Unto Leviathan [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

So, fertig mit Unto Leviathan, und ich frag mich, warum das Ding den Philip Dick Award gewonnen hat, weil so toll wars jetzt nicht.

Blasse Figuren, viele banale Dialoge, z.T. auf Grundschulniveau. Ich dachte erst, dass mir die Dialoge so komisch vorkommen, weil ich eher selten Bücher auf Englisch lese und nicht so das Gefühl für die Sprache habe. Nachdem ich jetzt City on fire (von Walter Jon Williams) angefangen habe, wurde mir aber das Gegenteil bewiesen: Russo schreibt echt so schlecht (jedenfalls in dem Buch hier).

Letztlich war nicht alles schlecht, aber der Roman wird nicht von den Figuren, sondern von der Handlung getragen (d.h. die halbe Länge hätte auch gereicht). Interessantes Ende (weil offen), aber der Bringer war's insgesamt nicht.

This book won the 2001 Philip K. Dick award (under the title "Ship of Fools"), and that tells me two things. First, 2001 must have been a monstrously poor year for Science Fiction. And even given that, (second:) the standards of this award have become perilously low. I'll come back to that in the end of my review. I'm still furious that I wasted time and money on this book, and I want to convey this in my review, too.

It's hard to make my point clear while not giving one or the other hint on how the story plot is developping. It's not that the publishers would mind, they didn't ask the Wikipedia guys to remove their plot synopsis - but I don't want to spoil the reading "fun" for those who are still willing to buy this ... effort.

The plot is not rich enough for a novel and would have been more adequate for a short story - but that isn't even my point of criticism. You could say that the author inflates a short story to a novel, but at least that he's doing extremely well: the characters are well done, deep, rich and credible, their relationships are complex and elaborate, the places are well drawn and engaging, and the story plot is quite convincing, at least for the first three quarters of the book, where it is logical, coherent and psychologically probable. So, for the first and greatest part of the book, this is actually really good literature (or one great bore for a not-literary-minded hard core SciFi fan...).

An especially strong point of the book is the depiction of the complexity of relations and politics on the generation ship. For the main plot, it would ultimately have been sufficient to reduce all that to a simple, Star-Trek-like chain of command, but Russo took the pains to elaborate the ship's society, and succeeded. For some dozen pages you could even think that this is going to be the main theme of "Unto Leviathan", the ship being a timeless symbol of human society and history itself. It's good and thoughtful, it's a memorable achievement.

Another strong point is the treatment of religion. Russo manages to avoid the simplistic pitfall of setting stupid, evil fundamentalists vs. good iconoclastic rationalists. Instead, he treats the topic in a thoughtful, intelligent and well-balanced manner, and integrates it neatly into the overall framework of the plot. Also here, the book is a rather good read, and I commend it for that.

So what went wrong?

The main plot starts when the generation ship reaches the planet Antioch, finds that it had already been settled by humans, and discovers the gruesome fate of the settlers - just as it is hinted at in the book's flap text. By now, the author has presented us with a complex and interesting story background, engaging characters, a shocking revelation and a mystery that yearns for a solution on an intellectual and literary level worthy of its exposition. That's exactly what the reader has the right to expect when the ship leaves the planet and has an ... encounter soon afterwards. Even there, the author continues to build up expectations and a sense of mystery.

Now there is a promise here, given to the reader by the author. Just imagine a crime novel that received, let's say, the Agatha-Christie-Awart (if that exists). It starts out with everything done right by the author, just like in "Unto Leviathan", and at first you get the impression that whatever twist the plot is going to take, in the end you'll be presented with a worthy ending, a deeply philosophical, intellectually surprising and truly memorable solution to the central mystery of the plot. But it's horse manure you'll get. In the end it was the gardener, and you might have suspected that all along, but who would have thought that the book is going to be that stupid after all! And it was not just the gardener, it's also that he did it just because he's that sick and evil kind of person you'll only find in third rate direct-to-video crime movies. The kind who'll get their behinds kicked by Jean-Claude van Damme. There's NOTHING MORE BEHIND IT, he's not really a character, just a MacGuffin, and that's all. All! That's how the story ends! Ten exclamation marks! Goodbye, reader, buy my next book ...

And that is exactly the experience you'll get from "Unto Leviathan". Moreover, it all ends in a jumble of badly forced drama, cheap-tragic heroism and the kind of stoic self-sacrifice you'd expect from a direct-to-video movie script. It's painfully illogical. There is not even the sense of an open end here, of questions better left open because we cannot possibly probe the alien mind. All questions are implicitly answered, only in a very, very stupid way. It's one big insult to the reader. "I'd say it's a piece of horse manure, but I've never seen a horse that big."

You'll hate this book if you're a more literary minded reader: it starts as good literature, then utterly collapses and ends up as cheap genre barf. And you'll hate this book if you're one of those no-frills SF fans: for them, everything up to planetfall will be a hell of a bore (all those discussions about religion, freedom of will etc.), while the ending is so forced, so hackneyed, threadbare and unengaging that they'll regret not having spent the money and time on another Star Wars novel instead ...

Finally, back to the Dick award: the most charitable assumption on why Ship of Fools (Unto Leviathan) was granted such an honour is that the jury members only read the first half of the novel, and dealt out the award in good faith, expecting that a novel that starts out that well couldn't possibly blow it all in the end. Any other assumption about the award-giving mechanism would be just too depressing. Philip K. Dick himself had the approach to start many of his stories with themes and motifs taken from lowly contemporary genre trash, but then giving unexpected depth to his material and twisting it into intriguing and deeply engaging works of literature, one could even say: philosophy. Russo, however, goes exactly the opposite way: he starts his novel as good literature (in the conceptual framework of a specific genre), does everything right for three quarters of the book, but then insults his reader with a cheap, stupid and utterly disappointing conclusion, with a broken promise ... He just totally blows it.

Thus I conclude that in 2001 the jurors at the Norwescon found no one worthy of receiving the Philip K. Dick award. Instead, they decided to give away what was really an Anti-PKD-award to mark the worst and most pretentious failure of the year, and the winner was: Richard Paul Russo, "Ship of Fools / Unto Leviathan". The rest was just one big misunderstanding ...