“GleanedWritAdv: ‘Aliens are mysterious, romantic,
compelling…only as long as they remain distant.’ McDevitt”
I understand what he’s saying, and when you read his novels,
it’s clear that he would have no trouble bringing his aliens on stage. They
would be well-constructed, strangely motivated, and they would be living, breathing
characters. Even so, some reviewers see this as a fault, “One problem to acknowledge up-front: those
familiar with McDevitt's work will probably realize that aliens are not his
strong point. It's questionable whether any human writer can really imagine a
non-human intelligence, but McDevitt's aliens tend to be more human than most.”
(http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-441-01210-8.html)
Most of them don’t realize that to McDevitt, having his aliens on stage,
front-and-center, is NOT the way he prefers to do things.
Other author’s
take different tacks, for example, CJ Cherryh’s Atevi are humanoid in shape and
most of their behaviors – with one exception: the Atevi are hard-wired to form
associations, not to love. This single difference is what Cherryh explores in
every one of her books.
I just finished a
reread of Ursula K. LeGuin’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. In that novel, her “aliens”
are genetically modified Humans whose single difference forms the entire basis
of the novel: they are sexually potent and their bodies become either male or
female during an event called kemmer,
which happens roughly once a month.
Anne McCaffrey’s novels
are predicated on a war with an alien civilization that has never once come
into any one of her books, and is not ever named. In her novels, Humans become
alien.
The novels of
David Brin, Julie Czerneda, and countless others use intelligent alien life to
explore Humanity, and for me, this is the strength of science fiction. To look
at who we are and how we act.
Even McDevitt,
who argues powerfully for the invisible alien, has gone to the center of the
galaxy of his Omega Cloud books and eventually explains where and why they do
what they do in CAULDRON. The book was generally reviewed badly: “the
galaxy-spanning mystery was still magnificent and seemed to only grow deeper
and richer the more we learned. When at last, Hutch offers her theory for the
mystery's origin -- objects d'art from a hyper-advanced race -- I was blown
away. I loved this idea and it had my imagination buzzing for weeks…[Then in
CAULDRON] what happened to the sense of awe and wonder? I got the sense that
Mr. McDevitt just couldn't care less about this book, and that is devastating
to me. Why put love into a pointless knock-off like CHINDI and leave just a
handful of pages here for resolving one of the great mysteries in the last few
decades of speculative fiction?”
What happened was that somewhere, someone (most likely his
publisher) told him he couldn’t leave the series with ODYSSEY. Maybe they
wanted more money? Maybe they thought that SF readers everywhere wanted to have
a sense of completion? Whatever the reason, CHINDI onward took McDevitt to
places he didn’t actually believe he should go – they created a violation of
his “mission statement”. The statement above: “Aliens are mysterious, romantic,
compelling…only as long as they remain distant.”
My lesson from this? When you have a philosophy that is
logical and firmly established, don’t throw it out the window!
No comments:
Post a Comment