Category: Books

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Book Review: Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le GuinChanging Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin is a book based on a little pun — the idea that the relentless hostility of airports to the human mind can, at times, drive a person out of our plane of reality and into another. While waiting to change planes, then, one might find one’s self actually changing planes. Since only a few minutes pass in one’s home plane while one is traveling through another, there’s no reason not to spend one’s layover napping on a tropical beach or hiking through some other world’s mountains.

Changing Planes doesn’t have a plot as such. It’s a series of vignettes of the different planes one might choose to visit. Each one is enthrallingly lyrical (I was almost sucked back into the book in the process of writing this review) and drawn with the eye for telling detail that has always made Le Guin’s writing stand out from the rest of genre fiction. Each chapter addresses a different world. The shift in tone ought to be jarring, but isn’t — though she focuses on a different aspect of humanity in each world the protagonist (such as there is) visits or hears about, the book still stands as a cohesive whole.

When I picked up Changing Planes, I didn’t realize that I had already read two of the chapters when they were published as short stories in Lightspeed Magazine. One of them — “The Silence of the Asonu” — stayed on my iPod for a while so that I could re-listen to it. I love the feelings it evokes. It is not a happy story — few of these chapters are happy stories. The deep mystery of the silence of the Asonu combined with the ridiculous mysticism that tourists have projected onto them call to mind a pattern that I am familiar with from our world. That the story takes such a dark turn at the end fits that pattern.

Science fiction is at its best when it reflects aspects of our shared humanity back at us. The worlds in Changing Planes are similar to ours, with a few telling changes. I believe that anyone who reads these stories will come away with a clear idea of what Le Guin was criticizing about our society — but I don’t think any two people will necessarily agree about what that was. Take the other story that is available in Lightspeed: “The Island of the Immortals.” Is it a commentary on the quest for eternal life? Or a statement about how a society chooses to treat its elderly? Both? Or something else? Even stories that don’t feel particularly nuanced proved to be more complicated than they appeared once I tried to pick them apart. For example, I remembered the chapter called “Great Joy” as a straightforward commentary on corporate greed. Upon rereading, it was clearly a scathing criticism of the commodification of holidays.

Changing Planes will frustrate some readers. It does lack a plot and a clearly-drawn protagonist. Its style reminded me most strongly of Always Coming Home — which happens to be my favorite work by Le Guin. I think it will speak to people who love science fiction for its own sake, and not just for the superficial trappings of rockets and starships. Le Guin is once again trying to make her readers look at the world in a new way. Whether or not Changing Planes succeeds in doing that will depend on the reader. Fans of Le Guin should give Changing Planes a look. Readers who are on the fence should read or listen to the two chapters published in Lightspeed before making up their minds.

Oct 25, 2011 | 1 comment View Post
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Book Review: “The Colorado Kid” by Stephen King

The concept of “based upon Book X by Author Y” is stretched pretty far these days. Sure, sometimes you get a Harry Potter or a Twilight, but other times you get a movie or TV show that is so loosely-based on the source material that, if the book was a person and the TV show was a pair of jeans, the combination of the two would violate the saggy-pants bans that are in effect in several states.

I mention this because I watch the TV show Haven. In the opening credits and most of the promotional material for season one, the producers hit “based on The Colorado Kid by Stephen King” pretty hard. When I first saw the promos, I figured, okay, this should be somewhat interesting. And it is; I happen to enjoy Haven, even if I’m still concerned they won’t be able to wrap up everything from this season in the upcoming finale*.

But it’s not based on The Colorado Kid. Not really. Because here’s what the two works have in common:

  1. They take place in Maine.
  2. They both have small-town newspapermen Vince and Dave.
  3. There’s a bar/restaurant called The Grey Gull.
  4. The policeman’s last name is Wuornos.

So, saying Haven is based upon The Colorado Kid is, in my opinion, a little disingenuous. Especially since Haven is quite clearly a genre show, while The Colorado Kid is a straight-up mystery novella.

The Colorado Kid is mostly a story-within-a-story. The main character, Stephanie, is a journalism student working an internship in Moose-Lookit (a small island in Maine, at least an hour away from Bangor), at the local paper — a weekly run by Dave Bowie and Vince Teague. After a few months on the island — which is so small that it and so inaccessible that older students need to take the ferry to get to and from high school every day — Stephanie has been accepted by the town and by her bosses. In other words, she’s no longer an outsider.

One day toward the end of her internship, Stephanie, Vince, and Dave host a reporter from the Boston Globe who’s writing a series of features on unexplained mysteries of New England. After he’s gone, Stephanie learns that Moose-Lookit does indeed have an unexplained mystery, but it’s not the kind of thing Vince and Dave feel comfortable telling the Globe about.

Instead, they tell Stephanie the entire story, and that’s the main plot of The Colorado Kid: who was the man found dead on the beach, who killed him, and why?

Throughout the whole book, I kept waiting for the King twist — what was the supernatural aspect going to be? What kind of monster would end up being the killer? And, because Haven was ostensibly based on the book, when was I going to read about “the troubles”?

Answers: it wasn’t a monster, and never.

Because The Colorado Kid is a straight-up mystery.

I’m not going to say I was disappointed with the story, because I really wasn’t (although the ending was a bit of a head-scratcher). I think the issue was more that I went into it expecting one thing and I got something totally different. I was primed for a supernatural story — I’ve read several of King’s other stories, novellas, and novels, and it’s pretty well-known that he writes mostly genre fiction — and the fact that Haven was based on the book (or so I’d been repeatedly told by the show’s promotional material) made me more-or-less ready for one.

In the end, I’ll say this: if you like Stephen King’s style of writing, you’ll probably like this book. If you like mysteries, you might like this book, although you’ll probably do some head-scratching, just like I did. But if you go into it expecting a sci-fi, fantasy, or horror story, or a story anything like the television show Haven, The Colorado Kid will probably disappoint you. It’s a pretty good story, but it’s not a genre story.

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Note to Parents: The book contains some gross-out scenes, especially during the autopsy, but is otherwise acceptable for most teenage audiences. They’ll probably think it’s boring, but there’s nothing objectionable. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

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* I wrote this before the season finale. It did… pretty well, actually.

Oct 16, 2011 | 1 comment View Post
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Book Review: City of Ruins by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

City of Ruins coverScience fiction always runs the risk of getting caught up in pointless details. City of Ruins by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is one of those science fiction novels that spends too much time looking down at its feet and not enough time staring up at the wondrous ideas that it is proposing. Half explore-the-ancient-machine, half first-contact, City of Ruins should not have been dull. Nevertheless, I found my attention drifting.

City of Ruins is the second book in the Diving Universe series, following Diving into the Wreck. It takes our nameless hero, Boss, to the oldest city on one of the oldest planets in the galaxy. Her daring crew of space-spelunkers have heard rumors about remnants of the lost and legendary “stealth tech” hidden beneath the city. Boss thinks the whole mission is a waste of time. Everyone knows that starships with stealth tech are found in space, and planets are full of icky things like dirt and other human beings.

It’s hard to worry about Boss, or her co-protagonist, Captain “Coop” Cooper. They’re both calm and rational people who always think things through, even when their emotions threaten to get the best of them. While it’s nice to have a pair of thoughtful protagonists, it sucks a lot of the drama out of the book. So long as she has all the necessary facts, Boss isn’t going to make mistakes. She’s too smart for that. The really interesting conflict comes at the end, when Boss and Coop are pitted against one another. That state of affairs only lasts for a few pages, but they were some of my favorite pages in the book.

I can’t write much about Coop without giving too much of the plot away. He brings more emotion to the story than Boss does, weighed down as he is by the decisions he has made and the people who rely on him. Unfortunately, it is sometimes hard to feel bad for a man who can ponder the unfairness of life over a plate of comfort food cooked by his personal chef.

The chapters in this book are short, sometimes only a few pages long. Each one ends with a cliffhanger. I found that the short chapters gave me plenty of jumping-off points, and after a while I was so inured to the cliffhangers that they couldn’t drag me back. Even with the deadly dangers of underground archeology and malfunctioning technology, very little actually happens. The protagonists bicker while the plot carefully excavates and diagrams every possible conflict between it and the end of the book.

Rusch takes a bit of a gamble with the points of view in City of Ruins. Coop tells his story from the traditional third-person past tense, but Boss’s sections are all in first-person present tense. The switch may distract some readers, but I found that it helped to draw a sharp line between the two stories. It also has a sort of symbolic relationship to the two characters’ situations.

City of Ruins is based on an award-winning novella originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. It will be followed by Boneyards. I did not get a chance to read either the preceding novellas or Diving the Wreck, so it is possible that City of Ruins is a stronger book when viewed in its proper context. I don’t plan to read the next book, and I hesitate to recommend this one. If you’re already a fan of the series, or if you’re looking for a space opera that takes place in a claustrophobic underground setting, this book might be for you.

Oct 12, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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Book Review: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresault by Genevieve Valentine

Cover for MechaniqueIn a time of thousand-page fantasy epics, a little book like Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti is easy to overlook. I recommend making the effort to track it down. Mechanique is a beautifully written book. Genevieve Valentine says more with hints and suggestions than some authors can say in a thousand words of blunt narration. There is more truth in Mechanique than in other books twice its size.

Mechanique has been categorized “steampunk,” but it does not indulge in the Victorian nostalgia that marks the steampunk literature that I’m familiar with. The world of Mechanique is a post-war wasteland, where last scraps of civilization survive in walled cities. It is outside these cities that the Circus Tresaulti pitches its tents. Little George, the book’s first person narrator, is the circus’s advance scout, putting up posters and checking the mood of the inhabitants to see if they’re the kind of people who might enjoy a circus — or who would rather enjoy chasing a circus out of town.

The mechanical legs that Little George wears for these excursions are fake, but the core of the circus are its genuine half-mechanical performers. Women with metal bones, men with reinforced mechanical bodies, and, once, a man with mechanical wings. It sounds like a good deal — have your fragile and overheavy bones replaced with light, flexible copper and spend your days on a high-flying trapeze. The Boss doesn’t take just anyone, though, and being accepted by Boss and having the bones installed doesn’t mean you’ll survive being part of the act.

No one joins the Circus Tresaulti who isn’t at least a little bit broken. Valentine’s narrative is equally fractured, slipping from second person to third person, pausing in the present tense and then sliding back into the past. Little George narrates in first person. Elena and a few other characters narrate in third person. The reader also hears whispers and asides from another narrator, the voice of the storyteller, who points out when the characters aren’t quite being honest with themselves. The overall effect is strange, and could be off-putting for many readers. I found it entrancing.

Readers of Fantasy Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies will already be familiar with stories about the Circus Tresaulti. All of those stories are available as podcasts: Study, for Solo Piano; The Finest Spectacle Anywhere; Bread and Circuses. If you’re unsure whether you’ll like Mechanique, give those a listen. The tone and the style of the narration does not change from the stories to the book. Valentine just pulls the curtain back a bit more in her novel, and lets her readers see things that she only hinted at in the short stories.

Mechanique steps away from traditional adult fantasy literature with its illustrations. I heartily approve of this trend. The artist who did the cover (and the promotional Tresaulti tickets) has done a handful of lovely black and white illustrations for the interior. One picture in particular that stands out in my mind is the drawing of Elena sitting alone in the big top, swinging back and forth on the trapeze and staring away into the darkness.

Mechanique is surreal. The narrative is nonlinear and the magic works because Boss says so. Readers looking for traditional fantasy narratives should probably look elsewhere. Fans of Genevieve Valentine, and those readers who are willing to take a risk, should buy a ticket for the Circus Tresaulti. They have beer in glasses, dancing girls, and mechanical marvels to shock and amaze you.

Oct 07, 2011 | 1 comment View Post
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Book Review: The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

The Cloud Roads coverBooks like The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells are why I love fantasy literature. In The Cloud Roads, Wells has built a world where people aren’t just divided by color and language, but by species and life-cycle. In a surprisingly short time, Wells touches on the kinds problems that a world like hers would have, and populates it with compelling, believable characters who provide the driving force behind the narrative.

Our hero, Moon, is surrounded by people from a hundred different races — but no one who looks like him. There is one species whom he resembles: The Fell, a race of flying predators. Moon rarely gets to stay in one place for long, because eventually someone notices that, hey, this guy can shapeshift into a big flying dragony thing, kind of like the big flying dragony things that smashed up our city and ate our families. Once someone notices, it’s just a matter of time before Moon has to move on. Every time he moves, he has to integrate with an entirely new species.

Living alone and constantly under suspicion of being a ravening beast has made Moon into a deeply suspicious person. He never overlooks the possibility that people are simply lying to him, either out of malice or because they want to use him. Wells is careful to show the reader that Moon’s suspicious nature isn’t just a personality flaw — his instincts save the day more than once. Despite everything, Moon is a basically decent person, which helps keep him sympathetic through his moments of self-pity.

Martha Wells seems to have mastered the trick of making every character in The Cloud Roads sympathetic, even if only when seen from a particular angle or at one moment in the story. Some people will have trouble with this book because there aren’t any humans in it. However, there are more three-dimensional and fully-realized characters in The Cloud Roads than I’ve seen in some books that only feature humans. I even caught myself feeling bad for the Fell. Sure, they’re murderous cannibalistic monsters, but they can suffer (I still cheered when Jade ripped a Fell’s head off — regardless of pathos, rampaging cannibal monsters make lousy neighbors).

Jade isn’t the only kickass woman in this book. It’s always a relief to see women written as people, rather than as collections of stereotypes — particularly when they’re fierce shapeshifing dragon-women. The women in The Cloud Roads are just as flawed and just as compelling as the men. I could see Wells having fun with the gender roles in her society — Moon’s place, when he finally finds it, was such a wonderful twist that I will not spoil it here.

Wells’s writing is straightforward and functional. The reader will be working hard to understand this complex alien world that Wells has built, and so she doesn’t waste time with literary distractions. The Cloud Roads is Moon’s story, and never strays from his point of view. The pacing in The Cloud Roads is superb. It drops the reader right into Moon’s bad day, sketching the outlines of his world right before the action begins and everything changes.

The Cloud Roads is a short book and a fast read. It also comes with some beautiful cover art — the thumbnail attached to this review doesn’t do it justice. I recommend The Cloud Roads for readers who are looking for something different, thoughtful, and fun.

Oct 04, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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Book Review: “H.I.V.E.: Higher Institute of Villainous Education” by Mark Walden

Let’s say there’s a secret school populated by a secret subculture of people living in a world alongside ours. Let’s say there’s a kid who has no idea this subculture exists, but he’s been doing things that would bring it to his attention. Let’s say that, one day, he’s accepted into this secret school, where he’s the smartest kid in his year, naturally good at everything, and has some sort of special connection to the head of the secret school.

You’d think you’d know what the story’s about and how it ends, wouldn’t you. You’d think you’re reading Harry Potter, or The Magicians, or Percy Jackson.

But let’s say the secret school is the place where the next generation of super-villains learns everything they need to know about the future of world domination. Changes things a bit, doesn’t it?

Umm… maybe not.

H.I.V.E.: Higher Institute of Villainous Education, by Mark Walden, is the first in a (so far) seven-book young-adult series of novels that borrows from the well-traveled genre tropes that gave us the three books I mentioned a few paragraphs ago.

H.I.V.E.‘s main character, Otto Malpense, is a white-haired thirteen-year-old British boy with the uncanny ability to comprehend everything he reads and understand the underlying principles of everything he sees. In general, he’s more a pragmatist than a villain — he came to the attention of H.I.V.E. not because he did something evil for evil’s sake, but because he was trying to save the orphanage that was the only home he’d ever known. It just so happened to involve making the British Prime Minister look like an idiot.

Otto’s contemporaries can be picked out of most any genre lineup:

  • Wing Fanchu, an Asian boy who’s good at martial arts and is very honorable.
  • Laura, a Scottish girl good with technology.
  • Shelby, an American cat burglar.
  • Nigel, the kid who’s there because his father was a super-villain and is only good at one class — go on, guess which one*.
  • Franz, an overweight German kid who only talks about food and is also not very good at most classes, although he takes quickly to the ones teaching students how to use politics and economics to take down the good guys.

Other than Nigel and Franz, Otto and his classmates are not happy to be at H.I.V.E. They think they’ve been kidnapped by the school’s headmaster, Dr. Nero, and all they want to do is get home. But to do that, they’ll have to fight off another genre lineup, this one comprised of schoolteachers:

  • The headmaster who “takes an interest” in the main character.
  • The absent-minded technology professor.
  • The drill sergeant who teaches physical education.
  • The one who was turned into an animal.
  • The second-in-command who also can control your mind.
  • Professor Sprout**.
  • The ninja.
  • The artificial intelligence/computer system that sees everything and knows everything, but really just wants to be human (and if it starts performing Shakespeare or tries to hold Commander Riker hostage in one of Dr. Crusher’s plays in a future novel, I’m hanging it all up now).

So far, I’ve given H.I.V.E. a lot of grief over its use of genre conventions, but I hope I’ve done it good-naturedly enough to keep you from being put off the book. I mean, it’s YA; it’s sort of YA’s job to use genre conventions to make characters relatable and understandable. And the story itself is something most kids can understand: being taken from your home because you’re special, but once you get away, all you want is to go back again. I mean, come on, how many of us (when we were kids***) have thought “I’m smarter/better/awesomer than this life I’m currently leading; when will I get to go to that secret school for wizards/villains/demigods?” I mean, you wouldn’t believe how hard I wished to be pulled 300 years into the future so I could go to Starfleet Academy.

It didn’t happen, obviously****. Hence my love for genre fiction (escapism) and a fondness for stories using the genre plot we see in H.I.V.E.

The storytelling is pretty good. The characters are well-rounded and often funny. The adventure is… um… adventurous. If anything is poorly-done, it’s the occasional forays into Dr. Nero’s world — we need them to forward the plot and explain whatever couldn’t be infodumped by the Contessa (Professor McGonagall) during the school tour, but they take away from the important part of the story, which is Otto and his friends. When Rowling did it in the Harry Potter novels, she confined it to the first few chapters, sort of a “meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice” thing before we got into whatever adventure Harry is facing in the current book, and I could handle that. But the whole point of third-person-limited is that you only see things through the eyes of your main character, and I think that, by using the Dr. Nero scenes to explain important plot points, the story misses out on the opportunity for more adventures or further characterization of our heroes. For example, they could’ve overheard Nero’s staff dinner because Laura was working on an extra-credit project or something, instead of the author just showing us said dinner.

Of course, that could also have just been a homage to your old-school heroes-vs-villains TV shows and movies where the hero’s journey is briefly put aside to show what the bad guys are doing right now.

I rather enjoyed H.I.V.E., to be honest. I think the storytelling moves at a good clip, the characters are funny, and the idea behind the story is novel enough that I’m interested in reading more books in the series. As a YA book, it reads quickly enough, and is short enough, that you can probably squeeze it into a week’s worth of lunch breaks. I’m not sure how the “intended” audience — young adults — would actually like it, but I know that I got a kick out of it, and I think you will too.

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Note to Parents: Because it’s a YA novel, H.I.V.E. doesn’t contain anything truly objectionable. There’s some bullying and some violence, but nothing more explicit than, say, Prisoner of Azkaban. So, if your kids can handle that, they can definitely handle H.I.V.E.. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

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* If you said “Herbology”… err, that is, Botany, give yourself a pat on the head.

** The one who is fairly nice and takes care of students who don’t feel like they belong. Also, she teaches Herbology. I mean Botany. Oh, whatever, it’s Professor freaking Sprout from the Harry Potter novels. Just go with it.

*** Or, you know, right now. Either way.

**** OR DID IT???

Oct 02, 2011 | 2 comments View Post
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Book Review: “The Magician King” by Lev Grossman

Please note: this review contains spoilers for Lev Grossman’s previous novel, The Magicians.

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In The Magicians, Lev Grossman introduced us to Quentin Coldwater, an intelligent, callous, callow youth who was picked for the entrance exam to Brakebills, a secret magical academy in upstate New York. Because this is a fantasy novel, I think we all knew he’d make it in. He spent several years learning magic, and learning that it was nothing like Harry Potter. But what made Quentin different is that he also believed in Fillory, a Narnia-like world created by an English novelist. He never expected to actually find it.

Now, a couple of years later, Quentin is one of the two Kings of Fillory. Joined by his Brakebills cohorts Eliot and Janet, and his high school friend Julia, the four of them rule the strange, magical kingdom. But Quentin is getting bored, and what do kings do when they get bored?

They go on quests. And Quentin’s quest takes him right back to where he started: Brakebills. Among other places. Along the way he meets up with his friend Josh and Josh’s new cohort, a dragon-ologist named Poppy. Then Quentin meets a dragon and he learns that his quest might affect the future of magic as he — and everyone in all the worlds — knows it.

As with many sequels, it took me a few chapters to really start enjoying The Magician King. The sense of wonder and discovery from the first novel isn’t quite as evident, although Quentin’s bone-dry sarcasm and asshat-like behavior certainly are. However, the discovery returned when Grossman started layering in flashbacks to Julia’s life — for Julia, unlike the other three rulers of Fillory, did not come up through Brakebills. No, her journey to magic was much rougher, much more “street” — think of those annoying teen films where the from-the-streets dancer has to fit in with the classically-trained ballerinas — and while nothing really new happened, it was still interesting to learn how the other half of witchcraft lives. And judging from what Julia went through at the hands of a trickster god, perhaps it would be better to not have learned magic at all.

But Julia’s journey does introduce us to some interestingly-named characters, such as Pouncy Silverkitten and Failstaff, even if parts of it are quite cliche and technologically silly-sounding (especially the bits with the text-to-speech forum reading software). And, as each layer of Julia’s journey is revealed, so too do we get a little closer to figuring out why Julia acts the way she does in Fillory.

One of the better points of The Magicians was that the book attempted to subvert most of the common tropes of magic-school fiction — either that, or hang such a hugely-kitschy lampshade on them that readers can’t help but wonder how they ever worked in other books. The Magician King does some of the same with Fillory — the random kids who just show up and become kings, the silly-named islands that are actually pretty boring, the constant references to Fillory’s peculiar moon. The seagoing parts of the book directly draw from CS Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader — as I said before, all of Fillory draws from Narnia — although here again Grossman hangs massive lampshades upon pretty much everything, at least until the story gets serious.

Since the world of Fillory is intended to be Narnia-esque, the author pretty much has to depend upon characterization to fulfill my personal “must have good worldbuilding and interesting characters” requirement. Quentin, while interesting, is quite annoying in his world-weary way; at least Eliot is a little less hipster-mage in this book. He really bugged me in The Magicians. The main characters, though certainly well-rounded, are in their own way fantasy tropes, but again Grossman’s subversion and lampshading of the standard fantasy fiction toolbox makes them worth getting to know. From Benedict the emo-cartographer to Bingle the extra-awesome swordsman, from the talking sloth who won’t shut up to the holier-than-thou of Penny, even from the irrepressible sidekick humor of Josh to the let’s-see-it-through-her-eyes characterization of Poppy, the people (and animals) who populate this book are exactly where they should be.

The overarching plot of the novel felt a bit forced to me — “complete this quest or all magic will go away” — but Grossman manages to pull it off by keeping Quentin’s character consistent. Though Quentin does change as a result of what he goes through, he’s still the same old ennui-filled Quentin. Also, the whole “the hero pays the price” angle didn’t seem like much of a price to me. Still, I enjoyed reading the book, and there were a lot of clever and funny things to keep me interested until I got to the next plot point. And, unlike the first book, The Magician King clearly sets up another sequel. I’m not sure how much longer Grossman can keep up this particular style of storytelling, but I’m on board for book three.

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Note to Parents: This book contains adult language, violence, adult situations, and sexual situations — one of them very violent. I would not recommend it to any but the most mature teens. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

Sep 04, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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Book Review: Fade to Black by Josh Pryor

I imagine that it can be difficult to sell big-idea hard-science-fiction books. How do you elevator-pitch a story about the virus that may have been the catalyst to turn humanity from people living in caves to the society we know today?

If you’re author Josh Pryor, you do it by adding a trip to Antarctica, a little cannibalism, some commandos who do CSI, and a whole cast of unsympathetic (or, at least, unlikeable) characters.

In Pryor’s Fade to Black, the story shifts back and forth between the two main characters: Ethan Hatcher, who commissioned a research mission to Antarctica to study hydrothermal vents, and Claire Matthews, a community college science professor with a whole host of psychiatric issues and a rather novel theory on the disease that killed a Russian expedition almost 30 years ago. Oh, and the two of them used to sleep together, just to add a little extra tension.

Ethan and Claire, along with a team of the military’s finest CSI guys and a couple of civilian contractors, are sent to Antarctica to figure out what happened to the rest of Ethan’s team. What they find horrifies even the hardiest of men — and Ethan definitely isn’t one of those. It’s the disease Claire’s based her publications on..

And it’s spreading.

Outside of the big science ideas, the early section with Alan and his team, and some of the The Abyss-like expedition sequences (albeit on the ice shelves of Antarctica instead of hundreds of fathoms deep), I had a lot of trouble liking Fade to Black. While the main characters were extremely well-rounded, they seemed to me to be almost too detailed — we learned literally everything about Ethan and Claire in a series of infodumps that really turned me off to the characters. Ethan was supposed to be unsympathetic, but to my surprise, I really disliked Claire as well. I think that’s because there were too many “damaged female character” tropes crammed into this one person. It allowed her to have internal monologues full of fretting and fear, but those monologues just kept… on… going. Even through the climax of the book.

Meanwhile, the military team seemed a bit too caricature-y for me — they each had one or two distinguishing characteristics, and seen through Claire’s eyes we got a very Anita Blake-esque rundown of their physical features, but in the end I was again seeing a bunch of smart, capable military guys that were pretty much interchangeable. The same with the Russians — and the trope was taken one step further by having their base be kind of a dump while the American base was neat and tidy. But of course Ethan was boinking the one woman on the Russian crew, just to cement his status (established earlier) as the kind of guy who does that sort of thing. We did get Sergeant Price, who was the best-written of all the secondary characters, but even with that his behavior seemed a little too forced, as if to keep telling us that he’s super-studly-soldier-guy.

Fade to Black is a short book — my reader put it at 248 pages, including cover, copyright, and whatever you call those blank pages at the end — but it’s densely packed with descriptions, science, and internal monologues. I definitely got a feel for the locations where the action took place, and the frozen hell of Antarctica was quite capably written, with the right amount of mood and reaction. But the characters were either too full of tropes or too full of details that I really could’ve lived without, and the hero of the book was someone I just didn’t like. Not that I absolutely need to like the hero/protagonist, but I was actively disgusted by a lot of her characteristics and all of her whining. Look, I understand a lot of bad stuff happened to her and she’s reacting to that, but I don’t know that we needed her to have that much stuff in her past. The problems with her parents (together and separate), the history with Ethan, the issues with Eric… it was just too much.

And speaking of Eric, the last time he appeared in the book, I was completely stymied as to exactly what had happened, even though I went back and read it three or four times.

I will say that the book ends in the best tradition of “the surviving good guys are rescued from a bad situation, but then *dramatic musical sting!!!!!!!*”, although to me it felt a tad abrupt.

If you like science, CSI, stories that take place in Antarctica, or lots-of-people-crammed-into-a-small-space-slowly-going-mad, then you’ll enjoy Fade to Black. Those really aren’t my preferred genres, though (except for the science part), and I felt there were too many other issues with the book — most notably the unsympathetically-annoying main character that we were all supposed to like — for me to say I really enjoyed it. I could have overlooked one or two, but not all of them.

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Special thanks to Red Hen Press, the novel’s publisher, for providing a review copy.

Sep 02, 2011 | 2 comments View Post
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Book Review: River of Gods by Ian McDonald

River of Gods coverThe average science fiction novel takes one or two interesting ideas from recent history and modern science and extrapolates them forward for fun and enlightenment. In River of Gods, however, Ian McDonald found a place for a little bit of everything in the caldron of India’s future. Artificial intelligence, climate change, extreme body modification, alien artifacts in space, alternate realities, and cyberpunk-flavored digital warfare all have their place in this enthralling work of near-future science fiction.

One hundred years after its founding, the now-Balkanized nation of India is facing both the emergence of superhuman artificial intelligence and a war over water. Being one of the only nations that has not banned advanced AIs, they also find themselves in the unique position to translate the output of an artifact that the Americans have found in outer space. River of Gods covers the events of August 15th, 2047 — the day when these factors (and others) come together and everything explodes.

River of Gods was published in 2004, and has a more action-movie feel than McDonald’s most recent novel, The Dervish House. Like The Dervish House, it tells the same story from the perspectives of many different people — a vicious street criminal, a cybercop, a genderless fashonista, a politician, a lonely housewife, a pair of naive computer programmers, a reporter, a comedian, and a prophet. Through their eyes, McDonald draws a picture of a future India that stands on the edge of a technological revolution, but has not yet finished its struggle with poverty and religious bigotry.

One of McDonald’s thought experiments is the character called Tal. Tal is a neut — short for neuter and neutral, a self-described noncombatant in the war for genetic survival. The description of what Tal went through to achieve this state is simultaneously frightening and fascinating — the ability of an individual to choose that level of body modification could have been the core of its own novel. Instead, McDonald has Tal embody the emotional and social consequences of this technology. In my opinion, McDonald does a masterful job in drawing a character that is neither male nor female, but still human and relatable. Tal’s fall and redemption is one of the most compelling plot arcs in River of Gods.

Seeing the same city in India through ten sets of eyes can be overwhelming for the reader, particularly given McDonald’s dense and image-rich prose. Car chases and judiciously-placed explosions help to hold the reader’s interest. As the book progresses, the cuts between perspectives come faster and faster until they literally converge in an anime-style ball of white light. For me, the end of River of Gods is not as strong as The Dervish House. I felt like the book reaches for a science fictional twist and leaves many of the characters — whom the reader has, by this point, been seduced into loving — spinning off in poorly-defined directions.

Despite my (slight) disappointment at the ending, I do recommend this book. If you, like me, miss the glory days of cyberpunk, you’ll find something to love in River of Gods. If you enjoyed The Dervish House or if you are looking for some high-concept science fiction combined with war robot action sequences, political intrigue, and heart-tearing drama, pick up this book. River of Gods is complex, beautiful, and a lot of fun.

Aug 30, 2011 | 1 comment View Post
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Book Review: “Spectyr” by Philippa Ballantine

The following review contains spoilers for Geist, to which Spectyr is a sequel.

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At the end of Philippa Ballantine’s Geist, Deacons Sorcha and Merrick, along with the aid of Raed the Young Pretender*, vanquished the geistlord Murashev (an exceedingly evil being), who had been brought into their world by the Arch Abbott — the leader of their Order. Raed escaped from an Imperial prison and returned to his pirate ship, Dominion, and Sorcha and Merrick returned to the Mother Abbey to help put back together the Order they serve.

To get to that point, Sorcha and Merrick joined up as partners, journeyed across many miles to a faraway outpost of the Empire, fought members of the Order turned to evil as well as several creatures from the Otherside — the Order exists to protect the Empire from these beings — flew on airships, fell in love, had sex… basically, everything that’s done in a fantasy/buddy-cop/hero’s-journey story of 300 or so pages.

In Spectyr, they do most of those things all over again.

Spectyr begins a few weeks after the end of Geist, with Sorcha Faris and Merrick Chambers being dispatched to rid the Imperial capital of Vermillion of various small-time geists, ghasts, shades, and spectyrs. This rankles them both, and what rankles Sorcha even more is that her husband, Kolya — a marriage in name only, at this point — is, for some reason, fighting to keep Sorcha around the Mother Abbey instead of letting her out into the world to fight the bigger creatures she’s capable of destroying.

Eventually, our Deacons are tasked with protecting an ambassador to the far-off desert land of Chioma. One of the daughters of the Prince of Chioma is to be wedded to the Emperor, and the ambassador is headed there to negotiate something or other**. But once they arrive in Chioma, Sorcha and Merrick uncover a series of murders as well as evidence that a very powerful geistlord — the ancestral enemy of the Rossin — has decided that now is the time to make a comeback.

As I said in my review of Geist, Ballantine’s writing is well-paced, not overly laden with exposition (a major flaw in several fantasy novels I’ve read), and tends to leave tropes for readers to trip over.

Cases in point:

  • Buddy cops relegated to crappy tasks because they’re so powerful no one knows what to do with them.
  • Kick-ass sibling of the Emperor who happens to be a True Believer in a religion to which no one gives credence***.
  • A long journey via airship.
  • A far-off land where the government is semi-autonomous from the Empire, and the Order are as well.
  • Good guys falling into a murder investigation.
  • Main characters get separated.
  • Long-lost relatives.
  • Treachery from out of nowhere.

It’s that last one that really bugged me. At least in Geist I had a fairly good idea who the most evil member of the Order was going to be, but in Spectyr there’s a heel turn that I felt had no real support within the story. It’s like, “oh, hey, here’s someone we haven’t seen in a while. Let’s have him/her be evil now.” I at least need some foreshadowing for that to be effective, and I got none. It would be like if, just before they face Riddler and Two-Face in Batman Forever, Robin suddenly sucker-punches Batman, steals the Bat-boat, and leaves Batman there to get his ass kicked.

There’s also a geist-powered journey to the past for one of the Deacons that provides an info-dump without sounding like one — Ballantine is particularly good at avoiding info-dumps, which is greatly appreciated — while also giving more information about the Native Order (the one that came before the one Merrick and Sorcha are in). This does lead to a fair bit of melodramatic behavior by the other (I’m being vague to avoid spoilers), and I felt somewhat irked because said behavior was out-of-character for the Deacon who didn’t go to the past.

My biggest problem with Spectyr, though, was that, with the exception of the bad guys having different names and the locales being deserts instead of mountains, I could swear I read the same story in Geist. That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the book, but I wanted something more. Something newer. And I really didn’t get it.

Fortunately, Ballantine is a good enough writer**** that it doesn’t matter that she’s used lots of well-known fantasy tropes. The characters are well-rounded and interesting; the action is on par with other fantasy novels (sometimes better); the worldbuilding is complete and comprehensible without requiring massive info-dumps; and the Boss Fight, if a little too much “stuff happens to our hero” than “our hero kicks the Final Boss’s ass”, has an ending that directly leads into the next novel — which Ballantine is writing right now. I’m truly curious to see what’s going to happen at the start of Wrayth, and how our heroes are going to get out of the jam the Boss Fight put them in.

I’d say the book gets really good toward the last 25 percent (similar to what I felt with Geist): we’ve got all the information we need, the pieces are in place, and if one of the Deacons has made some decisions that weren’t the strongest in terms of storytelling, what s/he does at the end of that plot thread is cool enough to make up for it.

I also want to note for the record that, in a follow-up to some of my concerns voiced in my Geist review, Sorcha does not take on any more of Anita Blake’s features, and she does not have a power-of-the week. In fact, the story is written in such a way that it’s impossible for her to level up any further. And, anyway, the story’s not about Sorcha becoming more powerful or learning new battle techniques. Geist pretty much established that Sorcha is as powerful and talented as you can be, and I think that was an excellent choice on Ballantine’s part. It deftly sidesteps the whole training montage that many writers feel they have to include to justify their main character’s badassery, and I respect that storytelling choice. (However, there is a moment in Spectyr that really underlines why every Active, like Sorcha, absolutely must have a Sensitive, like Merrick, in order to function at his or her full potential.)

Overall, I’ll say this: if you loved Geist, you’ll love Spectyr for the same reasons. If you liked Geist, you’ll probably like Spectyr, although you’ll also probably see the same issues with it than I did. Still, Ballantine has created a rich world with a lot of stories to be told, and there’ll be at least two more (she’s contracted to write a fourth Order book after Wrayth). If you like fast-paced fantasy evocative of what you read in the 90s, then you’ll enjoy Spectyr.

And, as I said in my Geist review, that’s exactly the kind of book I like.

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Special thanks to Ace, the novel’s publisher, for providing a review copy.

Note to Parents: Spectyr is a bit more graphic than Geist. If it was a film, I would rate it a “soft R” (with the exception of the sex scene in the first third). It contains enough violence to warrant that. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

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* To the throne. The Emperor’s family ousted the Rossin family, to which Raed belongs, and now Raed is persona non grata throughout the Empire.

** I didn’t find it of that much import to the story, so I didn’t remember it. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of the tale.

*** After you read the scenes in the beginning with Zofiya, tell me you weren’t thinking of Alia in the… third?… Dune novel. Or at the very least the scene where she goes all ninja-crazy on the practice robot in the Sci-Fi Channel adaptation Children of Dune.

**** As a writer and a former English teacher, I know there’s nothing technically wrong with it, but Ballantine has a habit of writing sentences with long dependent clauses followed by short action clauses. For example: As she sipped her tea and nibbled a scone while thinking about what to do this Sunday morning, Gina felt a chill. Completely legal from a grammatical perspective, but the author does it enough that I noticed it.

Aug 05, 2011 | 0 comments View Post
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