Tag Archives: book review

Farthing by Jo Walton

farthingJo Walton’s a badly underrated writer. She’s not underrated by speculative fiction awards committees, just the public consciousness. Since the start of her career in 2000, Walton has won the World Fantasy Award, the Prometheus Award, the Nebula, and the Hugo (these last two for the same book). She could be the most decorated author you’ve never heard of.

Which is a shame. Walton does fluffy society novels, but twists them in ways you’ve never seen before. I was first introduced to her work by her 2002 novel, Tooth and Claw. It’s Pride and Prejudice if every character in it were a dragon. It’s a world where a maiden dragon’s need to maintain her “virtue” is dictated not just by custom but by biological reality.

Farthing starts out like a fluffy society novel, too. It’s set in an alternate 1949 where Britain and the Third Reich have fought it out to a draw and signed a peace treaty. At the start of our book, a bunch of flighty British nobles are cooped up in a friend’s country house for a weekend party. Sunday morning, one of the upper-class twits is discovered dead. While Inspector Carmichael tries to solve the mystery, he’s exposed to the antics of Lucy Kahn, née Eversley, a debutante who married a Jewish man, and her mother, who’s never forgiven Lucy for it. He wades through speculation about who’s sleeping with whose sister, who’s sleeping with whose servant, and who’s sleeping with other men. We see upstairs-downstairs as the servants split into factions, the ones who support Lucy’s marriage and the ones who don’t. There’s also a lot of wrangling over the difference between India tea and China tea, which still leaves me puzzled. Are these black tea and green tea, respectively?

It’s all quite amusing and fluffy until it slowly dawns on you that George Orwell is writing the novel.

That’s all I’ll say about how it ends. Though it’s a testament to Walton’s skill as a writer that while this is technically a sad ending, she manages to fill it with so much hope.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

enders-game-novel-coverEnder’s Game is a hard book to review. It’s considered one of the classics of the science fiction genre, so what do I have to say about it that hasn’t already been said?

Since the movie of the book came out last November, you probably already know how the story goes. Ender is a super-intelligent child, probably genetically engineered, who’s destined to lead Earth’s military forces against an alien insectoid race. At the age of six, he’s enrolled in Battle School with a bunch of other superkids. The teachers put them through war games that get ever more grueling until everything goes horribly wrong – or horribly right, depending whose side you’re on.

This book was just as hard to read as it is to review. One of the reasons is that Ender’s Game was never really meant to be a novel. Orson Scott Card originally published this story as a short story in 1977, then later beefed it up so he could write the sequel, Speaker for the Dead. It shows in the pacing, which goes by in fits and starts. And the ending is bizarre by a novel’s standards. Throughout the book, Ender makes the same mistake over and over again. He only means to beat his opponent, but he beats him so thoroughly he winds up killing him. At the climax of the story, Ender makes the same mistake, big time. It’s only in the denouement that he starts to change and get better.

But the biggest reason this book was so hard to read is that it’s chillingly real. Orson Scott Card is a skilled writer and he puts you through the hell on earth Ender has to go through. In my edition of Ender’s Game, Card writes in an introduction that the book’s become a manifesto for gifted children. Of course I’m nowhere near as smart as Ender, but I was a gifted child. I knew that same alienation and embarrassment when I’d run circles around my classmates academically, so the book struck close to home. Petra could have been me.

Should Ender’s Game be a manifesto for gifted children? Ender is no role model. Ender commits atrocities, and the book is never totally clear whether Ender’s a monster or just unlucky. Would any bright kid in Ender’s situation have done the same things? Does the book condone this?

I don’t know, but I want to add that I watched the movie at the same time as I read the book. It’s never destined to be classic cinema, but the movie was good. It fixed the pacing issues and lightened the story up a lot. Fine with me. It’s a great way to chase out nightmares after you’ve read the book.

One final note: the book wound up undercutting its own scariness, completely by accident. I couldn’t help snickering every single time one of the characters mentioned the Buggers. *snerk* Buggers!

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

It’s an odd experience to read a work of science fiction written before 1994 or so. These writers went to the wildest reaches of their imaginations to show us a vision of the future, and these visions included things like flying cars, nuclear apocalypse, nuclear-powered cars, robots as smart as humans (or even smarter), food pills, space aliens, and cheap and easy space travel. Then in the middle of it all, our hero picks up a newspaper made out of an actual piece of paper to find out what’s going on.

Nobody expected the Internet.

Image courtesy of YouTube.

Image courtesy of YouTube.

Erm. Sorry. But it’s true that science fiction just didn’t see this one coming. So it’s refreshing to read something by a science fiction writer who had the slightest inkling. One such writer was Neal Stephenson, who’s most famous for his 1992 cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash. The characters of Snow Crash spend much of their time in a Metaverse that looks like the Internet. Sort of.

Stephenson imagined a fanciful place where people hardly ever use boring old keyboards and touchscreens. Instead you full-on VR into the Metaverse and walk around in a 3D-rendered street that represents all the places you can go. Never mind how frustrating it would be if you couldn’t instantaneously get to your e-mail when you want to see it, it’s cool.

Hiro Protagonist is a down-on-his-luck freelance computer programmer in real life, but in the Metaverse, he’s a katana-wielding warrior prince. When a virus starts going around that fries computer programmers’ brains if they so much as look at it, Hiro must find out who’s responsible and stop them.

That’s the plot, but the plot doesn’t really matter. Stephenson loves going for the outlandish imagery. Hiro’s sidekick is Y.T., a skateboard courier who wears a piece of personal protective equipment called a dentata (go on, guess). Corporations have taken over the world and the United States has been reduced to a patch of land near the LAX airport.* We’ve got a nuclear-bomb-toting Aleutian, wireless-radio-controlled zombies, and supersonic cyborg dogs.

The crazy part is that despite all of this gonzo, Stephenson’s Metaverse doesn’t go far enough. Check out this curious passage from near the beginning of the book:

In the real world – planet Earth, Reality – there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol.

I bet you just meet tons of people who think, “Yeah, I could have Internet access, but why bother?”

Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has gutted the newspaper industry and revolutionized publishing and music. Television looks like it’s going to be next. I do all of my banking over the Internet, much of my shopping, and I call my parents and write to my coworkers over the Internet. President Obama won the election in 2008 largely because he was better at doing Internet than McCain. The United Nations has toyed with the idea that Internet access should be a human right.

Since Neal Stephenson is still very much alive, I hope he likes the brave new world he sees.

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* It bugged me throughout the novel how this world could work without any functioning national governments. For starters, if we have a modern population density and no Center for Disease Control, would AIDS, tuberculosis, or Spanish flu finish these people off first?

Twinja Book Reviews

Now here’s a blog whose time has come:

Twinja Book Reviews

Despite the name, this blog has nothing to do with twins and it’s only sometimes about ninjas. It’s a site dedicated to promoting multiculturalism in genre fiction. Great idea! In the 90’s, I was frustrated with how fantasy was stuck in a rut of medieval-Europe Tolkien knockoffs. We’ve made great strides to break out of that, but I still see a lot of urban fantasy with white people, paranormal romance with white people, and steampunk smack in the middle of Europe.

I’ve got a wishlist of things I’d love to see a fantasy writer try:

  • A fantasy epic that takes place in the medieval Arab world or Asia. More stuff like Across the Nightingale Floor, please! Or what The 47 Ronin could have been if only it had been a good movie. Sigh…
  • A steampunk that takes place in British-occupied India. That would be so cool.
  • Cultural mix-and-match works like Avatar the Last Airbender (the cartoon) and Firefly.

Have any of you got recommendations for good non-European fantasy writing? Anything you’d like to see?

Wise Child by Monica Furlough

Wise Child and its sequels all have sweet cover art.

Wise Child and its sequels all have sweet cover art.

Happy Labor Day, everyone! To commemorate it, here’s another book review:

Wise Child by Monica Furlough takes place on a remote Scottish island in the early days of Christianity. Wise Child, a bright young girl of the village, is abandoned by her parents and taken in by the local witch, Juniper. Wise Child learns to navigate Juniper’s ongoing rivalry with the village priest among gorgeous description of a time and place that’s alien to our own.

The best part of reading this book is the setting. How often do you get to read a story that takes you to Scotland in the year 700 or so? Monica Furlough has clearly done her research, too. Her descriptions are vivid – and the villagers’ ongoing struggle with starvation is especially painful. Wise Child’s cousin gets excited at being offered a glass of milk. The historical forces of the era, the introduction of Christianity to the British Isles, are an undercurrent that run through the whole story. It’s like watching Titanic. You know that the iceberg is going to win.

The book doesn’t have much of a plot, but I didn’t mind. Wise Child goes through a series of episodes as the ward of the witch Juniper. Each one is intended to let us learn more about the world than to learn about Wise Child. Wise Child grows up a bit, and at the end there’s something like a climax.

Recommended if you want to go on a historical trip.

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Discworld_PostalA great book, as is usual from Terry Pratchett, but I had some nagging issues with the plot.

Moist von Lipwing (yes, that’s his real name) is a con man who’s finally gotten caught. Lord Vetinari of Ankh-Morpork gives him a choice: execution, or a job as postmaster-general of a haunted post office. Lipwig takes the job.

From then on, the story has two major plots. The first is a Lovecraftian sort of thing. The post office is shut down, filled with piles of undelivered mail and pigeon guano. The only living beings inside are a creepy old man, his assistant, and a cat. Lipwig must get to the bottom of why all the previous postmasters-general died in this building, and what is the horrible thing that lurks under the floorboards and drives people mad.

And also, the letters are beginning to talk to him.

The other subplot features Reacher Gilt, who owns a vaguely steampunky monopoly on the semaphore lines. He’d like to see Lipwig put out of the way.

I love Moist. He’s a complex character and boy, he grows throughout this book. It’s a foregone conclusion that he hits the fast track from con man to reformed con man, but you totally believe it.

What bothered me about this story is that the Lovecraftian plot gets resolved about halfway through the book. Moist von Lipwig figures out what the abomination is and dispatches one of the major villains. After that, the book is all about the societal issues of technology and monopoly. It’s still good, but it’s a major shift in tone.

And the resolution of the other plot, the Reacher Gilt one, didn’t make much sense to me. But I read the last 1/3 of the book in one sitting, so maybe I missed something.

Recommended. Going Postal is a good standalone and it’s a good way to introduce yourself to the Discworld. And it does a better steampunk than most of the books that advertise themselves as such.

The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

9780385267472_p0_v1_s260x420I picked up this book because I’d read Hyperion and I wanted to find out what happened to all of the characters. Sadly, I was disappointed.

The first book in the series had a Canterbury Tales conceit. Seven people from all walks of life set off on a pilgrimage to see a mysterious creature, the Shrike. In The Fall of Hyperion, the Canterbury Tales is abandoned and there’s nothing left but straight space opera. The unique voices of the main characters, as they told their own tales, are gone. The entire galactic empire is at stake in this book, but somehow I don’t care.

And it drags. The Fall of Hyperion takes about 500 pages to describe a week’s worth of events. There is an entire chapter devoted to Meina Gladstone wandering through the network of worlds and worrying about things. Entirely too much time is spent rehashing events from the previous book.

Did not finish.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Hyperion_595Ah, good old space opera.

I’d thought that I’d gotten thoroughly sick of space opera because so much of it is made out of recycled material. The issue of FTL travel irks me, too. But it turns out with Hyperion by Dan Simmons, that if you do space opera well enough, it’s still quite enjoyable.

Hyperion does use recycled material. But instead of trying to file the serial numbers off of the materials Simmons got his ideas from, he decided to go whole hog the other way and see just how many references to other stuff he can cram into one book.

This book’s Galactic Empire has a backwater planet called Hyperion, home to a mysterious killing machine called the Shrike. Legend has it that if a prime number of people make a pilgrimage to see the Shrike, it will grant one of them a wish and slaughter the rest. The book follows seven people on what may be the last pilgrimage ever as they board a spaceship headed for Hyperion. On the way, they decide to take turns sharing their reasons for going. Sound familiar? It’s The Canterbury Tales in space.

What I like about the book is that Simmons turned all the material drawn from other works into an artistic statement. Ever since Earth accidentally got swallowed up by a black hole (the Fall of Rome in space), human culture has failed to progress. They can’t do anything but recycle our own popular culture. Their society’s stuck in a Space Middle Ages.

It’s fun to pick out the references. The Ousters are Space Huns. Our pilgrimage party includes a Space Templar and a Space Jesuit. The Consul’s tale is Romeo and Juliet in space. Brawne Lamia’s tale manages to be simultaneously private detective noir in space and a story about Mary Magdalene with Robot Christ.

Not to be outdone with the religious references, Simmons also includes Fehdman Kassad, a Space Muslim. Maybe in 1989 when this book was published, Islam wasn’t as sensitive a topic as it is now, but Kassad still starts life as a street fighter, rises through the ranks of military academy, and then earns the title “The Butcher of Bressia.” Awkward.

On the other hand, I think Simmons did a great job with Sol Weintraub. He could very easily have come across like this. Instead, he’s a fully rounded character who’s being forced to relive the story of Abraham. Sol’s one of my favorite characters, second only to Brawne.

And about that pesky FTL travel: Simmons acknowledges that these characters travel at relativistic speeds and they actually have to face the consequences of the time dilation. Good work, sir.

If you’ve got a background in the classics and you like spec fic, you’d find this book fun.

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

9780553293401_custom-d20a26023ec4687ff257f81593313d8876755020-s6-c30Science fiction from 1954 is a hoot!

Recently I finished The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. In a nutshell it’s a buddy cop story. To be specific, it’s a buddy cop story where one cop is a technophobe and the other cop is a robot. They’re forced to put up with each other in order to catch a killer (and it’s a foregone conclusion that they wind up friends). This might sound like a cliché, but as far as I know, Isaac Asimov was the first writer to try it.

The real fun of this story is how unintentionally amusing the New York City of the future is. It’s the year 2500 or so and Earth’s population has risen to a ghastly eight billion people. All of Earth’s land area has been turned over to cellulose farms* and the world’s human beings squeeze into steel-enclosed cities that look like crosses between Tokyo and Calcutta. The state controls all aspects of peoples’ lives, from where they can live and what food rations they can get to how many children couples are allowed to have. Yet curiously, the state fails to follow through with any form of mandatory birth control (probably because the birth control pill didn’t hit the market until six years after this book was published).

This high-tech New York is filled with millions of nuclear families that look like they walked straight out of Leave it to Beaver. Women primarily work as wives and mothers because they’re too airheaded to do anything else. Where’s Susan Calvin when you need her?

There’s all sorts of little incongruities, too. Eyeglasses drop when you break them because they’re made out of actual glass. Newspapers still exist and they’re still made out of paper, too. The police department’s most advanced computer takes two hours to search its database and the characters marvel at its speed. And yet the robot cop’s brain is so sophisticated that he regularly passes the Turing test, except when you try to talk to him about emotions. Also he’s atomic powered. Not nuclear power, atomic power.

At least there’s one familiar-looking technology in this book. The “trimensic projection” that the characters go on about so much is clearly Skype.

I’m not trying to make fun of Isaac Asimov for this book. Asimov was brilliant. But this book just goes to show that one of the smartest men alive in 1954 can get the future so wrong. It makes me wonder what we’re going to get wrong about our projections of the future.

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* The cellulose gets hydrolyzed to sugar, which then gets fed to yeast. The yeast have been genetically engineered to produce all the organic molecules we need to eat. This is in fact a really cool idea.