"Dune" by Frank Herbert

Set within the feudal interstellar society of the far future of the human race, Dune tells the story of the struggle for control of the desert planet Arrakis (otherwise known as Dune) and it's production of "spice" (also known as melange), an extremely valuable psychoactive substance used for several purposes. Duke Leto Atreides, the ruler over the House Atreides on the water-covered planet of Caladan, is granted control of the planet Arrakis in exchange for Caladan by the Emperor Shaddam IV of the ruling house Corrino. The granting of Arrakis to Atreides is a politically-motived move by the emperor to destroy the duke, who has gained popularity in the Landsraad, an alliance of houses whose power rivals that of the imperium. The emperor provides house Harkonnen, a rival to Atreides led by the devious Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, with powerful Sardaukar imperial troops in an effort to destroy Atreides before the house is given sufficient time to organise defences after moving in on Arrakis. Harkonnen and Sardaukar troops are aided by a traitor within house Atreides and take control of the planet, killing the Duke while his son Paul and lover, concubine and mother to his only son and heir Lady Jessica escape into the desert. Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit, an ancient order of women trained in the art of mental power over others. Myth tells that a Bene Gesserit will eventually give birth to a male Bene Gesserit known as the "Kwisatz Haderach", a kind of prophet with the power to see past, present and future all at once. Paul is believed by some to be the Kwisatz Haderach, and has already shown promise through the Bene Gesserit training received by his mother. Jessica and Paul are greeted and taken in by the Fremen, native desert-dwellers on Arrakis that are fierce fighters and hold strong ties to the native giant sandworms of Arrakis whose movement and breeding cycle and responsible for producing the spice on the planet. The Fremen ingest spice as part of their diet and it plays an important role in religious ceremony, granting a degree of prescience to those who use it. The myth of the Kwisatz Haderach spreads amongst the Fremen and they rally behind Paul, believing he will lead them to victory against the occupying force of House Harkonnen. Paul consumes the Water of Life, an essence of spice in a test of whether he really is the Kwisatz Haderach and gains the power to see future events. He witnesses the Fremen defeating the Harkonnens, regaining control over Arrakis and going on to wage a terrible interstellar Jihad against the imperium and the rest of known space. Led by Paul, the Fremen attack the Harkonnen stronghold on the planet defeating the overlords and capturing the emperor himself, who was on the planet to oversee the final destruction of the Fremen and gain ultimate control over the production of spice. The emperor is forced to abdicate and grant control over the imperium to Paul when he threatens to use his control over the Fremen to destroy all of the spice of Arrakis, which would have devastating consequences for the rest of the galaxy.

Dune is a dense and complex book that knits together a tapestry of invented ancient history, myths, rituals, language, cultural and religious references. The novel describes in rich detail the environment and ecology of the Arrakis desert and marries this to the detailed culture of desert-dwelling Fremen to who water is valued above all else; all daily activities revolve around it's conservation and the water in one's body is considered the property of the group in which one travels. The book also explores the complex political life of the great houses and the imperium with rivalries, back-stabbing, double-crossing and "Kanly", a system of strict rules and customs pertaining to feuds or vendettas. Between the chapters, the novel is filled with passages taken from invented historical texts that exist in the time following the events of the novel, written by the Princess Irulan, the emperor's daughter who was betrothed to Paul Atreides after the emperor was forced to abdicate.

A quote by Arthur C. Clarke about the novel "I know nothing comparable to it except Lord of the Rings" really rings true; it is unique in it's construction of such a detailed world with it's own style that I've not seen anything else like in all I've read. Admittedly I don't read a lot of fantasy, and I assume that the level of detail of these aspects in Dune is perhaps more commonplace within this genre. I really liked the vivid picture of the desert world and the associated ecology; I think this must have had at least some influence on other authors' work such as Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. I think one of the main reasons for the book's success and popularity is that it creates a very engaging "hero's journey" in Paul's ascendancy from young prince in exile to all powerful ruler of Arrakis. It's interesting that Herbert has stated that he wanted his story to carry the message "beware of heros" and to provide a sort of critique to the classic version of the hero's journey. This is probably something that comes out more in the sequels set in the same universe.

Overall a great book and easy to see why it's considered on some lists to be the most popular science fiction novel of all time.

"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time; so the book begins. Billy experiences sequences from his life in a random order. Lying down to sleep as a middle-age man he wakes up as a prisoner of war in Germany in the Second World War; moving through a door way, he is an old man in the future and hearing a song, he is back in his childhood. At one point in his life, Billy is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians, an alien race that experience time as a fourth dimension that they can move back and forward in as they please. They keep him in a zoo for several years with Montana Wildhack, another kidnapped Earthling and movie star, with whom he mates with. They explain to him the nature of time and that it's not all linear and moving in a single direction so that when someone dies, it is only in that part of time that they are dead but have been and always will be alive in another part of time. So it goes. As a young man, Billy attends six months at college to become an optometrist, before being drafted into the war in Europe. After the war, Billy returns home to Ilium, New York and marries a rich optometrist's obese daughter, and raises two children. Years later Billy is the sole survivor of a plane crash, which leaves him comatose for several weeks, during which his wife dies in a car accident while rushing to his hospital bedside. After recovering, Billy goes on to tell the world about what he has learned about the Tralfamadorians and the nature of time before he is assassinated by a laser-beam while giving a public address on UFOs in 1976 after World War Three. He had always known this was how he was going to die because he had visited his death several times. During the war Billy was captured by the Germans in the battle of the bulge and sent to work in Dresden, where he witnessed the allied firebombing of the city on the night of the 13th February 1945 that was responsible for killing over 25,000 civilians. Billy along with the other POWs and four guards survived the attack inside an underground meat locker, slaughterhouse-five, which had been their temporary home during their service. Edgar Derby, a fellow POW is tried and shot for stealing a teapot from a collapsed bomb shelter while helping to clean up the city after the attack, and one morning, not long after, the war is over and Billy finds himself a free man. While walking the streets, a bird says to Billy "Poo-tee-weet?"; so the book ends.

Slaughterhouse five is a somewhat semi-autobiographical account of the Second World War and the firebombing of Dresden; Vonnegut was actually an American POW in the Second World War and witnessed the fire-bombing, escaping the ensuing firestorm by staying inside the disused slaughterhouse as Billy Pilgrim did. The opening chapter is written explicitly from the voice of Vonnegut himself where he talks about the bombings and his struggle to structure a novel around his experience. Throughout the rest of the novel, events are narrated and often Vonnegut identifies himself in the story: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book". The novel is satirical and is at times both funny and harrowing; events are described in loose detail, the facts are stated straight up from the start and then down the track the story returns to each event and describes it in more detail. The satire and absurdity of the story seem to be a sort reaction to the horrors of war witnessed by Vonnegut and the inability to write anything sensible about a massacre (likewise Billy and Eliot Rosewater turn to the topsy-turvyness of science fiction while recovering from post-traumatic stress from the war). Similarly, one interpretation of Billy's uncontrolled time travel is that it is a product of the trauma he has sustained during the war. The novel explores the notion of determinism and free will; Billy is taught by the Tralfamadorians that all moments in time simply exist and have always existed the way they are and that of all the species in the universe only Humans have any notion of the concept of free will.

This was a great read; short and immensely readable. I loved all the little humorous vignettes of Billy's life and the characters in them. I really liked all the different characters Vonnegut paints such as the nasty, rugged-up Roland Weary and his delusions of grandeur, Paul Lazzaro and his lust for revenge and the weird and jaded Kilgore Trout. The novel is all the more amazing because a lot of the events really happened and were witnessed by the author. The novel has only a loose claim as being science fiction; it's more a sort of post-modernist satire where the time travel and aliens are more mechanisms that are symbolic of the post-traumatic stress experienced by the central character (and presumably the author). Still really glad it was on the list such that I got to experience it. Recommended reading.

"I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov

"I, Robot" is a series of short stories, originally published in "Super Science Stories" and "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine in the 1940's that explore the fictional future development of robotics. The stories are framed around the recollections of Dr. Susan Calvin, head "Robopsychologist" at US Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. during an interview with a reporter from the Interplanetary Press. Dr. Calvin's stories follow the exploits of experimental roboticists Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan, researchers Alfred Lanning and Peter Bogert, Stephen Byerley, a robotic politician and of course Dr. Susan Calvin herself. The stories typically explore themes of human and robotic morality via the "three laws of robotics" (built into every positronic-brained robot) that loosely state that robots may not harm humans (or allow them harm via their own inaction), must obey humans and must not allow harm to come to themselves (in that order of priority). Interesting stories include a robot which becomes stuck between the opposing forces of the second and third laws while trying to retrieve a much-needed chemical substance at great personal risk, a self-learning skeptical robot that refuses to believe he was created by humans, and a mind-reading robot who lies to prevent humans undergoing emotional hardship (an interpretation of the first law).

I really wanted to say something good about this book, because it is a bit of a popular favourite, but I found it hard. On a positive note, it's a short and easy read with some nice ideas and a few moments that really shine. The philosophical reasoning of QT-1 in "Reason" was quite fun, as was the relationship between the little girl and her robot-companion in "Robbie". I found Asimov's optimistic perspective on robots having a really positive influence on humanity refreshing given the typical "frankenstein-complex" of robots turning on their masters typically found in science fiction.

Generally speaking though, "I, Robot" is rather dull (particularly the characters and the robots themselves) and there were ideas and concepts that didn't really work and that I think could of been explored with a bit more complexity. I thought "Runaround", "Reason", "Liar!" and "Evidence" were the only stories I really enjoyed; I felt the other stories followed too much of a formula of providing an almost unsolvable premise and ending with either (sorry to use the cliche) a deus-ex-machina or what I interpreted as a twisting of the laws to make things fit. A lot of the endings just didn't feel clever. It felt like there were so many more aspects of human morality and ethical dilemmas which could have been explored from the perspective of the robotic mind.

"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon

"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" is set in an alternate reality in which the 1940 "Slattery Report" was passed in the United States congress and a temporary independent Jewish settlement was created in Sitka, Alaska. As a result, two million Jews were killed in the Nazi holocaust (rather than six million), the second world war continued into 1946 (when the atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin) and the state of Israel failed in 1948, and Jerusalem is still part of Palestine (amongst other small differences). After sixty years, the lease is up on Sitka and the "Reversion" back to Alaskan control of the territory is due in two months. The story's hero, Meyer Landsman, a homicide detective with the Sitka police, is down-and-out on his luck; living in a run-down hotel on a diet of alcohol and nicotine after separating with his wife two years ago and still dealing with the mysterious death of his younger sister last April, Landsman is struggling to hold on to his glory days as Sitka's finest. The novel opens as Landsman is called in to investigate the execution-style murder of man in the room down the hallway in his own hotel, Mendel Shpilman, the runaway son of Rebbe Shpilman, Sitka's most powerful religious man (and organised crime boss). To complicate matters. Landsman's ex-wife, Bina, is back in town after being promoted into the role of Landsman's new boss, and pressure "from the top" is calling for all eleven of Landsman's open cases to be closed in one way or another before the Reversion begins.

Landsman and his trusty half-Jew-half-Tinglit native American partner Berko Shemets, set off to investigate Mendel Shpilman's death and through the course of the novel uncover the real killers of his younger sister Naomi (who, by circumstance, was wound up in Mendel's affairs) and a plot between hardline Zionist Jews and the United States government to bomb the Dome of the Rock, a Jerusalem holy site, and setup a new Jewish homeland in the aftermath. Landsman and Shemets, with the help of Bina, track Mendel's killing back to the hands of Hertz Shemets, Berko's ex-FBI and counterintelligence agent father. After saving the day, Meyer and Bina reunite, ready to face an uncertain post-Reversion future together.

"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" is a great novel; I definitely wouldn't call it science fiction, perhaps speculative fiction, but really its just a cracker of a detective mystery novel. I was fooled into putting it on my list because it won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, but I'm glad I did, because its a great read. Chabon creates a fantastic array of characters in his world-that-never-was; I love how he brings out such rich colour to Jewish Sitka through the quirks and charms of its residents. Berko and Bina are great and Landsman evokes a great feeling of sympathy for his plight and really had me rooting for him the whole way through. Chabon has a poetic-like mastery of metaphors which he splashes around that brings real humour to the story; he really is a great writer (he did win a Pulitzer after all).

I would recommend this book to anyone really, particularly fans of the crime-mystery genre.

"Gateway" by Frederik Pohl

Gateway is set in a future in which humanity has discovered the remains of an ancient advanced alien race, referred to as the "Heechee", originally from ruins on Venus and later through the discovery of "Gateway", an space station-converted asteroid which contains thousands of working Heechee spacecraft. Through trial and error, humankind has discovered how to launch and return the spacecraft to one of a large number of seemingly pre-set interstellar destinations, travelling faster than light and typically taking on the order of two weeks to a year to return, but with no control over or prior knowledge of the destination itself. Calling for volunteers to pilot the spacecraft, the "Gateway Corporation" who manages the discovered station provides those willing to risk the trip a chance at discovering a fortune in ancient artefacts and scientific knowledge. Of course, the typical mission results in either a boring, unfruitful destination or gory death at the hands of stellar phenomena, exobiotic infection, starvation or madness.

Bob Broadhead, a disadvantaged worker from the food-producing shale-mines of Wyoming, is a willing volunteer who comes to Gateway after a chance lottery win buys him the flight from Earth. When he arrives he falls in love with a fellow volunteer, Klara and bides his time waiting for the "lucky mission" to come up. After his third mission, Bob has struck it rich, returned to Earth and now lives a life of big spending, easy living, fast women and "Full Medical". "Full Medical" includes a weekly visit to an artificial-intelligence Psychiatrist, (who Bob nick-names "Sigfrid von Shrink"), with whom Bob discusses his issues of anger, guilt and denial following the deep psychological trauma experienced during his final mission. The novel moves back and forward between chapters of Bob's time on Gateway and his visits to Sigfrid, where Bob struggles to come to terms with talking about his experiences on Gateway. It is eventually revealed that during his final mission, Bob jettisoned a compartment of the ship containing nine fellow crew members, including his lover Klara, in a moment of terror in order to save himself from being consumed by a black-hole that the ill-fated mission had arrived at. The time-dilation induced by the black-hole means that although years have passed since the event for Bob, now back on Earth, only minutes have passed for his fellow crew members, and this knowledge leaves Bob with an extra burden of guilt that he wrestles his every day.

When I first saw the front-cover (and the blurb) of the book I wasn't expecting a great read (don't get me wrong, I really enjoy SF art but I assumed that the cover was making up for the lack of a quality piece of literature). I was pleasantly surprised that Gateway was actually quite a good read; the concept of the random-destination Heechee ships was well executed, the characters were engaging with appealing personality flaws and the story kept a good pace and was generally exciting. I found Bob to be generally unlikable (his violence, misogyny and irrationality) but somehow this didn't ruin the book for me, as it usually would. Throughout the book there are little inserts of Gateway brochures classifieds ads, mission reports and transcripts of Heechee science lectures that add to the background story and scene setting; these were an effective mechanism for exploring the premise of the novel's setting and I quite enjoyed them.

Overall, I wouldn't say Gateway is on my favourites list, but I would recommend it for science fiction fans.

"Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem

Kris Kelvin arrives at the scientific research station which floats above the planet Solaris, built to study the curious ocean surrounding the planet, which is thought to be a gigantic living entity, and exhibits some form of alien intelligence through it's physical reactions and interactions with human visitors. The station's two remaining personnel, Snow and Sartorius, are behaving strangely, showing signs of fatigue and paranoia and inform Kelvin that the station's third scientist, Gibarian, a former colleague of Kelvin's, has committed suicide. After waking from his first night's sleep on the station, Kelvin is confronted by a physical manifestation of a long-dead lover, Rheya, who remembers little about how she arrived at the station. It is revealed that the other members of the crew have also received "visitors", manifestations of people from their past that are associated with deep and personal experiences (for Kelvin, Rheya committed suicide ten years previously after their relationship fell apart with which Kelvin associates deep feelings of guilt and regret). Attempting to escape from his visitor, Kelvin locks Rheya inside and shuttle and launches her away from the station, only to find that she re-appears the following morning with no memory of the incident. After learning what she is, via tape recordings made by the late Gibarian, Rheya, out of sympathy of Kelvin's situation, attempts suicide by drinking liquid oxygen, where she discovers that she is immortal and regenerates quickly after incurring damage. Kelvin eventually loses his fear and grows attached to the manifestation of Rheya and asks her to return to Earth with him, as part of his wish for a second chance. The station crew try to come to terms with their visitors and attribute their appearance as part of an unconscious experiment performed by the Solaris ocean, and one of the crew, Sartorius, develops a device for disrupting the neutrino field associated with the physical form of the visitors, enabling the visitors to be killed. Realising she cannot return to Earth, Rheya voluntarily allows Sartorius to use the device on her, ending her visits. Kelvin, Snow and Sartorius all come to terms with their visits in different ways and agree to remain on the station to continue their study of the ocean.

Solaris is an intelligent and thought-provoking novel and a really good read. A really enjoyed Lem's sophisticated treatment of the notion that communication or mutual understanding between humans and alien entities (i.e. the Solaris ocean) is essentially a flawed anthropogenic dream. The novel provides a convincing exploration of the emotions surrounding Kelvin's relationship with Rheya and his experiences with her as a visitor. I felt deeply engaged with his character because of this; this level of engagement is on par with the protagonists in "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Dispossessed".

Solaris, like all of Lem's books, was written in Polish and the English translation of Solaris comes from a previous translation from Polish to French. Apparently Lem, who was fluent in English, was critical of the English translation and wished for it to be re-translated (which never happened, or at least was never re-published). In general, I liked the writing, particularly in the complexities of the descriptions of the characters and their surroundings (i.e. the Solaris ocean physical phenomena) and found the "academic text" aspects of the novel really interesting, however there was a certain lack of poetic flair in the writing, for which I've read Lem was known for in his original Polish novels. What a shame I can't read Polish! (or speak it for that matter).