Now Who Says Politics is Boring?

Had a bit of a restless night so I managed to make significant headway with both Chapterhouse Dune and The Memory of Whiteness. As I mentioned earlier these were books that I'd previously had problems maintaining an interest in and subsequently abandoned. A little explanation as to why is maybe called for. It probably has a lot to do with politics.

Chapterhouse Dune I'd never really given serious consideration. I struggled to get into any of the Dune cycle post-Muad'Dib. I loved Messiah and to a lesser extent Children, but they were clearly sequels to Dune itself, (as opposed to the ubiquitous trilogy mode), and seemed to be simply meeting a publisher's need rather than delivering a quality read. Too often God Emperor in particular was like wading through a gospel tract or a textbook for some geo-political economics degree course. I couldn't really get excited about the Golden Path, Leto II's transformation, more Atreides descendants, the perpetually resurrected sequence of Duncan Idaho gholas etc. The prescient Machiavellian plotting was impenetrable! It was hard work and not entirely rewarding when you got to the final page. However in Heretics the passing of a few millenia, the shift in emphasis towards the Bene Gesserit and the introduction of the Mentat Bashar, Miles Teg rekindled my interest. Yes, he, Siona and soon to be mother superior Darwi Odrade are all still Atreides and still obsessed with the nightmare of becoming another Kwisatz Haderach or Tyrant, but the invasion by the Honoured Matres, the antithesis of the Bene Gesserit, injects some well needed action and jeopardy into the cycle. Throw in the Tlielaxu revelations and these later Dune works become quite exciting indeed. The universe really does get torn apart, planets blasted, races brought to the edge of extinction. Though I had my reservations about the direction Herbert was going in I can say I'll probably give Hunters of Dune a go, when I'm finished with Chapterhouse! That involves me forgiving KJ Anderson and Herbert Jnr for the schlocky robot nonsense of the Legends of Dune cycle, not an easy thing for me to do. If only Herbert Snr had given us a little more insight into the workings of the Spacing Guild!

The Memory of Whiteness, got a little bogged down in musicology and 10 dimensional quantum physics somewhere about 150 pages in. Kim Stanley Robinson's depiction of a human empire spread across the entire solar system, where even the moons of Uranus are made habitable by the presence of artificial stars called whitsuns, is pleasingly plausible. No FTL travel or communication, no aliens, no ray guns or inertia defying space fighters. Mature, classy SF, not unlike Iain Banks. But I find KSR's characterisation a little spartan. I've never really developed any attachment to any of his protagonists in the Mars series and as a result found it hard to imagine them beyond 2D stereotypes; dumpy Russian, fiery Frenchman, eccentric scientist, rangy American etc. Without being able to hold a satisfactory image of the characters in my mind's eye, I found the players overlapped and the plot got hard to follow. The emphasis on the ecological politics of terraforming in the Mars cycle is memorable though. I hadn't realised till now though that The Memory of Whiteness was written in 1985 a good six or seven years before Red Mars. Many of the themes that would later dominate the Martian epics pop up here. Though set centuries after the Mars trilogy (and never intended to be part of any chronology) as the Great Tour comes to Mars to play a monster gig to 4 million martians on the terraces of Olympus Mons during the Great Areology celebrations, KSR introduces the now familiar democratic debate between the Reds and the Greens and the struggle for Mars to be free of Earth's ancient authority. Great stuff...if only there wasn't so much of the hard going musicology!