Rollback

Next up on my Hugo reading list: Robert J. Sawyer's Rollback. (Tor, 2007; editor: David Hartwell; originally serialized in Analog; editor: Stanley Schmidt).  I'm still not having a good year here.  Once again I'm an outlier in my opinion of a very popular book.  But once again I have a novel in front of me that has two extremely nifty ideas in it and doesn't really follow through effectively with either.  This is getting annoying.

Significant spoilers follow.

There are two intertwined stories in Rollback.  The first concerns the stretched-over-time conversation occurring between an alien race from a planet orbiting Sigma Draconis and humans on Earth.   The 18.8-light years' distance between Earth and the Dracons makes for a very slow exchange of messages, and the book opens just as Dracon-to-human message #2 has finally been received.  Sarah Halifax, the wife of the protagonist (an ordinary sort of guy named Don) is the astronomer who decoded and composed a reply to the original message.  Unfortunately, the thirty-eight years that have passed since then have left her and Don both eighty-seven and in poor health.  Sarah might live long enough to figure out the new message and compose a reply, but she won't last much longer.

This brings us to the second story, which is an interesting riff on the possible perils of longevity treatment.  The medical know-how exists to make people effectively immortal and to bring back their youthful bodies (the "rollback" of the title).  A rich SETI enthusiast offers the treatment to Sarah and, at her insistence, to Don so that she can continue to lead the human-Dracon interactions.  But there's a hitch: long-ago experimental cancer treatments have left Sarah's body unable to regenerate.  Pretty soon we have the uncomfortable situation of a healthy twenty-something Don married to a sickly eighty-seven-year-old Sarah.  Can this marriage be saved?

Both of these are pretty neat ideas and I was fairly excited at the beginning of the book.  But the human-Dracon story is severely handicapped by the long timeframe.  Despite Sawyer's heavy use of flashbacks to Don and Sarah's youth and the time of the original message from the Dracons, the main business of this storyline is Sarah sitting at a desk thinking intensely.  This does not make for lively storytelling, even with a clever robot for her to bounce ideas off of.  And while the flashbacks illuminated the history, I often found them clumsily set up as well as prone to the same trouble: thirty-eight years before, here's Sarah thinking intensely!  I would rather have seen this story told in sequential segments.  The unraveling of the alien's language and the decoding of the second message (which is encrypted as well) are clever and interesting, they just don't take up enough of the book.

(Spoilers coming.  Big spoilers.  Really.)

And then there's the love story, or stories.  Don and Sarah have always been exactly the same age and have gone through every part of life in lockstep.  We know this because Sawyer tells us over and over again.  Now they're not the same age any more.  Don is young and full of testosterone and wants to have sex!  And in sixty years of marriage, they haven't come up with any ideas other than the missionary position, which Sarah is too fragile for.  Horrors!  So, men having these uncontrollable needs (Sawyer being somewhat sexist as well as ignorant about sexual variations), Don promptly embarks on an affair with a graduate student in Sarah's old department who is just like a younger version of Sarah.  But she wants to get married and have babies!  Oh, no, what shall we do?  Don loves Sarah but he also loves Lenore!  And Lenore's name gives us so many chances to quote Poe in a meaningful way, whereas Sawyer totally misses the obvious comparison by failing to name Don and Sarah's son Isaac!  See it all next week on Oprah!

(Here comes the big spoiler.  Don't say I didn't warn you!  Skip two paragraphs if you don't want to be spoiled.)

There are the seeds here of a very poignant look at the real differences and problems that would arise with the sudden appearance of such an age gap in a longstanding marriage as well as the mental gap between Don and Lenore.  But the interesting possibilities are overwhelmed by the soap opera love triangle, and Sawyer punts.  Sarah is so old that the problem is solved by her conveniently-timed death.  This would have been a much more interesting plotline if Sarah had been somewhat less fragile and more feisty and had lived considerably longer and had time to interact with Don more instead of focusing on codebreaking.  I'd be more concerned about having dropped this spoiler in if I'd found the love triangle more interesting; as written, it was mostly an annoying distraction from the neat stuff about alien syntax and the aliens' goals, which I have carefully avoided the details of so as not to spoil the parts of the book that are actually good.

One overall problem with this book is that Don is a pretty dull character and just a bystander for the entire alien-message-decoding part of the plot.  Sarah had more flair and was actually doing the first contact work; I think Sawyer picked the wrong protagonist.  Don is interested in Don's problems, but they were not that interesting to me.  There are not enough glimpses into Sarah's thoughts and feelings, and once she died I mostly lost interest.  Don and Lenore and the babies offered some possibilities, but Sawyer jumped forward another couple of decades and missed the chance to write about them.  Instead we got the sentimental visit to Sarah's grave, and my sense of déjà vu kicked into high gear for reasons I'll get to in a later post.

(No more spoilers after this.)

Along with the major plot annoyances above, Rollback also contains several minor irritations that really add up over the course of the book.  One is the gratuitous pop-culture name-dropping.  The age difference between Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones.  Contact.  Seinfeld.  Maybe this would be more amusing if I cared about the Douglas/Zeta-Jones marriage, or had seen the movie, or had watched the TV show.  Or maybe it would work better if Sawyer did not feel compelled not just to name-drop but to explain his name-dropping.  But the references were so unnecessary and heavy-handed that they kept jerking me out of the story.  For example, did Sawyer really need all this:

Sarah fondly remembered Seinfeld, although, sadly, it hadn’t aged well. Still, one of Jerry’s bits of stand-up seemed as true today as it had been half a century ago. When it came to TV, most men were hunters, switching from channel to channel, always on the prowl for something better, while women were nesters, content to settle in with a single program.

as a prologue to saying that Sarah was restless and kept channel-hopping?  He could have skipped that whole bit and it would have made not the slightest difference in the scene.  Similarly, did we really need a detailed review of all the flaws in Contact to make the point that Sawyer is much more realistic about how first contact would work?  Granted, already!  Nor did I need an ongoing plug for the Atkins diet; those bits felt like a paid product placement and made me wonder if the Atkins folks chipped in on his advance or something.

Only somewhat less irritating is the excessive specificity of the locations.  Don and Sarah live on Betty Ann Street.  Don walks down Diagonal Road past Willowdale Middle School.  These names and places don't matter at all in the story.  Nor does it matter that the convenience store is a 7-Eleven, or that said store is actually open twenty-four hours a day.  Who cares?  Why is Sawyer determined to take up valuable mental real estate with these mundane little details?  Is it just to give some cheap thrills to the locals?  ("Look, honey, our neighborhood 7-Eleven is in the book!")  The place-specificity works in well-done urban fantasy, but it didn't do anything for me in Rollback; again, it kept jerking me out of the story.

So what to make of Rollback?  I didn't hate it, and it had some clever bits, but overall it left me frustrated and dissatisfied.  There was a really good story here!  There were two good stories!  Why didn't Sawyer write them?  What a waste of good ideas.

I'm sort of torn over where to start this book out on my ballot.  I don't personally find it Hugoworthy; it's flawed in too many ways.  It's not nearly as ambitious or literate as the Chabon.  On the other hand, it didn't repulse me (can the praise get any fainter?)  For now I'll put it at four.  I know two of the remaining three nominees are going to go higher, and I hope the third doesn't end up in a traffic jam at the bottom of the list with this and YPU.

My ballot as it now stands:
1.
2.
3.
4. Rollback
5. The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Plenty of people disagree with me about this book; you may too.  See for yourself:

Comments

[Marilee J. Layman]

When the third book comes, I'm finishing a Sawyer trilogy, even though years ago I said I wouldn't read any more of his. We did the first for the bookgroup and even though the worldbuilding and physics were crap, the story was interesting. The library had the second book so I ordered the third from Abebooks. If I'd read the second first, I wouldn't have ordered the third. The second was all lecturing (that I agreed with, but I don't like 40 pages of lecturing in my fiction). I have hope the third will at least have some interesting bits because I plan to start it since I bought it. I'll pass it on to anyone in the bookgroup who also read the second (I know others meant to) and want the third. At least I bought it from Abebooks.

[Susan de Guardiola]

This was the first book of Sawyer's I've read. I suppose I would try another if it was put in front of me or was a Hugo nominee, but his failures in Rollback do not incline me to go out looking for more of his work.

[Serge]

I haven't read the novel, but I get the sense from your description of it that this story should really have been a novella. Am I off the mark?

[Susan de Guardiola]

I'm not sure what it should have been, but perhaps two separate novellas? The alien-contact stuff alone is pretty cool and would've made a nifty novella in and of itself. The rollback concept is likewise interesting and would have done well with a more interesting protagonist and more focus on Sarah. Maybe these are two great tastes that just don't taste great together?

If I were Schmidt or Hartwell I would have been savage with the red pen on the product placement and pop-culture references, though. For me, they're an ongoing irritant. For a younger reader, they might well be a real barrier, in the way that my younger friends look politely befuddled and soon change the subject when I go on about Classic Trek. I didn't even mention the Lost in Space references, which to me are pretty much gobbledy-gook and mainly made me wonder how creaky Sawyer himself was. It's a problem with being so specific with the years; I think the book is going to feel weirdly dated in the future. And it really wasn't necessary to the story to be so specifically dated.

[Marilee J. Layman]

I just looked him up in ISFDB, and he's five years younger than I am, so he can't be too creaky.

[Susan de Guardiola]

He's eight years older than me, so not creaky in the literal sense. But Lost in Space feels like a generational marker for people some years older than that. Interesting, since it's roughly the same vintage as Classic Trek, which feels like "my" era, even though I was too young to watch it new. Maybe it's because it didn't hold up as well or last in reruns the way Trek did, so the demographic slice is narrower and older?

[Serge]

Unless the story is set in the era where those references would have meant something to those who lived then, I prefer that writers abstain from making those references - at least if they're likely to become incomprehensible to future readers. (And I never watched Seinfeld.)

And there is the danger of dating the story, like when the movie Contact had Bill Clinton appear as the President.

[Susan de Guardiola]

The only reason I knew Bill Clinton appeared in Contact is that Sawyer mentioned it in his discussion of the movie's flaws in Rollback. I plan to evict this annoying little snippet of information from my brain as quickly as possible to make room for something more interesting, like collar-starching technique.

[Marilee J. Layman]

The best way to starch a collar is to have a form to lay it out on.

[Serge]

Did ST-TNG use collar-starching on its cast?

[Susan de Guardiola]

I had really bad luck starching the collar in question. I am tempted to solve this problem by interfacing the collar.

[Marilee J. Layman]

If it doesn't show, no reason you shouldn't!

[Susan de Guardiola]

Well...it does and it doesn't. It's the shirt collar, which is mostly covered by cravat (which also needs starching) and waistcoat collar. But it does show at the tips. The downside of making it permanently stiff is that I would love the ability to appear en déshabillé with the cravat dangling loose, collar open, throat visible, etc., and that is a bit more problematic if I build the interfacing into the collar itself.

[Marilee J. Layman]

What about using collar points -- the metal ones are time-accurate. And light interfacing might work, too.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Dunno, but I have to do something - every time I watch the video, the floppy collar makes me INSANE.

[Marilee J. Layman]

Even though it's dark, I see your point. What about using really stiff interfacing -- like what's used for couch skirts -- and making it removable? It's stiff enough to stand up by itself, and if you include tiny snaps or velcro at the bottom inside, you could pull the interfacing when you wanted to look casual.