Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Book Review: The Coldest War, by Ian Tregillis

2013-05-16T01:57:37Z

An alt-history in which demons and supermen threaten Mutually Assured Destruction.

Tor, 2012, 352 pages

Someone is killing Britain's warlocks.

Twenty-two years after the Second World War, a precarious balance of power maintains the peace between Great Britain and the USSR. For decades, the warlocks have been all that stand between the British Empire and the Soviet Union-- a vast domain stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the shores of the English Channel. But now each death is another blow to Britain's security.

Meanwhile, a brother and sister escape from a top-secret research facility deep behind the Iron Curtain. Once subjects of a twisted Nazi experiment to imbue ordinary humans with extraordinary abilities, then prisoners of war in the vast Soviet effort to reverse engineer the Nazi technology, they head for England.

Because that's where former spy Raybould Marsh lives. And Gretel, the mad seer, has plans for him.

As Marsh is drawn back into the world of Milkweed, he discovers that Britain's darkest acts didn't end with the war. And as he strives to protect Queen and country, he's forced to confront his own willingness to accept victory at any cost.

Warning: This review contains spoilers for book one, Bitter Seeds.

Bitter Seeds was a great debut novel about an alternate-Earth's World War II. In it, Nazis figure out how to create supermen, and unable to fight them, Britain resorts to recruiting warlocks, who can summon beings called Eidolons capable of destroying armies. The problem is that the Eidolons consider humans a stain upon reality, and in exchange for every service they perform, they demand blood sacrifices. So the main British characters of Bitter Seeds, Will and Marsh, ended up serving a super-secret organization called Milkweed that had to provide those blood sacrifices.

The first book ended with many of the Nazi super-men dead, the Eidolons having just wiped out a German invasion fleet, and siblings Klaus and Gretel being hustled off as prisoners by Soviet occupation troops.

I thought the next book would continue World War II. Instead, The Coldest War picks up twenty-two years later. It's 1963, and the USSR now controls all of Europe, except for Britain. The British believe that their doughty heroism fended off the Nazis and now keeps them free from the Soviets. The truth is that it's their warlocks, and Milkweed has to regularly arrange bombings, train derailments, sinking ships, and other fatal accidents killing innocent civilians in order to keep empowering the Eidolons, who are the only thing really holding back a Soviet invasion.

To make matters worse, the Soviets occupied Germany, so they have the technology that created the German superhumans. When it turns out that Soviet agents are killing off Britain's warlocks, Milkweed figures they are preparing a big move, possibly an invasion, and they summon Marsh and Will back to work.

The Coldest War is a rare book: it's the middle book of a trilogy that does not slump at all. It's better than the first book, and based on the ending, I'm not sure I will like the third (though I am definitely going to read it soon). Like Bitter Seeds, the sequel is full of action, from the Lovecraftian horror of the Eidolons to battles between superhumans, even more powerful than before. There is tons of violence, the fast pace just keeps ramping up all the way to the end, and stakes get bigger and bigger: first it's the fate of the characters, then it's the fate of Britain, and then it's literally the fate of the world.

As in the first book, characterization is a little weak at times, but the characters are more three-dimensional in this book. Will, who seems to have made a splendid comeback after having hit rock bottom at the end of the last book, is actually haunted by guilt, but while he thinks he's trying to atone for his sins, he turns out to be the same self-centered, rationalizing asshole he always was. And then when you think he's past redemption, he gets better in the second half of the book. Meanwhile, Marsh, who was a golden boy in the first book, is now a failure, an unemployed, alcoholic, emasculated wretch, with a wife who's turned into a poisonous harpy and a hellish home life.

However, what makes this book truly brilliant is Gretel.

Gretel was the mad seer of book one. Gifted with the power of precognition, she sees the future with almost omniscient accuracy. We started to realize by the end of Bitter Seeds that she was not just manipulating characters, but the entire course of history. The Coldest War is really all about Gretel and her machinations. Even her own brother fears her and has no idea what her real plan is, while Will and Marsh try futilely to outguess someone who always knows what you're going to do before you do.

The plotting really shines in this book, because Tregillis handles all the complications of a character who knows the future (a problem just like time travel) without ever seeming to cheat or introduce paradoxes. Gretel's game of Xanatos Roulette is brilliant and convincing. While I did see the revelation at the end coming, it was still a great big "Oh. Shit."

That said, I am waiting to be convinced by the device with which Tregillis seems to be maneuvering himself out of the corner into which he's written himself.

View Poll: The Coldest War

Verdict: A great sequel, and a book that makes me eager to finish the trilogy. Mixing superpowers, magic, and alternate history in a very grim world of 1963, The Coldest War is a fast-paced bombshell of an adventure not afraid to threaten to destroy the world.

Also by Ian Tregillis: My review of Bitter Seeds.

My complete list of book reviews.

Book Review: The Ozark Trilogy, by Suzette Haden Elgin

2013-05-12T16:34:20Z

A slightly dotty 80s fantasy trilogy you've probably never heard of — why has it stuck with me all these years?

Doubleday, 1981, 535 pages

When Baby Terrence McDaniels is snatched from his basket at church, Responsible of Brightwater Kingdom knows that more than mere mischief is afoot on the planet Ozark. It was almost comical when milk began souring on Mondays and mirrors shattered inexplicably. But now Responsible sees the abduction as the wrong use of magic — a treachery connected to the forthcoming Jubilee, the 500th-anniversary celebration of the founding of the confederation of Ozark's states. Indeed, she suspects that factions may tear apart the Confederacy itself and thus end the entire culture of Ozark. So she sets out on a Quest...unaware that she will encounter intruders and traitors who will threaten Ozark's existence.

Twelve Fair Kingdoms, The Grand Jubilee, And Then There'll Be Fireworks: An exciting, witty new trilogy about the magic-makers on a wondrously different planet.

Suzette Haden Elgin is one of my favorite writers for reasons I can't entirely explain. Her worldbuilding is a little daft and the premises on which she builds her stories have me going "Bwu-what?" a lot. But there is a deep wisdom and charm in much of what she writes — and a bit of mostly harmless wingnuttery. I wrote a little bit in this post about her Native Tongue trilogy.

Haden has a PhD in linguistics, and for years she put out the Linguistics and Science Fiction Newsletter. She's also written a series of books based on her Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense.

She was once active here on LJ as ozarque. Unfortunately, her husband has reported that Dr. Elgin is now suffering from advanced, irreversible dementia. So, there will be no more books from her. :(

I rarely reread books. But recently I decided to reread this trilogy that has stuck in my mind (like all of Elgin's works) since I first read them over 20 years ago. Although the books are not quite as vivid upon rereading as they were in my memories (I've also become a more critical reader in recent years, and so the "Bwu-what?" moments were more frequent) I still enjoyed them, and think the trilogy is a lot of fun if awfully goofy (and yet also surprisingly dark in places), and, for those of you who are fans of my fan fiction (if you're not, don't worry, I won't talk about that until the end), yeah, you are going to see that I just may have ripped off more from Suzette Haden Elgin for my Alexandra Quick series than I did from J.K. Rowling.

I should have known that something was very wrong when the mules started flying erratically.

Elgin writes about how what became the first line in the first book came about here. The Ozark trilogy began with a creative writing class brainstorming flying mules.

I read elsewhere that Elgin was allegedly also poking gentle fun at Anne McCaffrey's aerodynamically-impossible dragons, and while I don't know if that's true, comparisons with the Pern series are certainly apt. Like the Dragonriders of Pern, the Ozark trilogy is a fantasy pretending to be science fiction, or science fiction pretending to be fantasy, depending on how you want to look at it, and if you can suspend your disbelief for the major worldbuilding elements, the rest seems to make a kind of sense.

I am going to snark these books, but I snark them with love.

So, let's start with the basic premise of the Ozark trilogy: a thousand years ago, twelve families from the Ozarks became so disgusted with the violence, greed, and pollution of Earth that they all boarded a ship and set off for a planet where they would never be found and they could live their lives in peace.

How did a bunch of Ozarkers get their hands on a starship? And how plentiful are habitable planets that they could just choose one that no one else knows about? Don't think about these things too hard. Just like the population figures for a richly-habitable world after a thousand years, the coexistence of not one, not two, but three other sapient races on the planet, and, oh yes, magic, there is a lot in this series that will make anyone reading it for scientific plausibility throw up their hands in despair. The Ozark Trilogy is technically science fiction (especially if you assume that the "magic" is actually advanced psi-powers, which is likely since in a later book Elgin ties Ozark to her Communipath Worlds setting), but for all practical purposes, anything "science fiction" works in a manner indistinguishable from fantasy, and the books read much more like a fantasy series than a SF one.

A thousand years later, everyone on Ozark is still descended from one of the twelve original families. Yes, everyone on the planet has one of twelve surnames. They live on six continents (Arkansaw, Kintucky, Tinaseeh, Oklahomah, Mizzurah, and Marktwain), some of which are, after a thousand years, still mostly untamed wilderness. Partly this is because of deliberate efforts at population control, partly because two of the other resident species, the Gentles and the Skerrys, are as pathologically isolationist as the Ozarkers and so their territories were promised to be left in peace, and partly it's because Suzette Haden Elgin is, in the words of another reviewer, one of those authors for whom numbers aren't actually real things. (She kind of admits this here.)

I also wonder why "Tinaseeh" and "Kintucky" (which are Appalachian states) were included. As a native Ozarker herself, Elgin certainly knows that Appalachia and the Ozarks are two very different regions. But anyway...

Twelve Fair Kingdoms

The answer to a Challenge
is a Quest,
and if you want to stop Mischief
then Magic is best!

In the first book of the trilogy, Twelve Fair Kingdoms, we learn the basic history of Planet Ozark (at least the Ozarkers' version of it) and how it came to be settled, and we meet Responsible of Brightwater, a fourteen-year-old girl who is the most powerful person on the planet.

She is the first-person narrator of the first book (whereas the next two are written in third person since Elgin needs to step outside of Responsible's head for large portions of them). Responsible is burdened with enormous responsibilities and knowledge that cannot be shared with anyone else, but while a little headstrong and only human (thus making mistakes, some fairly big ones), she dutifully lives up to her name. She is responsible for holding together what passes for a government on Ozark: the Confederation of Continents. Several of the twelve families are dead-set against the existence of even a fig-leaf of a central authority and would much rather be "Boones," living completely independent, self-sufficient lives despite the fact that Brightwater Kingdom supplies everything from food to medicine to the global communications network to the other continents. So, as a meeting of all the continental delegates at the 500th anniversary Jubilee approaches (I guess this would make it the second Jubilee in the planet's history?), things start to go awry at Brightwater Castle. A magical mischief-maker steals a baby and leaves it in a tree, curdles milk, and causes a mule crash, among other things. Responsible deduces that these incidents are a "shot across the bow" from someone who wants to sabotage the Jubilee and is trying to demonstrate their magical superiority to Brightwater Kingdom. Her solution: a Solemn Quest, in which she will dress in solemn questing gear and fly a mule around the planet, visiting each of the other eleven families in turn, "showing the flag" and demonstrating that youall can't mess with Brightwater.

Ozark, as I've mentioned, has magic. There are various levels of magic. There is "Common Sense magic" which anyone can do with a little study and effort. There is Highfalutin' Magic, which only Magicians can do. There is Granny Magic, which only the Grannies can perform. (More about them anon.) And then there are Formalisms and Transformations, the most powerful form of magic, capable of doing anything from turning people into animals to teleporting around the planet. Only Magicians of Rank, the most powerful people in the world, can do this kind of magic.

Oh yes, and Responsible.

Over the course of the book, Responsible pretty much ignores all the rules that apply to everyone else. She is the most potent magician in the world, and even though it's considered not just impossible but immoral for a female to perform high-level magic, she can and does. She has to do so in secret, to avoid frightening and offending people, but one of the big mysteries, not really answered until book three, is just how she's able to do this and why a fourteen-year-old girl is the de facto leader of the planet (despite the fact that she's regarded with attitudes ranging from patronizing affection to fear and loathing from everyone else).

A hint comes from her name. The Naming of girlbabies is very important on Ozark. Only the Grannies can name girls, and an Improper Naming can have disastrous effects. (In an appendix, Elgin even provides the numerology scheme by which names are assigned a number of magical significance.) There is always, and only ever, one girl named Responsible on the Planet Ozark.

The Grannies, chosen from a select group of old women who must be either virgins or widows and demonstrated (through tests and trials) to be exceptionally wise, potent, and irredeemably crotchety, act as hecklers, healers, and an untouchable class capable of speaking truth to power with the job of keeping everyone humble. They're kind of a hoot, and also kind of really annoying, which they are meant to be.

The politics of Ozark and the end of Responsible's quest make up the plot, but this first book is really all about worldbuilding. As Responsible tours the planet, we learn about this strange world, the people and creatures who inhabit it, and the preternaturally potent protagonist.

The Grand Jubilee

When Ozark is endangered
by Darkness and Night,
Then a girl named Responsible
must make Magic bright!

Book two begins right where book one ended. The Grand Jubilee takes place in Part One. It does not go well.

There were a lot of questions raised in book one. Why is Responsible so exceptional and why is she responsible for the whole planet? Why is it so important for the Confederation of Continents to remain intact when it's got no real authority? Why do sentient telepathic flying mules let humans ride them?

A few answers are revealed in this book, but the worldbuilding never becomes exactly tight or logical. Responsible knows some very important secrets that, for reasons never precisely explained, she cannot share with anyone else even though they involve the very fate of the planet.

Before things go all to hell, Responsible meets Lewis Wommack the 33rd, who is prophecied to be her ultimate nemesis in a very vague prophecy that basically says "You're screwed no matter what."

Well, "nemesis" can be read in various ways. What actually happens is that Responsible, who most of the time could be a Granny herself, she is so unnaturally mature beyond her years, discovers that her Achilles heel is a sudden case of raging adolescent hormones, and Lewis Wommack is the poisoned arrow that strikes her there.

Yeah, they totally Do It. Not a very responsible thing to do in a society with an unreconstructed view of female sexuality (it's evil), and where "Detect Virgin" is apparently an inherent ability of all Grannies, so as soon as Responsible no longer is one, all the Grannies know it and start calling her, in so many words, a whore.

Not to mention, Responsible has already observed that being a virgin makes you immune to certain types of hostile magic. And all the Magicians of Rank hate her (mostly because she's a girl and she shouldn't be so damn powerful). So her roll in the hay proves to be very costly. But hey, she's fifteen. It's about time she did something stupid.

The Grand Jubilee also introduces us to Responsible's older sister Troublesome. Troublesome kicks some ass. She only plays a minor part in this book, but for the remainder of the trilogy you will be left wondering what's so damn "evil" about her — while the Grannies' Naming is supposedly a deep and magical process, it actually seems to be an arbitrary assignment of whatever social roles they feel need to be assumed by some poor girl, creating self-fulfilling prophecies and in Troublesome's case, an awfully unfair stigma.

So, as the middle book ends, Troublesome is still exiled to her lonely mountaintop, Responsible has just been put into a coma by the Magicians of Rank (who, despite being enormously powerful, are still all frail-egoed men of the pitiful variety), and things are about to go to hell in a handbasket on Ozark.

And Then There'll Be Fireworks

The first two books had a serious plot and a few serious points to make, but were mostly rather light fantasy with a bit of theological and social subtext.

The tone in book three starts out much darker. The Planet Ozark has fallen into anarchy, and on Tinaseeh, the Traveller family, who for the first two books have been the "bad guys" inasmuch as anyone deserves that label, being the most conservative, joyless, theocratic, and oppressive of the twelve families and the most eager to dissolve the Confederacy, have gotten their wish. Now they're all alone and unrestrained on their remote continent, and also starving to death, which they regard as merely a test of their faith. In the meantime, they are whipping ten-year-old girls to death for being insufficiently submissive to their husbands. Yes, I said "ten-year-old girls" and "husbands."

Usually it's the middle book in a trilogy that seems to suffer, but I'd have to say that despite the name, And Then There'll Be Fireworks is the weakest of the three books. It's also the shortest, so Elgin tries to wrap up an awful lot, leaving a lot of unanswered questions, so if you were hoping all those strange bits of worldbuilding might be explained in a way that makes sense, you'll be disappointed.

It turns out that when there is no girl named Responsible taking care of things, not only does the planet fall into anarchy, but there's also no magic. The Magicians of Rank are powerless (even to reverse Responsible's coma, which they realized was a big mistake just a little too late), and with the dissolution of the Confederacy and an end to magic, there is no more intercontinental trade or communications. Ozark, we learn, thanks to strict controls that have been in place since the Ozarkers first landed, has been a planet without disease, starvation, or war for a thousand years. That quickly goes out the window as people start starving, dying of plagues, and shooting each other.

For the first part of the book, the main character is Troublesome. Yay, Troublesome! She gives the Grannies lip, then goes on a quest of her own to find a cure for Responsible's magical coma.

Meanwhile, an evil magical interstellar empire has parked giant gemstones in the air above all twelve of Ozark's family castles and is threatening to take over the planet.

Yeah, seriously. The "Garnet Ring" and the "Out-Cabal," referred to since the first book, finally makes an appearance as the threat that Responsible has secretly been protecting the Planet Ozark from.

Will Responsible awaken from her coma and save the day? Do Mules shit in the woods? The ending is somewhat satisfying but abrupt, and not everything is wrapped up neatly. But the most grievous offenders get theirs, or soon will, and once again awesome women undo the mess that stupid men made. Umm, yay?

It's... an ending. And while I would not say this is the most brilliantly executed trilogy ever, it does reach a solid climax with all the current problems more or less resolved. And if Elgin were to write any more books in the Ozark series, I would certainly read them. (There is, in fact, one more book: Yonder Comes the Other End of Time, which is next on my TBR list.) But as I noted above, her health situation is such that this will most certainly never happen, so this is all we've got.

From Margaret Mitchell to Suzette Haden Elgin: gender politics that stick in your craw but make you think

In the last LJ post Elgin wrote, she mentions her love of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

I am not surprised (partly because I really like Gone with the Wind as a novel too, despite its hideous racism), because the gender politics in Elgin's work are a feminist reinterpretation, of sorts, of those in Mitchell's Confederacy.

What Melanie did was no more than all Southern girls were taught to do: to make those about them feel at ease and pleased with themselves. It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land in which men were contented, uncontradicted, and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world, except credit for having intelligence.

Herein is where the elements of Elgin's abstruse feminism are presented in that annoying way that has set many a reader's teeth on edge. There were similar but even more oppressive gender politics in Elgin's other series, the Native Tongue trilogy, in which at one point a girl asks an older woman why life is so unfair and why they have so much less freedom than the women of the 20th century, and the answer is basically that what they have now is better than back when there was all that rape and pornography and slasher flicks.

Well, that's the argument made by a lot of oppressive conservative cultures that advocate regulating the womenfolk, and it's kind of at the core of Ozark society too, but inverted, so Ozark is patriarchal on the surface but women (from the Grannies on down) are basically all in on a big conspiracy to keep secret from the menfolk the fact that they're mostly stupid and useless. Women have to keep everything running while letting the men think they're in charge because their fragile egos could never bear the terrible truth.

It didn't matter how many girls there were to a Granny School; a Granny took as many as happened to be there. And since, on all of Tinaseeh, the only Granny was Granny Leeward, it was a large group of little girls she faced that same day. But she had no more concern about what they must be taught than the Tutors did for the boys, and she needed no book to keep it straight in her head.

"Men," she was saying, "are of but two kinds: splendid, and pitiful. The splendid ones are rare, and if you chance on one you'll know it. What I tell you now has to do with the rest of 'em — as my Granny told me, and her Granny told her before that, and so back as far as time will take you..."

As in Native Tongue, Elgin's version of feminism seems to be: "Men suck, so women have to endure them by virtue of their inherent superiority." Women who suck are the ones who do a bad job of coping with men. (No, I don't think Elgin would agree that that's what she's actually saying. This is my critical interpretation of her work, disregarding authorial intent.) Now, I'm not complaining about "reverse sexism" here, I'm saying the message strikes me as just a warped version of the old "Men just can't help it a-hyuck a-hyuck" justification for lowered expectations. After all, if men are just inherently stupid, insensitive, and beastly, then you can't really expect them to behave any better, can you? As in Native Tongue, I reached the point where I was thinking: "Well, if you're so damn smart and you could bring the system down if you chose to, why don't you?"

I've read quite a bit of Elgin's work, both fiction and non-fiction. She seems to be deeply religious but very liberal, her view of God also being expressed in the Ozark series — they have churches and Solemn Services but only token clergy and while they worship a Holy One, there's a short story in the first book explaining how they lost their only copy of the Bible when they first landed (yes, just suspend your disbelief, they only packed one Bible for a permanent migration to another planet).

"Botheration," First Granny said when they realized it was gone. And the Captain allowed as how he was deeply sorry.

"Well," said First Granny, "I suppose we'll just have to Make Do."

And so we have, ever since.

Elgin's Ozark Center for Language Studies is "dedicated to the two goals of reducing violence in the U.S. and getting information about linguistics out to the public," two goals she sees as inextricably linked. Most of her writing addresses ways to reduce violence in part by how it is expressed in language. So the Ozarkers are, in a sense, quite backwards — notwithstanding magic and high technology, they have not evolved as a society at all in a thousand years. But Elgin presents this as a good thing, because for the price of a culture in permanent stasis with rigid gender roles (and, incidentally, not a single non-white Ozarker, and nary a hint of homosexuality), they get a peaceful, unspoiled planet. It's hard to argue that this isn't a deal a lot of people would take, but let's just say there are a few... gaps there that I find problematic.

So that's where the Ozarkers came from!

Yes, that's where the Ozarkers came from.

I have mentioned Elgin's influence on my Alexandra Quick series before. I "borrowed" a lot of her Ozarker lore and magic for my own Ozarkers. The Grannies. Troublesome. The rather oppressive, traditionalist culture. And even some other elements you haven't seen yet...

Like the Harry Potter books, which I read much later, there was something about the Ozark trilogy that, while by no means the best thing I'd ever read, captured my imagination.

So when I was looking to create some uniquely American magical cultures for my fan fiction series, I started with Ozarkers and borrowed a lot of things I remembered from Elgin's books.

Now, keep in mind I actually hadn't read them in a long time. I've only just reread them for the first time in decades. So while obviously there are some names and things I lifted straight out of Elgin's novels, my Ozarkers aren't purely her Ozarkers, just as Alexandra Quick isn't Harry Potter.

I also suspect that Suzette Haden Elgin, as a career linguist and native Ozarker, would not be pleased by my rendition of the Ozarker dialect. (There isn't a single "hain't" in any of her books.)

That said, if you read the Ozark Trilogy, you will even see a few other things I obviously borrowed that I haven't mentioned in this review. ;)

View Poll: The Ozark Trilogy

Verdict: This trilogy would never be published today. It's just too offbeat and requires some great suspensions of disbelief, but it's charming and witty and kind of like a more feminist version of Pern in a very odd sideways way. I have always liked Suzette Haden Elgin's work, even though she is full of woo and her gender roles can make her books wallbangers. (Not as bad as Sherri S. Tepper, though.) It's a series that left mindworms in my head that came out in my fan fiction, and for that alone I'll always thank Elgin for years of entertainment.

Suzette Haden Elgin was at one time a prolific writer, but she never rose above midlist obscurity. She's now in very poor health and will not be writing any more books. I hope more people will discover her books and appreciate what a thoughtful writer she is while she is still alive.

See also the SFWA Ozark Trilogy homepage.

My complete list of book reviews.

Saturday Book Giveaway: The Joanna Brady series by J.A. Jance

2013-05-12T03:04:46Z

Maybe my last giveway: The Joanna Brady series on bookish.

Book Review: Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

2013-05-10T22:51:35Z

The stream-of-consciousness natterings of discontented rich people.

1925, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 216 pages

It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment?

Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.

Luminously beautiful, Mrs. Dalloway uses the internal monologues of the characters to tell a story of inter-war England. With this, Virginia Woolf changed the novel forever.

Mrs. Dalloway chronicles all of the innermost thoughts in the day of the life of middle-aged society lady Clarissa Dalloway as she goes about planning a dinner party.

“Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not 'here, here, here'; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoke to, some women in the street, some man behind a counter - even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps - perhaps.”

Let's just say I did not find her mental landscape particularly fascinating. Virginia Woolf's continual stream-of-consciousness prose, while very cleverly composed with the sort of writing skill that one cannot help but admire, I found intensely annoying. I'm not sure which annoyed me more about this book: the style, or the essential vacuousness of most of these self-absorbed rich people.

I know, I know, I like Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and Anthony Powell, who also write about self-absorbed rich people. But Woolf reminded me more of Edith Wharton, another chronicler of the dissatisfactions of the very rich who writes very prettily about characters I couldn't care less about.

Clarissa Dalloway long ago had to choose between the dashing, somewhat feckless Peter Walsh and the staid, respectable Richard Dalloway. She went with staid and respectable, also tossing over her girlfriend Sally Seton, with whom a youthful lesbian relationship is very strongly implied. Now, as she plans her party, Peter is back from India, still feckless and still clearly carrying a torch for Clarissa. No, there isn't even a whisper of a hint that Clarissa might run off with him or do anything else interesting. He's just there so we can look inside their heads.

Intertwined with the thread about Mrs. Dalloway's dinner preparations is a secondary narrative focused on Septimus Warren Smith, a tragic, shell-shocked veteran of the Great War. For a woman writing in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf did very effectively capture the horror and pain of what we would now call PTSD, and did so in a fairly sympathetic manner. Septimus is a broken man, but he still wants to live life on his own terms, and the ineffectual efforts of his wife and his doctor to "help" him are the final indignity.

So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.

So yes, I got what Woolf was doing, contrasting Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway, both of them trapped in their own way in the suffocating expectations of others, forever denied the true freedom they yearn for.

I still think her prose is annoying and her characters unbearable. I am not entirely sure why this gets classified as a "feminist" work — because it's (mostly) a woman's inner monologue, revealing between the lines how miserable marriage is? Because of the lesbian allusions? I mean, inasmuch as it's a woman writing from a woman's POV and a woman criticizing marriage and society, I guess it was feminist for 1925, but sheesh. I'd call Jane Austen just as feminist as Virginia Woolf.

Mrs. Dalloway (1997)

I didn't like the book, but I still followed my obsessive habit of watching all the films of books I read. And I was curious to see how you render a stream-of-consciousness monologue on film.

This 1997 movie, with Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway, was a pretty period piece that didn't really try to recreate Woolf's prose (an impossible task), just portrayed all the events as described (and reflected upon) in Woolf's novel. It's a faithful adaptation, nicely rendered, and like the book, the only remotely compelling part is Septimus Smith's subplot.

View Poll: Mrs. Dalloway

Verdict: Virginia Woolf writes pretty. She's deft and elegant and nuanced. And this book was boring and the prose was annoying. It may have been a landmark of 20th century literature, but I don't care about Mrs. Dalloway's dinner party, her old flame, or the fact that she once kissed a girl and liked it. Sorry, Virginia Woolf fans, but she struck out with me.

My complete list of book reviews.

Book Review: Ship of Fools, by Richard Paul Russo

2013-05-10T01:15:52Z

The crew of a generation ship encounters an alien vessel that practically screams "Get out!" so of course they poke around.

Ace Books, 2001, 370 pages

Home to generations of humans, the starship Argonos has wandered aimlessly throughout the galaxy for hundreds of years, desperately searching for other signs of life. Now a steady, unidentified transmission lures them toward a nearby planet, where the grisly remains of a former colony await the crew. Haunted by what they have seen, the crew has no choice but to follow when another signal beckons the Argonos into deep space — and into the dark heart of an alien mystery.

Ship of Fools is a Big Dumb Object crossed with a haunted house, and you can just picture it on the big screen, with an audience hanging on the edge of their seats when things go from creepy to scary to HOLY FUCKING SHIT! at the end.

The Argonos is a generation ship, run by an Executive Council with nominal authority over the Captain. The first part of the book is largely political machinations: we learn that the Argonos has lost its original mission, or any connection with human civilization elsewhere in the galaxy. They occasionally find human-inhabited colonies, but infrequently and there is no substantial trade or diplomacy. Instead, they've become an insular, closed community, several thousand people divided into "downsiders," who are virtually serfs, and the ship's officers and crew, who spend most of their time playing petty political games.

The main character and first-person narrator is Bartolomeo, an orphan born with stunted limbs and a misshapen spine, which he compensates for with an exoskeleton and prosthetic limbs. Nikos, a childhood friend of Bartolomeo, is now the Captain of the Argonos. Bartolomeo's gratitude toward the man who befriended him when no one else would and whose friendship now gives him a great deal of privilege he otherwise wouldn't have, is sorely tested when a group of downsiders try to enlist his help in a covert insurrection.

The Captain's chief rival is Bishop Soldano, the leader of the ship's Church (never explicitly named, but clearly a futuristic Catholic sect). Although Soldano is an antagonist, the Church is not the villain here: one of the secondary characters who becomes Bartolomeo's close friend (and the object of his unrequited love) is Father Veronica, who brings a somewhat philosophical spin to the book, though really her conversations with Bartolomeo are pretty rote discussions of free will, the Problem of Evil, and so on.

All this background serves to set up the interpersonal and societal conflicts after the Argonos reaches a world called Antioch, and finds the remains of a human colony. The colonists were slaughtered, in a horrific, nightmarish way. But when the Argonos leaves the planet, they pick up a signal from the erstwhile colony beamed at another point in deep space.

Well, how can they not investigate? Of course it turns out that they really, really shouldn't have.

They find an alien ship — the first encounter with aliens ever recorded — seemingly empty and abandoned. The scenes where Bartolomeo and his boarding crew explore the ship are all the scarier because there aren't any monsters.

Yet.

The ship is creepy and scary and even the most innocuous discoveries are just wrong in all kinds of ways, and you know the whole time (as Bartolomeo does too on some level) that this is Not Going To End Well.

This is a book to which I find comparisons to movies come more readily than comparisons to other books, and that's not a bad thing. Think Alien, Event Horizon, or Lifeforce. (Okay, maybe not Lifeforce — that film was kind of crap.) But you will also find this kind of grimdark pessimistic sci-fi in another little-read favorite of mine, A Grey Moon Over China.

View Poll: Ship of Fools

Verdict: I sometimes make fun of books that seem to be Hollywood-bait — "Please, please Ridley Scott, option me!" — but dayyum, Ship of Fools would make an awesome, pants-shittingly scary movie. This is the manuscript that Prometheus should have been.

My complete list of book reviews.

Book Review: Deadline, by Mira Grant

2013-05-06T03:43:06Z

Book two of the Newsflesh trilogy is a thrill-ride like the first, though the twists and turns had me cocking my eyebrow a bit more.

Orbit, 2011, 420 pages

Shaun Mason is a man without a mission. Not even running the news organization he built with his sister has the same urgency as it used to. Playing with dead things just doesn't seem as fun when you've lost as much as he has.

But when a CDC researcher fakes her own death and appears on his doorstep with a ravenous pack of zombies in tow, Shaun has a newfound interest in life. Because she brings news - he may have put down the monster who attacked them, but the conspiracy is far from dead.

Now, Shaun hits the road to find what truth can be found at the end of a shotgun.

Warning: Spoilers for Feed, the first book of the trilogy.

I really liked Feed, in which Mira Grant (a pen name for Seanan McGuire) created a zombified world of 2041, in which people live in fortified enclaves, and even the most trivial errand involves batteries of blood tests at every checkpoint and the certainty of being shot in the head if you test positive for the Kellis-Amberlee virus.

Book one also introduced the conceit of bloggers becoming the real news media, since when the Rising happened in 2014, the "mainstream" news suppressed the truth while bloggers were warning people about flesh-eating zombies and the need to go for head-shots. We were introduced to George (Georgia) and Shaun Mason, adopted siblings who jointly ran a blogging news site that covered a presidential campaign in this post-zombie apocalypse America. Of course things go very wrong on the campaign trail: zombies, conspiracies, dead characters, etc.

At the end of book one, Shaun had to shoot his sister George in the head after she "amplified," having been infected with the Kellis-Amberlee virus.

So, about half of book two is Shaun moping about his dead sister. Which seriously got old. The author also kind of "cheats" after having killed off one of her two main characters in book one: Shaun still hears George in his head. Constantly. She's for all practical purposes still an active character, giving him advice, offering commentary, engaging in witty banter with her crazy brother, reminding him that she's actually a figment of his imagination, etc. Except she's such a constant presence that I was half-convinced the author was going to reveal that she somehow was actually there, although psychic powers or a mind-meld would have been pretty outside the scope of the setting.

This didn't bother me as much as how downright creepy it is that Shaun is so fixated on his sister. I mean, in book one, it was kind of disturbing that these two young adults appeared to have no close friends and no romantic relationships, only each other. Are you really going to go there, Mira Grant? Well, it's sure hinted at in book two; when Shaun does get a chance to hook up with a sexy blogger employee of his who's been all but throwing herself at him forever, he sleeps with her, and then calls her by his sister's name.

Besides Shaun's obvious issues, there's the fact that his friends and coworkers are constantly walking on eggshells around him because if they mention George's death (or suggest that maybe talking to your dead sister whose voice you can hear in your head is not an indicator of good mental health), he's likely to throw a violent tantrum.

Dude, you lost your sister. You live in the world of a zombie post-apocalypse: everyone has lost loved ones. If Mira Grant had shown us how society-wide PTSD was unhinging everyone, then Shaun's coping mechanism (or lack thereof) might have been a poignant commentary, but it just makes him look unhinged and dangerous, which made me question why his friends and employees stayed so loyal to him.

That said, although I've been pointing out the things that bugged me about Deadline, I really liked it, as much as I liked Feed, even though the flaws in Grant's worldbuilding (and the deeply dysfunctional nature of her main characters) were more apparent. The plot boils along, the stakes go up and up and up, and naturally not everyone survives.

Supposedly this book addresses one of the big weaknesses in the first book: the cardboard caricaturization of the main villain, and his eeeeevil but not terribly rational scheme. It kind of did, in that we learn there are even more eeeeevil people involved in a much bigger conspiracy, but my suspension of disbelief was occasionally hanging on by its fingernails.

Finally, there is another BIG TWIST at the end. Which, from reading other reviews, had a lot of readers going "Holy shit!" but not me, because as soon as the CDC researcher showed up earlier in the story and introduced the cloning subplot, I just knew where Grant was going. I knew she was going to do that.

Nonetheless, I do need to know what happens next.

View Poll: Deadline

Verdict: The Newsflesh trilogy is a real page-turner. Even if the story sometimes stretches credibility (come on, it's zombies!), there aren't a lot of books I've read lately that make me want to zoom through them so quickly. Deadline has a few weaknesses that make it slightly less convincing than the first book, but I'm still eager to read book three.

Also by Mira Grant: My review of Feed.

My complete list of book reviews.

Saturday Book Giveaway: A stack of schlock

2013-05-05T03:52:15Z

I am giving away the schlock at the bottom of my paperback pile on bookish.

Book Review: The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill

2013-05-04T03:34:18Z

A finely-crafted traditional ghost story best read alone in a big dark house.

Vintage, 1983, 164 pages

The classic ghost story by Susan Hill: a chilling tale about a menacing spectre haunting a small English town.

Arthur Kipps is an up-and-coming London solicitor who is sent to Crythin Gifford — a faraway town in the windswept salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway — to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of a client, Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. Mrs. Drablow's house stands at the end of the causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, but Kipps is unaware of the tragic secrets that lie hidden behind its sheltered windows. The routine business trip he anticipated quickly takes a horrifying turn when he finds himself haunted by a series of mysterious sounds and images — a rocking chair in a deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child's scream in the fog, and, most terrifying of all, a ghostly woman dressed all in black. Psychologically terrifying and deliciously eerie, The Woman in Black is a remarkable thriller of the first rate.

Ghost stories are not effective without atmosphere. That's why we tell them around campfires or late at night in dark rooms. And for a generation raised on slasher flicks and daily news about terrorist attacks and school shootings, it's a lost cause to try to "scare" people with words in a book.

Ah, yes, yes, indeed. All the time I had been listening to their ghoulish, lurid inventions, and their howling and groans, the one thought that had been on my mind, and the only thing I could have said was, "No, no, you have none of you any idea. This is all nonsense, fantasy, it is not like this. Nothing so blood-curdling and becreepered and crude—not so... so laughable. The truth is quite other, and altogether more terrible."

So, The Woman in Black is a traditional ghost story, told in the style of a Victorian ghost story, though the setting is approximately Edwardian. (It's never made precisely clear when it takes place, but there are electric lights and automobiles, so certainly early 20th century.) It starts with Arthur Kipp listening to his children and stepchildren telling ghost stories, and soon he drifts into reminiscing about his own personal ghost story. Which is, indeed, a terrible one.

Susan Hill doesn't try to do anything particularly new with the story. The ghosts are not clever or different or original. There's no deep hidden meaning, or if there is, I didn't feel inclined to dig for it. But what she does very well is convey atmosphere.

I ran quickly and lightly over the short stretch of rough grass between the graves toward the gap in the wall, and came out almost on the edge of the estuary. At my feet, the grass gave way within a yard or two to sand, then shallow water. All around me the marshes and the flat salt dunes stretched away until they merged with the rising tide. I could see for miles. There was no sign at all of the woman in black, nor any place in which she could have concealed herself.

Who she was — or what — and how she had vanished, such questions I did not ask myself. I tried not to think about the matter at all but, with the very last of the energy that I could already feel draining out of me rapidly, I turned and began to run, to flee from the graveyard and the ruins and to put the woman at as great a distance behind as I possibly could. I concentrated everything upon my running, hearing only the thud of my own body on the grass, the escape of my own breath. And I did not look back.

Kipps, as a young London solicitor, is sent to an old mansion on the English moors called, appropriately enough, Eel Marsh House. The sole occupant, the elderly widow Mrs. Drablow, has just passed away, and his firm sends him to attend her funeral, sort through all her papers, and wrap up her affairs.

Eel Marsh House is situated at the end of Nine Lives Causeway, which cuts through the marshes and is completely submerged at high tide, cutting the house off from the nearby village of Crythin Gifford. Kipps is not surprised on arrival to find the villagers generally unwilling to talk about Eel Marsh House or Mrs. Drablow. She was a secluded old bat living alone in an isolated creepy mansion, so he is expecting ghost stories and local superstition. He takes on the job as a modern, rational fellow who does not believe in ghosts.

Naturally, he learns that ghosts believe in him. Even so, he continues to behave in a sensible fashion. He doesn't keep playing stupid when there's no other explanation, but he also doesn't immediately say "Fuck this, I'm going back to London." After all, it's just a ghost — what can it do to him?

He finds out.

There are, of course, some secrets to uncover, and a tragic climax, but the twists and turns of the tale (which are really fairly predictable) aren't what makes this a good story, but the descriptions of Eel Marsh House, especially when Kipps (as all fools do in ghost stories) spends the night alone there. The trips across Nine Lives Causeway and the dreadful secret of the woman in black will give you a few shivers if you read this in the right mood in the right environment.

The Woman in Black (2012)

Okay, ignore Daniel Radcliffe trying to deliver sexy Leading Man five-o'clock shadow. Also ignore the opening soundtrack, whose plinky piano notes are, uh, suspiciously reminiscent of another movie theme.

The movie follows Hollywood formula much the way the book follows ghost story formula. We start with creepy little girls:

Hmm, does this remind you of anything?

As supernatural thrillers go, The Woman in Black was only okay. It changes a lot of details from the book, and they gave it a completely different ending. The movie is a lot more Amityville Horror and The Shining than the book was, with more gruesome effects and a lot less subtlety. The movie tries to generate thrills from sudden noises and abrupt ghostly appearances in windows, mirrors, etc. The book does it with atmospheric dread.

View Poll: The Woman in Black

Verdict: Save this one for Halloween. Highly recommended for late night reading alone in a dark house!

My complete list of book reviews.

AQATWA update

2013-05-01T02:21:41Z

I feel like I should post something about AQATWA every now and then.

I won't say I am suffering writer's block, exactly, but I'm stuck and have been having a devil of a time getting past this sticky point to the parts that are, uh, more interesting.

Now, standard writing advice is that if there is a part of your story that's boring you, it will almost certainly bore your readers, so you should cut it. But I really need this transitional chapter, so I am trying to figure out how to cut the part that's aggravating me while keeping the important stuff.

Another piece of writing advice is that if you're stuck on one part, write a different chapter. You don't have to write everything in order. But I've always written in a linear fashion, and I can't seem to make myself break that pattern.

So, yeah, not a lot of progress in the past couple of weeks. :/ But I mean to plug away some more this weekend!

One-line review of Silver Linings Playbook:

2013-05-01T02:15:04Z

Yawn.

I only watched it for Jennifer Lawrence. And she did a fine acting job, though I'm not sure it was really worth an Oscar.

But this was a really dull movie with a really dull story with really good actors.

Book Review: The Mermaid's Madness, by Jim C. Hines

2013-04-29T02:12:51Z

Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty vs. the Little Mermaid — still not as dumb as it sounds.

Daw Books, 2009, 339 pages

There is an old story — you might have heard it — about a young mermaid, the daughter of a king, who saved the life of a human prince and fell in love.

So innocent was her love, so pure her devotion, that she would pay any price for the chance to be with her prince. She gave up her voice, her family, and the sea, and became human. But the prince had fallen in love with another woman.

The tales say the little mermaid sacrificed her own life so that her beloved prince could find happiness with his bride.

The tales lie.

I liked The Stepsister Scheme and was in the mood for some more light entertainment. In book two of Jim C. Hines's Princess series, Danielle Whiteshore, Princess of Lorindar (aka "Cinderella"), Snow White ("Snow" to her friends), and Talia (aka "Sleeping Beauty") are back, and this time they are taking on the Little Mermaid.

Yeah, not so much.

Closer.

Okay, I just liked hunting for mermaid pics.

Incidentally, I actually own the edition of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid that is illustrated by Charles Santore. It's really a beautiful version.

I will note, however, that while Jim C. Hines is supposedly drawing on the "darker" versions of the original fairy tales... he isn't so much. He's responding directly to the Disney versions and infusing them with Hans Christian Anderson and a few other versions of the most well-known fairy tales, but Hans Christian Anderson, of course, was just doing what Hines is doing, writing his own version of an older story, and that version was sanitized a lot.

Hines does put a few original twists in the story, though. Danielle, Snow, and Talia initially encounter the Undines on a trade and diplomacy mission. Unfortunately, the Undines aren't being very diplomatic when they attack and stab Queen Beatrice, Danielle's mother-in-law, with a magic knife that steals her soul.

It soon develops that Lirea, one of the daughters of the Undine king, has gone completely mad. Hearing voices, suffering psychotic paranoia, she killed her father and one of her sisters and is trying to kill the other. Meanwhile, she's gathering her tribe in preparation for war with the humans.

Our three princesses thus have to prevent a war, try to save the other little mermaid, and find a way to restore good Queen Bea's health.

The Undines are presented as an interesting, independent fantasy race with their own culture and biology. And the seafaring adventure mixing gunpowder and magic was very Pirates of the Caribbean. Danielle, Snow, and Talia continue to grow as characters. But you'll really appreciate The Mermaid's Madness if you are thoroughly familiar with the original "Little Mermaid" story, not just the Disney version — Hines takes on all the tropes from Hans Christian Anderson's version, from the sea witch to the magic knife to the "true love of a prince," to the question of whether or not merfolk have souls, and gives them a plausible, adult treatment. There are plenty of plot twists and sudden but inevitable betrayals.

Mild spoiler for book one: In The Stepsister Scheme, we learned that Talia has a crush on Snow. This is developed further in book two; Snow isn't just flirting with all those men, and Talia is suffering from serious jealousy and unrequited love.

I think Hines handles this pretty well and a lot of fans are probably shipping Snow and Talia something fierce. But I do wonder where he's going to go with this. Snow seems to be awfully fond of men, so it will be hard to write her suddenly being willing to bat for the other side in a way that won't make me roll my eyes. But poor Talia, if she is fated to be forever disappointed.

View Poll: The Mermaid's Madness

Verdict: An equally entertaining sequel, good enough to keep me reading the series. The Princess books are well-executed traditional fantasy with a few clever fairy tale twists, and notably full of female characters — not just one or two "strong women" but a whole cast of women, good and bad. In fact, if you think about it, the men are, while decent characters also, entirely supporting cast with minor roles, who do little to further the plot.... I SEE WHAT UR DOING THAR JIM C HINES.

Also by Jim C. Hines: My review of The Stepsister Scheme.

My complete list of book reviews.

Saturday Book Giveaway: Forgotten Fantasy of the 80s

2013-04-28T02:15:42Z

Have you ever heard of Lyndon Hardy? Get his books on bookish.

Book Review: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

2013-04-27T02:12:07Z

Two interwoven quests in very different alternate universes strangely like our own.

Vintage International, 1993, 400 pages

Information is everything in Hard-boiled Wonderland. A specialist encrypter is attacked by thugs with orders from an unknown source, is chased by invisible predators, and dates an insatiably hungry librarian who never puts on weight. In the End of the World a new arrival is learning his role as dream-reader. But there is something eerily disquieting about the changeless nature of the town and its fable-like inhabitants. Told in alternate chapters, the two stories converge and combine to create a novel that is surreal, beautiful, thrilling and extraordinary.

It's only my impression, but I generally get the feeling that Japanese fiction suffers more than most in translation. It's evident in everything from the way sentences are constructed to the way thoughts flow together and the details an author focuses on that the impression a Japanese reader is getting is probably very different from what we're getting in English. Certainly there is something lost in any translation, but Japanese literature gives me that "Something got lost there" feeling more than most.

“There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people. An expensive automobile may be well worth its price, but it's only an expensive automobile. If you have the money, you can buy it, anyone can buy it. Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy. It takes money, yes, but you also need a vision of the superior sofa. That sofa among sofas.”

I'd really like to see an in-depth review of Haruki Murakami's writing style and themes in Japanese by a Japanese critic. Of course that review would have to be translated into English, and something would be lost in the translation, and so the arrow will never reach the wall.

Oh yes, that was a Zeno's Paradox reference. Here's Murakami's version, in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World:

"The encyclopedia wand's a theoretical puzzle, like Zeno's paradox. The idea is t'engrave the entire encyclopedia onto a single toothpick. Know how you do it?"

"You tell me."

"You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you've lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you've got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.173000631... Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick. If 0.50000's your exact middle on the toothpick, then 0.3333's got t'be a third of the way from the tip. You follow?"

"Sure."

"That's how you can fit data of any length in a single point on a toothpick. Only theoretically, of course. No existin' technology can actually engrave so fine a point. But this should give you a perspective on what tautologies are like. Say time's the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn't have anything t'do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It'll be finite, but pretty near eternal. Though if you make it a repeatin' decimal, why, then it is eternal. You understand what that means? The problem's the software, no relation to the hardware. It could be a toothpick or a two-hundred-meter timber or the equator - doesn't matter. Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, subdividin' for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It's makin' a straight line for the brain. No dodgin' it, not for anyone. People have t'die, the body has t'fall. Time is hurlin' that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin', thought goes on subdividin' that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits."

"In other words," I said, "immortality."

"There you are. Humans are immortal in their thought. Though strictly speakin', not immortal, but endlessly, asymptotically close to immortal. That's eternal life."

That annoyingly dialectal speech pattern used by the dotty professor giving our nameless protagonist a lecture on information theory, by the way, is an example of where something gets lost in the translation. I am guessing that Murakami wrote that character using a roughly equivalent sort of informal slang in Japanese, and that's how the translator rendered it in English.

Notwithstanding the above passage, and there are a lot more such esoteric and philosophical discussions in this book, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is actually not as bizarre as some of the other Murakami novels I've read. It's still bizarre, but it's bizarre in a way that almost resembles a conventional science fiction/fantasy novel. If someone who's a regular SF&F reader wanted to try Murakami, I would probably recommend this book as a good starter, since while most of Murakami's books have a fantastic element in them, it's often a lot harder to see the sense or purpose in them.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is actually two stories, told in alternating chapters.

In the first, our nameless protagonist is asked to do a job for a scientist who lives in an underground complex. He has a spunky teenage granddaughter who is repeatedly (like, every single time) described as chubby but pretty, and apparently she has a fetish for wearing pink. If you're thinking this is the usual Murakami nebbish who will go through the book experiencing one bizarre and often life-threatening thing after another with a sort of resigned imperturbability, and the usual Murakami manic pixie dream girl who will constantly exude sex in her actions, dress, and random conversational topics like "Do you like having your semen swallowed?" (yes, that's one of her actual random conversation starters), but whom the protagonist will never actually have sex with, you're right.

The protagonist is a "Calcutec." He works for "the System." The System is some sort of big bureaucratic quasi-governmental organization that sends Calcutecs out to do things. What things? "Shuffling." Some sort of mental process whereby the Calcutec sits down with a nice glass of wine and a homecooked Italian meal (immacutely-described pasta dishes are as inevitable in a Murakami novel as conversations about semen) and "Shuffles" numbers in his head.

The System has a rival organization: the Semiotecs. Soon, our nameless Murakami protagonist finds that this last job has brought him to the attention of the Semiotecs. They break into his apartment, rough him up, and threaten him.

It's all vaguely alt-universe and never completely explained, but it reminded me, for some reason, of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. This half of the book is more science fiction than fantasy. There is a lot of "theory of the mind" stuff, especially at the very end.

There are also my favorite Murakami creations yet, all the more interesting because they never actually show up, leading me to wonder whether we're supposed to question whether this entire adventure isn't all their heads:

"Oh, I see," I said. "How about telling me something about the INKlings then?"

"INKlings? A sharp guy like you don't know about INKlings? A.k.a. Infra-Nocturnal Kappa. You thought kappa were folktales? They live underground. They hole up in the subways and sewers, eat the city's garbage, and drink graywater. They don't bother with humans beings. Except for a few subway workmen who disappear that is, heh heh."

"Doesn't the government know about them?"

"Sure, the government knows. The state's not that dumb."

"Then why don't they warn people? Or else drive the INKlings away?"

"First of all," he said, "it'd upset too many people. Wouldn't want that to happen, would you? INKlings swarming right under their feet, people wouldn't like that. Second, forget about exterminating them. What are you gonna do? Send the whole Japanese Self-Defense Force down into the sewers of Tokyo? The swamp down there in the dark is their stomping grounds. It wouldn't be a pretty picture.

"Another thing, the INKlings have set up shop not too far from the Imperial Palace. It's a strategic move, you understand."

Kappas, living under Tokyo. That's just so awesome and so ridiculous. I wasn't sure if Murakami was paying tribute to C.H.U.D. or J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. I was very disappointed to find out that "INKlings" was something the English translator coined, not what Murakami used in the original Japanese. Murakami is a voracious reader and he constantly references Western literary works in his own books (his characters are always reading Thomas Mann or Balzac or Dostoevsky), so that kind of pun is totally something he would come up with.

The other half of the book takes place in a town called the End of the World. Here, too, the protagonist is nameless, passive, and drifts through an odd, dreamlike world in which things are described but never explained. The town is peaceful, and people do odd, undefined jobs for no particular reason. The protagonist learns upon arrival that no one is allowed to keep their shadow. Your shadow stays outside the forbidding Wall, and only after your shadow dies are you fully a resident of the Town.

The main character plays an alternate-universe version of chess with a friendly Colonel, and performs the job he was given upon arrival of being the town's Dreamreader. The town library has hundreds of skulls on its shelves, skulls of the furry, docile Beasts who surround the town. The Dreamreader's job is to read dreams contained in the skulls. Eventually he decides he wants to leave the Town, and try to save his shadow.

Like the first story, the second one takes a while to start making any kind of sense. You just have to accept everything on its own terms. If the first story was vaguely sci-fi, the second one is a sort of pastoral fantasy with only the slightest ripple of creepiness pervading it.

As you read through Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, reading first a chapter in the first story, then the next chapter in the second, it feels like reading two books in one until about midway when you start seeing connections that can't be coincidental, and then, gradually, more of the truth is unveiled. You may or may not guess where Murakami is going, but it's definitely a trip.

“You're wrong. The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things. If you believe in me at all, then believe this: I promise you I will find it. Everything depends on this."

"I believe you," she whispers after a moment. "Please find my mind.”

There are definitely some common themes (I might even say, fetishes) in Murakami's works, and after having read several of his novels, I can start checking off all the boxes as I go along. Yet each one is still original and interesting in its own way, so now and then I keep feeling the mood to try another one.

View Poll: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Verdict: You have certain expectations from a Murakami novel, certain tropes he uses over and over, yet he's never just copying himself. If you're a Murakami fan, then Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World should be on your to-read list, but I also think it's one of his more "readable" novels, at least for people who don't shy away from fantasy. It's odd and goes in weird places, like all his books, but the quest is one part mindfuck, two parts fantasy adventure, and much of it reads like Murakami is winking at you, tongue in cheek. It's pretty accessible even to readers not familiar with Murakami's style.

Also by Haruki Murakami: My reviews of Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

My complete list of book reviews.

Book Review: Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan

2013-04-23T03:13:41Z

Dashiell Hammett + William Gibson in a noir cyberpunk thriller which is better than most.

Del Rey, 2002, 526 pages

In the 25th century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person's consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or "sleeve") making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched 180 light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats "existence" as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.

Oh dear. Not for the first time, I greatly enjoyed a book that got cored and gutted on Requires Only That You Hate. acrackedmoon called it neckbeard wish fulfillment. (In fairness, a lot of acrackedmoon's vitriol was because the author, Richard K. Morgan, was kind of a dick to her on Twitter.)

Well, that's a fair cop. Takeshi Kovacs is a bad-ass super-soldier who carves a bloody swath of vengeance across the criminal underworld in between bouts of pleasurin' the laaaydeez, so yeah.

There's a tradition in sci-fi of obligatory, and obligatorily bad, sex scenes, born of the era when many sci-fi authors wrote erotica to actually pay the bills and just transported those literary skills wholesale into their science fiction once they could get away with it.

Richard Morgan, dude, that era is over. The book doesn't need porn in it to keep us from getting bored between firefights — really.

Altered Carbon takes place in a future where humans have colonies on other worlds and people can be instantaneously "needlecast" between planets thanks to the technology of "sleeving." The basic premise is one that's been explored already in science fiction: digitized humanity. People can be stored, uploaded, backed up, plugged into virtual realities, and even copied, and of course, "resleeved" in any available body. This means a form of immortality for the rich, but just a new way to be oppressed for everyone else. Crimes are punished with being put "on stack" — your mind in digital storage, while anyone with the money can lease your body to walk around in like a new suit of clothes — while the worst crimes are punished with Erasure, i.e. Real Death.

Takeshi Kovacs is a former member of the U.N.'s "Envoy Corp," which is made up of specially-trained young men and women given all kinds of psycho-social, neuro-chemical, cybernetic, and physical enhancements to turn them into killing machines. They get needlecast around the galaxy, resleeved into synthetic superhuman bodies to go fight the U.N.'s wars, and when they die, they just get retrieved from storage to do it again. Then like every stupid government ever, the U.N. turns all these highly-trained killers loose on society as pariahs with no legitimate job prospects once they no longer have a use for them.

(The idea of the U.N. in the future being not only a global Earth government, but governing all of Earth's colonies as well, is barely touched on.)

Kovacs, having become disillusioned with the U.N. and the Envoy Corp, has struck out on his own, but as the book starts, he struck out in a major way, getting himself and his lover killed and Stacked. When he returns to consciousness, he is on an alien world — Earth. A "Meth" (Methuselah) named Laurens Bancroft has arranged to have Kovacs freed from storage to do a job for him: namely, solving his own murder.

Kovacs proceeds to run around "Bay City" (a decaying, far future San Francisco) looking for clues and shooting people or getting shot. He stays at a hotel run by an Artificial Intelligence with the personality of Jimi Hendrix, blows up a black market resleeving clinic, bangs Laurens Bancroft's super-sexy immortal wife (of course), bangs the hot policewoman nominally in charge of the Bancroft case and keeping an eye on Kovacs (of course), and tries to rescue a whore, who still dies (of course). Yup, it's pure noir, with backstabbin' dangerous women and whores, whores, whores. The cyberpunk elements, besides the sleeving technology, arise when Kovacs finds out the real plot involves a yakuza gang boss and political machinations that go way above the tawdry activities he was initially investigating.

This is the sort of book you either like or hate, and if you are not into cyberpunk or noir thrillers, there's probably no level of writing ability that will redeem it for you.

So, I liked it. I liked it a lot more than I liked William Gibson, but not as much as Neal Stephenson. (In Snow Crash, Stephenson actually has his protagonist hang a lampshade on the silliness of indulging in exactly the sort of "I-will-fucking-kill-every-motherfucker-in-sight" testosteronic fantasy that Morgan dives headlong into.)

Snicker-worthy sex aside (you can read an excerpt at the linked ROTYH review above for a sample), I did enjoy Altered Carbon. But I like noir fiction and cyberpunk and bad-ass macho dudes blowing shit up if written with a modicum of intelligence, and I'll just have to disagree with acrackedmoon on Morgan's writing ability — he's not brilliant (William Gibson writes much better prose, and Neal Stephenson's worldbuilding is far more original), but the book is entertaining in a splash-bang way and while the cyberpunk aspects of it are no longer novel, there are some some clever twists. The complicated plotting and multiple levels of backstabbing and scheming by everyone involved is standard noir, and Morgan brings it off fairly well.

Is it a work of genius or a genre classic? No. But it delivers what it promises, and as noir cyberpunk goes, it is head and shoulders above this.

View Poll: Altered Carbon

Verdict: For lovers of cyberpunk, Altered Carbon is a good read. Yes, it's testosteronic macho fantasy with a hard-boiled burned-out super-soldier ultimately solving the case by killing everyone in sight, but there are some intelligent bits of worldbuilding (Takeshi Kovacs frequently quotes from a revolutionary from his homeworld in a way that makes her sound entirely believable), and the cyberpunk technology introduced enough moral dilemmas and thought experiments to make this not a completely mindless action thriller. It is what it is, but I found it quite a lot better than most cyberpunk I've read lately.

My complete list of book reviews.

Saturday Book Giveaway: One and two-thirds trilogies

2013-04-21T02:48:49Z

I am getting rid of Jack L. Chalker on bookish.

Book Review: The Master of Go, by Yasunari Kawabata

2013-04-17T00:56:05Z

A Nobel prize-winning novel* about a go game.

Vintage, 1954, 189 pages

Go is a game of strategy in which two players attempt to surround each other's black or white stones. Simple in its fundamentals, infinitely complex in its execution, Go is an essential expression of the Japanese spirit. And in his fictional chronicle of a match played between a revered and heretofore invincible Master and a younger and more modern challenger, Yasunari Kawabata captured the moment in which the immutable traditions of imperial Japan met the onslaught of the twentieth century.

I think this book loses a little something in translation starting with the title. In Japanese, Yasunari Kawabata's most famous novel is "Meijin" (名人), which was a title traditionally bestowed on Japan's strongest go player. Translating it as "The Master of Go" is accurate in a literal sort of way, but you can kind of see how the nuance in English is different.

Not knowing enough Japanese to read it untranslated, I don't know how how much is lost throughout, but I'm sure that given the delicate imagery Kawabata painted with words, and the nuanced portrayals of his subjects, which still came through in all their subtlety in the English version, it must be a different experience reading it as he wrote it in Japanese.

Meijin is a slightly fictionalized chronicle of actual events: the retirement game between Honinbo Shūsai (in the book referred to only as "the Master"), the reigning Meijin, and a younger player named Minoru Kitani, whom Kawabata renames "Otake" in the book. Kawabata reported on the real game for Japanese newspapers, and here he recounts it as a first-person narrator. It's a book that blurs the line between "memoir" and "novel," but in relating the six-month contest between the Master and his upstart rival, Kawabata uses the two players to reflect images of a Japan that is fading and the Japan to be. Kawabata's sympathies are unquestionably with the old guard and tradition, but Otake is hardly an unmannered radical. Indeed, the two players, Kawabata's novelized alter-ego, and all the other players, judges, reporters, family members, and witnesses are never anything but exceedingly polite to one another.

It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art. The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice, even when challenging the Master himself. The fault was not Otake's. Perhaps what happened was but natural, Go being a contest and a show of strength.

It's the "fussy rules" that occupy a great deal of Kawabata's narration. The Master and Otake both suffer from ill health, though Otake is only 30 and the Master over twice that. They repeatedly negotiate where to play, how often they will play, how long the break will be between game sessions, etc. The Master is distressed by the new "sealed move" system, in which the last play of the day is sealed in an envelope and kept hidden until the start of the next session, so that one's opponent doesn't have the advantage of being able to spend the break thinking about his response, or possibly consulting with his students. (Getting outside advice is of course against the rules, and of course go professionals have often been accused of doing this.) The Master at one point accuses Otake of making a sealed move to buy time.

The ins and outs of the go game, however, are not really the point of novel, nor are you reading to find out who wins. Kawabata talks about the game and the environment and the people with finely descriptive melancholy observation, and I suspect there are subtleties in his narration that are only apparent to Japanese, perhaps only Japanese of his generation. Still, the way he relates everything to the game, and does so in such a way that you can read this book without even knowing the rules of go and still follow and feel the tension of the struggle, is quite brilliant.

I am a very casual aficionado of go. I am not very good. There is one chapter in Meijin in which Kawabata meets an American on a train, who turns out to be an enthusiastic devotee of the game.

I first tried giving him a six-stone handicap. He had taken lessons at the Go Association, he said, and challenged some famous players. He had the forms down well enough, but he had a way of playing thoughtlessly, without really putting himself into the game. Losing did not seem to bother him in the least. He went happily through game after game, as if to say that it was silly to take a mere game seriously. He lined his forces up after patterns he had been taught, and his opening plays were excellent; but he had no will to fight. If I pushed him back a little or made a surprise move, he quietly collapsed. It was as if I were throwing a large but badly balanced opponent in a wrestling match. Indeed this quickness to lose left me wondering uncomfortably if I might not have something innately evil concealed within me. Quite aside from matters of skill, I sensed no response, no resistance. There was no muscular tone in his play. One always found a competitive urge in a Japanese, however inept he might be at the game. One never encountered a stance as uncertain as this. The spirit of Go was missing. I thought it all very strange, and I was conscious of being confronted with utter foreignness.

The American is described as being 13-kyu, which is about my level, give or take a couple of stones. I think Kawabata believed what he wrote here, that go is a game that exists on a metaphysical plane and that there is something uniquely Japanese about its spirit. He of course acknowledges its origins in China, but argues that the game was refined to its highest level in Japan. At the time in which this match took place, that may have been true, though nowadays, the best Korean and Chinese players are more than a match for top Japanese professionals, and there are a growing number of Western players capable of playing at a level that would probably have astounded Kawabata.

The game described in Meijin took place in 1938. The war that had already begun is not mentioned, other than a vague reference to "the current crisis," but Kawabata wrote this book in 1951, and one can easily see the shadow of Japan's defeat in his telling of this story about a go game.

Yasunari Kawabata was the first Japanese to win the Nobel prize for literature. He committed suicide in 1972, not long after The Master of Go was translated into English, and two years after his friend Yukio Mishima, another famous Japanese author, did the same.

You can read this book without knowing anything about go. Go is just the medium. But there are diagrams of the game throughout the book, and it is still studied and dissected by Japanese and Western players alike.

View Poll: The Master of Go

Verdict: An exquisite read with surprising depth, you have to read The Master of Go to understand how an account of a go game could help its author win a Nobel prize. It's about two men representing different aspects of a changing Japan, and what Yasunari Kawabata thought Japan had lost, on the go board which represented the world. If you like Japanese literature, or you'd like to sample Japanese literature, don't pass this book up because you're not a go player; you don't have to be. Plus, it's short. But good! On the other hand, if you are looking for action, drama, and something more Western in the way of a "plot," The Master of Go will probably just bore you.

*Pedantic ETA: Yes, I know that the Nobel prize for Literature isn't given for a single novel, it's given to the author for a body of work. So my one-line blurb was sloppy. The Master of Go is generally considered Kawabata's finest novel, though.

My complete list of book reviews.

Book Review: Kris Longknife: Mutineer, by Mike Shepherd

2013-04-15T01:57:22Z

Privileged brat becomes a space navy ensign in a perfectly mediocre generic space opera.

Ace Books, 2004, 389 pages

Kris Longknife is a daughter of privilege, born to money and power. Her father is the prime minister of her home planet, her mother the consummate politician's wife. She's been raised only to be beautiful and marry well. But the heritage of the military Longknifes courses through Kris' blood - and, against her parents' objections, she enlists in the Marines.

She has a lot to live up to and a lot to prove in the long-running struggle among her powerful family, a highly defensive - and offensive - Earth, and the hundreds of warring colonies. Then an ill-conceived attack brings the war close to home, putting Kris' life on the line. Now she has only one choice: certain death on the front lines of rim space - or mutiny.

I've found a few good SF novels lately, but with this one we are back to strictly average. Mutineer was pleasant but unimpressive entertainment on a par with maybe a good episode of a mediocre TV science fiction show. Kris Longknife seems cut in the same mold as Honor Harrington or one of the Vorkosigans, but she's boringly derivative and so is her universe: the stitched-in political intrigue shadowing the book to the climax, about the Society of Humanity breaking up and Kris's homeworld being on the other side of a schism from Earth, was not developed enough, nor was this universe and its politics, to read as anything interesting enough to make me want to read the rest of the series. Kris herself is an interesting enough character, if a little too good to be true, but the writing and the setting just didn't hold my interest.

First of all, this book is the first in a series that is like all those other series that are derivative of Horatio Hornblower — see the young officer start out as boot ensign, and in each book she will have bigger battles on a grander scale and steadily be promoted.

Mutineer portrays the military as always a force for good, except when bad officers are subverting their lawful orders. (The "mutiny" in Mutineer takes place only at the end of the book, and involves Kris discovering that some officers have decided to effectively stage a coup and start a war.) The real problem, though, is just as there is no complexity or ambiguity in the role of the military in this book (they are only seen saving little girls from terrorists and bringing food to starving farmers), there is no complexity or ambiguity in the trials faced by Ensign Longknife. She is always and unmistakeably in the right, and while she occasionally questions the wisdom of her tactics or whether she will succeed, she never questions whether she's in the right, because she always is. She doesn't have to make any hard and ugly choices. Maybe this happens in later books, but in book one, it's all about how Kris is an awesome person and will be an awesome naval officer who will always do the right thing. And conveniently she has a super-rich, politically powerful family with a legacy of war heroes to boot. While this introduces some complications for her (her family's reputation of course precedes her, and her fellow officers want to know why the spoiled little rich girl decided to join the navy), it's mostly an endless network of favors and influence she can call in when she has to. For example, she conveniently has a personal AI with her unlike anything issued to other officers, which allows her access to information that no one else has. It's easier to be right all the time when you have a special super-computer backing you up.

There isn't a lot of detail in this universe. The Society of Humanity spans hundreds of worlds, with apparently Earth and Kris's homeworld of Wardhaven (of which her father is the Prime Minister and her grandfather is a former Prime Minister) being the two most influential. There are references to a past war with tentacled aliens called the Iteeche, but they aren't seen in this book, nor are any other aliens. There also isn't a lot of dwelling on technology or weaponry: jump ships, AIs, lasers, let's move on.

The first part of the book almost lost me completely. First, there was a lot of infodumping, often delivered in "As you know, Bob" speeches. This became less annoying in the second half of the book. Second, we get introduced to Kris's background story by way of the aforementioned rescue mission, in which we learn that Kris had a little brother who was kidnapped when she was a child, and did not survive. All right, that's tragic and unsurprisingly, on a mission to save a little girl of a similar age, it dredges up the past for her, but the degree to which she has trouble coping — apparently she can still barely stand to say his name — left me in doubt as to the maturity and stability of this 22-year-old naval officer. The angst was dialed well beyond the point of believability.

I also found much of the supporting cast to be annoyingly stereotypical, from Kris's Chinese-Irish best friend (why do all these far-future space operas feature old Earth cultures spread across the galaxy and unchanged in hundreds of years? There's even a friggin' Scottish Highlanders space marines regiment!) to her vacuous mother who would have fit right in at the Netherfield Ball.

It may be that I judge SF too harshly nowadays. Mutineer is entertaining enough as a pure military SF adventure, and Kris Longknife is competent and noble, without stumbling as a character, if a little too blessed and perfect at times. But this book just didn't hook me, so looking at the rest of the series, which is now up to nine books, does not make me feel like diving in.

View Poll: Kris Longknife: Mutineer

Verdict: Passable, average, decently but not thrillingly written, I wanted to be more enthusiastic and there's nothing about Mutineer to make me give it a really negative review, but I just can't muster much enthusiasm about it. It's pure generic space opera with a pretty generic heroine, so the best recommendation I can give it is that it will fit the bill if you are in the mood for that kind of thing.

My complete list of book reviews.

Saturday Book Giveaway: The Wild Cards series, edited by George R. R. Martin

2013-04-14T04:03:31Z

I am giving away George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards series on bookish.

Book Review: Coyote, by Allen Steele

2013-04-10T01:16:40Z

A novel of interstellar exploration.

Ace Books, 2002, 400 pages

Coyote marks a dramatic new turn in the career of Allen Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of Chronospace. Epic in scope, passionate in its conviction, and set against a backdrop of plausible events, it tells the brilliant story of Earth's first interstellar colonists - and the mysterious planet that becomes their home...

The crime of the century begins without a hitch. On July 5th, 2070, as it's about to be launched, the starship Alabama is hijacked - by her captain and crew. In defiance of the repressive government of The United Republic of Earth, they replace her handpicked passengers with political dissidents and their families. These become Earth's first pioneers in the exploration of space...

Captain R. E. Lee, their leader. Colonel Gill Reese, the soldier sent to stop Lee. Les Gilles, the senior communications officer, a victim of a mistake that will threaten the entire mission. Crewman Eric Gunther, who has his own agenda for being aboard. His daughter, Wendy, a teenager who will grow up too quickly. Jorge and Rita Montero, ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. And their son Carlos, who will become a hero in spite of himself.

After almost two-and-a-half centuries in cold sleep, they will awaken above their destination: a habitable world named Coyote. A planet that will test their strength, their beliefs, and their very humanity...

In Coyote, Allen Steele delivers a grand novel of galactic adventure - a tale of life on the newest of frontiers.

The United States has been overthrown in a coup, and is now the United Republic (actually only occupying part of North America, with the Pacific Northwest and New England having seceded and now at war with them, along with Europe). 50 stars have been replaced by a single one. The repressive police state has ruined its economy to build the world's first interstellar spaceship, which will carry one hundred colonists to another planet in hibernation, where hundreds of years later, they will ensure the Republic lives forever.

Except that Captain Robert E. Lee is loyal to the U.S. of A that he grew up in, and he plans to steal The Alabama.

The story is about the colonists settling Coyote, a world 42 light years away, but the first third of the book takes place on Earth, telling us how a group of dissidents conspire to sneak aboard the starship and replace its loyalist crew. The novel is really several short stories and a novella strung together in a contiguous timeline; there is stealing the Alabama; there is the story of the unfortunate colonist who's woken early and cannot return to hibernation, thus being condemned to live out the rest of his life alone aboard the ship; there is the landing and initial colonization of Liberty, on the island of New Florida, with all the expected exploring-a-new-planet-and-discovering-that-some-of-the-wildlife-finds-humans-tasty challenges; there is a teenage adventure with a shift to a first-person narrator, Wendy Gunther, who runs off with her boyfriend and several other kids on an ill-considered river voyage; this bildungsroman continues with her (now ex) boyfriend who continues his own journey alone; and finally, there is the arrival of another ship, which leaves enough loose ends for the next book.

Was Coyote terribly original? No, I've read more than a few "first interstellar colony" stories and this is very much of the same mold. Was the prose dazzling? No, but it was perfectly competent. I want to rave over Coyote because I liked it a lot, but I have to admit it's perfectly typical genre SF. But I like genre SF and Coyote was well-written, had no stumbles or clunky prose or stupid plot twists, and none of the characters were annoying or unbelievable. Since I can't say that about a lot of the SF "classics" I've been reading lately, I give Coyote a high recommendation if you like this kind of book.

Verdict: Coyote is exactly what it says on the cover. Allen Steele writes good solid hard SF without being a crank or exercising his fetishes (how sad is it that this makes him above average for SF writers?) and this first interstellar colony offers challenges, surprises, and a decent cast of characters.

My complete list of book reviews.

Alexandra Quick and the Lands Below: Author's Notes (Chapter 3 — Stormcrows)

2013-04-08T01:38:23Z

Chapter 3 — Stormcrows

Chapter three starts with the traditional shopping trip to the Goblin Market, with Darla and Angelique both boasting about their summer activities which are much more interesting than those of Alexandra and her friends.

"My family and I went to the North Pole on an Aurora Borealis cruise," sighed Darla, barely waiting for Alexandra's reply. "It was so romantic! I met the most wonderful boy on the cruise, he goes to the Blacksburg Magery Institute, and he's four years older than me –"

The first step in Darla's downfall — an unrequited summer crush.

Rereading the bus trip, there is a lot of exposition that was mostly just rehashing, and dialog that probably could have gotten the important bits across in much fewer words. Of course I needed to drop the foreshadowing about Darla and Martin, and the Pritchard twins' education in wandcrafting and interest in Muggle Studies is also significant. But a lot of it is padding.

Of course, when I say "padding," I'm thinking like a 'wannabe pro' author and not like a fan fiction author. Sometimes I talk about excessive word count, and people say they enjoy the added details and worldbuilding. I enjoy it too, because you can get away with this kind of indulgence in serialized fan fiction chapters.

Alexandra's trip to Gringotts, for example:

At the front of the line, Alexandra had to crane her neck up to see the goblin leaning over the counter to stare down at her.

"Well?" demanded the goblin.

"I need to exchange Muggle money for wizard money," she said.

"Do you have an account with us?" the goblin snapped.

"No."

"Well, then you'll have to pay a surcharge."

Alexandra frowned. "What if I open an account?"

The goblin wrinkled his nose, studying her. "How much Muggle money do you have?" he inquired.

She pulled out her bills, and counted them. "Umm, seventy-six dollars."

The goblin grimaced, and showed teeth as he spoke, very slowly. "We are not a piggy bank, little girl!"

Alexandra could see why Gringotts didn't leave out any cards inviting patrons to comment on its customer service, like she'd seen at Muggle banks.

She left with two Lions, six Eagles, and two Pigeons, and a vague suspicion that she'd been cheated, though since she didn't really know what the exchange rate was, she couldn't be sure. Still, she liked jingling the gold coins in her hand.

I had fun writing that, and eventually the existence of a non-goblin competitor to Gringotts, the Colonial Bank of the New World, will have some relevance. But here it's basically nothing relevant to the plot. I could have eliminated that entire scene and it wouldn't have changed the story at all.

Likewise, the traditional annual confrontation with Larry.

Vance led the way through the large double-doors into the department store. A pair of shiny gold mechanical men (wearing magnets on their chests that said, "Get service like this at home, too! Tockmagi ® Clockwork Golems") opened the doors for them. As soon as Alexandra and Anna stepped across the threshold, they collided with an invisible barrier, and stumbled backwards. Anna yelped in pain and rubbed her nose, and Alexandra was about to do the same – it felt like she'd walked face-first into a wall. Then she heard howls of laughter from just inside, and saw Larry, Ethan, and Wade all standing in the entrance foyer of the store, doubling over and pointing with glee.

Of course that ongoing antagonism has not been entirely without purpose, but as I reread Stormcrows, I see a lot of character fluff before I get to the real point of the chapter.

Alexandra's eye was on the Muggle-Fried Specials section, wondering just what wizards thought 'Muggle-Fried' meant, but then she heard Darla let out an excited little squeal. She turned to see what the other girl was fussing about now, and noticed for the first time a group of six teenagers sitting at a table to themselves, all wearing blue and silver military-style uniforms, with dark blue cloaks lying neatly folded on the benches next to them.

They looked like they were probably juniors or seniors, but they definitely weren't Charmbridge students. There were four boys and two girls. They sat erectly in their seats, barely seemed to notice the other students and adults around them, and ate together in a stiff, almost synchronized fashion.

"Stormcrows," said Vance.

The Blacksburg Magery Institute is loosely based on institutions like the Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel. Of course those are post-secondary schools, so BMI is really more comparable to a military boarding school like Massanutten Military Academy. But I've been following Rowling's precedent in not giving the wizarding world much in the way of actual universities.

Alexandra noticed that all of the BMI students looked bemused, except for one, a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered boy with straight hair as dark as Martin's. He was studying Alexandra and the other Charmbridge students next to her, rather than staring at Darla, who was still babbling.

And that's all the introduction I gave for Maximilian's first appearance.

The rest of the chapter was poor Darla getting humiliated. A lot of people thought Martin was a jerk to her. He kind of was, but in fairness, their "romance" was almost entirely in her mind. Martin did not really (deliberately) lead her on; he flirted with her on that Aurora Borealis cruise because he thought she was cute (like a child, not like a girl) and it amused him. Not having a younger sister, like Max, he also didn't understand girls very well and didn't think she'd take it as seriously as she did. Keep in mind also, as we learn later, that Martin has been "flirting" for years with Julia, who also had a crush on him. So he's used to this kind of playing around, without meaning anything by it.

He could have been a lot nicer to Darla, and crushing her right in front of all her friends and his was definitely cruel. But he's a teenager and she's a kid, and he was surrounded by his friends, so he did not exactly show his nobler qualities here.

And while that, of course, was not directly the cause of any of Darla's subsequent behavior, it was a precipitating event, giving her a little push in the wrong direction. Alexandra, so far immune to the lure of boys and able to coolly assess Darla's own foolishness and humiliation, is seeing the beginning of Darla turning into her dark mirror image.

Saturday Book Giveaway: Books that sometimes were better movies

2013-04-07T02:05:42Z

I am giving away Michael Crichton novels on bookish.

Book Review: Starve Better, by Nick Mamatas

2013-04-05T00:11:27Z

How to be a starving writer while biting the hands that feed you.

Apex Publications, 2011, 172 pages

Starve Better makes no promises of making you a bestselling author. It won't feed aspiring writers' dreams of fame and fortune. This book is about survival: how to generate ideas when you needed them yesterday, dialogue and plot on the quick, and what your manuscript is up against in the slush piles of the world. For non-fiction writers, Starve Better offers writing techniques such as how to get (relatively) high-paying assignments in second and third-tier magazines, how to react to your first commissioned assignment, and how to find gigs that pay NOW as the final notices pile up and the mice eat the last of the pasta in the cupboard.

Humor, essays, and some of the most widely read blog pieces from Nick Mamatas, author and editor of fiction that has caught the attention of speculative fiction's most prestigious awards, come together for the first time in a writers' guide that won't teach anyone how to get rich and famous... but it will impart the most valuable skill in the business: how to starve better.

I've read a lot of books about writing. I'm a little beyond most "writer's advice" books now — not because I've got nothing left to learn, but I know how to punctuate dialog, and I know why it's bad to start your story with your protagonist waking up from a dream and examining herself in the mirror. But I like reading books by writers about writing. Stephen King's On Writing is one of the best, and I also liked John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist, even though if I ever do become a novelist, I'll be nothing like John Gardner (or Stephen King, for that matter). I certainly won't be anything like Nick Mamatas.

Mamatas (known here on LJ as nihilistic_kid) is a professional writer. The traditional kind — the starving, write-anything-that-pays-the-rent kind who will rub your nose in your MFA aspirations and your bourgeois laptop-at-the-coffee-shop pretensions. Starve Better is a collection of essays and blog posts that is about half writing advice (or "advice") and half advice on how to make a living as a writer who has to scrounge up rent money this week. Mamatas has been a writing instructor, he's ground out articles for content mills and tiny, niche magazines, he's written a couple of books, and he also wrote a rather infamous piece called The Term Paper Artist (reprinted in this book). I read it years ago and somehow had not realized that that was Nick Mamatas.

These are all interesting, entertaining, and unromanticized short pieces about the writing life. Mamatas acts the curmudgeon and gadfly, but it's obvious he really does love being a writer. He also loves taking the piss out of dilettantes and blowhards and mocking the mockable. (Unsurprisingly, he's Twitter friends with Misandry Shrugs of Requires Only That You Hate.) So he's got something of an online rep. Like John Scalzi (and less affable about it), he pisses people off by saying your writing probably sucks, you've got lousy taste, and you should get some home training before you go to cons and start skeeving on people.

I am one of the people he mocks, someone who once dreamed of being a writer but who went for the day job with health insurance instead, and now monkeys around with a laptop at cafes. But at least I don't write fantatwee. (Actually, I'm not sure where he stands on Harry Potter fanfiction. :( )

If you really are one of those starving writers who means to make a living writing and aren't too proud to scrounge and hustle for whatever freelance jobs you can get, Starve Better seems to offer quite a bit of useful advice, though the publishing landscape is changing so quickly that any advice about current markets is likely to be dated by the time you read this.

Verdict: Starve Better is aimed at would-be writers and anyone who just likes reading about making a living as a writer. Also, anyone who likes to read a writer bagging on critique groups, slush piles, and the inflated distinction between literary and genre fiction. A short, quick read which I enjoyed quite a bit, and has more actual useful advice than you'll get in most "how to improve your writing" books.

My complete list of book reviews.

AQATWA: All over the map

2013-04-03T00:37:33Z

Well, I kicked myself back into gear to start setting aside some writing time for AQATWA. I just finished Chapter 11, and am at 57K words.

I cranked out a whole bunch of words which involve a character giving an extemporaneous speech that is supposed to Drop Clues and Foreshadowing and set Plot Points into motion and it's all disorganized confusing bullshit. And at 11 chapters and 57,000 words, I haven't really started any of the major subplots yet.

So, yay?

I'm trying to just write and not go back and rewrite (yet), which is what usually slows me down. Yes, the big speech can be completely rewritten. Or eliminated. After the rest of the story takes shape, I can fit the speech around it to make it make more sense.

But right now, it's barely more than a bunch of stream-of-consciousness paragraphs.

Saturday Book Giveaway: Enough Irish to last you until next St. Patrick's Day

2013-03-31T00:06:30Z

I am giving away Morgan Llywelyn on bookish.

I hate myself a little

2013-03-30T20:13:15Z

I was listening to Pandora, and a song came up on the playlist that I thought was cool, so I clicked the "like" button - and it turns out to be from the Twilight soundtrack.

Shoot me now.

In other news: I have more bookcases! I can possibly for the first time in the history of my life shelve all my books!

There are several thrift stores in my area, and I am always amazed at the furniture you can find there (and sometimes annoyed that I just spent five times as much at Ikea or Office Depot buying something just as good or better that was available "gently used"). $200 office chairs for $20. Complete living room sets for a couple hundred dollars. People throw out so much crap that doesn't need to be thrown out.

Besides some good, solid bookcases, I also picked up a nice loveseat, coffee table, and recliner, so my living room is starting to look like a living room, and my basement is starting to look like a library. :D

Okay, so I'll admit it's kind of a butt-ugly chair. But it's comfy, and it was cheap.

There was even a guy with a truck hanging around outside so I was able to get door-to-door delivery for a very reasonable price.

Yes, I am a cheap SOB. But that's how I was able to buy a house. And I gave the guy 25% more than we agreed on.

Now that winter is reluctantly letting go, though, there is exterior and yardwork I'm gonna have to get to pretty soon. :P

This is relevant to Alexandra Quick fans (see, if I am going to occasionally ramble about prosaic crap, I try to make it relevant to those of you who only read my blog 'cause you want to know if I am ever going to finish AQ5 - aren't I considerate?) because... I have found that my writing environment greatly affects my ability to keep my butt in a chair and write. The chair and desk I sit in really matters. So does the lighting, and the ambiance, and the nature of surrounding distractions. (People: okay, if I can wear headphones. I like bookstore coffee shops and the smell of espresso and pastries. My office: not so okay, because my Internet browser is right there. My living room: also not so okay, because the television is right there.)

So I am trying to transform my basement library into my "ideal" writing workspace. On a cheap-ass budget. So far: nice office chair, simple writing desk, and an adjustable footrest (why did I not ever think of buying one of these before?). Added bookshelves (so I can get replace those unsightly boxes with walls lined with books and a recliner (so I can read, all comfy-like). Wireless speakers so I can pipe music from my stereo or computer upstairs.

The non-cheap step will be adding more insulation in the walls, because while it's a finished basement with a heating vent, it still gets cold.