Book review: End in Fire, Syne Mitchell
Apr. 20th, 2006 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xthreadTuesday night I read End in Fire by Syne Mitchell, a Seattle-area author who's been doing some wonderful work in relatively hard SF over the last several years.
Pico-review: Wow. Not for the readily depressed about the prospect of the end of civilization by stupid nuclear conflagration. Less depressing than On the Beach, which is the classic in this genre.
Science Fiction has been addressing The End of Civilization since before Science Fiction broke off from mainstream fiction and became a genre of it's own. The End of Civilization by nuclear conflagration has been a subgenre since World War II, although it was alluded to in some Golden Age Pulp Fiction between the wars, and HG Wells predicted nuclear war, and the resultant near-death-experience of civilization, in 1900. The modern classic of the genre is Nevil Shute's On The Beach, which was made into an excellent movie in the 1959. For a while apocalyptic nuclear stories had shifted from Science Fiction and into mainstream Literature, simply because the political situation between the West and the Soviet Bloc was so tense. It was a welcome change when such stories again became the work of purely speculative writing, by authors who wished to use the fall of civilization as a backdrop against which to examine issues of duty, and survival, of the balance between selfish and collective action, and of the importance and dangers of paranoia.
End in Fire, released in 2005, comes back to the subject. Given our country's current misadventure in poorly planned warfare and repudiation of the Balance of Power tactics that kept the Cold War from becoming Hot, it was a somewhat eerie and unsettling read. Mitchell's style is a combination of SF Thriller and Hard SF, and I found that each time I put the book down, my heart rate had crept up while I hadn't noticed. The nuclear conflagration itself transpires in the first thirty or so pages of the book, after which we follow the events on an American space station as the astronauts attempt to return to earth. This book was definitely in the tradition of the Lensmen and other heroic SF works that concern themselves with how one ought to behave in challenging circumstances, although the lead protagonist is a female scientist in her early thirties, which was a very nice nod to the world having changed since the days of Kimball Kinnison's chiseled jaw. I would not describe this book as having enough character development to keep highbrow character-fiction-only readers content, but there was still a fair bit; It was definitely a work with a great deal more character depth than most of Asimov's classic work, for example. I felt to some degree it had been written with a visual medium in mind, envisioning scenes that could appear in a teleplay, and it was a very emotionally forceful story. I'd only planned to read a few chapters, just to get the book started, and instead finished the whole volume in one sitting.
Trivia: during the 1920s, HG Wells was for a time considered one of the key political thinkers on the planet by many in the West. He was an early member of the Fabian Society in Great Britain, toured the Soviet Union before Trotsky was exiled, and spoke about the failures of Communism quite early in it's life.
Pico-review: Wow. Not for the readily depressed about the prospect of the end of civilization by stupid nuclear conflagration. Less depressing than On the Beach, which is the classic in this genre.
Science Fiction has been addressing The End of Civilization since before Science Fiction broke off from mainstream fiction and became a genre of it's own. The End of Civilization by nuclear conflagration has been a subgenre since World War II, although it was alluded to in some Golden Age Pulp Fiction between the wars, and HG Wells predicted nuclear war, and the resultant near-death-experience of civilization, in 1900. The modern classic of the genre is Nevil Shute's On The Beach, which was made into an excellent movie in the 1959. For a while apocalyptic nuclear stories had shifted from Science Fiction and into mainstream Literature, simply because the political situation between the West and the Soviet Bloc was so tense. It was a welcome change when such stories again became the work of purely speculative writing, by authors who wished to use the fall of civilization as a backdrop against which to examine issues of duty, and survival, of the balance between selfish and collective action, and of the importance and dangers of paranoia.
End in Fire, released in 2005, comes back to the subject. Given our country's current misadventure in poorly planned warfare and repudiation of the Balance of Power tactics that kept the Cold War from becoming Hot, it was a somewhat eerie and unsettling read. Mitchell's style is a combination of SF Thriller and Hard SF, and I found that each time I put the book down, my heart rate had crept up while I hadn't noticed. The nuclear conflagration itself transpires in the first thirty or so pages of the book, after which we follow the events on an American space station as the astronauts attempt to return to earth. This book was definitely in the tradition of the Lensmen and other heroic SF works that concern themselves with how one ought to behave in challenging circumstances, although the lead protagonist is a female scientist in her early thirties, which was a very nice nod to the world having changed since the days of Kimball Kinnison's chiseled jaw. I would not describe this book as having enough character development to keep highbrow character-fiction-only readers content, but there was still a fair bit; It was definitely a work with a great deal more character depth than most of Asimov's classic work, for example. I felt to some degree it had been written with a visual medium in mind, envisioning scenes that could appear in a teleplay, and it was a very emotionally forceful story. I'd only planned to read a few chapters, just to get the book started, and instead finished the whole volume in one sitting.
Trivia: during the 1920s, HG Wells was for a time considered one of the key political thinkers on the planet by many in the West. He was an early member of the Fabian Society in Great Britain, toured the Soviet Union before Trotsky was exiled, and spoke about the failures of Communism quite early in it's life.
