The Fractal Hall Journal

This was the first title to be published in Orion’s SF Masterworks line. It’s a fine series, and it should give you an idea of this book’s regard in the genre that it was chosen to kick it off.

In fact, its status as a classic makes it a little difficult to review like this. It’s unlikely that I’m going to say anything that hasn’t been said many times before in the quarter-century since it was first published. One thing that does stand out for me, in particular in light of Old Man’s War (the book that would have been reviewed tomorrow but I haven’t finished yet, so TO BE CONTINUED) is the episodic nature of the novel. This is one of a number of parallels between this book and John Scalzi’s, although Scalzi hadn’t read this one before writing his, but I’ll cover that in a later post.

Many classic SF works follow this pattern, unsurprisingly because that’s the way they were first published, chapter by chapter in fiction magazines like Asimov’s. The way the chapters cover different periods of the main protagonist’s life add to this. The hook here is that thanks to relativistic effects of travelling at the speed of light in order to get somewhere and kill things, William Mandella is forever returning to a civilisation farther and farther beyond him (the culture shock represented here by a society where, and I paraphrase, OMFG everyone is TEH GAY). The separate episodes are an effective way of representing the disorientating, disjointed way that Mandella is experiencing his life.

What makes the book stand out historically, and what makes it relevant today, is the way it was written as a reflection of the author’s own experience in Vietnam, in fighting a seemingly senseless war without end, and in returning to a country where everything seems to have changed in the author’s absence. The dehumanising aspects of training troops how to slaughter then dropping them into harsh and inhospitable landscapes are reiterated time and again.

Perhaps the most significant thing about the book is the way it wears the clothes of a rip-roaring military space adventure, but is actually more subversive than that. It succeeds not by presenting human fears as alien monsters to be blown away, or even by getting all Star Trek and suggesting that plot twist the monsters are misunderstood and are in fact just like us! (although there is a spot of that going on), but by using a standard SF archetype to show that regardless of the motive and circumstance of any given war, it’s the soldiers that we send out to do the fighting that end up with all the shit.

Oh, and while we’re talking about the Masterworks line, a couple of other recommendations for you: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (the second in the series and for God’s sake don’t watch the film first) and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Over in the Fantasy Masterworks companion line, Dan Simmon’s Song of Kali is a very odd, festering little horror story that’s worth a look. All three get the nod for not being of Tom Clancy-esque door-stop proportions.