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FMK #14: SF in Translation
Hi all! I am back. I did not get my birthday candle wish of having a different president when I got back to the USA, but at least Theresa May is in deep hot water now, so I guess you all did what you could.
The FMK #13 winner is Discount Armageddon, pulling ahead at the last minute in a very close race! The loser was Pawn of Prophecy, in a not-very-close race, althoughMan-Kzin Wars put up a good fight.
I brought Rocket Ship Galileo and Tarnsman of Gor with me on the trip as two K winners that I couldn't bear dumping without Having Read. I... am about 30% through Tarnsman of Gor; so far it is not bad enough to make me hate-read it or throw it at the wall, but also not particularly compelling a read. I still want to Have Read it though, I think.
Rocket Ship Galileo is going to be K for Keep, I am afraid. I tried! But a book written in 1947 about teenagers fighting Moon Nazis was going to be hard for me to dislike. :/ The downsides: the random I Will Teach You Physics bits that weren't even plot relevant - I like a good physics lesson in my boys' own SF but not when it's completely irrelevant to the story. And sometimes it just read too much like A Heinlein Novel in character voice and didactic Heinlein Opinions, although it's not bad at all compared to his later stuff and I probably wouldn't have even registered that if I wasn't oversensitized to Heinlein being Heinlein.
I was going to say it avoided being egregiously bad on racism and sexism etc. by not having any diversity, except that actually, at least one of the main characters is almost definitely Jewish. (I might have missed it if I'd read it fifteen years ago, but I'm not sure what else a reference to 'when you stood in front of the congregation and gave your speech and said "Today I am a man."' is supposed to be. And two others are the son & brother-in-law of a concentration camp survivor, although that might have been just as a political prisoner.) So it's Jews fighting Nazis on the Moon and how can I not keep it?
Plot-wise, it is not as ludicrous as that sounds, either - the Moon Nazis are Hydra-style Mad Science Neo-Nazis, not people who have been hiding on the moon since the 1940s. And the "teen boys build moon rocket" works a lot better when it's set in a near-future where intercontinental rocketry and commercial space stations are common - they use mostly off-the-shelf parts and an atomic drive invented by a former Manhattan Project scientist who is leading the project. (And it's interesting that the main character conflict in the book is the adult scientist agonizing on whether it's a good idea to take 18-year-old boys into danger, which is one of several things that make one thoughtful in the context of the 1947 copyright date.)
I'm not saying it's a great book, but if you like old SF it's a pretty good one, and there's nothing in it that makes me as a modern reader actively cringe. (Except that I'm pretty sure even in 1947 you couldn't fire unmodded rifles on the moon.)
Anyway, in honor of my international travel, today's theme is SF In Translation.
How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.
Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)
The FMK #13 winner is Discount Armageddon, pulling ahead at the last minute in a very close race! The loser was Pawn of Prophecy, in a not-very-close race, although
I brought Rocket Ship Galileo and Tarnsman of Gor with me on the trip as two K winners that I couldn't bear dumping without Having Read. I... am about 30% through Tarnsman of Gor; so far it is not bad enough to make me hate-read it or throw it at the wall, but also not particularly compelling a read. I still want to Have Read it though, I think.
Rocket Ship Galileo is going to be K for Keep, I am afraid. I tried! But a book written in 1947 about teenagers fighting Moon Nazis was going to be hard for me to dislike. :/ The downsides: the random I Will Teach You Physics bits that weren't even plot relevant - I like a good physics lesson in my boys' own SF but not when it's completely irrelevant to the story. And sometimes it just read too much like A Heinlein Novel in character voice and didactic Heinlein Opinions, although it's not bad at all compared to his later stuff and I probably wouldn't have even registered that if I wasn't oversensitized to Heinlein being Heinlein.
I was going to say it avoided being egregiously bad on racism and sexism etc. by not having any diversity, except that actually, at least one of the main characters is almost definitely Jewish. (I might have missed it if I'd read it fifteen years ago, but I'm not sure what else a reference to 'when you stood in front of the congregation and gave your speech and said "Today I am a man."' is supposed to be. And two others are the son & brother-in-law of a concentration camp survivor, although that might have been just as a political prisoner.) So it's Jews fighting Nazis on the Moon and how can I not keep it?
Plot-wise, it is not as ludicrous as that sounds, either - the Moon Nazis are Hydra-style Mad Science Neo-Nazis, not people who have been hiding on the moon since the 1940s. And the "teen boys build moon rocket" works a lot better when it's set in a near-future where intercontinental rocketry and commercial space stations are common - they use mostly off-the-shelf parts and an atomic drive invented by a former Manhattan Project scientist who is leading the project. (And it's interesting that the main character conflict in the book is the adult scientist agonizing on whether it's a good idea to take 18-year-old boys into danger, which is one of several things that make one thoughtful in the context of the 1947 copyright date.)
I'm not saying it's a great book, but if you like old SF it's a pretty good one, and there's nothing in it that makes me as a modern reader actively cringe. (Except that I'm pretty sure even in 1947 you couldn't fire unmodded rifles on the moon.)
Anyway, in honor of my international travel, today's theme is SF In Translation.
How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.
I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.
Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)
Poll #18485 FMK #14: SF In Translation
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26
The City Trilogy by S. K. Chang (Chinese, 2003)
The Vampire of Ropraz by Jacques Chessex (French, 2006)
Han of Iceland by Victor Hugo (French, 1823)
Malevil by Robert Merle (French, 1972)
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (French, 1864)
TSelf-Reference ENGINE by Toh Enjoe (Japanese, 2010)
Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime by Mizuki Nomura (Japanese, 2006)
The Next Continent by Issue Ogawa (Japanese, 2006)
Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem (Polish, 1977)
World's Spring by Vladimir Gakov (Russian, 1981)
The Final Circle of Paradise by the Strugatsky Brothers (Russian, 1965)
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende (Spanish, 1982)
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...or, well, I feel like I should like it, I have actually read shamefully little of it.
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But that's partly because it hadn't really organized itself as a genre until then, so you'd just get a writer doing a book or two that happened to have SF elements, or short stories showing up in fiction magazines. And a lot of it's not really, like, classic literature. And as mentioned above, I have done more reading *about* it than actually *reading* it. But even Mark Twain wrote a book in 1894 where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were abducted by a UFO! (okay, it was a "mysterious airship," but close enough.) And a lot of mystery/adventure stuff from that period had "fifteen-minutes-in-the-future" technology, like Madelyn Mack's "pocket telephone." And a whole subgenre of utopias, like "Looking Backward" or "The Sultana's Dream."
And that's not even getting into the technophilic boys' series of the early 20th century of which Tom Swift is only the tip of the iceberg.
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So Twain invented Aliens Made Them Do It :)
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So I spent a lot of time going, "Wait. What???"
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ahahahah, Heinlein. Yeah. Oh god, I do not miss those.
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I am fine with my Asimov "here is three pages on how to read ephemeris data" from the same period when they go on to navigate to a tiny moon using said ephemeris, but when it's not even RELATED to the plot or themes that's just bad writing by any standard.
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I read Journey to the Center of the Earth this year, albeit in French, so I even have fresh memories of it! It's interesting. It involves a lot more of the male lead panicking and swooning amidst geological calculations (and 19th century arguments about whether the Earth's core is too hot and high-pressure to live within or not) than I would have expected, while his aged uncle and their stoic Danish guide get on with things that are not panicking and swooning. I liked 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea better, but I also like marine biology better than geology as far as my scientific interests go, so that may be relevant.
House of the Spirits I read in either high school or middle school -- I want to say 8th grade -- and I have only very patchy memories of it. I've been meaning to reread it sometime to see what I think of it now. I liked it at the time, but that doesn't necessarily mean a lot for whether I would now.
...And I haven't read Han of Iceland but I absolutely want to read your review of it, so.
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I am really surprised I never read any Han of Iceland reviews during my time in Hugo fandom on Tumblr. Surely someone else has bitten that bullet??
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And right? I feel sure someone has -- I mean, both from general odds but also because I have a nagging feeling that I read someone talking about having read it. But I can't for the life of me remember who, and I don't think they posted in great detail.
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I enjoyed Journey to the Center of the Earth but it's definitely a "If you enjoy that sort of thing, you will enjoy this." It has an incredibly vivid sequence of being in hot, suffocating, black tunnels without water.
I have not read any of the others but the first two Japanese ones have amazing titles.
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...I accidentally typed an extra T in that first Japanese title, oops, there is my official "embarassing typo" for this poll.
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No opinions on today's poll, by virtue of never having read any of them.
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....so far it just feels like a Barsoom ripoff with all the actually creative bits of Barsoom missing and extra daddy issues. There's quite a lot about the Priest-Kings, though! You mean they never become "plot"-relevant in the first one at all, after all that exposition? Wow.