The City and the Stars

The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke

If I were asked to pick a single book that defines “sense of wonder,” the one I’d pick Clarke’s The City and the Stars. This book – in my opinion, Clarke’s best work – is a marvelous tale of the incredibly far future, a future marvelous in itself but one that also has legends behind it that add to the awe and wonder. And expansion and reworking – and an improvement upon – Clarke’s somewhat shorter novel Against the Fall of Night – it’s one of the handful of SF books that I re-read every few years. And each time I do, I still feel the wonder I felt when I first encountered it (the shorter version was probably the first SF novel not by Wells, Verne, Doyle, or Burroughs that I read). It’s a great work of far future SF, and, even more so that the great works by Cordwainer Smith, Robert Silverberg, Jack Vance, and others, really is the defining piece for this subgenre.

The novel takes place more than a billion years in the future. The great city of Diaspar, as far as its inhabitants know, is the last city on earth and has existed in its present form for a billion years, its existence maintained and renewed by the city’s central computer mind and its memory banks. People, too, live forever; they emerge from the memory banks, live for a thousand years, then return to the memory banks to be resurrected tens or even hundreds of thousand of years later – to find Diaspar pretty much the same as they’d left it. Many once had a galactic empire, back at the dawn of time (for, from a billion years in the future, our entire history is only a very, very short span), but had been driven back to earth, as the old stories go, by the Invaders. Mankind put up a last heroic fight at the great fortress of Shalmirane, where mankind had agreed to leave space to the invaders and remain on earth.

The novel centers on Alvin, a unique – someone who emerges from the memory banks but who has no past life. He, unlike everyone around him, is truly a “child” (though 20 years old at the time of the story). And he is unique in another way. Everyone else in Diaspar ignores anything outside of the city, and is in fact afraid of what is outside. All the rest of the world is desert, they have been told, and they have been conditioned to fear leaving Diaspar. Alvin, on the other hand, craves to learn more, and his urges take him beyond Diaspar and eventually beyond earth.

Throughout the book, Clarke paints a picture of an extremely ancient world, while at the same time evoking a sense of wonder. He does this in several ways. One is by the use of legends. The citizens of Diaspar remember only bits and pieces of the history of the far past – the Invaders, Shalmirane, and so on. Presented in this way – incomplete, with everyone remembering only certain bits – is in line with any civilization looking to its ancient past (look at how we view the much more recent stories of the Trojan War).

Clarke also scatters fantastic events and settings in various points throughout the book. The world Alvin is in is fantastic, but things become even more so when he leaves Diaspar. His first encounter with an alien – a completely alien religious fanatic – at the Shalmirane is startling, but wonders begin coming even more quickly as Alvin leaves earth and travels to the planets of the seven suns. (I won’t say more here, for those who haven’t yet read the book. I’ll let you experience these for the first time yourself.)

And finally, Clarke knows not only what to say but what not to say. This is particularly true in the startling conclusion to the book, when he explains in two or three pages the true story of earth’s past. It’s one of the great bits of creating a remarkable and awesome future in SF, but part of the wonder of it is due to Clarke knowing not to fill in the details, to just tell what had happened in broad outline. While the reader is left wanting to know much more, Clarke knows that to try to give more would destroy some of the magic. (Anyone who has read Greg Benford’s sequel to Clarke’s works knows this is true. Benford – normally a very good writers – drains Clarke’s universe of its wonder by giving us too many details and trying to explain too much).

Clarke, like Asimov, has been criticized for creating characters without much depth, who are there just for the sake of the story. This is true (though in some ways beside the point) for a number of his works. It is not true for The City and Stars. Alvin is a well drawn character, who evolves and changes as the novel progresses. Some of the characters around him are also done well in their own right, though (as one character notes) they are drawn into the whirlpool that Alvin leaves in his wake. Alvin is a dynamic character, whose energy and intelligence change not just the world but the galaxy.

I’m not sure what else there is to say about this marvelous novel. It was published in 1956, and unfortunately, 1957 was one of those years before Hugo categories were firmly established and the only Hugos presented were for best magazines (American, UK, and fan). Thus, one of SF’s best books didn’t win a Hugo. But it remains a great book, one that, nearly 50 years after it’s initial publication, still presents one of the most compelling visions of the far future ever done.

Will in the World

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
By Stephen Greenblatt

Shakespeare was the English language’s greatest writer and quite probably the greatest writer of the last 500 years (Cervantes and Dante are arguably at his level). He is also a man of whose life we only know bits and pieces. I don’t say “surprisingly little,” because, given the record keeping of the time and Shakespeare’s profession, it really isn’t that surprising that we don’t know more. While we know a lot about royalty and some of the nobility, we know comparatively little about most others. And while we know a bit more about a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, we know even less about some of them.

We do know many of the important facts – when and where he was born, a bit about his parents, who he married, who his children were (at least the legitimate ones), what property he owned, what he invested in, some of his travels, and so on. We know about when he wrote most of his major works, and who he collaborated with on a few of the minor ones. And we know when and where he died and the contents of his will.  Stephen Greenblatt has taken these known facts, combined them with some speculation – some based on knowledge of what most did at the time (e.g., we know what school most children in Stratford went to, thus, even without records to definitely prove it, it’s a good bet that Shakespeare went there also) and some based on historical events that might have driven him – and some extrapolation from the plays to construct an interesting biography of sorts of Shakespeare. Greenblatt plays fair: the speculation is clearly labeled as such, and he gives the reader a good idea of how likely he various speculations are. It creates a very plausible picture of Shakespeare’s life, even if you decide that some of it is stretching it just a bit.

One of the more fascinating points of the book (and one of the less known parts of Shakespeare’s life) is the time from when he was a boy until he moved to London in the late 1580s. He was married – to a woman he had already gotten pregnant; was that the cause? Was he trying to escape a bad marriage. Or, there are some hints that Shakespeare’s father (and perhaps young Will) had some connections with the Catholic parts of the population. This was a time, soon after the ascent of Elizabeth to the throne, when religious strife was particularly bitter. Religion at the time was closely tied to politics; not following the state religion was looked at as disloyal. And things became worse when the Pope declared that anyone who killed Elizabeth would not be guilty of a mortal sin and when Catholic Spain made overtures to English Catholics, looking for their support in a possible attack on England. Did Shakespeare flee to London to escape this? This is interesting history and fascinating speculation, though this is also the part of the book where Greenblatt has to go farthest out on a limb in his speculations, given how little we actually know about this period.

Greenblatt presents Shakespeare as being in some ways connected to but in many ways separate from the other playwrights of the time (of whom Christopher Marlow was the most famous). Unlike them, Shakespeare was not educated at one of England’s two great universities, and there was some snobbery on their part, aimed at an actor who was getting above himself in actually writing plays. Yet Shakespeare rapidly became a success as a writer. Shakespeare was also s shrewd businessman, investing in the theatre and the company, and taking his cut.

Greenblatt, of course, does spend some time on examining the works, looking at what made Shakespeare great. He does a competent job discussing how Shakespeare, moving beyond playwrights before him, was able to find ways to show the inner character, to truly show to the audience how his characters thought, and to create real characters (though Harold Bloom, among others, goes into more depth on this aspect of things).  He also tries to tie the plays to Shakespeare’s life. Did he see the humiliation and execution of Elizabeth’s Jewish physician (accused of treason), and did his reaction to the crowd there cause him to create a Shylock who his audience couldn’t just laugh at but also feel pain over. (Contrast this with, for example, Marlowe’s Barabas.) Did the death of his son cause such a shock to his life that he moved to the next level and thus write Hamlet. Did his fears of losing his powers and approaching retirement effect his writing of King Lear?

While all this is interesting speculation, the relationships between the plays and actual historical events is perhaps better grounded. For example, Greenblatt ties Macbeth to both James I’s fascination with witches (he even wrote a book about witches) and with his desire to in all ways appear legitimate (he viewed Banquo as his ancestor).

The book also contains a lot of interesting detail about how the theatres worked, how administrators viewed them, how prone they were to be closed (bubonic plague was still a common occurrence, and if it reached a certain level, officials closed the theatres), and so on. It also explains how plays were printed (and why they rarely were and thus why so many plays from the period were lost). Plays were considered the valuable property of the company. It wasn’t in the company’s interest to print copies that other companies could steal and use. In fact, individual actors only had a roll of paper with their own lines to study (our modern “role” comes from this “roll”).

There’s much more here, ranging from the sonnets to details of the other great plays. It’s all – even the parts were Greenblatt is speculating – interesting and informative. There is enough detail of the history to make what’s going on intelligible to even those who don’t know much about the history of the time and enough about the works such that even a casual reader of Shakespeare (that is, someone only really familiar with perhaps the half-dozen most famous plays) to find something of merit. Highly recommended.

Books, plays, poems, TV, and other things: the last few weeks

The last couple of weeks have been a bit hectic. First, Laurie and I traveled to Boston to go to Boskone in mid-February. As always, it was a good convention, with some very good program, a very nice art show, and so on. The guest of honor this year was Ken MacLeod, whose Learning the World is one of my top choices for the Hugo this year, and who is always interesting to talk to or to listen to. Charlie Stross, whose Accelerando and The Family Trade/The Hidden Family were also among my favorites of 2005 also attended, as did Cory Doctorow, who, along with Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Beth Meacham participated in a great panel discussion on copyright and “intellectual property.”

I got back from Boskone for a few days, only to travel back to Boston for an IBM meeting. The editors of IBM’s developerWorks site get together once a year to work out strategy, discuss best practices, etc. and this year’s gathering was in Lexington, MA. It was both a useful and a fun week; I manage a group that’s spread out all over the US, so it’s always great to get together with them, go out to dinner, and so on, since I often see them only once or maybe twice a year.

From there, it was back home where Laurie had been looking at houses and wanted to show me a few. We looked at a couple of newer houses in a nearby suburb and began thinking about them – they were a bit bigger than our current house, and we’re running out of space. Then Laurie found that the same builder also had some larger houses in a somewhat farther out development. The price was at the top of our range, but the house that seemed the best of this new group was 4800 square feet. It was a tough decision. The house is in the boonies (defined as “not within walking distance of a Starbucks”), but it was a great house (see http://www.dpsinfo.com/images/wyndhamalllarge.gif for the plans). In the end, we decided to go for it. We’ll be able to fit all of our books and DVDs, etc., though we’ll be broke for a while (at least until we sell our current house). So, we put down some money. The house will be complete in late April, so we’ll be moving in the first half of May.

All of this is my way of explaining in part why I haven’t read and reviewed as much as usual over the past few weeks. I have read some things, which I’ll mention briefly here, and hopefully I get back to a few longer reviews later this week.

I’ve been reading and rereading some Shakespeare as well as some material about Shakespeare. Central to this was re-reading King Lear, which I hadn’t done for several years. Lear is both a great and a devastating play. It is quite possibly Shakespeare’s greatest work (only Hamlet really challenges it) and one of the greatest works of the last 500 years. I first read it when I was a teenager, and even then I was impressed and shaken by it, even though at that point I really didn’t try to analyze why, didn’t look at the structure, or at Shakespeare’s use of language. Now, I read such things more slowly and think more about that. What I also like to do with Shakespeare is read the play, then read criticism about the play. I think this is the equivalent of being able to have a discussion of a work, something I always enjoyed in my college days (so long ago).

I keep two books of recent Shakespeare criticism nearby – Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All. After reading a play, I then read the chapters on that play in Garber and Bloom. Bloom is idiosyncratic, enthusiastic, and very firm in his opinions. (In some ways, he’s the modern version of his favorite critic, Doctor Johnson.) His essays are interesting and provide some insights into the plays. Garber, however, is more comprehensive. She provides very thorough examinations of each of the plays and really helps you appreciate and understand what you’ve read. Thus, while I like both, if someone were to ask me to recommend just one, it would be Garber.

I’ve also been reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’d of course read many of them before, but never all of them. But yesterday I started with the first and am making my way through all of them. They are beautiful and striking. I’m not the right person to review poetry, since my knowledge of it is rather spotty, so I won’t say more here.

Finally on the Shakespeare front, I’m reading the biography Will in the World. Look for a full review of that in a week or so.

The only other thing I’ve read recently is Kelly Link’s marvelous collection Magic for Beginners. The first story is the award winning “The Faery Handbag,” which tells the story of how an entire village moves into a handbag to hide. And it is perhaps the least strange story in the book. All of the stories are weird and creative; many are also very interesting from a narrative or structural point of view, telling stories within stories or playing games with structure. Link is a major writer of fantastic short fiction and is also getting attention from the wider critical world (Time, for example, included this collection as one of it’s best fiction books of 2005). If you haven’t yet read her work, you should.

And of course, in the midst of all this, I have been keeping up with the few TV series I watch. Thank goodness for Digital Video Recorders and, when there are glitches, for iTunes (where I was able to buy the episode of Lost I forgot to record to $2). Last night, the three major Sci Fi channel shows had their season finales. All ended on cliff hangers. Galactica was especially impressive, with an hour and a half finale, that, like most Galactica episodes, pulled no punches and provided no easy answers. Galactica if full of shades of gray and moral ambiguity. Is it right, for example, to try to fix an election when you know your opponent is going to lead you to disaster. (I think the answer in the end is still “no” but it is unsettling.) It’s going to be a long summer, waiting for the next episodes.

Anyway, I hope to get back to longer reviews later this week, now that travel and house hunting are over for a while (and before I have to start packing).