Review: Diverse Energies, a science fiction anthology

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley.  It’s a science fiction anthology that includes stories from Paolo Bacigalupi and Ursula LeGuin.  While I don’t read a lot of anthologies, it’s also nice to think you might find some new authors to read.

The theme of this anthology is diversity.  Its editor, Tobias S. Buckell, who is Caribbean and British, says:

Books were my entertainment.  I loved tales of fantasy, strange lands, strange worlds, strange futures, and adventure.  And over time I came to realize that most of the books I read had only one kind of hero, one kind of face on the cover.

I write adventures about the future, and of future worlds, and they’re populated by a diverse set of characters.  Why?  It’s the future face of the world.  It’s us.  All of us.  And we all deserve to be seen in the future, having adventures, setting foot on those strange new worlds.

I wanted to see all the sides of my families in stories about the future, from my pale relatives to my dark-skinned ones.  I want to see the whole human race.

I’m not sure what’s the right way to review an anthology.  I can tell you I skipped around a little, and there are a few stories I didn’t finish.  There are a few stories I didn’t like at first but once I gave them ten pages I was deeply drawn into them.  And I can tell you I enjoyed the book as a whole, not just for the statement it’s making, but for the science fiction-dystopian entertainment of it.

My husband likes his science fiction to be pretty technology-driven, and these stories aren’t.  But if you’re looking for good fiction about strange worlds and cultures, or what racism and classism might look like in the future, you’ll enjoy this.

A quick run-down of some of my favorites.

“The Last Day” by Ellen Oh.  Set in Japan, this story is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to what it might feel like to be around when a nuclear bomb goes off.  I won’t forget this story any time soon.

“Good Girl” by Malinda Lo.  About a dystopian future where mixed-ethnicity people are considered to have terminal illnesses and forced to live underground.  And there’s an outside world that nobody’s seen.

“A Pocket Full of Dharma” by Paolo Bacigalupi.  If you’ve read Pump Six, Bacigalupi’s book of short stories, you’ll be disappointed because this story comes from that book.  Still a fascinating story though and one of the best in this collection.  Bacigalupi’s writing really stands out here.

“Blue Skies” by Cindy Pon.  A story of the futuristic divide between haves and have-nots.  In this story, the “haves” (ten percent of the population) breathe through oxygen tanks and have all kinds of futuristic technology where the “have nots” are lucky if they live till thirty. But the real story here is about a brief human interaction between the two classes.

“Solitude” by Ursula LeGuin.   I’ve had trouble reading LeGuin, having started two of her books and put them both down.  Something about her writing style doesn’t work for me, even though I know her books are classic and adored by many.  This story was different.  It’s about a woman who is a field ethnologist, someone who studies different cultures.  She finds a culture that is extremely difficult to communicate with, and the only way to learn about them is to reside in their village with her two young children.  During the time she stays there, her children become so integrated into the culture it becomes impossible to take them from it.  An absolutely fascinating read.

And a few others I enjoyed:

“Pattern Recognition” by Ken Liu.  This is a story about children growing up in a shelter where they work every day to learn and decipher patterns.

“Next Door” by Rahul Kanakia.  Set in the near future, where the “haves” are immersed in virtual technology and barely see what’s going on around them.  The “have-nots” live by squatting in houses and staying out of the way of the upper class.  This story definitely felt like it could be the future.

“What Arms to Hold Us” by Rajan Khanna.

There were maybe three I didn’t care for, by authors K. Tempest Bradford, Daniel H. Wilson, and Greg van Eekhout.  Why?  Two were a little too action-oriented for my tastes, and one started out really interesting but went on a bit too long for me.

But all things considered, this was an anthology that introduced me to new ideas and authors, and scary visions of the future that could very well exist.  I think for many of these stories, we can draw a line between today’s political decisions to what might happen down the road.  And that’s something we should definitely think about.

Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

So much has been said about this book, I’ll keep it short.  That said, it was a great read and I highly recommend it to anyone who grew up in the eighties.

Ready Player One is set in the near future, when mankind has pretty much given up on preserving the Earth and now spends most of its time in OASIS, a virtual world.  Wade Watts attends a virtual high school and is fixated, like most people, on one thing: winning a challenge set by the now-dead James Halliday.  Halliday created OASIS and became the richest man alive, and before he died he created a contest: to find three keys hidden deep in OASIS.  The first to complete the puzzle will win his fortune.

Wade is poor, and mostly family-less except for his aunt.  He lives in a trailer and is lucky to have the basic equipment he needs to log into OASIS.  Without resources he can’t possibly travel to the many worlds inside OASIS to look for the keys.  What he can do, though, is learn everything he possibly can about Halliday’s history and favorite things, which all come from Halliday’s childhood during the eighties.  Just as in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it’s unrealistic to think that starving little Charlie Bucket is getting a ticket to the factory when every rich parent in the world is paying people to open candy bars.  But if Charlie doesn’t get in, we don’t have a story.

Unlike Halliday, and clearly Ernest Cline, I didn’t like the eighties.  I don’t have warm fuzzy memories of John Hughes movies, Cyndi Lauper, arcade games, etc.  So I thought I wouldn’t enjoy this book, but I did.  Maybe because the eighties pop references are so integrated into a fantastic story.  Maybe because everything in this book was so intricately detailed, I couldn’t help but be impressed.  Reading this book felt like you were part of the puzzle, because everything in it triggers a memory of something you forgot you knew.  Cline doesn’t go for the super-obvious, but for the slightly, more obscure references, like the movie WarGames.

My husband read it first, and he thought all the game references would leave me bored or confused.  It’s true I didn’t get most of the D&D and video game references.  But the cool thing about this book was that somehow Cline makes the story perfectly clear.  And one thing I liked about this book was that even if I wasn’t reliving my childhood, I was at least reading about my husband’s childhood.  And seeing the world through his eyes is always something that makes me happy.

At any rate, if this book was just one long collection of pop culture references, I’d have gotten bored pretty quickly.  But it’s not.  Wade is competing against all the other people trying to win this prize, and he’s also competing against the evil corporation, IOI, which has employed people (the soulless Sixers) who spend their days trying to win this contest so that OASIS can end up under corporate control.  Wade and the other contestants are fighting to keep IOI from ruining their beloved virtual world.

If it sounds a little formula, it is.  It’s predictable, but it also reminded me of all those oh-so-cheesy 80s movies that pitted one smart individual against the evil corporation (think Working Girl or The Secret of My Success or Wall Street).  It’s pop culture clichés piled on top of each other.

But the twist on the solve-the-puzzle, fight-corporate-greed story is this: it’s mostly happening in a virtual world.  So the cool thing about this book is that Cline really thinks about how his story goes in and out of the real world, and what it means if in the future, most of our interactions are through avatars rather than in-person.

This book isn’t Shakespeare, by a long shot.  Cline is either ripping everyone off or he’s completely brilliant.  Either way, it’s a fun and clever read and one I was sorry to put down.

Review of The Drowned Cities by Paulo Bacigalupi

I’ve become a big fan of Paulo Bacigalupi after reading his short stories and his first YA novel, Ship Breakers.  Bacigalupi is not only a great writer and world-builder, but like all good science fiction or dystopian fiction, he makes really compelling statements about the world we live in.

The Drowned Cities is no exception.  This is a book about two children, Mouse and Mahlia, who live on the edge of the war-torn Drowned Cities.  Mahlia is the daughter of a Chinese peacekeeper.  In this world, peacekeepers had been sent to control the Drowned Cities, but at some point they abandon the city, and when they leave the retribution is brutal.  Mahlia’s mother is violently murdered and Mahlia has her hand chopped off.   Her friend Mouse saved her life, and together they are fortunate to have been taken in by a kind doctor.  But in this savage and violent world, their life isn’t going to stay calm for very long.

While violent, Bacigalupi has created an incredible world, full of warring political factions, children trained as soldiers, and genetically enhanced creatures who are enslaved to the government as fighting machines.

Mahlia and Mouse, struggling to survive, run into Tool, a dog-man introduced in Bacigalupi’s earlier book, Ship Breakers.  Tool is an intelligent being bred and trained as a weapon of war.  He’s half man, half beast, with the sensory perception of a dog and incredible strength.  The dog-men are bred to be devoted to their masters, yet Tool somehow breaks away from a life of slavery and seeks his own path.

The setting of the Drowned Cities is based on Washington, DC, although I admit I didn’t pick up on that for most of the book.  Once you do, the parallels are really fascinating and make me want to read the book over again.

Bacigalupi’s writing is incredible, from the first sentences of the book.

Chains clanked in the darkness of the holding cells.

The reek of urine from the latrines and the miasma of sweat and fear twined with the sweet stench of rotting straw.  Water dripped, trickling down ancient marble work, blackening what was once fine with mosses and algae.

Humidity and heat.  The whiff of the sea, far off, a cruel, tormenting scent that told the prisoners they would never taste freedom again.  Sometimes a prisoner, a Deepwater Christian or a Rust Saint devotee, would call out, praying, but mostly the prisoners waited in silence, saving their energy.

The best thing about this book is that Bacigalupi really develops the characters and the friendship between them.  There is a devastating hopelessness to the lives of these two children, yet they continue to fight for each other.  Mahlia has learned at a very young age that the only way to survive is to put herself first – but she also has to learn that sometimes putting the people you love first is the only way you can live with yourself.

I’ve read a lot of young adult fiction recently that I found to be incredibly adult.  And not because of sexuality – I mean a combination of complexity, traumatic subject matter and violence that makes me wonder why we call these books YA.  What makes a book “young adult” fiction?  Is it when the main characters are young?  Does it have to do with length or complexity of the book?  I think I’ve decided it’s a marketing tool more than anything else.  And I’m not sure it matters.  But I have a very hard time calling this book YA.

I loved this book even though it was incredibly violent, and in a brutal, graphic way that really got to me.  Bacigalupi doesn’t write about death, he writes about torture and fear.  He makes you think about how innocent people can be turned into killers and how people lose their humanity.  But at the same time, he really takes you into the minds and hearts of his characters, and creates a vivid and terrifying future.

I highly recommend this book — although not so much for younger readers.

Review of Living Proof by Kira Peikoff

Living Proof, by first time novelist Kira Peikoff, has a really great concept and is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.  I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and the book was published on February 28, 2012 by Tor/Forge Books.

The story takes place in the near future, where Dr. Arianna Drake is running a fertility clinic under the careful watch of the government – which monitors the production of every embryo so that no embryos can be used for stem cell research or harmed in any way.  This is the Christian-extremist version of the near future, which doesn’t really seem all that far-fetched.  Personhood is now defined at the creation of every embryo rather than at birth or during the fetal period.  So not only is every embryo tagged and monitored, but every pregnant woman is subject to government review every month and is considered a criminal if she does anything (like drinking a glass of wine) to harm her fetus.

Arianna is careful to pass every government inspection, but she has a secret.  She’s working with a team of scientists to clone embryos for stem cell research.  Her mission?  To find a cure for the impending condition of multiple sclerosis that will have her in a wheelchair within months.

Unfortunately, a growing number of women seem to be visiting the clinic, and the government is suspicious.  So they send in an agent, Trent, to get to know her.  Trent poses as a romantic interest and lures her into friendship so he can learn more about what she’s doing.  Trent considers himself to be a Christian and a good government employee, but he also struggles with the morality of what his religious beliefs and his job require him to do.

I’ll stop there with the plot summary.  What follows is a mix of science fiction, thriller, and just generally a good story that raises a lot of important issues.  I always find it’s hard to mix good story-telling and point-making but this book does it well.  In the process I also learned a ton about stem cell research and embryo production, but I’ll admit a lot of it went over my head.

Arianna is an awesome character, strong and smart and courageous, although her vulnerability with Trent is frustrating.  She is so guarded yet she meets Trent and believes everything he tells her.  I wanted to shake her and yell “wake up you idiot!”  But at the same time, here’s a woman who’s so independent and intelligent, and lives under this huge burden of disability and impending death, that you can totally understand her wanting to believe in somebody.

At times her mission to cure MS also seems a little selfish, because she’s putting other scientists and friends at great risk.  But clearly, a cure for her will be ground-breaking for many others, and could possibly change the political trajectory for stem cell research.  And you can hardly blame someone for trying to cure their own disease first.

An interesting note about the author: While studying journalism at NYU, she reported on the White House for the Orange County Register.  In the summer of 2006, she watched as President Bush announced a veto to deny federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.  That experience led to the creation of this book.

All in all, this book was enjoyable, fast-moving, easy to read yet full of interesting social, political, religious and scientific issues.  Highly recommended.

Review: Pump Six and Other Stories by Paulo Bacigalupi

Paulo Bacigalupi is the author of the award-winning science fiction novel, The Windup Girl, and a young adult novel called Ship Breaker.  I loved Ship Breaker; but I’ve tried to read The Windup Girl and found it difficult to get into.  Bacigalupi introduces a very detailed alternative world that’s can be compared to the noir-dystopian-Asian-influenced world of the movie Blade Runner. 

Pump Six is a collection of his short stories, published in science fiction magazines from 1999 to 2008, and many of them are set in a similar world as Windup Girl.  I don’t read a lot of short stories but I thought these might be a more “accessible” way to get into the head of Bacigalupi.

I wasn’t disappointed.  The stories in this book are thoughtful and disturbing and written in rich detail.  Some take place in a future very close to ours, and others are wildly different.  These are dark, violent stories.  They brought to mind Atwood’s vision of the future or Bradbury’s.  I’d describe them as science-fiction for the non-science-fiction reader, by which I mean they are about people, society, governance and society, more than technology or science.

My favorite story was called “Pop Squad” –  in this story, an investigator is hunting down criminals.  He breaks into a house and finds a couple of drug-addled women, who are taken away.  He then encounters three young children.  Rather than taking them in, he executes them.  It turns out this is a world where a drug has been invented that allows people to live indefinitely in perfect health.  The catch?  Children aren’t allowed in a world where nobody dies; the drug is a form of birth control as well.  There are a small number of women who, desperate for children, go off the drug and give up their own immortality — only society hunts them down and kills them.

What’s brilliant about the story is how complex the issues are – would we want to live forever if we could?  What would that mean for our population?  If having children was outlawed, would we want them more or less?  Why are some people so desperate to have children?  Would you give up your whole life to have a child?  Bacigalupi brilliantly contrasts today’s society, which is so baby-crazy that gigantic stores full of products are designed just for babies and children, with a world where people can’t remember children and toys exist only as collectibles.

The investigator asks one of the women, “what you breeders are thinking” considering that having a child means you and your child will be hunted down like criminals.  She responds, “I’ve been alive for one hundred and eighteen years and I’m thinking that it’s not just about me.  I’m thinking I want a baby and I want to see what she sees today when she wakes up and what she’ll find and see that I’ve never seen before because that’s new.”

“The People of Sand and Slag” is a similar story in which humans have become nearly indestructible.  Animals have been extinct for years because of their mortality, but the characters discover a surviving dog and adopt it.  Only then they find it’s so weak (if it breaks a limb it doesn’t automatically repair itself) they don’t know if they want the burden of caring for it.  Another disturbing story is “Pump Six,” in which the main character discovers that humanity is gradually getting stupider every year, which will ultimately lead to a breakdown of infrastructure and equipment that no one is smart enough to fix.  It’s happened so subtly no one could tell.

“The Pasho” was another of my favorites, because it addressed the clash of two cultures, one focused on tradition and religion, the other focused on knowledge and change.  It asks the question, at what point should a “traditional” culture adopt new ways, when those ways are based on information and can improve lives?  Does adopting new ways mean the death of tradition, belief, and community?  Is the integration of different cultures a bad or a good thing?  When is it right for a community to fight to remain separate?

As is always true of short stories, some resonated more than others.  “Tamarisk Hunter” and “Softer” weren’t as interesting to me, but overall this book was outstanding.  In many ways these stories reminded me of the old “Twilight Zone” stories I read (and watched) as a child.  They may not be real life, but the real-world implications hit you like a punch in the gut.

Review: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

In The Year of the Flood, Atwood does something unusual: she writes a book that’s set in the same time and place as her previous book, Oryx and Crake, but from the perspectives of different characters (see my review here).

In an interview on Amazon, she says that one reason for this was to address a problem in Oryx, the lack of female perspective.  I would agree that this is a weakness in Oryx, and a surprising one coming from Atwood.  Still, I loved the book so clearly it was a problem I could live with.

Atwood also writes this story from a very different perspective, that of the lower socioeconomic class out in what she calls the “pleeblands.”  In Oryx, Jimmy is brought up in a comfortably well-off family employed by the Helth-Wyzer corporation.  He lives in a “compound” which is basically corporate housing.  He’s under control of the company and knows little about what happens out in the rest of the world.  Jimmy can visit the pleeblands on a lark but he doesn’t have to survive there.

Year of the Flood is told by two women, Ren and Toby.  It took me a little while to understand the differences in these two characters.  Toby is older, more practical and knowledgeable.  Ren is younger and much more malleable, a trapeze dancer who works in a strip club.  The book begins in the time after what is referred to as the “Waterless Flood” – the release of a virus that kills nearly everyone.  Both Ren and Toby tell their stories through flashback, so we understand a lot more about life in this devastating world — even though from Oryx we already know about the use of BlyssPluss and the resulting pandemic.  Atwood paints a picture of a very tough, merciless life for most people in the pleeblands, if you don’t work for, and follow, the corporate government.

Before the Flood, Ren and Toby are part of a religious group called the Gardeners.  They are sort of a radical environmental group that falls somewhere between a commune and a cult, although calling it a cult is inaccurate because no one is brainwashed or forced to stay with them.  In fact, the Gardeners rescue Toby from a psychotic thug who has been raping her and will kill her if she tries to leave, and they rescue other characters as well. The Gardeners’ leader is Adam One, who sermonizes about the importance of respecting the earth, from eating vegetarian to reusing resources to growing food.  The Gardeners are also survivalists – Adam One preaches about the Waterless Flood, and he teaches his followers how to forage for food, and to keep emergency rations stored at all times. The Gardeners are run not just by this one person but by a team of leaders known as the Adams and Eves.

Atwood makes the Gardeners seem a little silly at times, with their made-up hymns and their homage every day to a different saint (some of these are people you’ll have heard of, like Dian Fossey and Rachel Carson).  At the same time it’s clear that the Gardeners are an ideal.  They maintain harmony among their group without being abusive, and they follow their principles but don’t demand zealous belief.  Toby confesses she’s not sure she’s a believer but Adam One responds that as long as her actions are consistent with their principles, she doesn’t have to believe everything they preach.

Also it is the Gardeners’ teachings, like avoiding drugs and storing emergency supplies, that help Ren and Toby to survive the virus and the challenges that follow.  Like many post-apocalypse stories, it isn’t necessarily surviving the plague that’s the hard part, it’s the hysteria, crime, and unavailability of resources that follow.

While I definitely recommend this book, I felt it lacked some of the impact that Oryx had.  I’ve read a number of comments by people who found Year of the Flood better, but I’m not one of them.  Yes, the characters are more sympathetic, and their lives are more compelling.  But Jimmy, with his lost mom and his sad love for Oryx, was compelling in his own way.

I think the reason is that the parallel story line was a bit distracting.  Jimmy kept popping up in the story and I kept trying to remember the first book and what role Ren, Toby and the Gardeners played.  There was also too much coincidence in terms of the same few characters losing each other and then finding each other again.  Atwood’s idea of parallel stories is a good one, since so much was left untold in the first book, but her story of Crake, Oryx and the Crakers (who sort of just “pass by” in this book)  held my interest much more.

Both books for me started slowly and were somewhat hard to follow at first, but in Oryx I felt like it all pulled together.  In Year of the Flood I had a problem with the story line that occurs towards the end of the book.  Instead of pulling the story together, Atwood veers into a side story driven not by our main characters but by an over-the-top villain and Ren’s not-so-three-dimensional friend Amanda.

One more thing: Year of the Flood tells what happens right after Oryx ends. Atwood explains that she got so many questions about the ending of Oryx that she wanted to write more about it.  Personally, I love an ambiguous ending.  I think I would have been much happier with this book if it told a story that was independent of the characters in Oryx.

So,  a mixed review but still a definite thumbs up, and I will acknowledge that many reviewers found Year of the Flood to be a worthy or even superior sequel to Oryx.  I just felt it was distracting because as I read, I kept comparing the two.  But thanks, Margaret Atwood, for writing two of the most compelling (and scary) books I’ve read in a while.

Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I read a review of the movie that just came out, and it sounded so interesting I thought I’d read the book first.  This was an interesting book to read after Oryx and Crake, because both address the ethics of genetic engineering, only in very different ways.  In fact, this was different from what I expected, because it had no science in it all.  It’s really a story about friendship and love, but at the same time about whether it’s ethical to clone people and use them for parts.

The book is about three friends who grow up together at Hailsham, a rural English school.  From the beginning you know that the lives of these characters are unusual.  Kathy is a carer — she cares for donors, who have as many as four donations until they die.  Kathy is thirty which is old for a carer.  She tells us that caring is traumatic work but she’s good at it so “they” keep her at it.    We know that Hailsham graduates are somehow special but it’s not clear why or how.

Hailsham is a rural English boarding school where Kathy and her friends Tommy and Ruth grow up.  The students have no family and very little contact with the outside world but in every other way they have a good life.  They are encouraged to take care of themselves physically, and at the same time they seem to receive a quality education.

There are at least two key differences between our world and theirs.  One is they are encouraged to be highly artistic.  In fact their artwork is regularly put on display, sold to the other students, and the best work is collected by one of the instructors (for some unknown purpose that the students wonder about).  The second is they are taught about sex, taught that they won’t ever have children, and encouraged to explore sex physically with each other.  In effect, they are taught that sex is a physical act that is unrelated to love and relationships.

As Tommy and Kathy grow older, they begin to question their existence – why do they make some of the instructors fearful, angry, or sad?  Will they be able to love each other, or to have careers? What happens when they leave school? Does it matter that they won’t have children or won’t live much beyond the age of thirty?

Ishiguro spends a lot of time on the characters’ expectations and understanding of their function in life.  The people in this book are bred, cared for, and for the most part treated honestly about why they are there.  Humanity can almost say they are acting humanely, in the same way that we say if we breed animals for food, and treat them humanely (which we generally don’t, but let’s say we do), then there is no ethical problem — after all, they wouldn’t exist if we didn’t eat them, right?

But of course these are thinking, feeling human beings.  They know very little about the lives of other humans, because that is kept from them, but they know enough to question whether they are entitled to better lives than these.  They know their non-cloned counterparts are out in the world and fantasize about meeting them. I think that is the subtly frightening thing about this book.  I also found it disturbing that these people are forced to care for each other as they die.  In other words, only a few humans who are not clones (basically the instructors at the school) ever have to interact with the cloned humans, and they never have to watch them suffer and die.

I hope this doesn’t say too much about the book if  you’re thinking about reading it. It’s an engaging, thoughtful read.  Ultimately, it’s a book about the relationships of three people, but it’s also a book about the life they are born into.

Review: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

I read Fahrenheit 451 in two days this weekend.  There aren’t many books that make you see the world differently when you’re done, and for me this was one of them.

The book tells the story of Montag, a fireman, in a near-future American town.  In this near future, books are illegal, the government controls all media, and firemen burn houses containing books on as little evidence as a phone call.  Montag meets Claire, a girl who gets him thinking about why he does what he does.  Then he has to burn the house of a woman who is willing to burn to death herself rather than leave her books.  This sparks a rebellion in Montag against the book-burning system.

As with his other books, the images Bradbury conjures are lasting and disturbing – I won’t be forgetting the Mechanical Hound, the “families” in the walls, and the people who all step out their front doors at the same time because TV tells them to.

But more than just imagery and Bradbury’s always beautiful prose, this book is about what we take for granted — it’s about the power of literature and language; the need for people to think critically; and the need for silence and time to reflect on what we read.  (On this last point, see a recent article in the New York Times about how technology is keeping us from that time to process.)

In the story, the government doesn’t have to try very hard to silence people’s thought – the people did it to themselves. The invention of television causes people to stop reading and talking to each other.  The government then realizes how much more manageable people are when they stop thinking, and makes books illegal.  No one minds enough to protest, aside from a small minority of academics.  Television becomes “family” and people “interact” with it.  People are happy and prosperous, and though there is a war going on, no one knows or cares much about it.

Beatty, the head fireman, explains the philosophy behind book-burning:

“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo.  Burn it.  White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Burn it.  Somone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs?  The cigarette people are weeping?  Burn the book… If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one.  Better yet, give him none.”

This book was published in 1953, and clearly many of the dire predictions of the book have not come true – in fact communication today is about as open as it could possibly be.  We have the Internet, hundreds of private cable channels, regular and satellite radio, and any book we want, thanks to online and big box bookstores.  More importantly, television hasn’t caused people to stop reading.  Some even argue that the Internet enables us to read more.

At the same time, Bradbury’s concern about the television viewer as a passive non-thinker seems VERY relevant today.  There’s no question that we watch television differently from the way we read, that we cease to interact in a meaningful way with each other, and that we soak up messages without really thinking about them.  In Bradbury’s time, popular television was designed to soothe (e.g. Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver).  Today it’s designed to shock.  But I’m not sure it’s any different.  Even when we watch horrifying things on television, we still turn the TV off and go about our day.

Sure, we can watch instructional television if we want to – but is there any real difference between watching a show like “Mythbusters” and watching “Real Housewives of New Jersey”?  Maybe not according to Bradbury.  Beatty explains that the government tries to “cram [people] full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information.  Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.  And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.”

In Fahrenheit’s world, communication was controlled by the government; today, there may be harm in having too many choices of media. More and more, we listen to whoever agrees with us, so rather than being exposed to objective sources of information, we have to pick and choose, and we generally choose whoever agrees with us.  So you watch Fox News because you already share their viewpoint, and in turn they just keep reinforcing that viewpoint without offering multiple points of view.  In a 2003 interview on the 50^th anniversary of the book, Bradbury expresses the concern about television news deluding viewers, and I definitely agree.

I read Fahrenheit 451 in paper form, which is unusual for me these days, but it wasn’t available on the Kindle.  In fact, Bradbury, who turned 90 this month, has vehemently rejected putting his books on the Kindle or other e-readers.  Two weeks ago he told the LA Times “we have too many machines now.”

However, in the book Bradbury makes very clear that it’s not the format of the book that matters, it’s the thought process. When paper books aren’t available, the characters memorize the words so they can be reproduced later. One of the characters says “books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all.  The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

Columnist Tom Horgen in the Minnesota Star Tribune recently made two complaints about e-readers.  He says: “An e-book is not a book. A digital screen does not replace the feeling, the scent and the joy of turning the pages of a classic novel. That’s why I wouldn’t be caught dead using an e-reader…”  While I get that people are attached to the feel of paper books (I personally love the dusty smell of old bookstores), we don’t read for the feel of the page, we read for the words, the thoughts, the meaning.

Horgen goes on to say “If the circumstances of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian future in “Fahrenheit 451″ were to happen today, the government wouldn’t even have to burn books. They’d just press a button to delete them. That’s sad.”  It’s true that Amazon has the power to remove books from our Kindles, as they did last year with an unauthorized copy of 1984.  It’s a serious concern if there is only one e-publisher.  But as long as there is competition, there is little difference between publication on an e-reader and regular print publication.

Censorship still exists. There are plenty of communities out there removing Harry Potter, Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye from library bookshelves.  But today’s censorship may lie more in the ability to pay for the books you want to read, since Amazon and other vendors allow us to buy pretty much anything we want, while libraries in schools and low-income neighborhoods are sadly underfunded and underused.

Bradbury’s fears of censorship may not have come to pass — but having read this amazing book I will definitely think more about what – and how – I watch television.

Review: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

(Spoiler alert: don’t read if you’re still planning to read The Hunger Games)

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Hunger Games – I was expecting Twilight but these books are fun, thoughtful reads . I was also put off at first by the fact that Hunger Games seemed like some combination of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Stephen King’s The Running Man.  But there aren’t that many original plots in the world, and these are good ones. Collins takes these ideas and creates a highly original world.

Catching Fire has a tough act to follow as a sequel and as the middle book of a trilogy.  The book immediately draws you in, right where the last left off.  Katniss has survived the Games, and she gets to spend the rest of her life as a wealthy, adored celebrity.  Perfect, right?  Except we already know from The Hunger Games that Katniss will actually have to spend the rest of her life coaching young competitors in the Games, so she will actually have to relive her experience again and again. And she’ll actually become a part of this tyrannical system of government that forces children to kill each other to survive.

On top of that, the Games have placed her in the impossible position of having to pretend she loves Peeta.  It may be she actually does love him; or maybe she could have loved him if her feelings hadn’t been so manipulated.  So now she returns home to deal with her feelings for Peeta and her friend Gale.  Collins has created something more interesting than the standard love triangle here because Katniss really has no idea how she feels or what it means to be in a relationship.  (Although this can also be a detractor at times.  Kat is oddly asexual for a teenage girl; Collins describes kissing like she’s never done it before.)

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away.  In some ways, Catching Fire was not as engaging a read as the first one.  The book starts out strong, drags in the middle, then picks up again in the second half.  But Hunger Games had the advantage of a simple, straightforward plot device – character thrown into a conflict, fights for survival, and at the same time grows and develops as a person.  On the other hand, in this book Collins is really freed up to be more creative with the story – and we see that in her depiction of the Quell Games and the creation of characters who are more multi-dimensional.  Also, she moves from a story focused on the survival of a couple of people, to broader ideas of tyranny, and revolution.  Can one person make a difference? And if you could make that difference, could you sacrifice yourself, or the people you love, for a larger ideal?  I think the idea that one person, whether they intend to or not, can spark a revolution must be true.  Also interesting is the idea that Kat is the spark but Peeta is kind of the conscience — although even he is willing to kill people in the Games which I found contradictory.

The end surprised and satisfied, and definitely kept me anticipating the next book.  For people who like this series, check out the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld, a fantastic writer of young adult paranormal/steampunk/dystopian fiction.  Also check out this article a friend sent me from the New Yorker, “Fresh Hell” – it’s all about why young adult dystopian fiction is so popular right now (though I’m not sure that’s anything new).