All I need to say to recommend this book, really, is to mention that Terry Pratchett wrote it.
It’s ostensibly a Christmas book, in the same way The Nightmare Before Christmas is ostensibly a movie about Christmas. When the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus goes MIA, Death fills in for him. Hilarity ensues. And dang it, the guy manages to sneak in a reference to DOCTOR. In a fantasy novel about Christmas.
Meet Singapore Three … a city set in a future that’s just around the corner, a nexus of cultures where you can find nanobots and whorehouses, magical drugs and fried noodles, seedy slums and the estates of the rich. And gods and demons from several major religions walk the earth.
Zhu Irzh is a rookie cop in the Singapore police department. He’s here on a work visa because he was born in Hell. The Demon and the City is a fascinating send-up of the noir genre, several world mythologies, and some received notions about good and evil. The trouble starts when Zhu Irzh has to investigate a murder while his partner is on vacation. Naturally, matters escalate until there’s a hopping-mad goddess on the rampage in the city, and Zhu Irzh and his friends have to save the day.
Though Williams’s vision of Singapore is fun, it’s the characters that really make this book worth reading. You can never be sure who is a good guy and who is a bad guy, and there is always an ulterior motive. (The murderer is not, absolutely not, who you would expect.) Zhu Irzh is a demon. He’s supposed to be Evil. So why does he have to keep whacking himself upside the head when he starts to care?
One of the characters is a badger who can shapeshift, at will, into the form of a teakettle.
The Demon and the City is part of a series, so there were references to past events that I hadn’t read about, but it wasn’t hard to catch up. In fact, Liz Williams might be trying a little too hard to bring us up to speed. Characters discuss things with each other that they would already know. At one point, Zhu Irzh remarks to one of his colleagues, “I am a demon, you know.”
But it’s a minor fun in a book that was a lot of fun to read. This book pushes the envelope – is it urban fantasy or is it science fiction? I’m definitely going to be looking up the other books in the Detective Inspector Chen series.
A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
All right, Iain Banks is not an idiot. You can tell by the way he writes that he’s actually quite intelligent. Here’s the deal: in the far-distant future, humans (or at least some species that looks a lot like us) have spread all over the galaxy in an anarchist utopia with easy FTL, strong AI, and near godlike technology. They live in a postscarcity economy and the AIs do all the work, so ordinary citizens can do pretty much whatever they want. One wonders why they bother to do anything at all.
Against this conflict-free backdrop, a minor diplomatic intrigue slowly develops over the course of the book on the planet of Sursamen. Much late-night cavorting in nanotech bars and descriptions of planet-sized engineering projects ensues. Eventually, the intrigue gets to the point where the whole planet is threatened and Djan Seriy Anaplian, secret agent, must save the day. The ending is depressing all but one of the characters I like dies horrifically. Even then, nothing that happens on Sursamen matters, because it is only one of literally hundreds of thousands of inhabited worlds in this universe.
Why did Banks bother to spend 600+ pages to tell us this? Well, to show off the high-tech special effects. If you like intricate, high-concept scientific wordplay, this book is for you, but if you were looking for plot, look elsewhere.
I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but the novel just didn’t have the same charm as its movie adaptation.
First, a little background: Howl’s Moving Castle is better known as an anime film by veteran filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, that guy who manages to produce hit after hit after hit like Pixar. (He’s also responsible for Princess Mononoke and Ponyo). Howl’s Moving Castle the movie is a richly layered fairy tale with a Beauty and the Beast love story at its core. The characters are complex and original. The visuals are stunning.
So, the novel that Miyazaki got his idea from must be great, right? Well … all of the characters have the same names. That’s about as far as the resemblance carries.
Diana Wynne Jones was not trying to write a fairy tale when she wrote Howl’s Moving Castle the book. Her aim was more of a madcap comedy. And a mystery. …and a romance … and a parody. The final product ends up being none of these, not quite. On top of much of the material found in the film, Howl’s Moving Castle the book contains an entire extra dimension, a shapeshifting dog-man, a John Donne poem, several cases of mistaken identity, and an evil plot by the Witch of the Waste that’s introduced in the last chapter and makes absolutely no sense. There’s so much clutter in here that the poor characters are shunted to the sidelines, mere shadows of themselves. Diana Wynne Jones writes like she’s trying to cover ground.
Miyazaki was right to pare the story down to what really matters: Howl’s heart and who it belongs to. By doing so, the movie has a living heart, too. The novel has a heart in there, but it’s hard to see under all those layers of stuff.
To sum up, rather blah. One of the redeeming features of the novel was its send-up of traditional fairy tale elements, but if you’re in the mood for that, go read Terry Pratchett. Go read Terry Pratchett right now.
You’ve just got to read more of a book that has this as its opening line:
Hayden Griffin was plucking a fish when the gravity bell rang.
The rest of Karl Schroeder’s Sun of Suns lives up to the promise delivered in the first line, at least in the setting department. Hayden Griffin’s world is a giant bag of gas with a fusion reactor at the center to give light. Cities are wheels that spin for local gravity so that people’s bones don’t degenerate. People hunt for flying fish in nearby clouds and farm on clumps of dirt caught in nets. Cue lots of airship travel and zero-g aerial battles. Oh, and outside the giant gasbag? It’s a post-singularity far-future SF that’s only being kept at bay because the fusion reactor scrambles electronics.
In short, the setting of Sun of Suns is exotic, cool, and creative. Everything else about the book is … well, okay. The plot: Hayden Griffin is out for revenge against an admiral who ordered an attack on his home city. The characters: I’m not buying Hayden’s rather sudden character growth at the end. It feels like Schroeder deliberately put dimensionality into his characters rather than letting it grow. And somehow he manages to make sky pirates not awesome. They are also okay.
Overall, Sun of Suns reminds me of Larry Niven’s Integral Trees, but better. Integral Trees had a really cool setting with characters you don’t care a whit about. Sun of Suns has a really cool setting with characters you can kinda sorta care about. Plus, it’s the first book in a trilogy, so maybe Hayden and his friends will get more interesting as the story develops.
Okay, I admit it, Richard Dawkins is being a jerk on purpose. But he’s a jerk who knows how to write well, and compared to the stuff you find in YouTube video comments, he’s downright gentlemanly.
Take the section called “Deserved Respect,” for example. In it, Dawkins says he doesn’t have a problem with a conception of God as a sort of transcendent all-oneness, or a marvelous somethingness that’s immanent in the whole universe, or a source of wonder. He just thinks we should call it something else.
When he describes certain religious traditions, he really, really tries. He takes pains to point out that some highly sophisticated theists are close friends of his. Words like “nonsense” and “bunk” slip out from time to time, but you can practically hear the poor fellow biting his tongue. When you agree with him, the book is thoroughly enjoyable; when you disagree with him, the sensation is something like being gently but insistently jabbed in the ribs. I did both, depending on the chapter.
The God Delusion’s real enemy is the God who hates gays and will sentence you to eternal damnation for thinking bad thoughts. Theists and non alike can agree that fighting hate and ignorance is a good idea, right? I recommend this book, even if it makes you feel like you want to throw it across the room. It’s eloquent, funny, and a mind-expander.
There’s an unwritten rule in the zombie flick genre that you’re not allowed to use the z-word. Call them anything else you like, revenants, unmentionables, the infected, the restless dead, but they are not – are not – zombies. Because to call them zombies would be to acknowledge that you’ve got zombies in your movie.
Something like that is going on in Across the Nightingale Floor: Tales of the Otori by Lian Hearn. Takeo is a freaking ninja. Sure, in the context of the story, they say he’s a member of the Tribe, a nomadic people who dress in black and perform political assassinations for people. Maybe Hearn wants to escape the stigma of writing a book about ninjas. But you know what? That’s okay. Takeo is so cool, and the book is so well written, that I don’t much care what he calls him.
Takeo grew up in a peaceful farming village with his mother and stepfather. When this village gets sacked by the evil bad guys, he’s taken in by a mysterious stranger, learns some surprising things about who his real father was, and goes into secret ninja training to defeat the evil overlord. This plot may sound a little familiar. But it’s spiced up with some delicious political machinations (you may find it helpful to take notes) and a writing style that sucks you into Takeo’s world. Just check out these lines from the opening page:
But when I did get back, muddy from sliding down the hillside, bruised from fighting, once bleeding great spouts of blood from a stone wound to the head (I still have the scar, like a silvered thumbnail), there would be the fire, and the smell of soup, and my mother’s arms not tearing me apart but trying to hold me, clean my face, or straighten my hair, while I twisted like a lizard to get away from her.
Across the Nightingale Floor is a vision of a Japan that never was. You can practically smell the persimmons and the frying eels. There’s an intense psychological realism, both for Takeo and his love interest, the lady Kaede. The end leaves several issues hanging, so now I want to get my hands on the other two books in the trilogy.
And did I mention that there are ninjas?
Is it ever a good idea for a magician to explain his tricks? When you find out the mechanics behind an illusion, it leaves you feeling disappointed when you realize there isn’t really any magic involved. Even worse to be shown how a hot dog is made. There are some things man was not meant to know. It should come as no surprise, then, that when Matt Ruff shows us the ugly workings of how a story is made in his novel Fool on the Hill, he gets mixed results.
That I felt that there was some wish-fulfillment going on in this book would be an understatement. S. T. George is a multiply-published, rich and famous author who has a writer-in-residence post on the campus of Cornell University. He slays a dragon by story’s end and gets the girl, and no, I am not revealing any spoilers by saying this. Along the way he gets to have fantastic sex with a goddess. George is too much of a dork to accomplish any of these things by himself, so we get to see the god Apollo manipulate events in his life into the shape of a story.
Fortunately, the side characters – and the prose itself – are good enough to make up for a bland leading man and love interest. (Her name is Aurora and she’s a Daddy’s little princess – three guesses as to what happens to her.) This alternate Cornell is populated by pixies, a possessed mannequin, and Ragnarok, the Black Knight. Ragnarok is an undergraduate haunted by his past in the Klan and interesting enough to be the main character of a book in his own right.
Matt Ruff is a master of the throwaway reference, rivaling Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics and perhaps even besting him for the sheer density of the things. One of the characters (he’s a talking dog) approaches a pair of canine philosophers to ask them about the nature of the divine. They inform him that they are waiting for Dogot, and ask him whether he has seen him. No mention of this incident is ever made again. There is also the case of the best scene of the book, when the villain’s rat army is preparing to take over Cornell’s dining hall. They forgot to account for the hall’s head chef:
The chef is Swedish, in case you were wondering.
Ruff is also capable of writing beautiful prose … when he feels like it.
“Are you real?” he asked her, still dizzy from the fall.
“What?” Myoko glided up to him. “You been into something heavy tonight, Li?”
He didn’t answer, but reached out gently to touch her, as if fearing that she too might whirl and vanish. He clasped her hand in his, marveling at the feel of solid flesh and bone; he brushed his fingertips against her cheek.
True, there are so many gonzo occurrences in this book that it can only be called a WTF book, but it’s a good kind of WTF book. The plot is contrived. Ruff acknowledges that it’s contrived, and even goes to lengths to show us how he … I mean Apollo … contrived it. As a writer, I’m quite familiar with the manipulations that Ruff/Apollo undergoes to get characters in the right places so that coincidences can happen. I’m just not sure if it belongs in a finished product. When an author tells us he’s about to employ a deus ex machina, it’s not as much fun anymore.
A Jewish grandma who fled Europe in 1944 tells her granddaughter a variant on the Sleeping Beauty tale in which a poisonous mist kills everybody in the princess’s hometown. Eh. I saw that twist ending coming.
This might be perfectly enjoyable for the younger set, though.
The first time I started reading this book, I didn’t get it. I gave up in disgust when I got to the point where the Librarian was an orangutan. Real fantasy wasn’t supposed to be absurd! It was supposed to have magic spells in it!
Only the efforts of many friends singing Terry Pratchett’s praises finally convinced me to pick it up again. Now I realize the guy is freaking brilliant. Discworld still doesn’t make a lot of sense, but the fantasy isn’t the point, it’s the characters.
Guards! Guards! is about guards. Those faceless people who get killed off in droves in your typical fantasy story while the readers yawn. Only these guards get names. Not only do they get names, but they get backstory, and character development, and a romantic subplot. They even get to save the day. Terry Pratchett focuses a lens on our foibles and some of the less admirable aspects of human nature. Ankh-Morpork doesn’t sound like a place I would like to live. And yet, while optimistic would be too strong a word, Guards! Guards! is eminently hopeful.
And who could resist going all fangirl all over Commander Vimes?