Review: Mission to Minerva by James P. Hogan

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2005
Acquired June 2012
Read July 2012

Mission to Minerva
by James P. Hogan

I loved Inherit the Stars but haven't been loving its sequels; one of my problems has been that the original novel sets up this great image of humanity clinging on beyond all hope and managing to survive when they home planet of Minerva is destroyed, the survivors riding it out on Minerva's moon as it is flung into orbit of Earth. The later novels have ignored this image, focusing on the Ganymeans, who were really only in Inherit the Stars to explain how humanity could both originate on Minerva and also share characteristics with other Earth animals. When they did focus on it, they undermined it; we've been told since that the Ganymeans scooped up the Minervans and deposited them on Earth, which is nowhere near as cool.

I was excited, then, to see that the last book in the Minervan series, Mission to Minerva would return us to that original, captivating piece of mythology. Charlie and Koriel, and all that.

Well, I should have expected that Mission to Minerva would just be the most recent disappointing sequel, the worst book in the series in fact. The first half of the book is spent working out Hogan's own hard scientific ideas for time travel, which could perhaps be possible to someone who hasn't read decades of sf that takes both time travel and alternate universes as a part of the landscape.

Hogan could maybe get away with this if it was interesting... but it's not. Not remotely. The first book made scientific problem-solving accessible and exciting; this one makes it into dull gibberish.  Here's a key moment in the novel:

"Standing waves." She turned her head back and focused on him. "Defining a structure distributed through a volume of space. That's the way to halt a test object! It propagates as a longitudinal M-wave function. If we project an interference function to create a standing wave in resonance with the normal transverse solution, it will lock into the target universe. It would force the object to materialize there."

But of course! How could I not have figured it out myself? It was obvious!

Once the characters do travel back in time to Minerva, the book doesn't really get any better. Even the original breakdown of Minervan relations turns out to go back to Jevlenese crazies-- can't humans ever do anything terrible for themselves? It doesn't help that Hogan is unable to write villainous characters without making them one-note and brutish. Complex politics are certainly not his forte.  Also, there's not even a sign of Charlie and Koriel!

When I read Entoverse, I complained about Hogan's reactionary politics. I should have counted my blessings; Mission to Minerva has characters explaining how a new glorious age is going to come into existence ad nauseam. When he shows this instead of telling it, it almost works: the book's closing image of Earthers, Jevlenese, Ganymeans, and Minervans united in a common cause is almost uplifting. But that's one moment in an overlong novel.

Inherit the Stars will always remain a favorite novel of mine. But the only one of the sequels that has even been vaguely worth my time is Giants' Star; this is definitely a case where I should have quite while I was ahead.

Review: The Two Worlds: Two Giants Novels by James P. Hogan

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2007 (contents: 1981-91)
Acquired June 2012
Read July 2012

The Two Worlds: Two Giants Novels
by James P. Hogan

This book collects the third and fourth Minervan novels, Giants' Star and Entoverse; I already read and reviewed Giants' Star as part of The Minervan Experiment, so I'm just going to review Entoverse here.

Like Inherit the Stars before it, Entoverse sets up a scientific problem for its characters to solve. Like all of Hogan's attempts to recreate the dynamics of that original story, The Two Worlds fails at it because its premise is at once too obvious and too impossible. The answer to why many Jevlenese are radical militarists (which I felt was sufficiently answered by them being, well, people) turns out to be that the Jevlenese computer, JEVEX, is so complicated that it's actually a universe on the inside, whose properties have given arise to emergent life whose consciousnesses sometimes leaps out of the computer and into the brains of the Jevlenese, and these folks are unable to deal with their new reality.

Oh, of course. It's not exactly the elegant simplicity of Minerva in the first novel, is it?

At the same time the problem seems so bizarre, it's also super-obvious, because Hogan crosscuts the narrative between attempts to solve the mystery on Jevlen and what's going on inside the Entoverse, so the reader quickly figures it out, and spends the whole book waiting for the characters to catch up.  The Entoverse is a great idea, but it feels like an awkward graft on the Minervan novels, which haven't really dealt with this kind of science before. I like these books for their secret history of humanity!

Though this book does give plenty of that-- it's just stupid. Apparently all the terrible people of Earth history are Entoverse-escaped Jevlenese. There's also a lot of ranting by the main characters that the Ganymeans really messed up in assuming that humans were like them, since humans are intrinsically selfish and violent, and the best political systems channel this rather than ignore it. This has two problems: 1) I don't buy it and 2) the novel itself has told us that the worst humans are Jevelenese!

There's also yet another love interest for Hunt; at least this one has a vocation beyond "Hunt's girlfriend," but she barely contributes to the plot, and is pretty stupid for a supposedly experienced journalist.

I was pleased to note that my supposition that Hogan had read Kuhn was proved correct; there are two very explicit references in Entoverse.

Inherit the Stars

Hardcover, 728 pages
Published 1981 (contents: 1977-81)
Acquired March 2008
Read June 2012

The Minvervan Experiment
by James P. Hogan

I have fond memories of reading James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars from when I was a kid. It was passed on to me by my father, and I know I read it at least twice. A few years ago, I acquired this book-- the first I knew that Inherit the Stars had any sequels, much less four. It's first two are collected here, and I took the opportunity to reread the original and read the other two for the first time:

Inherit the Stars
It's pretty easy to read many sf stories as essentially detective fiction, but perhaps that has never been more true than with this novel. The novel lays out a very intriguing mystery-- how did the corpse of a human being in a spacesuit end up on the moon 50,000 years ago?-- and all of the information, and then proceeds to have the characters solve it. There's not much of characterization or depth here, really, but that's not what you're reading it for. Even if you've read the book before and know the answer, there's a certain joy in watching a set of skilled professionals at work, slowing piecing together the clues and unraveling the mystery.

Inherit the Stars was published around a decade after Thomas Kuhn blew open the scientific world with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and it would not surprise me at all to learn that Hogan had read his work; the book in many ways epitomizes what Kuhn says about the moment of crisis that causes a paradigm change. Some attempt to keep on working in the old paradigm, ignoring bits that don't fit, others plunge ahead, and it's hard for everyone to communicate without a common language.

There are also some interesting echoes of Darwin. One of my favorite parts of The Descent of Man is when Darwin talks about the valiant little ape who saved his comrade, as it's inspiring; we as a species came into existence because of a countless number of events of tenacious survival. Inherit the Stars ends similarly, with the solution to the mystery actually being quite inspirational in what it says about humankind.

The Gentle Giants of Ganymede
This book suffers one of the most common problems of sequels. It's essentially the same book as the first one, only less compelling. It's structured around a mystery, but instead of "how did the corpse of a human being in a spacesuit end up on the moon 50,000 years ago?", it's something about amino acids. Of course, it grows more complex from there, but one central mystery never drives the novel, just a number of small and underdeveloped ones.

One of the big weaknesses in Inherit the Stars, by the by, is that the characters uncover the spaceship on Ganymede at the exact moment they need the information it contains. Lucky them! The Gentle Giants of Ganymede exacerbates this tenfold with its big coincidence; all in all, I found this a dull and pointless sequel.

Giants' Star
Thankfully, things pick up with Giants' Star, which takes the series from scientific mysteries to political ones; this is actually a pretty fast-paced thriller about alien interference in human development. There's spy missions, space warfare, alien invasions, and some really cool mysteries to unravel. It's a massive change in tone from the first two books, and involving in a much less intellectual way than Inherit the Stars, but I liked it a lot anyway-- you just have to enjoy it for what it is. The plots within plots get pretty elaborate at some points.

It does undermine the series' own mythology in some key ways, though. One of the problems I have with the Foundation series as it goes on is that it constantly undoes its own purpose: you start out thinking psychohistory predicts everything, but soon you find out that the Second Foundation's telepaths manipulated everything, and then you find out that there are even further levels of manipulation, so that psychohistory (ostensibly the core premise of the series) doesn't work at all. Something similar happens here; by the end of Giants' Star, you've learned that the scientists in Inherit the Stars were right about what happened... but for all the wrong reasons. It reads as though readers objected to Hogan's solution on scientific grounds, and he had to keep on coming up with reasons it could still work, disrupting the sheer elegance of the original. I also think that focusing on the giants is focusing on the less interesting part of the series premise-- Charley's people are the cool ones!

If you can just look at Giants' Star as a standalone though, it works pretty well, and I'm interested enough that I've picked up the last two books in the series, and hopefully I'll read them soon...

(These books also introduced me to the UK idea of the "cryptic crossword." Geeze! I struggle with the L.A. Times one enough, and I'll stick to that, thank you very much.)