Tag Archives: book review

Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder

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.

The God Delusion

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.

Across the Nightingale Floor: Tales of the Otori

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?

Fool on the Hill

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:

“Vermin?! Vermin in my kitchen?  DUH-HYUN!”

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.

Why I Love the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman

Though the other books in the series were childhood favorites of mine, somehow I’d never managed to read The Wizard of Oz, the one that started it all.  Recently I got to read it for a class on the history of fairy tales and it was a delight.

As a kid, the characters of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow were my favorites.  They still are.  It was fascinating to me the way they were kind of alive and kind of not.  They have special strengths and weaknesses – the Scarecrow can be disassembled and reassembled without being hurt, but he can’t handle fire.  But the most deeply reassuring thing to my 7-year-old mind was that all the other characters were okay with that.  I used to feel different from all the other kids on the playground, and here were these characters who were so different they weren’t even human, and still they were accepted as equals.  I needed that.

L. Frank Baum, thank you for the wonderful childhood memories.

Guards! Guards!

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?

Isis

A chilling retelling of the story of Isis and Osiris, set in Victorian England.

The book is written as if it were a Victorian novel, but with wisps of modern sensibility stealing in here and there.  Iris Villiers is a Gothic heroine with a touch of supernatural power who spends her days trapped on the ancestral estate with nothing to do.   When her beloved brother Harvey dies from falling out a window, she’s willing to pay any price to bring him back from the dead.

You might want to stop reading at the end of chapter seven and pretend that chapter eight doesn’t exist.  Left there, it’s a bittersweet tale of life and death.  The real ending is tragic.  It also wins a prize for scariest use of a locked container ever.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan

A wordless graphic novel that seems to tell the story of an immigrant arriving on Ellis Island, except that this new country is like no place we’ve ever seen before.  Giant crockery dominates the landscape, trollies fly, and people keep strange animal hybrids for pets.  And yet the people in this alien landscape are familiar.  The Arrival is warm and human in the same way that impressed me so much with The Graveyard Book.  To use too many words to describe it would disturb its Zen-like quality; instead, see these excerpts for yourself.

The Arrival has won the New South Wales Premier Literary Awards’ “Book of the Year” prize and the Children’s Book Council of Australia “Picture Book of the Year” award.

Paradise Lost

The English-language literati have been reviewing Paradise Lost for centuries, so I won’t go into that here.  Is Satan a villain or a Byronic hero?  Did Milton intend people to sympathize with the Devil, or is it just a product of our modern anti-tyrannical sensibilities?  Was Milton using it as a vehicle for his anti-monarchist ideals?  It’s all been covered before, and by people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Whatever your position on Christian doctrine, you’ve got to read Paradise Lost for the special effects.  The scope of the story is epic in every sense of the word.  It starts out in Hell as Satan escapes it and flies out into the Void that surrounds the different planes of existence.  It then swings backward in time to the War in Heaven, the creation of the entire universe, scoots past the apple incident, and then flashes forward to the history of all time until the second coming.  If Milton had only been born in the right historical era, Paradise Lost would have been a blockbuster movie with a multibillion-dollar budget, all-star cast, and directed by George Lucas.  It would have been awesome.

During the War in Heaven episode, Satan and his rebel colleagues invent gunpowder in order to take the other angels unawares.  They wheel out these huge triple-barreled cannons and flatten the loyal angels with cannonballs attached to chains.  What do these angels do after literally being made into pancakes?  They pop back into shape and keep fighting.  Because angels are just that cool. That’s not even the end of it – then they scale the war up a notch:

Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power,
Which God hath in his mighty Angels placed!)
Their arms away they threw, and to the hills
(For Earth hath this variety from Heaven
Of pleasure situate in hill and dale)
Light as the lightning-glimpse they ran, they flew,
From their foundations, loosening to and fro,
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and, by the shaggy tops
Uplifting, bore them in their hands. Amaze,
Be sure, and terror, seized the rebel Host,
When coming towards them so dread they saw
The bottom of the mountains upward turned,
Till on those cursed engines’ triple row
They saw them whelmed, and all their confidence
Under the weight of mountains buried deep;
Themselves invaded next, and on their heads
Main promontories flung, which in the air
Came shadowing, and oppressed whole legions armed.

You read that right.  Those angels just picked mountains up and threw them at each other.

There are many reasons Paradise Lost would not be appropriate for a 12-year old boy, from its theological subtleties and dense prose, to Satan’s unconventional “family.”  And yet it’s got everything a 12-year-old would love: fire and brimstone, naked people, swords, space travel, God getting all Old Testament on people, and a cool villain.  All it requires to be complete is a cross-dressing sky pirate.