To keep things a little mixed up, today we’ve got the next five What I’m Reading reviews:

6. Sky Coyote / Mendoza in Hollywood – Kage Baker
7. Cyteen – C.J. Cherryh
8. Archangel Protocol – Lyda Morehouse
9. Memory – Lois McMaster Bujold
10. Digital Knight – Ryk Spoor

These reviews were originally written for the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup. Although originally rather informal productions, their scope and purview quickly grew to become substantially more elaborate. I’ve often thought of reviewing as an attempt to communicate an essentially experiential phenomenon — in other words, I am more interested in describing what it was like to read a novel rather than describing the novel itself. In many ways, therefore, the writing of the WIRs was (and is) an essentially blog-like activity.

Once I’ve finished reposting the WIRs originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written, I’ll continue posting new WIRs as they’re written.

For the past three decades, the state of our educational system has seen nothing but consistent decay. In math, science, literature, language, history, and every other subject, the educational standards to which we hold our children are lower than the standards to which their parents were held. We are supposed to be a nation of progress, and yet our children suffer in an educational system which continues to backslide out of control.

This is not the way it is supposed to be.

So we have a problem. What’s the solution?

Well, if our standards have declined, then it’s time to draw a line in the sand. In fact, we need to do better than that: We need a set of standards that says we can do better. We need to challenge ourselves. We need to challenge our teachers. And, most importantly, we need to challenge our students.

You may think we already have a set of standards: The state’s Profiles of Learning. But the truth is, they aren’t doing the job. There are two important areas where they fail:

Nature of the Standard. The state’s standards are vague, emphasizing methods of learning over the content of what is learned. Setting those standards as a minimum would result in students dotting i’s and crossing t’s… instead of knowing what the i’s and t’s actually mean.

What I’m proposing, on the other hand, is a knowledge-based standard. A standard which sets out what students need to know, and which can be used in an objective manner to determine whether or not students have learned what they need to learn.

Application of the Standard. The other problem with the state’s standards is that they are applied at the end of a student’s career, instead of being used as an integral part of the educational process. The Basic Skills Tests are given in 8^th grade, and are then given again and again – while the student continues to advance in school – until they are passed… at which point the student is allowed to graduate.

This is not an effective way of solving the problems our schools have. We have to address these issues earlier – and that means detecting problems before they become insoluble. Furthermore, we can no longer ignore problems in the hope that they will disappear of their own accord.

What does this mean? It means we begin assessing the progress of students at every grade level. And, furthermore, it means that we actually take action – on an individual basis – as a result of those assessments.

In the system as it exists today, we already conduct aptitude tests – but we ignore the results. Applying a standard means making those aptitude tests mean something. It means applying a minimum standard of knowledge for advancement.

Why is this important? Because the first time you push someone beyond their capabilities, it’s over. You’ve doomed them to failure. If you take someone who cannot read and promote them ruthlessly until they find themselves in a high school setting – still unable to read – you have not done them a favor: You have crippled them for life.

Is testing going to solve our problems? No. But setting a standard – and having a willingness to enforce that standard – will. A child who cannot read should not be prevented from graduating; they should be prevented from reaching the second grade. Why? Because the high school setting is not – nor should it be – designed to teach reading and writing: That’s what the first grade is for. And attempts to rectify in high school a problem which should have been corrected ten years earlier compromises the educational quality of the high school experience. If we make sure that the only students who reach second grade are those students who are ready for second grade, then we’re going to have a lot fewer students reach high school who aren’t ready for the experience.

It’s a matter of not letting children slip through the cracks.

Knowledge, not process.

Teachers, not bureaucrats.

Education, not socialization.

Three years ago I ran for the Minneapolis School Board. I believed then, as I believe now, that education is the fundamental bedrock on which a successful democracy is built. And I believed then, as I believe now, that the dire and worsening condition of the American education system is the largest and most troubling threat to this nation’s long-term security and prosperity.

I believe that many of the problems in our educational system today can be traced back to the fact that, by and large, we have no understanding, at a very basic level, of exactly what our schools are attempting to accomplish. And that’s a charge which I direct not only at our community as a whole, but, more importantly, at the school system itself.

The problem is that our educational goals — our standards — are often left unspoken. And because they are unspoken, they are unclear. The result is, inevitably, not only a lowest common denominator, but a lowest common denominator which becomes poorer and poorer with every passing year.

To make matters worse, when attempts are made to set goals for our educational system, the standards which result are usually vague, poor, or both. For example, when I was attending public school in Minneapolis (I graduated in 1998), students were required to pass a Basic Skills Test in order to graduate. This test was given in 8th grade and then, if the student failed, given again in 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades until the student passed. For all intents and purposes, this Basic Skills Test was the graduation standard for the Minneapolis Public Schools.

And what did the Basic Skills Test require? Basic reading skills. Arithmetic, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and basic geometry.

In practice, the school district waited until we were in 8th grade to test whether or not we had skills which should have been learned in 3rd. If we didn’t have those skills, we were simply promoted into 9th grade and given the test again.

It shouldn’t take too much effort to understand the fundamental problems with this system. And it shouldn’t come as any particular surprise to learn that, in 1996, only 50% of 8th grade students managed to pass these tests.

But here’s the scary part: The Minneapolis Public Schools consistently test in the top 10% of the school districts in Minnesota. And Minnesota is routinely ranked somewhere in the Top 5 states for education. So when we talk about the problems of the Minneapolis Public Schools, we’re talking about the problems of the top 10% of the top 10%.

Things have gotten a little better in the Minneapolis Public Schools. Four out of every five 8th graders are now passing the Basic Skills Tests on their first attempt. This tells us that merely setting goals and then assessing our success at meeting those goals can be an effective way of achieving improvement in our educational system. When clear goals are communicated, those within the system can work towards achieving those goals in a substantive and meaningful fashion.

But I still believe there is a fundamental failure to take meaningful and substantive action to address the educational needs of those who fail the Basic Skills Test. And I am even more concerned by the fact that the Basic Skills Test are, essentially, an expectation of mediocrity.

Over the next few days I’m going to be posting the three position planks I used for my 2002 campaign. I’ll be following that up with a very general outline of what I believe a truly effective educational standard would look like. Then I hope to wrap things up by posting my thoughts on the No Child Left Behind initiative, which has begun to change the landscape of public education.

SCHOOL BOARD GOALS
Goal 1: Setting a Standard
Goal 2: Forming a Foundation
Goal 3: Opportunity and Support

An Outline for a Standard of Education

Alfred Bester is one of those authors that I’ve been aware of for a long time, but who never quite made it onto my To Read List: His name would come up in a discussion or article, but my interest was never quite piqued enough, or a copy of the book never found its way in front of my eyes in a timely fashion, and he would sink back into the mental noise of my consciousness.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, the stars aligned themselves in the heavens, Bester again came to my attention, and – lo and behold – I discovered used copies of The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man on the shelves of Uncle Hugo’s here in Minneapolis, MN.

Wow. I’ve been missing out.

Three things about Bester stand out to me:

First, his use of what I must call, for lack of a better term, casual detail. Bester will seamlessly drop a staggeringly original idea into a paragraph, casually passing it by as if it were no more remarkable than the mention of an automobile in a novel of today. The effect is that of a novel written in the far future, not merely taking place there. It’s a technique which was pioneered by Heinlein, but Bester presents it in a perfected form.

Second, the fact that these are – at their core – incredibly powerful character dramas. They have all the strength and pathos of a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, while simultaneously being driven by a fast-paced, tautly-plotted action-adventure. The result is a reading experience which is not only compelling and addictive, but tremendously powerful. The depth with which the characters are drawn, and the sheer emotional extremity of their circumstance, leaves a lasting impression on your mind and soul.

Finally, the astonishing originality and scope of his ideas. Unlike this contemporaries, Bester is not content to simply choose one or two or ten different ideas with which to build his future. Instead, he uses dozens, spinning them out one after another in an incredibly dense, breath-taking vista. Nor is his cascade a random cornucopia of creativity: Each idea is a facet painstakingly set within an imagined epoch, carefully revealed not only to deepen the setting, but to further the story.

To see this depth and mastery in a piece of 1950s science fiction is astonishing. Bester was incredibly ahead of his time. It would take nearly a decade after the publication of The Stars My Destination before science fiction, as a field, began tentatively taking steps to explore in the directions Bester had already intuitively mapped out. It would take nearly thirty years before the genre showed serious signs of actually catching up to Bester, and even today – nearly fifty years after its publication – The Stars My Destination continues to exist on the cutting edge.

In fact, if I didn’t already know who Alfred Bester was, I would have been terribly excited at discovering a new, cutting edge author after finishing The Stars My Destination. It is the only novel from the 1950’s that I feel could have been written yesterday: The setting reads like a post-cyberpunk novel, and the main character reads like a protagonist from Iain Banks or Stephen Donaldson.

That’s an incredible accomplishment. And the result are books which are exciting to read in any case, and shockingly revelatory when read within their historical context.

After reading these books, one is left to wonder what science fiction would have been like if Bester hadn’t left the field shortly after the publication of The Stars My Destination in 1956. I detect a definite pre-Bester vs. post-Bester watershed in the genre, and I think that if one were to carefully trace out the earliest whispers of the New Wave movement, one would find those whispers firmly rooted in the soil of Bester’s work. Would Bester’s continued work in the field, therefore, have quickened that development? Would Bester have served as a catalyst for a revolution? And, if so, how would that revolution have differed from the one Harlan Ellison catalyzed with Dangerous Visions?

Unfortunately, such ponderings are lost to history – just as Bester was lost to Holiday magazine for the better part of two decades. Perhaps it is an alternate history tale for Michael Burstein to tell.

I have it on Good Authority(TM) that the books Bester wrote upon returning to the SF field in the 1970’s do not compare with these early masterpieces. That’s unfortunate. I plan to give them a shot at some point, anyway, starting with The Computer Connection (since that turned up on the used shelf recently, too).

GRADES:

THE STARS MY DESTINATION: A+
HE DEMOLISHED MAN: A+

Alfred Bester
Published: 1956 / 1953
Publisher: Vintage Books
Cover Price: $12.00
ISBNs: 0679767800 / 0679767819
Buy Now!

The Ruby Dynasty novels – published by Tor as the Saga of the Skolian Empire – have collectively won the Nebula, the Sapphire, the Prism, and several other awards. It was the Nebula, in particular, awarded to the sixth book in the series (The Quantum Rose), which drew my attention. After reading the cover blurb on Primary Inversion (the first novel in the series), I decided to take a chance. And, since the store also had a used copy of the second novel, Catch the Lightning, I ended up picking up a copy of that, too.

This is a reaction to the first three volumes in the series: Primary Inversion, Catch the Lightning, and The Last Hawk.

To give some brief background for the series (and provide necessary context): Six thousand years ago, an unknown alien species, for reasons unknown, scooped a selection of humanity off of Earth and took them to a distant planet. The aliens eventually abandoned this human settlement (again, for reasons unknown) and disappeared. Salvaging the alien technology left behind, this colony of humanity went out to the stars, looking for their lost home.

They never found it. But their colonies did spread throughout the local region of the galaxy under the banner of the Ruby Empire. Eventually, however, the alien technology they had salvaged began to break down – and they lacked the knowledge to repair it or replace it. The Ruby Empire broke apart, and its colonies reverted to various stages of barbarism.

Then Earth discovered the secrets of interstellar travel for itself and turned its eyes to the stars… only to be surprised by the discovery that other humans had gotten there first.

One other piece of crucial information: When the aliens scooped up a segment of humanity, they had, intentionally or not, ended up with a small community which possessed all of the recessive genes necessary for telepathy. Inevitable inbreeding led to psi powers expressing themselves frequently in the Ruby Empire, and in the barbarous colonies the Empire left behind.

In Asaro’s future, humanity is broken down into three interstellar empires: The Allied Worlds of Earth, the Skolian Empire, and the Trader Empire.

The Skolian Empire is effectively ruled by the Ruby Dynasty, a small family of powerful psi descended from the original Ruby Empire. Known as the Rhon, these psi power the Skol-Net – a psi network which binds their empire together and give their fighter pilots a notable edge over the Trader Empire.

The Trader Empire is ruled by aristocrats. These aristos are the result of genetic tinkering with the Rhon. Although the tinkering was an attempt to strengthen their psi powers, the result was far worse: The aristos are genetically-coded sadists, whose psi-receptors receive pain and transform it into pleasure. They conquer worlds mercilessly, and seek out psi to serve them as “providers” (tortured slaves whose ability to project pain greatly increases aristo pleasure).

The Allied Worlds of Earth maintain their existence by virtue of the fact that they could tip the balance of power in the conflict between the Skolians and the Traders. Neither side of the war can afford to antagonize the Allieds.

PRIMARY INVERSION

Asaro’s first novel is packed full of great stuff. At first glance, the plot is well-done space opera of the best sort: Dramatic space battles, larger-than-life characters, planets to be saved, empires to save and empires to thwart.

But as the book develops, surprising depth and detail begin to emerge.

The space battles and interstellar empires are given a firm foundation of hard SF drawn from the cutting-edge of scientific theory: Everything from FTL to space fighters are thoroughly justified. Her larger-than-life characters are given biotech, nano-nets, and cybernetics. Even her planet destroyers are freshly original, thoroughly detailed, and – as a result – thoroughly horrifying in their conception.

And Asaro doesn’t stop there. In addition to her Big Ideas, she also liberally spreads neat ideas all over her universe. The result of all this is a richly textured backdrop against which her action plays out.

Even Asaro’s plot, however, is revealed to have a greater depth than a first glance would reveal: A space opera adventure is quickly shown to be laced by the drama of the characters who participate in it. Romance and heartbreak arise naturally out of Asaro’s strong characterization and active plotting.

Primary Inversion is not, however, without its flaws. Asaro’s ending seems rushed and arbitrary (although it still provides a satisfactory conclusion). The central romance is literally justified through Rhon hormones, instead of arising naturally from circumstance and character.

But these flaws are minor. Primary Inversion is a great read and a ton of fun, and for a first novel it demonstrates a remarkable mastery. I was hooked. I wanted to immediately run back to the store and pick up the rest of the series.

But I had Catch the Lightning already in hand, so I went to that first.

CATCH THE LIGHTNING

Unfortunately, Catch the Lightning was a major let-down.

First off, the hard SF and space opera of Primary Inversion has been flushed for an incredibly stupid alternate universe. Asaro literally tries to convince us that delaying the birth of Jesus Christ and the appearance of monotheism by 340 years would essentially have little or no impact on the modern world. If it hadn’t been for the remarkable strength of Primary Inversion, this would have been a “throw the book against the wall” moment.

The strong, natural plotting of Primary Inversion has also disappeared, to be replaced by deus ex machina after deus ex machina. “Oh, no! The government has taken my boyfriend’s spaceship! It’s a good thing that the mother of my best friend’s roommate works at the top secret facility where my boyfriend’s spaceship has been taken!” (This, by the way, would qualify as yet another “throw the book against the wall” moment.)

Although remnants of the strong, deep characterization remain (notably in the two main characters), most of the cast is populated by poorly rendered clichés. You can always tell who the bad guys are, for example, because they’ll be the ones raping (or trying to rape) the main characters. And even the main characters ring false: The main character is an orphaned teen on the streets of 20th century Los Angeles, yet she has absolutely no problem traveling to the future and engaging in space opera adventures. (Oh, there’s a couple sentences where she tells us how hard it was to make the adjustment. But that’s not demonstrated in even the slightest degree by what she actually says, thinks, or does.)

Perhaps worst of all, the romance elements which made the first novel so endearing have literally been transformed into softcore porn. In fact, all pretence is discarded: Rhon hormones explicitly drive the main characters together, so that Asaro can gleefully move onto describing condoms, erections, and penetration as quickly as possible.

In short, this is an atrocious book. It fails as science fiction. It fails as romance.

It just… fails.

And the disappointment is all the more bitter because it follows the delightful experience which was Primary Inversion.

Based on the strength of Primary Inversion, however, along with some much-needed advice from rec.arts.sf.written, I decided to give Asaro’s third novel a try.

THE LAST HAWK

The Last Hawk reads to me like a strange, mutant blending between Iain Banks’ The Player of Games and all the worst clichés and flaws which began cropping up in Catch the Lightning. The plot strands a Rhon prince on a relatively primitive world. While being held as a secret political captive for various reasons, the prince engages in a somewhat interesting romp of sex, politics, and gambling.

With this book I began to conclude that Asaro simply lacks the skills of a world-builder. She has a lot of neat ideas to throw onto the table, but that’s not the same thing as investing those ideas with believability or making those ideas come together in a coherent fashion. For example, Asaro creates the game of quis: Quis has not only managed to replace warfare on this planet, it has also become the forum for political debate, a repository of lost scientific knowledge, and a way of transmitting messages from one side of the planet to the other (as a result of one player influencing another, who influences another, until the influence reaches the other side of the planet and is then interpreted by someone there).

The problem? Asaro describes quis to us early in the book. It’s essentially a pattern-matching game with a complexity slightly above that of poker. It might have slightly more representational power than Chess, but it comes nowhere near the complexity of Go (even assuming that Asaro is describing to us a simple version of the game). So, basically, Asaro is asking me to believe that Go could replace war, replace talking as a means of conversation and debate, maintain scientific and technological information hidden in its advanced strategies for several millennium, and transmit messages from one side of the planet to the other.

I ain’t buying it.

When Iain Banks told a largely identical story in The Player of Games, the game to which he ascribed such remarkable properties was infinitely more complicated than the simplistic pattern game Asaro describes. (And, in fact, Banks doesn’t ascribe nearly as many ridiculous powers to his game.) As a result, Bank’s story works… and Asaro’s doesn’t.

Did I also mention that this planet is a matriarchy? No? Well, that’s probably because it keeps slipping my mind. The problem is that Asaro’s version of a matriarchy is to essentially take a standard patriarchy and flip-flop the gender roles. In fact, you can take the entire book, flip the genders of the characters, and end up with a perfectly coherent tale. The problem, of course, is that matriarchies don’t work that way. In a society without birth control, for example, females do not become sexually promiscuous while, at the same time, embracing a tradition of warrior leadership. Nor would the concept of “virginal honor” (in the medieval sense) be transferred onto males: They simply lack the physical characteristics required to create such a sense of “honor” being “taken”.

Asaro’s “shortcuts to softcore porn” also take a turn for the worse. No longer content with merely having Rhon hormones justify instant love and eternal commitment, she simply has every single woman with the least hint of sex appeal fall instantly in love with her main character – thus allowing her to quickly segue into pointlessly graphic descriptions of their sex life, before shuffling the female off stage right in order to bring in a brand new love interest from stage left.

What finally killed the book for me, however, were the incessant deus ex machinas. Some of them had become utterly predictable by this point, while others were freshly insipid. For the third straight book, for example, the main character miraculously bumps into someone with a complete set of Rhon genes, but none of the typical recessive deformities. And if you do decide to read this book, make sure to keep an eye on Kelric’s telepathic abilities: Damaged early in the book, they remain turned off whenever they would be inconvenient, but are immediately turned right back on whenever Asaro needs him to read somebody’s mind, only to disappear again in short order when their presence again becomes hindering.

On top of all this, there are quite a few places in the book where Asaro’s plotting is badly telegraphed, and the ending falls apart into a nearly incoherent mess: Scenes without meaning or context begin to be thrown around with wild abandon, jam-packed with coincidences indicative of an author desperately trying to stick to her outline and deadline. And let’s not even discuss the continuity flaws and other authorial oversights. (The main character, for example, leaves his children to die a horrible death by slow poisoning at the end of the book. Not intentionally, but because the author apparently hasn’t realized that that’s what will happen.)

But I’m forced to ask myself this: Would I be judging this book so harshly if it weren’t for the fact that the appallingly bad Catch the Lightning had painted me a roadmap of Asaro’s weaknesses and foibles?

I don’t think so.

But it still isn’t an impressive offering by any stretch of the imagination. Ultimately my reaction to The Last Hawk can be summed up like this: It took me a day and a half to finish the last twenty-five pages of the book. I literally couldn’t muster enough interest in the characters, the plot, or the book to keep my attention focused for more than a couple of minutes at a time.

CONCLUSIONS

All of this leaves me, once again, in a quandary. Do I keep dipping my toes into this pool, hoping that the lightning which struck with Primary Inversions will find Catherine Asaro again? I ended up picking up a copy of The Quantum Rose the day before I started The Last Hawk, because it was used and cheap. But there are still two more volumes between The Last Hawk and The Quantum Rose. So… I dunno. Maybe. There’s still enough there to convince me that Asaro has the stuff it takes to make a good (possibly even great) author. And there’s that Nebula award for The Quantum Rose, which is what intrigued me into trying the series in the first place.

But, at the very least, it will be awhile before I do: There’s other stuff I want to read.

GRADES:

PRIMARY INVERSION: A-
CATCH THE LIGHTNING: F
THE LAST HAWK: C

Catherine Asaro
Published: 1995/1996/1997
Publisher: Tor
Cover Price: $6.99
ISBNs: 0-812-55023-4 / 0-812-55102-8 / 0-812-55110-9
Buy Now!