Merry Christmas, Rebel scum!
Merry Christmas, Rebel scum!
It has taken me two years to finally finish The January Dancer by Michael Flynn. I began reading this book soon after reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge in 2012. After having to restart from the beginning once, going back several chapters once, and just not reading it for very long periods of time while I focused on studying Japanese to pass my Japanese Language Proficiency Tests (JLPT), I finally finished reading this book. I began reading it at the end of September 2012, and finished it in October 2014.
Exposition 1
I really miss Borders Bookstores. When I was a college student, a typical weekend night was spent going to Petco and Petsmart to look at tropical fish, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. This is where I would spend my Friday or Saturday evenings. I loved hitting up both Borders and Barnes & Noble the most. But while B&N made you pay for their discount membership, Borders' membership was free. Just print out a coupon and enjoy. When Mayu and I moved to Arizona after living in Himeji, we would often visit Borders. When Ulan-chan was born, she was a night owl, and we would often take her to the nearby Borders so that she could play with the toys and we could read books to her. The store didn't close until 11pm or so.
We had a lot of fond memories of Borders, so we were sad when Borders filed for bankruptcy. When they were liquidating their inventory, we would often go to the Borders stores in Chandler and Mesa and buy discount books. While searching through the dwindling selection of the science fiction and fantasy novels section, I was certainly grabbing books by staple authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov that I had been meaning to buy. But I was also finding some other interesting books by striking up conversations with people. I was talking with one guy for quite a while, and we swapped recommendations. I suggested that he get Idoru by William Gibson (he'd never heard of Gibson, as hard as it was to believe). He had some great recommendations for me, too, such as Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. It looked interesting, so I snagged it. YOINK! He also told me about The January Dancer and its sequel, Up Jim River by Michael Flynn. He said that these books were fantastic space opera in the vein of E.E. Doc Smith. I picked up The January Dancer and read the back of the book.
Exposition 2
So let me give you some more background. When I was in high school, I discovered a computer game called Starflight by Electronic Arts. I played it on the family's 286 AT. (The computer ran at 16Mhz, had 1MB of RAM, and an 8mb hard drive. Dad bought this back in the summer of 1989.) It completely blew me away how the game designers could fit a quadrant of a galaxy onto one 3.5" floppy disk. (Earlier versions of this game came on two 5.25" floppies.) This was the first role-playing game I had ever played. It was very much like Star Trek: to crew your vessel, you have a captain, a communications officer, a science officer, an engineering officer, and a ship doctor. You basically create these characters by choosing their race, giving them names, and training them. You first start out exploring your immediate solar system, and after upgrading your ship's engines, you begin to explore the sea of stars, exploring planets, communicating with aliens, and going on adventures. It was a totally engrossing computer game.
What really intrigued me about the game is how it presented the element of interstellar archaeology. In the game, you could come across old, abandoned outposts and ruined cities and read messages left behind. You can also come across the ruins of a race called The Ancients, which had once occupied the sector of the galaxy and nobody knew what had happened to them. Growing up in Arizona, I likened this to the legends of the Anasazi: who were they, and where did they go? The ruins of the Anasazi can be found throughout the Four Corners area, and this mysterious history always excited me. Well, now it is apparent that these Anasazi are simply the ancestors of the modern day Pueblo peoples, who had just abandoned their cliff dwellings in favor of a different way of life. My dad's friend is a Hopi, and he told us this much. But it is the romance and mystery that always intrigued me as an Arizonan boy. The Starflight game posed the same questions about The Ancients: Who were they? What were they like? Where did they go? What happened to them?
I never did complete the game. I even bought the game's strategy guidebook, but I could never destroy the Crystal Planet at the end of the game. I had the bombs to detonate the planet and save the galaxy, but the darn thing just would not blow up. I had written many letters to Electronic Arts, and finally they determined that my copy of the game must've just had defective coding. Instead of sending me a replacement disk, they merely suggested that I buy the game again. Thanks a lot, EA! I did get started on playing Starflight 2, but once we had upgraded to a 486, the math coprocessor was too fast for the random programmed subroutines to trigger the alien vessels' response to hailing frequencies, making them extremely difficult to talk to (if not impossible 95% of the time).
The January Dancer
Anyhow, it is this sort of nostalgic feeling I had for Starflight that I felt when I read the synopsis for this book. I took that guy's advice and bought this book along with its sequel. YOINK!
The plot of The January Dancer revolves around such ancient, galactic archaeology. In this book's universe, there once was a race called the Prehumans, a race of aliens that had once settled space thousands of millennia ago, leaving behind archaeological marvels. But why they had disappeared from known space is a mystery. I found this particularly fascinating.
Another interesting aspect of this book is the limitations placed on this fictional universe. One such limitation is placed on interstellar travel. This is unlike typical space travel, as is presented in the bulk of SF books, in which going from point A to point B involves travel in a straight line. As I mentioned in my review of A Fire Upon The Deep, this sort of limitation on space travel fascinates me. In The January Dancer, space can only be navigable through certain pathways in space. Starship engines called "alfvens" are necessary for interstellar travel. Within a solar system, starships are confined to obey Newtonian space. However once outside, these alfvens can ride these strands of electric space that binds stars together and form corridors of travel. These are like wormholes that connect stars. The closer the stars are to each other, the stronger the pathway. But across great distances, such as to another spiral arm of the galaxy, instead of a wide freeway between stars the connection would be likened to walking a tightrope across thousands of lightyears at warp speed, and if that pathway be lost, then the ship would be lost in space forever.
Ships entering a solar system would exit the space highway via a "ramp" in space, and the system's installed magbeam generators catch these ships and slow these inbound vessels down. If these magbeams are disabled for whatever reason, an unsuspecting ship would be forced to emergency brake and cause great strains on its alfvens. This book also hints at secret pathways between stars. What is also unique is that ships will leave their imprints on the fabric of spacetime as they shoot through these electric avenues, and in fact the fossilized images of the Prehuman ships could sometimes still be seen.
Another interesting limitation placed on this universe is that communication faster than light does not exist. Communication is established through ships bearing information from star system to star system, or through launching probes (called "swifties") down the interstellar highway routes.
So about the book: Before reading, one thing that grabbed my attention right away was that this novel has a map. I like books with maps! It has interesting sounding star system names like Ugly Man, Hawthorn Rose, Abyalon, Jehova, and the Jenjen Cluster. The space routes are named too: St. Gothard's Pass, Palisades Parkway, Silk Road, The Long March, and such. Neat! Another thing I really like about the book is the narrative writing style. It's just written matter-of-factly that it impressed me. The book is split between the "scarred man" telling the events to the "harper" (kind of like some interstellar bard of sorts), and switching to the actual story. While the parts between the scarred man and the harper were the least interesting, apparently this is some sort of Irish folk-story telling writing style that I really cannot pretend to know or care much about. While I didn't like being jerked out of the story and back to the man and the harper, eventually it is explained how the old man and the young woman are tied to this story.
Basically, the story begins with a tramp freighter captain, Amos January, and his crew's discovery of a vast, sprawling complex of Prehuman architecture while mining for some ore on a barren planet because their ship had broken down in that system. In it, January discovers a sort of twisting, sandstone brick that seems amusing, so he takes it. Other relics include a scale model of the galaxy inside of a small, black egg that is incapable of being picked up by human hands, a frictionless fractal coral that is also impossible to be picked up, and other mysterious wonders. January and his crew are forced to abandon their mining equipment to escape an immense sandstorm that is encroaching on their position.
Later, January is left with no choice but to sell the artifact for money to repair his ship and replace the parts his crew were forced to cannibalize for repairs. It turns out that this seemingly innocent relic has some rather deep legends regarding it, with the promise of power that some are willing to kill for. The stone is confiscated in a raid by spacefaring barbarians called the Cynthians, and pursuit is given to track down the stone.
I really liked January and his crew, but they are not the main characters in the story. The actual main characters are slowly introduced a little at a time, which is a bit unusual as far as typical storytelling goes. Hugh is the first one to emerge, a man who had become the de-facto administrator of a planet called New Eirann that had just undergone a violent political struggle. He was exiled, and later is joined by a man called "the Fudir" who seemed to actually be the least interesting character, yet the most pivotal. Galactic police investigators called Hounds are introduced, and Greystroke and Bridget Ban make up the other two main characters. The story follows these four throughout their travels, in pursuit of the Dancer, on the hunch that it could possibly be an extremely dangerous artifact in the wrong hands.
I have read criticism that this book is "difficult to read," however I did not find it really that difficult. Even though it took me two years to finish this book, this was not due to any difficulty in reading it. One thing is that the characters in the story use several aliases, so you will have to keep track of their multiple names. There is a list of characters in the front of the book to help with this. However, I would certainly not recommend it to anybody who speaks English as a second language though, since much of the words used require a bit of interpretation. Certain names of objects and such are introduced without any real explanation, and it just takes the reader to absorb the context they are in to make sense of it. The book introduces "Terrans" as an ethnic group. Basically, they are people exiled from old Earth into this region of space, in which people had left earth quite a long time ago. Terrans are basically looked down on and treated as second class citizens. Perhaps the main reason is because they talk like idiot Gungans. Take this quote from Mgurk, the first Terran introduced in the story: "Hey, alla come-come, you. Jildy, sahbs. Dekker alla cargo, here. We rich, us." This sort of crap hurt my eyes to read because most of it makes no sense, and the Fudir often speaks like this throughout the book. It's like if you take the "it's cool to speak like a moron" aspect of hip-hop culture, see how hip-hop's popularity is so widespread, advance this concept thousands of years into the future, and you will see how stupid people on this planet will eventually talk. It's like watching the movie Idiocracy, except that it takes it further into the future than the movie does. No wonder people in this part of the galaxy look down on Terrans.
I don't want to talk much more about the book without giving away spoilers. I will just say that this was not a disappointing book to read and that it really drew me into its universe. It really was an enjoyable read. In fact, I have already started reading its sequel, Up Jim River. I just hope that it won't take me as long to get through this. I just started it a week ago, and I'm up to page 50 in it. I just hope I can balance my life, studies, and hobbies better to allow me to get through this next story more quickly than the first. The January Dancer introduces a bit of a back history about a fearsome Terran Confederation, located in the spiral arm where Earth is located, that is a threat looming beyond the Rift, the dead space which separates their domain from the spiral arm where the events of this book are located. This apparently is setting things up for a larger story that goes beyond just the two books that I own, and apparently there are several books in this series to date. I'm not sure how long I will follow these stories, but for now I am already enjoying the second book in the series.
Prepare to recoil in horror and shield your eyes for what awaits in the next chapter of Greg's Life!
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