John Perry is a likable old man from Ohio who joins the army of the future for a shot at a second life. In typical Heinlein fashion, military recruits derive benefits unavailable to everyday citizens. See, if you join the army on your seventy-fifth birthday you receive the luxury of a brand new body, which is more physically fit than your original body ever was. From there you’re shuffled off to boot camp on a remote planet where you’re likely to learn that disgusting, evil-looking aliens are humanity’s allies while the pleasant-looking, dear-like aliens are most likely among your worst nightmares.

That’s nearly half of the book, but I haven’t given too much away. The fun isn’t so much what happens, but how it happens. Remember Kick the Can? It was the episode of The Twilight Zone (remade as a segment in the movie version) in which a group of elderly people learn how to be young again. That’s what Old Man’s War reminds me of a lot of the time. It’s as if a large group of seventy-five year olds relive their first day of school on an intergalactic scale. For a long, opening section of the book it’s a whimsical fantasy. At the beginning of the second section, however, it turns dark, but manages to retain its charm.

Although I frequent his blog more than most I haven’t gotten around to reading any of John Scalzi’s fiction until now. I bought Old Man’s War a long time ago after reading Scalzi’s candid introduction to The Forever War (one of my all-time favorites), but it was one of those books that got lost by the bed in my ever growing “To Read” pile. I should know by now that the book I plan to read is never the book I read at the time. Every time I finish one novel, instead of going to the next in line, I go through my unread pile and read first sentences at random. A Dune sequel wasn’t doing it for me. Neither was The Wheel of Time or Consider Phlebas. So with a sigh I picked up Old Man’s War and read:

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.

Now you should see why I was hooked. Openings are the most important and perhaps hardest part to get right. Scalzi does it in a little over a dozen words.

Heinlein’s stamp is all over Old Man’s War in a pleasant way… and I’m not the biggest Heinlein fan. Scalzi is a Heinlein fan and isn’t ashamed to draw inspiration from the SF maestro. Old Man’s War is a casual read, though not at all shallow, and you can’t read it in the same house anyone’s sleeping in—it’s far too funny for that. An early scene in which John visits an army doctor had me howling.

I think it’s worth noting that Scalzi originally self-published Old Man’s War on his blog, where it became so popular Tor eventually picked it up. It just goes to show that the science fiction portion of the publishing industry is relatively fearless of trying new things, not to mention particularly proud of finding new talent. In a matter of a few short years Scalzi went from being a self-published science fiction writer to the head of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Oh, and Paramount optioned Old Man’s War into a movie. Sure, options are a dime a dozen—I’m still waiting for a Repairman Jack film—but I imagine Old Man’s War: The Movie has a good shot of being made if Ender’s Game performs well at the box office (it will).

I assumed John Scalzi was one of those guys who lucked out. I realize I was wrong. The guy’s got the talent to back it up. I don’t remember the last time I became so enamored with a writer after reading only one of his novels. Check out the user reviews. I’m far from being the only one with such high praise, even if two of the three people in the video above disliked it.

I don’t plan on reading any of the sequels next, but that’s only because I never read the books I plan on reading.

If you know me at all, you know I love the works of Arthur C. Clarke. As Woody Allen told Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, love isn’t even a strong enough word. I need an entirely new word for how much I love ACC. Yet, I don’t absolutely love everything he’s written. I’m not so blinded by my fandom that I can’t see the flaws in his method. It sometimes seems there are two ACCs, one who writes what we want and, well, one who almost seems like an impostor. Almost.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!

In 1941, Isaac Asimov published a What if? story inspired by John W. Campbell who, in turn, was inspired by the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote above. What if humanity had never seen stars? In both the short story and novel form, Nightfall proposes people would go crazy. Catastrophically crazy.

The Short Story

The short story takes place on a planet with six suns. At any given time, you can expect the six suns to light every inch of the surface. Which means the people who live there don’t know what darkness is. It’s an abstract concept to them. We learn early on that when these people are faced with darkness they go apeshit insane.

A group of scientists make a terrifying discovery: every two thousand years, the planet goes dark. What does this mean for a civilization who has never seen darkness? Widespread psychosis. A civilization that tears itself down. See, the darkness is scary enough, but the appearance of the stars make the people go absolutely mad. Gripped by the star-crazed madness, the people will do anything for light. They’ll burn any and everything they can get their hands on.

The story scared the shit out of me. It doesn’t play on the fear of darkness itself, but on the fear of “crazy” people. To be more exact, the horror element emerges from the taut suspense: you know people are going to start flipping out and you know there’s nothing the main characters can do about it. The very last line of the story chilled me to the bone.

Asimov stated he was perplexed by the popularity of the story (along with Campbell’s Who Goes There? and Orson Scott Card’s original version of Ender’s Game, it’s often called the best short story in the SF genre). He had been reluctant to give the story credit, but finally did in a short stories collection. To date, the story has been anthologized almost 50 times.

The Novel

In the nineties, Asimov and Robert Silverberg co-wrote a novel version. The cover of my edition claims the short story was only part of the story. They weren’t kidding.

The novel begins years before the events we witnessed in the short story. We get to know many of the characters and watch them piece together the facts: a psychologist who is treating psychotic patients who have been exposed to darkness, an archaeologist who accidentally discovers several previous civilizations, all of which were burned to the ground, and an astronomer who realizes a time will come when the planet is plunged in darkness.

The catastrophe itself takes place about midway through the book and it happens more or less exactly as it happened in the short story. The last third of the book is about the aftermath, in which most of the world’s survivors are irreversibly insane. At one point, a main character observes a group of crazy men desperately trying to uproot a tree. It was one of those images that will stick with me. The men had no good reason—you don’t have to when you’re crazy—they just wanted to pull a tree out of the ground.

You could say these people are overreacting, sure, but even Earthlings who are accustomed with nightfall have this embedded fear of the dark, which is only ignored and never cured. It isn’t really that hard to buy the catastrophic events that occur.

The original title of this post was Nightfall VS Nightfall, but it wasn’t fair to compare them. They are two separate entities written at two very different times. The novel won’t be considered a classic, and that’s shame, just because it retreads some of the same material as the short story, which is considered a classic. I suggest reading them both, starting with the short story which you can listen to at Escape Pod.

I couldn’t really remember why I liked this book so much when I was younger and decided to check it out again.

One day, chemist Frederick Hallam discovers plutonium-186… sitting on his desk. The container is marked TUNGSTEN STEEL. As it turns out, aliens from a parallel universe want our tungsten. The physical laws of their universe are different than ours; tungsten to them is as powerful an energy source as plutonium-186 is for us. What the humans set up with the aliens (“para-men”) is a free energy trade: they get our tungsten steel, we get their plutonium-186. And although there is the distinct possibility that pumping resources back and forth will lead to disaster, humanity is too addicted to care. They deny the potential catastrophe. Who’d want to give up free energy?

Isaac Asimov is known for relying on standard prose to convey grand ideas, but here he steps out of his comfort zone (a little) and creates something unusually (for him) literary. In his memoirs, which I read recently, he calls it “writing above my head.” For the first time he writes something which belongs with the then current trend of “New Wave” science fiction. It’s experimental, it’s risque, and it’s anything but golden age.

The book begins with Chapter 6. Then we get Chapter 1, more of Chapter 6, Chapter 2, and so on. When Chapter 6 finally concludes, you get why he arranged the novel this way. And just when you get to know the human characters—poof!—Asimov changes gears altogether and presents us the titular gods themselves: the para-men, who occupy roughly one third (the best part) of the novel’s attention.

The somewhat abstract yet scientifically plausible para-men are as different from any alien ever imagined as they are from the humans. They come in two major categories: the hard ones and the soft ones. The soft ones come in three sexes: parental, emotional, and rational, and it requires all three of these types for the species to breed. The good doctor does something he’s never done before: he writes about sex. And although their sex is vastly different than our sex, he isn’t dodging anything at all even though Asimov himself complains about his sometimes laughable characterizations of sex matters in the aforementioned memoirs.

Despite Asimov’s departure from his usual style, you never forget he’s the man who masterminded it. He’s far too modest when it comes to the quality of his writing, but The Gods Themselves proves he shouldn’t be. Here he proves he is a great science fiction writer. He has said this is his favorite novel of his. Maybe it’s my favorite book of his, too. I don’t know.