1995 Hugo Award Winner- 'Mirror Dance' by Lois McMaster Bujold

The entire Vorkosigan series is a fun read, Bujold plays with a bunch of old SF tropes like faster than light travel, interstellar war and empire, new technology, and a lot of pre-existing SF stereotypes.  But, she manages to make the whole thing fresh enough to keep the reader interested.  One of the best things about the series has been watching Bujold grow as a writer, 'Shards of Honor,' the first book in the Vorkosigan Saga, was published in 1986, so it's not much of a shocker to say that Bujold has changed as a writer since then, it was almost thirty years ago.

'Mirror Dance' comes right in the middle of the series, published in 1995 Bujold was beginning to break away from the standard Galactic Warfare plotting of the previous novels, and really the books that come after Mirror are much more focused on character than the ones previous.  Mirror sees Bujold really stepping into her own as a writer taking on much more of a challenge than she had before.

Two characters dominated the Vorkosigan Saga prior to Mirror, Cordelia Naismith and Miles Vorkosigan.  Both are interesting and compelling characters in their own right, but neither really stands out as groundbreaking as far as SF is concerned.  Miles, the diminutive protagonist for most of the series is a fan favorite character, and makes for good reading, but the idea of a handicapped individual overcoming long odds to achieve greatness is such an SF cliche that Philip Dick was sending up that trope back in the sixties with 'Dr. Bloodmoney.'  Cordelia, on the other hand, playing the fish out of water is the strong female character that (I'm happy to see) has always occupied a place of pride in SF.  I think Burroughs brought her out at the turn of the century.

And so what if these characters are cliches?  Bujold does great things with them, and writes incredibly compelling books.  If these were the only two characters to drive the series it would still be deserving of all the accolades piled on it (10 + Hugo and Nebula Nominations, with five wins).  SF has a big sandbox, it's nice when authors create something brand new but it's not absolutely necessary.  There are still great books to be written treading the ground that the SF Masters laid down.  No matter how many books may have been written on any given subject, there's always room for one more good one.

Prior to Mirror it seemed that the entire Vorkosigan Saga would fall into that category, playing with tropes that had been kicking around SF for years.  'Mirror Dance' delved deeper into the world Bujold had already created, and kicked a few characters up a notch.  By the time I had read up to Mirror I was trying my best to read the series in order, and I have to say I was wholly unprepared for what was inside.

The character of Mark Vorkosigan had appeared earlier in the series, 'Brothers in Arms' was a decent novel. It wasn't nominated for any awards, and though I wouldn't call it a bad book by any means, it retread more of the same ground from the previous novels introducing a far-fetched plot for Miles to solve and delving a little deeper into the soap opera half of Bujold's space opera series.

There was no hint that Bujold would introduce so much depth to the character of Mark, that there even was so much depth to the character.  He is something I had never seen before in SF.  There are plenty of confident, heroic characters spread all throughout any SF library, it's rare to read about characters with actual neurosis, truly conflicted characters with genuine flaws.

Bujold has never shied away from complicated subjects, which is perhaps what makes the Vorkosigan saga so interesting.  Homosexuality (never a very taboo subject in SF but still a difficult thing to sneak into literature in the mid 80's), rape, sex, all of these things had shown up in her writing before Mirror.  Bujold goes to an incredibly dark place with Mark in this novel, without shocking the reader for the sake of itself she shows what a lifetime of neglect and abuse might actually do to a person like Mark.  It makes for a great read.

Bujold's Vorkosigan series straddles the line between soft and hard SF (whatever that means), but it's the 'sort' side to the novels that keeps me coming back, the characters.  It's a joy for the readers to keep coming back to these characters, to see them grow and watch their motivations change as they age.  As much as I enjoyed the first books in the series it's 'Mirror Dance' that is my favorite, and the character of Lord Mark I'm always waiting to see in each new book published (though he doesn't show up as much as I'd like). After Mirror I'd have to say 'A Civil Campaign' is high on my list, and that book has no action at all.  I don't know if anyone has actually complained about the drop off in action in the series, the latest book might have well have been called "Ivan Finds a Wife," and I loved the hell out of it.

You can start this series anywhere, Bujold didn't even write all the books in chronological order, there's no reason to read them in order, but for anyone starting the series I'd recommend putting Mirror off as long as you can, just to save it for later.

Anyone looking to purchase this book can find it here for pretty good value.

It's been awhile since I posted anything, sorry I've been busy.  Part of that was that I was reading 'A People's History of the United States.'  That took up about a month and a half of my time.  Great book, but not really something I'm going to write about on here, not really something I'm qualified to write about anywhere at all.  After that I started looking through what I was going to read next and having a little trouble deciding.

One thing that's kind of bothered me since I started trying to read all the nominees is that I'm constantly pushing to knock more books off the list, even if I really like a book or think to myself that I'd get more out of it if I read it again it just tends to go on the shelf while I whittle the list down some more with the next one. Books like 'Shadow of the Torturer,' or really anything by Gene Wolfe, are really something that you're not going to get everything out of on the first run through.  So after People's History I decided to go back to Lois Bujold and reread some of the Vorkosigan Saga.

I'm really enjoying the later books in the series, even though they have less action I really just like to check in on the characters.  The way Bujold advances the series and takes the characters through all the major milestones of a lifetime is very satisfying for the readers who have stuck through the entire Saga.  While I admit I came a little late to Bujold's work I'm now completely caught up (also in the last month I finished 'Ceteganda,' the last Vorkosigan book I hadn't read) and this makes me incredibly sad.  I still have Bujold's other Hugo and Nebula nominated series The Sharing Knife which I haven't even started, but I'm saving it for when I really need it.

One thing I found when going back over the series is that I didn't even own 'Mirror Dance,' my favorite book in the series, and also the book where I felt the entire Saga graduated from a fun little SF story into something else entirely.  Dance is where Bujold made the leap into the next tier of SF writers.

I'm giving up entirely on reviewing the Vorkosigan Saga in order, she didn't write the books that way so I shouldn't feel compelled to review the books that way.  A review for 'Mirror Dance' will be up soon.

Yesterday I put up a new review for Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy.  I reviewed the whole series all in one go.  I'm not a big fan of reviewing each book in a series seperately, I talked about this at length in  my review for 'A Dance with Dragons.'  That book is pretty much un-reviewable without looking at the novels published on either side of it (some of which haven't been written yet).  While the books that comprise the Newsflesh trilogy aren't quite as inter-connected as A Song of Ice and Fire they still rely on one another to tell a story, and what's more I didn't really care too much for the later books in the series and didn't want to write a specific review just for them.

I was a little curious to see if more people felt like me when I finished the series, like 'Feed' deserved a nomination but the next two books in the series didn't live up.  I didn't realize there was such a large controversy over this until I went online and started doing some research.  There's Justin Landon's essay on the Hugos that really singles out Grant's work as an example of how the Award has fallen into the worst sort of popularity contest.  Also there's quite a few essays providing counterpoint to Landon's views.  Curiously the one thing most of these have in common is that at some point they mention how they know Grant personally, both John Scalzi's defense and Charlie Jane Anders over at i09 specifically mention how they know Grant personally, not doing a lot to disprove Landon's point.

Landon presents some good ideas.  Saying there are large blocks of voters who each year ensure that their favorites win an award isn't really stating something new.  If you look at the award as a whole there's no real denying that's the case, 'Doctor Who' is a pretty good show but I don't know if it necessarilly deserved the last eight Hugo awards for Dramatic Presentation or to be nominated three times every year.  Landon goes on to single out several other categories like fanzine (which doesn't include blogs) and editor that are continually won by a small group of people.  In the novel category Landon looks to Grant, Bujold, Kim Robinson, Scalzi, and a few others that are perennially nominated for Best Novel.

Landon has a point, almost everything some of these authors write can be relied upon to get a Hugo nomination, and it can get pretty irritating when those books you love don't get any respect.  It would be nice if more authors excused themself from Hugo consideration like Neil Gaiman did for 'Anansi Boys.'

Landon's main problem is he acts like this is all something new.  He brings up how it's scandalous that Bujold has garnered almost as many Hugo nominations as the great Robert Heinlein.  What he doesn't mention is that Heinlein got a lot more of those name recognition nominations than we like to talk about.  'Friday?'  'Job: A Comedy of Justice?' 'Time Enough for Love?'  Let's be honest here and say that those just aren't that great of books, but at the time almost anything Heinlein wrote would have gotten a nomination.  How are those nominations any different from what happened with Grant?  People were going to nominate Heinlein no matter the quality of his work, which is the same crime alleged against Grant.

Heinlein, Pohl, Asimov, Clarke, these are all great writers who at one time or another beneffited from their reputation and garnered an undeserved nomination or even award.  Can you really tell me that 'The Gods Themselves' deserved a Hugo over 'The Book of Skulls' or 'Dying Inside?'  Or 'The Fountains of Paradise' over 'On Wings of Song?'

The Hugo is a popularity contest plain and simple.  People complain about it every year, but it can be relied upon to constantly nominate the most popular piece of work.  I've got a pretty strong argument that Newsflesh probably wasn't the best work of SF published for the last three years, but I've got no leg to stand on if I try to claim it wasn't popular. 

This is one of the reasons I'm also reading the Nebula Award Nominees as well as the Hugo.  The Hugos are voted on by the fans, the Nebulas by the writers themselves.  Occasionally there will be works nominated for both, but a lot of times they are quite different.  Together I feel they give a much better overview of what was going on in SF for a given year.

Landon concludes his essay with a bunch of recommendations for what should have been nominated over Grant and Bujold for the 2013 Hugo (he really should have picked on Scalzi or Robinson more, blasting the two women makes him look like an ass).  I really don't know what to say about his choices.  Jemisin and Kiernan were nominated for a Nebula so they're still getting plenty of respect.  Also I don't really have anything I would have nominated in Grant's place.  I'm not that up to date on current SF, I'm that guy using the Hugos to decide what to read, not lobbying to get something nominated.

So while I'm not in any position to try and raise something up in place of Mira Grant's work, I'm ideally situated to compare her to past Hugo nominees as far as quality goes.  And while neither 'Deadline' or 'Blackout' are going to shake the foundation of the Hugo Award (neither were nominated for a Nebula) with their quality, they are far from the worst novels ever nominated, and nothing to get as upset over as Landon.  They're right in there with Scalzi's work, entertaining as hell, probably shouldn't give them too much thought.  Just perfect for the Hugos.  And still I'd say they were much better than 'Friday.'

Newsflesh Trilogy

I'm going to review all of Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy in one review for several reasons.  One, I've never really enjoyed reviewing each separate book in a series.  I wrote about this in my review for 'A Dance with Dragons' but I think when you look at the individual books in any series, especially one as tightly packed as Newsflesh, they can't be as easily separated from the greater story as most reviewers would like you to think.  Two, I didn't really care for the last two books in the series.  'Feed' was a great piece of worldbuilding that had a lot going for it, but the next two books didn't really live up to it.  Other than this great world that Grant built there's a really cliched conspiracy plot and a bunch of irritating characters that I kind of want to punch in the face. 

And those are really my only two reasons for not wanting to review each book separately.  I don't feel much like reviewing 'Deadline' or 'Blackout' very much, so I'm doing this all at once.

Grant does a great job of building a world in which zombies are more than just the shambling impetus that drives a story forward.  The choice to place the novels after a zombie Apocalypse, after humanity has reached a plateau of normal, is an interesting decision that pays off in spades.  There is plenty of media out there that explores how humanity will react during the Apocalypse, movies, books, ridiculously popular TV shows that sometimes live up to the hype.  It's fun to read about what life might be like after all this has occurred and people need to drastically alter the way they live in order to survive.

Some of the reviews for Grant's novel have blasted her for repeating herself.  I'm willing to bet that at least once per page throughout all three novels someone is getting a blood test.  They slap their palms against the testing unit, thrust their arms into the tester, feel the prick of needles testing their blood.  Grant runs out of adjectives pretty early in the series but keeps plugging along.  Even positive reviews will point to this as one of the major writing flaws of the series.

And I totally disagree, the repetition is one of the largest points I see in the series favor.  It reminds me of Paolo Bacigalupi's 'Windup Girl' and how many reviewers complained about his constant reminders that it was hot outside.  Concepts like it being hot outside or quarantine protocol might be easily and quickly conveyed through a visual medium like television, but they're too easily forgotten in book form.  Grant could just as easily have described the protocol for the first time her characters entered a building and just touched upon it now and then throughout the story, just like Bacigalupi could have mentioned once that it was hot and left it at that. 

But admit it, as a reader it's easy to just shove that brief description to that back of your mind and continue on with the rest of the story.  If concepts like either of these are actually important to the story the writer needs to really hammer the point home or readers will gloss right over them.  I couldn't tell you what the temperature was in 'Embassytown,' 'Leviathan Wakes,' or 'Ringworld,' but I know it was hot outside during 'The Windup Girl.'  And I know that the world of Newsflesh has some dramatic differences from the world we live in.

It's small details like that that make Grant's world fun to play around in.  She's definitely done her research concerning virology and methods for dealing with outbreaks.  The virus that causes people to turn into zombies is more of a factor in the story than any of the zombies themselves.  Which is a good thing, if the Apocalypse is really over and we're looking at how people are coping with a new world it would be redundant if the main obstacle for our heroes was monsters lurking behind every corner, their obstacle is trying not to turn into monsters themselves.

The world Grant has created is great, and I enjoy spending time learning more about it, but it's almost like Grant invested all her time in creating the world, but forgot to create compelling characters to inhabit that world, or a plot worthwhile enough to drag the reader along.  'Feed' starts off well enough, Georgia and Sean are interesting at first glance, and accomplish the task of introducing the reader to this brand new world surprisingly well.  The plot is is serviceable, the conspiracy well enough put together that it kept me guessing until the end.  The main selling point to the actual story is that Grant is willing to kill off her main character right at the end.  The death of Georgia hits hard even if you know it's coming.

'Feed' builds a lot of goodwill towards the reader, but the next two novels in the book squander it.  It's an old SF cliche that if a series goes on long enough the later books will end up walking all over what you loved about the series in the first place.  I couldn't understand the thinking behind bringing Georgia back to life, and the justification within the story is even harder to put my finger on.  I've had plenty of time to think over these choices within the book and still the best I can come up with is that Georgia was brought back to life so the CDC could somehow exert control over Sean, even though he was only brought out of obscurity through the CDC's own convoluted plot.  Honestly about midway through the second book I have no idea why things are happening.

Making Sean the protagonist of the second book is a no-brainer, Georgia's dead.  The problem is Sean's an ass.  There is very little about the character at this point to make the the reader sympathize with the character, he's abusive to his friends, he's irrational, and in a world where every character has a heartrending story of loss we're supposed to believe that Sean's suffering is somehow worse than those around him and his grief entitles him to punch his employees in the face.  I can suspend my disbelief for zombies, but that people would continue to work a low paying job where they were physically assaulted is where I draw the line.

There have been plenty of great novels with unsympathetic main characters.  This of itself doesn't make 'Deadline' irritating.  What bothers me is that every other character within the book is completely unable to see that Sean has no redeeming qualities.

Where a lot of people drew the line was in finding that Sean and Georgia were in a sexual relationship.  I don't know if it's the fact that they grew up together referring to each other as brother and sister, the fact that they still, throughout the books, refer to each other as brother and sister, or that their reasoning for keeping their relationship a secret is more convoluted than the conspiracy, but this whole reveal really creeps me out.  The less said about it the better.

All the other issues I had with the novel are forgivable, there have been other books with silly plot twists and laughable reveals.  It's the conspiracy itself that I found so difficult to handle.  The reader is supposed to believe that there is this globe spanning conspiracy responsible for covertly killing thousands of people, but every other character we meet seems to know all about it, and every member of the conspiracy introduced is a total idiot.  The main villain revealed at the end of 'Deadline' is one of the most two-dimensional characters ever created.  Several of the heroes mention how he started with good intentions and went astray, but he might as well be twirling his mustache while he ties Georgia to a set of train tracks.

Grant creates a very original world but uses a plot that should have come out of a Dan Brown book to navigate around it.  I'm not real big on conspiracy theories that involve more than two people in a room keeping a secret, much less ten thousand people keeping millions of murders quiet.  Grand conspiracy theories taken down by a couple scrappy kids in a van should be left to Scooby Doo, or Goonies, they did it best. 

I'm not really one for writing reviews that bang on writers.  I'm not a fan of horror fiction but I thought Grant created an interesting world.  She did plenty of research into virology and injected a degree of realism into a sub-genre not exactly known for it.  Like a lot of SF series Grant goes astray in the later books, she's not the first author to do this, and by far not the worst (I'm looking at you Philip Jose Farmer).  The things Grant does well in the series she does really well, I just wish she could have done a better job of maintaining it throughout the series.

It's been almost a month since I've updated, and I feel a little bad about that.  Sometimes life get in the way, vacation and whatnot.  But, I've still been reading, just not that much SF.  I finished 'A Perfect Circle' by Sean Stewart, and really liked it.  The book straddles that line between what we would consider SF or just general fiction.  It reminded me a little of Keyes 'Flowers for Algernon' in that regard.  I also finished 'The Last Place on Earth' by Roland Huntford about the race for the South Pole.  It was a great book, and really fascinating.  I read a little of Plutarch's 'Age of Alexander,' mostly the chapters concerning Alexander the Great.  One thing I've found if you're trying to read some history is that it's always best to go back to original sources.  When I was trying to teach myself a thing or two about Ancient Greece I kept getting fed up with reading books from the history section because they just seemed to quote the same sources over and over.  Finally I just went to the source and read Herodotus' 'The Histories.'  One of the best books I've ever read.  Plutarch isn't quite as interesting as Herodotus but it's still enlightening.

I also read a good book about the Crusades from an Arab perspective, 'The Crusades through Arab Eyes' by Amin Maalouf.  A really interesting book, though it probably would have payed off a little better if I had a better knowledge of the Crusades from a Western perspective.  Maybe now that I have the Arab view I can go back and get the Western one.  What I'm really interested in is getting a biography of Saladin written in his own day, but that seems a little tough to come by in the bookstores I frequent.

I also read most of Greg Rucka's 'Queen and Country' and Brian K. Vaughan's 'Y the Last Man.'  Two very different but equally great graphic novel.  I believe Y was nominated for the first graphic novel Hugo award, and it's too bad I'm not really reviewing those here because I really loved it.  I have the last two collections to get through before I'm completely done with it.  I'll post all my thoughts about it when I'm done.  Q and C I really liked as well though I was a little thrown off by the last few collections.  It seems there's a prose novel in there somewhere that I'm supposed to have read.  I don't know if my love of the characters will carry over to the novel, so I'll steer clear unless I read good things about it.

Right now I'm rereading 'Something Wicked this Way Comes' by Ray Bradbury.  I picked up so many new novels on vacation that I have to say I'm a little intimidated about where to start, but I also grabbed a copy of this and it's been a little while since I read it.  So often I'm trying to finish off new Hugo and Nebula nominees I don't get a chance to go back to the classics or the books I really love.  It's been years since I've read any Hemingway or LeGuin.  I wanted to go back to a book I really loved as a kid and I saw this sitting on a shelf.  When I'm done I'll get back to all the nominees, and I promise I'll get back to posting more.  Vacation's over after all.

I've put up a new review for 'The Masks of Time' by Robert Silverberg.  This novel, along with Bester's 'The Demolished Man' had a pretty big effect on my reading of SF.  I read both novels when I was a kid, both introduced me to some new ideas for a kid, and broadened my horizon somewhat.  I actually remembered Demolished quite a bit better than Masks of Time, I forgot the title for Masks for several years there.  And when I looked it up on wikipedia it brought back a few plot points that I'd completely forgot.

I don't know if the review I wrote for 'The Masks of Time' is what you would call a 'good' review.  This is a book that I read when I was a kid that had a pretty profound impact on my enjoyment of SF, I can't really take a very critical eye to it, or rather I don't really want to.  Also I don't really want to read it again, in that it's kind of like 'Stranger for a Strange Land' in that I'm reluctant to read it again and be relieved of all the good feelings I have for the book.  Sometimes we just have to acknowledge that we don't exactly have the most objective standpoint for why we like a certain book.  This is one of them for me.  So take the review as it is.

In my last post I said I was going to try and put some ads up on the site.  Apparently that didn't work out, they won't let me put ads up.  The only thing I can think is that my review for 'The Void Captain's Tale' is a little too sexually explicit, I know it barred me from looking at the site from a public computer or two.  Oh well, I liked that review, thought it summed up my thoughts on the book pretty well.  So there won't be any ads showing up on my website just yet.

I ordered several more books from thriftbooks recently, and though I know I'm kind of a shill for that website I can't help but blow their horn one more time.  They even sent me a 15% discount for my birthday, which I thought was pretty cool.  Which is good because I'm apparently out of the Kindle business.  My Kindle just broke, it was my third one, so I think I'm gonna let the technology go for a little while until it's durability catches up to it's usefulness.  I even tried to dismantle the two broken ones I had and switch around components, either the components for the different brands of Kindle are incompatible or my technological prowess is not what I though it was.  It's a toss up between the two.

I'm reading 'Bones of the Earth' by Michael Swanwick.  Mostly because I find it hard to believe that the author of 'Stations of the Tide' could write a book about time travel and dinosaurs.  I'm not very far into it so I expect it to get pretty weird.

On a note completely unrelated to SF I just read an article about a New York politician and Bail bondsman, a woman who passed as a man her entire life.  She came over from Europe dressed in boys clothes and for the rest of her public life acted entirely as a man.  She was married twice and even adopted a daughter.  That she was a woman only came to life on her death and, get this, the part that shocked people the most was that she had been able to vote.  This blows my brain, and I find it kind of embarrassing that women haven't even been able to vote for a hundred years.  That story is better than any SF I've read in quite awhile.  I tried to find a book about the person, Murray Hall, but apparently no one has written one.  That's really too bad.

 

1968 Nebula Award Nominee- 'The Masks of Time' by Robert Silverberg

It's  been quite awhile since I read this book, and while I don't intend to read it again just to write a more detailed review, I can say that the novel had a profound effect on me while growing up.  The ambiguity of the conclusion, the sexuality involved in the story, the religious (sacrilegious?) themes involved, and the hints of homosexuality might be commonplace today, but when I read it as a teenager they were all deeply shocking and eye opening. 

 

As reviewers or readers of SF we can look down on a work for being cliche or trite, but I think it's important to always remember that at one point everything was new to us as well.  So if I were to read Silverberg's 'The Masks of Time' today I don't think I would find it particularly enjoyable or groundbreaking, when I read it as a sixteen year old it was all that and more.

 

Masks was written just at the start of Silverberg's amazing run of SF Award winning novels.  I've written before about Silverberg's writing pace, but it's always worth an extra look at his bibliography, this guy was ridiculous.  Silverberg was a fairly middle of the road SF writer during the 50's and early 60's.  There were a few hints of brilliance with works like 'Thorns' (Hugo and Nebula Nominee) and 'The Man in the Maze' (No nominations) but starting in 1968 Silverberg ripped out an eight year run that produced eight Nebula and Hugo Nominated books.  This is totally unprecedented.

 

This period of Silverberg's writing starts with Masks and ends with 'Shadrach in the Furnace.'  Shadrach is a near perfect novel that stands up incredibly well today, Masks has a few faults, but you can almost see the brilliance that Silverberg was about to embark upon, and while his treatment of sensitive subjects like religion and homosexuality might inspire more giggles than introspection today, dealing with those issues in SF was unheard of then.

 

Masks deals with a rather tried SF story of a man who travels back from the future to take advantage of the past.  He leaves his origin shrouded in mystery, wrapping himself in a quasi-religious themes.  The reader is never given the full story of whether this man really is from the future, or might be God coming down to Earth.  It's just a little hard to believe that God would come down to Earth for the purpose of having sex with as many people as he could.

 

This novel contains a lot of sex.  The mysterious traveler from the future (Vornan-19 is his name, and it's been so long since I read this book that I had to look this up) basically has some sort of animal magnetism that allows him to sleep with whoever he wants, male or female, it seems no one can resist him.  This makes for an interesting scenario when some purple man from the future shows up and whisks him off.  Is everyone from the future as big a jerk as Vornan?  Is he some kind of criminal from the future?  The author never tells us.

 

I am unable to take an objective view of this book.  I think our age and mindset when we first read a book has just as much to do with our enjoyment of said book as any objective merit a story could have.  While a novel dealing with sex, homosexuality, exogenesis, and religion might be overdone in today's SF culture (I just reread that sentence and don't know if I quite believe it myself) but for a sixteen year old being exposed to most of those ideas for the first time they can be incredible.

 

As we get older it's easy to say that we take a more cynical look at the pop-culture we enjoy.  If I had read this book later in life I would have been forced to discuss this novel as an ironic send up of Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land' or even to criticize it for the things that made it impressive when I was younger.  Sometimes I find it helpful to think back on those works that got me interested in SF in the first place, but not examine them too closely.