Science Fiction Though the Decades

Monday, November 18, 2013

2002: Archform: Beauty (Modesitt, L.E., Jr.)

Lack of art in dialogue, character development, etc. (2/5)

I had never heard of L.E. Modesitt, Jr. before seeing this beautiful little paperback on the shelf of my favorite second-hand bookstore. Sounded good so I picked it up—one of those blind faith purchases. Surprisingly, he’s been writing since 1982 and has more than forty novels, thirty short stories, and a collection published. At this point in the introduction, I would usually note, “This author is most famous for his…” or “Most notably, this author has written…”, but in this case, all that fails me.

Rear cover synopsis:
“Four centuries in the future the world is rich. Every basic need is provided for, every desire can be fulfilled. It should be Utopia…

But a darkness lies at the heart of this future Earth. A police investigator, assigned to study trends, begins to see a truly sinister pattern behind a series of seemingly unrelated crimes and deaths. Meanwhile a news reporter is beginning to glimpse the shadow world that lies beneath the headlines of the day.

Across the planet, one by one, people are realising that something is very, very wrong with their world—and that they may be powerless to change it.”

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By the twenty-fifth century, society has fallen and risen from two catastrophes. Nanotechnology is no longer a modern wonder but an ingrained daily need. The “filch” (a tongue-in-cheek designation used for the filthy rich) “get full nanite protection and self-clone replacements” (122) while three other levels of society getting decreasingly protected against disease and immortality: sarimen (salary men), permies (permanently corrected individuals guilty of offenses), and servies (the uncared for dregs of society).

As a whole, our society was richer than any before it, and yet there were still bioweapons and terrorism across the entire globe, and tensions between Earth and Mars despite more and more material affluence. There were still students glassy-eyed on soop [a common, accepted drug for the youth], murders despite ever more restrictive surveillance and improved nanite shields, and a quiet dissatisfaction that verged on desperation. (184)

Homes and private transportation now use fuel cells, a well-regarded technology and inherently safe for the user. Yet, a string of suicides and accidental deaths are caused by the result of these fuel cells malfunctioning. A researcher for NetPrime, name Parsfal, is the first to begin connecting the dots of the various news stories he is researching; death by fuel cell malfunction is unheard for thirty years and additional death by nanite failure is becoming to seem increasingly unlikely. Due to rigid and sanctified private personal information laws, Parsfal is limited to skimming public records and open statements; even then, a pattern begins to arise, a pattern suggesting murder for cover-up.

Also sensing an uneasy pattern behind a string of unlikely deaths is Lieutenant Eugene Tang Chiang, a Trends Analysis Coordinator whose job is similar to Parsfal’s: connect the dots. In Chiang’s case, however, his job is also to predict patterns of crime. With Parsfal’s intuitive precociousness and Chiang’s wedge of authority, the duo work closely in mining the truth of supposed suicides, vehicular accidents, and death by fuel cell immolation in addition to the spontaneous deaths of some youth who had visited a razrap concert and ingested the drug soop—What is killing these innocent concertgoers? Combined, their divining rods of suspicion indicate a deep, unpleasant, and ominous betrayal. This betrayal, manipulative of the perpetrator’s circle and treasonous against their own country, may pin the social divisions against each other or even destroy an entire generation.

Innocence radiates from an adjunct professor of classical music and voice training, Luara Cornett, whose Music 101B class on Understanding and Appreciation of Music should be the utmost of her professional worries; however, the dean tells her of another budget cut, less hours for her, and possibly a cut in her private voice training at the university. She’s miffed by everyone’s ignorance of real music because of the popularity of rezpop and rezrap, a genre of music relying on resonance and auto-tune: “Today, the rezrappers and poppers don’t practice. They just spew it out. The systems reformulate the sound as they attempt to sing, add in rhythmitonal resonances based on the audience profile” (68).

Classically trained but in need of money, Luara both sings at soirees and sings for commercials, which also use resonance. Laura laments, “working singers in our world—those who don’t want their voices twisted and turned by technology, those who want to preserve the inherent beauty of voice and song—we don’t have much choice” (78). It is at one soiree where Luara gets a chance meeting with a politician, though who exactly that politician is is unknown to her, for she has little care for the nefarious dealings in the nation’s capital, Denver. The passion behind her words in support of classic music woos the politician, yet Luara may not be prepared for the limelight.

Oh, and the ebol4 virus has been killing millions worldwide… and shards of a rocky asteroid, once mined by the Martians, are headed towards Earth, something which Mars is dearly sorry about.

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“[Y]ou can’t improve people or society by pandering to them. You have to challenge them, and give them examples of good singing, and good art, and excellence” (264). Ah, the idealism of Luara! She’s a bit of a tiresome character—very one-dimensional in regards to her denouncing modern music and lauding the virtues of classic music—thereby making her appearance tiresome.  But honestly, the entire cast is equally as one-dimensional and tiresome, thus making the entire book rather boring.

I wish Modesitt understood the art and beauty of dialogue as much as Luara understood the intrinsic human need for real music. The dialogue is often painful, monotonous, and droning; it ping-pongs back and forth for pages and pages studded by intermissions with additional dialogue via communication link; it blatantly foreshadows every nook and cranny of the proceeding plot. There’s nothing intricate or enlightening from the words uttered other than the occasional glimpse of opinion which Modesitt decided to slide into the novel as a substitute for a soapbox.

Whether it’s about the decline of music appreciation or the fall of penmanship, Modesitt’s injected ideas are nothing new, nothing unheard of; for example, “Almost no one even knew how to write by hand anymore. There were times like this [letter of condolence] when that anachronistic touch was vital, because it showed more than special care” (273). Luara’s love for art and lamentation for the decline of art appreciation reflects the common thought that today’s world is always worse off than a generation ago. The age-old adage is even more tiresome than a string of uni-faceted characters… then writing a book around that idea is eye-rolling.

Considering the novel’s place in time—the twenty-five century—the reader would think that technology would play a key role in society, that some innovations would make life drastically different than modern life. Well, the reader would be wrong in a number of ways. (1) The resonance of rezpop and rezrap sound a lot like auto-tune, an unfortunate and ridiculous technology which sprung to fame with Cher’s song “Believe” in 1998, pre-dating Modesitt’s novel by a hardy five years. (2) Parsfal uses a search engine to limit his investigation to scholarly articles, a technology much like Google Scholar which was launched one year after Modesitt’s novel in 2004. (3) People seem to be without mobile phones, they seem to be only contactable through their respective office; whether this is a technological discrepancy or privacy issue of the future, it seems that the limitation of the ease of communication is screwy.

But Modesitt did nail one thing—the explosive concern, or awareness at least, for privacy. In the twenty-five century, privacy is held sacrosanct. With online data mining by vast corporations, questionable cookie reading, and virulent social media, people’s privacy has shrunken greatly when compared to 2003, just ten years ago. Most of “our lives are open screens” (101), letting most of our information remain private yet when sifted, a great deal about our personalities and habits can be lifted from the data. “All we see of the filch [or the rich, in general] are beautifully decorated covers … They’re shielded by privacy laws, by their credits, and my other filch” (101). Teams of lawyers and modes of harassment can shield you privacy further, but for the common man, only street smarts and careful consideration can protect your privacy. When laws are written by the powerful for the powerful, the modern day equivalent of sarimen, permies, and servies can only fend for themselves.

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Nothing inspiring here. This is a dud of a first read for my Modesitt experience… if there’s a one-off novel that sounds interesting, I may give it a shot but I sure as hell am not going to invest my time in one of his eight series, fantasy or SF. If I haven't summed it up well enough, Ian Sales offers this:

16 comments:

  1. I tried to read Modesitt's fantasy when I was a kid and obsessed with every Tolkein rip-off out there... Even in that mental state I couldn't make it through the first novel, The Magic of Recluse, of The Saga of Recluse sequence...

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  2. In lighter news, I'm reading a "best of" anthology from 2004, which includes VanderMeer's "Three Days in a Border Town" - great story, but shite collection thus far.

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  3. Interestingly enough, it got starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.

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  4. Thankfully (or at least for you), my blog doesn't "sell" a book or condemn it to oblivion. I'm simply an informed reader who adores the genre. I'm actually selling your book BACK to the bookstore today. I'll inform the second-hand bookstore owner of Publishers Weekly's and Kirkus Reviews' high regard for your novel. Perhaps he won't care... much like me.

    And if I remember correctly, you once sided with the opinion of the small voice, "with the multiplicity of outlets for views and opinions, minority opinions become even more fragmented and lost in the noise, and only views held by a great number of people tend to prevail." High opinion or low opinion for your work, you have to accept both with a statement like that.

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  5. I've also made the point that, with the multiplicity of media outlets and opinions, that everyone can find a viewpoint with which they agree, whether or not it's valid or accurate. Because a viewpoint is a minority does not make it either accurate or inaccurate.

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  6. Well in that case, my minority viewpoint says that your opinion is accurate. But that doesn't change my inaccurate opinion. Is my blog another one of your soapboxes?

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  7. No. Merely pointing out that there are other opinions as strong as yours which differ from yours.

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    1. What exactly do you seek to accomplish pointing such things out?

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    1. But it's hardly like you have even responded in anyway to the criticisms.... Rather, simply stated that other reviews exists -- anyone who can use google knows that. Especially people who know the genre -- as 2theD does.

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    2. So I read the entire book, took time to quote it, took notes on characters... and I didn't give it any "thought". I don't live in your mind, I don't have your experience, I didn't write the book. I feel that the SFRA review was good... but that doesn't make the experience of reading your book good. It's not about the content, it's about the delivery... which was bad... so bad in fact that it warranted a generous 2. Get over it. You can't change my opinion no matter how lofty your ambition was, no matter how elegant your prose is.

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  10. There would have been little point in that. From 2theD's review, it's fairly clear that he has no real concept of what the book is about, nor is he interested in finding out. That's not a personal attack. There are books that I feel that way about, but I don't write reviews about them. My only point was to suggest that there are others who see the book far differently, and I have to beg to differ on the point that others would either know that or know those views. Most people won't search for a contrary view of a book written almost 15 years earlier.

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    1. "Most people won't search for a contrary view of a book written almost 15 years earlier." The other fourteen reviews on Amazon offer some contrary views. I read them, disagreed, and let sleeping dogs lie.

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    2. Of course, I can't change your opinion. That was obvious, and it was never the point. I write books for people who think.

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