Short Book Reviews: World-Hopping While You Sleep, Part 2

 Prison of Sleep, by Tim Pratt (Angry Robot)

 I’m an unabashed fan of Tim Pratt’s work, and Doors of Sleep, the first volume of the “Zax Delatree duology,” captured me immediately. The premise is an engraved invitation to heart-breaking adventure: whenever sweet, compassionate mediator Zax Delatree falls asleep, he wakes up in a different reality. Not another planet or even another galaxy, a completely different dimension. He can take with him only what he carries and can stay only as long as he remains awake. Fortunately, the worlds he travels to are habitable (no gas giant atmospheres or torrents of liquid diamonds), so he can breathe the air and digest whatever food he can find. At first, he could not even understand the language of his destination culture and had no way of obtaining the necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter) except by theft. Worst of all was the soul-crushing loneliness of leaving behind every friend he makes. In Doors of Sleep, he encounters a psychotic scientist who infects him with a translation virus, meets and falls in love with artist, Ana, and found a few companions (including a sentient crystal disguised as a ring) capable of traveling with him.

Now comes the second part of the story: the revelation of What It’s All About: the secret behind dimension-hopping and the dastardly plot behind it. Along the way, he reunites with Ana (and gets separated again, several times) and friends, new and old. Having more lasting relationships helps Zax survive emotionally as well as physically and fuels his determination to leave each world better than he found it.

As always, Pratt’s narrative is endlessly inventive with great characters, smooth prose, and nifty plot twists. Best of all is the sense of humanity and compassion flowing through these two linked books.

Book Reviews: Masquerading as Science Fiction?

Dreams Before the Start of Time, by Anne Charnock (2017, 47North); and The Rift, by Nina Allan (2017, Titan).

Spoiler Alert...

What makes science fiction a genre? Is it the bells and whistles, the FTL space ships, the futuristic technology? Is it the ability to travel in time or across vast regions of space? Does it involve interactions with alien species, either for the first time or as a matter of course? Or is it simply because the author or the publisher says so? I will not dignify the argument put forth by “litr’ary” types that science fiction is an inherently inferior form of literature. Clearly, they haven’t been reading the superbly imaginative, elegantly crafted work of the last couple of

decades.

Following the principle of showing instead of telling, I refer you to the discussions surrounding The Time Traveler’s Wife (by Audrey Niffenegger, Harcourt, 2003). With due respect to my colleagues who might disagree, I thought the only people who considered this novel science fiction were those outside the genre. Yes, the man of the romantic pair bops about from one time period to another (losing his clothing along the way), but that did not make it science fiction in my eyes. I could accept it as romance. The focus, as in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, is the (romantic) relationship between two people. (Although Outlander involves time travel, very few readers I know would classify it as science fiction rather than fantasy or romance.) For me, the aspect that put The Time Traveler’s Wife firmly outside science fiction was the failure to develop the implications of time travel for society. How has this one man’s ability changed the world? What are the moral and political consequences of his actions? Why isn’t he found out and his abilities exploited? How can the “fabric” of time continue linearly with such repeated “tears”?

In other words, science fiction doesn’t just present nifty ideas in a vacuum – it focuses on how those ideas and gadgets and twists of fate have larger effects on the natural and human world. Perhaps back in the age of pulp magazines, a fun gimmick was sufficient to sustain a story with flimsy plotting, cardboard characters, and mediocre prose, but that hasn’t been true for a long time now.

This, too, is why I believe Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale falls squarely in the science fiction genre. Atwood herself refused to consider her dystopian world as science fiction, calling it instead “speculative fiction.” I think that’s a distinction without a difference. One critic (readily identifiable as ignorant of the field by his use of “sci-fi”) wrote, “Sci-fi sells us fantasies. Margaret Atwood’s classic novel is all about the danger of fantasy.” To those of us who are actually conversant with science fiction, the reverse is true, and is a powerful argument for The Handmaid’s Tale belonging on the same shelf as other brilliantly written feminist dystopian science fiction.