Brain Candy

Nothing like a toothache to make higher-level brain functions (or at least what passes for them in me) impossible. Suddenly the prospect of tackling a difficult literary novel or writing an honest appraisal or preparing for a workshop I'm going to lead feels beyond me, and I grab whatever "easy" reading has piled up next to my bed and go through them like a bag of Chips Ahoy.

So I've discovered that I can still read Lee Child after writing a long article about him, and that a British TV-producer-turned-writer is still producing the best American thrillers today.

And a trilogy of novels by a relatively new SF writer, John Scalzi, are not only in the tradition of Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's Forever War, but better than them. Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Lost Colony are better because they are not written to support a thesis, as Heinlein's novels so often were. They are concerned at their heart with choices that characters must make, and the discovery of their own ethical boundaries. I like to see that portrayed in all types of fiction, from TV shows to Greek tragedies. By making these difficult choices, these characters become more meaningful to readers--I found myself actually caring about these characters' fates, and it's been a while since that happened while reading a SF novel. Scalzi wisely says at the end of The Lost Colony that he is moving on to other fictional universes for the moment, which I think is a wise decision--The Lost Colony could probably have been 100 pages shorter.

I wish other writers and editors would show the same wisdom in not succumbing to the lure of easy money in sequelitis.