books: July 2005 Archives

Three guesses where this is from (identifying words or phrases redacted):

"I cannot emphasize strongly enough how dangerous the present situation is, and how much care each of us at BLEEP must take to ensure that we remain safe. The BLEEP BLEEP fortifications have been strengthened over the summer, we are protected in new and more powerful ways, but we must guard scrupulously against carelessness in the part of any BLEEP or member of staff. I urge you, therefore, to abide by any security restrictions that your BLEEP might impose upon you, however irksome you might find them... I implore you, should you notice anything strange or suspicious within or outside the BLEEP, to report it to a member of staff immediately. I trust you to conduct yourselves, always, with the utmost regard for your own and others’ safety."

Could it be the head of Scotland Yard in response to the recent Tube bombings? Could it be the mayor of New York, explaining why cops are searching backpacks entering the city’s subway system? Could it be the general in charge of the Pentagon describing some new bomb-sniffing method put in place there? No?

Fill in the missing words, in this order:

Hogwarts, castle’s magical, student, teachers, castle (the speaker is Dumbledore, welcoming students back for another school year)

Is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince dark? You better believe it. J.K. Rowling, Generation Xer (she was born in 1965), has written a children’s book in which magical warfare is a metaphor for terrorism, public paranoia, and national security as a lifestyle. Is it time to admit that yes, the terrorists have already won?

And I’m only a third of a way through the book. I’m sure it only gets darker from here.

People who wouldn’t be caught dead browsing the science fiction section at their local Borders are nevertheless gobbling up Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, a wonderfully heartbreaking story of a romance made more difficult by the fact that one of the lovers spontaneously time travels on a regular but unpredictable basis. The time travel is a metaphor, of course, for the things that separate even the most devoted of couples, of the mysteries inherent in getting to know someone, of the impossibility of ever fully knowing another person, of the secrets we keep from each other.

But the fact that it’s easy to find yourself sobbing by the end of the novel doesn’t make the book any less science fictional. Nor does the fact that the book was a selection of The Today Show Book Club. The SF in every novel actually labeled SF and stacked on the shelves in the SF section of bookstores is metaphoric, too -- no book succeeds that does not speak in some way to who we are here and now. Some reviewers understand this:

This is an extraordinary novel with a unique premise, an exploration of the unknown in this expanding century, where the impossible becomes possible, if not routine. In the vast prism of the universe, there is much that remains to be discovered. Who can know the secrets of the future?

[from Curled Up With a Good Book]

Most don’t:

This is far from a science fiction exploration of the space-time continuum, but a heartfelt love story of two people who must live with this curse as part of their lives.

[from ReviewsOfBooks.com]

And though it's about time travel, the book is more literary romance than science fiction.

[from BookPage]

Unfortunately, this aversion to calling a spade a spade is all too fathomable. The term "science fiction" is so bogged down with images of nerds in Spock ears and unkempt, antisocial types that few people can see past the stereotypes when a counterexample is right before their eyes. It’s a shame, because those people are missing out on a ton of books they might otherwise enjoy.

Like Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward, which I read just before I picked up The Time Traveler’s Wife. The two books have some startling thematic similarities: Flashforward also involves characters who get a glimpse of their futures, as the chronically displaced Henry does in Wife; the difference in Sawyer’s book is that it’s the entire human race who gets a peek, not just one man. Sawyer is techier; his novel is more concerned with big ideas than with the hearts of only two people... but as he explores the dramatic effect the look at the future has on global society, he does so through the eyes of a handful of people. The result may be less "literary," but it’s just as thought-provoking, and just as haunting. But it’s no more science fictional just because the spine actually has the words "science fiction" on it.

Harry Potter's latest secret may have already slipped out in Vancouver but publishers of the best-selling books hope the magical allure of author J.K. Rowling's autograph will get it back under wraps.

Rowling's sixth novel about the young wizard is not scheduled to be released until Saturday, but a Vancouver grocery store accidentally sold 14 copies of the book last week.

[from CTV.ca]

Now, when I was in high school, my geeky friends and I shared our Isaac Asmiov paperbacks around, and we got tremendously excited when Douglas Adams published something new. We analyzed The Hobbit for fun.

But we were the honor-society kids. We were the brainiacs. We were the dorks. If you had told any of us that twenty years later, little kids and grownups and people we would have dismissed as "mundanes" would be lining up to buy a fantasy novel... that law enforcement and civil courts would have to step in to maintain order while folks were waiting for this book’s release... Well, we would have laughed, and we would have considered that fantasy. And yet:

Raincoast Books, along with Bloomsbury Publishing PLC of Britain and author J.K. Rowling, were granted a so-called "John and Jane Dow'' injunction last Saturday in B.C. Supreme Court.

The injunction restrains anyone who has directly or indirectly received a copy or any other form of disclosure of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from disclosing all or any information from the book before 12:01 a.m. on Saturday July 16.

[also from CTV.ca]

We are all dorks now.

Sure, I shall be spending a good chunk of this weekend devouring Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. But I would have been doing that anyway. That so many other ostensibly normal people will be doing the same thing is extraordinary.