What Makes This Book So Great (43 page)

This is a book I tend to remember as lighter than it is. Actually it’s full of whistling past the graveyard—all the worlds in it are ending. The future world is hardly sketched in, it’s assumed to be the default world the reader knows—in 1984 we were still regularly waking up from nightmares of nuclear destruction. Its future can go with Varley’s “Air Raid” which also uses time travel to try to save humanity.

The worlds of the past are seen in much greater detail, particularly the Mound Builder culture in the alternate world in which Yazoo finds a home. Waldrop makes the details of daily life in that world seem very real. It also does a lot with our assumptions about pre-Columbian America and timelessness—this is an alternate history that’s part of a complex changing dynamic culture that has traditions and innovations. It too is ending, with the introduction of plagues and wars—though why they have come now and not thirty years before when the traders first visited isn’t clear. There’s a lovely passage where the Greek-speaking Islamic traders give Yazoo an update on history on their side of the Atlantic—no Alexander, Carthage beat Rome, no Christianity, science has continued to advance slowly but surely. Waldrop’s well aware that his average reader will be far better historically educated about this kind of thing than about the American cultures Yazoo has found and he’s teasing us with this. It’s the Mound Builder culture we see in detail and that really comes to life here.

The world of 1929 archaeology is also seen in fascinating detail—shellacking the anomalous horse bones—Bessie the female archaeologist and her male colleagues are working against time as the rains come to flood their site and wash away all their evidence. The story of the excavation interlocks with Bonnie’s diary and the duty rosters of the camp—we’re hearing what happened to the Americans in the past both from their own notes and from Bessie’s excavations. What we don’t know is whether this 1929 is part of our world, or part of the world they came from, or whether these are the same. It reads like our 1929, and there’s nothing to indicate that their 2002 wasn’t supposed to be our 2002, but they could both be slightly different worlds. Certainly time travel doesn’t work the way they think it does—they were aiming for the 1940s. Maybe the future is easy to change, and maybe your own past is impossible to reach. The set of quotations used to start the book and as chapter headings strongly suggest the latter. Bonnie and her soldiers are lightly sketched, seen more in shadow than in substance, though the throwaway bit about the Book of Mormon is amazing.

A normal book about modern Americans thrown into the past would be like S. M. Stirling’s
Island in the Sea of Time
or Eric Flint’s
1632,
and comparing those to
Them Bones
really highlights some things. Firstly, those are books about success, about Americans winning, whereas this very much is about people setting off to change the past and finding themselves swallowed up in it. Secondly, they’re books about modern Americans interacting with Europeans in the past, while this really isn’t. There is an Aztec interlude in ISOT, but it’s an interlude to the main plot. In
Them Bones,
the Arab traders are an interlude in the important interactions with the Americans of the past.

Them Bones
was published as one of Terry Carr’s Ace Science Fiction specials, and it starts with a heartening little introduction which says how science fiction is in the doldrums and needs originality and shaking up. It’s always cheering to read things like that from thirty years ago and note that the genre is still here.

JUNE 10, 2010

110.
I’d love this book if I didn’t loathe the protagonist: Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr’s
Household Gods

Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr’s
Household Gods
is a well-written book that always annoys the heck out of me. I thought about it after finishing
Them Bones
and wondering what other stories have time travel that doesn’t achieve anything.

Nicole Gunther-Perrin is a lawyer in Los Angeles, and she’s the most irritating person you could ever spend a whole book with. Usually when fans call people “mundanes” in a sneering way it makes me recoil, but in Nicole we have a character who truly is mundane, or even a caricature of a mundane. She has no curiosity, no education (about anything other than her specialty, law), no idea how anything works, and poor social skills. Worst of all she’s so self-centered, you can hardly escape her gravity well.

She needs to be like that for the plot to work—divorced with two little kids, passed over for promotion, she prays to the Roman gods Liber and Libera, about whom she knows essentially nothing beyond their names, for them to send her back to their time. They kindly do, sending her back to the body of an ancestress, Umma, in Carnuntum on the borders of the Roman Empire in the time of Marcus Aurelius. There, instead of behaving like any other protagonist of this kind of novel, she freaks out at the lice, disease, death, invasions, and sexism, and longs to be back in California. In some ways, yes, it’s refreshing to have a time travel book where the protagonist doesn’t know everything about history and technology and invent ninety-eight things and save the day, but did it have to be the one where the protagonist is a girl?

The good thing about this book is the background. Nicole finds herself in the body of Umma, a widowed tavern keeper in Roman Carnuntum. She’s given the ability to speak Latin, but nothing else. She has to cope with Umma’s life and responsibilities and problems. Carnuntum feels real in every detail, the baths, the tavern, the lives and relationships and attitudes of the other characters. As a story about how people lived at the edge of the Roman Empire, it’s brilliant. That’s why I kept reading it the first time and why I have re-read it since. (The rest of it is so good that I tend to forget between times just how annoying Nicole is.) T. Calidius Severus the dyer, his son Caius, Julia the slave who is afraid to be freed, Umma’s children, her brother, her neighbours, even Marcus Aurelius—they’re all wonderfully real, and especially nice to spend time with because they’re not Nicole.

The problem with it is that ignorant selfish Nicole constantly gets in the way with her ridiculous attitudes. She sees a legionary soldier and thinks, “Didn’t Rome have a Vietnam to teach them about the horrors of war?” She has no idea that while in her own time there’s a glass ceiling, in the time she’s come to women are legally chattels of men. Her father was an alcoholic, so she’s horrified to see people drinking wine. I’d like the book more if I didn’t feel that the entire novel is setup for her to be as ignorant and annoying as possible and then Learn A Lesson. This is a personal fulfillment story, and indeed she learns a lesson and is personally fulfilled, but I still want to kick her. Some of the lessons she learns—about the army protecting the town, about wine being safer than water, about science and technology making the world safer and more equal—are obvious. Some others, such as the bit about the benefits of smacking children, are odder, by which I mean that I don’t agree.

Mild spoilers ahead. Though mostly they’re the kind of spoiler I got for Card’s Alvin Maker books when I discovered from external sources that William Henry Harrison was elected president and then died.…

The accounts of the pestilence and the invasion and the famine are vivid and individual. This is the kind of writing that’s very difficult to do well, and Tarr and Turtledove carry it off perfectly—these are the kind of close-up personal views of history happening that make it seem real. The same goes for the encounter with Marcus Aurelius, with his famous personal integrity. This is the kind of encounter with a “celebrity” that often weights a story in the wrong way, but here it’s excellent.

Now a couple of specific spoilers, but still fairly mild ones:

The thing about Nicole that I think best sums her up is that at the end of the book, when she is back in California, she goes into a bookshop to check whether she can really read Latin or whether the whole thing was a hallucination. She finds she can really read Latin. Then she
goes out of the bookshop again
! There she is, with the ability to look up the actual history and find out what happened next to people she saw what was for her literally yesterday, a bookshop where Marcus Aurelius’
Meditations
is very likely available, and she just walks out. This is typical of her whole attitude, even after the authors have piled calamities on her so that she has learned to thank people, and realize how nice hot showers, and doctors, and regular meals can be.

I remember a friend of mine complaining about Thomas Covenant: “Any of us would give our right arms to be in the Land, and he goes about moaning and he won’t even believe that it’s real.” That’s my exact problem with Nicole—she’s had this marvellous opportunity and there she is so passive and ignorant that I want to kick her out of the way and do it myself and prove that women can be Martin Padway and not all Nicole Gunther-Perrin. (Also, I have had head lice. They’re not that bad.)

We never learn what happened to Umma—she wasn’t in Nicole’s body, so where was she? Is she going to wake up the next morning in the lumpy bed with no memories of the last six months? Or what? I’d really have liked a hint. Also, I’d have liked a companion volume of “Umma spends six months in Nicole’s life” because I bet she would have coped just fine, though she might not have wanted to go home again.

The world really is excellent. The history is accurate, and the daily life is as accurate as possible. If you can put up with Nicole, it’s terrific.

JUNE 16, 2010

111.
Screwball-comedy time travel: John Kessel’s
Corrupting Dr. Nice

Corrupting Dr. Nice
is about time travel and con games, it’s fast paced and funny, the chapter titles all come from classic screwball comedies, and it contains a cute dinosaur called Wilma. If you don’t want to read it already, you probably won’t care that it also has one of the best courtroom scenes ever, the trial of the apostle Simon for terrorism.

Corrupting Dr. Nice
is the kind of book that’s either your kind of book or it isn’t. I bought it because the British edition had a very striking cover. It shows a red car whizzing past a row of Roman legionaries with rifles standing by a city gate, plus an Ursula K. Le Guin quote—the combination got me. It doesn’t matter that this moment doesn’t occur in the book, it accurately represents the story, as does Le Guin’s comment “brilliantly intelligent, light-handed and warm hearted.”

There are a lot of different ways of doing time travel stories. What Kessel does here is to take the idea of a very large but finite number of universes (137 splitting off every second) which he calls “moment universes.” Time travel to different moment universes, whether settled and exploited from the future or “unburned” and never visited before, is easy but controlled—you usually move from one stage to another, stay in tourist hotels, and visit the sights.

This is in one sense a satire on tourism and exploitation of the third world, but along with that come the deeper implications of what it means to exploit different versions of the past. In the second half of the book we see what it’s doing to the future—it’s very hard for the ordinary people of the future to get a job when famous people from the past are available. The past might be full of locals begging for bacteriophages and televisions, but the future isn’t a nice place to live either—people are selling off organs to survive. This is a comedy, and it is full of comedic set-pieces, but it’s a better comedy for being set against a dark background.

Dr. Owen Vannice (“Dr. Nice”) is the son of very rich parents, a klutz, and a palaeontologist who spends most of his time in the Cretaceous. He has a trusty bodyguard and sidekick, Bill, who happens to be an AI inside his head who can take over his body from time to time.

Genevieve Faison and her father, August, are con artists. Owen steals a baby apatosaur and illegally takes it forward through time. He meets Gen and August in the tourist hotel in first-century Jerusalem. They decide to scam him and things get complicated from there on, with the story involving true love, revenge, disguise, and of course the baby dinosaur.

With this setup, Kessel is potentially facing the “Riverworld problem”—if you can have anyone from any time in history, all mixed together, then what do you do with them? What he does works very well—he sticks to his protagonists from the future, Owen and Gen, and to Simon the apostle, who when we first meet him is working in the kennels of the hotel.

We see Jesus, Lincoln, Mozart, Freud, Jung, etc. in passing, enough to pull off the joke and create the illusion of a world full of people that people in the near future would think are worth the trouble of “rescuing” from their own contexts, but we don’t see enough of them to get bogged down. Feynman being recruited as the drummer for Mozart’s band is a good one-line joke, that’s all it needs and all it gets. Same with Jesus’ talk show—Kessel mentions it, we don’t need to see it. This is a believably complex future world, with time travel and with protesters against time travel, with neo-Victorians, with downloadable personalities and implantable AIs, and with James Dean working as a receptionist because he got fat at forty. You sail through it so quickly that it all glitters past.

On the human emotional level, I am seldom convinced that characters in romantic comedies who have deceived and tricked each other will be redeemed by love and remain together happily, and this is no exception. It isn’t a problem, especially as the Simon strand ends so well, but I think Kessel was right to stop where he did and not a moment later.

I picked this up now because I was thinking about time travel.
Them Bones
and
Household Gods
both have time travel that doesn’t work very well.
Corrupting Dr. Nice
has time travel that’s well understood and works really well and can bring people and objects from the past, and is still not helping. This is in the Paratime tradition though it doesn’t have alternate universes until time travelers have started to mess them up.