Sci vs Fi
Lord of The Rings vs Dune
Start with how close neither of these came to existing. Frank Herbert was rejected 20 times before Sterling Lanier, an editor at Chilton, picked Dune up off its serialization in Analog. Chilton published auto repair manuals. They printed 2,200 copies, priced it at $5.95, and sold so few that Lanier lost his job inside a year. The book that reshaped science fiction was brought to you by the people who told your father how to replace a water pump.
What Tolkien and Herbert built with that near-miss are opposite machines. In Middle-earth the land is a moral mirror. The Shire is green because its people are decent; Mordor is ash because of what rules it. Look at a landscape and you know where you stand. On Arrakis the land is the moral engine. Water scarcity is not scenery, it is the cause. It produces the Fremen, their discipline, their funeral rites, their willingness to die, and eventually the religion that swallows a galaxy. Tolkien's world reflects virtue. Herbert's world manufactures it, and does not care what it makes.
That gap opens widest on the savior. Frodo fails at the last possible second. He stands at the Cracks of Doom and claims the Ring for himself, and it takes Gollum's greed and a fall to finish the job. Grace carries him over the line. Paul Atreides does not fail. He wins completely, and winning is the catastrophe, because the jihad he foresaw and could not stop rides out under his name. Herbert said he wrote it as a warning about charismatic leaders. Tolkien reportedly disliked Dune "with some intensity," and he had every reason to. It is an argument against the thing his book believes.
Winner: Draw
Thoughts: A draw, and not the polite kind. These two are in conversation, and they are asking the same question: what does a savior cost the people who need one? Tolkien answers that the cost is borne, and that mercy shown to Gollum on a mountainside pays the debt when nothing else can. Herbert answers that the cost is 61 billion dead and a man who saw it coming and rode anyway. Neither wins because neither is trying to beat the other. Read one and you understand hope as a discipline. Read the other and you understand why hope is dangerous in the hands of someone everybody believes. You want both, and you want them in that order.
Something Old
Paratime
by H. Beam Piper
"Infinite worlds, infinite possibilities, and infinite dangers. The Paratime Police guard the secret of interdimensional travel, keeping the knowledge of parallel timelines hidden. When corruption and chaos threaten that balance, one agent has to navigate a tangled web of alternate histories to prevent catastrophe."
Here is what makes the collection worth hunting down. In 1809 a British diplomat named Benjamin Bathurst stepped out of a Prussian inn at Perleberg, walked around a team of horses in front of witnesses, and was never seen again. The case is real and it has never been solved. Piper took it and wrote "He Walked Around the Horses" (Astounding, April 1948), told entirely as official reports, depositions, and letters from officials who have no idea what they are describing. The reader works out what happened roughly 200 years before the men filing the paperwork ever could. Piper later folded Bathurst into the setting proper in "Police Operation," and the Paratime Police have been cleaning up that kind of accident ever since.
Piper is worth knowing about too. He never went to college, taught himself science and history, and started at 18 as a laborer and then a night watchman in the Pennsylvania Railroad's Altoona yards. He wrote around the job. In 1964, broke after a divorce and convinced his career had collapsed, he shut off the utilities in his apartment and shot himself. He was wrong about the career. His agent had died without telling him about several sales, and the money was on its way.
One good thing came out of the wreckage. Piper's copyrights lapsed, so a large part of his work is legally free right now on Project Gutenberg, "Police Operation" included. You can start reading him in the next 30 seconds without paying anybody.
If you haven't read Paratime, it's highly recommended. Start with "He Walked Around the Horses," then take the rest in any order you like.
Free on Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8301
Collected editions available on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Paratime-H-Beam-PIPER/dp/B005IGOVJC
Something New(er)
Constituent Service
by John Scalzi
Amazon summary:It’s a close encounter of the municipal kind!
The aliens have come to earth...and a lot of them live in the Third District, the city’s only alien-majority neighborhood. They work, live, shop and sing karaoke here, just like anyone else would. Ashley Perrin, right out of college, has gotten a job as the community liaison for the Third District’s city councilman, and is learning very quickly that even if extraterrestrials are ordinary folks, their problems and concerns are, shall we say, pretty unique ones. Her first week will involve parades, sewer systems, con women and a chicken with an eye for trouble. It's more than Ashley expected…but she’s ready to help where she can.
It’s a fast, funny novella from the Hugo-winning author of Redshirts and The Kaiju Preservation Society. Come visit the Third District!
Review: First contact has been done to death from the top down, with presidents and generals and men in dark glasses. Scalzi does it from the bottom up, through a 22-year-old with a municipal email address and a constituent complaint about the drains.
The writing is clean and crisp, even as it dances about alien physiology, cultural foibles, and unpronounceable names. Our protagonist is a recent Tufts graduate who hoped for diplomatic work, preferably off-world, only to end up as the community liaison for a local politician in Earth's most heavily alien-populated district.
The dialog and action are reminiscent of a timeless Monty Python sketch; imagine John Cleese as the alien office manager insisting the newest employee perform karaoke as the only human in an alien dive bar. It's all good fun and team building until the sewers explode!
No spoilers, so I'll just say you should read it if you want something light-hearted but still relevant in a moment when we let little things like race, sexual preference, or political beliefs separate us. This is a tale of beings working and living together across species.
Highly Recommended
Available on Amazon and Apple Books
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