The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Reader's Annotation

A madman kidnaps Jane Eyre from the pages of Charlotte Brontë's famous novel.

Summary

In Great Britain circa 1985, time travel is routine, and even travel into works of literature is possible. If you enter the world of a book, you can change it—but only for that one copy. However, if you enter the original manuscript, any change will affect every subsequent copy of that work. Naturally there are laws against that sort of thing, and it's the job of Thursday Next, Special Operative in literary detection, to enforce them. When a madman kidnaps Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday faces the challenge of her career. With the help of her time-traveling father, an executive of the all-powerful Goliath Corporation, and Edward Rochester himself, Thursday must track down the criminal and enter the novel herself to avert an act of literary homicide.

Evaluation

This was a fun and silly novel. I loved all the literary references, the funny names, and the made-up words. It may be a little hard to suspend disbelief for such a silly conceit as traveling into the pages of a novel, but The Eyre Affair is not meant to be taken seriously. If you liked this book, try the rest of Fforde's Thursday Next series or perhaps one his other series such as Nursery Crimes Division or Shades of Grey.

For even more silly British humour in the vein of the Thursday Next series, try the works of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and P.G. Wodehouse.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy
Subgenres:

Island in the Sea of Time

Island in the Sea of Time by S.M. Stirling (1998)

Reader's Annotation

Through a mysterious Event, the island of Nantucket is transported 3,000 years back in time.

Summary

A mysterious phenomenon transports the island of Nantucket and the United States Coast Guard ship Eagle back in time to the Bronze Age, around 1250 BC. Chief of Police Jared Conklin struggles to maintain order and establish a provisional government as the islanders slowly come to terms with the changed world around them. Realizing that the island will not be able to feed their population without new sources of seed and livestock, Conklin sends the Eagle, commanded by Captain Marian Allston, on a trading expedition to the island that will one day be Britain. The local tribes are awestruck by Allston and the Americans, and the expedition is a great success, returning with everything Nantucket needs. Unfortunately Lieutenant William Walker of the Eagle has seen that with a little modern technology he could be a king. He gathers allies and steals a boat along with most of the Nantucket's guns and ammunition. By the time the people of Nantucket can mount an expedition to stop him, Walker is well on the way to carving out his kingdom.

Evaluation

This was a fun story in the tradition of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It was interesting to observe how the Nantucket Islanders re-adopted whaling and fell back on earlier technologies that don't require the full infrastructure of a modern civilization. The book was competently written with interesting characters. The peoples of ancient Britain were well described and seemed to fit what is known about the history, language, and culture of those times. Warfare, both ancient and modern seemed accurate to the best of my knowledge and was entertainingly described. For similar reads, try the rest of Stirling's Nantucket series, his related Emberverse series (beginning with Dies the Fire), and Eric Flint's 1632, the first of his Ring of Fire series in which a small West Virginia town is mysteriously transported back in time and space to Germany in 1632.

Genres: Science Fiction
Subgenres: Time Travel, Military SF

Fuzzy Nation

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi (2011)

Reader's Annotation

The little "fuzzys" are cute and clever, but if they're people, ZaraCorp loses a planet-load of money.

Summary

Back on Earth, Jack Holloway used to be a corporate lawyer. Now Jack lives alone in the outback of the planet Zarathustra—178 light years from Earth—where he prospects for precious sunstones under contract to ZaraCorp. As the company with the exclusive charter to exploit the resources of Zarathustra, ZaraCorp runs nearly everything on the planet.

As a contractor, Jack makes only a tiny percentage of what his finds are worth, but one day he gets lucky. Not only does Jack find the mother of all sunstone deposits, but, thanks to a legal error by ZaraCorp, he is able to negotiate a much larger share for himself—enough to make him a very wealthy man. 

That very evening, a small furry biped—trusting and ridiculously cute—shows up at Jack's outback compound, followed shortly thereafter by its entire family. As it dawns on Jack that these little "fuzzys" may actually be people, he recalls that ZaraCorp's legal right to exploit Zarathustra will remain in effect only so long as no native sentient life is discovered. With a planet-load of money at stake, Jack fears that ZaraCorp will choose to hunt his new friends to extinction before anyone can prove they're more than animals. It's happened before on other planets. That's something Jack can't live with, even if it costs him a fortune in sunstones.

Jack soon realizes that his fears are well founded. His only hope to save the fuzzys is to return to the courtroom for the first time since he was disbarred.

Evaluation

This was an enjoyable old-school science fiction novel. And that's not too surprising as this is a "re-boot" of the 1962 classic Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. It's nice to see the story gain a new readership. The original novel is a little dated but still very enjoyable and is readily available as a public domain ebook if you'd like to compare it with Fuzzy Nation. John Scalzi was a good choice to update the original story. He is among the best of the new science fiction writers but still has something of an old-school style and choice of subject matter. His Hugo-nominated Old Man's War was clearly inspired by two classics of science fiction: Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's Forever War.

Fuzzy Nation deals with a common trope of science fiction: first contact with a intelligent alien species. In this case the theme is: How do you decide whether an alien species is sentient? What criteria do you use? The fuzzys are small and furry like an animal and don't speak an obvious language, but they use tools and seem to behave intelligently. How sentient are they? Are there degrees of sentience? How do you assign rights to a species and who will protect those rights? These are some of the big questions that science fiction can be used to explore, the sort of questions that are seldom addressed in modern science fiction.

If you enjoyed Fuzzy Nation, you may enjoy other novels that explore first contact with an alien species: The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge are two classics in that subgenre.

Genres: Science Fiction
Subgenres: First Contact

Under the Dome

Under the Dome by Stephen King (2009)

Reader's Annotation

When an invisible force field seals Chester's Mill off from the world, the good people  pull together, but to "Big Jim" Rennie it's an opportunity to grab power.

Summary

When the small town of Chester's Mill, Maine is mysteriously sealed off by an invisible and completely impenetrable force field, the results are like nothing anyone could have imagined. Planes and cars crash into the invisible barrier. Family members are stranded on opposite sides. Even worse, as long as the Dome is up, no new resources will be coming in from outside: no food, no gasoline, no propane, no medicines. "Big Jim" Rennie, used car dealer and town selectman, sees this situation as the perfect opportunity to grab power. As Rennie expands the police force into his own private band of thugs, he is opposed by Iraq War hero Dale Barbara and a few of the town's more sensible citizens. When opposition becomes open conflict, destructive fires poison the Dome's limited atmosphere. Dale Barbara and his friends must race to discover the secret of the mysterious Dome before it's rendered completely uninhabitable.

Evaluation

I can only compare this recent novel to King's earlier novel The Stand. Like that novel, Under the Dome is a big sprawling book with a huge cast of characters. And like The Stand, it is an allegory of our society in microcosm. Few writers could pull off a novel with this many characters and keep them interesting and worthy of our attention. The only other writer I've read recently who can do this is George R.R. Martin, whose epic fantasy Game of Thrones has a similarly large cast of interesting characters.

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller
Subgenres: Disaster, Human Monster