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Tag Archives: science fiction

Book review: The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide

words and images Posted on July 28, 2007 by dlschirfNovember 12, 2022

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams. Highly recommended.

If finding out your house is about to be bulldozed to make way for a highway bypass is unnerving and life changing, imagine finding out the same is about to happen to your planet. Thus begin the adventures of human Arthur Dent in The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams.

Of course Adams is not the first writer to use science fiction to satirize the foibles of the human race and its institutions and culture (including science fiction), but he does does so with a rare combination of sophistication, style, and humor. His description of why the bypass is being built and why Arthur doesn’t know about it alone starts the series off on a scathing note. In the universe of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the book within a book), people sometimes survive government and corporate bureaucracy and personal greed and thoughtlessness, but more often destruction and waste seem to result.

Throughout his post-Earth adventures with Ford Prefect, the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox, fellow human Trillian (Tricia McMillan), and Marvin the perpetually downcast robot who takes lows to new highs, Arthur is the proverbial Everyman, whose struggles to make tea (and thus achieve some sense of ordinariness) in his new life result in near-destruction. At one point, he happily serves as “Sandwich Maker” on a pre-technological world that views this skill with awe.

Adams is perhaps strongest in his numerous asides in which he talks about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the publication for which Ford Prefect researches and writes, and the Encyclopedia Galactica; the nature of improbability; the humorously and seemingly invariable and inevitable tragic histories of various planets and races; and various theories surrounding such things as time, space, and infinity, almost always with a slyly serious wink about the absurdity of it all. These digressions allow his imagination and his intellect to soar and in many cases are more interesting than the story itself. This may go back to how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy begins—that people want to move between Points A and B very fast, and that people at Point C in between (Everyman Arthur Dent) “often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.” There seem to be no Points A and B in Arthur’s new universe; there are infinite points and lines and continuums, most of them absurd in one way or another.

With the exception of Trillian, Arthur’s fellow travelers are well drawn. The most amusing is, sadly, Marvin, whose programmed depression is annoying and whose perception is accurate.

There are ingenious ideas scattered throughout the six stories, including the irony of a lorry driver who hates the perpetual rain that follows him no matter where he goes because, unbeknownst to him, he is a Rain God.

The problem is that many of these ideas, like life events, crop up randomly, play themselves out, and then seem to fall flat in the end. Undoubtedly, this is part of the universe as Adams sees it; it is made up of absurdity upon absurdity, which may not have neat Point A to Point B progressions. Some of this lack of cohesion also may be the result of transforming material written for episodic radio into book form; a certain sense and continuity may have been lost as the author diverts his tale to Points E, M, and T.

The first two books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, are the best in the series. Life, the Universe and Everything is, almost as the title promises, too contorted and meandering. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, which takes place on Earth, lacks an engaging focal point, which makes it seem long and tedious at times. “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” appears to be a throwaway story reflecting the author’s views. Mostly Harmless, written at what Adams admitted was a bad time in his life, lacks the élan of the earliest books; it is more downbeat in attitude than its predecessors and borders on determined and grim. Marvin is long gone as comic relief; the weakest character, Tricia/Trillian, now moves to the forefront but without further development; and even Ford Prefect has sobered up, quite out of character. It as though Adams wanted his characters, most notably Random, to reflect his anger and depression and his universe to end without possibility of resurrection—in the same way that Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes.

Underneath the satire, the humor, and the bitterness, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide is imaginative and thought provoking, revealing a rare story-telling and writing gift that is brilliant both on the surface and in the depths.

Saturday, 28 July 2007.
© 2007 by Diane L. Schirf.

Posted in Blog, Book Reviews, Books | Tagged fiction, novel, science fiction | Leave a reply

Book review: The Lost World

words and images Posted on June 2, 2007 by dlschirfDecember 16, 2018

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle with an introduction by Michael Crichton and Diane Johnson and notes by Julia Houston. Recommended.

By Arthur Conan Doyle’s day, advances in scientific method and technology had broadened our knowledge and shrunk our world. The popularity of novels such as Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne lay in part in the mystery of the unknown and inaccessible places in which they were set and their effect on a human imagination that probably felt crowded and claustrophobic. The Lost World continues the tradition with a wry nod to the reality that events recounted by narrator/journalist E. D. Malone were no longer possible or even imaginable.

The reader is privy to the humor long before the narrator, who is sent to seek adventure by the woman he loves. “It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won, for they would be reflected upon me,” Gladys tells Malone.

Malone seeks adventure to impress his ladylove, while Professors Challenger and Summerlee aim to distinguish themselves in the crowded field of zoology, and Lord John Roxton desires to set himself apart from his fellow big-game hunters. In his world, anyone can hang a rhino head on the wall, but how many have the chance to take a dinosaur?

They are extraordinary men, like those of The Mysterious Island. Intentionally or not, Conan Doyle pays homage to Verne when Malone writes, “I have as companions three remarkable men, men of great brain-power and of unshaken courage” and “Man was always the master.” In the post-Darwin age, Verne and Conan Doyle were ready to demonstrate that nature was at the service of resourceful man.

The humor in The Lost World, such as the resemblance of the ape-men king to Professor Challenger and their subsequent treatment of him, is balanced by scenes such as the narrator’s vivid description of a pit into which he falls. “This bottom was littered with great gobbets of flesh, most of which was in the last state of putridity.” The addition of, “The atmosphere was poisonous and horrible” is gratuitous for the imaginative reader, whose mind pictures “these lumps of decay.

The Lost World is strongest when it is focused on the characters, the plateau, and the dinosaurs, especially the pterodactyls, and weakest when attention is turned to the plateau’s anthropomorphic life. While Challenger believes it to be a watershed in evolutionary history, the battle that determines supremacy is anticlimactic compared to the descriptions of the swamp of the pterodactyls, the glade of the iguanodons, and Malone’s death trap.

The amount of time spent on the plateau is short, but seems tediously prolonged by some of Conan Doyle’s plot choices. The ending is predictable, as it was meant to be, and only the surprise prepared by Challenger for the Zoological Institute adds interest to it. While Verne wisely destroyed his creation, thus making it possible, Conan Doyle leaves his plateau intact, with conflicting hints from the narrator that it is impossible to find and that it will someday be exploited by hunters, adventurers, and other men.

When man finds undisturbed nature, he is bound to ruin its very character. Within a week of their arrival, the four adventurers and their technology have altered a longstanding balance of power. A paradise that never was is no more.

As with Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s strength is in creating characters with a handful of memorable traits — the pompously arrogant Challenger, the acerbic Summerlee, the courageous and bluff Lord John, and the young Malone, whose naivete and powers of observation make him a suitable stand-in for the reader.

Despite its weaknesses of plot and its Eurocentricity apparently bolstered by Darwin’s work (the Europeans are clearly the fittest, with Indians and Africans serving as subject races and “half-breeds” as a treacherous one), The Lost World is still a good adventure story, even if dated. Suspend your modern sensibilities and beliefs and enjoy the possibilities of an impossible tale.

2 June 2007
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Posted in Blog, Book Reviews, Books | Tagged fiction, novel, science fiction | 1 Reply

Book review: The Mysterious Island

words and images Posted on September 25, 2006 by dlschirfDecember 25, 2018

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. Recommended.

After reading The Mysterious Island, I wonder how much Jules Verne’s current reputation is based on 1950s and ’60s movies loosely — very loosely — adapted from his novels. In this book, there are no giant crabs or bees, or aliens, or even women. There are five men and a dog seeking to escape besieged Richmond during the Civil War who are carried off in a balloon by hurricane winds to an uncharted island in the Pacific, where they find and make what they need to survive.

The “colonists,” as they style themselves to avoid the negative connotations of “castaways,” are an improbable assortment, each man having knowledge or skills that complement those of the others. Cyrus Harding, the engineer, is not only a bottomless well of information about mechanics, chemistry, navigation, and other practical topics, but is also a natural leader. Gideon Spillett, the reporter, is an expert hunter. Pencroft, the sailor, knows shipbuilding and is a willing worker, while his teenage ward, Herbert, is a knowledgeable naturalist and able hunter. Harding’s servant, Neb, plays the role of cook and domestic, while Harding’s dog, Top, provides keen senses and instinct. When Verne wrote, “It would have been difficult to unite five men, better fitted to struggle against fate, more certain to triumph over it,” it cannot have been without some sense of irony, since he is the one who brought them together in his imagination.

While a mysterious influence, whose acts are ambiguous at first but become more tangible over time, rescues the settlers or provides them with just what they need just when they need it, the real mystery of the island is the island itself. Perhaps Verne misunderstood or misused common names; he calls Jup’s troop both “orangutans” (apes) and “baboons” (monkeys). He might have been pandering to a Victorian taste for the exotic.

The island that the settlers call “Lincoln” for their wartime president is an impossibility of nature. Creatures from nearly every continent and ecosystem roam among an equally unlikely mixture of geological formations and collection of plants. Onagers from the Asian steppes and Middle Eastern deserts, koalas (described as “large” and speedy) from Australia, jaguars from Central and South America, orangutans from the Borneo rain forest, and musmons from isles of the Mediterranean are among Nature’s bounty found on this small temperate island. Here, tropical apes, cats, and parrots survive below-freezing winters as easily as the musmons and goats.

The mineral riches are equally diverse, but even as he wonders about this paradise, Harding tells his comrades, “Nature gives us these things. It is our business to make a right use of them,” signaling the beginning of man’s never-ending quest to conquer and destroy nature. Even the water must be tamed; the settlers must “borrow its power, actually lost without profit to any one.”

Under Harding’s leadership, and with the occasional help of the island’s secret benefactor, the colonists build an incredible infrastructure that provides them with shelter, water, food, clothing, power, tools, and weapons. Harding is not the leader because he is rich, good looking, charismatic, well spoken, or the other things that appeal to civilized man; he is the leader because he knows what to do and how to do it, and has faith in his ability to do it — and because he has intelligent followers in whom he can instill that same faith.

The lack of discord among the colonists is as unlikely as the flora and fauna, but it may be Verne’s commentary on leadership when it is most needed. When an important decision must be made, Harding refuses to make it without obtaining the opinions of all concerned, including his own servant. Taken away from civilization and its layers of social, moral, and other complexities, and forced into a situation where able leadership and willing cooperation mean not only survival but comfort and satisfaction, these men rise to the occasion. It is no coincidence that the impetus for the arrival on Lincoln Island is the Civil War, one of America’s bloodiest, most savage times.

In the afterword, author Isaac Asimov tried to determine the appeal of “robinsonades” like Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, and The Mysterious Island. He came to the conclusion that such tales answer the question, “What do I do if civilization fails me?” — a question that could apply to castaways on an uncharted island or survivors of a civil war or a nuclear or chemical/biochemical holocaust. Perhaps, though, the more basic question might be: “Do I need civilization at all?”

While the North and South were counting and burying their dead and trying to heal the nation — a process that has not been completed — Harding and his group were using both their minds and their hands to shape a near-paradise (one in which tobacco is missed, but not women).

The Mysterious Island starts off slowly; too much ink is dedicated to Pencroft’s desire to kill eat every creature they encounter, and the characters can seem psychologically shallow and limited. At some point, however, I found myself so interested in Lincoln Island that I, like the colonists, was reluctant to leave it. I was even disappointed by the ultimate fate and home of the settlers, as it did not seem the right place for them to be. While not a literary masterpiece, The Mysterious Island does not need giant crabs, bees, or even women to be a good story of its kind.

25 September 2006
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Posted in Blog, Book Reviews, Books | Tagged fiction, novel, science fiction | Leave a reply

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