Fahrenheit 451

It came out during dinner with friends that I had never read Ray Bradbury's classic, Fahrenheit 451, and Sue immediately jumped up to pull it from her shelves. It made a big impression on her when she studied it at school, and many of the details, as well as the central message, had stuck with her for decades.

I can see why it's become a school text staple. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel of ideas, first and foremost. In a society where books are outlawed and ritually burned when they're discovered, the population are kept docile on a diet of shallow entertainment provided by screens and ear-'seashells' and war is a constant threat, it's no wonder that in some ways Bradbury's novel seems even more relevant today that it was in 1953. Fireman Montag works at setting fires, not putting them out, and over the space of a few days, becomes first quietly questioning, then fully radicalised to oppose the prevailing social structure, ending in a thrilling pursuit and a cataclysmic ending.

But... it didn't really work for me. Apparently it was written in a frenzy and needed quite a bit of editing to pull it into shape. I wasn't totally convinced by the world-building, though the ubiquitous screens certainly seem prescient -- there are plenty of logical holes in the story and the characters' reactions don't always make sense. But the size of the concepts and the breathless pace of events would sweep younger readers along, and the ideas the novel raises definitely need to be aired. Maybe if I'd read it when I was 14, it would have worked magic on me? 

Project Hail Mary

My younger daughter is a big fan of space, and she loved Andy Weir's previous book (and the movie) The Martian, so she was very excited both for this novel and the film which has just been released, starring another favourite, Ryan Gosling. (She went to see a preview of Project Hail Mary at IMax, and we are going together to see it again next week.)

Andy Weir is very good at writing about science and using science to solve specific problems. There's no hand-wavery here (not that I can detect, anyway). In The Martian, we saw a marooned astronaut figuring out how to survive on Mars. Project Hail Mary widens the scope of the drama to put the entire Earth in jeopardy, when a light-feeding life form starts devouring the sun. The whole of humanity unites to solve this problem (pity we can't seem to do this for the climate crisis) and it ends up with, again, a single astronaut, Ryland Grace, far, far out in space, having to work out what to do to save the world. This time our sole survivor is joined by an extra-terrestrial who looks like a spider, uses hearing instead of sight as their primary sense, and 'speaks' with sound, who has come from his own home world to solve the same emergency, which he calls, 'bad bad bad.'

Some of my favourite scenes in the novel are the ones where Grace and Rocky are working out how to communicate with each other and work together, despite the differences in their physiology. It's lucky that Rocky's culture is broadly compatible with that of an American high school science teacher and they can get along so well. I had a quibble when Grace noted that Rocky calls him the Eridian equivalent of the word 'grace,' which, given the religious and historical freight of that word in English, raised more questions about Rocky's planet than could possibly be answered.

Weir does an excellent job of continually raising the stakes and throwing obstacles at his characters; he also skilfully uses flashback and Grace's initial amnesia to reveal the backstory of events on Earth. Honestly I was more interested in the Rocky/Grace timeline but it was all fun. I can't wait for the movie, which my daughter reviewed as 'amaze! amaze! amaze!' 

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

I first heard Becky Chambers recommended on one of the ABC radio book shows, and I think they said something about her writing 'hope-punk,' which sounded both intriguing and inviting. I found the first of her Wayfarer series, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, at the Athenaeum Library, and I'm happy to report that there are two more in the series.

I used to read quite a bit of science fiction as a teenager, culminating in Ursula Le Guin's philosophical novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, but as I got older, I grew out of the habit. I did love Star Trek (especially Voyager), and of course Doctor Who and the dystopian Blake's 7, but science fiction writing has largely slipped out of my life. 

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet recaptured all the things I loved about my adolescent favourites. There is a cheerful, multi-species crew of various sexual and gender persuasions; there are adventures and encounters both pleasurable and dangerous; there are political and ethical dilemmas, and just a sprinkling of techno-babble. All the characters talk like twenty-something college students (except the dignified captain, Ashby) and there is plenty of banter as well as heart-rending moments. I was slightly disappointed that the planet-let Cricket was named for giant insects rather than the game! But it was really delightful to spend time on the Wayfarer, and I approve of hope punk. I'm looking forward to more. This is technically an adult book, but in many ways it would make a perfect YA.
 

Comes the Night

To my shame, I've only read one other Isobelle Carmody title, despite her being the 'queen of YA fantasy' as proclaimed on the cover of Comes the Night. But as soon as I started reading, it was obvious that I was in the safe hands of an experienced and accomplished author.

I would classify Come the Night as science fiction more than fantasy, though it does contain a fantasy element in the form of 'dream-walking,' whereby some individuals can enter a kind of collective consciousness known as the dreamscape and even enter into the dreamspaces of other people. There are some baddies looking to manipulate politicians and take over the world using the dreamscape, and I must confess that I became a little lost in the intricacies of their plot towards the end of the novel.

However, the struggles of Will and his friend (or more than friend?) Ender to discover what happened to Will's dead uncle Adam, the mystery of the extraordinary kite Adam left behind, who has abducted Ender's gifted twin Magda, and why, are all absorbing and exciting. This story, like We Do Not Welcome Our Ten Year Old Overlord, is set in an alternative Canberra, this time in the future (2070) when cities are protected by domes from the damaged environment resulting from climate change. People communicate with ophones, use and are monitored by household computer hubs, and travel by tubeway between domes. But they still go to see films, exercise on climbing walls and ride buses.

The world-building, as you'd expect from Carmody, is highly detailed and meticulous, and I enjoyed being immersed in this slightly dystopian world. I wondered if some of its features might have been influenced by Covid lockdowns, with intensive surveillance and the possibility of protective measures being abused by authorities. But most of all I appreciated the name of Will's beautiful and technologically sophisticated kite, Lookfar, the same name as Ged's boat in the Earthsea books.
 

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord

I enjoyed this book a lot. Garth Nix has mined his own Canberra childhood, his history as a teenage D&D Dungeonmaster and put a John Wyndham-esque sci-fi twist on it all to produce an action-packed middle grade novel.

Kim (Chimera) and his younger sister Elia (Elieithyia) live with their eccentrically hippie parents on the outskirts of 1970s Canberra, spending most of their time hanging out with their friends Bennie and Madir, but everything changes one day when they fish a mysterious golden globe out of the lake. This incident is based on a true story from Nix's childhood, when he thought he saw a severed head in the murky waters one day (I think it turned out to be a motorbike helmet). Before long, child prodigy Elia is in communication with the strange sphere, which becomes progressively more and more threatening and dangerous.

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord reminded me of John Wyndham's classic Chocky, which scared the suitcase out of me as a child, and also fascinated me. Things never get too terrifying here, though there is certainly plenty of danger and lots of action. I raced through it and I hope plenty of young readers do the same. My only quibble is that I was never quite sure how to pronounce Elia.
 

Chocky

 

I read all of John Wyndham's books in high school, but haven't returned to them since. My memory of 1968's Chocky, his last published novel, was that it was very creepy, but I didn't find it frightening this time round at all. Perhaps my memory was clouded by the fact that I tried to write my own version of a Chocky story, which my mother read and worried that I'd developed schizophrenia!

Chocky is the story of 12 year old Matthew (narrated by his concerned father) who seems to have an invisible friend (always a fascination of mine); however 'Chocky' seems to have access to knowledge and abilities that Matthew himself doesn't possess. The family doctor is no help, a psych consultant brushes off their anxieties, Matthew's mother is in denial, but gradually his father becomes convinced that Chocky is real. But exactly who or what are they?

You read John Wyndham for the ideas and the plot rather than for character development, but I had forgotten how thin his characters are. I'd also forgotten the strand of casual misogyny that runs through this novel. Much like Nevil Shute's On the Beach, of similar vintage, women exist in this world purely as anxious mothers, whose 'irrational' fears need to be soothed by their calm, sensible husbands. Some prescient predictions by Chocky, though; if only we'd listened...