Tag Archives: book review

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 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.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin

How in the world did Ursula K. LeGuin think that an Earth with seven billion people in it would be on the brink of starvation?

This is just one of the issues I had with one of LeGuin’s more well-known works, The Lathe of Heaven. It’s still an excellent read despite all these issues. George Orr is an ordinary man with a very weird problem. Sometimes his dreams come true. Not in the sense of prophetic dreams, but his subconscious somehow retcons the entire universe so the dream has always been true, since the dawn of time. Naturally Orr winds up referred to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist, Dr. William Haber, starts to manipulate Orr’s dreams for his own purposes…

Over the course of the book, Orr runs through a lot of universes, exploring a bunch of mostly dystopian science fiction ideas along the way. (Notice his name is a pun on George Orwell?)

At the beginning of the book, the year is 2002 and global warming has melted all the ice in the world, including Antarctica. This is even true in realities where the human population – and thus CO₂ emissions – nosedive sometime in the 1970’s. In realities where the world’s population is still seven billion, the people of Portland are crammed in so tight they can barely move, and the state of Oregon has to build several more cities in the desert, each containing millions of people.

I can’t fault LeGuin for getting the details of global warming wrong, since this book was published in 1971. But she’s too smart to miscalculate how many people a world can physically hold. All one needs to figure that out is the square footage of a typical one-bedroom apartment, the square footage of the world’s urban areas, and some math.

Another objection I have is to Dr. Haber. The book’s meant to present a moral dilemma: How far would you go to make the world a better place? That’s a fine dilemma and one I’d like to see explored. Dr. Haber’s meant to be a sympathetic character who makes questionable choices. But in practice, Dr. Haber behaves so despicably that this book does not work for me as a dilemma.

I am a scientist. I have a thing about scientific ethics. And Dr. Haber blazes past the bounds of acceptable behavior within the first dozen pages. He is literally performing medical experimentation on an unwilling patient with no protocol, no control group, and no institutional oversight. And he’s stupid. When one of his experiments on Orr kills six billion people, does it occur to Dr. Haber that this project is dangerous and he should stop? No.

There’s merit to watching a monster version of my own profession in action. And Dr. Haber makes a great villain. But a moral dilemma he does not make. I want to see him squashed like a bug. (I found the end of the book quite satisfying, but I’ll leave the reader to discover the details on their own.)

The Lathe of Heaven is meant to critique utilitarian ethics. But like I said earlier, Dr. Haber inadvertently kills six billion people for the sake of the remaining one billion. Sacrificing the many for the sake of the few is far from a utilitarian ideal. One of LeGuin’s short stories, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” does a much better job of critiquing utilitarianism.

And LeGuin puts Taoist philosophy into characters’ mouths when they don’t have any in-universe reason to know these things.

But that’s enough ranting for now. Though I have all these objections to the book, at no point does LeGuin slip into shoddy writing. The book’s beautiful. And I disagree with it. And I like it when books bite back.

It’s wonderfully ambiguous what’s actually going on with Orr’s mind. There is a Blade-Runner-like blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at the beginning of the book that changes everything.

All the universes Orr surfs through remind us how weird our universe is compared to what science fiction writers expected. We live in the world where the Soviet Union sort of evaporated in 1991. Where obesity now poses a greater worldwide health burden than undernutrition. Where Eastern Europe and Japan aren’t having enough babies. Where it’s 2015 and we still haven’t conquered space, but we’re still managing to do some really awesome things with it.

The Woman Who Loved Reindeer by Meredith Ann Pierce

Uncomfortable love story, really cool setting.

I loved Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Trilogy when I was a kid. Hoping for more awesomeness, I’ve read a few of her other works over the years. Each time, I’m unhappy to find out that she seems to have pulled a Shyamalan: she’s good at one specific thing, which made The Darkangel so special, but when she tries to do the same thing in other books it doesn’t work. Her literary career seems to have petered out in 2004.

The same applies to The Woman Who Loved Reindeer.

A girl named Caribou is orphaned in her teens and the villagers refuse to take her in because she’s a seer and they’re a little afraid of her. She gets by living alone outside of town. One day Caribou’s sister-in-law Branja shows up. Branja has been charmed and impregnated by a trangl, a kind of were-deer in his human form. Branja managed to hide the pregnancy from her husband over a long hunting trip, but now she needs to get rid of the baby. Caribou reluctantly takes the baby in and names him Reindeer.

Part of what follows is a really cool adventure story. Volcanoes are taking over Caribou and Reindeer’s homeland, so Caribou uses her witch-powers and Reindeer uses his were-deer-powers to lead their people to safety. Lots of explodiness and epic crossing country scenes. There’s also a romance plot that I don’t like. It’s between Caribou and Reindeer.

Here are just a few of the problems I have with that:

Caribou is legally Reindeer’s aunt,
She raised him like a son, including breastfeeding him,
She’s twenty-eight years old and he is fifteen when they start having sex,
Caribou ate Reindeer’s father. (She thought he was an ordinary deer at the time, but still, she eventually figures it out.)

There’s also no earthly explanation why they love each other that way. Shared interests? Tender moments? Not really, Caribou just panics whenever she thinks Reindeer is going to leave her.

But gosh, the world Pierce has created is so cool. Caribou belongs to a hunting and farming community who live on a volcanically active polar continent. It’s got two fertile regions separated from each other by the pole itself, which is partially underwater. The book contains beautiful descriptions of the terrain and the adaptations of the people’s culture and lifestyle. I wanted to see lots more of that, but unfortunately it’s not the focus of the book.

I think The Woman Who Loved Reindeer would have been improved if told as a regular mother and son story. Reindeer has to grow up and run with the reindeer herd and Caribou has to learn to let him go. It would also have been better if Pierce had not tried so hard to make this into a fairy tale, because it isn’t, it’s an adventure story.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Ever gotten a few pages into a book and recognized something you learned about from Kerbal Space Program? I didn’t realize how awesome that would feel until I read The Martian.

Some time in the near future, NASA has organized a manned Mars space program. The first two Ares missions go off without a hitch. On the third, a freak dust storm on the surface of Mars forces the crew to ditch the mission early. An antenna breaks off in the wind and impales astronaut Mark Watney. He goes down and his suit’s vital signs blink out. The rest of the crew don’t have time to recover the body, so they leave.

There’s a problem. Mark Watney’s still alive.

Just … how did Andy Weir manage to make a space disaster thriller hilarious? Watney accepts the fact that he’s probably going to starve to death with surprising aplomb. His mission log entries are the high point of the book. The book’s told in a highly unconventional mix of first person (Watney’s snark), third person (NASA officials, who are freaking out), and omniscient (what’s going on with equipment and unmanned probes). Weir shouldn’t get away with it, but he does because it’s so very entertaining.

You’ll want to read this book if you want to know how a manned mission to Mars would work. Weir’s thought the details through. This book sent me to Wikipedia a lot, and while I don’t understand all of the science, it’s rock-hard. Yet it’s not dry and technical. Weir manages to make nail-biting tension out of Hohmann transfer windows.

If you wanted to know what a mission to Mars would look like, though, you won’t find out here. For example, here’s a description of the Hermes, the spacecraft the Ares crew used to get to Mars:

The Hermes crew enjoyed their scant personal time in an area called “The Rec.” Consisting of a table and barely enough room to seat six, it ranked low in gravity priority. Its position amidships granted it a mere 0.2g.

This is the most extensive description of the Hermes in the book. The Martian surface doesn’t fare much better.

I also have a pet peeve about Vogel’s broken English. His grammar is ridiculously bad for someone who has spent months of mission time and years of training time using English exclusively to communicate. If NASA had caught him saying things like “Very important is thirteen centimeters,” they would have kicked him off the mission.

But that’s a minor point. The Martian is the most entertaining hard science fiction I’ve read in a long time.

Edit: NASA just announced they found evidence of liquid water on Mars. The timing couldn’t be better.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

I don’t usually write DNF reviews, but this has got to be one of the best books I couldn’t get through.

In an alternate 1940, the U.S. government decides to allow European Jews to set up a temporary homeland in the panhandle of Alaska. One the one hand, four million of the six million Jews killed in our timeline escape the war and survive. On the other hand, on January 1, 2008, their lease will expire and they will be screwed yet again. (Israel doesn’t work out so well.)

The premise is absolutely brilliant and I wanted so much to read this book. But I can’t. Get. Through. The. Prose. It is so dense. Chabon describes every little thing. Reading The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is like trying to eat an entire chocolate flourless torte – a little bit is delightful. Chapter five, the backstory about Meyer Landsman’s relationship with his father and chess, would have made a great short story on its own. It’s also the point at which I gave up.

If you like alternate history and you can hack the prose, I recommend it. But if you can’t, don’t feel too bad.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

A surprisingly okay book, given its awesome premise.

The year is 1914. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie causes the great powers of Europe to lurch towards war. The Central Powers wield clankers, gigantic walking war machines and the Allies use beasites, genetically engineered creatures that have been turned into weapons. AWESOME.

Westerfeld takes those elements and weaves a pretty conventional story with them. Deryn Sharp a plucky girl (conveniently an orphan) disguises herself as a boy to join the British Air Service. Aleksander Hapsburg (conveniently made into an orphan at the start of the book) flees assassins who want to finish the job. Their fates entwine, they put aside their national and technological differences, they become friends. Add a lady scientist and a couple faithful family retainers, and all the story needs to complete the cliché picture is a smart-talking chimney sweep.

But it’s an all right book. The writing is solid. Alek starts out as a brat, but he mellows out over the course of the story. I like how Westerfeld takes the language barrier these two characters would have had and uses it as part of the plot. And the genetically-engineered gasbag creatures that the British use as war machines? They call them Huxleys. That’s brilliant.

But it could’ve been so much more. For one thing, there’s no good reason for the clanker-wielding and beastie-wielding people to hate each other. The two technologies line up on the sides that real life countries did in WWI – even though they would have had to develop the technologies decades before a war that nobody saw coming. I would have loved to see the technologies line up along Catholic/Protestant lines. Or manipulation of the beasties equated with social Darwinism and the rest of the world’s horrified reaction to it.

Characters cussing with “Clart!” and “Barking spiders!” gets old pretty fast. And there’s a war on and nobody besides main characters’ parents ever gets killed.

I still recommend it. Most steampunk works shy away from WWI. This book explores the boundaries of what’s possible with the genre.

Watchmen by Alan Moore

Minor spoilers.

A work that gets a lot of hype, especially in the graphic novel community. Is Watchmen the greatest graphic novel ever written? I dunno. But it is damn good. Good enough that you could have a healthy discussion of it in an English Literature class.

Watchmen is set in an alternate universe where, like in our world, superhero comics hit the newsstands around the time of WWII. But then in their world people take it upon themselves to actually do masked crime fighting and the fictional heroes fade away. None of these masked heroes has superpowers (except for one of them), they have all too human failings, and they may have wound up doing more harm than good.

Watchmen was published as a serial in 1986-87 and as such captures the very essence of Cold War paranoia. It’s strange to think that a couple of years before I was born, people were walking around thinking that they could be vaporized at any moment. The moment when I most felt like an alien reading about another planet was during a phone call. One of the characters has to button the call off because calling California is so expensive.

Gosh, it’s clever. I recommend reading it over twice so you catch all the sight gags. The Indian restaurant where some of the characters meet is the Gunga Diner. A retired heroine is hanging out at the Nepenthe Gardens. One of the masked heroes names himself Ozymandias and fails to see the problem with that.

You’ll also want to see the ending. There’s a subversion of the villain’s monologue of epic proportions.

I have a couple of quibbles with the text. Dr. Manhattan regains interest in life on earth because every person born on earth is a statistical impossibility. They’re not. Once life gets started, it makes damn sure it keeps going. I also don’t buy the plot to make him leave Earth in the first place by convincing him he’s giving people cancer. All anybody had to do was hold a Geiger counter up to him and they’d see he’s not radioactive.

On the whole, though, it’s delicious with literary references, shocking, and will never really let you think about superheroes the same way again.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

I decided to read this book in honor of the late and great Terry Pratchett. I’d read it described on TvTropes as one of his best books. How I felt about it? It’s good, but Going Postal is still my favorite.

Sam Vimes is chasing a cop-killer named Carcer across the rooftops of the High Energy Magic Building when a lightning strike sends them both thirty years back in time to the bad old days of Ankh-Morpork. Vimes has to figure out how to get home and keep Carcer from dooming history.

The book is unevenly good. The beginning didn’t do much for me, and it won’t make sense for people who haven’t read the other books about the Watch anyway. It picks up when the actual time travel happens. The Ankh-Morpork of Vimes’s youth is in much worse shape than it is in the present day – it drives home how much Vetinari has accomplished during his time in power. It helps to be familiar with Les Miserables to get the full enjoyment of the book.

And then there’s the scene where Vimes and the younger version of himself find Findthee Swing’s special basement. That scene blew me away. Very little is actually described. It’s a master example of leaving details out to make a story more scary.

We’re also treated to a view of Reg Shoe in life. And we get to witness his finest moment, the one at which he becomes a zombie. But then the action moves away from him. Inquiring minds want to know what his first few days as a zombie were like. Did he freak out? (I would.) How did he figure out how to keep himself from rotting? I like to imagine some kind undertaker took him under wing and explained the facts of undeath.

Night Watch manages to be both dark and funny. It’s just as worth reading as all of Terry Pratchett’s stuff.

Steam Trains and Ghosts

Margaret R. Taylor's Writing Blog