I first listened to The Rookie at work while I was doing a big photography project. I wasn't quite sure if I would be interested in a story about football, even if it did have aliens in it, but I liked Scott Sigler's work (I'd just finished listening to Ancestor), and I thought I'd give The Rookie a try. And I loved it.

Then Sigler decided to publish The Rookie himself, even though he has a publishing deal with Crown Publishing, a division of Random House. His publisher wasn't interested because it didn't fit the horror/thriller genre that Sigler's other books are in. I listened to him talk about his decision on an episode of Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing and I was inspired by his positive view of the future of publishing. The same night that I listened to that podcast, I bought a copy of the book. I received it last week and read it in a couple of days, and I liked it just as much in print as I did in audio.

The Rookie is set in the future, after aliens have become known to Earth, and in fact after one race of aliens conquered much of the galaxy. Football is still around, and it's a very popular sport across the galaxy. In the Galactic Football League, different races hold different positions on the team, based on their physiological traits. It's rough and deadly serious--deaths on the field are a normal part of the game.

The protagonist is Quentin Barnes. He's a young and hugely talented football player from the Purist Nation. These religious humans decry the other races, calling them "sub-races" and believing them to be Satan's associates. They don't allow aliens into their space (except for the members of the ruling race, since they have no choice), and they teach their children to hate and fear the other races. These children grow up learning how to kill the other races, and Quentin Barnes is no different in his hatred of these aliens.

When his contract is sold to a GFL team, he has the chance to realize his dream, but he's faced with the reality of having to live and work with these aliens, and even with other humans who don't fit the Purist Nation standard of humanity. In the beginning of the book, Quentin is an asshole. I don't know how else to put it--I didn't like him at all. He thinks he's so wonderful that he doesn't have to listen to anyone --his coach, the starting quarterback for his new team, his other teammates. He can't recognize honest help when he sees it, and thinks that everyone is out to embarrass and humiliate him. As Quentin begins to grow into a likable, respectable person, he's faced with more challenges and has to learn to lead the rest of his football team by seeing them first as his teammates instead of as the aliens he learned to hate and fear. His character growth drives the book, and Sigler does a great job of creating a realistic character who learns from his environment and the people around him.

And it's not just Quentin--even the alien characters are very well realized. They feel real, but still alien. They're beings just as much as any of the humans in the book, and there are things that bring everyone together while not losing each of the races' unique characteristics. This is why I can love a book about football.

That said, I guess I've got to talk about the football. I don't know anything about it, or at least I knew very little when I first listened to the podcast version of this book. I'm glad that I listened to it before reading it, because while I was reading I found myself reading a little faster through the football scenes, because I don't know the difference between a lineman and a linebacker or a fullback and tailback. The great thing is that it didn't matter--the energy of the game, excitement, danger, joy, pain, tragedy, it all came through clearly in these scenes, especially in Sigler's reading, but also in the print version. I felt for these characters, I wanted them to succeed, as individuals and as a team.

The coming-of-age story, of someone learning to deal with their preconceptions and realize that the world is a lot bigger and a lot more complicated than they believed, is a timeless one. I've read this story in fantasy settings, in the modern day, and in science fiction, and it will always have a place. Sigler did an excellent job telling this story in a sci-fi setting to satisfy any sci-fi fan. I can only imagine how great this book must be for anyone who's a fan of both science fiction and football.

I think I recall hearing Sigler say that he had more to write in this universe, and I know that I will listen to or read all of it, whether it's about football or about anything else, because he's created an engaging, real universe with beings worth rooting for.

Norton's Ghost, by R. Canepa, is a first person narrative about Kyle, a young college student who finds out his father died, leaving him without any family and leading him to question his current life. After his father's funeral, he doesn't return to that life, a business major with no real purpose or goal. Instead, he just starts walking.

As Kyle walks, the reader is introduced to the harshness of the road. Rain and hunger stand out among the road's trials. Throughout Part One, Kyle meets several people who make an impression, both on him and on the reader. The tone of the book changes in Part Two. Kyle reaches San Fransisco and ends up staying for a while. The city as Kyle experiences it feels real. It's dirty and dark. The homeless do what they can to survive, and some of them don't. Death is a pervading theme in this book, and Kyle's emotions affected me as I read.

There is a part of our being that recognizes death not on the pure physical level but at a layer much deeper than we can be aware of consciously. I think that awareness was what I was feeling as I sat on the curb and wept while strangers walked a wide path around me. It made me feel small, temporary, insignificant.

Kyle's time in the city is not all dark. He meets people who form a family of sorts, and these connections bring light and hope to his story. I think he learned something from everyone he met, and these people stay with him even after he leaves San Fransisco to continue his journey.

Part Three brings Kyle more heartache and more self-discovery. Back on the road, he seeks answers to questions that he was carrying with him since the beginning of the book. He finds a reason to reconnect with the world and become part of it again. With a renewed sense of self and a purpose, Kyle ends his narrative on a positive note that satisfied me as a reader and as someone who had become emotionally involved with his journey.

As a person who predominantly reads genre fiction, Norton's Ghost was a departure for me. I also am not a huge fan of first person narrative. I still thoroughly enjoyed this book. I read an advance copy with a pencil in hand as a proofreader, and I'm sure that I missed things because I was too caught up in the story.

When I first started reading, I was a bit distracted by the writing. It seemed wordy and rambling, but as I continued to read, I was able to accept this as Kyle's voice. One of first person's qualities is that it is meant to immerse the reader in a character. If the character is very different from the reader, this is a hard thing for a writer to achieve. As someone who has tried to write, I noticed how different the narrative was from anything I would write in first person, and so it took me a little while to settle into feeling like Kyle. But Kyle is a very real character, and I think he's relatable. Everyone has experienced loss, everyone has wondered why they're here, what they're supposed to be doing. His emotions and thoughts felt genuine and immediate--something first person is well-suited to portray.

My forays into writing fiction have always been sci-fi or fantasy, and so I've never used real-world settings in a work of fiction. It's something I've always been nervous about, never quite knowing how to portray a place as fiction while still being true to the location. Canepa does an excellent job of this in Norton's Ghost. This is important in a story about traveling--if the places don't feel real, the whole story will seem off. I never doubted the realism in any of the places that Kyle visited.

Norton's Ghost is about discovery. It's about really experiencing life. Any story about life on the road will talk about the pleasure of eating a meal or taking a shower when such basics are difficult to come by. This is something that Kyle describes, but it isn't glorified or elaborated on at length. It simply is there as a fact of such a life. This book left me not with the desire to hitchhike around California, but with the desire to really live life, not to just float through it with my mind always elsewhere. Kyle's journey is one that anyone can understand and relate to.

Norton's Ghost will be available in late September 2009. Visit http://nortonsghost.com/ and follow @roncanepa on Twitter for more information.

Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: Ace, 1987

Original copyright date 1961.

Stranger in a Strange Land is considered a science fiction classic. It deals with religion, sexuality, politics, and the general condition of humanity by inspecting all of these things through the perception of Valentine Michael Smith, the Man from Mars, and that of the people around him. The book follows Mike's journey of discovery of the human race and his own humanity, as well as his teaching of Martian beliefs to those who become his "water brothers."

Looking at humanity through the eyes of an alien is a valuable thought experiment, though a very difficult one to carry out well. Most people have a difficult time bringing themselves out of their cultural perspective and into another, even if it's simply a different human culture. Creating an alien culture that is detailed enough to provide a clear, well-shaped lens with which to examine humanity takes a great deal of skill and invention, and, I would imagine, would require a willingness to be uncomfortable with one's discoveries. One must be willing to put her own culture under examination and be able to recognize what a foreign culture would deem shortcomings, problems, immorality, or, to use Mike's word, wrongness. It is difficult for some people to grasp or appreciate this when it is presented to them by a writer or other artist--it is even harder do actually do. Heinlein managed it with this book.

This is the first thing I've read by Heinlein, and the rest of his work will now have to be added to my reading list. Stranger in a Strange Land is certainly not the be-all and end-all of scifi--I think there are more inventive and perspective-altering books out there than this one. But given its original publication date of 1961, and the fact that its author is a male of that period, it's should still be considered groundbreaking.

The book maintains the binary male-female distinction, and even glorifies it as ideal, perfect. The hierarchy in the male-female relationship is toyed with but never really dissolved. Gender, in general, is not explored in depth, and the stereotypes of women and men are maintained:

"[...] Men care very much about how we women look. So we try to be beautiful and that is a goodness. [...] But, Jubal, women are not men. We care what a man is. It can be something as silly as: Is he wealthy? Or it can be: Will he take care of my children and be good to them? Or, sometimes, it can be: Is he good? As you are good, Jubal. But the beauty we see in you is not the beauty you see in us."

This is mostly just an observation, and not a criticism, though, because I wouldn't expect a book like this to address these topics, the way work by LeGuin or Tiptree might.

One thing that Heinlein does very well is present a comparison of human and martian thought that doesn't absolutely rank one as better than the other. The Martians have a much greater understanding of the mechanical functioning of the universe, and are able to get inside things and truly understand them far better than most humans are able to, but they lack human love, particularly romantic physical love, and Mike declares this a disadvantage for the Martians. It didin't feel like there really was a ranking of these two cultures by the end of the book; instead the focus was on each of the cultures' strengths and weaknesses, without an absolute judgement based on these. I would imagine that science fiction dealing with alien cultures can fall into the trap of judging humanity quite harshly, claiming that an alien culture is "superior" because of their technology, their morals, or their advanced intellect, and that would be simply depressing to read.

I definitely enjoyed reading this book, and not only because I haven't been doing much reading. I'm glad that I've finally read it, because it's a classic, and it certainly deserves to be.