Archive for Books

Review: “I Am Not a Serial Killer” by Dan Wells

Cover of "I Am Not a Serial Killer"I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells is the story of a fifteen-year-old sociopath. It’s the sort of young adult book that gets shelved in with adult novels, because the experiences of a fifteen-year-old white boy are the sort of thing that everyone is supposed to be able to relate to. (Where this particular book ends up in the bookstore is governed by some arcane system that I do not fully understand. It took two Borders employees the better part of a quarter-hour to find my copy, and not for lack of trying – what I will miss most when my local Borders closes are the people who worked there.)

Our hero, young John Wayne Cleaver, is trying very hard not to become a serial killer. He’s a lonely sociopath who has been obsessed with serial killers ever since he saw a picture of John Wayne Gacy in the newspaper when he was eight. He is smart and self-aware enough to be terrified by all the things in his life that seem to be pushing him down that road. He believes that the strict system of self-imposed rules which he lives under will keep his dark impulses in check. Like a lot of sociopaths, he’s capable of pretending to be an ordinary human being, until he is put under stress — in this case, by the appearance of what might be a real serial killer in his quiet town.

This is Dan Wells’s first novel, a fact that is in no way borne out by the quality of the writing. His prose is clear and direct, with an edge of sardonic humor that keeps the reader from getting too wrapped up in all the terrible things that are happening until the author decides to go for the big scare. Staying inside his young sociopath’s head lets him avoid some of the more obvious cliches. John Wayne Cleaver is not inclined to guilt. He is capable of operating with scary precision at times when an ordinary character would be curled up and gibbering on the floor. He likes dead bodies.

I Am Not A Serial Killer is a fast read. Dan Wells does a superb job of using suspense to keep the reader interested, without hording all the secrets for a dramatic reveal at the end. The beginning, which is devoted to the trials of a fifteen-year-old boy’s life, is saved by his humor and the mental-whiplash-inducing mentions of the supernatural element that drives the rest of the book. Watching that supernatural horror stalking the townsfolk is only slightly scarier than watching John Wayne Cleaver’s self-control crumble.

Whether or not this book lives up to the standards of the horror genre is not something I feel that I can fairly judge. I am not a horror reader. I will say that I Am Not A Serial Killer is a fun book and a nice change from my usual fare. It’s always nice to find a stand-alone novel with a satisfying ending that also has sequels. I will be interested to read those sequels – if Mr. Wells continues to improve his writing, they should be very strong books indeed. I recommending tracking down I Am Not A Serial Killer in your local bookstore — finding it may be an adventure, but the effort will be worth it.

2011 Award Season: The British Contingent

The 2011 awards season is well and truly upon us – it’s an exciting time of year, with all but one of the big awards having released their shortlists, and the SF community engaging in discussion and debate both online and off. I’m sure that there are a lot of us who know some of the nominated people personally, and in some small part we can share what must be a nerve-wracking few weeks until the various award ceremonies are held.

The big award that is still collecting nominations is, of course, the Hugos. Laura Burns has already talked about the Hugo awards, the granddaddy of the lot, perhaps. One great thing about the Hugos, as Laura mentions, is that you can join WorldCon as a supporting member, even if you can’t attend the convention itself. This entitles you to nominating and voting rights, and you get an electronic pack of all the final nominees. I’m mentioning this here again as I did this for the first time last year, and was very impressed. As a UK resident it cost me £25, and I still haven’t finished reading everything that was provided. As well as the opportunity to take part in the Hugo awards process, you get very good value for money!

As well as the Hugos and the Nebulas (summarised nicely by Bill Peters), there are two more major SF/fantasy awards on this side of the Atlantic which have recently announced their shortlists.

The Arthur C. Clarke award, so named in honour of the great SF author and originally founded thanks to a grant from the man himself, is presented each year for the best science fiction novel first published in the UK in the previous calendar year. It is described as the most prestigious award for science fiction in Britain, and is unusual in that it is a jury-judged prize. Six novels are selected from publisher submissions, and the prize itself (the amount corresponding to the year of the award, so this year is £2,011) is presented at a ceremony as part of the Sci-Fi London event in April.

The Clarke awards often provoke intense debate and analysis in the UK. Personally, I don’t think the shortlist ever quite reaches controversial levels, but usually the selection is very interesting and quite unpredictable, with most commentary (at least initially) focussing on what books didn’t make it. Last year’s winner was The City and the City by China Miéville, which went on to win both the British Science Fiction Association award and the Hugo the same year. Miéville also broke the record by winning the Clarke award for the third time with The City and the City.

This year’s shortlist (selected from 54 eligible submissions) is:

Zoo City – Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)

The Dervish House – Ian McDonald (Gollancz)

Monsters of Men – Patrick Ness (Walker Books)

Generosity – Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)

Declare – Tim Powers (Corvus)

Lightborn – Tricia Sullivan (Orbit)

The eligibility criteria  – specifically the requirement for the book to have been published in the UK to quality – have thrown up an interesting result this year with Declare by Tim Powers making the shortlist. While this book was first released in the US in 2001, the first UK edition didn’t come out until 2010, hence it is eligible. Also, Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness is the third book in a trilogy.

The shortlist was released on Friday 4th March, and Clarke award administrator Tom Hunter managed to spare some time to give me his thoughts on this year’s selection:

I’ve spent most of the day tabbing between different web pages, following threads, checking Google alerts, clicking links and generally watching Twitter like the kind of geekily obsessive SF stereotype I am. I spend a good part of my Clarke Award working-life trying to challenge, and the overwhelming conclusion from all of this adhoc research is that people seem to really like this shortlist.

This doesn’t mean that they necessarily agree with all of it, and there’s no rule that says they should, but I think this year people have really seen where our shortlist has come from and the real hard work that’s gone into it on the part of the judges; who I think deserve some real kudos by the way.

Then again, maybe all the goodwill is simply down to it being our 25th anniversary…

Either way, it’s a great result for the Award and a fantastic statement about the health of modern science fiction literature – just don’t ask me to guess the winner, this really is one of those great shortlists where the field is wide open.

The British Science Fiction Association award shortlist was also recently announced, with the award ceremony held at the national science fiction convention (commonly referred to as EasterCon), Illustrious, over the Easter weekend. Interestingly, of the Best Novel nominations, three out of the five BSFA nominees are also on the Clarke award shortlist. Together, the BSFA and the Clarke awards count as two of the ‘big ones’ for the UK. A third set of awards, given by the British Fantasy Society, happen later in the year.

Best Novel

Paolo Bacigalupi – The Windup Girl (Orbit)

Lauren Beukes – Zoo City (Angry Robot)

Ken Macleod – The Restoration Game (Orbit)

Ian McDonald – The Dervish House (Gollancz)

Tricia Sullivan – Lightborn (Orbit)

Best Short Fiction

Nina Allan – ‘Flying in the Face of God’ – Interzone 227, TTA Press.

Aliette de Bodard – ‘The Shipmaker’– Interzone 231, TTA Press.

Peter Watts – ‘The Things’ – Clarkesworld 40

Neil Williamson – ‘Arrhythmia’ – Music for Another World, Mutation Press

Best Non-Fiction

Paul Kincaid – Blogging the Hugos: Decline, Big Other

Abigail Nussbaum – Review, With Both Feet in the Clouds, Asking the Wrong Questions Blogspot

Adam Roberts – Review, Wheel of Time, Punkadiddle

Francis Spufford – Red Plenty (Faber and Faber)

Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe the Notes from Coode Street Podcast

Best Art

Andy Bigwood – cover for Conflicts (Newcon Press)

Charlie Harbour – cover for Fun With Rainbows by Gareth Owens (Immersion Press)

Dominic Harman – cover for The Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Gollancz)

Joey Hi-Fi –cover for Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)

Ben Greene – ‘A Deafened Plea for Peace’, cover for Crossed Genres 21

Adam Tredowski – cover for Finch, by Jeff Vandermeer (Corvus)

Voting on the BSFA awards is open to all members of the BSFA and of EasterCon, with advance votes due by 18th April and on-site ballot boxes available at EasterCon itself.

The shortlists so far announced show, I think, that 2010 was a pretty strong year for genre fiction. Certainly some of the novels released in 2010 I now count among my favourites, periods. All that is left is wait for the Hugo shortlist to be announced. And I’m looking forward to that very much indeed.

Book Review: “Paths of Disharmony” by Dayton Ward

Boy, does it suck when everything goes horribly wrong. For 200 years, these dudes have been our friends, ever since we helped them make peace with these other dudes who were our friends even longer. But now they’re all pissed at us. So let’s send our most awesome dude to their house and hold a giant party, inviting everyone. That’ll totally work! Until the few asshats who kind-of-sort-of know these friendly dudes’ roommate call in all their asshat friends and start throwing down.

That’s pretty much the entire plot of Star Trek: Typhon Pact #4: Paths of Disharmony. Also known as the one with Captain Picard and the dreadlocked Andorian on the front cover.

In all honesty, this is quite possibly the best of the Typhon Pact novels so far, and I’m not really surprised at that. It’s the most popular ship and crew in Star Trek, plus a race that has really gotten kind of short shrift in televised Trek (Enterprise notwithstanding), plus a classic Trek “let’s go to a planet and solve a problem” episode. It’s written by Dayton Ward, who has done some really great Trek writing over the years. And, of all the Trek tie-ins written since the end of Voyager, this one brings together the largest amount of the most popular crew (four-sevenths of the central TNG cast).

Paths begins with the Enterprise being sent to Andor, a staunch Federation member for more than 200 years, because their people are up in arms that genetic research is being done to help them find ways to reproduce that don’t involve four distinct sexes. Lieutenant Thirishar ch’Thane, late of the Deep Space Nine relaunch, is a part of that team. Support on Andor is turning against the Federation, and the Andorian presider hopes a scientific conference will be the answer. Like I said, pretty standard TNG at this point.

Aboard the Enterprise, we find Picard, Beverly, their son Rene (who is now one year old), Worf, and Geordi. Added to their number are science officer Elfiki, contact specialist (and somewhat annoyingly Mary-Sue-ish*) T’Ryssa Chen, security chief (and Worf-squeeze) Jasminder Choudhury, assistant chief engineer Taurik, and ship’s counselor Hegol Den. Picard is mentally battling with himself as to whether or not he should take a promotion to Admiral (or even Ambassador), and he and Beverly are definitely looking to make things a little more stable for their son. Geordi is having love issues (a common theme for him). And everyone is worried about the Typhon Pact.

Upon arrival at Andor, the crew splits up into their traditional small groups — Picard does some diplomacy and is enticed to visit an archaelogical dig; Beverly works with the genetic scientist who caused all this trouble; Geordi builds a power station; Choudhury has to secure the conference building; and up on the ship, Worf is left in charge. Through all of this we meet many secondary Andorian characters, as well as a lot of enterprising young men (and women) — mostly in security. About 40 percent into the book, a rebel group of Andorians strikes at the Federation personnel, but it’s not until halfway through — the traditional cliffhanger point — that we see who’s really behind all of this anti-Federation settlement.

As one would expect, after the Typhon Pact drops a bombshell that shakes the Andorian people’s trust in the Federation, the true villains make a series of attacks somewhat reminiscent of the Picard-on-the-surface-Riker-on-the-ship that we saw in Insurrection. Our heroes must stop these terrorists.

You can guess how that turns out.

In exactly the same way that Rough Beasts of Empire didn’t, Paths of Disharmony manages to make me care about all the secondary (and even the minor) characters enough that I didn’t get lost when we jumped from place to place. With the exception of a huge digression (Picard’s archaeological trip, which seemed to me to be an excuse to tie in Enterprise), the writing is well-paced and the action is gripping.

I know there are at least two more Typhon Pact books in the offing, but they’ll be hard-pressed to top this one. Definitely worth it, for both casual and die-hard Star Trek fans who are looking for the next chapter in the lives of our Next Generation friends.

* I don’t blame Ward; he didn’t invent the character, and he actually gives her some respectable things to do in this episode.

Book Review: “Rough Beasts of Empire” by David R. George III

I’m really hoping that the Star Trek Typhon Pact tie-in novels aren’t going to suffer from the odd-numbered curse all the way through, because I don’t think I can handle spending another $8 on book five if it’s going to be as disappointing as Rough Beasts of Empire, the third book in the saga.

I had really hoped Empire would be great. After all, the author, David R. George III, wrote what was to my mind the best installment in the Lost Era, Serpents Among the Ruins (if you like Trek and you haven’t read it, you should rectify that situation immediately). George has also written other very enjoyable books in the Trek universe. But, unfortunately, this Typhon Pact novel just doesn’t cut it.

I’m usually a fan of multiple interlocking stories that come together at the end. I even liked Love Actually, despite the extremely-tangential way some of the storylines touched each other. But compared to Empire, that film’s stories were completely intertwined.

There are four distinct stories in Empire, and the only way to explain them is to keep them separate, like they are in the novel.

The Tzenkethi. As with the other Typhon Pact novels, Empire exists to show us a Star Trek race that we haven’t seen. The Tzenkethi are a merit-driven caste society of beautiful beings with no bones and a very unique approach to the use of floor (and ceiling) space. Their names are so complex that I can’t even remember what the main Tzenkethi character was called. Something with an A at the end. Anyway, this Tzenkethi was sent to be the Typhon Pact’s ambassador to Romulus, although she had a secret mission. Which was addressed so infrequently that I totally forgot about it until the very end.

Vulcan-Romulan Reunification. Spock is still on Romulus, trying to bring both sides together. This was by far the least interesting of all the storylines because, (a), we’ve been dealing with it in novels for far too long and, (b), we know it’s never going to succeed. It’s just an excuse to get a picture of Leonard Nimoy on the cover of the book. In any case, an assassination attempt is made upon Spock, which leads him to approach Praetor Tal’Aura* with a groundbreaking proposal.

The Romulan Senate. The Ortikant family, led by Gell Kamemor**, is heavily involved in the reformation of the Romulan Senate under Tal’Aura.

Captain Sisko. I firmly believe that this is the story George wanted to tell when he started writing this book. It is the most interesting, the most nuanced, and the most compelling. In the beginning, we see Sisko commanding the starship New York during the Borg war in Star Trek: Destiny. This actually happens before the first two Typhon Pact novels, which confused me at first, but I got over it. Anyway, after the battle, Sisko goes home to Kasidy and his family, but remembers that the Prophets told him he would only know sadness if he made a life for himself on Bajor. So he makes the questionable decision to leave Bajor and return to Starfleet. He is assigned a starship on patrol along the Romulan border, where he becomes Emo Sisko.

There’s also several minor sub-plots, including the return of a somewhat-overused-as-a-plot-device character, the summit between Empress Donatra and Praetor Tal’Aura, the observations of Senator Durjik, and an out-of-nowhere flashback to Sisko’s experiences during the last Tzenkethi conflict which completely pulled me out of the story.

The plots above only barely touch, and I don’t feel as though they were adequately tied together (especially Sisko’s, which only very slightly interacted with any of the others). I really feel this is two books — Sisko’s story, and the Romulan story. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really get into the Romulan story because it was too boring, and I couldn’t really get into the Sisko story because I can’t believe that Sisko would walk away from his family just because the Prophets told him to. I can think of at least three better ways to get Sisko into the story, and I’m probably not the only Trek fan who read “reunification” and thought “oy vey, enough already.”

I realize I’ve been pretty negative overall, but mostly what I’m negative about is the plot and the story. George’s writing is still top-notch, even when he’s dumping scads of exposition, and as with the other Typhon Pact novels there are plenty of hooks into other Star Trek shows and books that fans will remember and recognize. I just don’t think this book was interlaced enough with its A and B plots to really interest me; therefore, I’ll have to recommend that you give this one a pass and just read the spoilers online.

* You may remember her from Star Trek: Nemesis as the Romulan woman who left the Senate chamber just before everyone turned into stones and crumbled to dust.

* See Serpents Among the Ruins, where she was the chief Romulan negotiator on the Treaty of Algeron, best known for preventing the Federation from developing or using cloaking devices.

2010 Nebula Nominees

Congratulations to everybody, and if you want to listen to two of them we’ve already podcast the ones with Love in the title — Conditional Love and I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno. What this says about us or SFWA can be speculated on in the comments.

SFWA:

Short Story

Novelette

Novella

Novel

The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

  • Despicable Me, Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud (directors), Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul (screenplay), Sergio Pablos (story) (Illumination Entertainment)
  • Doctor Who: ‘‘Vincent and the Doctor’’, Richard Curtis (writer), Jonny Campbell (director)
  • How to Train Your Dragon, Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (directors), William Davies, Dean DeBlois, & Chris Sanders (screenplay) (DreamWorks Animation)
  • Inception, Christopher Nolan (director), Christopher Nolan (screenplay) (Warner)
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright (director), Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright (screenplay) (Universal)
  • Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich (director), Michael Arndt (screenplay), John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, & Lee Unkrich (story) (Pixar/Disney)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

Book review: “Zero Sum Game” by David Mack

In the summer of 1988, my mom picked my sister and me up from our summer camp and said that my dad had gotten hurt at work (his foot) and was in the hospital. We were going to go see him, but since we’d be there for a while, she’d take us to the bookstore first. I remember picking out a book, and then on the way to the front, I noticed a whole shelf of Star Trek novels. I grabbed the one with the coolest cover.

That was my first exposure to non-YA genre fiction. The book was Diane Duane’s My Enemy, My Ally, still one of my favorites.

Since then, I have read hundreds of Star Trek novels across all five series. I used to read every single one, but now I pick and choose. I’ve been pretty judicious lately. However, I decided I’d give the Typhon Pact novels a try, and started with the first one, David Mack’s Zero Sum Game.

Although marketed as a Typhon Pact novel, Zero Sum Game is really a DS9 book at its heart. It also kind of requires that you’ve read the Destiny trilogy so you know about the characters, and that you’re at least aware of the events in Keith R.A. DeCandido’s A Singular Destiny (read the spoilers; I found the book kind of boring and Mary-Sue-ish). For those who aren’t: Ezri Dax is now the captain of the starship Aventine, and her crew contains folks from DS9 and TNG — including Simon Tarses. The Typhon Pact is a group of traditional Trek enemies that formed in the wake of the Borg invasion chronicled in Destiny; it includes the Romulans, the Tholians, the Gorn, the Breen, the Kinshaya, and the Tzenkethi. I seem to remember the reason for their creation as being pretty flimsy, but that’s neither here nor there. It seems as though the Typhon Pact novels are going to humanize Trek enemies who haven’t gotten a lot of play over the years. First up, the Breen, who speak in machine language and whose faces have never been seen. In the DS9 years, the Breen allied themselves with the Dominion, and that’s really about all you need to know.

In Zero Sum Game, Starfleet Intelligence has learned that the Breen are developing a slipstream drive to rival the Federation’s fastest propulsion technology, which is installed aboard the Aventine. Dr. Bashir, who has done a few missions for SI in the past, is tapped to infiltrate the Breen because he is genetically-enhanced, thereby giving him the ability to learn, process, and react faster than your average SI agent. His briefing is conducted by the other enhanced individuals Bashir met during DS9, including Sarina Douglas, with whom he’d fallen in love at one point. He agrees to go on the mission, with Douglas as his partner, and after an overly-convoluted plan to get them inserted into Breen space on the correct planet, they get their — and every Trek fan’s — first view of what the Breen are really like.

And that is, by far, the best part of the book. Not the action sequences, not the narrow escapes from death, not the way Douglas overcomes her captors or Bashir fights moral battles with himself over killing, and definitely not the B-plot of Dax trying to keep the Aventine on the Breen border so they can pick up Bashir and Douglas when their mission is complete. All of the plot and action is average Trek, and there’s actually quite a lot of improbable goings-on that seem to work out perfectly for our heroes. Even the ending is pretty unbelievable, and the coda wasn’t as surprising (to me, anyway), as I think it was intended to be.

But the Breen… ah, the Breen. I’d hate to spoil it all by saying everything Mack came up with to make them interesting, but the reason they really wear those masks and armor is almost worth the price of admission. As with many Trek novels, there’s plenty of space to explain and describe things that just can’t be covered in a television episode, and Bashir and Douglas’s mission to the Breen world is enough to fill a couple of episodes by itself.

The novel is $8, whether it’s electronic or paper, and I’m quite pleased that Mack writes such long stories because there’s almost nothing that annoys me more than paying $8 for something that’s only 225 pages with large print and big spaces between the lines. While all Kindle books use more or less the same font size and kerning, Zero Sum Game is 352 pages in print, so I definitely didn’t feel cheated by paying $8 for it. However, after the heart-wrenching character deaths in SCE: Wildfire and the sweeping grandness of Destiny — probably the best cross-series saga available in the Trek universe — I felt a little let down by Zero Sum Game. I’ll still read Mack’s next book, because he can easily reach the bar he set with Destiny, but I don’t feel as though I needed to read this novel the way I needed to read Destiny or Invasion or The Lost Era.

A few last words on the Typhon Pact miniseries: I happen to be the kind of person who can’t stop reading a series once it’s started, so I’ve already bought the second in the miniseries. It’s the Titan entry, and I happen to enjoy the Titan novels — they seem to have taken the mantle of the single-episode novel that TNG and TOS used to have, back in the day. I also understand the concept of needing a Big Boss now that the Borg are out of the picture. I even understand wanting to show us the Trek races we don’t know very well and humanizing them so we sympathize. But I’m not sure the Typhon Pact is a credible enough enemy, and I don’t fear them the way I feared the Borg or the Romulans. Where these books will shine is the exploration of the lesser-known enemy races, and also in the interactions between characters. Mack wrote Dax’s crew as a cohesive unit, and I don’t remember if he invented Lieutenant Kedair but she is definitely an interesting addition to the cast; the way he showed us the Breen was also quite well-done. So far in Book 2, I’m learning quite a bit about the Gorn.

I think my problem is that I’m just not as excited about these books as I was for Destiny, or for new entries in New Frontier, or even for stand-alone Trek novels like in the 90s and early 2000s. And I think that really does a disservice to both Star Trek and to the novelists they’ve tapped to write these books — Mack, Michael A. Martin, David R. George III, and Dayton Ward, who have written some really great Star Trek fiction in the past. Perhaps when taken as a whole, after I’ve read them all, the Typhon Pact miniseries will feel like a complete storyline and I’ll feel better about recommending the entire series. But not yet.

Book Review: “Kraken” by China Mieville

When China Mieville’s The Scar — still my favorite book of his — came out, I was working for an over-the-air sci-fi-themed radio show which shall remain nameless. They booked an interview with Mieville, and as the board-op, I called him (I’m guessing at his hotel in Los Angeles or wherever he was), thanked him for being on the show, and potted him up when it was time for him to go on. The hosts talked to him about the novel, which was noteworthy to them I guess because it had a vampire in it. After about 15 minutes, they thanked him, and it was over*.

Mieville’s latest novel, Kraken, is about a giant squid in the same way The Scar is about a vampire.

Kraken is an extremely difficult book to summarize; Mieville’s plots often are. So instead I’m going to link you to this review by The Guardian. Their one-sentence precis is quite masterful:

Following the quest of museum curator Billy Harrow to recover his mysteriously vanished prize exhibit, the giant squid Architeuthis, Kraken plunges Billy and the reader into an alternative London of cults and magic.

Now that you know that, here’s what I liked (and didn’t) about the book:

When I first started reading the novel, I have to say I was — quite sadly — disappointed. Not with the content or the ideas, but with what I perceived to be the novel’s generic nature. It had many of the hallmarks of a fantasy story, and while each element was quite interesting… well, a $1000 hamburger at a gourmet restaurant still looks like a hamburger. To wit:

  • The main character, Billy Harrow, is about 30, intelligent, a little geeky (but not too much), and non-violent. Stuff happens to him. Eventually he takes control of that stuff.
  • Dane is a guard who is the key to the world of weird, and while our MC didn’t like him at first, it turns out he’s quite an important character.
  • There’s a trio of policemen who want Billy to work for them, and they come off kind of like Smith in the first Matrix, but it turns out that, hey, they’re not all bad.
  • Wisecracking female cop who knows more than her colleagues? Check.
  • Small god who is very helpful but can’t actually do anything.
  • This is the big one, the one that really ripped it for me: while the Big Bad Guys are the usual sort, it seems like most urban (or regular) fantasy contains two guys who speak with a funny patois or patter to their speech, are ruthless, love their jobs, and are feared by everyone. Yep. They’re totally there. And they commit murder and inventively-violent ways which, to me, seemed far too over-the-top even for Mieville, who, in the past, has had the arms of a dead child grafted onto its mother’s face as a form of punishment.

After the first 100 pages or so, I got into the swing of things and the generic feel of the characters went away. The use of conventions makes sense — it allows a fantasy reader to jump right into the world through the use of familiar characters, and casual readers are able to map character types onto the kind of characters they’re used to in, say, political thrillers or romantic comedies, thereby making what is often a very tough book to read just slightly easier.

And make no mistake: this isn’t the easiest book in the world to read. Mieville knows a lot of words, and he makes no bones about using them all — and not just in the order you’re used to. His writing is almost gymnastic in nature, and it forces you to pay attention to every bit of it in order to ensure you don’t miss anything. It’s really tough on those of us who are quick readers. He also continues to use very visceral and phantasmagoric verbal imagery — something I noticed in the New Crobuzon books — and, while it adds strength to the storytelling, sometimes it just gets tiring to have to think so hard about the words, instead of what they’re saying. (For example, when the Final Boss is revealed, and the monologue is given, I had trouble remembering the various clues that were given throughout the rest of the story as the Final Boss explained them.) I don’t mind working hard to read a book, but it can be too much from time to time.

I really enjoyed the book’s humor and genre awareness — for example: if you give a Star Trek fan the magical power to teleport, of course he’s going to beam everywhere he can. And speaking of Trek, one of Billy’s primary weapons throughout the novel is his phaser. It really works. In some places, Mieville basically says “yeah, this genre convention is crap, here’s how it really is when a magical practitioner does it”. That works too. One of his strengths is that every little bit of the world is fully-realized, which means the novel is packed full of little moments of win.

Also on the positive column is the sheer amount of cool and different powers the denizens of London possess. Smoking reality, teleportation, burning something so thoroughly it never even existed, creating a demonically-possessed iPod… there are dozens, and they’re all interesting. As are the end-of-the-world cults and the weird religions, the Embassy of the Sea, and the penultimate Boss Fight (think Jenova, with the final boss being Sephiroth).

Kraken is Mieville at his creative best, building a detailed and immersive world with a complex and layered plot that — in this case, quite literally — could mean the end of the world. The novel certainly has its flaws, as I noted above, but it’s definitely a good story, exciting and enjoyable to read. It’s no The Scar, but I think it’s a better book than The City and The City (which I didn’t really enjoy that much). I for one would’ve preferred another visit to New Crobuzon, but this is almost as good.

So, if this book’s just sitting on your bookshelf, gathering dust, perhaps it’s time to —

— oh, yes, I’m going there —

RELEASE THE KRAKEN!

funny dog pictures-Release the Kraken!

* One would think the guy who had actually read the first novel in the New Crobuzon cycle might have helped in the prep for the interview. But that didn’t happen. If only I’d known how big a fan of Mieville’s I’d become, I’d have gotten in on the ground floor there.

Book Review: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald is the kind of science fiction novel that rewards the attentive reader. It begs its fans to create timelines and diagrams and carefully-plotted maps of the characters’ paths through the Queen of Cities. I felt I was missing layers of meaning, and if I just took the time to do the math, to make a map, I could discover the clever synchronicities and hidden stories that I missed on my first read. It may just be an illusion created by the quantity of detail crammed into this book, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Dervish House covers a week in the lives of a group of people in Istanbul as they move through a morass of religion, technology, terrorism, commodities trading, and deals made over ancient artifacts. The drama begins when a suicide bomber strikes on the tram line. Nobody except the bomber dies — that wasn’t the point of the attack. The effects of the explosion ripple outward. One character miss a job interview. Another send his Kid Detective spy robots out to see what happened. Still another makes a note of how high the stocks for a bombing had gotten on the Terror Market.

From there, events spin out of anyone’s control. One of the last Greeks in Istanbul must finally face the consequences of his misspent youth. A group of day traders conspire to divert crude oil from Iran’s radioactive oil fields to Baku, and thereby turn themselves into instant millionaires. A nine-year-old boy hunts for terrorists while the squatter in his basement sees visions of djinni. Across the street, a woman searches for the tomb of a mummy who was embalmed in honey — the legendary Mellified Man, whose flesh is said to have healing powers to rival a unicorn’s horn, and who may have never existed in the first place.

From a science fiction point of view, one of the more interesting aspects of The Dervish House is the way McDonald makes nanotech scary without resorting to a gray goo scenario. In fact, explicitly denies that scenario. He points out that we already live in a world filled with replicating micro-bots: We call them bacteria. The problem with nanotech is not that it might drown the world under a blanket of ooze, but that it could be used to reprogram the human mind on the scale of an epidemic. Simultaneously, he presents this as nanotech’s great promise — that we could turn every person’s body into a living computer of vast capacity.

I first heard of Ian McDonald in discussions of The Windup Girl. The Dervish House has the same sort of complex plotting and frenetic pace as The Windup Girl, but with far more complexity and optimism and both in the setting and in the characters. Yes, there is global warming to deal with, and nasty geopolitics, and the threat of technology used for evil, but there is also beauty and hope in McDonald’s Istanbul. In a way, The Dervish House calls to mind my favorite parts of my beloved cyberpunk — flying through filthy, glorious cities, watching brilliant people struggling in the space between corrupt governments and ruthless corporations.

The Dervish House is supremely clever. I have a feeling that I’ve missed many of the jokes (although there are some good ones about a science fiction writer who plays a minor role in the story). A reader who is knowledgeable in Turkish politics and history would probably get much more out of this book than I did. However, The Dervish House contains enough detail to get its readers through the various intrigues without resorting to tedious infodumps. This is probably not a book that will change your life, but it is a lot of fun.

Book Review: “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart

Warning: the following book review contains explicit language, which is quoted directly from the novel. Reader discretion is advised.

I find most near-future-world-gone-mad stories hit-or-miss. Either they try too hard, or the characters are too flat, or the ideas are just too far out there (or not far out there enough). But occasionally I’ll find one that has the perfect mix of stuff I like.

With Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, I got lucky.

Super Sad True Love Story is a hilariously-scary near-future love story about a 39-year-old man named Lenny Abramov, clearly based at least in part on Shteyngart himself. The son of Jewish Russian immigrants who moved to New York before he was born, Lenny grew up with all the Russian pessimism, Jewish guilt, and immigrant pride that those folks were wont to do. Now he works for a multinational corporation’s Post Human Services division, selling life extensions to HNWIs (high net worth individuals). Our story begins with him finishing up a year in Italy, trying to make sales and failing spectacularly, living in a way considered dangerous by his coworkers (eating too many carbs, drinking too much wine), going to parties, and trying to figure out how he’s going to explain to his boss and close friend Joshie why he hasn’t hooked any clients.

At a party, Lenny runs into Eunice Park, spending time in Italy between her graduation from college and her entry into law school. Eunice, the daughter of Korean immigrants living in New Jersey, is very thin, very pretty, and very much a product of her environment. Lenny falls in love with her instantly, and through a strange confluence of circumstances manages to take her to bed.

Using first-person accounts from Lenny’s diary and Eunice’s GlobalTeens account (more on that shortly), the book then follows Lenny and Eunice as they separate and get back together, return to New York, and try to build a relationship.

Until America falls.

From a science-fictional perspective, Super Sad True Love Story is the standard “America loses power while Europe and China grow in strength, America falls, America is rebuilt” story I’ve read in various short-stories and novels over the years. But where the novel shines is in the author’s uncanny predictions of the near future*. Here are some:

Money: The dollar is as devalued as the currency in current third-world nations, but most upper- or middle-class Americans use yuan, or “yuan-pegged dollars”, which are worth more. Right now, if I’m reading the news right, the dollar isn’t as well-respected globally as it used to be. Also, in the book, several nations are run by their largest companies — StatOil in Norway, HSBC in the UK (which is now called HSBC-London), Stability in Canada, and Petro in Russia. Mergers are rampant, too; Eunice’s bank is AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup, and LandOLakes also apparently has a financial wing.

Technology: Phones have been replaced by an umlaut-laden version of the word apparatus, “apparat”. People rarely speak (or “verbal”) to each other, preferring to use apparati to instantly find out about others. This is already happening; people on dates, trying to build relationships, would rather sit and stare at their phones than actually speak to each other. Apparati are also getting smaller and smaller, and are able to bring in more and more information; while cell phones have actually gotten slightly larger, the other half is already happening. (The book also has a very clever dig against iPhones in it.) Oh, and the sheer amount of information Lenny can get about Eunice as he flies back from Italy is staggering and scary — credit information, friends, photos, addresses, shopping trends…

Social Networking: Today, everyone and everything is on Facebook, and Facebook can suck in all your different social networks — Twitter, Foursquare, GetGlue, etc. In Super Sad True Love Story, everyone — adults, kids, professionals — uses a social network called GlobalTeens. Eunice happens to write long letters to her best friend Jenny, who lives in California (where Eunice used to live), and GlobalTeens keeps telling her that people don’t read anymore, that she should send image messages or video streams instead.

TV News: There are apparently only two 24-hour news channels, FoxLiberty-Prime and FoxLiberty-Ultra. Lenny’s parents watch these. Everyone else gets their news from media streams, which can come from anywhere, including Lenny’s friend Noah (who does a political stream) and Noah’s girlfriend Amy (who, despite being in perfect shape, runs the “Muffintop Hour”). This is sort of a riff on Current, and others who have YouTube or UStream shows.

Devaluation of Shock: Slang has gotten more and more extreme. JK, for example, has become “JBF”, or “just butt-fucking”. Eunice talks to Jenny about porn they watched together as children (and the context indicates this is completely normal). The terms AssLuxury and AssDoctor are thrown around with impunity. One of Noah’s friends runs a liberal-slanting news stream intercut with explicit video of hardcore homosexual sex. The pervasiveness of porn and the subsequent imitation of acts seen in it is described in Jenny’s letters to Eunice about parties where it is normal for people to have pornographic-style sex in company. A top retailer of clothes for women and men is JuicyPussy. The hot new jeans trend is called Onionskin, which are completely transparent. “TotalSurrenders” are women’s undergarments that pop right off with the touch of a button. And we complain about pants on the ground…

Rating Everything: Walking through New York City, Lenny passes credit poles, which display his high rating (1520). Apparati can rank everyone in the room to see who the most desirable men and women are. Personality and fuckability are measured on a scale of 0 to 800. At Lenny’s office (a converted synagogue — actually kind of a cool image), an arrivals/departures train board shows what kind of mood everyone is in.

American Patriotism: In the novel, America is very much in decline. Poorly-spelled signs from the American Restoration Authority claim “Together We’ll Go Far” (the Wells Fargo slogan; I knew it sounded familiar) and various other vaguely-positive messages about change. Anti-immigrant sentiment is strong, and people who don’t look like “‘Murricans” (in the Fox News sense of the word) are grouped by metaphor or stereotype — Chinese people save, Latinos spend or have bad credit, and so on. As things get worse, roadblocks are set up throughout New York, plastered with signs saying that, by reading the sign, citizens deny the existence of the checkpoint while implying their consent to let the ARA do whatever it needs to do. And while the use of apparati is permitted on airplanes, the closest Lenny can get to JFK to meet Eunice’s plane is somewhere on the Van Wyck Expressway, at an ARA checkpoint patrolled by National Guardsmen with automatic weapons.

The novel is full of clever wordplay, prescient references, hilarious-while-being-vaguely-uncomfortable interactions between characters, and a scenario about the end of America that will frighten the hell out of you because it’s completely plausible. It’s also vaguely reminiscent of the way Muggle Britain was unaware of the war between Voldemort and the Order during HP6 and HP7. I really enjoyed reading it, and I got through it quickly — it’s an easy read, and I’ve always found humor to go faster than tragedy. I’d call this a satire more than anything else, but I think it also fits into sci-fi in the same way as films like Gattaca and Code 46**, and its exaggeration of what’s happening now echoes the “Would You Like To Know More” moments of Paul Verhoeven’s adaptation of Starship Troopers. I definitely recommend Super Sad True Love Story.

And I’m not JBF.

* I believe the book takes place in the 2030s (possibly the 2020s or 2040s). I can’t recall it ever being explicitly stated, and I wasn’t able to easily infer it.

** A quick rant about “Code 46” — I really liked the film, and thought it was beautifully-shot with great sets and locations. It doesn’t have any cursing, and there’s no explicit violence, but it’s rated R. Why? Because in one scene, actress Samantha Morton is shown from the front with her bottom half completely uncovered. Meanwhile, films suffused with violence like “The Dark Knight” and “Batman Begins” are PG-13. What does it say about us as a culture that we’re more afraid of a one-second shot of the place that babies come from than our tweens and teens seeing a pencil jammed through a guy’s eye and the aforementioned guy stumbling around in pain for at least five times that long?

Review: “Monster Hunter International” by Larry Correia

Monster Hunter InternationalI had a warm spot in my heart for Larry Correia after reading his HK rant. (“Because you suck. And we hate you.”) Unfortunately, I decided to read his novel, Monster Hunter International. This book was originally self-published, and owes its success to Mr. Correia’s marketing instincts. I don’t have space to cover all the flaws in this book, so I’ll just hit the highlights. Because it was self-published and only later picked up by Baen, Monster Hunter International shows no sign of an editor’s pen. The characters are flat. The prose is stale and repetitive. The plot reads like something intended for a weekend of tabletop gaming, complete with prophetic visions from the storyteller to keep the protagonists on track.

The company called Monster Hunter International was founded when a group of good Southern boys got a lynch mob together in order to drive some unsavory elements (read: vampires) out of their town. I wish I was kidding. In the years since, Monster Hunter has made its founder’s family rich by collecting government-sponsored bounties on supernatural creatures like werewolves, zombies, and vampires. These days, the only thing they fear is the EPA (and Fish and Wildlife, and OSHA, and…).

Our hero, Owen Pitt (brother of the heavy metal artist Mosh Pitt — not kidding about that one, either), gets involved in the monster hunting business when he defeats his evil-boss-turned-werewolf in single combat. Afterwards, he is visited at his home by Monster Hunter International’s recruitment team, including one Julie Shackleford, who tells him that not only is he the first man in history to kill a werewolf with his bare hands, but that his scores in various firearm competitions are even better than hers! Also, his college degree proves that he is a genius. Owen decides that he is in love (though whether with her or her handguns is sometimes an open question). He expresses his love by staring at her a lot, and when that doesn’t work, by pretending to be her friend.

I decided to read this book based on the strength of its action scenes, but to my dismay I found that the narrative is dominated by lectures. The hundred pages or so that pass between the werewolf fight and the first vampire fight are filled with Owen’s monster hunter training. We are introduced to some more monster hunters, whom the reader might be tempted to worry about if Mr. Correia had the fortitude to kill his characters. In training, Owen proves that he is the best at every possible thing (except running), earning the admiration of all the instructors. Multi-page monologues leave the reader with only one questions: Who will be beating our hero with the exposition bat this time?

When the book finally gets back to the action, it’s a mess of vampires on a cargo ship. Owen saves everyone from the cowardly French vampire, and is left for dead by Julie’s asshole boyfriend (and who didn’t see that one coming?). We learn the first rule of monster hunting: Any problem can be solved by getting a bigger gun. In Owen’s case, it’s a fully automatic cut-down combat shotgun with a spring-loaded bayonet and optional grenade launcher. (“How many gun laws does this break?” “All of them.”) The action scenes are precise and well-scripted, but I was willing to put this book down at any time up to the last fifty pages. The final battle is the most interesting one in the book, but suffers from overuse of the passive voice (see: the perils of self-publishing). Finally, it turns out that women are the source of all evil.

Owen is not the kind of character who thinks his way out of problems. Despite being introduced as a genius, he isn’t particularly bright. He has a magical dead Jew in his head who does his thinking for him (still not kidding). Instead of figuring out the bad guy’s plans, the magical Jew dumps Owen directly into the bad guy’s head and lets him see through his eyes, removing all suspense from their later encounters. People who learn things tend to go insane, like Julie’s father.

Monster Hunter International did not have to be seven hundred pages long. Its sequel, which I am told did benefit from the attentions of an editor, is much shorter. Not that it really matters, since I’m not going to spend any more time struggling through yet another lecture set to the sound of an entire Viking army’s worth of political axes grinding. Monster Hunter International is not a book for people who enjoy well-crafted prose or fast-paced action. It is not for people who don’t care about the difference between a Government .45 and a Glock. Larry Correia is writing for a specific audience, and it is clear that I am not one of them.

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