The Lost Books of the Odyssey purports to be a collection of lost stories from Homer's Odyssey, all of which are variants on the events in the "official" version of the epic tale. It also claims to be a novel, right there on the cover.
Neither of these claims are true. The book was a remarkable read, however, filled with beautiful and thought-provoking imagery. It's a new book, I have to turn it back in soon, but I've held onto it in case I want to read through one of the stories again.
If you like Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Paulo Coehlo, perhaps some Stanislaw Lem, I think you'll like Zachary Mason. He has the same deft magic realist touch, the imagination that is both vivid and thoughtful, and a way of crafting brief passages that draw you into a mood and setting with ease.
Why isn't a novel? Well, I think the simplest explanation I can offer is that if you can pick up a book and start reading any chapter at random without feeling as though you missed anything that came before or learned anything that helps you understand the events described in following chapters, then that book doesn't have a narrative structure that you can consider a novel. It is so unlike a novel that I don't know why they bothered with the label at all.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a collection of vignettes, pastiches, contemplations, or what have you on the underlying themes of the Odyssey, a re-imagining of many different scenes, several of them more than once, as well as a depiction of many different possible individuals named Odysseus. It's quite hard to describe, yet I think you can pick up a copy, read one of the shorter chapters that is just one or two or three pages in length, and come away with a sense of how the entire project feels. You can sample the first two chapters by clicking the Look Inside option at the other end of the Amazon link above.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Book Review: The Trade of Queens
The Trade of Queens is the sixth and supposedly concluding book in the Merchant Princes series. If you haven't read the earlier books, this one will confuse the hell out of you, regardless of all the efforts to update people on the plot. I found those little summaries of what has happened so far useful to keep up and I've read the other five novels, just not in a short span of time.
Essentially it's a very well thought-out, highly realistic story of alternate worlds whose events and conflicts hinge largely upon differences in economics, politics, social customs, and concepts of law. That sounds dry, but the story isn't--it moves at breakneck speed, with a large cast of characters. Stross does a really nice job of delineating the differences a subtly different America circa 2003, the Norse colonized Gruinmarkt of the world-walking Clan, and the world of New Britain.
I'm particularly impressed at how smoothly Stross moves through complicated nomenclature and jargon within various subcultures. It's a fun series and this is a decent novel, but as my comment above might suggest, Stross has SO many balls up in the air at this point, so many plotlines going on multiple worlds, that this actually feels a bit rushed and doesn't feel that much like the series has ended. By the standards of some of the earlier cliffhangers in the series, this one wraps up, but there's still so much left to be decided.
I also feel the book suffers from Stross resolving too many of the conflicts that he poses too quickly; there isn't enough time for the tension to really build in many cases. The series is still well worth a read, in my view, and if you do you'll eventually want to know how some of the major plotlines pan out, which is the goal of this novel.
Essentially it's a very well thought-out, highly realistic story of alternate worlds whose events and conflicts hinge largely upon differences in economics, politics, social customs, and concepts of law. That sounds dry, but the story isn't--it moves at breakneck speed, with a large cast of characters. Stross does a really nice job of delineating the differences a subtly different America circa 2003, the Norse colonized Gruinmarkt of the world-walking Clan, and the world of New Britain.
I'm particularly impressed at how smoothly Stross moves through complicated nomenclature and jargon within various subcultures. It's a fun series and this is a decent novel, but as my comment above might suggest, Stross has SO many balls up in the air at this point, so many plotlines going on multiple worlds, that this actually feels a bit rushed and doesn't feel that much like the series has ended. By the standards of some of the earlier cliffhangers in the series, this one wraps up, but there's still so much left to be decided.
I also feel the book suffers from Stross resolving too many of the conflicts that he poses too quickly; there isn't enough time for the tension to really build in many cases. The series is still well worth a read, in my view, and if you do you'll eventually want to know how some of the major plotlines pan out, which is the goal of this novel.
Book Review: The Yard Dog by Sheldon Russell
The Yard Dog is a mystery set in the area surrounding a Nazi prisoner of war camp in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma during WW II. Thousands of Nazi prisoners were brought to the US during the war and held in such camps. The main characters include Hook Runyon, a one-armed railroad detective (or "yard dog"), Runt Wallace, a young man with a twisted spine and legs, Dr. Reina Kaplan, a Jewish academic in charge of the program aimed at reeducating the Nazis while they are being held, and a number of other eccentric folks.
The plot revolves around Hook's efforts to investigate the death of a mentally challenged bum who lived around the railyards. As far as mysteries go, the clues build up very slowly and rather haphazardly, with different characters coming across bits of evidence, so the plot drifts a bit, even though the book isn't that long. The payoff is pretty good, but the journey there doesn't build up as much suspense as I would like. Sometimes the narrative voice explaining the thoughts in the characters' heads feels a little forced and cliched as well.
But the dialogue just crackles off the page, quick-witted and very believable, and the period setting is sketched out with sharp, sure details that really bring it to life. Though I lived many years in Texas and have absolutely no love for Oklahoma, it was really engaging. I genuinely liked many of the key characters by the time the story was finished. Another read I stumbled across just by browsing the shelves in the public library, and I'm glad I did.
Its implied that this will be the first in a series of stories about Hook Runyon and I'll look for sequels, on the assumption that plotting is something that an author can get a little sharper with, but establishing a voice and creating an engaging setting are good skills to build upon. Plus, the idea of Hook, who lives in a caboose, traveling to some different period locales doing his work for the railroad has promise, as long as Russell keeps his focus on some of these lost stories and places from the time.
The plot revolves around Hook's efforts to investigate the death of a mentally challenged bum who lived around the railyards. As far as mysteries go, the clues build up very slowly and rather haphazardly, with different characters coming across bits of evidence, so the plot drifts a bit, even though the book isn't that long. The payoff is pretty good, but the journey there doesn't build up as much suspense as I would like. Sometimes the narrative voice explaining the thoughts in the characters' heads feels a little forced and cliched as well.
But the dialogue just crackles off the page, quick-witted and very believable, and the period setting is sketched out with sharp, sure details that really bring it to life. Though I lived many years in Texas and have absolutely no love for Oklahoma, it was really engaging. I genuinely liked many of the key characters by the time the story was finished. Another read I stumbled across just by browsing the shelves in the public library, and I'm glad I did.
Its implied that this will be the first in a series of stories about Hook Runyon and I'll look for sequels, on the assumption that plotting is something that an author can get a little sharper with, but establishing a voice and creating an engaging setting are good skills to build upon. Plus, the idea of Hook, who lives in a caboose, traveling to some different period locales doing his work for the railroad has promise, as long as Russell keeps his focus on some of these lost stories and places from the time.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Books I've Read in 2010
May
Fiction
April
Fiction
Fiction
Fiction
Fiction
Fiction
- The Yard Dog by Sheldon Russell. [A good book. Review here.]
- The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross. [Not as good as the first few books in the Merchant Princes series, and feels a bit like it rushes to the ending. Longer review here. ]
- The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming. [A very unusual story centered on an equally odd romance between a mechanic from Idaho who is helping to build the brand new New York subway system and a princess/mathematical prodigy from the Kingdom of Toledo, which may or may not have ever existed. Edison, Tesla, and J.P. Morgan all make appearances. The novel blends a bit of urban history with colonial history mixed liberally with totally made up history from a closely parallel world, complete with sections replete with thorough footnotes to sources that might or might not exist. There's also a very vaguely described deus ex machina involving instantaneous travel through time, space, alternate universes, or possibly all of the preceding. It's a strange, confidently written novel that kept me turning the pages. As literary fiction with a touch of the fantastic cloaked as weird science, it works. As literary science fiction, it fails, mainly because it's incoherent as to the causes and effects of its central plot devices. So your level of enjoyment will probably be colored by what you're expecting to read. I was in the mood for something odd yet mainstream, so I enjoyed it. I think the faux history sections helped with that; they break up the momentum of the narration a bit, but are very cleverly done.]
- Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay [Another poetic, epic, and deeply engaging Kay novel, this one set in a fantastic version of the Tang Dynasty in China. It begins with the middle son of a decorated general in the midst of carrying out the task he has chosen to mourn his father's passing: burying the thousands of dead soldiers (from both sides of the conflict) left untouched for many years at an isolated mountain battlefield at the very edge of the Empire. This unusual act draws attention to him, that, combined with less dramatic events in his past and the ties of his family to the Imperial Court, changes his life, and the course of the Empire itself, irrevocably. Highly recommended.]
- The Last Guardian of Everness by John C. Williams. [An epic fantasy that mixes the modern-day with an everything and the kitchen sink compilation of mythologies, folklores, and legends. The world is about to be overwhelmed by the Dark Lord of the Dreaming. The last guardians of the old order are the only ones who can stop it, but to do so they're supposed to bring about the end of the world. As you might guess, this leads to some hesitation. Can be a little confusing at times, but has lot of interesting imagery. The way in which so many different mythological elements are blended together is intriguing. And the sense of how the passage of time and the simple human capacity to forget can erode the power of those who were once legendary. Ends on a total cliffhanger, with the fate of the world literally in the balance. A really powerful imagination at work here.]
April
Fiction
- The War in 2020 by Ralph Peters. This book is now nearly 20 years old, so its predictions of future conflict involving a still solvent Soviet Union, a white-controlled South Africa, and a militaristic Japanese economic powerhouse all seem quite dated in some respects. In others, such as its depiction of the threat posed by the warmongering tendencies of various ethnic, nationalist, and fundamentalist Islamic factions in Central Asia, the collapse of order in Mexico, the tension between needing high-tech solutions to battlefield problems and the need for trained and dedicated soldiers to implement them, and social disruption at home, it seems eerily prescient. Not a book that glorifies combat or warfare, but one that does laud the honor and sacrifice of those who fight for their country. More nuanced and better written than much military fiction, though the female characters fall pretty flat.
- The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin. [Intriguing and engaging first novel, a fantasy about gods, power, and family politics. The world is ruled by a single family due to the fact that they were the chosen of the Sky God, who won a terrible war with the two other founding deities of his pantheon, killing one and enslaving the other and all his children. So this family holds its power through the simple fact that it has bound gods and demi-gods into its service. At the same time, one must be very careful how to unleash their power. A young woman whose mother, once the heir apparent, was exiled from the family for marrying beneath her station, receives a sudden summons to the Court after her mother's death and is named one of three potential heirs. The rest of the novel is her struggle to understand the true history of the god war, to survive her encounters with her relatives and the enslaved gods, and to understand her true place in the world. An understatement to say that the final transformations involved are quite dramatic.]
- Young adult books on the Maya, Aztec, and Inca.
- Yellow Smoke, a book on how technology and changing geopolitics have impacted the status and goals of the modern American Army. Perhaps a bit too sanguine in its assessment of how technology will supplant the fighting and killing role of ground forces, who will be transformed from primary fighters to recon units who target enemy forces for destruction by a wide array of weapons platforms operated remotely or fired from a great distance. But a lot of interesting insights into how the U.S. military system works and how it could be improved over time.
Fiction
- A Gentleman's Game by Greg Rucka. [A well-paced, engrossing espionage novel based on the characters and situations from Rucka's black-and-white Queen and Country comic series. This tale is about an MI-6 Special Ops agent named Tara Chace who is given the assignment to assassinate a prominent imam with suspected ties to a terrorist attack on London. Does a good job of showing how complicated and dangerous the job can be when almost everything goes right according to the plan, because of the politics that emerge when the U.S., British, Israeli, and Saudi Arabian governments are all involved.]
- Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. [A Young Adult novel that deals with the very serious themes of how civil rights, technology, and national security can intersect with frightening results in the age of terrorism. I read nearly the entire book in one day on my iPod Touch. Some pretentious British jackass who teaches literature poo-pooed this book's Hugo nomination as an example of dumbed-down pap dominating the awards. But this book was very engaging.]
Fiction
- Counting Heads by David Marusek. [See my lengthy review of this interesting but flawed science fiction novel.]
- Mainspring by Jay Lake. [An enjoyable steampunk fantasy about a young man on a quest to repair the mainspring that turns the brass clockworks of an Earth in a literal clockwork universe. I liked the first half of the novel better than the second, and the ending was a bit mystical for my tastes, but overall it was a fun read.]
- Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon. [Not a dazzling novel, but a well-crafted and well-written story that doesn't play games with the reader or try to impress us with metaphysics. I enjoyed it and have already checked out the sequel. Longer review here.]
- Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon [Another great collection of essays about writing and fiction that filled with me wonder and envy. My reading habits and experiences with writing courses in college seem to have paralleled Chabon's very closely, but his drive and talent created light years of distance in the final result.]
- Supercapitalism by Robert Reich [A decent look at how the growth of corporations has undermined the democratic process. Essential argument is that corporations in the global marketplace maximize benefits to consumers and investors but ignore the needs of citizens, all the while growing more involved in the political arena to the detriment of our good as a society and a democracy. Does a nice job in showing how we got to this point since World War I. Falls flat in prescriptions for change: limit corporate spending on politics (a goal nullified by the recent, obnoxious Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) and stop the legal fiction of treating corporations as individuals.]
- Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein [This slim volume attempts to illustrate some of the essential concepts of various philosophical thinkers through the use of jokes whose humor is based on those concepts. It's funnier than my description makes it sound. Not sure that I have a deeper grasp of philosophy, but I did laugh at a fair number of the jokes.]
Fiction
- Lamentation by Ken Scholes [Impressive novel blending sci-fi and fantasy.]
- Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon [Great collection of essays about being a son, father, and brother.]
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Birthday Loot
So I had a delightful haul this year.
I got three graphic novels--Checkmate/Outsiders, The Invisibles: Say You Want a Revolution, and World Below--which I will read and probably comment on in my reading list in due course.
From my Wish List on Amazon, I also received an introductory guide to rhetoric and a collection of essays by scientists and engineers predicting what discoveries or developments will dramatically impact our future (This Will Change Everything). These both look very cool.
I received two New York Times crossword puzzle books, one with Tuesday puzzles (easy ones) and one with Wednesday puzzles (average ones) which is about all I can handle at this stage in my crossword puzzle development, though I do enjoy solving them.
My kids got me a set of DC action figures, the new ones that are smaller than the DC Animated style but have more articulation. It was a pretty cool limited edition Battle for Metropolis set they found discounted at Toys R Us, with Lex Luthor in battle armor, four Lexcorp troopers, Captain Marvel, Captain Atom, and Superman. The kids absconded with the figures almost immediately, but they eventually returned them and they are cool.
I did my usual sudden infatuation thing and tracked down a bunch of used, out of print hardcover books for the hard science fiction roleplaying game Blue Planet. I now have the Moderator's Guide, Player's Guide, Fluid Mechanics tech guide, First Colony city guide, Natural Selection planetary guide, and am awaiting the arrival of Frontier Justice, which details law and order. Now I need to make sure that I read the damn things. Odds of me ever actually playing this game? 5%. But if I enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed, say, the Transhuman Space books, then I'll get many hours of enjoyment in the year ahead.
And I received two of the Great Courses on DVD, Building Great Sentences and Games People Play: Game Theory. I hope to start watching these soon, learning some things of interest, and hopefully being able to apply them. If it goes well, I may look to get another of these courses for Christmas.
I think that's it. A LOT of material to read and/or absorb, but I consider that a win-win scenario. Either I don't get any freelance work in the near future and have the free time to enjoy this stuff, or the arrival of so many books leads to a contract offer, the way that washing your car helps ensure that it will rain soon.
Thanks to the wonderful people who fed my omnivorous reading habits! Rest assured that I will bore each of you with the fruits of my reading and researches at some future date.
I got three graphic novels--Checkmate/Outsiders, The Invisibles: Say You Want a Revolution, and World Below--which I will read and probably comment on in my reading list in due course.
From my Wish List on Amazon, I also received an introductory guide to rhetoric and a collection of essays by scientists and engineers predicting what discoveries or developments will dramatically impact our future (This Will Change Everything). These both look very cool.
I received two New York Times crossword puzzle books, one with Tuesday puzzles (easy ones) and one with Wednesday puzzles (average ones) which is about all I can handle at this stage in my crossword puzzle development, though I do enjoy solving them.
My kids got me a set of DC action figures, the new ones that are smaller than the DC Animated style but have more articulation. It was a pretty cool limited edition Battle for Metropolis set they found discounted at Toys R Us, with Lex Luthor in battle armor, four Lexcorp troopers, Captain Marvel, Captain Atom, and Superman. The kids absconded with the figures almost immediately, but they eventually returned them and they are cool.
I did my usual sudden infatuation thing and tracked down a bunch of used, out of print hardcover books for the hard science fiction roleplaying game Blue Planet. I now have the Moderator's Guide, Player's Guide, Fluid Mechanics tech guide, First Colony city guide, Natural Selection planetary guide, and am awaiting the arrival of Frontier Justice, which details law and order. Now I need to make sure that I read the damn things. Odds of me ever actually playing this game? 5%. But if I enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed, say, the Transhuman Space books, then I'll get many hours of enjoyment in the year ahead.
And I received two of the Great Courses on DVD, Building Great Sentences and Games People Play: Game Theory. I hope to start watching these soon, learning some things of interest, and hopefully being able to apply them. If it goes well, I may look to get another of these courses for Christmas.
I think that's it. A LOT of material to read and/or absorb, but I consider that a win-win scenario. Either I don't get any freelance work in the near future and have the free time to enjoy this stuff, or the arrival of so many books leads to a contract offer, the way that washing your car helps ensure that it will rain soon.
Thanks to the wonderful people who fed my omnivorous reading habits! Rest assured that I will bore each of you with the fruits of my reading and researches at some future date.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Review: Counting Heads by David Marusek
Overall Grade: B+
The book jacket for this 2005 science fiction novel includes blurbs such as "One of my favorite books of last year in any category" by the New York Times and "The most exciting debut SF novel I've read since Neuromancer . . . one of the best novels, period," by Fantasy & Science Fiction, and "one of the best first novels of the decade so far" by Locus.
It's certainly a good novel in many ways, though it didn't leave me eager to pick it up every day and I thought it was really running out of gas by the end.
Setting: I'd give the book a B+ in this area. As noted under "Cool Factor," the setting is very creative, but I never had a strong feel for how everything held together. Marusek throws in clones, artificial intelligences, moderate transhumanism, and advanced biotech and nanotech without really explaining or showing how all of these elements could coexist. That is, he shows them coexisting, but there's a lot of smoke and mirrors involved. I have no real idea of the citizenship status of clones, or the artificial minds called mentars, or exactly how the majority of regular people manage to earn money, or even how people regard the very strict population controls (which seem to vary throughout the course of the book).
Most critically for me, Marusek presents a future North America that seems to have a draconian centralized security authority that can violate individual rights, yet seems to derive its powers from no clear source of political or economic power. There are just a lot of competing companies that apparently cooperate to create an oligarchy that then monitors their own actions and members? It just felt disjointed at a fundamental level without some sort of clarification.
Now, some people, including the ectastic reviewers, were probably thrilled that Marusek neatly avoided the traps of info-dumping and lecturing to the reader that plague so many novels of ideas. He really concentrates on the show not tell approach. But his ideas were too complex and his plot too meandering for me to get a good grasp of them as I read. I felt that very little was explored--as a reader I was shown many surfaces of the world but not the heart or machines that drove it. So it left me a bit flat. I give it a high B simply because Marusek has so many intriguing applications of technology to society.
Characters: The book gets a solid B in this category for me. Some of the characters have the potential to be quite interesting, but we never seem to spend enough time with them as the narrative flits around from person to person. Others seem to exist mostly to show that supposedly stereotyped people (clones, retroboys, etc.) can struggle against the expectations of their type. The author cleared cared about characters and characterization, but I didn't care about most of them as the book drew to a climax. Others may have been more annoyed by the lack of likable characters than I was. I just wanted more interesting or fully developed characters. But I credit Marusek for caring about them.
Part One of the book is stronger on characterization and could stand alone as a novella. Part Two was a mish-mash. Several key characters do change over the course of the story, which is good. But the changes they undergo don't really seem to have anything to do with the main plot that supposedly links them together, with the exception of the clone Mary.
Plot: This is a B-, based largely on how disappointing Part Two of the book was. The plot at the core of Part Two is exceedingly simple: a powerful woman has been assassinated and there are mysterious forces trying to kill the barely living remains of her sole daughter and heir. This is then cluttered by byzantine twists and turns, multiple point of view characters, a lot of deus ex machina episodes with super-powerful computers and hidden conspiracies, and a lack of specific information to pay us off for our attention to the twists and turns. It's either a Gordian knot that doesn't get cut, or else the villains and their motivations are so simple that those we are led to suspect by one character in the beginning are really behind it all for the simple motivation of profit.
By the end, the thing I expected to happen had happened, and I felt somewhat annoyed at the twists and turns we took to get to that predictable event because the length seemed to be made largely of detours intended to show off clever ideas for the setting, which while entertaining individually were often confusing when I took a step back to try to fit them into the setting as a whole.
Language: While I wasn't bowled over by Marusek's style or his turns of phrase, I thought he wrote well. I was impressed enough by the jargon he devised to describe his future to rate his use of language as an A. The book is loaded with evocative terms like seared and iterant and company names like E Pluribus that are both informative about their subjects and believable in their usage.
Cool Factor: The book gets an A or A+ in this regard for the sheer quantity of clever and weird ideas that are jammed in. Everything from security slugs that crawl around sampling skin cells to rectal plugs that monitor neural and physiological reactions to the orbital Skytel billboard originally created as an anti-terrorism device are simultaneously creepy and intriguing. There's a very gifted imagination at work here.
Big Ideas: I really could not find a Big Idea in the big bubbling stew of little ideas and events that Marusek cooked up. In Part One, the Big Idea seems to be that in the future we will give up our privacy in the name of security.
Overall Grade: B+, carried by the trifecta of language, cool factor and setting while being dragged down by the characters and plot. I would have given the novel an A-, but several times over the course of the last 100 pages I had to stop and decide if I wanted to finish the book or not, because the stretching out of the wandering main and sub-plot lines and the lack of connection to the constantly shifting multiple characters made it feel like a chore. I had no expectation of being surprised by the ending (and I wasn't), but I had hoped that it would prove more illuminating as to why many events were taking place, or that it would resolve more than it did.
In general, I think speculative fiction critics are most often impressed by complex, innovative settings that involve multiple plot threads and characters. They don't seem to care much if those characters are likable (or at least capable of being related to), if the plot twists show good pacing and structure, or if the setting makes the reader work too hard to get a grasp of it. I do care about those three things, so while I've read highly praised books that were superb in my view, quite often I find them disappointing as stories because they fall flat in those areas.
The book jacket for this 2005 science fiction novel includes blurbs such as "One of my favorite books of last year in any category" by the New York Times and "The most exciting debut SF novel I've read since Neuromancer . . . one of the best novels, period," by Fantasy & Science Fiction, and "one of the best first novels of the decade so far" by Locus.
It's certainly a good novel in many ways, though it didn't leave me eager to pick it up every day and I thought it was really running out of gas by the end.
Setting: I'd give the book a B+ in this area. As noted under "Cool Factor," the setting is very creative, but I never had a strong feel for how everything held together. Marusek throws in clones, artificial intelligences, moderate transhumanism, and advanced biotech and nanotech without really explaining or showing how all of these elements could coexist. That is, he shows them coexisting, but there's a lot of smoke and mirrors involved. I have no real idea of the citizenship status of clones, or the artificial minds called mentars, or exactly how the majority of regular people manage to earn money, or even how people regard the very strict population controls (which seem to vary throughout the course of the book).
Most critically for me, Marusek presents a future North America that seems to have a draconian centralized security authority that can violate individual rights, yet seems to derive its powers from no clear source of political or economic power. There are just a lot of competing companies that apparently cooperate to create an oligarchy that then monitors their own actions and members? It just felt disjointed at a fundamental level without some sort of clarification.
Now, some people, including the ectastic reviewers, were probably thrilled that Marusek neatly avoided the traps of info-dumping and lecturing to the reader that plague so many novels of ideas. He really concentrates on the show not tell approach. But his ideas were too complex and his plot too meandering for me to get a good grasp of them as I read. I felt that very little was explored--as a reader I was shown many surfaces of the world but not the heart or machines that drove it. So it left me a bit flat. I give it a high B simply because Marusek has so many intriguing applications of technology to society.
Characters: The book gets a solid B in this category for me. Some of the characters have the potential to be quite interesting, but we never seem to spend enough time with them as the narrative flits around from person to person. Others seem to exist mostly to show that supposedly stereotyped people (clones, retroboys, etc.) can struggle against the expectations of their type. The author cleared cared about characters and characterization, but I didn't care about most of them as the book drew to a climax. Others may have been more annoyed by the lack of likable characters than I was. I just wanted more interesting or fully developed characters. But I credit Marusek for caring about them.
Part One of the book is stronger on characterization and could stand alone as a novella. Part Two was a mish-mash. Several key characters do change over the course of the story, which is good. But the changes they undergo don't really seem to have anything to do with the main plot that supposedly links them together, with the exception of the clone Mary.
Plot: This is a B-, based largely on how disappointing Part Two of the book was. The plot at the core of Part Two is exceedingly simple: a powerful woman has been assassinated and there are mysterious forces trying to kill the barely living remains of her sole daughter and heir. This is then cluttered by byzantine twists and turns, multiple point of view characters, a lot of deus ex machina episodes with super-powerful computers and hidden conspiracies, and a lack of specific information to pay us off for our attention to the twists and turns. It's either a Gordian knot that doesn't get cut, or else the villains and their motivations are so simple that those we are led to suspect by one character in the beginning are really behind it all for the simple motivation of profit.
By the end, the thing I expected to happen had happened, and I felt somewhat annoyed at the twists and turns we took to get to that predictable event because the length seemed to be made largely of detours intended to show off clever ideas for the setting, which while entertaining individually were often confusing when I took a step back to try to fit them into the setting as a whole.
Language: While I wasn't bowled over by Marusek's style or his turns of phrase, I thought he wrote well. I was impressed enough by the jargon he devised to describe his future to rate his use of language as an A. The book is loaded with evocative terms like seared and iterant and company names like E Pluribus that are both informative about their subjects and believable in their usage.
Cool Factor: The book gets an A or A+ in this regard for the sheer quantity of clever and weird ideas that are jammed in. Everything from security slugs that crawl around sampling skin cells to rectal plugs that monitor neural and physiological reactions to the orbital Skytel billboard originally created as an anti-terrorism device are simultaneously creepy and intriguing. There's a very gifted imagination at work here.
Big Ideas: I really could not find a Big Idea in the big bubbling stew of little ideas and events that Marusek cooked up. In Part One, the Big Idea seems to be that in the future we will give up our privacy in the name of security.
Overall Grade: B+, carried by the trifecta of language, cool factor and setting while being dragged down by the characters and plot. I would have given the novel an A-, but several times over the course of the last 100 pages I had to stop and decide if I wanted to finish the book or not, because the stretching out of the wandering main and sub-plot lines and the lack of connection to the constantly shifting multiple characters made it feel like a chore. I had no expectation of being surprised by the ending (and I wasn't), but I had hoped that it would prove more illuminating as to why many events were taking place, or that it would resolve more than it did.
In general, I think speculative fiction critics are most often impressed by complex, innovative settings that involve multiple plot threads and characters. They don't seem to care much if those characters are likable (or at least capable of being related to), if the plot twists show good pacing and structure, or if the setting makes the reader work too hard to get a grasp of it. I do care about those three things, so while I've read highly praised books that were superb in my view, quite often I find them disappointing as stories because they fall flat in those areas.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
I Have a Lot of Books
This became clear when I posted a list of the books that I own but haven't gotten around to reading all of yet. And I have many more books than that, not even counting the rpg books or the graphic novels. Probably 400 books or so including all the graphic novels and rpg books.
The funny thing is, I'm always finding new, interesting books in the library. The other funny thing is that I read almost nothing in the typical bestseller or literary fiction categories.
So I thought about it, and this is why I have so many books and haven't read a bunch of the ones I own (though I have read most of the books I own, probably 3/4 or so):
I really need to figure out which of the guides to writing are worth keeping. Part of that involves actually doing the exercises that they suggest.
Anyway, my shelves and shelves of books are a pleasure for me for the most part, though it can be hard figuring out what to keep in the basement (where most of my shelves are) and what to keep upstairs for easier access. Every few months I get the urge to reorganize my books, which drives everyone else in the family a little crazy. Don't know why I have that impulse. I just do.
The funny thing is, I'm always finding new, interesting books in the library. The other funny thing is that I read almost nothing in the typical bestseller or literary fiction categories.
So I thought about it, and this is why I have so many books and haven't read a bunch of the ones I own (though I have read most of the books I own, probably 3/4 or so):
- I'm a fairly voracious and omnivorous reader. I'm guessing that I average about a book a week (I usually have one work of fiction and one or two nonfiction books going at any given time). I would say that half of what I read is nonfiction (divided amongst science, history, and miscellaneous cultural stuff ranging from theories of magic to linguistics). The remaining half is divided between science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries,in that order of preference. I'm just curious about a lot of things.
- If I enjoy a book a lot, I really like to own a copy of that book. If I check a book (fiction or nonfiction) out from the library three or more times to read all or part of it, then I try to acquire a copy of that book. And I like shopping for book bargains the way some people like to buy shoes. I love used books and have ever since I was a kid in Las Cruces, where places like Dave's Paperback Exchange were a little oasis of speculative fiction in a town filled with people whose imaginations didn't run in the same vein as my own. (One reason I don't yet own a copy of Clifford Geertz's Local Knowledge is that I haven't found a used copy for less than $5 and I don't feel like buying a beaten up copy for $10 or $20 for a new copy. I like the book but not that much.)
- In a similar fashion, I reread the best fiction books in my collection every few years and refer back to sections of the best nonfiction books every year or so. Right now I'm debating when I'll get around to rereading several Guy Gavriel Kay novels and whether I'll reread a couple Sheri Tepper novels first. Anyway, this type of behavior isn't conducive to getting rid of books once I acquire them and it can delay me from reading more recently acquired books.
- I have an odd schedule because I am a work-from-home freelancer. This means that there are stretches when I have more free time than most people because I don't have a paying job and the kids are in school. Even an extra free hour translates into a lot more reading time. But at the same time, I can't predict when I'll be free and when I'll get a contract to work on, so I sometimes get books intending to read them and then have little free time to read for the next couple months. Those books may then slip out of my awareness and gather dust on a shelf.
- Traits a and b sometimes combine to convince me to buy cheap books without really thinking through the purchase--I see something at a book sale that intrigues me and it looks like a great deal so I grab it. I'm thinking of just avoiding the big library book sale that occurs twice a year here in Boise, because while I have found a few nice books over the years, I probably don't get around to reading the majority of the stuff I acquire.
- I write speculative fiction and I never know what kind of resource/reference material might be useful, so I cast a wide net. I've got books on some fairly esoteric stuff because I came up with some unusual questions. Our library is good but not exhaustive by any means, so I have to buy some of these books if I want to explore their contents.
I really need to figure out which of the guides to writing are worth keeping. Part of that involves actually doing the exercises that they suggest.
Anyway, my shelves and shelves of books are a pleasure for me for the most part, though it can be hard figuring out what to keep in the basement (where most of my shelves are) and what to keep upstairs for easier access. Every few months I get the urge to reorganize my books, which drives everyone else in the family a little crazy. Don't know why I have that impulse. I just do.
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