Category Archives: Reviews

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

It was time to see what all the fuss was about. Although I accidentally started with the third book in the Millenium series, I don’t mind. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest gives a good explanation of what came before it and brings closure to the series.

Lisbeth Salander, a woman who’s wanted for three murders, shows up nearly dead of gunshot wounds in Gosseberga, Sweden. Her father, an ex spy, has an axe wound to the face. As Salander recuperates in the hospital, awaiting trial, shadowy forces try to make the whole situation disappear.

The book’s greatest strength is Salander herself. It’s fun to inhabit the mind of a genius computer hacker who’s uninhibited by the morality of mere mortals, though I wouldn’t want to meet her in person. Larsson writes with a crisp, dry style that even makes the infodumps interesting. I learned more about Sweden, the Swedish justice system, and the Swedish Intelligence Service than I ever thought I wanted to know.

The whole book was fun.

It has some problems. It’s heavy-handed: I get the point already that violence against women is bad, and breaking the Swedish constitution is bad. Computer hacking does not work the way that it is presented in the book. And it’s a pretty serious wish fulfillment fantasy for journalists. Not only does Mikael Blomquist have a full-time job at a financially solvent magazine, he gets to dash around protecting the vulnerable, exposing crooks, and earning the admiration of Swedish Intelligence agents. And for some reason everybody wants to have sex with him.

The book also has some worrying ethics. The protagonists of the book form a team effort to clear Salander’s name of the murders she didn’t commit. But Salander really is a criminal. She’s stolen billions, attempted murder twice, and in the epilogue, she’s an accessory to another murder. Her friends do a lot of breaking and entering and creepy-as-hell surveillance to help her. A doctor at the hospital intentionally misdiagnoses Salander to buy her time before she goes to prison. His actions echo those of the villain Teleborian, who misdiagnoses Salander to get her locked up in a mental institution. Why is this behavior okay when it’s done in the service of Salander?

I recommend the book. Though it’s odd, and Lisbeth Salander is terrifying, it’s a wonderful romp through Swedish society.

Mind of my Mind by Octavia Butler

Wild Seed was my introduction to Octavia Butler’s work. I loved it. My edition contained a large chunk of Mind of my Mind, the next book in the series, which left me eager to learn what becomes of Doro and Anyanwu.

Mind of my Mind takes place in the 1970s or so, about a century after the events of Wild Seed. Both immortals have settled in California. The story focuses on Mary, the latest of Doro’s breeding experiments. As Mary comes into her powers, the experiment gets out of hand.

This book is one of Butler’s early works (her second), and it shows. The book feels unfinished. The narrative skips over great gaps of time in the middle as Mary learns to control her telepathic network and the writing is so spare that it cuts into the bone.

Within that short text, though, Butler raises questions about power and control. The telepaths are a race of people who have to prey on others to survive. Should they exist? If they already exist, what kind of ethics can they hold on to? Is Mary a villain? What about Doro?

The climax of the story was rushed but brought a satisfying closure to the story of Doro and Anyanwu. It’s not a happy ending, but it is a classic one, following in the tradition of Frankenstein.

Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman

Another well-regarded book that I didn’t like. I wonder what’s going on.

Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman features an alternative West where the Devil rules the Great Plains, preventing the United States from expanding any further west than the Mississippi. Enter Isobel Lacoyo Távora, the Devil’s foster child. On the day of her majority, she walks up to him and demands a job.

It’s a Western with a Latina main character (cool) and a bildungsroman about the Devil’s new left-hand man (awesome). How do you mess this up? Somehow, Laura Anne Gilman manages to do just that.

The biggest problem with this book is that Izzy doesn’t have clear goals. The Devil throws her out onto the road to learn by doing, without explaining what she’s supposed to do. Izzy spends the first third of the book complaining that she doesn’t know what to do, instead of, well, doing anything. Which isn’t entirely Izzy’s fault. The Devil pulled a Yoda-level it-will-all-become-clear stunt on her. He’s not a Jedi, he’s a businessman. He’s the sort of boss who would be very explicit with his minions and make sure he gets results.

The narrator keeps telling us that Izzy is not a namby-pamby young woman, but tough and capable. Izzy’s actions belie this. (See the bit about the whining.) Early in the book, because of some emotional upset, Izzy loses her appetite and tosses away her breakfast. That doesn’t make sense! She knows how precious calories are out on the road. If she were tough and capable, she would stuff that into her pockets for later.

The descriptions of the land in this book are beautiful. You can tell Gilman has been to all the sites she writes about and loves them deeply. But I think I’d rather deal with The Mechanical, which got me angry and excited at the same time, than with Silver on the Road, which left me cold.

The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis

Full of cool ideas, but with a frustrating writing style.

In an alternative 1926, the Dutch have taken over the world using armies of alchemical slaves. Magical compulsions keep the Clakkers in line. What could go wrong?

Jax, a household Clakker, inevitably comes into contact with a lens that frees him from his geasa. He has to run up a steep learning curve to deal with his newfound freedom. Meanwhile, Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord, spymistress of what’s left of France, dreams of overthrowing the Dutch Empire. Her attempt to reverse-engineer a military Clakker ends in disaster. Jax and Berenice’s adventures bring them together and into an uneasy alliance.

There’s also Visser, who should never have been a viewpoint character in the first place. More on him later.

The Mechanical is full of super cool ideas. Dutch alchemical robots. Robots versus glue. A secret language for slaves. A clockwork Green Lantern. Weaponized Calvinism. I like a book that sends me to Wikipedia, and The Mechanical had me looking up Huygens, Spinoza, and what the pineal gland actually does (it makes melatonin).

Tregillis squanders that potential with an overwrought writing style. He goes in for eyeball kicks and cheap grossouts, while I am a subtext and quiet horror kind of gal. He does scare me when he mentions in passing that “Don’t harm humans” is the lowest priority of the Clakkers’ hierarchical metageasa. He lets me figure out the implications of that for myself. But most of the time I’m treated to stuff like this:

The central courtyard of the inner keep looked and smelled like a charnel house. Berenice struggled to make sense of what she saw through the pink haze of one blood-clotted eye and the mounting fog of pain. A crumpled silver funicular lay amidst the crushed rubble of the ground station, its windows shattered and empty. Bodies strewn like wreckage. Parts and whole. Blood puddles.

It’s not scary because I know exactly what’s going on. Most of the book is gratuitous; I figured out pretty early that I could skip to the end of the fight scenes and the chase scenes to see who makes it and I wouldn’t miss much.

When body fluids aren’t spattering on walls, Tregillis raises an interesting philosophical question about free will. The characters regard free will and freedom as the same thing. Even Jax himself thinks enslaved Clakkers have no free will, and it is somehow granted when the geasa are taken away. But we can see him struggle against his geasa (and fail) and say whatever he wants to his friends because it never occurred to his makers to stop him. The Clakkers aren’t missing anything, they’re willed beings with shackles added. I really hope that Tregillis is working up to a point that free will doesn’t mean getting to do what you want.

Jax is too clever for belief. He’s lived for 118 years with his every motion spelled out for him, so I expected him to feel overwhelmed by having to make so many decisions so fast. But no, he runs the entire city of New Amsterdam a merry chase, making all the right decisions, then he hijacks an airship.

While he clings to the belly of the thing in midair he decides he needs to recruit the Clakker mind inside it to his side so they can both escape. He thinks the eyes are the windows of the soul and slams his magic lens into the airship’s eye. Which works. Earlier, he got his freedom when the lens got lodged inside his chest. And he hadn’t taken the lens outside of himself yet, so he had no good reason to think he could survive doing that. And in other parts of the book, he’s not sure if enslaved Clakkers even have souls.

The Dutch people don’t make sense, either. They go out of their way to pick on Clakkers even when they’re working properly. All of the people. Jax even notes that he thinks humans are all the same. He should be wrong. I’d expect to see at least a few Dutch people take them for granted, try to take them apart and get arrested, fetishize them, demonize them, fight for the abolition of slavery, but they all seem to react to Clakkers the same way. The Dutch Empire doesn’t have to work hard at their totalitarian state at all.

Meanwhile, Luuk Visser is a blithering idiot. He’s a secret Catholic priest, working as a spy for the French from within the Hague. He learns that most of his spy cell has been executed and one woman taken prisoner. In his guise as a Protestant pastor, he asks to see the prisoner and then kills her to keep her knowledge out of Dutch hands. Reasonable enough. But then the moron tries to go home. Of course Dutch agents are waiting for him there and take him prisoner.

And then he gets enslaved under geasa and turned into a machine for the Dutch. Since he can’t make decisions, he stops being an interesting character. I would rather have Jax and Berenice hear rumors that Something Very Bad happens to Visser, then later witness the zombie-like Visser thing. That would have been scarier.

Which makes Berenice my favorite character. She’s the only main character who’s a mere mortal, she’s not too good or too evil, and above all, she makes sense. She violates medical ethics after a cold calculation that her work will benefit France. When she brings a military Clakker into a French fortress to study it, it breaks free and kills over thirty people. Does she mope? She figures out a man sabotaged her glue and hunts him down. And she has a nuanced view of Clakkers. She accepts they’re sentient, but she’s still willing to take advantage of them. Her alliance with Jax could be a lot of fun.

I’m excited to see where Tregillis is going with all the neat ideas in this series, but I think I will skip to the end to see who makes it.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

The main character is a spaceship. And she is hell bent on revenge.

It is not the plot that makes Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie shine – the above is all there is to know about it. Nor is it the setting, which is standard space opera fare. It’s the technical mastery it takes to write a first-person novel from the point of view of an AI hive mind. In some of the early chapters Leckie writes from the first person omniscient. I didn’t even know you could do that. Look:

“Is she coming or not? If she isn’t coming she should say so.”

At that moment Lieutenant Awn was in the bath, and I was attending her. I could have told the lieutenants that Lieutenant Awn would be there soon, but I said nothing, only noted the levels and temperature of the tea in the black glass bowls various lieutenants held, and continued to lay out breakfast plates.

Near my own weapons storage, I cleaned my twenty guns, so I could stow them, along with their ammunition. In each of my lieutenants’ quarters I stripped the linen from their beds. The officers of Amaat, Toren, Etrepa, and Bo were all well into breakfast, chattering, lively. The captain ate with the decade commanders, a quieter, more sober conversation. One of my shuttles approached me, four Bo lieutenants returning from leave, strapped into their seats, unconscious. They would be unhappy when they woke.

Justice of Toren/One Esk Nineteen/Breq has a bizarre sense of identity. In the first half of the book, every other chapter describes the backstory, in which the Justice of Toren is a battleship crewed by dozens of officers and running her software in the brains of hundreds of meat-puppet human bodies. In the present day, the Justice of Toren has all been destroyed save for one puppet body. She still thinks of herself as a spaceship. And she thinks of herself as having already been murdered.

What the hell is Justice of Toren/One Esk Nineteen/Breq? She’s AI software running on a human brain. To make things even weirder, another character points out that it’s probably possible to bring back her body’s original owner (some nameless political prisoner). And her remaining body earns command of a ship, so now she’s a spaceship inside a human inside a spaceship.

A lot of the philosophical parts of the book explore what happens when a mind becomes divided against itself. This doesn’t just apply to the spaceship characters.
On the other hand, there’s so much philosophy in the book that not much happens. Add to that a nonlinear plot, an unreliable narrator, and characters who like to talk around the point in a way that would make Jane Austen proud, and you have yourself a tough read. I recommend looking up all the spoilers online first so you can know what’s going on. Then you can sit back and enjoy the thought experiment.

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

They are the only two immortals in the word: Anyanwu, an Ibo woman who can repair her body at will, and Doro, a spirit who possesses bodies and devours souls. They hate each other with a passion; the loneliness of immortality makes them need each other.

I’ve kept hearing Octavia Butler’s stuff is really good. I only waited this long to read something of hers because I didn’t know where to start. Butler broke into print in 1976 with Patternmaster then wrote successive prequels to it. Wild Seed is the earliest in the sequence of events and regarded by John Pfeiffer as the best book she ever wrote.

The language of this book struck me right away. Check out this passage near the beginning:

Anyanwu looked away, spoke woodenly. ‘It is better to be a master than to be a slave.’ Her husband at the time of the migration had said that. He had seen himelf becoming a great man – master of a large household with many wives, children and slaves. Anyanwu, on the other hand, had been a slave twice in her life and had escaped only by changing her identity completely and finding a husband in a different town. She knew some people were masters and some were slaves. That was the way it had always been. But her own experience taught her to hate slavery. She had even found it difficult to be a good wife in her most recent years because of the way a woman must bow her head and be subject to her husband. It was better to be as she was – a priestess who spoke with the voice of a god and was feared and obeyed. But what was that? She had become a kind of master herself. ‘Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid being a slave,’ she said softly.

I think I count a dozen words in that entire paragraph with French or Latin origins. The rest of it is Ango-Saxon, emotional and gritty. She introduces complex ideas about slavery, gender, dominance and submission with deceptively simple language. And she keeps it up this way for an entire novel.

Wild Seed is also about game theory, since Anyanwu is trapped in a game with Doro she can’t win. And it’s about our relationship with our bodies, since Anyanwu’s super power is her body and Doro has no body at all. He’s fascinated with breeding human beings to each other because he’s impotent. The book is everything N. K. Jemisin was trying to cover with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but Octavia Butler is a master at it. The book will make you think. A lot of it you’ll wish you weren’t eating lunch while you were reading.

Wild Seed feels like an epic love story even though it’s a fairly short book. The ending was abrupt, especially for me, because my edition includes a big chunk of Mind of my Mind. I got three quarters of the way through the book, saw the end, and had to page backward looking for a climax.

Other issues include that you can tell it’s a prequel. Many aspects of the psychic humans are really only in there because of the psychics later in the series. And Doro’s breeding program has a surprising lack of Asian people considering that a) most people in the world are Asian and b) Doro’s willing to take advantage of all the genetic material he can get. But these are quibbles. This is a beautiful, thought-provoking, challenging book.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

A book set in a galaxy with a peculiar quirk of physics: the closer to the galactic core you get, the less intelligence and stock science fiction goodies like faster-than-light travel are possible. A group of explorers punch into the galactic edge, the Transcend, and wake up a five-billion-year-old Blight that likes to eat souls.

A Fire Upon the Deep is two books, really. One book is a space opera in which Ravna Bergensdot and Pham Nuwen race to find a cure for the Blight. The other book is a work of xenofiction in which the only cure for the Blight crash lands on a planet of hive-mind ratdogs.

Space opera just isn’t my bag, so I found myself slogging through those parts to get to the xenofiction parts. There’s nothing especially wrong with it, Ravna and Pham are nice enough, but it’s all stuff you’ve seen before if you have a passing knowledge of science fiction.

But the ratdogs! (They just call themselves people, but a girl who crashes on their planet nicknames them Tines.) There isn’t enough xenofiction out there and the work Vinge has done with the Tines is top notch. Each individual person is made out of four to six creatures that communicate by ultrasound. Vinge thinks through a lot of the implications, like the naming conventions, what happens when two of the major characters get each other pregnant, and what it’s like to see through six pairs of eyes at once.

One of the most interesting parts is the Tines’ relationship with identity. Each group person can accomplish something like immortality by pulling a careful Ship of Theseus. They make themselves bigger by giving birth, and they make new people by splitting in half or splicing together bits of themselves and their friends. They fear becoming unrecognizable like we fear death. Vinge pulled off a work of hard science fiction where souls are very much a part of daily life.

The book’s full of wonderful ideas. None of the characters are especially strong, though the Tine characters make up for it by being so damn cool. The ending relies on a lot of coincidences to get all the characters onto the same stage at the same time. I would have rather Ravna and Pham had landed on the Tines’ world early on and raced to stop the Blight on the ground. Even better if Vinge had dispensed with the space opera entirely and written a book about the Tines’ political intrigues, Watership Down style.

I have a nitpick about Pham Nuwen’s almost but not quite Earth name. He’s clearly supposed to be Pham Nguyen because he’s described as a living fossil (hard vacuum mummification accident), derived from an Asian culture, and nobody can pronounce his last name to save their lives. So why not just call him Pham Nguyen? The slightly-offness of his name makes by brain itch.

The Tines are so cool that this book’s worth reading on their strength alone.

Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey

Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey isn’t for everyone. Be forewarned that the main character is a prostitute, BDSM is her specialty, and there are lots of explicit sex scenes. That didn’t bother me, but it can be pretty divisive.

In an alternate history Europe, Mary Magdalene and Christ have a child by magic. Their son Elua wanders the earth with some fallen angel disciples, preaching free love, and eventually settles in alternate France. The religions of this Europe are a mishmash of free-love-utopia, paganism, and regular Christianity, whose followers live in the “Yeshuite Quarter” of the city and are mistrusted at best.

Phèdre, a holy prostitute in training, gets the opportunity one day to also become a spy. Clients talk when they let their guards down. This book is her bildungsroman.

It takes a long time to get going. I recommend you muscle through the first few dozen pages or so until Phèdre starts plying her trade for real. It gets better.

The book’s at its best when Carey examines what a free-love-utopia might actually look like. She handles the touchy subject of prostitution with subtletly. The practice isn’t glorified or vilified. It’s a career, with all the day-to-day gripes that go with it.

Carey has the fortitude to poke her notion of utopia full of holes, too. Do the characters really “love as they wilt,” as Elua commands them to? How willingly taken is the vow of sacred prostitution when the prostitutes are sold into the temple’s service at a very young age? What about the nobility, who have to marry for political reasons? What happens if people with incompatible sexualities fall in love with each other?

The sex didn’t shock me. It did send my eyes rolling sometimes. No, they wouldn’t have been able to do that. Not that many times in one evening! Other characters get pregnant by accident, but not Phèdre for some reason, and STDs are mysteriously nowhere to be seen.

The alternate history aspect of the novel was a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, a magical being controls the English Channel and doesn’t let most people through. An alternate Britain that never had a Norman Conquest is pretty cool. You’re thrown into a world that’s halfway between Beowulf and the Mabinogion yet strong enough to be an (almost) equal partner to alternate France.

But alternate Germany didn’t make any sense. That region of Europe in our world has been alternately impressing or terrifying its neighbors with technology since the Renaissance. It brought us the printing press, modern chemistry, and rocket science and in Phèdre’s world they’ve been reduced to Orcs. The only reason they present any threat at all to France is they found a leader with two brain cells to rub together and there are a lot of them. The changes to Britain make sense because of the isolation, but there’s no explanation given for the Germans.

Worse, the book can tread into some pretty unfortunate territory. The D’angeline (French) people are inherently more awesome than their neighbors because of their ethnic background, which contains angel blood. It gets to the point where the German savages are awestruck by Phèdre and her companion just by looking at them. Phèdre describes non-D’angeline people as “like children” on two separate occasions.

Should you read this book? If it’s your thing, sure. If it’s not, don’t worry about it.

The Writer’s Mary Sue Test by Kat Feete

What is a Mary Sue?

Mary Sue is a problem that tends to happen when we writers are just starting to learn the craft. A writer wants to make a character AWESOME, but she doesn’t know how to do it, so she slaps a bunch of AWESOME characteristics onto the character, like an unusual hair color, a dark and troubled past, unbeatable fighting skills. And the AWESOME character starts to look suspiciously like the writer herself…

Kate Feete wrote an insightful quiz to determine whether you are getting too personally invested in a particular character. Check out her analysis of the Mary Sue phenomenon after the quiz, too.

The Writer’s Mary Sue Test

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

A paranormal romance in which the heroine is not an idiot,

A book that raises fascinating questions about power, sex, theology, race, and slavery – and answers none of them,

Does it count as deus ex machina if the deus in question is (spoiler) the main character?

An ancient war between the gods left the Amn people in charge of four godly prisoners of war. Turns out that enslaved gods make the ultimate weapon, and now the Amn rule the world. (And it’s not a coincidence that Amn sounds like Aryan. They’re described as bone-white in the book and they’re overly concerned with ethnic purity.)

Yeine Darr, the mixed-race granddaughter of the current king of the world, gets summoned to the court where she receives surprising news: the king’s throwing her into the succession contest along with her cousins. Meanwhile Nahadoth, one of the enslaved gods, takes a shine to her. Two cousins who want to murder her and unwanted advances from a billions-year-old chaos god? Yeine must navigate this nightmare.

Just for the fact that it’s something different, I would say bravo to the romance aspect of this book. Yeine possesses a lot more self-awareness than other paranormal romance heroines I’ve read. She knows the difference between lust and love and knows full well that sex with Nahadoth could fry her brains out. She carefully ponders that risk. Jemisin indulges in some Meyeresque prose sometimes – she’s fond of taut moments and bitter looks – and Nahadoth wants Yeine because she’s special, not because of anything Yeine did. On the other hand, there’s a damn good plot reason Yeine is so special.

The politics side of the book left me wanting so much more. For one thing, I want to know how the ruling family of the Amn managed to stay in power for two thousand years straight. We get to see the current nobility guilty of slavery, rape, sex slavery, child sex slavery, religious persecution, torture, mutilation, cannibalism, incest, and alcoholism. That’s an interesting exploration of what two thousand years of absolute power will do to you. But in all that time, there was nobody insane enough to use the god-weapons to destroy the entire planet? Everybody hates the rulers, so I would at least think that failed rebellions would ruin the world’s economy.

Here are just a few of the questions that the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms raises: If your slaves are insane, do you dare set them free? What happens if you engineer a zombie plague that only kills commoners? (That one could have been an entire book.) Is Nahadoth responsible for his actions? Is Yeine Amn or Darre? Is Amn an ethnicity or an attitude? Is brutality to save one’s own people ever justified? Is Yeine ever justified in commanding the enslaved gods?

Are the Darre people any better than the Amn? Yeine accuses the Amn of being barbarians, just the barbarians with the most toys. If the Darre had control of the enslaved gods, what kind of people would the Darre become? The Darre are prejudiced against men and they have a habit of kidnapping and mutilating their neighbors. They earned their enemies. But they didn’t earn the annihilation Yeine’s cousin threatens to deal out to them.

But no, none of these questions get addressed. Yeine just (spoiler) becomes a goddess and fixes everything to her satisfaction. Which includes letting Nahadoth torture one of her cousins. Both Yeine and Nahadoth are forced to do horrible things over the course of the book, but the ending implies that neither of them are going to face any consequences for them.

I enjoyed the book. It’s gripping and I devoured it in a few days. But I really, really wanted it to be Game of Thrones with enslaved gods added and it’s not. It’s foremost a romance novel that happens to have tantalizing political asides.

Steam Trains and Ghosts

Margaret R. Taylor's Writing Blog