Because I Like to Talk About Books, Dammit

WARNING: The following post is about books. Not just books, science fiction books. It will probably be super boring. You have been warned.


So, it seems that I love any book from the science fiction section, right? I mean, whenever I babble on about a book it's usually something sci-fi like, right? Aliens and what have you. This is actually a misconception - I really only love well written science fiction. But I willingly wade through huge piles of sci-fi crap that I never mention in order to get to it.

There are plenty of different types of bad science fiction.

There is the poorly written stuff, which you usually see in your movie and video game tie-ins. The kind of stuff that relies on branding to sell, rather than story or any competency with the English language. (Your Warcrafts, your Star Treks, your *shudder* Halo tie-ins)

Then you've got your poorly framed stuff, where the universe makes no sense or contradicts itself, or there's too much deus ex machina/"A Wizard Did It" explanations, or over-exposition on the universe with no good character correlation... really there are tons of different ways that this comes up. But it boils down to not immersing the reader properly into your world. This is not always a vital component of science fiction, you can write a good book without explaining the universe you're in, but more and more I find this to be the big hitch in my enjoyment of a novel.

Separate but equal to that, you've got the authors who have a perfectly explained universe, but can't write a convincing character or conversation to save their life (or their book). This is a rarer form of bad, usually if someone has enough of a handle on a scenario to map out a whole unifying theory for the entire world they can also imagine realistic ways for people to act within it, but it's still common enough to put on the list.

The last category is the hardest to define and the most nebulous, but it mostly has to do with intent and storytelling. Why are you telling this story and more importantly why should I care? This is less of a science fiction issue than an overall fiction issue - if the reader doesn't care about the story, or isn't invested in the outcome, there's no reason to keep reading, even if it's perfectly constructed.

In my mind sci-fi has a layer added on to that - not only must the story be compelling, it should have some reason for this alternate setting. Which, I'll admit, is only a gripe of mine. You can have a traditional novel (say, murder mystery or detective novel) that is just set in some sci-fi setting, but in most all cases it comes off as annoying, pretentious, or unnecessarily confusing. (This is not a condemnation of those sorts of books as a whole, though. Turning a genre on its ear can be interesting in its own right. Just more often than not it plays out as a gimmick rather than a conscious plotting choice that has meaning to the novel.)

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Now that I've already written a full post complaining about bad science fiction, I get to the reason behind this whole line of thinking - I just finished a set of three novels by John Scalzi: Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony. These are my precise definition of great science fiction.

It's a trilogy of sorts - each book is set in the same universe but would probably work equally well as stand-alone novels. They do share various characters and follow an over-arching plot, though, so where they really excel is in the sum of all three books taken together.

Each book manages to avoid all those pitfalls above:

- they're delightfully well-written,
- have a clear, concise, and uniform universe that is introduced as naturally as possible (only the slightest out of place chucks of clunky exposition),
- with honest-to-God unique characters who have realistic dialogue,
- and a clear sense of purpose and drive for each novel that sucks you into the story and keeps you engaged.

The storyline follows a future where humans expand out into the galaxy and find it teeming with life. Life that mostly wants to destroy humanity to keep all the available real estate to themselves. The humans decide to go with the flow and attempt to wipe out everyone else too and get to colonizing.

The first two books are military novels (borrowing brilliantly from the Heinlein school of writing in the most direct way possible) that follow the new super-human soldiers who act as the front line against all the alien races, while the third is mostly a political story that builds on the plots developed over the course of the first two books. So you get plenty of action and alien killing, plenty of pathos (as the universe is a very easy place to die in), and plenty of humor as all the protagonists keep a relatively happy and witty outlook in the face of all the horrors they're up against.

This does not sound groundbreaking in general, but it's just refreshing to find the formula done so well, and carried out through three full books. They immediately get a spot on my shelf right next to the Ender series as a go-to quick and fun read.

But the real reason I'm so up on these books is because they're so eminently accessible to just pick up and read. I wouldn't have a second thought recommending them to anyone, even if they aren't a science fiction fan per se. A lot of that comes from the writing style - each book has a keen sense of humor and drama without so much of the extra baggage that you so often see with hard science fiction.

See, I can love and dig into a book like Charles Stross' Accelerando, but I wouldn't dare send anyone near it that wasn't fully on board with pushing through a very difficult read in order to reap the rewards. You've got to focus and parse through not just the writing style, but the constant shifts in tone, time, and technology. Conversely, these books still tell a great story but do it without making it feel like work.

Relevant, helpful disclosure: I devoured these books. Read all three of them in a span of three days, getting though The Ghost Brigades and better than half of The Last Colony from noon to ten at night on the second day. And then reread Old Man's War a few days later so I could discuss it with someone who had just finished it.

The ease of the writing and the compelling way the story is paced make it a chore to put down the books, which is the last hallmark I need to recommend them universally as a great entry point to science fiction. Because, even within the ridiculously small subset of people who read for fun, I think there's a bias against science fiction. Most people compare the whole genre to broccoli - you like it or you don't. But the real comparison should be to a whole food group - you may not like broccoli, but there is surely something in the Fruits and Vegetables Section that you enjoy.

I may just be spouting nonsense (as usual), but whatever, I really, really enjoyed these books and urge anyone to try them out. Who knows, maybe you have latent geek tendencies just waiting to spring forth.