, evil corporations preying on the weak, evil computer systems gone haywire, deformed fetuses, deadly infectious diseases,  and the threat of alien invasion.  Perhaps the most squeamish sequence unfortunately will remind many of us of a C-section.  At least it reminded my wife of hers, which I witnessed, and in some ways this was not the most pleasant experience for either of us.  Anyway, in the movie a crew member is impregnated with an alien, and she must use the auto-surgery pod to abort this alien, a pod, as I said, designed for a man.

(After the machine cuts her open and then staples her back together, she's off and running to the next task, with a bit of a stomach cramp.  Of all things, in a movie with ancient aliens and androids, this really shook our suspension of disbelief.)

As is usual in a movie like this, the best sequences are those when the crew lands on the planet and begins to explore the ancient aliens' lost outpost.  And the best character is an android named David.  You don't see androids in movies much anymore, so he's welcome here as a walking HAL-9000 with unknown sinister motives.

It's David that stimulates one of the movie's major themes, that of the relationship between creator and creature (or creation).  The humans think of David as a robot, a mere machine easily deactivated, and yet they can't figure out why the ancient aliens won't answer their questions about the meaning of life.  These aliens, as the movie points out, are the creators of human beings, just as the humans are creators of the android. Yet the aliens want to destroy human beings -- the moon's outpost being a military installation where the aliens bio-engineer organic WMD, which is meant to destroy all of life on Earth.  So why would a creator create something only to destroy it later?  In other words, the humans wonder, why are the ancient aliens so mean to us?  Prometheus depicts humanity as cosmic loners, unable to fully understand and care for the natural environment, unable to respect and control its own creations, unable to have relationship with a higher power (here the aliens).

The main character, Dr. Shaw, presents the only hopeful alternative -- pursuit of the creators.  By the end of the movie, after the other humans have died, she's flying in an alien spacecraft ostensibly to the alien homeworld.  Once there, she will demand to know the answers about why the aliens created us. Of course she begins this journey just after one of the aliens has savagely attacked her, a couple of hours after her C-section gone wild, and with the android who killed her husband and impregnated her with a deadly alien squid.  Sounds like the sequel will be a rollicking road trip/buddy pic.