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 reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reviews. 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.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Lost and 24 Compared to Comics
Stumbled across this commentary on the television shows Lost and 24 . I agree more or less completely with all the points made.
Confession: my wife and I watch both of these shows. Further confession: I do so out of inertia more than anything else. Both of these series long ago jumped the shark.
My small contribution to the discussion is to compare these series to superhero comics.
Like an aging superhero comic book series, 24 simply ran out of new ideas for catastrophic crises and started to repeat itself. Unlike a superhero comic book, 24 doesn't have the option of staging an epic crossover with other titles to renew flagging interest, reimagining the powers of its protagonists, or dumping a retcon upon its viewers. All of these would violate the parameters of suspended disbelief that its audience has agreed to: violent torture will produce swift and viable intelligence, one guy can kill dozens of terrorists in a 24 hour period without ever being incarcerated or held for questioning for more than 20 minutes, you can drive all around a major metropolitan area without taking more than 15 minutes to get anywhere, and nobody functions worse on when sleep deprived.
24 is in the same boat as a venerable comic book character like Batman. It has to rely on two types of fans: those that have committed to watching/collecting the "character" regardless of who is writing or what the storylines are, and those who are new to the experience and the familiar plots. At the same time, the central conceits of the character have become creative straightjackets for the writers. You can't draw out storylines in 24 because everything has to take place in a frenetic rush as the clock ticks away. You can play up his gadgets or his detective skills, but these days you pretty much have to write Batman as a dark, terrifying hardass.
Unlike 24, Lost actually does employ comic-book inspired techniques such as retconning, time travel, alternate dimensions, body doubles, and paranormal powers to try and stay fresh. But it mixes this madness with an attempt to make us interested in the everyday lives of its characters, which becomes a bit confusing given that the characters are supposed to be normal people one second, supernatural candidates the next.
The biggest flaw with Lost is that the writers obviously never had a clear idea how their story was going to end when they started it, or even what the hell the story was about from one season to the next. It's like a comic that switches the creative team every year, changing the tone and style of the series.
Lost also makes two fundamental mistakes that a typical ongoing comic book series, at least a successful one, avoids. First, Lost very rarely answers any of the puzzles that it introduces. Second, it adds too many new characters and elevates them to major character status too quickly, diluting the focus on the characters that the audience has come to appreciate.
It's kind of amazing how Lost manages to rope in viewers, including me, by continuing to violate basic storytelling principles. On the one hand, I wouldn't watch the show with any regularity if my wife wasn't still interested in it. My main reaction now is amusement at the train wreck the plotline has become. On the other hand, I'm amazed at how fervently many fans seem to believe that there really is a point to the story or an upcoming conclusion that could possibly tie up all the loose ends that have been left dangling.
Confession: my wife and I watch both of these shows. Further confession: I do so out of inertia more than anything else. Both of these series long ago jumped the shark.
My small contribution to the discussion is to compare these series to superhero comics.
Like an aging superhero comic book series, 24 simply ran out of new ideas for catastrophic crises and started to repeat itself. Unlike a superhero comic book, 24 doesn't have the option of staging an epic crossover with other titles to renew flagging interest, reimagining the powers of its protagonists, or dumping a retcon upon its viewers. All of these would violate the parameters of suspended disbelief that its audience has agreed to: violent torture will produce swift and viable intelligence, one guy can kill dozens of terrorists in a 24 hour period without ever being incarcerated or held for questioning for more than 20 minutes, you can drive all around a major metropolitan area without taking more than 15 minutes to get anywhere, and nobody functions worse on when sleep deprived.
24 is in the same boat as a venerable comic book character like Batman. It has to rely on two types of fans: those that have committed to watching/collecting the "character" regardless of who is writing or what the storylines are, and those who are new to the experience and the familiar plots. At the same time, the central conceits of the character have become creative straightjackets for the writers. You can't draw out storylines in 24 because everything has to take place in a frenetic rush as the clock ticks away. You can play up his gadgets or his detective skills, but these days you pretty much have to write Batman as a dark, terrifying hardass.
Unlike 24, Lost actually does employ comic-book inspired techniques such as retconning, time travel, alternate dimensions, body doubles, and paranormal powers to try and stay fresh. But it mixes this madness with an attempt to make us interested in the everyday lives of its characters, which becomes a bit confusing given that the characters are supposed to be normal people one second, supernatural candidates the next.
The biggest flaw with Lost is that the writers obviously never had a clear idea how their story was going to end when they started it, or even what the hell the story was about from one season to the next. It's like a comic that switches the creative team every year, changing the tone and style of the series.
Lost also makes two fundamental mistakes that a typical ongoing comic book series, at least a successful one, avoids. First, Lost very rarely answers any of the puzzles that it introduces. Second, it adds too many new characters and elevates them to major character status too quickly, diluting the focus on the characters that the audience has come to appreciate.
It's kind of amazing how Lost manages to rope in viewers, including me, by continuing to violate basic storytelling principles. On the one hand, I wouldn't watch the show with any regularity if my wife wasn't still interested in it. My main reaction now is amusement at the train wreck the plotline has become. On the other hand, I'm amazed at how fervently many fans seem to believe that there really is a point to the story or an upcoming conclusion that could possibly tie up all the loose ends that have been left dangling.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
My New Review Scale
For when I bother to take the time to review a book, I'm now trying to follow this scale, more or less.
An A is something very impressive, one of the better books that I've read.
A B is something that I enjoyed reading and think was well-crafted. Good but not great.
A C was mediocre and didn't impress me in any way. I may not have bothered to finish it.
A D is awful. I'd only review something like this if it has had success that seems unfathomable to me.
An F has no redeeming qualities and isn't worth a long review.
For works of speculative fiction, I'm looking at the following areas:
An A is something very impressive, one of the better books that I've read.
A B is something that I enjoyed reading and think was well-crafted. Good but not great.
A C was mediocre and didn't impress me in any way. I may not have bothered to finish it.
A D is awful. I'd only review something like this if it has had success that seems unfathomable to me.
An F has no redeeming qualities and isn't worth a long review.
For works of speculative fiction, I'm looking at the following areas:
- Setting: Depth, breadth, and imagination are the name of the game here. A good setting draws you into the world of the characters.
- Characters: I'm one of those readers who needs to have at least one protagonist who is likable or whose actions can be explained by necessity. I hate antihero lead characters who show no qualms or suffering about the awful things that they do--some level of introspection is important. I also appreciate villains with some depth to them. And characters who are smart are much preferable to ones who just gut things out. Characters who change over time, either personally or in terms of their relationships, are also preferable. Just my taste.
- Plot: I like to be able to follow the plot. If there are Byzantine twists involved, drawing my attention first here and then there, then the resolution needs to tie up all the major loose ends created by those twists. If the story is supposed to lead up to some big cosmic revelation at the end, it had better be impressive or astonishing in scope. Otherwise I just feel as though I've been jerked around. Nothing wrong with a solidly told story that builds logically and drives through to a conclusion that has real repercussions for the characters. A LOT of otherwise impressive speculative fiction falls down badly in this area. The number of long books I've read that just fizzle at the end with a confusing pastiche of imagery . . . ugh. I call it the 2001: A Space Odyssey factor. I do not enjoy spending a week or more with a book only to put it down at the end and say, "What the f**k?"
- Language: Some writers just craft more evocative or beautiful sentences than others. Or they write dialogue that crackles right off the page. Either way, it stands out. And then there are writers with a solid plot and characters whose descriptions and dialogue are so laughably bad that they kill the sense of being immersed in the story by reminding me that I'm reading something written by a hack.
- Cool Factor: Some ideas are just cooler than others. Has nothing to do with how scientifically or historically accurate or complex they are, everything to do with how clever and imaginative they are. It's very relative and it only feels cool the first time you encounter it. An example would be bullet-time from The Matrix. Cool the first time. Got old after that.
- Big Ideas: A lot of speculative fiction addresses one or more big metaphysical concepts, issues such as life after death, the nature of intelligence, perception of time, and so forth. Trying to tackle a big idea deserves some credit in my book if it is handled in an interesting way.
- Clarity: Can you understand what you're looking at? Can you follow the panel layout?
- Detail: Can you tell one person from another without looking at their clothes?
- Visual Style: Does the look of the artist's stand out in a good or bad way?
Review: Trading in Danger by Elizabeth Moon
Grade: B
This short (about 300 pages), sweet science fiction novel tells the story of a brand-new spaceship captain dealing with relationships and duty and the day-to-day practicalities of space travel and proving herself under fire. This novel reminds me of the old Heinlein "juvenile" sci-fi novels, and I mean that in a good way. Another comparison might be the military sci-fi of David Drake crossed with the more character driven s.f. of John Scalzi. Some who don't like the novel seem to have compared it unfavorably to David Weber's Honor Harrington or the Lois McMaster-Bujold's Miles Vorkasian, arguing that Moon's protagonist is a bit of a rip-off of those characters. Well, I haven't read either of those--I tried reading an Honor Harrington novel, but the telepathic pet cat was a major turn-off. :-)
Moon puts the young merchant captain Ky Vatta through a lot of challenges, all of which flow logically from one trial to the next. There are a lot of little detailed bits of business about the practical side of being a starship captain and dealing in cargo, all while avoiding a lot of heavy concepts in physics or anything wildly innovative in terms of tech or the planetary societies being described.
It that sense the novel is not as creative or imaginative as Counting Heads or Mainspring, but it does a better job of making me care about the characters and actually resolving the plot points that do arise in a straightforward manner without losing tension. I stayed up late trying to get to the end of this novel, because even after the major crisis was resolved, I was intrigued by how the fallout would affect the main character and set up the next storyline. That's the sign of a well-written book to me. One of the best touches is how the protagonist realizes that she's been incorrectly stereotyped by her family, but that there's not much she can do about it because they keep interpreting everything she does through the lens of their experiences with her as a child.
I've already checked out the next book in the series.
Quick Rundown
Setting: A Solid B. Nothing really original, but all the details seem to have been worked out and things function in a realistic manner.
Characters: B+ to an A. Plenty of likable characters (some people don't like the protagonist for reasons I can't quite follow--she acts more competently than most young people), some scum bags, some sitting on the fence. Motivations are typically explained and make sense.
Plot: A-. It isn't full of stunning twists or a tricky mystery, but it moves along nicely and I didn't find the specific events to be predictable once the ship got into real trouble. A plot I can follow and that meets my criteria for believability is a solid winner in my book.
Language: B. Nothing really fancy here, but no clunkers or failed attempts at "kewl" futuristic language or grammar.
Cool Factor: C. This all felt very comfortable and familiar. But no wow factor for me.
Big Ideas: C. Not really what this book is about. The biggest theme is coming of age.
This short (about 300 pages), sweet science fiction novel tells the story of a brand-new spaceship captain dealing with relationships and duty and the day-to-day practicalities of space travel and proving herself under fire. This novel reminds me of the old Heinlein "juvenile" sci-fi novels, and I mean that in a good way. Another comparison might be the military sci-fi of David Drake crossed with the more character driven s.f. of John Scalzi. Some who don't like the novel seem to have compared it unfavorably to David Weber's Honor Harrington or the Lois McMaster-Bujold's Miles Vorkasian, arguing that Moon's protagonist is a bit of a rip-off of those characters. Well, I haven't read either of those--I tried reading an Honor Harrington novel, but the telepathic pet cat was a major turn-off. :-)
Moon puts the young merchant captain Ky Vatta through a lot of challenges, all of which flow logically from one trial to the next. There are a lot of little detailed bits of business about the practical side of being a starship captain and dealing in cargo, all while avoiding a lot of heavy concepts in physics or anything wildly innovative in terms of tech or the planetary societies being described.
It that sense the novel is not as creative or imaginative as Counting Heads or Mainspring, but it does a better job of making me care about the characters and actually resolving the plot points that do arise in a straightforward manner without losing tension. I stayed up late trying to get to the end of this novel, because even after the major crisis was resolved, I was intrigued by how the fallout would affect the main character and set up the next storyline. That's the sign of a well-written book to me. One of the best touches is how the protagonist realizes that she's been incorrectly stereotyped by her family, but that there's not much she can do about it because they keep interpreting everything she does through the lens of their experiences with her as a child.
I've already checked out the next book in the series.
Quick Rundown
Setting: A Solid B. Nothing really original, but all the details seem to have been worked out and things function in a realistic manner.
Characters: B+ to an A. Plenty of likable characters (some people don't like the protagonist for reasons I can't quite follow--she acts more competently than most young people), some scum bags, some sitting on the fence. Motivations are typically explained and make sense.
Plot: A-. It isn't full of stunning twists or a tricky mystery, but it moves along nicely and I didn't find the specific events to be predictable once the ship got into real trouble. A plot I can follow and that meets my criteria for believability is a solid winner in my book.
Language: B. Nothing really fancy here, but no clunkers or failed attempts at "kewl" futuristic language or grammar.
Cool Factor: C. This all felt very comfortable and familiar. But no wow factor for me.
Big Ideas: C. Not really what this book is about. The biggest theme is coming of age.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Review: The Boys Vol 1-4 by Garth Ennis
Grade: D
I read these on someone else's recommendation: a librarian who went so far as to put them in my hands. He's had some good suggestions for other reads, so I went with this one and felt obligated to finish them. But I didn't take long doing it.
There's an interesting concept underlying the series, which is that a group of supposedly normal guys goes around keeping the superhuman jerks in line through nefarious means. The idea is that pretty much all the superhumans, at least the ones with public personas, are scumbags celebrities who abuse the puny humans around them without a second thought.
But that concept is buried under the sheer grossness that author Garth Ennis (whose last name, if there is any comedic justice in the world, must rhyme with "penis") can't seem to help indulging in. Calling his writing crass and juvenile is an understatement. Faces ripped off, multiple graphic and gross sex jokes played out in panels, people wallowing in their own shit, being urinated on, vomiting, and so forth. It's all there, more than once.
I get the impression that Ennis wants to come off as though he's poking fun at all the sick, twisted stuff that he writes about with comic glee, as though this is some sort of satire of a world brimming with demented sickos. To me, he comes across as a mentally disturbed writer with an obsession with bodily fluids and violence. Or possibly someone who fantasizes about being a superhero so he can have sex with rogue meteors and treat everyone around him like crap. Let's keep the radioactive spiders and power rings well away from Mr. Ennis, please.
Some of the plotlines, like the story of how the corporation Vought American became so influential through it's creation of superhumans, are pretty cool. Some might have been interesting if they hadn't gone so over the top. For example, a planned Russian coup involves keeping 150 superhumans cooped up in a warehouse until the big day when they will be set loose upon the city--except they're all unknowingly programmed to have their heads blow up on command. This would have been interesting with a dozen superhumans. But Ennis is like that guy from Spinal Tap--he just wants to keep turning the knob up to 11. He is the OverKiller.
Occasionally Ennis seems to be trying to slip a message about the corrupting nature of power and celebrity into these storylines, but it falls flat for many reasons.
Oh, and like a lot of Scottish comic book writers, Ennis seems to have a bug up his ass about the United States, though he also has characters claiming to love it in spite of its flaws. But just a suggestion: when you come from a small island that feels the need to draw extremely sharp distinctions between people of Scottish, English, and Welsh ancestry, it's a bit ridiculous to poke fun at Americans for celebrating their various hyphenated ancestries (Irish-American, Italian-Amerian, Mexican-American, etc) because "nobody wants to be like anybody else" or they're all searching for an identity because America has none.
I read these on someone else's recommendation: a librarian who went so far as to put them in my hands. He's had some good suggestions for other reads, so I went with this one and felt obligated to finish them. But I didn't take long doing it.
There's an interesting concept underlying the series, which is that a group of supposedly normal guys goes around keeping the superhuman jerks in line through nefarious means. The idea is that pretty much all the superhumans, at least the ones with public personas, are scumbags celebrities who abuse the puny humans around them without a second thought.
But that concept is buried under the sheer grossness that author Garth Ennis (whose last name, if there is any comedic justice in the world, must rhyme with "penis") can't seem to help indulging in. Calling his writing crass and juvenile is an understatement. Faces ripped off, multiple graphic and gross sex jokes played out in panels, people wallowing in their own shit, being urinated on, vomiting, and so forth. It's all there, more than once.
I get the impression that Ennis wants to come off as though he's poking fun at all the sick, twisted stuff that he writes about with comic glee, as though this is some sort of satire of a world brimming with demented sickos. To me, he comes across as a mentally disturbed writer with an obsession with bodily fluids and violence. Or possibly someone who fantasizes about being a superhero so he can have sex with rogue meteors and treat everyone around him like crap. Let's keep the radioactive spiders and power rings well away from Mr. Ennis, please.
Some of the plotlines, like the story of how the corporation Vought American became so influential through it's creation of superhumans, are pretty cool. Some might have been interesting if they hadn't gone so over the top. For example, a planned Russian coup involves keeping 150 superhumans cooped up in a warehouse until the big day when they will be set loose upon the city--except they're all unknowingly programmed to have their heads blow up on command. This would have been interesting with a dozen superhumans. But Ennis is like that guy from Spinal Tap--he just wants to keep turning the knob up to 11. He is the OverKiller.
Occasionally Ennis seems to be trying to slip a message about the corrupting nature of power and celebrity into these storylines, but it falls flat for many reasons.
- His insights are not that original aside from the levels of depravity he associates with the supercharged Caligulas that he puts on the rosters of his thinly disguised mockeries of big name DC and Marvel group.
- Even his big "shocker" reveals are pretty damn predictable. His Professor X knockoff is a pedophile who has abused all the members of his teams when they were children. Believe me, by the fourth volume in the series, I saw this coming very quickly.
- We're supposed to empathize with the actions of a team of psychopaths going around blackmailing and killing superpowered sociopaths. Because their extreme violence and vigilantism is directed only at really awful people, it's okay. All publicly known superhumans (except ONE) are scum. It's not even a consistent premise, because the members of the Boys are all enhanced with the same formula that gives the superhumans their powers.
Oh, and like a lot of Scottish comic book writers, Ennis seems to have a bug up his ass about the United States, though he also has characters claiming to love it in spite of its flaws. But just a suggestion: when you come from a small island that feels the need to draw extremely sharp distinctions between people of Scottish, English, and Welsh ancestry, it's a bit ridiculous to poke fun at Americans for celebrating their various hyphenated ancestries (Irish-American, Italian-Amerian, Mexican-American, etc) because "nobody wants to be like anybody else" or they're all searching for an identity because America has none.
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.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Review: Lamentation by Ken Scholes
Lamentation is a marvelous book that strikes a careful balance between the imaginative inventions of a distant future and the emotional depth of its main characters.
The events of the story are triggered by the awful destruction of the legendary city Windwir, which held the collected knowledge of lost ages under the auspices of the Androfrancine Order. The city was annihilated by the use of long-lost and forbidden magic, magic that was no doubt recovered as a result of the Androfrancine's own holy quest for knowledge in the ruins of the world long destroyed.
Precisely how Windwir was destroyed is revealed in short order. Why it was destroyed is a question that takes much longer to answer. And the impact of its destruction upon the lives of the main characters and the course of nations is the story whose first portion the book tells.
Scholes takes an interesting approach with his narrative. Each chapter presents us with several short sections a few pages in length, each offering the point of view of a different character. Most of these characters have their stories followed throughout the narrative. I found that this allowed Scholes to follow a number of storylines as they wove in and out of each other, intersecting and separating at different points.
Normally that sort of storytelling approach can leave me somewhat lost in the overall narrative or frustrated when the author jumps away from an interesting storyline into one I don't care about. Scholes avoids this by keeping each of the sections very succinct yet informative.
As a result, once you leave one character's storyline and touch upon the stories of three others, say, you haven't forgotten what you left behind when you return to that original character.
Moreover, I found that I liked all of the primary point of view characters that Scholes introduces.
These characters include: Petronus, the Hidden Pope; Rudolfo, the Lord of the Ninefold Forest Houses; Jin Li Tam, daughter of the mighty Tam banking family and an adept spy; and Nebios, the last (human survivor) of the destruction of Windwir. Another character, the mechanical man Isaak, does not get his own point of view sections in the book but really comes to life through his interactions with the main characters. Like Guy Gavriel Kay's work, this book is filled with clever people struggling to understand and outwit each other. There are also some moments of romance and love that are genuinely touching.The events of the story are triggered by the awful destruction of the legendary city Windwir, which held the collected knowledge of lost ages under the auspices of the Androfrancine Order. The city was annihilated by the use of long-lost and forbidden magic, magic that was no doubt recovered as a result of the Androfrancine's own holy quest for knowledge in the ruins of the world long destroyed.
Precisely how Windwir was destroyed is revealed in short order. Why it was destroyed is a question that takes much longer to answer. And the impact of its destruction upon the lives of the main characters and the course of nations is the story whose first portion the book tells.
Scholes takes an interesting approach with his narrative. Each chapter presents us with several short sections a few pages in length, each offering the point of view of a different character. Most of these characters have their stories followed throughout the narrative. I found that this allowed Scholes to follow a number of storylines as they wove in and out of each other, intersecting and separating at different points.
Normally that sort of storytelling approach can leave me somewhat lost in the overall narrative or frustrated when the author jumps away from an interesting storyline into one I don't care about. Scholes avoids this by keeping each of the sections very succinct yet informative.
As a result, once you leave one character's storyline and touch upon the stories of three others, say, you haven't forgotten what you left behind when you return to that original character.
Moreover, I found that I liked all of the primary point of view characters that Scholes introduces.
The setting is also interesting, a mixture of mostly well-understood magic (more akin to alchemy than traditional spellcasting), recovered technological artifacts, and high-Renaissance technology. Scholes pulls a clever trick here, in my view. The first few chapters bombard the reader with unusual images: birds carrying messages via carefully knotted cords dangling from their legs, mechanical men, soldiers treated with magical powders that make them both invisible and superhumanly fast, and so forth. But then these unsual creations are explained and expanded upon gradually over the course of the novel, while only a few new bits are introduced, so that by the end they have become facts of the world with which the reader is comfortable.
Compared to something like John C. Wright's work, which hurls out Big Ideas every couple pages at a breakneck pace, Scholes's work here is calmer. Instead of adding on new supernatural or supertech concepts, he expands upon the societies and major players in his future world.
There are clearly a lot more Big Ideas and Wondrous Things lurking around in the setting, waiting to be uncovered. But like an archeologist digging through a delicate past, Scholes shows patience and restraint in revealing their details over time.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Review: The Umbrella Academy
This graphic novel was written by Gerard Way, lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance, whose music I'm frankly unfamiliar with. (They make a big deal throughout the graphic novel of the author's rock star status.)Nothing against Way using his apparent star status as a musician to get this gig, as well as an apparent sequel volume that I won't be reading. But it reads like a bunch of unrelated bits that he thought were cool and decided to string together with amateurish glee.
It's the story of a group of kids, born under unusual circumstances and gifted with extraordinary powers that they use to save the world, under the guidance of their adoptive billionaire father, who is apparently an alien.
The story jumps back and forth between the present day, when the adult members of the Umbrella Academy unwillingly reunite to face yet another threat to the world, and the past, when they began their journey toward familial dysfunction.
The story has some interesting ideas, a lot of weird ideas masquerading as interesting ideas, a cast of potentially intriguing but undeveloped characters, and only the vaguest semblance of a plot. It reminded me of Grant Morrison's run on The Doom Patrol, with a slightly more coherent premise, equally weird but less interesting characters, and plotting that makes Morrison's early work look tightly scripted.
Bad guys appear and disappear with no clear motivation and no apparent relevance other than to provide a cool image and a loud bang. Even the main villains are the thinnest of sketches. Plot hooks are left dangling everywhere. It's not even clear just what kind of powers the various members of the Umbrella Academy possess. In some ways I applaud Way for trying to embrace the idea of showing rather than telling, but the scenes he devises are a jumbled mish-mash that end up telling us very, very little about anything. The big finale is a complete deus ex machina moment that relies upon one of the Academy members displaying a power nobody realized he had that single-handedly saves everyone from doom.
Ultimately, the Umbrella Academy is style turned up to 11 and masquerading as substance. The five star reviews on Amazon leave me scratching my head, frankly. The three-star reviews seem to hit the nail right on the head. If Way had exercised the storytelling discipline to flesh out anything that he dabbles in here, I'd have given him higher marks for the creativity of some of the ideas he tosses out.
But I feel that in the current comic book marketplace I can easily find much better told stories that are creatively satisfying.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Review: World War Z
I picked this book up from my local library on the slightest of whims.
I'm not a fan of zombie films (never even seen Dawn of the Dead) or zombie comics (I like Robert Kirkman but have never read any parts of his zombie opus The Walking Dead) or even zombie roleplaying games (I own the Angel and Buffy games from Eden Studios, but have never been interested in their flagship product, All Flesh Must Be Eaten). I'm not even a big fan of postapocalyptic settings.
On the other hand, I do like alternate histories and oral histories, and World War Z is a surprisingly well-done combination of the two. It's presented as a collection of interviews with survivors of the great zombie war, conducted on behalf of the United Nations as part of its efforts to record the history of that horrific event.
The interviews move all around the globe, talking to people at every level of society who had some role, large or small, in the unfolding of the conflict and the desperate attempts to fight back the zombie threat. The international scope of the story is one of the strong points for me, giving the reader glimpses of very different reactions to the zombie threat in different corners of the globe, as well as insights into the different societies themselves.
Another impressive aspect to the book is the level of thought Brooks has given to all aspects of the zombie threat. He deals with people trying to escape to the mountains, to the frozen north, to islands, to the open sea, and underground. There's even a glimpse of what happened to the crew aboard the International Space Station. Every possible manner in which people might be expected to react to the rise of the walking dead, both rational and emotional, seems to be covered at some point. There are unexpected reactions as well.
Many of the vignettes are powerful little stories in their own right. There are several recurring characters, but many one-shot glimpses into the horrible trials that people endured.
It was the thoroughness with which the topic was explored, combined with the diverse and interesting cast of characters portrayed, that made this book a wholly unanticipated good read for me. Interestingly, Brooks spends basically no time explaining how the zombie threat even arose in the first place. Most books would spend a lot of time belaboring this point. I guess zombie afficionadoes are supposed to know this sort of thing already.
I found this absence of explanation somewhat refreshing, because (a) no rational explanation is ever going to arise in a modern-day setting sans magic and (b) it puts the emphasis squarely upon the individual stories.
Monday, December 14, 2009
What I Want/Don't Want in Science Fiction and Fantasy
I've been thinking about this topic over the past few months as I've read a lot of different books and short stories in the two genres, written by a wide range of authors.
I've noticed some trends in the types of stories that I've been reading. Note that these aren't necessarily trends among authors. A talented or experienced author might try his or her hand at writing in several of the styles noted below, though I think the hackneyed style appeals mainly to people who are writing serial novels for licensed properties or else are content to rest upon their reputation for a bit and crank out some predictable books for the money.
There are two styles that I don't like in fantasy or science fiction novels. I won't bother to finish a book that clearly falls into either one of these categories. I might finish a short story or watch a film that indulges in them.
Hackneyed
These books are distinguished by two main traits: they don't work hard at all to maintain internal consistency and they don't respect the intelligence of the reader.
By internal consistency, I mean that the authors typically posit some form of magic or technology in the setting that would have much, much broader effects on the society than they describe. They simply haven't thought it through or they have but decided that it doesn't matter.
Another problem with internal inconsistency is related to characters. Characters are placed in positions of power or influence and then proceed to act with complete ignorance of a plethora of facts that 99% of the people placed in those positions would know. This reveals itself in spaceship captains ignorant of how their vessels function, villains with no sense of economics or tactics, and characters who exist mainly to be spoon-fed details of the plot.
These factors play into not respecting the intelligence of the reader. Authors often spoon feed the reader the most basic genre concepts or plot points, often repeatedly, via the mechanism of explaining those points to inept characters. Authors also make the assumption that whatever crazy idea they come up with will simply be accepted by the reader without any rationale.
A lot of science fiction and fantasy on television and film falls into this category. This can be palatable if there's enough action or humor or visual style. But I can rarely stretch my attention to two hours of this approach. It breaks novels for me. Mike Resnick's recent Starship novels fall squarely into this category in my view, as do most serialized novels based on popular movies or roleplaying games. There are always exceptions: John M. Ford's The Final Reflection is a very satisfying science fiction novel that happens to be set in the Star Trek universe.
I understand the reasons for this type of sci-fi and fantasy. Done with flair, it can be a good way to draw in new readers. I just don't care for it myself, because I'm not a new reader anymore. And I don't like it when recent works in this style get widely celebrated as masterpieces of the genre, because they aren't.
Literary Experiments
These are novels that tell a story in a style designed to be confusing, to shake up the reader. The most frustrating thing about these types of novels is that you get the sense that the author could write something much more satisfying and comphrehensible if they wanted to, but that they choose to be vague.
One approach is to use indecipherable language. Sometimes an author that I like will produce one of these and leave me scratching my head. Ian M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn was like that. I just couldn't labor through what the narrator was saying.
Another approach is to use a nonlinear narrative or no clear narrative structure at all. A common tactic is to present many different mysteries or paradoxes in the course of the novel and then explain none of them. Often these novels will suck you in with their clever writing, until you realize that they aren't going to provide anything resembling a satisfying conclusion, much less an explanation of what was happening in chapter four. In my view, Michael Swanwick is the master of this style of throwing out events and ideas without a care for explaining or resolving them, though I have to say that I just don't get Gene Wolfe either.
Some writers like to populate an entire novel with unlikable characters or center the novel on a main character with no discernable redeeming qualities (and I count being interesting or clever as a redeeming quality in this case). I can't think of any reason to do this with a work of fiction other than to try to upset reader's expectations and be daring in some way. M. John Harrison has done this, for example. If I get 100 pages into a book and don't care in any way what happens to any of the characters, then why am I reading it? Alistair Reynolds did this with Revelation Space, but I've found several of his other works less troubling in this regard.
As far as I can tell, writers who produce more than one book of the Literary Experiment style tend to stick with it. And it's the style I'm most likely to hate and whose practitioners most consistently leave me completely cold as a reader. They also tend to win awards, like avant garde types in any creative pursuit.
Unlike the Hackneyed style, I really can't see the point of this style of fiction outside of the short story length. If you want to be weird and obtuse for the sake of being weird and obtuse and conveying some sort of feeling, you can do that at the short story length without punishing your readers. I always get a significant whiff of arrogance from the authors who indulge themselves in this fashion.
Essentially, I believe that the point of writing both fiction and nonfiction is to communicate something coherent to the reader, and nearly all literary experiment novels fail badly on that score with me.
There's another style of science fiction and fantasy that sometimes works for me but fails at a fairly high rate due to the many pitfalls it contains.
Big Idea Obsessions
Science fiction is more prone to this than fantasy, as far as I can tell. There are really two different problems here for me.
The first type of Big Idea novel problem revolves around characters, or rather the lack of interesting, believable characters. A science fiction novel based around a big idea doesn't have to be bereft of well-rounded, intriguing, lifelike characters that you can appreciate as a reader. But oh so many of them are. They plod ahead with cardboard characters and plots that exist only to illuminate the central concept that the author is obsessed with.
This problem has plagued science fiction stories from the beginning of the genre, for the simple reason that some science fiction readers don't care about characters. What they want is a kind of speculative, technical nonfiction disguised as fiction. And that's fine by me. I just have no personal interest in that style. Some very popular writers fall into this category for me.
The character issue can manifest in another way that it less prone to criticism but which utterly fails for me as a reader. The author might create a huge tableau of characters, each seen in a brief glimpse before the narrative moves on to other characters. The result is that as a reader I never feel a connection to any of the multitude of characters tossed onto the scene in pursuit of the Epic Narrative, such as the fulfillment of a prophecy, which in these stories is a stand-in for the Big Idea. This is the type of Big Idea Obsession approach that fantasy is most prone to, although I have seen it the science fiction of authors like Stephen Baxter and Kim Stanley Robinson, whose work draws accolades but generally leaves me cold. I like to have anchor characters who persist over the course of the narrative.
The other Big Idea Obsession problem is the Mighty Technological Gimmick that Makes No Sense while dominating the plot. Some authors come up with an idea that sounds cool but which they are either incapable of explaining or which just doesn't hold together when you look at it closely, as one might over the course of a long novel. Tony Daniels' Metaplanetary was one of the most recent such ideas I've encountered.
A related category is the Mighty Technological Obsession That is Boring or Extraordinarily Technical. When boring, the concept might work in a short story, but can't sustain a novel. Nancy Kress's Probability Moon fell into this category for me, as did Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space, ultimately. When the Obsession is Extraordinarily Technical, well, it's just over my head, I guess, because it never makes sense to me yet I suspect that to someone thoroughly versed in an arcane technical or scientific field it holds together.
Big Idea Obsessions can work for me if the idea holds together and the author surrounds it with some interesting characters.
Some writers are mainly Big Idea Obsession types, framing their stories around the exploration of one big esoteric concept. Larry Niven has both hits and misses in this style, as do Greg Egan, Robert J. Sawyer, and Wil McCarthy. Others bounce around, writing a variety of novel styles. An example would be Greg Bear, who has some excellent Big Idea Obsession novels among his output.
What I Like: Well-Crafted Speculative Storytelling
This approach includes stories that have:
And I've learned that most of the writers who have produced some of the novels that I cited as examples of styles I can't stand have written other novels that I thought were great. I can't say with much certainty anymore that "I love author X or loathe author Y." This makes the idea of celebrating a particular writer a little less relevant to me. I celebrate particular stories and books and appreciate authors for having written those specific works.
Perhaps the Internet is an apt metaphor for the current state of fantasy and science fiction. Most of what is on the Internet is crap. It's still full of great stuff. Similarly, there is more bad speculative fiction (in my view) being published and celebrated than I would have thought possible. At the same time, the quantity of Really Good Stories is also tremendous.
So it's a great time to be a fan and a reader, but that doesn't make me any less critical.
I've noticed some trends in the types of stories that I've been reading. Note that these aren't necessarily trends among authors. A talented or experienced author might try his or her hand at writing in several of the styles noted below, though I think the hackneyed style appeals mainly to people who are writing serial novels for licensed properties or else are content to rest upon their reputation for a bit and crank out some predictable books for the money.
There are two styles that I don't like in fantasy or science fiction novels. I won't bother to finish a book that clearly falls into either one of these categories. I might finish a short story or watch a film that indulges in them.
Hackneyed
These books are distinguished by two main traits: they don't work hard at all to maintain internal consistency and they don't respect the intelligence of the reader.
By internal consistency, I mean that the authors typically posit some form of magic or technology in the setting that would have much, much broader effects on the society than they describe. They simply haven't thought it through or they have but decided that it doesn't matter.
Another problem with internal inconsistency is related to characters. Characters are placed in positions of power or influence and then proceed to act with complete ignorance of a plethora of facts that 99% of the people placed in those positions would know. This reveals itself in spaceship captains ignorant of how their vessels function, villains with no sense of economics or tactics, and characters who exist mainly to be spoon-fed details of the plot.
These factors play into not respecting the intelligence of the reader. Authors often spoon feed the reader the most basic genre concepts or plot points, often repeatedly, via the mechanism of explaining those points to inept characters. Authors also make the assumption that whatever crazy idea they come up with will simply be accepted by the reader without any rationale.
A lot of science fiction and fantasy on television and film falls into this category. This can be palatable if there's enough action or humor or visual style. But I can rarely stretch my attention to two hours of this approach. It breaks novels for me. Mike Resnick's recent Starship novels fall squarely into this category in my view, as do most serialized novels based on popular movies or roleplaying games. There are always exceptions: John M. Ford's The Final Reflection is a very satisfying science fiction novel that happens to be set in the Star Trek universe.
I understand the reasons for this type of sci-fi and fantasy. Done with flair, it can be a good way to draw in new readers. I just don't care for it myself, because I'm not a new reader anymore. And I don't like it when recent works in this style get widely celebrated as masterpieces of the genre, because they aren't.
Literary Experiments
These are novels that tell a story in a style designed to be confusing, to shake up the reader. The most frustrating thing about these types of novels is that you get the sense that the author could write something much more satisfying and comphrehensible if they wanted to, but that they choose to be vague.
One approach is to use indecipherable language. Sometimes an author that I like will produce one of these and leave me scratching my head. Ian M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn was like that. I just couldn't labor through what the narrator was saying.
Another approach is to use a nonlinear narrative or no clear narrative structure at all. A common tactic is to present many different mysteries or paradoxes in the course of the novel and then explain none of them. Often these novels will suck you in with their clever writing, until you realize that they aren't going to provide anything resembling a satisfying conclusion, much less an explanation of what was happening in chapter four. In my view, Michael Swanwick is the master of this style of throwing out events and ideas without a care for explaining or resolving them, though I have to say that I just don't get Gene Wolfe either.
Some writers like to populate an entire novel with unlikable characters or center the novel on a main character with no discernable redeeming qualities (and I count being interesting or clever as a redeeming quality in this case). I can't think of any reason to do this with a work of fiction other than to try to upset reader's expectations and be daring in some way. M. John Harrison has done this, for example. If I get 100 pages into a book and don't care in any way what happens to any of the characters, then why am I reading it? Alistair Reynolds did this with Revelation Space, but I've found several of his other works less troubling in this regard.
As far as I can tell, writers who produce more than one book of the Literary Experiment style tend to stick with it. And it's the style I'm most likely to hate and whose practitioners most consistently leave me completely cold as a reader. They also tend to win awards, like avant garde types in any creative pursuit.
Unlike the Hackneyed style, I really can't see the point of this style of fiction outside of the short story length. If you want to be weird and obtuse for the sake of being weird and obtuse and conveying some sort of feeling, you can do that at the short story length without punishing your readers. I always get a significant whiff of arrogance from the authors who indulge themselves in this fashion.
Essentially, I believe that the point of writing both fiction and nonfiction is to communicate something coherent to the reader, and nearly all literary experiment novels fail badly on that score with me.
There's another style of science fiction and fantasy that sometimes works for me but fails at a fairly high rate due to the many pitfalls it contains.
Big Idea Obsessions
Science fiction is more prone to this than fantasy, as far as I can tell. There are really two different problems here for me.
The first type of Big Idea novel problem revolves around characters, or rather the lack of interesting, believable characters. A science fiction novel based around a big idea doesn't have to be bereft of well-rounded, intriguing, lifelike characters that you can appreciate as a reader. But oh so many of them are. They plod ahead with cardboard characters and plots that exist only to illuminate the central concept that the author is obsessed with.
This problem has plagued science fiction stories from the beginning of the genre, for the simple reason that some science fiction readers don't care about characters. What they want is a kind of speculative, technical nonfiction disguised as fiction. And that's fine by me. I just have no personal interest in that style. Some very popular writers fall into this category for me.
The character issue can manifest in another way that it less prone to criticism but which utterly fails for me as a reader. The author might create a huge tableau of characters, each seen in a brief glimpse before the narrative moves on to other characters. The result is that as a reader I never feel a connection to any of the multitude of characters tossed onto the scene in pursuit of the Epic Narrative, such as the fulfillment of a prophecy, which in these stories is a stand-in for the Big Idea. This is the type of Big Idea Obsession approach that fantasy is most prone to, although I have seen it the science fiction of authors like Stephen Baxter and Kim Stanley Robinson, whose work draws accolades but generally leaves me cold. I like to have anchor characters who persist over the course of the narrative.
The other Big Idea Obsession problem is the Mighty Technological Gimmick that Makes No Sense while dominating the plot. Some authors come up with an idea that sounds cool but which they are either incapable of explaining or which just doesn't hold together when you look at it closely, as one might over the course of a long novel. Tony Daniels' Metaplanetary was one of the most recent such ideas I've encountered.
A related category is the Mighty Technological Obsession That is Boring or Extraordinarily Technical. When boring, the concept might work in a short story, but can't sustain a novel. Nancy Kress's Probability Moon fell into this category for me, as did Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space, ultimately. When the Obsession is Extraordinarily Technical, well, it's just over my head, I guess, because it never makes sense to me yet I suspect that to someone thoroughly versed in an arcane technical or scientific field it holds together.
Big Idea Obsessions can work for me if the idea holds together and the author surrounds it with some interesting characters.
Some writers are mainly Big Idea Obsession types, framing their stories around the exploration of one big esoteric concept. Larry Niven has both hits and misses in this style, as do Greg Egan, Robert J. Sawyer, and Wil McCarthy. Others bounce around, writing a variety of novel styles. An example would be Greg Bear, who has some excellent Big Idea Obsession novels among his output.
What I Like: Well-Crafted Speculative Storytelling
This approach includes stories that have:
- At least one interesting, multi-dimensional fleshed-out character or side that I can care about.
- A small group (at most) of point of view characters or a consistent omniscient viewpoint that concentrates on what happens to a fairly small group of characters. Social experiments strongly indicate that people don't make more than four to seven close friends at any point in their lives. Likewise, I don't care about the details of what happens to a dozen or more different characters in a single story or novel.
- Good dialogue.
- Interesting technology or magic that doesn't dominate the entire story. That sort of thing works much, much better in short stories than novels. If the concept is rich enough, with enough twists and turns to be worthy of novel-length exploration, then it desperately needs to be tied to the types of characters noted above. I don't care so much about how technology or magic affects civilization in the abstract; I care about how it affects people that I've come to care about in some way.
- Narratives that start at Point A and end up at Point B, not Point A or Point A-2. Don't loop. Something needs to change.
- Novels that offer some sort of resolution to the major challenges that they present during the novel. There can be dangling issues left unresolved, but if you say in the first few chapters that the immediate goal of the characters is X, then by the end of several hundred pages they had damn well better have achieved or failed to achieve X in a clear fashion.
- Stories that don't invoke something ridiculous from out of the blue to save the characters and the author.
- A sense of wonder and adventure. That's what I read speculative fiction for in the first place.
And I've learned that most of the writers who have produced some of the novels that I cited as examples of styles I can't stand have written other novels that I thought were great. I can't say with much certainty anymore that "I love author X or loathe author Y." This makes the idea of celebrating a particular writer a little less relevant to me. I celebrate particular stories and books and appreciate authors for having written those specific works.
Perhaps the Internet is an apt metaphor for the current state of fantasy and science fiction. Most of what is on the Internet is crap. It's still full of great stuff. Similarly, there is more bad speculative fiction (in my view) being published and celebrated than I would have thought possible. At the same time, the quantity of Really Good Stories is also tremendous.
So it's a great time to be a fan and a reader, but that doesn't make me any less critical.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Review: The Watchman by Robert Crais
This is another one of the action/mystery novels by Crais, set in Los Angeles and featuring the main characters Joe Pike and Elvis Cole. Pike is a former Marine, ex-cop, occasional mercenary, and sometimes PI and troubleshooter working with Cole, a private investigator. Pike is stoic, deadly, and taciturn. Cole is garrulous, glib, and tough. The Watchman is primarily a Joe Pike novel, though it does feature Cole and several other characters, like police forensics specialist John Chen, as point of view characters.
In this novel, Pike has to repay a favor from a previous novel and accept a job protecting a spoiled rich girl who caused an auto accident that allowed her to see the face of a dangerous man wanted by the federal authorities. Attempts on her life soon follow, and continue even after Pike is assigned to protect her. But seeing as Pike is not really a bodyguard at heart, he decides that the best strategy is to hunt down the people who are pursuing the girl.
Crais does an excellent job here keeping the events moving at a brisk pace. There aren't that many surprises in terms of the plot: a few twists that don't really knock you off your feet. But the twists and turns do seem to hold up well. Pike does some very dangerous things, but he does them in a very methodical, pragmatic fashion. By surrounding Pike with other characters who are more talkative, neurotic, and witty, Crais both makes Pike's oddness stand out and shows that he can write a variety of characters.
The best part of the story is what it reveals, bit by bit, about Pike's personality and that of Larkin Barkeley, the rich girl he is protecting. Crais takes a character who, on the surface, I've seen in dozens of action movies: the close-lipped badass who you don't want to cross. But he injects him with vulnerabilities, based on Pike's own past as an abused child and his present inability to really connect to most people. This is a guy who, for all his confidence in a crisis situation, is most comfortable when he's silent and unseen. He moves through the world around him almost like a ghost, and there's a sadness to his self-imposed isolation.
It feels as though Crais thought carefully about what kinds of life experiences and mindset would be necessary to create a guy capable of the sorts of action-film deadliness that Pike emanates, and then decided to show what that sort of person would be like in and out of battle. He's not the first person to take this approach; in many ways Pike is an archetypal Warrior, the one who protects the village but cannot truly be part of it. But Crais manages to present Pike with a simple and direct style that feels effortless on the page. I find it well-crafted and an enjoyable read.
In this novel, Pike has to repay a favor from a previous novel and accept a job protecting a spoiled rich girl who caused an auto accident that allowed her to see the face of a dangerous man wanted by the federal authorities. Attempts on her life soon follow, and continue even after Pike is assigned to protect her. But seeing as Pike is not really a bodyguard at heart, he decides that the best strategy is to hunt down the people who are pursuing the girl.
Crais does an excellent job here keeping the events moving at a brisk pace. There aren't that many surprises in terms of the plot: a few twists that don't really knock you off your feet. But the twists and turns do seem to hold up well. Pike does some very dangerous things, but he does them in a very methodical, pragmatic fashion. By surrounding Pike with other characters who are more talkative, neurotic, and witty, Crais both makes Pike's oddness stand out and shows that he can write a variety of characters.
The best part of the story is what it reveals, bit by bit, about Pike's personality and that of Larkin Barkeley, the rich girl he is protecting. Crais takes a character who, on the surface, I've seen in dozens of action movies: the close-lipped badass who you don't want to cross. But he injects him with vulnerabilities, based on Pike's own past as an abused child and his present inability to really connect to most people. This is a guy who, for all his confidence in a crisis situation, is most comfortable when he's silent and unseen. He moves through the world around him almost like a ghost, and there's a sadness to his self-imposed isolation.
It feels as though Crais thought carefully about what kinds of life experiences and mindset would be necessary to create a guy capable of the sorts of action-film deadliness that Pike emanates, and then decided to show what that sort of person would be like in and out of battle. He's not the first person to take this approach; in many ways Pike is an archetypal Warrior, the one who protects the village but cannot truly be part of it. But Crais manages to present Pike with a simple and direct style that feels effortless on the page. I find it well-crafted and an enjoyable read.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Review: The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell
I really enjoyed historical novelist Bernard Cornwell's retelling of the Arthurian legends (The Winter King, Enemy of God, and Excalibur). The Last Kingdom has a similar feel. The first novel describes the early days of King Alfred (before he got the name the Great) as he defends Wessex from the onslaught of the invading Danes and other Vikings, who conquer the other kingdoms of England with surprising swiftness.Except the story is told not from Arthur's point of view, but from that of Uthred, who is an English earl of Northumbria by birthright but raised as a Viking after being captured in battle as an adolescent. Uthred needs to choose between the adoptive family and culture that he loves and the lost heritage that he feels it is his destiny to reclaim.
Cornwell has a talent for describing wars and battles in a way that lets you understand both the larger movements of soldiers and the individual horror faced by combatants who can feel each other's breath in the press of the shield wall. Just when you think he's celebrating the violence too much via Uthred's reveling in the carnage, he'll pull back and show you the cost, or have a wiser Uthred commenting upon his luck or the fear that he felt.
The story also gives you a good feel for the events shaping the lives of people in England during the time of the Danish invasions and for what motivated them. The differences between the pagan Vikings and the devout Christian English such as Alfred are often stark, with Cornwell revealing a dislike for the hypocrisy of many churchmen through the thoughts and words of his protagonist, Uthred.
Ultimately, it's the way that Cornwell manages to make characters like Uthred and other supporting figures flawed, interesting, and likable enough to root for that makes the novel a good read. The novel is based on historical events, but not all the characters are figures from history, and those without a background in this historical period would probably be hard pressed to figure out which of the minor characters are "real" and which are made up. What this means is that you are never really comfortable as to who is going to die and who will live. That lends a real sense of anxiety and urgency to some of the conflicts. People you've come to like will die in this story, while others may surprise you by surviving.
All in all, a recommended read for fans of historical fiction, those interested in Vikings, and for anyone wanting to set a fantasy piece in this sort of feudal, Iron Age social and technological environment.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Review: In the Land of Invented Languages
The subtitle of this book tells you pretty much everything you need to know about its contents. Okrent, a linguist, explores both contemporary and historical attempts to create artificial languages.For each primary language that she explores, she provides not only a brief biography of its inventor (longer in some cases, such as that of the troubled man who invented the symbolic language Blissymbolics), but examples of the language in use. So you get various phrases written in English and translated into Esperanto, Klingon, and so forth. Moreover, you often get an intermediate translation, which shows what is literally being said before moving on to the smoother, "natural English" version.
The fundamental flaw faced by nearly everyone who has tried or is trying to create an artificial language from scratch is that they want to make a language that is superior in some fashion to languages that have developed organically over time.
They want their new languages to be more logical, more emotional, simpler to learn, easier to pronounce or spell, impossible to lie in, or some such goal. Often they based these goals on a belief in certain universal linguistic principles that their language will display more effectively than any others.
The problem, of course, is that their new languages usually make much more sense to the creator than to anybody else. And the new languages tend to promote schisms among their adopters at a startlingly early stage in the process, often when they have only a few hundred users at most.
And even when there is success with creating languages that are inherently more logical and precise, such as Loglan, a key problem arises: it is just too damn hard to figure out how to say anything in the natural flow of a conversation. People have to think too hard and in somewhat unnatural ways to communicate adequately. In other words, many of these ideal artificial languages assume a clarity of thought and intent that real people cannot live up to in the actual world. It turns out that while many people want to blame the limitations of language for our difficulties in communicating with each other, much of the problem resides within our own minds. "Natural" languages (I don't think the term is entirely accurate, as it seems to me that all spoken human languages are artificial in origin, but it suits how we tend to think about language) work in large part because they are flexible enough to deal with our own fuzzy thinking.
My favorite part of the book came at the very end, when Okrent describes the constructed language or "conlang" community, which consists of people who make up rigorous, linguistically accurate languages for fun, often basing them on elements borrowed from many different obscure terrestrial languages or coming up with really esoteric ideas suited to alien species. I don't think I'd want to do the work that those people put into their hobby, but I can appreciate the creativity and discipline that it takes. Some of the results, such as the squirrel language Dritok, which consists of clicks, pops, hisses, and snorts, sound very entertaining.
An interesting book, though not one I'd read if I was pondering the idea of creating a new language for the betterment of humanity, because the text is littered with the broken sentences of those who tried and failed.
Monday, November 30, 2009
More Conservative Christian Inanity
While looking for items for my daughter's wish list on Amazon, I stumbled across this review of the Bionicles books from Lego by a woman identifying herself as a Christian home-schooling her children.
I've heard rising divorce rates and environmental stress associated with higher urbanization and the fast pace of the information age mentioned as possible contributions to adolescent depression. Even video games and violence on television. But this is the first time I've heard someone blame fantasy worlds based on books stimulating the imagination. When I was a kid, that's the very thing that helped me FIGHT depression.
Bionicles might be potentially annoying to adults who haven't gotten into the setting as much as their kids, but they are hardly harbringers of a dark, occult worldview. I have no idea what to say to someone who is shocked that a book might do something as crazy as provide a detailed, alternate world of imagination. Perish the thought. Though I have to say, I'm pretty sure the world this woman lives in has its own language, history, politics, and religion compared to the world that I live in.
The BIBLE is loaded with more violence (wholesale slaughter left and right), cruelty (it condones slavery and sacrifice), and mature themes (multiple wives, spousal coveting, and so forth) than you will find in the Bionicle books. And plenty of stuff in the Bible is patently made up, should you choose to take it literally. So I'm puzzled as to how reading Bionicle books and playing with toys that require you to assemble them will warp them compared to intensive Bible study. And unlike the supposed "cult" inspired by Bionicle books, many people devoted to biblical teachings have actually murdered and repressed other people in massive numbers in the past as well as today.
I had some more stuff to suggest what is more likely to contribute to eventual depression among kids home-schooled in a narrow minded, conservative Christian worldview once they eventually encounter the diversity of the larger world and have to deal with arguments based on facts, but honestly I hope that her kids grow up happy and healthy.
"Not only are these Bionicle figures and their stories filled with dark images of death and cruelty, the paranormal, occult aspects are very liberally seen throughout the books. This dark world comes with an entire alternate reality, including it's own language, geography, religion and politics. It is very easy for boys of any age to get all caught in this dark world and the consequences could be very disturbing. . . .I don't even know where to start with this sort of earnest, well-intentioned, yet ultimately simple-minded and ironic (see Bible comments below) fearmongering.
We are Christians who teach our children the Bible and undoubtedly my son could sense how the themes of Bionicles were very different than those we were teaching at home and what he was hearing at church.
My advice is that ALL parents thoroughly review the Bionicle books before giving them to your children to read. My previous work in the field of child counseling showed me that children of today have enough problems with dark thoughts and tendencies (ie. the skyrocketing rates of childhood depression and suicide, boys getting "lost" in fantasy worlds, etc.) and do not need books with dark themes.
Christian parents who value raising children with a biblical worldview might well consider avoiding the Bionicle series as it will send messages that will conflict with views you desire your children to grow up with."
I've heard rising divorce rates and environmental stress associated with higher urbanization and the fast pace of the information age mentioned as possible contributions to adolescent depression. Even video games and violence on television. But this is the first time I've heard someone blame fantasy worlds based on books stimulating the imagination. When I was a kid, that's the very thing that helped me FIGHT depression.
Bionicles might be potentially annoying to adults who haven't gotten into the setting as much as their kids, but they are hardly harbringers of a dark, occult worldview. I have no idea what to say to someone who is shocked that a book might do something as crazy as provide a detailed, alternate world of imagination. Perish the thought. Though I have to say, I'm pretty sure the world this woman lives in has its own language, history, politics, and religion compared to the world that I live in.
The BIBLE is loaded with more violence (wholesale slaughter left and right), cruelty (it condones slavery and sacrifice), and mature themes (multiple wives, spousal coveting, and so forth) than you will find in the Bionicle books. And plenty of stuff in the Bible is patently made up, should you choose to take it literally. So I'm puzzled as to how reading Bionicle books and playing with toys that require you to assemble them will warp them compared to intensive Bible study. And unlike the supposed "cult" inspired by Bionicle books, many people devoted to biblical teachings have actually murdered and repressed other people in massive numbers in the past as well as today.
I had some more stuff to suggest what is more likely to contribute to eventual depression among kids home-schooled in a narrow minded, conservative Christian worldview once they eventually encounter the diversity of the larger world and have to deal with arguments based on facts, but honestly I hope that her kids grow up happy and healthy.
Review: Astro Boy Movie
Saw this film yesterday with the kids at a local "dollar cinema." Of course a dollar cinema doesn't cost a dollar anymore, but this one is reasonably priced and pretty clean, and five minutes from our house.
As for the movie itself, the kids liked it. My seven year old son was particularly entertained and enjoyed all the action sequences. My ten year old daughter, who has read some of the Astro Boy manga in translation, thought it was fine, but wondered why they made so many changes to the storyline of the manga.
Ah, the ageless question of why adaptations make the changes that they do to stories that we love. Although I can't say that I cared a lot about Astro Boy one way or the other coming in.
The film's narrative is very simplistic. The villains are foolishly and almost pointlessly villainous, the comic relief is slapstick, and the whole question of how humans should interact with intelligent beings that they have essentially enslaved is sort of waved at in passing. There's probably more action than necessary. You won't get any insights into human dependency upon technology or the emotions of robots as you do in Wall-E. As far as the animation, it's fine but not breathtaking in any way; the characters are cartoonishly exaggerated but without much subtlety of expression, kind of like a big screen Jimmy Neutron film with less humor.
All in all, not a film I'd recommend seeing or renting unless you have younger kids interested in it. Then it's not bad to sit through as far as such things go. The enthusiasm of children can compensate for a lot of visual and narrative shortcomings.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Review: The Renaissance at War
If you like military history or are interested in the wave of change that swept through Europe as a result of the Renaissance, then this book by Yale historian Thomas Arnold is a real treat.
In less than 250 pages, Arnold deals with a large amount of material in a very accessible fashion.
Chapter One, "The New Fury," describes the impact of the gunpowder revolution, specifically the introduction of artillery, on European sieges and fortifications. Arnold includes multiple sidebars that help the reader decipher the bewildering array of Renaissance military pieces and the key differences between them (culverins have longer barrels than cannons, with a thicker base that allowed them to use heavier powder charges and fire at longer ranges). You get a sense of the range of artillery, how much gunpowder and shot it used, and how difficult and costly it was to transport over distances. Then there is a good discussion of how fortifications had to change to withstand assaults by the new cannons.
Chapter 2, "The New Legions," discusses how infantry and cavalry were altered to adapt to the needs and capabilities of gunpowder weapons. This chapter brought up many points of which I was unaware. For example, military drums were a Renaissance innovation designed to provide a strict cadence needed for densely packed squares of pikemen and musketeers to march and manuever in unison while providing flanking fire for each other. Arnold also makes the point that the introduction of guns themselves didn't necessitate all the changes that took place. Early guns were less accurate than crossbows; someone could have instituted many of the Renaissance battlefield changes adopted for firearms without guns, based on equipping large numbers of soldiers with heavy crossbows, whose bolts could pierce armor.
But the early guns were cheaper to make and use than crossbows (which I did not realize, assuming that gunpowder was more costly than it apparently was), faster and easier to use (since they weren't aimed and reloading was apparently a simpler and speedier process than using a small winch to rewind a heavy crossbow), and possibly more intimidating (with a shock and awe effect of noise, flash, and smoke that crossbows lacked). So it was both more affordable and more feasible to equip large numbers of soldiers with the new weapons. Ironically, once this was done, it became necessary to institute new methods of drill, many originally inspired by Classical Roman training manuals, to put the large numbers of musketeers to good use.
This is also the first text I've read with a decent discussion of the design and uses of war wagons, which were a common feature of warfare in Eastern Europe (particularly among the Hussites). Not a lengthy discussion, but much more informative and easier to find than the coverage in every other general source that I've read. Since this was an interest of mine, I was quite happy.
These two chapters alone made the book a treat for me to read. Chapter 3, "The New Caesars," gives an interesting description of the changes to the battlefield role of the nobility and of military commanders during the period, which is helpful to anyone trying to envision what a battlefield of the period was like and how knighthood transformed.
Chapter 4, "Cross versus Crescent," describes the ongoing wars between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire for control of the eastern European frontier, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. Good reading, supplemented with some very cool and very readable color diagrams of several key sieges and battles.
The last two chapters, "Dueling Kings" and "Faith vs. Faith," are about the conflict between the Hapsburgs and the Valois kings of France on the one hand and between Protestants and Catholics on the other. These were well-written, but not particular interests of mine, so I didn't give them as thorough a read.
Overall, this is a portable, concise, informative, and attractive reference to the key military transformations of the period.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Review: Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons has an uncanny ability to write well in any genre. Muse of Fire is a science fiction novella about a wandering troupe of Shakespearian actors known as Earth's Men. They travel about the stars in a distant, bleak future where humanity lives under the rule of a hierarchy of mysterious and powerful set of alien overlords.
In this setting, the human race is divided into arbeiters, who perform manual labor, doles, who are gray-hearted and somber clerks, and the dragomen, who are sexless, genetically altered translators for the Archon, large arthropods who are the immediate overlords of mankind. The crew of the Muse of Fire don't seem to fit into any of these categories and it is isn't clearly explained why not, though the narrator is one of the few humans who comes from Earth, which is a blasted, desolate planet filled with the billions of sarcophagi of generations of dead humans, who are returned to their ancestral homeworld by their alien overlords upon death.
In the middle of a performance on one backwater world, the Earth's Men draw the wholly unexpected attention of an audience of Archons. They are then sent on a breakneck journey to perform a new play for each of the alien races who control the known universe. First they perform Macbeth for the Archons, then King Lear for the amphibious Poimen, then Hamlet for the colossal and terrifying Demiurgos, and finally Romeo and Juliet for the mighty deity Abraxas.
It is a strange journey, full of dazzling imagery and mysteries that remain mysteries to the largely befuddled human crew. Along the way, Simmons manages to give a pretty good description of the various personalities found in the theater and this particular troupe, coupled with asides relating to various aspects of Shakespeare's plays and the roles therein.
Knowing Simmons, but having only slight familiarity with gnosticism, I'm confident that there are many layers of symbolic meaning to the names and choices for the various alien hierarchy and the odd religion that the human race follows. However, not being able to appreciate the full depth of such aspects did not impair my enjoyment of the story, which kept me reading past my bedtime to get to the end.
In somewhat classic Simmons fashion, there's no real sense of the ramifications of the changes that take place as a result of the events in the story, either for the individual characters or for humanity as a whole. But it is quite clear that significant change has occurred.
I don't know that I would buy this book as a stand-alone novella unless I found it for a good price. But the story is included in Gardner Dozois' anthology The New Space Opera, so you can get it there along with a lot of other interesting stories.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Review: Purple and Black
This fantasy is an epistolary novella, told entirely through the letters written between Nicephorus, the young and recently crowned ruler of the Vesani empire, and Phormio, an old school chum who has been sent to the embattled frontier more for his loyalty to the embattled emperor than as a result of any personal qualifications.As is apparently in keeping with Parker's other fantasy works, this is more of a historical fantasy about an alternative world without magic, strange creatures, or wondrous landscapes. It's a highly political story, focused on the machinations of individuals in an old, corrupt imperial bureaucracy trying to acquire or preserve power and authority. And it is ultimately a tragic story of friendship, youthful idealism, and betrayal.
The conceit of telling the story through letters works well because the letters themselves are typically brief and to the point. There are some twists and turns that gave themselvs away a bit earlier than I would have liked, but the development of Phormio and Nicephorus's characters is handled well, with little bits of their backstory emerging.
The setting felt odd to me: clearly everyone is fighting at a high medieval level, with armor, swords, and so forth. Yet there are sections in the story where it is made quite clear (in fact, it is key to the plot) that there is a rather sophisticated record-keeping apparatus in place within the empire, to the degree that every piece of armor mass-produced by certain companies receives its own lot number. And books seem to be quite commonplace, at least among the elite. There are references to specific editions of multiple works and of texts updated over decades. All of this lends a somewhat more modern feel to what is otherwise a lower-tech society. I'm not sure how well it works; at times it felt anachronistic, even given that this is a make-believe world.
On the other hand, it did make me want to check on whether the Roman Empire or one of the Chinese dynasties employed such detailed and well-organized record-keeping for military matters.
I wouldn't spend the $20 or so to buy a hardcover of this novella; it's just too slight of a story for that sort of outlay unless you are a big K.J. Parker fan (this is the first of her books that I've read). However, the story is well worth reading if you can find it at the library or perhaps someday included in an anthology.
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