A collaborative blog by authors, reviewers, academics, and editors on SFnal commentary and notes and whatever else comes to mind. Blog posts do not represent Locus Magazine or Locus Online policy or perspectives.
John Thomas -- the most recent iteration in a series of John Thomases -- was left Lummox, the titular star beast, by his father. Who was left the beast by his father. And so on, back at least a century to the John Thomas who smuggled the young lummox off of his (or her, depending) planet of origin. The Lummox has grown from housecat size to dumptruck size over the years and has begun innocently causing property damage in John Thomas' hometown. The population does all but carry fiery torches over to the kid's house after Lummox's most recent escape. So begins the plot.
While The Star Beast is ostensibly a coming of age story, it is more about the use of diplomacy. Mr Kiku* and his cohort Sergei Greenberg spend most of the book negotiating with the rest of Lummox's race in order to keep the Earth from being blown up by them. The passages about the Beast and John Thomas are interesting -- but it feels like Heinlein really goes off on one of his giddy didactic tears when he gets into the gritty details of status, power and gesture.
It's hard to say who the main character really is. John Thomas is the one who is leaving home - but he never seems to be the agent of his choices. He reacts against his overbearing mother**, is manipulated by his girlfriend*** and is ultimately rescued by the Lummox. Mr Kiku, who is the agent of all of his own actions, feels more like the protagonist but hasn't changed in any substantial ways by the time the story ends.
Some of Heinlein's pet themes show up here, of course. Like how every culture has language that describes xenophobia. How brains are frequently more effective than brawn. How parents do not own their children or, as Mr. Kiku points out, that "sons are lost from the beginning."****
On that last one - I've often wondered what was in Heinlein's past that made this such a common idea in his books. Does it turn up just because of his audience for the juveniles or is there something else going on? I also wonder what his parent characters would have looked like had he had children. But that is an unanswerable question, sadly.
The Star Beast, like most Heinlein, is an enjoyable read and, unlike the recent US edition of Citizen of the Galaxy, my 1984 Del Rey edition has been proofread, which makes the reading that much easier. The plot clips along nicely, even if the author is a little too enamored with trying to teach us everything he knows about making a deal. What's harder to figure out is what (and who) the story is about.
* Mr Kiku's job: "Anything and everything outside of the Earth's ionosphere was Mr. Kiku's responsibility and worry. Anything which concerned the relationships between Earth and any part of the explored universe was also his responsibility. Even affairs which were superficially strictly Earthside were also his concern, if they affected or were in any way affected by anything which was extra-terrestrial, interplanetary, or interstellar in nature -- a very wide range indeed."
** A telling exchange:
"...take off your shoe, dear. I want to measure your foot."
Baffled, [John Thomas] started to remove his shoe. Suddenly he stopped. "Mum, I wish you wouldn't knit socks for me."
"What, dear? But mother enjoys doing it for you."
"Yes, but ... look, I don't like handknit socks. They make creases on the soles of my feet...I've showed you often enough!"
"Don't be silly! How could soft wool do your feet any harm? And think what you'd have to pay for real wool, real handwork, if you bought it. Most boys would be grateful."
"But I don't like it, I tell you!"
She sighed. "Sometimes, dear, I don't know what to do with you, I really don't."
*** At the end of the book she is described as having the "morals of a snapping turtle and the crust of a bakery pie." I still can't figure out what that last bit means. She's light and flakey?
**** Which makes one ask: What about daughters? It's a spot where it's clear how much society has changed since Heinlein's day -- and how much it hasn't.
I was meaning to post about something else tonight, but the news has overtaken me: David Langford's Ansiblereports that Robert Holdstock has died, at the age of 61, following his collapse with an E. coli infection on 18th November. I only knew him in the most tangential way, but this is a hell of a shock. His Mythago Wood sequence of books is absolutely central for anyone trying to get a hold on what fantasy literature in Britain has done since Tolkien. It evokes a version of the country's past that's rich but harsh and unsentimental, and makes all those old tropes like the Green Man or the Wild Hunt new and threatening again. And there are plenty of other works, like The Fetch, or the Merlin Codex sequence, which dig deep into other myths that get taken for granted. In person, I remember him being ebullient, thoughtful, and welcoming to newcomers; others who knew him better say the same; all sympathy to them.
In the light of this weekend's announcement that Syfy.com are discontinuing all their columns, including "Excessive Candour" by John Clute, I thought Roundtable-types might be interested in Erin Kissane's heroic work excavating links to all the columns dating back to 1997.
Over the weekend, I re-read Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.
I use the word "re-read" loosely, however; I am certain that I read it as a teenager but have no memory of the plot, characters or themes. This may be the first post in a series about the RAH books I read during those years - which would be all of the ones published before 1983ish - but can't remember all that well. Because the biggest thing that I'd forgotten about Heinlein is how fiendishly enjoyable his books are, even if you have some qualms about some of the issues they bring up.
Citizen of the Galaxy is one of RAH's classic juveniles: boy meets older mentor who is something of a genius, mentor dies, boy becomes man of honor after Thrilling Adventures. While the plot is predictable, the texture of the adventures make it worth the read.
Others have mentioned how seamless Heinlein's worlds are but I'm always gobsmacked by them, even now. You know that the writer was only showing the iceberg's tip of what he knew about any of his imagined outposts -- like Jubbulpore or the Free Traders' Sisu -- but what he chose to show was exactly what you needed to know. All of the needful stuff is condensed into the man's clear prose, which is never enamored with its own cleverness. In other hands, such concision could be a dull read but this reportorial approach works in Heinlein's hands.
I'd also forgotten how academically-based a lot of his cultures are. Citizen has the subtext of an anthropology primer while it tells a fast-paced coming-of-age story that captures the scope and imagination of space opera. The ending - which falls just as Thorby, the boy in question, launches himself in a new direction - seems to imply that Heinlein was going to revisit Thorby's continued quest in another work. Does anyone know if that was intended? Or begun? And have you re-read any Heinlein lately?
(A note, however, on editions. Unless you are a big fan of reading a book that doesn't appear to have been proofread, avoid the U.S. Pocket Books publication. I suppose I should be happy that the book is still in print but wish that Pocket had forked out the extra cash for a decent proofreader.)
I don't want to go on about my current condition, but reading horror stories while stuck at home with a broken leg (and on painkillers) is an odd experience. I've been working my way through Peter Straub's new two-volume set of American Fantastic Tales, plus the old classic Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. Although the good stories are having the desired effect of safe scariness on me, I haven't at any stage felt I shouldn't go on reading for fear of bad dreams or similar. (That said, the one book I have wimped out of re-reading is King's Misery; but I'm sure that's irrational and there aren't any Locus subscribers who would come round here and force me to retype me reviews to accord with their opinions...)
Anyhow, it occurred to me that there's one moment that's common to an awful lot of horror stories, and it's the moment encapsulated in one of my favorite scenes from any movie, the bathroom scene in Kubrick's The Shining (spoilers, obviously):
There are so many wonderful things in this scene I don't know where to start: Grady (Philip Stone)'s supernatural stillness; the relish with which he rolls the R's in "corrected"; Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson)'s superb delivery of the racial epithet that Grady throws out, showing both his discomfort at the word and the fact that he wants the conversation to continue; the distant ballroom music filtering through. But the structural point of the conversation is how it flips over and reveals the true shape of the story (and the horror) that's to come.
Actually, it flips over twice. Having started with Grady being obsequious to Torrance for spilling a drink over him, Nicholson seems to be getting the upper hand in the first two minutes, when he recognises Grady as the past caretaker who killed his family. Apart from anything else, it signals clearly that we're in fantastic territory and that Torrance accepts this. This is affirmed by Grady's from-the-tomb delivery of "You are the caretaker; you've always been the caretaker." And somehow, that's the point where he takes control of the scene. As he reveals the "talent" of Torrance's son, his implacable fervour gradually co-opts Torrance. (Part of the subtext, I think, is him challenging Torrance: Are you enough of a man to keep your wife and child under control, as they should be?) You can see how much Torrance wants his respect when he takes Grady's phrase "against your will" and puns on it, with a little smirk, as "He is a very wilful boy." And so the shape of the rest of the film, and Torrance's rampage, is set.
The more general point is that lots of stories have this moment (though not always so meticulously executed). The forbidden book is opened and read; the ancient temple is peered into; and the reader (and maybe the protagonist) realise just how bad things are going to be. Sometimes the protagonist may not fully realise their own condition, as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic "The Yellow Wallpaper", and the reader has to supply an awareness of just how trapped that story's narrator is. At the other extreme is what John Clute has called the Club Story, where a horror tale is not only told, but seen to be told to an audience of some kind. The horror is not only recognised, but can be reflected upon in the frame story: "Heart of Darkness", for instance.
The same kind of moment, of course, occurs in plenty of other kinds of stories: in sf, they're what Peter Nicholls has called the conceptual breakthrough moment. But the horror version has a particular kind of affect. The Straub volume includes a very short and pulpy piece by David H Keller, "The Jelly-Fish" (PDF here), in which a boastful professor on a marine expedition boasts to his colleagues that he can achieve anything he wants, including miniaturising himself. He does so, appearing on a microscope slide along with a captured jellyfish. He is ready to return to normal, but...I don't need to tell you the rest, do I?
When the 2007 Hugo ballot was released, there was a hailstorm of commentary about the lack of women on the list. I'm not sure how much the situation has changed in the genre (not much, imho) but I think it's interesting that a very similar controversy is swirling around the "legit" literature circles right now. Clearly, this keeps happening because women can't write their collective way out of a damp paper bag. And, yes, that's sarcasm.
