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The Man Who Fell To Earth #1
This book was written in 1963, and carries the problems of its day forward, like most SF. I have seen the 1974 film with Bowie as Thomas Newton twice, and have not yet seen the new series. How does the novel hold up after 60 years as SF? How does it hold up as a novel?
Comments
I thought it held up pretty well. I can skip over the outdated science of "Mars as barely habitable". But the characters weren't awful, the plot was believable, the worldbuilding was reasonable.
There's an element of the book addressing the concerns of the time, and there's that element of "retrofuture" about it. But the novel doesn't rely on the trappings of any particular time beyond "sometime in the past 80-odd years".
I agree, the novel still holds its own. I think this is partly because Tevis never tries to describe Newton's home (and so far as I recall never actually commits to Mars as an author, though some of the characters certainly do). I also think it's because his writing is good, so for me at least I was enjoying the immersion in the work quite enough not to be bothered by some vagaries about Newton's home planet. All that was really important about it plot-wise was that from his perspective, Earth was going through a very similar self-destructive trajectory
I think the reaction of various people on earth to this alien is interesting. Some guess he’s an alien, but are willing to go along with him because he’s a nice guy (and can make them rich?) Even the government is content to leave him alone. There’s none of that Cold War paranoia. For this reason it stands out to me.
Also, there’s a tragedy aspect, in that Mara is dying, it’s people are ‘suffering the long defeat’ to quote a Tolkien idea. Newton is working by himself to try and save them, but in the end he gives up on that dream, dooming them. And himself, really, since he can never go back.
Were this a current novel, he’d be crowdfunding, making YouTube appeals or Ted Talks, and he’d get it done. So in that sense, the novel still feels like it’s of it’s time, and not ours.
> I think the reaction of various people on earth to this alien is interesting. Some guess he’s an alien, but are willing to go along with him because he’s a nice guy (and can make them rich?) Even the government is content to leave him alone. There’s none of that Cold War paranoia. For this reason it stands out to me.
Talking of the government, something I totally missed was the reference to Watergate - I couldn't have told you when that happened, but turns out it was 1972, which would be smart in a 1963 book
It also seems that Tevis suffered personally from alcoholism through large parts of his life, which is perhaps why he foregrounds that both here and in Queen's Gambit.
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> Also, there’s a tragedy aspect, in that Mara is dying, it’s people are ‘suffering the long defeat’ to quote a Tolkien idea. Newton is working by himself to try and save them, but in the end he gives up on that dream, dooming them. And himself, really, since he can never go back.
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> Were this a current novel, he’d be crowdfunding, making YouTube appeals or Ted Talks, and he’d get it done. So in that sense, the novel still feels like it’s of it’s time, and not ours.
Two themes which are picked up in this year's streamed version, which in part is an exploration of how events might turn out different now.
I thought it was a good novel. Even though you didn't like the Buried Giant, I found this was similar in that it was concerned with the internal lives of characters who have passed their active times.
As SF I think it holds up pretty well, but I wonder if my grandkid can relate in any meaningful way to the world described. I don't think the world as described is very familiar to him, I suppose because the compromises global commercial society requires have already been made, and we are now on to dealing with the required compromises of a global society rather than the causes. Maybe I'll ask him to read it, but he's not much of a reader, like all the characters in the book.
I thought it was interesting that Newton's technology seemed low polluting, or maybe pollution didin't matter?
There were great changes in technology triggered by Newton, though they were not the changes that actually happened. They are intriguing in a "what would it have been like if technology went in these directions instead?" way, but what really makes this book feel strange is the static social order, which does not change at all. THAT felt odd to me.
Yeah the global political order was really inscrutable. The US seems to be in a heating up Cold War, but with who, and why it matters didn't seem important enough to tell us. Perhaps it's because it doesn't matter to any of our protagonists. I simply shrugged and moved on.