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Happy new year!
One of the squares for this year's bingo card is "the book that's been on your to-be-read list the longest," or, if you don't have a formal one, "a book you've been meaning to read for a very long time." I don't have a formal one, and of a small handful of books I'd been putting off until new bingo year, this was the one I acquired earliest (although still not very long ago). So we're going with it. To be specific, I picked it up at a used bookstore. James P. Hogan has written some good stuff ("Making Light" and "Star Child" both have amusing satirical looks at "religion versus science.") But even I, who tend to be more open-minded than the zeitgeist about "#cancellation is bad, people can say things you disagree with without being monsters unworthy to have their art engaged with," would probably not purchase a new book if money was going directly to this particular dude or his estate. However, he has been dead for twelve-plus years, and the premise of this book seemed similar to "Star Child," and it was used, so...I gave it a go.
Premise: decades ago, with war and nationalism and tensions flaring on Earth, scientists decided at the last minute to add some embryonic DNA material and caretaker robots on a scientific ship heading for Alpha Centauri, so a new generation of humans could grow up away from the problems of Earth. Now, a US-based colony ship that's been in flight for twenty years is about to land and meet planet "Chiron." The first chunk of the book is about the colony ship; the ideology of the people in power there is "we must bring Proper Authoritarian Leadership and the Good Old American Way to these helpless infants, because without it, people from Bad Countries start believing that they deserve Rights and Equality and As You Know Bob, That's Terrible." Given that this author rates pretty high on the yikestastic scale, I was suitably unnerved by this. But let me reassure you: this is not, in fact, true! Sometimes, the messages sent by important people in power, or even held by ordinary people, are wrong, and the narrative is self-aware enough to reveal that! Whew.
So the colonists attempt to start exporting their ways to the Chironians, who are...politely bemused. Without adults to contaminate them with scarcity-based Earth ideologies, the first generation (and their descendants) have embraced fully automated space communism. (Population growth is important and it's mentioned obliquely that many Chironians start having kids relatively early by Earth standards, which is the closest that things there swivel to yikes territory.) Many of the colonists, quickly or more slowly, realize "hey this is great, we don't need a government, we don't need weapons, let's just do science and live life," but a few stragglers are desperate for power for its own sake.
"Star Child," similarly, featured a culture clash between planetary humans doing the same things they have for centuries, and a generation of robot-reared kids innocent of those preconceptions. However, none of them are Earthlings, we don't have asides about RL politics; it includes both fantasy and SF elements, where "Voyage from Yesteryear" is exclusively SF; and it focuses more closely on a smaller set of character POVs (including robots), whereas "Voyage" jumps around quickly among more flat former-USian characters whose jobs, relationships, social structures are predominantly 1950s gender roles-esque. And again, Hogan is smart enough to know that this is not a good thing! It's just less engaging.
"Voyage" does have a sense of humor. Space travelers bet on sports--both games on the ship, and scores from Earth beamed with a four-year lightspeed delay! Chironians and their freethinking counterparts on the ship have no time for superstition: "She wanted to know what sign I was born under. I told her MATERNITY WARD." The bureaucratic shenanigans as Chironians new and old ignore the authority's increasingly dystopic nonsense were funny. And "Catch-22" was probably an influence in the early chapters; being judged as "sane," by a society who wants you to go kill one group of strangers for the benefit of another group of strangers, is not necessarily something to strive for!
This was published in 1982, before "Ender's Game" the novel (but after the short story it's based on); there's a similar "enemy's gate" tactic in the opening chapter (which the readers don't know is a simulation for eight pages!) that gets a thoughtful callback:
There's also an extremely infodumpy aside about the post-Standard Model physics that arises, and ultimately leads Chironians to invent antimatter tech. Hogan's "what underlying structures could unify our understanding both of quarks and leptons?" is...imaginative, but very much pulls you out of the narrative for several pages. The antimatter tech is a MacGuffin that comes up later, but...almost all of the conflict boils down to "false flags" and "bad guys not comprehending that most people are decent and can be trusted to do their own thing." Hogan wants to both point out the absurdity of our Earthling prejudices, but also, have a quirky ragtag squadron of misfits come to the rescue and blast open the doors to save the day, and I'm not sure you can have it both ways.
Bingo: like I said, I'm using it for "bottom of the TBR." While not as predominant as they are in "Star Child," there are a few named robot characters (many of them have Earth history names like "Cromwell" or "Wellington"), so I think you could count it for that square. This card looks to have more specifically fantasy (rather than SF) tropes compared to last year, so I'm not sure how well my random browsing/backlog will work, I may need to be more deliberate!
P.S. Told my work friends about this. "Yeah it's military SF about the colonization of Alpha Centauri. Some of the humor was nice, but not the author's best." MF comments: "so, overall, three stars?" Me: "I don't really have a numeric...waaaaaait that's an Alpha Centauri joke." Groan.
One of the squares for this year's bingo card is "the book that's been on your to-be-read list the longest," or, if you don't have a formal one, "a book you've been meaning to read for a very long time." I don't have a formal one, and of a small handful of books I'd been putting off until new bingo year, this was the one I acquired earliest (although still not very long ago). So we're going with it. To be specific, I picked it up at a used bookstore. James P. Hogan has written some good stuff ("Making Light" and "Star Child" both have amusing satirical looks at "religion versus science.") But even I, who tend to be more open-minded than the zeitgeist about "#cancellation is bad, people can say things you disagree with without being monsters unworthy to have their art engaged with," would probably not purchase a new book if money was going directly to this particular dude or his estate. However, he has been dead for twelve-plus years, and the premise of this book seemed similar to "Star Child," and it was used, so...I gave it a go.
Premise: decades ago, with war and nationalism and tensions flaring on Earth, scientists decided at the last minute to add some embryonic DNA material and caretaker robots on a scientific ship heading for Alpha Centauri, so a new generation of humans could grow up away from the problems of Earth. Now, a US-based colony ship that's been in flight for twenty years is about to land and meet planet "Chiron." The first chunk of the book is about the colony ship; the ideology of the people in power there is "we must bring Proper Authoritarian Leadership and the Good Old American Way to these helpless infants, because without it, people from Bad Countries start believing that they deserve Rights and Equality and As You Know Bob, That's Terrible." Given that this author rates pretty high on the yikestastic scale, I was suitably unnerved by this. But let me reassure you: this is not, in fact, true! Sometimes, the messages sent by important people in power, or even held by ordinary people, are wrong, and the narrative is self-aware enough to reveal that! Whew.
So the colonists attempt to start exporting their ways to the Chironians, who are...politely bemused. Without adults to contaminate them with scarcity-based Earth ideologies, the first generation (and their descendants) have embraced fully automated space communism. (Population growth is important and it's mentioned obliquely that many Chironians start having kids relatively early by Earth standards, which is the closest that things there swivel to yikes territory.) Many of the colonists, quickly or more slowly, realize "hey this is great, we don't need a government, we don't need weapons, let's just do science and live life," but a few stragglers are desperate for power for its own sake.
"Star Child," similarly, featured a culture clash between planetary humans doing the same things they have for centuries, and a generation of robot-reared kids innocent of those preconceptions. However, none of them are Earthlings, we don't have asides about RL politics; it includes both fantasy and SF elements, where "Voyage from Yesteryear" is exclusively SF; and it focuses more closely on a smaller set of character POVs (including robots), whereas "Voyage" jumps around quickly among more flat former-USian characters whose jobs, relationships, social structures are predominantly 1950s gender roles-esque. And again, Hogan is smart enough to know that this is not a good thing! It's just less engaging.
"Voyage" does have a sense of humor. Space travelers bet on sports--both games on the ship, and scores from Earth beamed with a four-year lightspeed delay! Chironians and their freethinking counterparts on the ship have no time for superstition: "She wanted to know what sign I was born under. I told her MATERNITY WARD." The bureaucratic shenanigans as Chironians new and old ignore the authority's increasingly dystopic nonsense were funny. And "Catch-22" was probably an influence in the early chapters; being judged as "sane," by a society who wants you to go kill one group of strangers for the benefit of another group of strangers, is not necessarily something to strive for!
This was published in 1982, before "Ender's Game" the novel (but after the short story it's based on); there's a similar "enemy's gate" tactic in the opening chapter (which the readers don't know is a simulation for eight pages!) that gets a thoughtful callback:
"He told me about the way you ruined the exercise on the ship too. I thought it was wonderful."
"If you're going to lose anyway, you might as well win," Smyley replied. "If you win the wrong way, you lose, and if you lose either way, you lose. So why not enjoy it?"
"What happens if you win the right way?" Kath asked him.
"Then you lose out to the system. It's like playing against [card trick expert] Driscoll--the system makes its own aces."
"If you're going to lose anyway, you might as well win," Smyley replied. "If you win the wrong way, you lose, and if you lose either way, you lose. So why not enjoy it?"
"What happens if you win the right way?" Kath asked him.
"Then you lose out to the system. It's like playing against [card trick expert] Driscoll--the system makes its own aces."
Nice.
There's also an extremely infodumpy aside about the post-Standard Model physics that arises, and ultimately leads Chironians to invent antimatter tech. Hogan's "what underlying structures could unify our understanding both of quarks and leptons?" is...imaginative, but very much pulls you out of the narrative for several pages. The antimatter tech is a MacGuffin that comes up later, but...almost all of the conflict boils down to "false flags" and "bad guys not comprehending that most people are decent and can be trusted to do their own thing." Hogan wants to both point out the absurdity of our Earthling prejudices, but also, have a quirky ragtag squadron of misfits come to the rescue and blast open the doors to save the day, and I'm not sure you can have it both ways.
Bingo: like I said, I'm using it for "bottom of the TBR." While not as predominant as they are in "Star Child," there are a few named robot characters (many of them have Earth history names like "Cromwell" or "Wellington"), so I think you could count it for that square. This card looks to have more specifically fantasy (rather than SF) tropes compared to last year, so I'm not sure how well my random browsing/backlog will work, I may need to be more deliberate!
P.S. Told my work friends about this. "Yeah it's military SF about the colonization of Alpha Centauri. Some of the humor was nice, but not the author's best." MF comments: "so, overall, three stars?" Me: "I don't really have a numeric...waaaaaait that's an Alpha Centauri joke." Groan.
