I somehow missed out on Narnia growing up, even though I know the basic structure and many plot beats through osmosis.
I’m 37 now, and with two young kids of my own I decided to take a look both for myself and them.
It’s a really, really good book. Narnia is warm, cozy, magical, and comfortable. Nothing is complicated: good people and good deeds are rewarded, bad people always lose at the end. Scary events don’t linger and your hopes are never misplaced.
The narration is wonderful, it’s the exact tone and style of a kindly grandfather reading a well-loved story besides a pleasantly warm hearth.
In the future, humanity has colonized the solar system, but is now stratified in a rigid class system that is enforced by science and government alike. Golds are at the top – the nobles, the warrior-knights, the leaders – while Reds – the miners, janitors, and dregs – are at the bottom.
Red Rising is the expected revenge and revolution story you’d guess from this premise, and it features a lowly Red – Darrow, a miner – rising up to bring down the Golds and the entire system along with them. It doesn’t stray far from expectations, but where it does is very interesting.
A professional liar feels morally compelled to finally tell the truth in the form of an autobiography. The result is an incredulous tale that is full of half-truths, artistic license, and (most likely) straight up lies.
What begins as a fairly mundane accounting of the practical work of battlefield salvage quickly turns into a mystery, a frame job, then quickly spirals out of control from there. And I do mean spirals; by the end you’re witnessing the early days of a world war on par with WW1. Saevus is a likable sort of jerk in a very complicated bind, and you find yourself laughing with him during his victories and laughing at him during his defeats.
To summarize Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead in an adverb and adjective, I’d call it: tremendously fun.
I don’t think I’ve read this particular Salvatore, but I read plenty like it as a teenager, and I really enjoyed them. I mean, I was an overweight nerd who had a hard time socializing – pretty sure Salvatore was practically required reading.
However, part of me knew that I shouldn’t revisit his works as an adult, that I should instead let my memories of his books float in the comfortable fuzz of nostalgia.
I did not listen to myself. This is not a good book.
Storywise, it’s somewhat like if Saving Private Ryan was rewritten as a Shadowrun campaign. A corpo Scion – an invincible mech suit that lets the very rich play at war – has gone missing in a questionable and ugly war. Now it’s up to a ragtag group of disparate expendables and at least one bio-horror to rescue the business boy.
2022 was a hard year for me and my family. We had terrifying medical issues, home emergencies, and worse. Not even work was an escape because my projects weren’t going very good either.
If there was a silver lining, it was that we didn’t have to deal with death or or the grief that comes with it. In that way we were lucky.
In 2023, we had to grieve a lot. I suppose we were overdue.
First it was my dog of 12 years, Lacey, who became lost and presumed dead. We never did get closure, but we did grieve.
Then there was my neighbor and good friend. He was only a little older than me with two very young kids. His death was a freak accident, a tragic medical emergency that happened at the worst possible time.
Another neighbor and friend was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She had just beaten breast cancer, and her reward for a lifetime of fighting was a terminal diagnosis? It was impossibly cruel. It feels wrong to consciously grieve for the living, it’s too early and presumptuous, but you do anyway.
We had many other close calls. Loved ones ended up in the hospital with COVID and worse. Heart issues we thought fixed are back. A fall down the stairs that makes us reconsider everything.
Last night my grandmother – my Memere – fell out of her bed. She had been suffering from dementia for several years, and in her confusion she injured herself very badly. This morning she died. We grieved.
I’ve come to think on is how we grieve, and what we grieve for and why. Not just for the death or loss of loved ones, but more abstract areas of life. We grieve when things change, but especially when they end.
Last year my wife and I made the decision to move from the house we built together back to where we grew up. We grieved for the things we’d miss – our friends and neighbors, our house, the river, the mountains, Huxdotter coffee, Fred Meyer.
In January of last year an online community I had been apart of since I was 13 years old shut down. How much can a message board mean to someone? A lot, actually. These were people I grew up with. They helped me get started in my new career, they were a huge source of inspiration and funding for Village Monsters and other projects I’ve worked on.
I grieved for it too.
I’ve had a lot of practice now, and I’ve come to appreciate grief as a skill.
It seems overly dramatic to think of grief during the times my computer shuts off unexpectedly during a storm, causing me to lose everything I worked on. Or when I’m working on a project only for a bugged algorithm require me to trash a week’s worth of effort and refactor it entirely.
But it feels like I’m using the same muscle. The frustration, anger, sadness, and feeling of helplessness are far less pronounced, but they are there nonetheless. As I get better at grieving the big losses of life, I’ve found it’s easier to brush off the smaller problems.
I didn’t respond to the problems of 2022 very well, so I’ve been trying to look at the brighter side of things. It’s not easy. It is, in fact, frequently impossible. But this realization on grief feels like a win.
When my Memere passed this morning, I did not cry. I will at her funeral, and in the moments later. But for now I reflected on my favorite memories, the times we walked together, rode in her beloved PT Cruiser, took pictures of landscapes, and talked about how to swear in French. This is how I’m grieving, at least for now.
Grief is the bridge to cross from one part of life to another. It’s not so scary to walk over it anymore.
There are obvious dangers serving on a colony ship headed for a potentially habitable planet. Will the crew manage the effects of isolation, zero g, and continuous existential crisis? What about the time dilation effects due to travelling at near light speed – can people cope with the fact that the planet they’re leaving will experience decades of change in their 5 year journey? What if the planet can’t actually sustain life – can you imagine having to go back? Even more practically: will you even survive the journey?
Tau Zero explores all these types of questions before grinning mischievously and throwing one last monkey wrench into the equation: what if the ship is damaged en route – not in a life-threatening way – and now can no longer stop? In fact, it can no longer even slow down; its crew is able to survive indefinitely, but time is dilating further as minutes on board the ship become centuries outside. They can’t land, call back to home, or even make repairs, and the stars and planets and galaxies they’re able to see outside their windows are looking ever stranger and out of reach.
It’s a really cool idea. Tau Zero is a hard science (well, for 1970) sci-fi book first and foremost, but at many points throughout it feels closer to a post-apocalypse story. After the aforementioned disaster strikes, the crew of the Leonora Christine become survivors of a very personal apocalypse. The world they knew is gone in every sense of the word, and they themselves have become ghosts without a home or purpose.
The book excels when it explores these ideas, or when it dips into the poetic to describe cosmic phenomena, or when dives into paragraphs of big, crunchy technical jargon for the all the science work being done. It’s wonderful scifi writing.
The problem is everything else.
A book detailing a disaster really needs to get the human element right. People should respond to it believably, which might mean some acting irrationally, others rising to heroics, still others falling into depravity or doom or hysterics. The drama and tension naturally arise from people overcoming their weaknesses, making tough decisions, and so forth.
But Tau Zero’s characters aren’t really people; they’re barely even 2D cardboard cutouts. They wander from scene to scene expositing dialogue at each other, or saying their internal monologues out loud to advance a thread, or suddenly acting out of character because it’s convenient for the plot at the time. There’s very little conflict (the most physical it gets is a single fistfight over cards) and drama is often resolved with a handwave.
The dialogue is especially embarrassing. There are some scenes early on where characters are literally just stating their backstories to one another intermixed with current world history that would surely be obvious to them. It’s the type of thing that’d get you in trouble with your 9th grade English teacher.
The worst by far is the protagonist. He’s a military man, a cop-esque figure on the ship. But also he knows everything about space and astrophysics and chemistry and planetary colonization and can stand toe-to-toe with experts in their field in any scientific discussion. His arguments are always correct, and those who doubt him eventually regret their words and deeds. He’s a better captain than the captain. He’s a master manipulator, with networks of deputies and secret deputies and spies. He can pilot star ships better than anyone. He’s the best melee fighter, the best at navigating zero-g, and the only one with a gun. He’s also naturally handsome, rugged, and is worshipped by at least two women.
He’s absolutely ridiculous.
It’s such a shame, because I love so much else about this book. Though the science never really rang true to me, I still suspended my disbelief because it’s explained so well. The premise is excellent, equal parts terrifying and exhilarating, and the tension it weaves throughout the book left my palms sweaty.
All it needed was a handful of characters who behaved like humans. Instead, we get these weirdos. You get the sense that Anderson viewed humans as an unfortunate necessity to write about a cool spaceship flight. I wish he hadn’t even bothered and made the Leonora Christine an unmanned expedition.
