The Time Machine/H.G. Wells/115 pp.

One of those books that I've always meant to read, but never got around to. The quintessential time-travel story. Wells' narrator explains, in pretty clear language (considering the book was written in 1895) how time is just a fourth dimension; just as we move from left to right, backward and forward, up and down, we can move forward or reverse in time. But just as gravity limits our movement up and down, there are forces that make movement through time difficult. And the Time Traveler (our narrator's host) has discovered a way to push through those forces and, using his time machine, travel into the future. Moving over 800,000 years into the future, the Traveler encounters a carefree group of humanoid creatures called the Eloi, and their opposite number, the Morlocks. He determines that the Eloi are descended from the privileged classes, while the Morlocks are the descendants of the workers who were moved further and further underground to maintain the machines that provided for the Eloi.
A self-described socialist, Wells uses The Time Machine to comment on the disparity, already noticeable in Victorian England, between the quality of life of the leisure and working classes. He sees that conditions could gradually deteriorate to the point that workers are closed up below ground, working to ensure the comfortable lives of the rich. In the novel, he envisions the final outcome of that process - a childlike, ignorant leisure class unable to fend for themselves, and a feral, animal-like working class, driven by hunger to eating human flesh. (In fact, the Traveler believes that the Morlocks are raising the Eloi for food, as a rancher raises cattle.)
Along with Jules Verne, Wells is considered one of the fathers of the science fiction genre; he coined the term "time machine" himself, and this novel is considered to be one of the best early works in the genre.

The Martian Chronicles/Ray Bradbury/181 pp.

This is one of those books I've always told myself I should read, one of the classics of science fiction. I finally got around to reading it, and I was very happy with it. In a chronological series of short pieces, Bradbury details Earth's colonization of Mars, from our first encounters with the planet's inhabitants, to our eventual destruction of the planet's natural beauty. Parts of the book were written as early as 1946, and it shows an uncanny understanding of how we, as Earthlings, can't take care of our own planet, let alone be guardians of another world's development. I read the piece "There Will Come Soft Rains" for the first time in junior high, as a short story, and its tale of an automated house that continues on even after its inhabitants have been killed in nuclear war was just as enjoyable the second time around.
Bradbury's easy prose and the shortness of the chapters make for easy reading.

The Ugly Little Boy / Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg / 387 p.

This novel is a 1992 expansion of Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story by the same name, by Asimov and equally famous sci-fi author Robert Silverberg.  The premise is that a private company has found a way to take a Neanderthal boy 40,000 years into the future, which in this case is around 2100, and it rapidly becomes clear that there are, well, issues with that, to use a properly 1990's word.  Most of the story is narrated by one Miss Fellowes, the woman hired to be a sort of full-time nurse for the boy.  There are also "interchapters" from the perspective of the Neanderthal group from which the boy is plucked.

I found the book a bit of a curiosity.  The authors' attempts to reconcile 1958 and 1992 gender norms in the ways the 21st-century characters relate to one another in thought, word and deed ranged from semi-believable to amusing to downright unmotivated.  And speaking of gender and unmotivated, what is the deal with Dr. Marianne Levien?  Her character raises a good many unanswered questions in the first chapter, and she resurfaces, tantalizingly, toward the end, only to play no role whatsoever in what eventually happens. Is her entire function in the novel to embody the "cold bitch" stereotype?  Seriously?  The themes of ugliness and other-ness and the rarity and value of humans' ability to comprehend one another accurately are still themes that shine through and help make up for some of this weirdness, though.

The remake I'd really like to see of this story would involve reconstructing a Neanderthal child genetically, rather than actually grabbing him from the past.  That would eliminate some of the problems that the fictional scientists inexplicably (to me) fail to plan for, in this story while allowing other, more subtle and interesting issues to arise.

Julian Comstock: A Story of Twenty-Second Century America / Robert Charles Wilson (413 p.)

In an interview with Tor.com about his latest book, Canadian sci-fi author Robert Charles Wilson revealed that, upon deciding to write a novel set 150 years in the future, he looked to popular books of 150 years ago, to see the difference in culture and worldview that he would have to convey between today and his future setting.  As it turns out, this look backward ended up influencing Julian Comstock much more directly: the characters speak as if they had stepped from the pages of a mid-19th century novel, often to hilarious effect; the post-oil future looks uncannily like a coal and steam driven Victorian era...and somehow, nary a machine gun has survived what the novel's religious establishment calls "The False Tribulation" that followed the end of the "Efflorescence of Oil" and the era of "The Secular Ancients" (that is, us), despite ongoing war with the Dutch over Labrador, and various other conflicts.  As prediction in any linguistic or technological sense, the novel cannot be taken seriously.

Nonetheless: once one accepts the idea of a chunk of the 19th-early 20th century being picked up and plunked into the 2170's...this novel is a treat: a splendid read, with memorable characters, a social, political and religious world spun and extrapolated comically and tragically from the substance of America, past and present, and a narrative that is capable of stirring the mind and moving the heart.

-Rachel

Links to Tor.com Interview, Part I and Part II.

The Sunborn / Gregory Benford / 436 p.

I picked up The Sunborn on a rushed descend-and-grab mission to Columbia Public Library, just before it closed for the night, so that I'd have something besides the South Carolina history item (review coming later) to read on the way to a conference in Charleston, SC.  As it turned out, this sci-fi paperback was anything but light reading - for one thing, it was written by a physics professor and contains diagrams of the heliosphere. 

In much of science fiction (or at least, much of that genre that I read), fairly ordinary human dramas of the political, military, social or sexual kind are played out against a background of some future, spacefaring civilization, or some other universe and cast of characters and species.  But in this novel, the scientist-astronauts deal primarily with problems of...science.  (Imagine: the two main characters are female scientists, including one of reproductive age, and there's no romantic or sexual plot at all, for a change!)  Sure, some of the most amusing moments deal with interpersonal tensions between the explorers and the corporate and political interests "Earthside" in the mid- 21st century, and their troubles with information overload and battling bureaucracies, but that's all just background noise compared with the tumbling cascade of events that begins when weird electric energies on Mars and vast, methane-based...um...entities on Pluto show signs that seem, beyond all human expectation, remarkably like intelligent life.

By the end of The Sunborn, the characters still seem hardly more than sketches, yet deep questions of philosophy and even glimmers of theology are sparking through the pages, spiraling at once outward to the cosmos and inward to the memory and art.  I came away thinking, "Now this is true science fiction, worth every diagram."