Not A Blog™

I recently finished Variable Star by Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson. You may remember my tale of acquiring said book. After all that trouble, I’m sure you are wondering: was it worth it?

My review follows. Be forewarned: it is not a so-called “critique” or “professional literary review”. It’s more like a rant. Well, actually, it is a rant. Just so we’re clear.

I should start off by saying that, stupidly, I didn’t bother to write down the page numbers of stuff I wanted to talk about. To be honest, I really didn’t think I was going to be writing this review. And then I got to the end of the book. It’s a doozy. Writing a review? Required.

In the past, usually in personal conversations, I have mentioned that book endings are incredibly important to me. One might even correctly say that they are inappropriately important to me. The book is so much more than the ending; can I not enjoy the journey? But after the time investment that goes into a book, I think a good ending is the least the author can do.

I’m coming back to this.

At first glance, the fact that this book exists at all would seem to be reason for excitement. A lost Heinlein! We haven’t heard all his stories, after all. What great tale awaits from the Grandmaster? Surely we only need an intrepid, living author to fill in the details; Heinlein will speak for himself.

But give it a moment’s thought, and this disintigrates when it comes in contact with the caustic lye that is bleeding obviousness. Let’s consider this, here. According to the explanatory postscript by Robinson, the Heinlein estate really did find some long-lost notes of his. There were seven pages out of a reported eight or possibly more, although no one seems to know if there really were more pages, judging by the way Robinson tells the story. Anyway, these notes, according to Robinson (pg 311):

…filled at least eight extremely dense pages: single-spaced ten pica type with absolutely minimal margins on all four sides and very few strikeovers. He also filled fourteen 3×5 cards with extensive handwritten notes relating to the book. And then, for reasons only he could tell us, he closed the file and put it in a drawer, and never got around to writing that particular book.

That’s a lot of work to put in a book, only to abandon it. Only Heinlein could tell us the reasons for leaving it outlined, unfinished! Well, technically, yes. But I’m going to take a stab at it.

The book was never finished because, frankly, it’s not very good.

I’m not talking about Spider Robinson’s writing, or creative liberties he may have taken. I don’t know the extent of those liberties, but I intend to consider his specific contributions to the book apart from the overall story itself. The actual story that Heinlein outlined—and I believe he structured all the main goings on, with the possible exception of the ending—is not his best work.

He painted himself into a corner with a hole, then wrote himself into the hole, buttered his bread, and layed in it. Or something like that. Basically what happened in the story was this. A young guy falls in love with a girl. He refuses to marry her because he wants to go to college and he knows he wouldn’t be able to support them both, on top of tuition. Well, she gets pissed at this, for reasons he can’t understand, until she reveals herself to be the granddaughter of the richest man in the universe. How fortuitous. Well, it turns out the only reason they want him is to carry on the Richest Man In The Universe line of genes, his life be damned. So he says, “screw you, guys” and “Vivra sa vie!”, runs away, gets drunk and high, and then gets on a starship headed far away to colonize a star out there somewhere.

I paraphrased a little bit, but you get the idea. Half way to the new planet, our sun explodes, destroying Earth and the entire solar system. This leaves only the dozen or so colonies that have already been established as the last bastions of human existance—plus the ship the Hero is on. A bunch of people responsible for making the ship go kill themselves, the engine dies, and now everyone on board is stranded out in space. (Technically the ship is still moving, but now they can’t stop it when they reach their destination star.)

I’m sure Heinlein recognized the problem for what it was. Where do you go from there? Well, there were those Rich People. The Rich people are introduced and developed early on, then completely cut out from the story, via the journey the main character takes and by virtue of the fact that the story is being told in the first person. This is interesting because I suspected that maybe, just maybe, Robinson was going to pull something at the end… I didn’t want to believe he would do it. It was such an obvious move, there’s no way. He’s a professional. But I don’t see any other—

The sound of my scream was dwarfed only by the blast of Sol, itself, exploding. The camera pulled up toward the ceiling as I knelt on the floor, face up, hands clenched.

You see, Robinson pulls a deus ex machina of monumental proportions. Bigger, I dare say, than the gods themselves.

And not only that, but you can see it coming from light years away! I wish Heinlein had had a good ending in mind—but he didn’t. Because if he did, the book would have been published fifty years ago. That’s not to say Heinlein never indulged in the deus ex. He had a few. We’ve all had a few. But not like this. To be sure, it plays with common Heinlein themes, most specifically, the notion that humanity must spread to other planets or we will, someday, be destroyed en masse. He got that part down. But he was unable to “solve the problem” of the sun exploding without introducing a biggest cop-out ever. So he chose the only logical path in that situation, which was to not finish the book and work on better ideas.

By doing this, he became famous, but not without leaving at least one unfinished series of notes behind for other people to lionize over.

Anyway, here’s the spoiler, if you haven’t guessed it by now. The Rich People, having essentially infinite resources to acquire top talent, snag a guy who invents a faster than light drive. Then they all go and rescue the ship. Eye rolling is not sufficient to convey my disgust at this blatently obvious plot point. I must roll my eyes hard enough that it ripples through my body. A body roll, if you will.

But what about the journey? Although I put quite a bit of stock in the ending of a book, it would still be acceptable that the ending sucked, if the rest of the book was excellent.

It’s not.

I keep saying I need to write about my literary pet peeves, and then never get around to it. This book introduces another literary pet peeve of mine, which I will call, “The Expiration Date.” Robinson, for reasons that baffle me, succumbed to the siren’s song of making the book too contemporary. Variable Star contains numerous pop culture referances.

Now don’t get me wrong, if the pop culture refs fit the book, that’s perfectly fine—expected, even. But this is science fiction set an unknown number of years IN THE FUTURE! It’s IN THE DAMN FUTURE! THE FUTURE! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!? Your thinking is stuck in something the size of a GODDAMN THIMBLE! The universe is bigger than the year 2006!

Look, this shouldn’t even need to be explained. The popular trends and debates and defining cultural moments of today are just that—they define the culture of today. Tomorrow we look at 2006 and laugh because we were so stupid looking then. You don’t write this crap into your book if you want it to be taken seriously! In twenty years no one will read this book because it’ll be too funny. In a hundred years, it will be a quaint reminder of the way things were in 2006! Any sort of humanitarian philosophical message in Variable Star will forever be overshadowed by Robinson’s throw-away gags relating to trends of today. I hope he wasn’t giggling to himself at the thought of his endearing cleverness; he killed Heinlein’s book with the curse of an expiration date.

Maybe it was intentional. But Heinlein didn’t pull this crap, at least not to the ridiculous extent Robinson did. (I can think of a few Heinlein wrote which came close, and this makes me think there may have been more.) But generally speaking, you read his books and, yes, the technology is dated. But that is nearly unavoidable. For instance, he’ll talk about playing “spools” which are obviously spools of magnetic tape. Okay, fair enough; that’s what they had, and the plot is such that specific technology is incidental. What he didn’t do was have his characters in year 23098 talking about, for example, the McCarthy hearings. That’s just dumb. Even today we don’t mention this kind of stuff in casual conversation.

Then there was the overall style of writing. Heinlein was pretty tight. If he wrote a paragraph, it was important. Heinlein was also pretty adept at weaving the inevitable exposition into the story to the point where, even when I noticed it, it didn’t bother me that much. At the beginning, Variable Star kicked off with a bang. This is to be expected because it was probably well defined in the notes. As it went along, however, the tone of the writing changed slightly, to where Heinlein’s snappy dialogue and clean delivery gave way to Robinson’s not-subtle commentary on contemporary politics interspersed with paragraphs about random crap that had little, if anything, to do with the story. Oh, yeah, and that plot about that guy on a starship.

After the ship has been in space for a while, Robinson runs out of story. The distance between, roughly, pages 116 (shortly after the ship leaves) and 240 (when Sol explodes), can be summed up by the phrase: “stuff happens”. It’s not very peritent to the main thrust of the story; nor is it terribly interesting.

After the sun explodes on page 240, something very strange happens. Robinson runs through a line of reasoning with his characters that threw me for a major loop. I thought I was hallucinating when I read this, but it actually is printed there, on the page.

On page 247, it starts out innocently enough, with one of the characters, saying,

The first scraps of actual hard data aren’t going to catch us for years to come.

This is true. He continues; a few sentences later he says,

I don’t think the question [of how Sol exploded] will be answerable in my lifetime. Except on Faith.

Hmm. Well, whatever works for you. I personally would be inclined to wait for the hard data, and reserve a prediction as to the cause until it was in, even if that was past my lifetime. But if it helps, use faith to “answer” the question, so long as you realize your answer is complete speculation. Naturally that doesn’t happen.

The sky has always been full of things we can’t explain. It still is. [….] But one explanation for all of them, a quite likely one, they have never once considered. Or at least anyone who did propose it instantly lost all credibility. […] Intelligent design.”

Disregarding the fact that “intelligent design” isn’t really a “quite likely” explanation for anything, do you see what I mean about the book being dated? Why aren’t the characters saying, “there’s only one explanation. Creation science”? You can’t honestly expect this term is going to hang around for the next few hundred years. The invokation of intelligent design here is lame. He’s not talking about God, necessarily, just an intelligent designer. Unfortunately for the reader, it gets worse.

The conclusion the characters come to is that an intelligent bunch of beings somewhere else blew up our star for target practice. Wha-? I’m still trying to figure out whether Robinson wants me to take this seriously, or if he’s making a snide comment on the state of rational thought today. Either way, it’s handled poorly. With little more than one guy busting out the phrase “intelligent design”, three pages later, every single person on the ship believes it was aliens AND they all want revenge. Even the Zen Meditation Master guy seems to believe its true—and he doesn’t even believe in God. I’m really dumbfounded, not because it’s a stupid concept—it’s really not—but because the characters’ reactions aren’t believable.

One of the things Robinson does do between pages 116 and 240 is character development. Even though it’s not particularly interesting, you do get a feel for the different people on the ship. They have wants, needs, etc. Any writer better be able to do this, especially professional ones. I’d be willing to bet even Raymond Feist can do this. But I digress.

Robinson spends all this time setting up these characters. Then the extent of their “debate” regarding what the cause could POSSIBLY be spans all of ONE PAGE! Some guy mentions Occam’s razor, as if this is all intellectualism has to offer in the way of deductive tools. Other guy dismisses it with the mighty power of intelligent design. BAM! MUST HAVE BEEN ALIENS! NO OTHER OPTIONS! Well golly gosh darn the Reader thinks, as well. That Robinson sure knows how to write a convincing line of reasoning. I’m convinced.

IF I WERE FIVE.

The whole book is full of these jumping, unrealistic character interactions, but the true nature of their ridiculousness doesn’t become apparent until the end. It’s suddenly brought into sharp relief when the attempt is made to have the characters intelligently discuss a concept as huge as the sun blowing up, only to find 1) they’re not saying what the author needs them to say and B) they’re not saying much at all because they aren’t all that well developed in the first place.

I think the idea of the sun being blown up by aliens is an intriguing one. Nothing is outside the realm of consideration by science fiction. But don’t ruin the idea by forcing your characters to accept it out of character because you need it to make the story go forward. Come on.

So all that to say that the book has Heinlein’s name on it, but his style does not crop up nearly often enough. The author here is Spider Robinson—an author who I am not familiar with in the least. Of course, now I have to buy one of his books, so I can guage how much of Variable Star is his doing, how much is him trying to emulate Heinlein, and how much is Heinlein. It’s going to be hard to evaluate any of his work without bias because my knowledge of his writing has been tainted by this impure sample of Heinlein-Robinson hybrid, and truth be told, I wasn’t terribly impressed. But Robinson has been described, by the New York Times no less, as “the new Robert Heinlein.” That must count for something. I’ll need to see for myself.

I can’t recommend this book if you’re a huge Heinlein fan. You’ll be caught up in the non-Heinlein-ness of it. “Heinlein would never have done that,” you’ll shout at the pages, incredulous, as if they cared. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend this book if you’re not a Heinlein fan, either, because then you’ll be thinking “man, Heinlein’s overrated.” I don’t know if I can recommend it to the Spider Robinson fan, but if Robinson traditionally pulls massive deus ex machinas at the end of his stories, and this doesn’t bother you, you probably won’t mind this book.

But—if you’re reading this review sometime around year 2026, I would recommend this book. It’s sure to be humorous to your sensibilities, seeing as how its infused with the essence of the year 2006.

-Ted