A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne

Like many people, the first science fiction that I read was the novels of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. I loved both, reading all of their major SF, some before I reached my teens. My favorite Verne novel then – and it remains a favorite now – was A Journey to the Center of the Earth. I loved followed professor Hardwigg (aka Lidenbrook – more on this below), Harry (Alex), and Hans as they descended into the crater of Mount Snaffles and made their way toward the earth’s core (a destination which, incidentally, they never reach). The book is full of wonders, dangers, and adventure, and remains full of sense of wonder and thrills despite its outdated science.

The story starts when Harry’s uncle, Professor Hardwigg, finds an old Icelandic manuscript. He opens it, and out falls an old paper, covered with runes, apparently code. After sometime, Harry and Hardwigg translate it. It’s several hundred years old, and from the Icelandic scientist/alchemist Erne Saknussemm. The note says that Saknussemm has traveled to the center of the earth and gives instructions for those who would follow. Hardwigg, dragging the reluctant Harry with him, is off to Iceland. The note has instructed them that crater of Sneffels, into the tunnel marked by the shadow of the peak Scartaris, in late June. From here on out, adventure follows marvel follows adventure.

The book is full of wonderful, memorable scenes. My textual memory is not great, and over time I often forget details of books. But, even though I hadn’t re-read this novel in 20 years, I remembered many of the key scenes clearly. Of course I remembered the descent into Sneffels. But I also remembered Harry getting lost, and only finding his uncle and Hans again by finding a “whispering galley,” which carried his voice miles away. And their breaking the wall to find the underground stream and save themselves dying of thirst. And the crossing of the underground ocean, including their seeing the sea monsters and the magnetic storm. And many other scenes which stuck in my memory over the years.

This is one of Verne’s very best novels. Verne himself is a better, more complex writer than he is often given credit for in some circles. He has often been badly served by his translators. The current translator, for example, not only tries to anglicize the characters by changing the name Lidenbrook to Hardwigg and Alex to Harry, but his phrasing is often clumsy (he several times refers to “optical delusion,” for example), his measurements switch randomly from metric to English, and so on. I say “he,” but that’s a guess, by the way; the translation I read was un-credited.

My paperback (Signet) also featured an insightful afterword by Michael Dirda, who spends some time talking about Verne as a novelist, his place in literary history, and this novel in particular. It somewhat makes up for the so-so translation, but I do hope to find a better translation some day. We got several new translations of The Mysterious Island a few years back. You’d think we could get at least one new one of A Journey to the Center of the Earth.

A few notes on the movie: I also re-watched the movie recently. Despite being a tad long – ten minutes or so could have been edited out of the first half-hour or so – it holds up very well. James Mason makes a very good Lidenbrook. (Strangely, the movie restores the original names, but moves the opening from Germany to Scotland.) The story is changed around a bit, but Verne’s basic ideas are still there, and several major events remain.

In the movie, the note from Saknussemm is found embedded in a piece of volcanic rock, though it provides the same instructions. Where the movie really diverges, though, is in setting up a human adversary to oppose the professor, Alex, and Hans (and his pet duck Gertrude) – the evil descendant of Arne Saknussemm. It also adds another character – the widow Goetaborg (whose husband was murdered by Count Saknussemm) – who joins the professor et. al. in the trip to the earth’s center (which, in the movie, they reach).

It’s a good movie – perhaps the best of the Verne adaptations.

Eifelheim by Micahel Flynn

2006 was a great year for SF novels. It gave us at least three novels that were of such quality that they are better than the Hugo winners many years – Rainbows End, Glasshouse, and Eifelheim – as well as several that were just below that level. When I read Rainbows End, I was convinced that it would be the easy Hugo winner. Then, when I read Glasshouse¸ I was torn, as both were good. But Eifelheim is perhaps the best of the three, and is now my choice for the best novel of 2006.

Most of the novel takes place in medieval Germany, in a small town in the area of the Black Forest. Pastor Dietrich years before settled here, but he’s also very much a learned man, very intelligent, trained in logic and the science of the time as well as in theology. But life in the town is disrupted when an alien ship crashes there. The aliens – who Dietrich calls the Krenken – look a bit like giant grasshoppers. They are intelligent but alien. In fact, the book really centers on the encounter between two alien cultures, for medieval culture – the way the people thought, their way of interpreting the world around them – are as alien as the culture of the Krenken (who, while alien in many social aspects, from a scientific point of view have a world view and basic assumptions in some ways closer to our own).

Actually, though, it’s even more complex than this simple contact of cultures, since each culture has it’s own subgroups. Some humans view the Krenken as demons and fear and shun them. Other view them as “men” in another form. And yet others view them as demons but deserving of help and conversion to Christianity. The Krenken meanwhile have different groups that adjust in their own ways to the humans. And all groups grow as the novel goes on, often starting out appalled or frightened by the others, then coming to some understanding (or at least what they think is understanding). For example, the Krenken are descended from creatures very like our social insects, and are at first appaled and dismayed when they discover that some humans were capable of rebellion against their lords. Dietrich, meanwhile, is taken aback when the Krenken admit that they descended from animals, since to him that would mean that they were driven purely by instinct, not by reason. But the pastor and the Krenken both come to understand more of what this means as the novel progresses.

Dietrich is both a very bright and a very humane man. When the Krenken ship first arrives, before anyone knows that it in fact has arrived, the town experiences an electrostatic discharge, and Dietrich remembers what he had learned in Paris about static electricity created by rubbing amber and makes the connection. Throughout he shows his intelligence, but often within the context of his medieval knowledge. He has difficulty accepting a sun-centered solar system, and points out the lack of detectable stellar parallax to the Krenken. When the Krenken describe electromagnetic waves traveling in the vacuum (and even essentially describe the Michelson-Morley experiment for disproving the existence of the aether), he again finds logical refutations, within the context of what his society knows. Thus, while we see much of what the Krenken do from Dietrich’s point of view, we often understand more of what their equipment does than he does.

Communication is handled by what is essentially an AI, which Dietrich views as a talking head. Flynn does a great job with this, especially in showing the limitations of such a device. It’s great at translating the concrete, much less good at translating the abstract (though it learns more as the novel progresses). And of course it is limited to using the terms and concepts of the time, something especially difficult when the Krenken try to explain their technology or advanced physics. Reading such advanced concepts in medieval language is fascinating in itself, though.

This main story is “framed” by a story set in our time. (Frame isn’t quite the right term here, since the contemporary parts are interspersed, though there is far less set in our time than set with Dietrich and the Krenken, and the modern section serves much the same purpose as a frame.) Sharon and Tom are a couple; she is a cutting-edge physicist; he is a cliologist (essentially someone who studies history via mathematical analysis). Tom has run into a historical anomaly. The town of Eifelheim was abandoned in the late 1300s and never resettled, even though all mathematical models show that it should have been. Sharon meanwhile is investigating theories of the universe that involve extra dimensions. There results, of course, dovetail in the end, since Tom eventually uncovers bits of the story of the Krenken (though not all, and in some places – especially in his view of the young monk who he reads wrongly – outright wrong), while Sharon has discovered how they got here.

Throughout the book is filled with fascinating insights into medieval culture and history (ranging from the attitudes of the people to the early history of the Inquisition – which is a bit different than the popular view of it), and includes great discussions on science, theology, and philosophy – but done in such a way that it’s all an integral part of the story.

As I noted above, this is right now my choice for the 2006 Hugo. It’s the best novel of the year in a very good year, and in fact is one of the best novels of the new century so far. Flynn, who was always a good writer, took one major step forward in The Wreck of the River of Stars, and now has taken another major leap. He’s moved from one of those writers whose books I get around to when they come out in paperback to one whose books I’ll start buying as soon as they are released. Highly recommended.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

Glasshouse is Charles Stross’s latest look at the marvelous, strange, and often scary world beyond the singularity. It’s set in the same universe as Accelerando, though in this case it’s a novel telling a single story, not the series of shorts that made up the previous book. It’s a future in which humans are virtually immortal; they can be changed and restored by A-gates – essentially nano-assemblers that can rebuild them in any form, make backups, make copies, and so on. But this world of marvels has a dark side. The censorship wars were fought prior to the start of the current novel. In those wars, factions literally erases parts of history by removing them from the records – including the memories of people who used A-gates, which had become infected with a worm called Curious Yellow (usually just abbreviated as CY). The idea that the worms we see on our computer networks today could effect our minds in the future is a truly scary and unsettling concept, but that’s just the lead-in to this marvelously complex and nicely structured novel by Stross – perhaps his most ambitious to date.

As the novel starts, the main character Robin is returning to life, having just gotten a partial memory wipe to remove the memories of some of the things he did in the war. He doesn’t remember what he did, but he knows he was dangerous and knows there are some dangerous people after him. He volunteers to live in a Glasshouse (a former prison/rehabilitation center for war criminals), which is now being turned into a social experiment. In this experiment, earth’s dark ages (1950-2040) will be recreated. The volunteers will be limited to the technologies of the time, while they are observed by the scientists conducting the experiment.

But Robin (resurrected in the Glasshouse as a female named Reeve) soon realizes that things aren’t what he was promised. The society is the breeding ground for a dictatorship, where conformity is enforced, and where those who don’t conform are ostracized and can even be killed. Those in charge are war criminals, but since it’s a closed experiment, Robin and the others are trapped, with no way to get word to the outside world. Meanwhile, Robin is having flashbacks of his old life, of what he did during the war. And he’s getting inklings that his reasons for being here are more complex than he had though.

Stross does a great job of unraveling the joint mysteries of what’s going on in the Glasshouse and who Robin was and is. He reveals this bit by bit, giving us just what we need to know as we need to know it, thereby increasing the tension and mystery of the novel. Along the way he also reveals more and more of the history of his universe. He’s done a good job of working out a consistent and believable though very strange future (in fact, it’s impressive that he can make a future that is this strange seem believable).

The novel, given the setting, also of course has a lot to say about our current culture, as seen through the eyes of someone many hundreds of years beyond us (and in many ways farther beyond us than we are beyond the ancient Romans). He provides a satiric and insightful glimpse at the fifties, but also one that’s at time chilling (several scenes bring to mind the attitudes Miller explored in “The Crucible” or that Jackson examined in “The Lottery”).

I’ve liked pretty much everything I’ve read by Stross, but this is perhaps his best work yet. It’s ambitious and wonderfully constructed, the characters are well drawn (especially Robin), and the future worked out in detail. It comes to a satisfying conclusion, not demanding (though allowing for) more exploration of the worlds he created in the future. Choosing between this and Rainbows End for the Hugo will be hard (and I haven’t read Mike Flynn’s Eifelheim yet – it’s next on my list – which is also getting great reviews). Highly recommended.