Robert Heinlein is one of my idols.  He wrote good stories, some of the best, but that’s not all of it.  He had good ideas, some of the best, but that’s not all of it either.  What I find personally inspiring is the idiosyncratic path he cut through the jungle of 20th century ideologies.  It’s inspiring because that precise path can not be copied, only his independent way of walking it.

That’s why I believe no person has ever encountered a Heinlein story and come off the worse for it.

The first volume of William Patterson’s biography of Heinlein traces the first half of that journey.  It shows how many of the beliefs Heinlein revealed publicly in his later years can actually be traced back to his time first as a socialist, and then as a Democratic activist.  He practiced culturally liberal beliefs long before becoming associated with the libertarian right.

There are also interesting, and sad, counterpoints between the lives of Heinlein the author and Heinlein the person.  He was not one of his own larger than life characters.  He was physically unwell, and mentally near the breaking point at times.  His second wife Leslyn became an alcoholic, causing their divorce.

Some would say Heinlein could have revealed more of that vulnerability in his writing.  Not me. Artistic honesty is about being true to a vision. Heinlein’s vision was of better worlds, with better people. Something to live up to.

Because science fiction is the literature of ideas, when it wants to be, science fiction criticism can head off in some really interesting philosophical directions.  Michael Moorcock’s essay Starship Stormtroopers explains that imaginary worlds aren’t just escapist dreams.  Which fantasies authors choose to create, and their readers choose to live in, say something about us.  “By and large the world we got in the thirties was the world the sf writers of the day hoped we would have — ‘strong leaders’ reshaping nations.”  So never mind that Moorcock was in an angry leftist mood when he wrote that in 1977, condemning an entire generation of SF authors as crypto-fascists – the general idea is good.

That’s the tradition Charles Stross writes in when he attacks steampunk for glorifying Europe’s imperialist and worker-oppressing past.  Steampunk, he argues, is at best a silly fashion, at worst morally bankrupt.

But Scott Westerfeld replies that this picture of steampunk is outdated. Current steampunk novels do precisely what Stross claims they don’t: Tackle honestly the dark side of life and politics in the past.  Stross just hasn’t been paying attention.  The genre is way ahead of him.

I haven’t read much steampunk, and don’t know what to think.  But, see, this is what I love about science fiction criticism: One moment you think you’re discussing a fashionable nostalgia for pocket watches.  The next it turns out you’re dealing with the entire moral legacy of Western Civilization.  And nobody finds that odd.  So wherever this discussion is headed, I’m all for it.

The more I read of science fiction from the 1930’s to 60’s, the more I realize that this was where our culture grew up in a sense it hadn’t before.  These people were dreaming the future we live in.  I don’t mean because they (good grief) “predicted” anything, but because they were pioneers of new ideas, new perspectives, new attitudes.  To fully explore all that you needed a literature without any limits, where every dial could be turned.

The format they did it best with was the short format.  Maybe it was an accident of publishing history, I don’t know.  But most of the best science fiction stories are either short stories or short novels.

For exploring the novels, have a look at the Gollancz Masterworks series.  For the rest there’s anthologies.  This is one of them.  Every story here is exceptional or historic in some way: Call Me Joe (1957) by Poul Anderson, which contains the core ideas of Avatar.  Who Goes There? (1938) by John W. Campbell, filmed as The Thing.  Universe (1941) by Heinlein, the original degenerate generation ship story, (one echo of which is WALL-E).  The Marching Morons (1951) by C. M. Kornbluth, the basis for Idiocracy.

The deep link between science fiction and libertarianism is demonstrated in … And Then There Were None (1951) by Eric Russell, which portrays moneyless anarcho-libertarians inspired by Gandhi, and With Folded Hands (1954) by Jack Williamson, the nanny state nightmare version of Asimov’s robotic laws.

As anthologies go, this is about as good as it gets.

There’s an image in my head that makes me smile: It’s when Clay Shirky decides to write the second edition of Here Comes Everybody, and realizes that he can’t get around writing about the Tea Party movement as the perfect illustration of “organizing without organizations”.

My own interest in the Tea Party movement is not so much their relevance to American politics, but this: Given some people who feel unease, anger and disgust with the political mainstream of their country, but don’t have the left’s traditions of grassroots mobilization to build on, how do you cause change to happen?

Because that’s me.  If Norway’s public sphere is like a friendly gettogether, with everyone chatting quietly, confident in their shared vision of the world, I’m the guy staring out the window, thinking “there has to be a way to smash all this”.  But I don’t know how.

The Tea Party movement is one of the data points I’m interested in.  They started with that same feeling, and are possibly achieving .. something.  This book explains how some of them see the world – with a bias towards the authors’ own organization FreedomWorks.  They present the movement as the marriage of fiscal conservatism with the organization tactics of the mid-20th century radical Saul Alinsky.  Their goal is to reinvent the Republican party, one elected official at a time.

Who knows if it will work, but this is the most interesting political phenomenon I’m aware of at the moment.  A new type of politics, with unexplored possibilities.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971) by Philip José Farmer is perhaps more a thought experiment than a novel.  Science fiction always has to walk that balance, because it’s the literature of ideas.  I mean, the really big ideas, the ones that are too big for a realistic novel.  Science fiction without ideas feels empty, like there’s a hole in it where something was supposed to be.  But then sometimes you get only a thought experiment, and not much of a story attached.

Scattered isn’t quite there, but it’s close.  Every human who has ever lived has been resurrected by aliens on one big planet, where they’re given the basic necessities of life, and no instructions.  Whenever anyone dies, they get resurrected again.  It’s one big angry world of warcraft.

We follow Richard Burton, the Richard Burton, who sets out on a mission to find those asshole aliens who are responsible for this mess.  He didn’t ask to be resurrected.  And for some reason, wherever he goes he keeps bumping into Hermann Goering.

You can choose to see Scattered either as a dressed up thought experiment, or as a minimalist and more subtle approach to story-telling.  I’m going for the second alternative, because it puts me in a good mood to be reminded of SF’s leaner, younger years, when you didn’t take one small idea and turn it into 600 pages of action-packed bloat.  You took plenty of big ideas, and crammed them into 200.

Revenge stories appeal to me. I guess they appeal to everyone, but it also doesn’t bother me that they appeal to me.  It has to do with believing that Justice is something more than Law.  That it lives in all of us, and is not something we can delegate entirely to legitimate authorities.

Revenge stories also frighten me, because they appeal to raw, destructive anger.  And it frightens me a bit that one of the easiest way to make a popular story is to base it on violent revenge.

A contradiction?  Perhaps.

And it’s a contradiction Joe Abercrombie captures in Best Served Cold.  Just as he in the First Law trilogy served up an epic fantasy premise, in order to undermine it, here he does the same with the vengeance trope.  It starts out, as these stories must, with a Great Crime, and a victim, Monza, the crippled sister of a murdered brother.  And then we follow her as she methodically eliminates every person she blames.

We start out sympathizing.  But as the story progresses, we learn that Monza and her brother, and the people she gathers to avenge him, are themselves among the most evil characters in the story.  And we watch how her ferocity causes ripples of suffering throughout a world already overflowing with causes for revenge.

Abercrombie force-feeds you vengeance until you’re sick of it.  And while he was fumbling about a bit in The First Law, now he knows exactly what he’s doing.  It’s brilliant.  And disturbing.  And just a bit funny.

What makes Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking a nerdy food science bible instead of a cooking book is that there aren’t any recipes in it.  Some people will say that a book about food that explains what meat really is but doesn’t contain any meat recipes sort of misses the point.  Others will say: Wait, it explains what meat really is? And what actually happens when you fry something? And it lists all the characteristics of common herbs in a big scary table with big scary words?  I want to own this!  If so, this book, and this review, is for you.

McGee covers not only the facts but the history of commonly eaten animals and plants, often in poetic terms.  What fascinates me about the history of food is how basically everything we eat has been shaped by humans in some way.  We’ve taken things that were barely edible and made them good, and things that were good and made them better.  Our food has been bred and hybridized upon for thousands of years – just to make us happy.

One of the trends of this history, as McGee tells it, is how this great (unnatural) variety was reduced and homogenized during the 20th century, as part of the rise of industrialized food, but is now being rediscovered.  The fun is returning to food.  And this book is above all fun .. for very nerdy values of fun.

There are several common ways of harvesting fish from the wild, none of them ideal. In the most controlled and least efficient method, a few fishermen catch a few fish, ice them immediately, and deliver them to shore within hours. This method can produce very fresh and high-quality fish – if they are caught quickly with minimal struggle, expertly killed and cleaned, quickly and thoroughly iced, and promptly delivered to market. But if the fish are exhausted, processing is less than ideal, or cold storage is interrupted, qualify will suffer.

[..]

By contrast to the logistical challenges posed by fishing, consider the care with which salmon are harvested in the best aquaculture operations. First, the fish are starved for seven to ten days to reduce the levels of bacteria and digestive enzymes in the gut that may otherwise accelerate spoilage. The fish are anesthetized in chilled water saturated with carbon dioxide, then killed either with a blow to the head or by bleeding with a cut through the blood vessels of the gill and tail.  Because the blood contains both enzymes and reactive hemoglobin iron, bleeding improves the fish’s flavor, texture, color and market life. Workers then clean the fish while it’s still cold, and may wrap it in plastic to protect it from direct contact with ice or air.

- Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking

There’s usually a government conspiracy at the bottom in Stephen Hunter’s novels.  He’s that kind of thriller writer.  The conspiracies sometimes stretch over generations, something Hunter can pull off because the two main characters in his universe are father and son Swagger, shooting it out with the powers that be in their respective eras: The post-war years and the 1990’s present.  One novel had a timeline in Vietnam as well, making it three separate eras where the strings are pulled by the (same) men in black.  Now that’s a powerful conspiracy.

And then these badass Swagger characters come in and shoot it all up.  That’s so much fun.  I’ve described Hunter’s novels earlier as trash, and they are, in the positive sense of easily readable palate cleansers.  I don’t mean that they’re unimaginative.  That doesn’t work for me.  What I mean is that he’s found a sweet spot in the balance between being readable and being interesting.

So whenever I want to remind myself of why I love to read, I pick up a Stephen Hunter novel, and gobble it down like back when I had just discovered books and could think of nothing more wonderful than spending an evening in a chair reading some amazing adventure story.  And then I forget the story and move on.  But the experience – so much fun!

Oh, and the story: A 1950’s Mississippi penal colony for blacks is a modern heart of darkness.  There’s a conspiracy.  And lots of shooting and general badassery.