Even the most dedicated Stakhanovite must occasionally take time off to recharge their batteries. But one must admit that vacations can sometimes be less than relaxing—sometimes they feel more like ordeals to be endured. Fictional vacations can be even more fraught. If they’re to keep readers interested, authors are likely to ratchet up the drama and suspense…although one author below found an entirely different way to entice readers. For your consideration: five SF novels about vacations.
Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ (1968)
Paradise, while lacking useful minerals or commercial lifeforms, does enjoy a wealth of beautiful landscapes. The otherwise useless world has been commandeered by the tourist industry. Provided they have access to advanced technology, off-world tourists have little to worry about as they wander the planet.
Thanks to the ongoing war, however, tourists very much do not have access to advanced technology, as it is easily detected and would invite attack. It falls to adventurer Alyx, retrieved from the depths of time, to shepherd her charges to safety. The tourists will not make the task an easy one.
While Alyx is not entirely successful in her attempt to convey the visitors to safety, she is functioning in a context alien to her, in a war zone, and has been denied the information she needs.
Despite setbacks, the survival rate is considerably better than it is for the characters in Russ’s We Who Are About To….
Hello Summer, Goodbye by Michael G. Coney (1975)
Alika-Drove accepts his circumstances as unremarkable. His world’s extreme climate—shaped by both extreme obliquity and orbital eccentricity—would seem odd to us, but to him, it’s just the way things are.
He is taking a summer holiday in the backwater fishing village of Pallahaxi when he meets Browneyes and his world is upended. She’s the daughter of the local tavern owner; he is smitten.
But he’s upper class; she’s lower class. This will make any long-lasting relationship impossible. It’s not just the relatives; it’s the impending end of the world as the lovers know it. Some will survive, but not people like Browneyes.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough to readers increasingly concerned about the fate of the two teens and of Browneyes in particular that you must read this short novel all the way to the end, especially the final page.
The Hostage of Zir by L. Sprague de Camp (1977)
Tau Ceti’s Krishna is not as technologically advanced as Earth and its peers in the interstellar community. It exists under a strict Interplanetary Council technological embargo, as the Council fears that its exuberantly violent principalities might learn how to make and use nuclear weapons. Off-worlders can may visit, however, which leads to an unfortunate development: the arrival of Magic Carpet Tour Company’s debut party of off-world tourists.
Tour guide Fergus Reith’s task would be challenging enough on Earth. On Krishna, where his charges combine ignorance of local mores with a careless willingness to violate them, the job of keeping the tourists happy and alive is nearly impossible. Being declared a god is therefore a most unwelcome complication.
Krishna’s rulers are ruthless, entitled, and sometimes impetuous. What they are not is stupid. Unlike other settings with non-interference policies, the Krishnans have twigged to the big secret of Terran technology, which is that it is possible at all. At least one prince has seen the giant flaw in the embargo, which is that it does not preclude local R&D.
It’s kind of a pity de Camp never set any of his sword and blaster stories after the embargoed worlds caught up technologically to Earth and its peers. There would be lots of drama in the embargoed forcing a reassessment of their second-class status.
Kitty Takes a Holiday by Carrie Vaughn (2007)
A quiet holiday allows werewolf radio personality Kitty Norville a chance to grapple with her writer’s block. Grappling fails, and she would welcome a distraction. Cue the appearance of her lawyer Ben in the company of self-appointed monster hunter Cormac.
Bitten by a werewolf, Ben is now one himself. It falls to Kitty to teach Ben how to do werewolf in a manner that doesn’t attract the attention of people like Cormac. The situation is complicated by not one but two escalating vendettas. Deadly violence is guaranteed.
The Kitty Norville books deviated from the standard urban fantasy/paranormal romance conventions in many ways. For example, it turned out that Kitty’s former pack master wasn’t really an alpha male, just a garden variety abusive asshole. In this novel, it turns out that even an experienced and well-meaning monster hunter can’t go around killing people (or paranormal entities) without running afoul of the law at some point. Who knew?
The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (2018)
Personal secretary to the semi-divine figure the Lord of Rising Stars (also known as the Lord Magus of Zunidh, the Sun-on-Earth, and—thanks to some regrettable policy decisions—the Last Emperor of Astandalas), Cliopher Mdang’s relentless hard work does not go unnoticed by the Last Emperor. Cliopher is provided with periodic holidays.
Aware of the benefits of rest, and equally aware that his only semi-divine boss works as hard as Cliopher, Cliopher makes the bold suggestion that the Sun-on-Earth might enjoy a vacation as well. The Last Emperor agrees…a decision that will have historic consequences.
This is a weighty tome remarkable because despite being focused on the final days of a declining empire, the plot is notably short on spectacular on-stage violence of any sort. Instead, the book offers crucial paperwork and heartfelt conversations between friends. Readers who felt the pace in The Goblin Emperor was too breakneck might like this book.
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There are many vacation-focused works I could have mentioned but did not. John Varley’s, for example, I omitted because I discussed them here. If one or more of your favorites were skipped, please mention them in comments below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
Hello Summer, Goodbye is a truly lovely novel, and one of the most purely “bittersweet” books I’ve read. And the romance between Drove and Browneyes is wonderfully affecting. And, yes, the ending is great.
There was a sequel, published posthumously, called I Remember Pallahaxi. It’s not as good as Hello Summer, Goodbye, but it’s not bad, and it does contain an actual instance of Alien Space Bats.
Then there is Koko Takes a Holiday by Kieran Shea, but the “vacation” is one from the title character’s life of ease as a former mercenary turned madam of a boy-toy bordello on an artificial pleasure island. The violence and the satire are both pretty extreme in this novel: depressives are encouraged to commit mass suicide, wealthy tourists get to blow up native villages and destroy ecosystems for fun, and a hired killer has to pause mid-job to advise her grandmother on a medical insurance claim denial. I guess you could maybe draw a dotted line from this one back to the Budayeen series of George Alec Effinger and the Parrish Plessis novels of Marianne de Pierres.
This series is more about the people in a small village filled with vacationers, but it’s a lot of fun.
DEATH AND RELAXATION, Devon Monk. “Ordinary Magic” Book 1. Urban fantasy. The town of Ordinary, Oregon, is anything but. It’s the vacation spot for gods and monsters, but the gods must put away their powers and immortality when staying. Police Chief Delaney Reed not only is the law, she is the bridge between mortals and gods, and one of those gods have been murdered. Now, she must find the killer, find a mortal replacement for the god, deal with the annual Rhubarb Festival craziness, and a concrete penguin who keeps being found in odd places.
Billions of people have been spared my attempts at fiction. One of the earlier examples involved the attempts by a company to get an employee to take their holiday, finally resorting to murder in the hopes the person would take time off to determine who killed them. In retrospect, it was a blatant Varley pastiche inspired by all of his holidays gone wrong stories.
I’ve read the version of “Picnic on Paradise” that appears in the collection Alyx/The Adventures of Alyx, but not the separately-published version which has to be considerably expanded based on page count, for all that ISFDB considers them the same thing. (The version in the Library of America series volumes edited by Gary K. Wolfe could be either.)
Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm is told from the perspective of locals working in the tourist industry, but deals with the impact of tourism and tourists.
@5) I think the ability of publishers to manipulate type face/size, etc. is pretty extreme, and I’m fairly sure (without checking) that all the versions of Picnic on Paradise are the same (save possibly for some typo corrections and stuff.) I have the early Ace paperback, 150 or so pages. I’ll take a closer look when I get a chance.
Several of Cherryh’s Foreigner books involve trips to the coastal estate granted to Bren where fishing, hanging out and eating great food are the principal items on the agenda – of course, trouble invariably ensues or vacation photos become a plot point later.
Along similar lines, there is also Bren’s supposed vacation trip to the East with a hidden agenda in book 1, and another Bren supposed vacation trip to the West near the continent’s communications facilities in book 3 and the supposedly trouble free birthday party to the center of the Padi valley in one of the books in the teens, and ….etc.
Two Bujold books come to mind: Paladin of Souls, sequel to The Curse of Chalion (which came up in the Homecomings thread and is also excellent) starts with the Queen Mother (not the local title) of Chalion going on an incognito ramble across the country to escape the stifling sameness of a noble widow’s life, disguised as a religious pilgrimage. It turns out that the Bastard (one of the Five Gods of the setting) has decided that the pilgrimage really will be a religious experience…
Diplomatic Immunity is one of the later Vorkosigan books, rife with spoilers, but is all about his honeymoon being interrupted by customs officials, international tension, treason, attempted genocide, and zero-gravity ballet.
Not directly on topic, but I recall reading a book where humans wandering the stars in a giant hollow asteroid meet batlike aliens (or rather are aliens to a planet of bat people), with a side plot involving the local equivalent of chimps having been domesticated as beasts of burden, but humans uplifted them to serve as spies, and the bats feel that this was extremely unethical, because people shouldn’t be treated the way the domestic bat-apes are, and the bat-people had still been treating them that way because they didn’t know they were people now.
@7 Certainly, but the stand-alone versions are all 157 pages and the version in my Timescape copy of the collection is just 94 pages, and is printed at what looks like a pretty standard size to me. I wouldn’t think anyone except Baen would blow it up by 67% unless making an actual large-print version, and in fact in Baen’s version of the collection the story is 140 pages. Hence my assumption that the text is different. But of course I could be wrong.
John M. Ford’s recently-published incomplete novel Aspects has a lengthy section in the middle which is certainly vacation-like if not actually described as such in the text.
In Asterix the Legionary, one of the “recruits” is convinced he’s at a holiday camp rather than a Roman legion post.
12: Shades of the Far Side cartoon about the happy man in Hell…
Then there’s A Wizard’s Holiday, the seventh book in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series.
I only read The Hands of the Emperor this year and it was great. There should be more fantasy without any violence to speak of.
At it’s core; Douglas Addams “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul” is about Odin taking a long rest holiday.
@6, @14 – beat me to it!
I think Robert Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles (1968) would be a good addition to this list – the hero is accidentally awarded a prize in a galactic lottery and taken off Earth to receive it, then gets a little lost trying to get back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_of_Miracles
And of course there are several Doctor Who episodes that deal with one or another aspect of tourism, not least
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Damned_(Doctor_Who)
Arthur C Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust deals with a bunch of holidaymakers trapped in a glorified coach under some lunar soil.
One could argue that Iain M Banks’s Culture series is very nearly all one big holiday for everyone, what with the Minds running all the ships and there being unlimited goodies for all. Some of the folks in Special Circumstances have a hard time of it now and again, I suppose, and there was that one in which a rather unpleasant individual got a nasty comeuppance, but I can’t remember the title. (I am making my slow way through them all, but, to be honest, my favourite is still Consider Phlebas.)
And, of course, there’s the Star Trek episode ‘Shore Leave’, in which the crew of Enterprise beam down for some R&R on a planet only too happy to accommodate them.
Isn’t Doctor Who a permanent tourist? :-)
As is Twoflower in Terry Pratchett’s “The Colour of Magic” and some of the sequels, but I think we are interpreting “SF” by excluding fantasy today. And there’s Rincewind in the same book and others, but again there’s a difference between being a tourist and being lost. And for that matter, Rincewind is usually not trying to go to interesting places and relax, but to go away from places that are so interesting that relaxation isn’t possible.
Rather about the consequences of someone else’s holiday: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Very interesting read and a good start to the brothers’ works. I do not know how good the translations are. But the Strugatzkys convey a lot of that awkward everyday feeling of Soviet Life. Compelling stories, often about totalitarianism and constant snooping and its consequences for people.
How many of Jack Vance’s books have sections in them that fall into the vacation category?
Moore and Kuttner’s “Vintage Season” involves a holiday by disaster tourists, who visit periods of perfect weather at various places, at different times in their histories.
Hiking vacations in the UK appear to be especially hazardous to one’s health, as one may encounter a rustic community that still practices seasonal sacrifice to pagan gods (“Resurrection” by Peter Bell) or attract the persistent interest of an unholy spirit after disturbing ancient relics (“Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M. R. James). It’s almost as dangerous as moving with your adoring spouse and adorable child into an old house inherited from an estranged grandmother or uncle you didn’t even realize you had…but that must be the subject for another article.
Given their …. differing views… I would love to know the precise context of that Poul Anderson blurb on the cover of Russ’ “Picnic on Paradise”.
@18 – Any mention of Star Trek in connection to vacations would also have to include the pleasure planet Risa, mentioned numerous times and first introduced into the continuity in ST:TNG but established in ST:Ent to have been around for quite some time before that.
I think it was CBC’s speculative fiction radio show Nightfall where any time people ventured out of Toronto into the untamed wilderness beyond, freezing to death was about the best they could expect.
There a whole stretch of the Foundation books (from “The Mule” through _Foundation’s Edge_, excluding “Now you see it…”) where he repeats, three times, the plot device of main characters who are pretending to be going on a vacation/honeymoon in order to do a little spying.
@10) I went ahead and compared my two copies of Picnic on Paradise. One is the 1974 Ace edition, which I’m pretty sure used the same plates as the 1968 Ace Special. It’s 157 pages, no chapter breaks, 30 lines per page, about 9 words per line — say 41,000 words. The second copy is the 1983 Timescape edition of The Adventures of Alyx. Within this, Picnic on Paradise occupies just over 91 pages, 42 lines per page, about 11 words per line — call it 42,000 words. For manual word count estimation, 41K and 42K are functionally equal. I assume they are the same text (with possibly some minor typo corrections in the Timescape edition.)
@24) Your comment is pretty astounding. Poul Anderson was an honest man who enjoyed science fiction of all sorts. For that matter, Picnic on Paradise is pretty straightforward SF adventure on a dangerous planet — much as with a lot of Anderson’s work. Anderson was very possibly friendly with Russ. While his political views, by that time, were surely somewhat to the right of Russ’s, that’s no reason he wouldn’t enjoy her books. Really, it’s pretty sad that you assume someone like Anderson, or Russ, would refuse to praise a book they enjoyed because they didn’t hold identical political views.
Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man (I finished it this morning!) is set during a space-cruise honeymoon vacation. There are cocktails, murder, and the cutest dog.
@24) I have an earlier Ace edition of Picnic On Paradise with a longer version of the Anderson blurb on the back cover. It says
Resident Mad Scientist, Book 6 of the Schlock Mercenary series by Howard Tayler, features (among other subplots) a pack of well-armed semi-sociopaths on vacation on Unspoiled Uncharted Middle-of-Nowhere Beach World. There they make pretty good first contact with one intelligent species and very bad first contact with another, and accidentally facilitate their first contact with each other. And play some volleyball.
J.G.Ballard’s Vermilion Sands is a collection of short stories set in a fictional desert vacation resort, populated with Ballardian characters and their various issues, psychoses and ambitions. It is a place Ballard said he would like to go to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermilion_Sands
@28, Also _Picnic on Paradise_ is rather conservative politically– the capable barbarian contrasted with the insufferably silly civilized people.
The first book that came to mind is The Stainless Steel Rat for President, which starts as a vacation and ends up… radically different. Although he does discover rum, which is nice.
“Readers who felt the pace in The Goblin Emperor was too breakneck might like this book.”
This is why I love you, James! And I love both of these books as well.
@9 re “batlike aliens”
I think the book you’re describing is _Learning the World_ by Ken MacLeod.
There’s Alexei Panshin’s Anthony Villiers books. Villiers is essentially on full time vacation, as the son of a noble family living the life of a remittance man – the family pays him a stipend as long as he stays away. So the three books in the series (Star Well, The Thurb Revolution, and Masque World) are a galactic travelog, referring as needed to the guidebooks of Wu and Fabricant. The second book, in particular, is set on a vacation planet with a variety of hotel and camping accommodations.
28:
Having read, as I am sure you have, the exchange of letters between them in Vertex rwomen characters in SF, I got the impression they liked each other just fine. It was just that at that time (1974), Anderson was constitutionally unable to understand Russ’ point that women, being people, do not need to be relegated to particular roles in fiction, and also unable to let the discussion drop. To quote Anderson:
Russ seemed more amused than annoyed by Anderson’s blind spot.
Re Russ and Anderson;
I get the feeling somebody may be looking at a 70s right/left American political discussion through the lens of the 2020s. Once upon a time, it was not such a Great Divide.
I’m just now reading Hands of the Emperor. It’s amazing how much is packed into that vacation, and that’s only about a quarter of the book. Can’t wait to see what happens next.
Senlin Ascends, by Josiah Bancroft, comes to mind. Newlyweds go to the tower of Babel for their honeymoon and immediately become separated. Incredibly imaginative, excellent character building, and beautiful prose!
How about a SF movie instead of a novel? ‘The sixth sense’ where Bruce Willis and M. Jovovich go on holidays to the idillic planet of Folson’s Paradise!
@29> Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man (I finished it this morning!) is set during a space-cruise honeymoon vacation. There are cocktails, murder, and the cutest dog.
I highly recommend the audiobook. The voices she makes when she’s playing the characters talking to the dog in baby voices cracked me up!
@42
That’s The Fifth Element. The Sixth Sense is the one where Bruce Willis is a ghost
In historical fiction, there’s always the tour company in Lindsay Davis’ SEE DELPHI AND DIE.
“Don’t eat the stew!”
Humbly mentioning “The Grand Tour”, book 2 in the Cecelia and Kate series by Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede. Newlyweds off to see the continent when mysterious things happen….
Robert Heinlein’s ‘The Rolling Stones’?
I’m currently about 45% of the way through The Hands of the Emperor and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I did in fact enjoy The Goblin Emperor but while I haven’t disliked the “cozy” books like Legends & Lattes, I don’t love them, either. But these political-in-the-form-of-bureaucratic stories seem to be a nice mix between my usual high stakes epic fantasy and books that are a little too sweet for me.
In H. Beam Piper’s Paratime story Time Crime, Verkan Val and Hadron Dalla were about to vacation on a primitive but peaceful timeline.
Until they had to deal with a cross-time slave-trading ring.
@39: 1974. By then, women had been allowed to have bank accounts for several years. But to run banks? Inform me. Thank you.
50. What does women running banks or not have to do with Russ and Anderson?
Now that I think about it, _Atlas Shrugged_ includes going on vacation. And as for the status of women, it has a woman running the biggest train company.
I liked having a woman running a big piece of infrastructure that’s in society, and I can’t think of any other fiction which has that. I don’t think Signy Mallory captaining a space ship has the same emotional effect, though it’s been a while since I’ve read any of them and maybe there’s more interaction between Signy Mallory and the larger society than I think.
@38, @51: If that’s a fair quote from Poul Anderson about other writer’s fiction either presenting “themes which inherently call for women to take a lead role”, or not (the latter being “cerebral”), I interpret that Anderson was expressing his view that he himself was writing in, and for, a culture that excludes women from any role which technically can be accomplished without them. Logically including “bank manager” and “bank customer”, which I chose as roles that were implicitly or explicitly male-only during some of our lifetimes – which I hope will shock other readers. That is why I mention them.
In 2023 we are still hearing people explaining the value of “someone who looks like me” in drama or in real life to show that a role may be open to them. As code nowadays that usually doesn’t mean “a woman”, it’s not how you’d say that, but that counts too, and that’s what a scheme of casting women only when unavoidable doesn’t provide.
If Ayn Rand had been a man, perhaps women would not have status in the corpus: but there I am criticizing a straw man.