What Makes This Book So Great

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  THIS IS FOR PAM ADAMS, AND STEVEN HALTER, AND THE OTHER WONDERFUL PEOPLE I HAVE MET THROUGH THEIR COMMENTS ON TOR.COM.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  1. Introduction

  2. Why I Re-read

  3. A Deepness in the Sky, the Tragical History of Pham Nuwen

  4. The Singularity Problem and Non-Problem

  5. Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Why isn’t it a classic of the field?

  6. From Herring to Marmalade: the perfect plot of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

  7. “That’s just scenery”: What do we mean by “mainstream”?

  8. Re-reading long series

  9. The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein’s Juveniles

  10. Happiness, Meaning and Significance: Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes

  11. The Weirdest Book in the World

  12. The Poetry of Deep Time: Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night

  13. Clarke reimagined in hot pink: Tanith Lee’s Biting the Sun

  14. Something rich and strange: Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine

  15. To trace impunity: Greg Egan’s Permutation City

  16. Black and white and read a million times: Jerry Pournelle’s Janissaries

  17. College as Magic Garden: Why Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin is a book you’ll either love or hate.

  18. Making the future work: Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang

  19. Anathem: What does it gain from not being our world?

  20. A happy ending depends on when you stop: Heavy Time, Hellburner and C. J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe

  21. Knights Who Say “Fuck”: Swearing in Genre Fiction

  22. “Earth is one world”: C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station

  23. “Space is wide and good friends are too few”: Cherryh’s Merchanter novels

  24. “A need to deal wounds”: Rape of men in Cherryh’s Union-Alliance novels

  25. How to talk to writers

  26. “Give me back the Berlin Wall”: Ken MacLeod’s The Sky Road

  27. What a pity she couldn’t have single-handedly invented science fiction! George Eliot’s Middlemarch

  28. The beauty of lists: Angelica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial

  29. Like pop rocks for the brain: Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  30. Between Two Worlds: S. P. Somtow’s Jasmine Nights

  31. Lots of reasons to love these: Daniel Abraham’s Long Price books

  32. Maori Fantasy: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

  33. Better to have loved and lost? Series that go downhill

  34. More questions than answers: Robert A. Heinlein’s The Stone Pillow

  35. Weeping for her enemies: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor

  36. Forward Momentum: Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Warrior’s Apprentice

  37. Quest for Ovaries: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos

  38. Why he must not fail: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Borders of Infinity

  39. What have you done with your baby brother? Lois McMaster Bujold’s Brothers in Arms

  40. Hard on his superiors: Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Vor Game

  41. One birth, one death, and all the acts of pain and will between: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar

  42. All true wealth is biological: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Mirror Dance

  43. Luck is something you make for yourself: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cetaganda

  44. This is my old identity, actually: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory

  45. But I’m Vor: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Komarr

  46. She’s getting away! Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign

  47. Just my job: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Diplomatic Immunity

  48. Every day is a gift: Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Winterfair Gifts”

  49. Choose again, and change: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga

  50. So, what sort of series do you like?

  51. Time travel and slavery: Octavia Butler’s Kindred

  52. America the Beautiful: Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain

  53. Susan Palwick’s Shelter

  54. Scintillations of a sensory syrynx: Samuel Delany’s Nova

  55. You may not know it, but you want to read this: Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin

  56. Faster Than Light at any speed

  57. Gender and glaciers: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

  58. Licensed to sell weasels and jade earrings: The short stories of Lord Dunsany

  59. The Net of a Million Lies: Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep

  60. The worst book I love: Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday

  61. India’s superheroes: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

  62. A funny book with a lot of death in it: Iain Banks’s The Crow Road

  63. More dimensions than you’d expect: Samuel Delany’s Babel-17

  64. Bad, but good: David Feintuch’s Midshipman’s Hope

  65. Subtly twisted history: John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting

  66. A very long poem: Alan Garner’s Red Shift

  67. Beautiful, poetic and experimental: Roger Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand

  68. Waking the Dragon: George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire

  69. Who reads cosy catastrophes?

  70. Stalinism vs Champagne at the opera: Constantine Fitzgibbon’s When the Kissing Had To Stop

  71. The future of the Commonwealth: Nevil Shute’s In the Wet

  72. Twists of the Godgame: John Fowles’s The Magus

  73. Playing the angles on a world: Steven Brust’s Dragaera

  74. Jhereg feeds on others’ kills: Steven Brust’s Jhereg

  75. Yendi coils and strikes unseen: Steven Brust’s Yendi

  76. A coachman’s tale: Steven Brust’s Brokedown Palace

  77. Frightened teckla hides in grass: Steven Brust’s Teckla

  78. How can you tell? Steven Brust’s Taltos

  79. Phoenix rise from ashes grey: Steven Brust’s Phoenix

  80. I have been asking for nothing else for an hour: Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards

  81. Athyra rules minds’ interplay: Steven Brust’s Athyra

  82. What, is there more? Steven Brust’s Five Hundred Years After

  83. Orca circles, hard and lean: Steven Brust’s Orca

  84. Haughty dragon yearns to slay: Steven Brust’s Dragon

  85. Issola strikes from courtly bow: Steven Brust’s Issola

  86. What has gone before?

  87. The time about which I have the honor to write: Steven Brust’s The Viscount of Adrilankha

  88. Dzur stalks and blends with night: Steven Brust’s Dzur

  89. Jhegaala shifts as moments pass: Steven Brust’s Jhegaala

  90. Quiet iorich won’t forget: Steven Brust’s Iorich

  91. Quakers in Space: Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day

  92. Locked in our separate skulls: Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall

  93. Saving both worlds: Katherin
e Blake (Dorothy Heydt)’s The Interior Life

  94. Yearning for the unattainable: James Tiptree Jr.’s short stories

  95. SF reading protocols

  96. Incredibly readable: Robert A. Heinlein’s The Door into Summer

  97. Nasty, but brilliant: John Barnes’s Kaleidoscope Century

  98. Growing up in a space dystopia: John Barnes’s Orbital Resonance

  99. The joy of an unfinished series

  100. Fantasy and the need to remake our origin stories

  101. The mind, the heart, sex, class, feminism, true love, intrigue, not your everyday ho-hum detective story: Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night

  102. Three short Hainish novels: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions

  103. On reflection, not very dangerous: Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions

  104. Why do I re-read things I don’t like?

  105. Yakking about who’s civilised and who’s not: H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking

  106. Feast or famine?

  107. Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, Jay Schreib’s play of Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren

  108. Not much changes on the street, only the faces: George Alec Effinger’s When Gravity Fails

  109. History inside out: Howard Waldrop’s Them Bones

  110. I’d love this book if I didn’t loathe the protagonist: Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr’s Household Gods

  111. Screwball-comedy time travel: John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr. Nice

  112. Academic Time Travel: Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog

  113. The Society of Time: John Brunner’s Times Without Number

  114. Five Short Stories with Useless Time Travel

  115. Time Control: Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity

  116. Texan Ghost Fantasy: Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle

  117. The language of stones: Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife

  118. A great castle made of sea: Why hasn’t Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell been more influential?

  119. Gulp or sip: How do you read?

  120. Quincentennial: Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth

  121. Do you skim?

  122. A merrier world: J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

  123. Monuments from the future: Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths

  124. The Suck Fairy

  125. Trains on the moon: John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless

  126. Overloading the senses: Samuel Delany’s Nova

  127. Aliens and Jesuits: James Blish’s A Case of Conscience

  128. Swiftly goes the swordplay: Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword

  129. The work of disenchantment never ends: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge

  130. Literary criticism vs talking about books

  Thanks

  Books by Jo Walton

  About the Author

  Copyright

  JULY 16, 2011

  1. Introduction

  This book is made up of a series of blog posts I wrote on Tor.com between July 2008 and February 2011. They appear here in order, and with their original dates. These are about a fifth of the total posts I made during that time. You don’t have to read them in order, but sometimes one will refer back to another and develop an argument. I wrote them as blog posts, and so they are inherently conversational and interactive—they were written in dialogue with each other and also with the people reading and commenting. I think they are still interesting when taken out of that context, but if reading them here makes you splutter “but, but” and reach for the follow-up key, the posts are still online, and I am still reading comments. Interaction remains a possibility. I’m still writing new posts too. (If, however, you are reading this in a far distant future in which this is no longer a possibility, hello! Nobody would have liked to talk to someone from your world more than I would, and any regrets are on both sides.)

  The brief I was given when I started writing for Tor.com was to talk about what I was re-reading. Patrick Nielsen Hayden said that I was always saying “smart things about books nobody else had thought about for ages,” and that’s what I tried to do. You won’t find any reviews here. Reviews are naturally concerned with new books, and are first reactions. Here I’m mostly talking about older books, and these are my thoughts on reading them again. There are posts on books in many genres and published between 1871 and 2008, but the emphasis is on older science fiction and fantasy. There are also posts here about the act of reading and re-reading, and about the genres of science fiction and fantasy and the boundaries between them. When I talk about books that aren’t science fiction and fantasy, I’m looking at them from a genre perspective, whether it’s how George Eliot should have single-handedly invented science fiction or wishing wistfully that A. S. Byatt had read Delany.

  My general approach to the books in these pieces is as a genre-reader, but not as a generic reader. There’s no impersonality here, no attempt at objectivity. These are my thoughts and opinions, for what they’re worth, my likes and dislikes, my quirks and prejudices and enthusiasms. I select the books I re-read based on what I feel like reading at the moment, so these are my tastes. I do from time to time write about books I don’t enjoy, for one reason or another, but what you’ll mostly find are attempts to consider the question I ask in the title of this collection—what makes this book so great?

  JULY 15, 2008

  2. Why I Re-read

  There are two kinds of people in the world, those who re-read and those who don’t. No, don’t be silly, there are far more than two kinds of people in the world. There are even people who don’t read at all. (What do they think about on buses?) But there are two kinds of readers in the world, though, those who re-read and those who don’t. Sometimes people who don’t re-read look at me oddly when I mention that I do. “There are so many books,” they say, “and so little time. If I live to be a mere Methuselah of 800, and read a book a week for 800 years, I will only have the chance to read 40,000 books, and my readpile is already 90,000 and starting to topple! If I re-read, why, I’ll never get through the new ones.” This is in fact true, they never will. And my readpile is also, well, let’s just say it’s pretty large, and that’s just the pile of unread books in my house, not the list of books I’d theoretically like to read someday, many of which have not even been written yet. That list probably is at 90,000, especially if I include books that will be written in the next 800 years by people as yet unborn and books written by aliens as yet unmet. Wow, it’s probably well over 90,000! When will I ever read all those books?

  Well, I read a lot more than one book a week. Even when I’m fantastically busy rushing about having a good time and visiting my friends and family, like right now, I average a book every couple of days. If I’m at home and stuck in bed, which happens sometimes, then I’m doing nothing but reading. I can get through four or six books in a day. So I could say that there are never going to be sufficient books to fill the voracious maw that is me. Get writing! I need books! If I didn’t re-read I’d run out of books eventually and that would be terrible!

  But this argument is disingenuous, because in fact there is that towering pile of unread books in my bedroom at home, and even a little one in my bedroom here in my aunt’s house. I don’t re-read to make the new books last longer. That might be how it started.… The truth is that there are, at any given time, a whole lot more books I don’t want to read than books I do.

  Right now, I don’t want to read Storming the Heavens: Soldiers, Emperors, and Civilians in the Roman Empire by Antonio Santosuosso, and/or The Phoenicians and the West: Politics, Colonies and Trade by Maria Eugenia Aubet and Mary Turton. I do want to read both of these books, in theory, enough theory that they came home with me from the library, but in practice they both have turgid academic prose that it’s work to slog through. I am going to try to slog through the Phoenician one before I go home to Montreal and the book goes home to Cardiff library, but the other one is goin
g back unread. (The Phoenicians, unlike the Romans, are insufficiently written about for me to turn down a solid book for bad prose.) But yesterday, when I was picking up books to take to read on the train to London, both of them glowered at me unwelcomingly. I was already in the middle of one (pretty good) book on Hannibal’s army, I wanted fiction. And I didn’t just want any old fiction, I wanted something good and absorbing and interesting enough to suck me in and hold my attention on the train so that I wouldn’t notice the most boring scenery in the world—to me at least, who has taken the train between Cardiff and London quite often before. I didn’t want to have to look out of the window at Didcot Parkway. I had some new fiction out of the library, but what I wanted was something engrossing, something reliable, and for me, that means something I have read before.

  When I re-read, I know what I’m getting. It’s like revisiting an old friend. An unread book holds wonderful unknown promise, but also threatens disappointment. A re-read is a known quantity. A new book that’s been sitting there for a little while waiting to be read, already not making the cut from being “book on shelf” to “book in hand” for some time, for some reason, often can’t compete with going back to something I know is good, somewhere I want to revisit. Sometimes I totally kick myself over this, because when I finally get around to something unread that’s been sitting there I don’t know how I can have passed it over with that “cold rice pudding” stare while the universe cooled and I read C. J. Cherryh’s The Pride of Chanur for the nineteenth time.

  My ideal relationship with a book is that I will read it for the first time entirely unspoiled. I won’t know anything whatsoever about it, it will be wonderful, it will be exciting and layered and complex and I will be excited by it, and I will re-read it every year or so for the rest of my life, discovering more about it every time, and every time remembering the circumstances in which I first read it. (I was re-reading Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist. “The first time I read this was in a cafe in Lytham St. Annes in 1987,” I mentioned. “How can you remember that?” my husband asked. “I don’t know. It was raining, and I was eating a poached egg on toast.” Other people remember where they were when they heard that Princess Diana was dead. I haven’t a clue, but I pretty much always remember where I was when I first read things.)

 
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