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Time Snatchers by Richard Ungar

Oct19

Caleb is a time snatcher, an orphan trained by the man he calls “Uncle”, to travel through time and steal valuable artifacts that people in the year 2060 will pay big bucks to own. His time-traveling and thieving partner is Abbie, and the two of them have been living with Uncle and working for his company, Timeless Treasures, for as long as they can remember. The two teens enjoy their time travel, cat burglar adventures, but Uncle is becoming more and more callous and brutal. And Caleb is confused by his longing for a real family and by his feelings for Abbie. Are they partners or does Abbie care for Caleb in a different, more romantic way? Or is Abbie falling for Caleb’s cheating arch-enemy, Frank?

The author blurb says that Mr. Ungar “was inspired to write this novel by an image in Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.” Good inspiration. Time Snatchers is a good novel.

What I liked: the idea of combining con games and cat burglary with time travel, the characterization of Caleb in particular, the cranky computer cyborg, Phoebe, who runs the elevator and has a running feud with Caleb, some of the snatches that Abbie and Caleb pull off.

What I disliked: Uncle is a particularly nasty bad guy who engages in rather gruesome child abuse to keep his “time snatchers” in line. To be specific, he uses a sword to cut off body parts of those who disobey him, and at one point he has his captive snapping turtles gnaw on Caleb’s arm. Yuck. The torture episodes gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Also, the romantic interludes (very tame and junior high-ish) seemed a little bit abrupt, not quite enough set-up or insight into what Abbie is thinking or feeling.

I’ve been watching a lot of the TV show White Collar, and I was reminded of that program while I was reading Time Snatchers. Caleb is not quite as classy as Neil Caffrey; he’s a lot younger, for one thing. However, just as Neil wants to know who his parents were and wants to be a part of a family, Caleb longs for a normal life with a real family. And both Caleb and Neil are pretty good at fast-thinking and theft. Unfortunately for both of them, thievery is not a very sustainable or morally justifiable lifestyle. Neil Caffrey and Caleb are both in the process of learning that crime doesn’t pay.

Time Snatchers ends with major unresolved questions, so I’m assuming we’re headed for a sequel or two. If you don’t mind the child abuse parts, it’s a good story.

The Prince Who Fell from the Sky by John Claude Bemis

Oct13

“JRR Tolkien said that story ideas arise from ‘the leaf-mould of the mind.’ This story grew out of the rich compost of Alan Weisman’s speculative science book The World Without Us; Native American creation myths; one of the first postapocalyptic novels (and possibly the only hopeful one), Earth Abides by George R. Stewart; and the animal-fantasy classics The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and Watership Down by Richard Adams.” Acknowledgements, The Prince Who Fell from the Sky by John Claude Bemis.

This story surprised me. I was expecting a medieval fantasy, or maybe a science fiction/medieval fantasy with space men going back in time. I guess I should have gotten a clue from the Big Bear on the the cover along with the spaceman-looking boy. This book is talking animals, but not cute talking animals, more like Watership Down, and it takes place in a postapocalyptic Earth jungle or forest where the wolves have taken over as tyrants and absolute rulers.

The bear is Casseomae, and when an airplane or space shuttle or some kind of flying vehicle falls from the sky near Casseomae’s meadow, the great she-bear rescues a a Skinless One, a child, and begins to take care of him as she would her own bear-cub. Along with a rat named Dumpster, Casseomae goes on a quest to find a place where the child-cub will be safe from wolves and other predators, called “voras.”

The bears and other voras speak a languge called Vorago, and there is some new word insertion, but it’s not excessive. (I agree with whoever it was that said that “the quality of a Sci-Fi/Fantasy story is inversely proportional to the number of new words made up by the author.”) The journey is fascinating as Casseomae follows her own instincts to protect her man-cub, and yet realizes that she is not really following the ways of her tribe when she preserves the life of a creature whose ancestors destroyed the entire forest many generations back. I definitely got the Jungle Book vibe from the plot, even thought it’s a very different stye, tone, and narrative from Kipling’s classic.

This book must have been difficult to write because we never see the events or the setting from the point of view of the only human in the story, the boy. Instead, we hear the words and the thoughts of Casseomae and Dumpster and later on, a dog named Pang. It was fun trying to figure out what some of the “relics” and other things that the animals described really were in human terms.

If you’re looking for an animal story combined with post apocalyptic fiction combined with sci-fi, The Prince Who Fell from the Sky is definitely the book for you. If, like me, you just enjoy a surprisingly good story, then this one might also be a good fit for you.

Cybils: Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy

Sep17

Bring it on! I am so excited that I get to be on the Round 1 judging panel for Cybils Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy. What are Cybils, you ask?

The Cybils awards are given each year by bloggers for the year’s best children’s and young adult titles. Nominations open to the public on October 1st. Anyone may nominate one book per genre during the nomination period. We post an online form from Oct. 1-15 every year. Any books published between the end of one contest and start of another are eligible. For 2012, that means books released between Oct. 16, 2011 and Oct. 15, 2012. This year, we are also accepting nominations for book apps for iPad, Web or computers.

What that means is that I get to read probably over 100 middle grade science fiction and fantasy books published this year on a search for the cream of the crop, five or six books that will go on a shortlist from which the second round judges will choose one book to win the Cybil Award in our category. I’m participating as a judge for Cybils for the seventh year, but this is the first time I’ve judged in this category. I love magic and science fiction and utopia and dystopia and weirdness, so I think it’s going to be a blast.

I’ve already put the following books on hold at the library:

The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy.

Ordinary Magic by Caitlin Rubino-Bradway.

The Second Spy by Jacqueline West.

Sword Mountain by Nancy Yi Fan.

More suggestions? Nominations open October 1st at the Cybils blog, but I see no reason why you can’t tell me the titles of books you’re planning to nominate for Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy (or the books you think will get nominated by someone). That way I can get a head start on all that luscious reading about other (imaginary) times and places.

What are your favorite middle grade science fiction and fantasy books published since last October 16, 2011?

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

May4

Dystopian fiction. Matt Alacron was not born; he was harvested. He’s a clone with DNA from El Patron, druglord of a country between Mexico and the U.S. called Opium, where other clones called “eejits” work the poppy fields in mindless obedience and slavery. But Matt is different; El Patron wanted Matt to retain his intelligence and his ability to choose, for some reason.

The House of the Scorpion won the National Book for Young People’s Literature in 2002 and was a Newbery Honor Book in 2003. I was fascinated by Matt’s fight for survival and by his oddly familiar world in which drug lords rule and people are enslaved by power-hungry dictators who long for riches and immortality. Would that all of those people who gain a little power would, rather than seeking after more and more, pray the prayer of Solomon:

God: “Ask! What shall I give you?”
Solomon: “Therefore give to Your servant an understanding heart to judge Your people, that I may discern between good and evil. For who is able to judge this great people of Yours?”
God: “See, I have given you a wise and understanding heart, so that there has not been anyone like you before you, nor shall any like you arise after you. I have also given you what you have not asked: both riches and honor, so that there shall not be anyone like you among the kings all your days.”
I Kings 3

There is a God, and I am not He. To fear Him is the beginning of wisdom, and the characters in The House of the Scorpion needed desperately to hear and understand that lesson.

Other novels about human clones and cloning:
The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson.
Double Identity by Margaret Peterson Haddix.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin.
Anna to the Infinite Power by Mildred Ames.

The Bone House by Stephen Lawhead

Jan10

I read The Skin Map, the first book in Stephen Lawhead’s Bright Empires series, in 2010 when it first came out because Mr. Lawhead is one of my favorite authors. I found it confusing and somewhat unsatisfying because it’s one of those “first of a series” books that doesn’t stand alone and ends in an abrupt cliffhanger way.

Still, I was interested enough to request a review copy of the second book in the series, The Bone House. I found it confusing and somewhat unsatisfying because it’s one of those “second of a series” books that doesn’t stand alone and ends in an abrupt cliffhanger way.

THe books remind me of Connie Willis’s Blackout and All Clear, my favorite two-volume book from last year. However, I kept the time travel and the multiple story lines straight (mostly) in the Willis books, and I couldn’t remember who was whom in these books. Nor could I remember what happened to one character in the last chapter about him when his story was separated by several chapters about other characters in other times and places. Yeah, confusing. It didn’t help that I read The Bone House on my Kindle. There are many things I like about my Kindle, but being able to go back and remind myself of something that happened in the earlier part of the book isn’t easy or intuitive for me on the Kindle. In fact, I can’t do it.

So, I think I should read confusing books with multiple stories that change times and places and characters from one chapter to the next . . . in print. And I think I should wait to read series books until the entire series has been published. Of course, that means that I will be the last one to read some really good series of books. But at least I’ll enjoy them. And I can always go back and read classics and all of the book I missed in past years and all of the books on my TBR list while I’m waiting for those series to be completed.

So, maybe I’ll re-read Stephen Lawhead’s Bright Empires series, in print editions if those are still around by then, in a few years when all of the books in the series are available. And if you enjoy and recommend them now, just don’t tell me.

There’s nothing quite like a Real Book:

Giving Books: Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Dec10

A seventeen year old friend of Brown Bear Daughter asked for some book suggestions. She just finished The Hunger Games trilogy (Semicolon review here), and she’s asking for “more dystopian fiction like The Hunger Games, with a little romance thrown in.”

First of all, The Classics:
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Published in 1957, this novel has the requisite romance, but it’s very, very, very sad. Nuclear holocaust slowly and inexorably moves over the whole earth, and one of the last habitable places is in Australia, near Melbourne. The last surviving humans must decide how to end their lives honorably.
Semicolon review here.
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. This one is a bit dated, but it must have scared some people silly when it was first published back in 1959 at the beginning of the Nuclear Age. In the story, a massive nuclear strike by the Russians destroys most of the large to medium-sized cities in the United States, including Tampa, Miami, Tallahassee, and Orlando. The survivors must decide what to do about nuclear fallout, government, and survival in general.
Reviewed at Upside Down B.
Semicolon review here.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. This book grew out of a short story by the same author. The short story was published in 1977, and the book was published in 1985. It’s more of a boy’s book, and there’s some crude soldierly language. Nevertheless, it’s tremendously compelling and exciting. Ender is a boy genius, chosen by the Powers That Be to train to save the world from an alien species that is coming to attack from outer space. No romance that I remember.
Reviewed by Girl Detective.
Bonnie at Dwell in Possibility hated it.
Semicolon review here.
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. A deadly microorganism from space is released on Earth, and a team of scientist must find a way to combat and eradicate the disease before everyone is killed or driven insane.

O.K. so those classics are probably not exactly what my daughter’s friend is looking for. She’s looking for a Hunger Games read-alike.

Published pre-Hunger Games:
The Giver by Lois Lowry. Classic Newbery award winning dystopian fiction. Companion novels are Gathering Blue and Messenger.
Reviewed by Zee at Notes from the North.
Semicolon review here.
Reviewed by Marie at Fireside Musings.
Unwind by Neal Shusterman. This dystopian stand-alone novel is one of Karate Kid’s favorites.
Reviewed by TeacherGirl.
Semicolon review here.
The Shadow Children series by Margaret Peterson Haddix. This series might be more appropriate for younger teens (ages 12-15), but I enjoyed it. In the series, it is illegal to have more than two children, and the illegal “thirds” are on the run from the law.
Semicolon review here.
The Declaration by Gemma Malley. “If the chance to live forever came with a price, would you opt in or out?” Sequels are The Resistance and The Legacy.
Semicolon review here.
Uglies by Scott Westerfield. Sequels are Pretties and Specials. What if you were ugly as a child (like everyone else), but on your sixteenth birthday you could undergo a procedure to turn pretty? In Westerfield’s dystopia, Tally can’t wait to have her surgery and become a Pretty. But maybe being pretty isn’t the most desirable goal in life.
Epitaph Road by David Patneaude. What if most of the men in the world were killed by a virus that only affected males, and as a consequence women ruled the world?
Semicolon review here.

Published post-Hunger Games (or at about the same time):
Divergent by Veronica Roth. This one is the book I would suggest first for reader who is “hungry” for a follow-up to Hunger Games.
Semicolon review of Divergent at The Point: Youth Reads.
Matched by Ally Condie. There’s not so much action and adventure in this book, but more romance and thoughtful commentary on the pros and cons of a “safe” society bought with the price of complete obedience to an authoritarian government. The second book in the series is Crossed.
Review of Matched by Megan at Leafing Through Life.
Delirium by Lauren Oliver. Lena lives in a managed society where everyone gets an operation when they turn eighteen that cures them of delirium, the passion and pain of falling in love. Sequels will be Pandemonium (2012) and Requiem (2013).
Delirium reviewed at A Foodie Bibliophile in Wanderlust.
Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness: The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, and Monsters of Men. In Prentisstown everyone can hear the thoughts of all the men in town, a situation that makes for a lot of Noise and not much privacy. These books should be read together, if at all. They’re all one story, and they should have a violence warning attached.
The Knife of Never Letting Go reviewed at Becky’s Book Reviews.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Jun11

The current Faith ‘n Fiction Roundtable book is A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr. I read the book a few years ago and honestly didn’t feel like a re-read. So this post is what I wrote back then, edited to include some discussion points that came up as the other people in the group read the book.

I thought the book was . . . interesting. In some ways, the ideas were fascinating. The plot was somewhat outdated; published in 1959, the book posits a world decimated by nuclear war in which culture and literacy are preserved only by a small group of Catholic monks. And even the monks don’t understand half of what they’re preserving. The barbarians have taken over the world, and only a few isolated outposts of civilization remain. Near the end of the book, euthanasia is a major issue, and that section was startlingly relevant to contemporary culture.

Some questions brought up in this novel:

Is it possible for an entire culture to be destroyed or lost and then revived or regained?

Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible–that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true in only the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God’s and not Man’s, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection.

Is there meaning in suffering? Particularly, why do children suffer?

“I cannot understand a God who is pleased by my baby’s hurting!”
The priest winced. “No, no! It is not the pain that is pleasing to God, child. It is the soul’s endurance in faith and hope and love in spite of bodily afflictions that pleases Heaven. Pain is like negative temptation. God is not pleased by temptations that afflict the flesh; He is pleased when the soul rises above the temptation and says, ‘Go Satan.’ It’s the same with pain, which is often a temptation to despair, anger, loss of faith –”
“Save your breath, Father. I’m not complaining. The baby is. But the baby doesn’t understand your sermon. She can hurt, though. She can hurt, but she can’t understand.”

Maybe this book isn’t outdated at all. Maybe the barbarians are at the gates. Maybe we are danger of destroying ourselves and our culture either with our nuclear weapons or with our gene-tampering technologies or in some other way that I can’t foresee. Perhaps we are becoming so illiterate and TV-obsessed that the treasures of Western culture and of Christianity may only be preserved in isolated communities and homes. Or maybe the sky isn’t falling. It’s worth thinking about.

Several of the characters in A Canticle for Leibowitz seem to carry deep symbolic meaning but I’m not really sure what that meaning is. There’s a Mad Poet, who is either a prophet or a fool. And Benjamin the Old Jew of the Mountain who lives out in the desert alone, waiting for the Messiah, or waiting for something, is intriguing, but I can’t exactly tell you what his character is supposed to signify either. Some of my fellow readers thought he was Lazarus, and others thought he was drawn from the legend of the Wandering Jew. Then at the end of the novel there’s an old “tumater woman” with two heads. Is she significant or just odd? (The other FnF roundtable readers struggled with the meaning of the two-headed tumater woman, too.) My guess is that all these ambiguous characters are thrown in to hint at meaning, maybe to tease the reader. After all, the question that runs through the entire novel is that of whether life has any meaning at all. I think the novelist intends us to keep asking.

I did a little research and read that not only did Mr. Miller renounce his Catholicism later in life after the publication of A Canticle for Leibowitz, he also suffered from depression and finally committed suicide. It’s a sad ending, and it contradicts the hope inherent in A Canticle for Leibowitz. But the book also indicates that men are inconsistent at best.

More discussion at the following blogs participating in this round of Faith ‘n Fiction Roundtable:

  • Book Addiction
  • Book Hooked Blog
  • Books and Movies
  • Crazy-for-Books.com
  • Ignorant Historian
  • Linus’s Blanket
  • My Friend Amy
  • Roving Reads
  • The 3 Rs Blog // Reading, ‘Riting, and Randomness
  • Tina’s Book Reviews
  • Victorious Café
  • Word Lily

    • Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

    Feb18

    Life is just one d— thing after another. ~Elbert Hubbard

    Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. ~John Lennon

    History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. ~Winston Churchill

    Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects. ~Herodotus, The History of Herodotus

    We are the prisoners of history. Or are we? ~Robert Penn Warren

    Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians. ~Franklin P. Jones

    Connie Willis writes some of the best books about time travel and history and epistemology and philosophy that I have ever had the privilege of reading. I first read her novel The Doomsday Book, about time-traveling historians from the future, in 2009. In that book Kivrin, a history student at Oxford in 2048, travels through “the net” back in time to the fourteenth century. After I finished The Doomsday Book, I immediately went out and found a copy of Ms. Willis’s next time travel history book, To Say Nothing of the Dog. It’s a delightful romp in which the fate of the universe may or may not be at stake. However, the course of history and the universe is “self-correcting,” shades of LOST, so the universe is never really in danger of imploding or careening off-track. Probably. I loved it even more than The Doomsday Book.

    Now, in 2010, Ms. Willis has published two more future-historians-travel-through-time books: Blackout and All Clear. In these some of the same characters reappear, and the universe or the space-time continuum IS in danger of going off the rails. The focal point of all the temporal disturbance and crisis is World War II, and of course, several of our intrepid historians are criss-crossing Britain through time and space, trying to avoid the temptation to interfere in history and do something that, however well-meaning, might actually change the course of the war and end up making Hitler and the Nazis the victors. It’s not easy to observe history without changing it, however, as Polly and Mike and Eileen find out. It’s also not easy to survive the Blitz in London, even if you know about when and where the bombs are going to drop. Nor is Dunkirk a safe vantage point from which to observe heroism, even though there’s a lot of it going on.

    I have several things to say about these two novels. First of all, they’re not really two novels; it’s one novel in two volumes, just as The Lord of the Rings is one book in three parts. So be sure to have the second book, All Clear, on hand before you start the first one. And read them in order even though there’s lots of time travel involved so that events in the novel(s) don’t exactly appear in chronological order.

    Second, read these books. If you liked LOST because of the mind-bending time travel and suspenseful and philosophical elements, you should like what Connie Willis has done with these two books. If you’re a WW II buff, you will find these books fascinating. If you just enjoy a good science fiction or historical fiction story, read Blackout and All Clear. And read all the way to the end. It’s worth the confusion that accompanies the 1000+ pages of the two books. (Time travel makes my head hurt—in a good way.)

    William Holman Hunt: The Light of the Worldphoto © 2007 freeparking | more info (via: Wylio)
    Finally, I think these are what I would call Christian worldview novels. It’s not blatant or didactic or obvious, but if Ms. Willis is not a Christian, she has certainly co-opted Christian values and symbols and made the books breathe a Christian ethos in a way that is both attractive and entertaining. The central images and metaphors of the novels are Christian: The Light of the World, a painting by Holman Hunt, St. Paul’s Cathedral standing above bombed-out London, The Tempest by Shakespeare, a door that opens to another world. The themes are all about redemption and sacrifice and the power of obedience to what is good and noble even when you don’t know what the outcome will be. And this conversation, between a time traveler from the future and an elderly Shakespearean actor caught in the darkest days of WW II, toward the end of the second volume, clinches it for me:

    “Was that your third question?” she managed to ask.
    “No, Polly,” he said. “Something of more import.” And she knew it must be. . . .
    “What is it?” she asked. . . .
    He stepped forward and grasped the staircase’s railing, looked up at her earnestly. “Is it a comedy or a tragedy?”
    He doesn’t mean the war, she thought. He’s talking about all of it–our lives and history and Shakespeare. And the continuum.
    She smiled down at him. “A comedy, my lord.”

    Surely, Christians are the ones who believe that life and history are ultimately a comedy that ends in the Great Marriage Feast.

    I loved these books.

    Guide to the Oxford Time Travel books at The Connie Willis.net Blog.

    Content consideration: These novels are adult novels, not for children, and the characters sometimes use bad language. The character Mike, in particular, does take the Lord’s name in vain on numerous occasions.

    Epitaph Road by David Patneaude

    Feb14

    Dystopian novels usually start with a dystopian premise: something has happened to change the world we know into a horrible place to live.

    What if government become so big and so repressive that it controlled everyone and everything?
    1984 by George Orwell.

    What if everyone in the world suddenly lost their fertility and stopped having babies? What would the world be like after twenty or thirty years of no new pregnancies?
    Children of Men by P.D. James.

    What if our world were destroyed and reconfigured by climate change and the greed of oil hungry corporations and industries? How would a future world cope with a severe scarcity of oil?
    Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. Semicolon review here.

    What if the world seemed perfect, no hunger, no violence, no inequality? But what if the underlying mechanism that sustained the culture and kept it pure and perfect was horribly unjust and hateful?
    The Giver by Lois Lowry.

    What if a repressive government used cyber-tools to monitor and control all dissent and to quash freedom?
    Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Semicolon review here.

    In Epitaph Road the premise is: what if most of the men in the world were killed by a virus that only affected males, and as a consequence women ruled the world?

    As it turns out, the result of getting rid of all of the men looks pretty good at first. Poverty, crime, war, and hunger have all disappeared. I happen to think Mr. Patneaude is mistaken in his predictions of what a female governed an female dominated world would look like, but it’s an interesting proposition anyway.

    Kellen Dent is one of the few, the disrespected, the males. He and all of his fellow men are restricted by law to only a few possible professions and required to have “minders” with them whenever they travel. So when Kellen finds out that the virus that killed all the men in the first place is coming back and may infect his father, it’s not easy for him to find a way to warn his dad. Then, as Kellen finds out more and more about the governing authorities and what’s really going on beneath the surface of his seemingly peaceful world, he must make life-and-death decisions not only for himself but also for the people he loves and for whom he is responsible.

    The best part of this novel was the way it turned everything upside down as far as gender roles and prejudice are concerned and yet at the same time it reinforced the preconceptions that we have about the real differences between men and women. In the book, the men are responsible for all the violence and crime in the world. With men a distinct minority, women are free to walk out alone in the cities without fear, to be intelligent without caring about male competition, to go anywhere, do anything. Men, on the other hand, are restricted, discriminated against, sometimes even treated as potential criminals and second-class citizens. One of the most coveted jobs for a man is sperm donor. I really liked the way the book made me think about why we need both men and women to make a vibrant God-honoring culture and about what roles men and women play in the growth of good government and cultural achievement.

    The issue that I had with the novel was that it seemed to move too fast. The characters came to decisions and acted in ways for which I, as a reader, felt unprepared. I often read reviews in which the reviewer complains that the pace of the novel was “too slow” or “uneven.” I actually felt that the pace of Epitaph Road was way too rapid. I needed more time and information to get to know the characters in the novel and to understand why they acted the way they did. Kellen was generally understandable, probably because I knew him the best. The rest of the cast–Kellen’s parents, his aunt, his two female friends/accomplices–seemed to act too quickly without adequate motivation or at least without reasons that I had enough knowledge to understand.

    Still, as long as I skipped over the questions about motivation and preparation, I enjoyed reading the book. I would be interested in a sequel–if it answered my “trust questions” such as why did Tia and Sunday suddenly trust Kellen enough to risk their lives for him? And why did Gunny, another character, protect some kids he didn’t know? And why did Dr. Nuyen share secrets with Kellen when she was essentially working for his enemies?

    Good solid dystopian fiction for the die-hard fan.

    Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card

    Aug6

    Wow! This historical fiction/science fiction novel by a master of both genres was so absorbing that I stayed up late to finish reading it and to find out what would happen to Christopher Columbus in a re-imagined world, changed by time travelers from the future.

    The book reminded me of Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. THe premise is similar: scientists from the future have found a way to look back, maybe even travel back, into the past by means of a “time machine.” Willis’s books are funnier, especially To Say Nothing of the Dog. However, Card’s Pastwatch delves more deeply into the inherent problems and temptations such an invention would bring to the attention of the scientists using it. Can we change the past to eliminate suffering and punish wrong-doers? Are our cultural mores and expectations really better than those of past cultures? If so, how do we know that? What about cultural imperialism? Is it a valid concern? TO be very specific, if you had the means to rescue a young man who is being sold into slavery, would you have the responsibility to do so? What if one change in the events of the past sets into motion a series of events that totally changes the future that you yourself are a part of, the so-called “butterfly effect”? All of these questions are a part of Pastwatch, but the book doesn’t give terribly satisfying answers to most of the questions. THe ending is somewhat overly optimistic, in my opinion.

    Still, as I said, it’s a great story that includes both history (Christopher Columbus, native Central American cultures, and slavery) and futuristic/dystopian/utopian elements. I enjoyed it very much. If you’ve already read Pastwatch and liked it, I would recommend Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. And if you’ve already read Ms. Willis’s time travel books and enjoyed them, I’d recommend Pastwatch.

    Oh, I was also reminded of LOST with scientists and mathematicians trying to explain concepts of time and time travel with time as a stream and distinguishable from what a scientist in the book calls “causality.”

    “Two contradictory sets of events cannot occupy the same moment. You are only confused because you cannot separate causality from time. And that’s perfectly natural, because time is rational. Causality is irrational. . . . What you must understand is that causality is not real. It does not exist in time. Moment A does not really cause Moment B in reality. . . . None of these moments actually touches any other moment. That is what reality is—an infinite array of discrete moments unconnected with any other other moment because each moment in time has no linear dimension.”

    And if you understand that, could you please give me an aspirin for my headache?