From archive (archive) Subject: Child of Fortune From: firth@sei.cmu.edu Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Date: 4 Nov 86 15:54:46 MET From: firth@sei.cmu.edu Child of Fortune Norman Spinrad ** Warning: this review contains spoiler material and explicit literary criticism. ** Part One "This too is a histoire of that archetype as it is incarnated in our own era: the Child of Fortune whom we have all been or will become. But herein will the detached observer shed all pretense of objectivity, for this is MY name tale's story, this is MY wanderjahr's song" And so, in the introduction to this 500 page book, we are placed at once on firm ground. This is to be a novel written in the first person - less usual in SF than in other genres. Moreover, the narrator is the protagonist, which is customary but not essential: recall Melville's Ishmael. Finally, what we have here is an example of the type of novel called, formally, a Bildungsroman: a novel of character development, specifically of the transition from youth to adulthood, told in terms of the events that mediated this development. The most famous novel of this form is Wilhelm Meister, which established the ground rules and hence may be called canonical. There must be a central character, whom the story is about. It must treat of the evolution of the character in response to external events, or, more specifically, in response to the human content of those events. This is an ambitious task. The reader must sympathise with the character, and must become engaged with that character's adventures and reactions. But, more important, the development of the character must be psychologically plausible, and also a response to events that are logically plausible. The author must run in parallel two threads, governed by two quite different kinds of causality. When this genre is transferred to SF, a new element appears. The events occur not in our own mileau but in another, and the author must use those events also to describe to us the imaginary world he is constructing. This raises the problem that, borrowing an analogy from another art form, I shall call the relation between 'figure' and 'ground' - the world in which the adventure is set must complement, and not overwhelm, the character who navigates it. The first major novel to essay this task is Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel, but in my view it is deeply flawed. SF examples that come to mind are Panshin's Rite of Passage and (more lightweight) Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars. There are many more; the Bildungsroman is a natural mode of writing SF, since the reader cast into the new world is necessarily a neophyte, and can therefore readily identify with a naive character. Spinrad's universe is the 'Second Starfaring Age', the setting also for The Void Captain's Tale. In it, humankind has spread to the stars and colonised many planets, using a stardrive filched from aliens offstage, that nobody understands. There have been social changes, of which the most significant is perhaps that, in OUR terms, everyone is immensely rich - just as, in terms of a mediaeval peasant, everyone in this nation is immensely rich. His protagonist, Wendi Shasta Leonardo, is female. She reaches adolescence, leaves home, wanders about, meets people, has adventures, grows up, and tells us about it. This is how most young folk in that society behave; they are called Children of Fortune and their rite of passage is the Wanderjahr, and the debt Spinrad owes to Hesse is clear. Well, if the above makes you eager to read the book, go ahead. The majority opinion is that it's great, and you'll probably enjoy it a lot. Should you care about my own opinion, it is in Part Two of this long review. Robert Firth From archive (archive) From: aterry@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Allan Terry) Organization: Teknowledge, Inc., Palo Alto CA Subject: Child of Fortune Date: 10 Nov 87 21:17:09 GMT Has anybody else read Spinrad's Child of Fortune? I read it recently and was very impressed by the writing. This is a coming-of-age tale set in a future when humanity has spread to the stars. When children arrive at a certain stage in development, anywhere from 14 to 20 or so, formal schooling stops and the child embarks on a quest for his or her adult self. Such "children of fortune" leave home and wander until they discover their adult names. This could be done very badly (such as cutesy psuedo-American Indian), but Spinrad ties it well to broad mythology. In fact, the heroine survives by making a myth for herself and then living it. Feels like touches of Cambell here and there. The writing is kalidoscopic, especially the language. The diaspora to the stars has created many pockets of local culture, and many old languages and customs have survived (along with new, very strange cultures). Each mond has its own sprach, which vraiment lends spice even to simple conversations, verdad? (This book is lots of fun if you are familiar with several languages, but that is NOT to say that it is unreadable.) Spinrad writes with a rather baroque voice here, well suited to the times he describes. Also well suited to a ruespieler such as Moussa. The book can occasionally feel like Spinrad in his "60s leftover" mode. I often felt like I was being preached at for not being young and hip. Then I remember how the story is being filtered through the growing perceptions of a young woman in the midst of her Wanderjahr. There was a lot good in the sixties, and this culture captures one way such ideas might go. The book is partly a challenge to some of us, "see what you left behind now that you think you are grown up". I wish I had or made the oportunity for a Wanderjahr for myself. Anyway, what do other netlanders think? It is the best Spinrad I have read so far. I have not read The Void Captain's Tale. Is this set in the same universe? I have heard it described as "The definitive tract upon the female orgasm", is it worth reading? Allan From rec.arts.sf.reviews Wed Jan 20 12:31:16 1993 Xref: lysator.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:25 rec.arts.books:7729 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books Path: lysator.liu.se!isy!liuida!sunic!uunet!spool.mu.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu.!wex From: ecl@mtgzy.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070) Subject: DEUS X by Norman Spinrad Message-ID: <9301181843.AA04187@presto.ig.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.misc Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1993 04:26:51 GMT Approved: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Wexelblat) Lines: 46 DEUS X by Norman Spinrad A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1993 Evelyn C. Leeper Good things come in small packages, they say, and this novella (it's slightly under 40,000 words) fulfills that concept. There's more to chew on here than in a half-dozen bloated space weaponry novels. Spinrad is tackling much the same question as Camus and others: the dilemma of existence. What is our purpose? Does it depend on the existence of God, or is this purpose within humanity and/or the individual? In DEUS X, the earth has been so polluted that it's considered hopeless (shades of Camus's PLAGUE here?). One possible escape is to download yourself into the Big Board, the worldwide electronic network. But are you downloading your soul or just a simulacrum? Father De Leone thinks it is the latter, and your "clone" is nothing more than (as he puts it) "a satanic golem." (That the latter phrase is clearly a mixed metaphor is worth noting!) because he does so believe, the Pope wants him to agree to be downloaded and to report back from the other side. But somewhere along the line things go awry and take a very different turn from what everyone expected. Spinrad does make a couple of slips. He seems to have bought into the common misconception of what papal infallibility means. (It does not mean that everything the Pope says is infallible, but that in matters of morals and faith the Pope is infallible when speaking as the "vicar of Christ." I believe there have been only three such occasions since the doctrine was put forth in 1870.) And he uses Gibson's simile of "a television receiver tuned to an empty channel" in a rather obvious fashion. But these are scarcely major flaws--the infallibility is not a necessary under-pinning of the plot by any means. I *highly* recommend this book. I even checked the exact classification (novel versus novella) so I would know exactly which category to nominate it in for a Hugo next year. %T Deus X %A Norman Spinrad %C New York %D January 1993 %I Bantam Spectra %O paperback, US$3.99 %G ISBN 0-553-29677-9 %P 177pp Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | ecl@mtgzy.att.com From rec.arts.sf.reviews Tue Oct 5 12:03:04 1993 Path: liuida!sunic!pipex!uunet!psinntp!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: kcc@cs.wustl.edu (Ken Cox) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Review of Norman Spinrad's _Deus X_ Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <9310011805.AA07197@siesta.wustl.edu> Date: 04 Oct 93 15:27:48 GMT Lines: 43 DEUS X Norman Spinrad A review by Ken Cox I was a little worried after reading the first chapter of _Deus X_, since it looked like Spinrad was trying to jump on the cyberpunk bandwagon. Not that I don't like cyberpunk, in moderation, but I'm beginning to think it's been done to death. Fortunately _Deus X_ is not cyberpunk -- well, not much -- and in any case Spinrad has managed to find a novel subject. The setting is Earth, sometime soon; the ozone is gone, greenhouse warming is melting the icecaps, and the biosphere is dying. However, humanity may still be able to survive in the form of electronic analogs, software duplicates of human beings. But -- do these electronic people have souls? The issue is splitting the Roman Catholic church. The conservatives say no; how could a program have a soul? The liberals, with one eye on the church's rapidly declining membership, say yes; after all, the software passes the Turing test, and that's the way we decide that the hairless apes around us are human. Finally, an experiment is performed in the hopes of resolving the issue, and its results aren't quite what anyone expected. _Deus X_ is an interesting, introspective examination of what it means to be human. It makes a good evening's read, but you'll be thinking about it for quite a while afterward. A warning: some of the material might be offensive from a religious standpoint. %T Deus X %A Norman Spinrad %I Bantam Spectra %C New York %D January 1993 %G ISBN 0-553-29677-9 %P 177 pp %O paperback, US$3.99 Ken Cox kcc@cs.wustl.edu From rec.arts.sf.reviews Wed Apr 6 17:43:27 1994 Path: lysator-ifm-isy.liu.se!lysator.liu.se!news.kth.se!sunic!pipex!bnr.co.uk!corpgate!news.utdallas.edu!rdxsunhost.aud.alcatel.com!aur.alcatel.com!news From: aaron@amisk.cs.ualberta.ca (Humphrey Aaron V) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Prograde Reviews--Norman Spinrad:Deus X Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: Sun, 27 Mar 1994 15:20:05 GMT Organization: not specified Lines: 61 Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <94Mar25.183636-0700.138602@amisk.cs.ualberta.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: aursag.aur.alcatel.com Norman Spinrad:Deus X A Prograde Review by Aaron V. Humphrey [some spoilers] I haven't read a lot of Norman Spinrad. That last thing I read by him, I believe, was a novella called "World War Last" in Asimov's a few years back, which was an incredibly heavy-handed satire on the Cold War and the U.S.A.'s role in it. I wasn't that impressed with it, but then I've discovered a low tolerance in myself for heavy-handed satire. In the Author's Notes at the back, it includes as accolades: Spinrad's novel about Adolf Hitler, _The Iron Dream_, was banned in Germany for seven years, and _Bug Jack Barron_, his controversial novel about presidential politics and the power of televisin, was denounced on the floor of the British Parliament. So, after that, _Deus X_ was a pleasant surprise. It's not heavy-handed at all. It deals sensitively with the spiritual issue: does an electronic replica of a personality(called a "successor entity")have a soul? The Catholic Church of the time is very concerned with this question, because its current anti-successor-entity position is losing it worshippers in droves; the ecology is going to hell, and some people would rather live in computer simulation than in the real world. They are desirable of finding out for sure. Father Pierre De Leone is dying. He is of the near-unshakeable opinion that successor entities do _not_ have souls, and that they are therefore a temptation of Satan. So Pope Mary I considers him the best candidate to discover the truth--by making a successor entity of him, and attempting to convince it that it has a soul. Marley Philippe is a net jockey called in when Father De Leone's simulacrum disappears mysteriously. It has somehow been spirited away to The Other Side, where the more mysterious entities dwelling on the Net live... And he eventually ends up having to convince Father De Leone that he _does_ have a soul. Spinrad isn't out to bash religion here. He treats it with sensitivity, not just pointing and laughing. And he deals seriously with the issues he raises. Expecting to have to slog through it, instead I only needed an evening and a morning to get through it. Short, fast-paced, and yet deeply thoughtful. A difficult combination to achieve, but Spinrad pulls it off. It may yet show up on my Hugo ballot. %A Spinrad, Norman %T Deus X %I Bantam Spectra %C New York %D January 1993 %G ISBN 0-553-29677-9 %P 177 pp. %O Paperback, US$4.99, Can$3.99 -- --Alfvaen(Editor of Communique) Current Album--Neil Diamond:Stones Current Read--Robert Reed:The Remarkables "curious george swung down the gorge/the ants took him apart" --billbill From rec.arts.sf.reviews Wed May 18 17:38:07 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!EU.net!uunet!spool.mu.edu!agate!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: aaron@amisk.cs.ualberta.ca (Aaron V. Humphrey) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: Retrograde Reviews--Norman Spinrad:The Last Hurrah of The Golden Horde Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 18 May 1994 08:54:00 GMT Organization: The Anna Amabiaca Fan Club Lines: 41 Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <2r9qg2$5av@scapa.cs.ualberta.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu Originator: mcb@remarque.berkeley.edu Norman Spinrad:The Last Hurrah of The Golden Horde A Retrograde Review by Aaron V. Humphrey A friend of mine (actually, a friend of my brother) was horrified when I told her I hadn't read much of Norman Spinrad, particularly his shorter work. She pressed a copy of _The Last Hurrah of The Golden Horde_ into my hand. Eventually, I got around to reading it. The stories in this book remind me of _With A Finger In My I_ by David Gerrold. Not because they're intrinsically similar, but because they both have that American New Wave feel to them. They're also vaguely similar to Harlan Ellison stories, though that didn't strike me at first. "Carcinoma Angels" is probably the best, although "It's A Bird! It's A Plane!" is pretty funny, and all but a few of the stories are great reading. The exceptions, in my opinion, are the title story, which features a character named Jerry Cornelius, and reminds me why I never read many of Michael Moorcock's book featuring a character of the same name; "The Age of Invention", which is far too cute, in the way of imparting modern-age behaviour to cavemen; and "The Entropic Gang-Bang Caper", which attempts to tell a story somewhat after John Brunner in _The Sheep Look Up_ and _Stand On Zanzibar_...but was a bit too indirect for me. Definitely a book not to be missed. %A Spinrad, Norman %T The Last Hurrah of The Golden Horde %I Avon %C New York %D September 1970 %G SBN 380-02368 %O Paperback, USD0.75 %P 223 pp. -- --Alfvaen(Editor of Communique) Current Album--Robert Plant:Pictures At Eleven Current Read--Philip Jose Farmer:The Other Log of Phileas Fogg "Thinks again--thanks to brain, the new wonder head-filler!" --Bluebottle Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!pipex!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: ecl@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper) Subject: PICTURES AT 11 by Norman Spinrad Message-ID: <9501051348.ZM1745@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Organization: The Internet Date: Sun, 8 Jan 1995 04:58:09 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 67 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:711 rec.arts.books.reviews:187 PICTURES AT 11 by Norman Spinrad Bantam, ISBN 0-553-37384-6, 1994, 455pp, $12.95 A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1994 Evelyn C. Leeper I picked this up at 10:30 one night, intending to read just a few pages before bed. At 2 AM I forced myself to put the book down, even though I was only halfway through it. After all, this was a work night. Well, needless to say, I did finish it. And it is a real page- turner. A group of eco-terrorists, the Green Army Commandos, has taken over a Los Angeles television and threatens to blow it up unless Californians defeat a referendum for a new nuclear power plant. At least that's how it starts. But soon everything escalates beyond ~control: Brazilian coffee boycotts, stolen plutonium, "Meet the Commandos" television shows, and much, much more. Spinrad has captured the cynicism of television newscasting, as well as the interactions of the various factions within the Green Army Commandos. And the story of how the media collaborates with terrorists to boost ratings is quite enthralling--almost as enthralling as it was when Paddy Chayefsky did it eighteen years ago in NETWORK. Even as I was reading about how the station was rationalizing their jockeying for higher ratings from the take-over, I was hearing Diana Christiansen talking about a "magnificent messianic figure inveighing against the hypocrisies of our times," and Frank Hackett saying "we're talking about putting a manifestly irresponsible man on national television." And when Spinrad got to the negotiations between the terrorists and their agent(!) when Heather Blake (the station meteorologist) suggests "Meet the Green Army Commandos, an interview of about ten minutes each with the eight anonymous terrorists the public hasn't gotten to meet," all I could picture was Laureen Hobbs, the Black Communist radical complete with agent and lawyer, who is asked to do a "weekly dramatic series based on the Ecumenical Liberation Army" which each week will open with an "authentic act of political terrorism, taken on the spot and in the actual moment." (And not surprisingly, after long diatribe on distribution costs, percentages, and deficit, Hobbs ends up responding to someone's ideological claims about the seminal prisoner- class infrastructure by screaming, "You can blow the seminal prisoner- class infrastructure out your ass! I'm not knocking down my distribution charges!" (And the fact that Kelly Jordan, the Minister of Information for the Green Army Commandos, is Black, makes the parallel even stronger.) Now, the fact that someone else wrote a very similar story earlier doesn't invalidate Spinrad's novel. But it does make PICTURES AT 11 more of a formula novel than many of Spinrad's other works. And its tendency to bog down in preaching environmentalism will undoubtedly annoy some readers. PICTURES AT 11 is a good book, but not as good as its trade paperback status might imply. %A Spinrad, Norman %T Pictures at 11 %I Bantam %C New York %D December 1994 %G ISBN 0-553-37384-6 %P 455pp %O trade pb, $12.95 -- Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | Evelyn.Leeper@att.com "As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place." -Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg on her visit to Auschwitz Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Path: news.ifm.liu.se!liuida!sunic!sunic.sunet.se!trane.uninett.no!nac.no!Norway.EU.net!EU.net!news.sprintlink.net!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!gatech!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news!nobody From: "Evelyn C Leeper" Subject: JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS by Norman Spinrad Message-ID: <9506131331.ZM7263@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.books.reviews Sender: news@media.mit.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Date: Tue, 13 Jun 1995 21:10:33 GMT Approved: wex@media.mit.edu (Alan Wexelblat) Lines: 73 JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS by Norman Spinrad Bantam Spectra, 1995, ISBN 0-553-37399-4, 160pp, US$9.95. A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1995 Evelyn C. Leeper This novella first appeared in Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy's 1988 anthology FULL SPECTRUM. What appears here is a revision of my review at that time. Norman Spinrad's JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS has been analyzed by far better reviewers than myself already, so I can merely concur with most of their criticisms. Bigelow, the main character, having found a cure/ inoculation for the AIDS virus(es) which are sweeping the country (which he does in about a month working on his own, while whole teams of researchers working for years have found nothing), inoculates himself against the disease. This cure is designed to be transmitted in the same way as the disease. He then decides to protect his wife and son. But he concludes the only way to pass the protection to his wife is by raping her, and the reader is supposed to sympathize with how bad he feels about having to do this. To protect his son, he goes to even more baroque lengths--he hires a prostitute to have sex with him and then a couple of days later, with his son. Now first of all, the cure is transmitted in the same way as the disease. But the primary method of transmission of AIDS even when Spinrad wrote JOURNALS was through infected blood (mostly between intravenous drug users), and certainly is now. Even assuming some sudden needle shortage that Spinrad fails to mention, Bigelow should be able to pass it through infected blood somehow. (It certainly seems to be transmissible enough that one session guarantees its passage.) Secondly, Spinrad seems determined to show us that a plague requires drastic means to contain it--Bigelow is willing to rape his wife (he doesn't tell her that he has the cure for reasons too flimsy to stand up) and this is "necessary." But Bigelow's (adult) son KNOWS his father has the cure, so one would imagine Spinrad would have Bigelow use the same method, minus the force. But no, that would be incest and homosexuality and even to save his son's life those are evil--rape is okay, but homosexuality between consenting adults is not, according to Spinrad. I find this moral structure odd, and Spinrad doesn't convince me of its necessity. (Admittedly, Bigelow's rape of his wife is not pre-meditated, which does ameliorate the inconsistency somewhat, but not enough, in my opinion.) And without the necessity for the actions Spinrad describes, the force of the novella is lost. By making his "unpleasant choices" too easy to refute, he destroys the message he seems to intend--that sometimes unpleasant choices ARE necessary. On the plus side, I thought the description of the quarantined San Francisco and the social structure created to be quite well done and logical. In fact, this aspect of the novella is strong enough to overcome my objections to the logic and make me give this a qualified recommendation. We are starting to see a lot of AIDS-inspired stories now, and while this is not the best, it does have an emotional impact that many more logically plotted stories lack. %T Journals of the Plague Years %A Norman Spinrad %C New York %D September 1995 %I Bantam Spectra %O trade paperback, US$9.95 [1988] %G ISBN 0-553-37399-4 %P 160pp -- Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | Evelyn.Leeper@att.com "I don't care what may be his politics. I don't care what may be his religion. I don't care what may be his color. I don't care who he is. So long as he is honest, he shall be served by me." --Theodore Roosevelt -- --Alan Wexelblat, Reality Hacker, Author, and Cyberspace Bard MIT Media Lab - Intelligent Agents Group finger(1) for PGP key Voice: 617-253-9833 Pager: 617-945-1842 wex@media.mit.edu http://wex.www.media.mit.edu/people/wex/ "When the possibity of art forms is analyzed from a rationalist standpoint, most can be shown to be dubious at best, if not outright impossible."