Childhood's End

Let me say it again. Science fiction is really not my genre. At all! When Books & Beer was deciding what book to read for our science fiction month, I had nothing to contribute and said I'd just go with whatever the majority wanted. At the meeting, only the person who suggested this title liked the book. At all. (One other member, who missed the meeting, said she liked it, too.)

I guess Arthur C. Clarke is a big name in science fiction. He wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey which I never read, but I did see the movie. And probably didn't enjoy. Childhood's End was a novel he wrote in the 1950s so I suppose this might also be considered a classic?

Alien invaders bring peace to the Earth. Not everyone is happy with that. But even bigger remains the question of what is the agenda of these aliens. 

By the time of our book club meeting, I still had another 34 pages left to read in the book. I still hadn't gotten up to the point of the novel where the title makes sense. Because I had to purchase the novel, it wasn't available at my libraries, I came home from the meeting and finished the book. Still didn't like it.

My guess is if you're a science fiction fan is that you've already read this. And if you're not a science fiction fan, just skip it.

Goldilocks - Science Fiction, Not the Fairy Tale

As I think I've mentioned before, my Books & Beer Club has a schedule of genres for the year. It makes sure that we read from a wide variety of books. I always shudder when we're approaching science fiction or fantasy months. Those are always difficult for me to read. Back in April, I was reading some list of new recommended titles and Goldilocks by Laura Lam sounded like a book I might be able to recommend to the Club. I must have requested it from the library, although I'm not sure why I would have done that. But it arrived on my virtual bookshelf so after I finished Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari's expanse, I picked up Goldilocks. (I'm still not sure that the title of Goldilocks  was a good choice.)

The timing of the reading was a bit unsettling at the beginning. Sapiens left me with the feeling that Earth might be doomed. Or at least humans. Goldilocks picks up at that point. The Earth is in trouble. Human life on Earth might cease to exist within the next 30 years.

Dr. Valerie Black is determined to take a team of women scientists to Cavendish, in the Goldilocks Zone, to start a new colony. Conditions could be right for human habitation. They do make it into space and face setback after setback. Finally some secrets are unveiled and the crew is forced to make some very difficult decisions.

This is not one of my genres yet I found this absorbing. A real page turner. But there was backstory missing. Other than climate change ravishing the country, there were hints at political turbulence, about women being forced out of the workforce. I wish we'd had a little bit more of that story.

What was crazy, almost, was it's as though this novel was being written now. Written now. In July of 2020. Not published in early 2020 meaning it was written sometime earlier. I'm not sure that this is the best book to read in the midst of a pandemic, but I did enjoy it as much as I hoped I would.

1984

When 1984 arrived and I realized I'd never read George Orwell's  1984, I purchased a copy and read it on a European vacation. I don't remember being terribly disturbed by the book then. Yes, it was a downer. Looking back, it didn't seem like the book had come true.

Now, 35 years later, I wonder. Seems like so much of Orwell's words were prophetic. Which makes the idea behind this novel particularly disturbing. There's talk of "fake news." Orwell describes "two minutes of hate." I can go on and on. But I choose not to.

Perhaps this book should be re-read as a cautionary tale? But will people get it? I'm not so sure.

Books and Beer Club read this as our science fiction pick for 2019. A good part of our discussion centered on whether or not we considered this science fiction. Most of us did not.

Should you read this novel published in 1949? Probably. Will you enjoy it? Probably not.

The Martian Chronicles

The only Ray Bradbury that I'd read prior to Books & Beer Club reading Fahrenheit 451 was (probably an abridged version of) "All Summer in a Day," about life on Venus, which I read as a fifth grade teacher with my class. I'd forgotten what planet "All Summer in a Day" was about and was excited, momentarily, thinking that it was going to be part of The Martian Chronicles.

Oh well.

I won't lie. I had a difficult time getting through The Martian Chronicles. As much as I enjoyed it piecemeal, I really wished it was more of a narrative rather than a loosely connected collection of stories about "Earth man's" experience on Mars. But in the end, I am really glad that I stuck with this and finished it.

The Martian Chronicles is set in the not so distance future (from 2030 until 2057), when people from Earth were settling the Mars frontier. It's important to remember that The Martian Chronicles was first published in 1950. I wish I had more knowledge of how certain things were back in 1950 to get a better handle on how Bradbury imagined things to be in the mid-21st Century.

In this novel, Mars is a planet full of lots of dead cities without a whole lot of Martians in 2030 and moving forward. Expeditions from Earth (from America) are trying to colonize the planet. The interactions between "humans" and Martians are quite violent. It's hard to know who is really a person from Earth versus who is a Martian in Bradbury's telling. And life on Mars doesn't appear to that different from life on Earth. Go figure!

Once the expeditions to Mars were more or less successful, transports carried building materials from Earth to Mars. But where did trucks come from? And how exactly where they fueled?

And in certain houses you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist at work; or the scratch of a pen, the poet at work; or no sound at all, the former beachcomber at work.

Who knew in 1950 that there wouldn't be typewriters in 2034? Surely not Ray Bradbury!

The references to telephones were interesting. No mobile devices. You'd think if he could imagine rockets transporting people and things, including food, back and forth between the planets that voice communication wouldn't be tied to a wired telephone. And were there answering machines in 1950? Will you leave a message on the answering machine so she may call you when she returns?

What year did Fahrenheit 451 take place? There's mention that books were all burned in the Great Fire of 2006.

There was a chapter called "Usher II." Would that have made more sense to me if I'd read The House of Usher?

My favorite chapter was one called "August 2057 - There Will Come Soft Rains." It's about an automated house in 2057 that probably stood empty for over 20 years. Yet everything continued as it probably had for the past 20 years. I wondered how the  house was powered to go on that long. And where did the food and the cigars and whatever come from after 20 years of being abandoned?

Which brings me to the whole abandonment thing. Let's assume that people started settling on Mars in the late 2020s (which right now seems like it might as well be tomorrow). A destructive war on Earth starts in 2036 and all the Earth folks rush back to Earth? Why rush back? What did I miss in this regard? If you traveled from Earth to Mars for a new life, why would you rush back to Earth when it's on the verge of destruction?

And why did one family rush to Mars to get away from all that?

"I'm burning a way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now. Forgive me if I talk like a politician. I am, after all, a former state governor, and I was honest and they hated me for it. Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That's what the silent radio means. That's what we ran away from.

I'm left to wonder whether there will be the start of settlements on Mars in my lifetime, even though I very much doubt the reality would be anything like Bradbury's vision. Looking forward to discussing this at Books & Beer Club to see how others saw the book.

A Wrinkle in Time, a reread

I first read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, the first book in a series of apparently 5 books, back in 1999 as part of a literacy class I took on the path to elementary school teacher certification. Of the books I read for that class, this is the one that I was only lukewarm about. Nearly 20 years later, I remain lukewarm.

Admittedly, I'm not a fantasy lover nor am I a fan of science fiction. In 1999, I learned that even though some of this middle grades novel are fantastical, it falls into the science fiction genre because much of the book is based on scientific fact. Or so I'm told. I have never had the desire to delve more deeply into the science behind the story.

The story has elements that I like. An insecure older sister with a close relationship to her child prodigy younger brother, a loving yet quirky mom. A first boy-girl relationship. I really, really wanted to like this book the second time around. I can see the appeal to others, but it just held no appeal to me.

As a fifth grade teacher, I wondered if this book was appropriate for my students. And years later, I still wonder the same thing. I found the language more difficult than most of my students would have been able to comprehend. Yet many of the fans of this novel are 4th to 6th graders. Even as an adult, there were some religious references that I don't quite understand.

It really wasn't until I read the introduction by Anna Quindlen titled An Appreciation of Madeline L'Engle that I fully understood the contrast between the real world and the dystopian society on the planet Camazotz. I think I didn't get that earlier because the stuff that I don't like about fantasy and science distracted me from that aspect.

I am, however, looking forward to the movie due to come out sometime in 2018. The trailer seems intriguing. Perhaps that's an adaptation of the story that I can like.

The Giver

This isn't the first time that I read The Giver by Lois Lowry. I was introduced to the middle grade science fiction novel in a graduate reading class in 1999. Not being a fan of science fiction, I read it begrudgingly and was surprised when I enjoyed it. I went on to read the sequels as they came out, Gathering Blue and The Messenger. The fourth book in the series, Son, came out after I left full-time teaching and my reading of young adult fiction slacked off. It's been on my "to be read" list for years. It might be time to pick that one up.

When The Giver was suggested in Books and Beer Club last week, I remembered that I did like the book. I remembered some of the story but not all. And I remembered that my favorite book in the series was The Gatherer. But for the life of me, I couldn't tell you why.

Some of the book club members mentioned that the movie of The Giver which was released in 2014 is on Netflix. Rather than my normal preference for reading the book and then watching the movie, I figured since I'd already read the book (albeit 17 years ago), I could watch the movie before the reread.

More details of the novel came back to me as I watched the movie. I loved the movie. It seemed very loyal to what I remembered of the novel. The cinematography was wonderful.

The night I watched the movie, I downloaded The Giver from the library. I started rereading it the following evening.

The setting of The Giver is a time in the future, after some really bad things have happened in the world and people are living in planned communities where sameness is the goal. There's no need for real decision making as the community makes all the decisions for the whole. Clothing and food and dwellings are provided by the community. Family units consist of a father, a mother (who are put in a family unit based on temperaments by the community) and two children, a boy and a girl (did you expect anything else?) specifically selected for them. There is no love. Every relationship is planned out by the community. After the children are grown and assigned to their own dwellings, the parents go to the place where childless people live. As opposed to the place where older people go.

In the community, there's no love. There's no emotion. There's no color. At twelve years old, children are thanked for their childhood and are assigned jobs based on their aptitude. Again, there are no choices involved.

Oh, and naturally there are no birthdays. There's nothing individual at all in the community. Each December there's a ceremony where all the babies born in the prior year are assigned to their family unit. There's a prescribed change for children at every single age. At 9-years old the children receive a bicycle, the only form of transportation in the community.

The year that Jonas becomes a twelve, all the other twelves are assigned to jobs. Jonas wonders what is going on when he doesn't get an assignment. The reason for that is because Jonas is selected for the most honored job in the community. Jonas is going to be the Receiver of Memory. Apparently memories, good and bad, interfere with living the kind of life those in the community wish to live. One person holds all the memories of past time so that everyone else in the community is living in the here and now. The previous Receiver of Memory is responsible for the training of Jonas. As such, the previous Receiver becomes the Giver. Through the transfer of memories from Giver to Receiver, Jonas begins to question the dystopian community he lives in.

As much as I loved the movie, I loved the book that much more. My memory served me correctly and the movie was very true to the novel with just some small exceptions. Since I was rereading the book and I'd seen the movie, I was able to move a little bit beyond the main story and catch details I hadn't caught before. There's definitely more to this novel that meets the eye.

I'd recommend this book to readers who enjoy young adult fiction and to those who have always wondered what it would be like to live in a world where you don't have to make choices, everything is done for you, there's no war, no religion, and people generally get along.