Tag Archives: book review

Imajica: What.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a book review on Steam Trains, but this one’s another doorstopper.  It’s the dark fantasy epic Imagica, and I almost don’t know what to say about it.

The plot is … well … the plot is not the point.  This is Clive Barker we’re talking about.  It goes something along the lines of there are other dimensions out there other than our own, and our hero and heroine (and our third character who is an it – it’s a long story) must go on a quest to save the cosmos from being ripped apart.

But the plot is most definitely not the point.  You read Clive Barker to immerse yourself in his weirdness.  Imagica is a disturbing rhapsody of magic, doppelgängers, bizarre sex, murder, theology, and oceans that make men pregnant.  Oh, and God is an evil fetus-city.  What?

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

A reclusive, bestselling author commissions our heroine to write her biography.  The two women come to loggerheads about how the story should be told almost immediately.  Margaret, the biographer (no relation to me) thinks there is more to Vida Winter than meets the eye and is determined to get to the root of the mystery whether Winter likes it or not.   What is Winter’s real name?  Where did she come from?  And where is the thirteenth tale, Winter’s fabled short story that was never published?

The first thing you will notice on starting to read this book is the Gothic use of language.  Margaret is a moody and shy lady who spends almost all of her time working in a bookshop.  A couple of pages into the book, Margaret takes a couple of paragraphs to describe a billboard by the road.  What is this? I thought.  Is Setterfield trying to write a twenty-first-century Jane Eyre here?

The answer is yes.  Big, old British mansions abound in this book, alongside ghosts, storms, madness, intrigues with the servants, illegitimate children, and, of course, a fire.  The Thirteenth Tale is an homage to the greats of the nineteenth century, which it references throughout the text.  Vida Winter’s favorite book is Jane Eyre.

That ultimately causes The Thirteenth Tale some problems.  It’s a good story, with a nice mystery and a satisfying surprise at the end.  But when you position yourself that close to Jane Eyre, how can you possibly measure up?

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Anathem is one of those books.  A tome.  A doorstopper.  An epic.  It clocks in at a couple of pounds and nearly 1,000 pages, complete with notes on the pronunciation at the beginning and a glossary and three mathematical proofs at the end.

But this is Neal Stephenson.  What were you expecting?  The premise is simple: math monks.  In a universe eerily similar to ours, society decided it would be a good idea to cloister its scientists and mathematicians in “concents” where they live ascetically and get to see the outside world every 1, 10, 100, or 1000 years, depending on their order.  Erasmas, a young fraa of the decennial order, is about to celebrate his first open house since he joined the concent ten years ago.  But as the day of the opening approaches, strange things begin to happen.  He and his scientist monk buddies have to sneak around the Wardens Regulant and the Inquisition to investigate the deepening mystery.  Many gratuitous Platonic dialogs ensue.  The reveal is just too cool to spoil here.

The characterization is decent, but in true Stephenson form, where the story really shines is in all the extra goodies he manages to pack into the text.  Like the title.  In our world, the words “anthem” and “anathema” are not etymologically related.  But what if they were?  What if they both stemmed from the same root, some ancient word still in use by monks who don’t get out much?  When one of the scientists is excommunicated from their concent, the bells ring anathem.

Puns abound.  A smattering of Latin will help you to get the most out of this book.  A good grounding in ancient history, philosophy, geometry, and physics wouldn’t hurt, either.  And don’t miss the reference to Star Trek.

If you’re up for some mental exercise and you don’t mind a rambling “plot”, check this book out.  Stephenson’s little bonuses are well worth it.

 

The equivalent of Jews in this world is the IT department.  I … can’t explain.  You’d just have to read it for yourself.

The Difference Engine

“A classic – something everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” – Mark Twain

And that’s about all I have to say about The Difference Engine. William Gibson was supposed to have almost single-handedly launched the steampunk genre with this book (though some people would make arguments about Morlock Night).  The Difference Engine is for steampunk what The Lord of the Rings is for high fantasy.

But while Tolkien is more awesome than any of his imitators, Gibson feels like he’s dealing in clichés, even if he did invent them.  There’s the plucky young woman who defies Victorian gender mores, for one.  And the hotshot computer engineer.  I quit around page 30 when I found out that in this alternate history – gasp! – Texas is its own country.

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Not going to be coming out with another review for a while.  I’m onto Anathem now, and if you know anything about Neal Stephenson … this is going to take me a long time.

Iron Angel

Before turning novelist, Alan Campbell worked on developing Grand Theft: Auto for a living, and it shows.  Not that this is a bad thing; I quite liked Iron Angel.

Campbell’s debut Deepgate Codex trilogy (Iron Angel being the middle book) is punk something or other.  Steampunk?  Gothic punk?  Dieselpunk?  None of these categories quite fits.  It’s the story of a deep, richly imagined world where life sucks.  For some deific political reason that is not fully explained (yet), the goddess of Heaven has closed her gates on the world.  If you’re dead, you’re screwed, because everybody is going to Hell now.  If you’re alive, you’re screwed anyway, because Hell is planning to stage an invasion.  Iron Angel describes the movements of the ordinary and some not-so-ordinary people who have gotten caught in the crossfire.

Campbell’s descriptive power reminds one of the work of Mervyn Peake and Clive Barker.  And if you know who those two writers are, then you should be very, very afraid of this book.  Like the bit with Cinderbark Wood.  Good Lord.  There’s a lot of brutality and you might say that humanity is in a bit of a tight spot, but it’s not all doom and gloom.  Amidst all the villains, there are some characters who are quite definitely good people, and they know how to fight.  Recommended.

The Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett

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.

The Demon and the City: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel

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.

Matter, by Iain Banks

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.

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

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.