space opera

They've finally chosen the interim director. I sent an email off today asking if she'd like any changes in the agenda for the summer meeting next week and if she'd be around later this week to go over the files in my office.

So it's nearly done and I can start to look for a new job and spend the summer reading science fiction. I've been bingeing on two writers - Iain M. Banks and Lois McMasters Bujold. I found Banks earlier this year and have just about collected all of his science fiction books. He also writes straight fiction under Iain Banks. Bujold is a new find. They both write the style of science fiction called space opera, but reading them close together like this underlines the inadequacy of genre names.

Space opera is a pretty old subgenre. I guess it goes back to the so-called golden age of science fiction, the pulps of the thirties. Broadly speaking, space operas are usually about wars between planets, between cultures, between species. The science is usually pretty shaky, what with all that jumping of light years and cosmic weapons and all. The opera comes from the fact that there are these big battles and struggles between good and evil or known and unknown. Bujold is probably closer to the classic style (I'm guessing about this). She's got a hero, a bit flawed, but he overcomes internal and external challenges to succeed by the end of every novel I've read so far. He's got a backstory because the series starts with his parents. This is pretty straight-ahead escape fiction. Bujold is funny, a little clever. Her characters are all human or humanoid as far as I can figure out. The different planets have different cultures, all of which seem to be extensions or exaggerations of current earth societies. Barrayar is a patriarchal, military culture (though changing unexpectedly quickly). Beta is a liberal, progressive culture. Jackson's Whole is a sort of wild west, libertarian, science culture. I don't really know enough about the rest. Even though I've read Komarr, I'm not at all sure what differentiates the Komarrans from the Barrayaran, except that they don't seem to have the same sort of military hierarchy. There's just not enough information. Bujold sketches things in and then lets the reader's templates for certain sorts of characters, cultures, societies, etc. do the work. She's an easy read and fun in a mindless sort of way.

Banks also has wars and he has more than humans and he's an altogether different (and better) writer. What makes him better is that he doesn't let a reader go on cruise control. If you stop paying attention, he's going to trip you up. Well he's going to trip you up anyhow, but it's more fun if you're paying attention. Where Bujold is content to use received ideas about cultures and people for her books (there's something very unpleasant with an evil sodomite), Banks takes on the work of completely creating worlds, cultures, and beings very far away from where humans are in the 20^th century, even if the seed of the creations comes from now. For example, the Culture is obviously based on liberal socio-political values, but he looks at what that means when people (not just humans) are beyond money and can have everything they want. What is a society like when individuals really do have a great deal of freedom? Will democracy hold together? How? Is is ethical to do anything in a society's power in the name of freedom and individuality? He follows this line, these lines to some very uncomfortable places. He takes machine intelligence seriously, without assuming that they're either just like us (but smarter and without emotions) or our sworn enemies (a la The Matrix). They're colleagues, with their own agendas. And they are a lot smarter than we are.

Banks is funny, but cooler, darker than Bujold . He uses complicated structures to tell the stories. This is most obvious in Use of Weapons. He tells a story from two directions. Aside from being clever (it is), it enables a slow unveiling, an explanation that comes clear like a developing Polaroid. When I finished his books, I want to dive right back to the beginning, to look at what he did and how he did it.

The bad news? Many of the earlier novels are out of print in the US. But British Orbit has been printing them and they're luscious looking. The British sometimes to a better job of their genre fiction. Arrow Press has new editions of Georgette Heyer's Regency novels with wonderful period covers. These are a necessary counter to the awful, horrible, sacrilegious mess that Harlequin's been putting out for the last couple of years.