→ December 22, 2015
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Double Star.

My latest Insider post covers Mike Leake’s contract with St. Louis. I don’t think I’ll be able to chat this week, but will get the word out if that changes.

I picked up Robert Heinlein’s short 1956 novel Double Star just before Thanksgiving when the e-book was on sale for $1.99, but it was already on my to-do list since it won Heinlein the first of his four Hugo Awards for Best Novel. While it wasn’t among his first novels, Double Star was only his third novel geared toward the adult audience rather than the juvenile readers of most of his early work, and presaged his turn around 1959’s Starship Troopers toward this sort of more serious literature.

Double Star is the fictional memoir of the actor Lawrence Smith, a.k.a. Lorenzo Smythe, who is coerced or tricked into a job – or perhaps he just took it because he was desperate, and concocted the reasons later – that involves serving as a stand-in for a major opposition politician in the solar system-wide government, a constitutional monarchy similar to that of the United Kingdom. The politician is indisposed for at least a few days, and Smythe needs to stand in for him at a major function on Mars, after which he’s to be paid and sent back to wherever he wants, but as you can easily predict, the job lasts longer than Smythe expects.

Although Heinlein’s milieu was science fiction, with Double Star taking place on Mars, the Moon, and various ships, the science aspects of the novel are almost irrelevant to the plot itself, and often serve as a distraction. The only meaningful addition from the sci-fi setting is the hostility between humans and Martians (described in the book as an intelligent if rather horrifying-looking species), which seems like a strong metaphor for ethnocentric policies in the racially and politically divided human world, such as the nascent civil rights movement in the United States at the time Heinlein was writing the book. Most of the other science fiction elements could go by the wayside without affecting the core story; some seem patently ridiculous now (Heinlein loved to depict settlement and/or native life on Venus) or incongruous (he was fine writing about travel as far as Pluto, but has characters doing tabulations by hand rather than on computers).

Instead, Double Star is a character study that happens to have a sci-fi backdrop. Smythe/Smith is a fatuous, egotistical actor of only modest success, down on his luck when he’s first approached about the job, yet playing the prima donna in all negotiations with his employers/captors. He’s the stereotypical method actor, inhabiting the part rather than just playing it, but also manages to grow somewhat even as he’s spending less and less time being himself. The fool we laugh at in the book’s first half becomes a modest hero in the second half, as he’s asked to do things that would stretch even the strongest personalities. With Heinlein often saying that readers shouldn’t look for metaphor or subtext in his work – I don’t buy that, but hey, it’s his writing – I do think his own argument for Double Star would have been built around the character first and the story second. Here’s a cleverly crafted individual, well-rounded, capable of growth, put in a situation that starts out as difficult and ends up nearly impossible.

It’s only about 140 pages, barely even novel-length, and since most of the sci-fi stuff feels tacked on or superfluous I’m not sure about this as Hugo-worthy, although I’d guess the competition at the time was mostly pulp anyway. I’m not terribly fit to judge the book in Heinlein’s canon, though, since I still have two more of his Hugo winners, the more widely acclaimed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land, left to read.

Next up: Almost done with Dan Simmons’ Hyperion.

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→ December 19, 2015
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Stand on Zanzibar.

John Brunner’s 1968 dystopian novel Stand on Zanzibar – still just $5 for the kindle through that link, or on iBooks – goes much farther than most preceding entries in the dystopian genre, with a rich, multithreaded plot and a vision of a world headed for collapse rather than one already there. It foresaw the rising power of multinational corporations and the widening gap between developed and developing nations, as well as offering a particularly prescient take on the importance and use of big data and machine-learning techniques decades before such things were even feasible.

The core plot of Stand on Zanzibar involves the effort by General Technics, one of the world’s largest companies, to execute a de facto takeover of the economy of the small, neutral (and fictional) west African nation of Beninia, which is caught geographically and politically between two unions of neighboring countries, Dahomalia and RUNG (a union of Nigeria and Ghana). Beninia is poor but in its own way paradisical, a sort of third-world Switzerland that has managed to assimilate various invaders over the preceding millennium. GT’s effort involves help from the U.S. government via their ambassador to Beninia, Elihu, and the GT executive Norman House, an “afram” man who feels he’s abandoned his racial identity to play white so he can move up the corporate ladder.

Meanwhile, Norman’s roommate, Donald Hogan, is a synthesist – a sleeper agent of the U.S. government paid simply to learn: he reads everything he can in selected subject areas and looks for connections and patterns that only he might pick up. Yet he’s “activated” after ten years on the job and “eptified” (retrained) as an assassin so he can go to the southeast Asian power Yatakang to see if the country’s claimed ability to genetically engineer their children to create a generation of supermen has any merit.

These two plots are intertwined on the page but not in fact, as there’s no practical connection between the two stories other than their shared setting in an overpopulated 21st-century Earth where everything’s gone a bit backwards. Most of the world limits reproduction (like China’s now-discarded “one child” rule), and most U.S. states have laws prohibiting reproduction by anyone with harmful or merely undesirable traits in their genotype, from diabetes to colorblindness. Many women (called “shiggies” in the strange lexicon of the book) live without permanent addresses, living with sexual partners and moving from one apartment to the next. Technology is pervasive, although Brunner’s vision of a future fifty years hence was a bit further off in this department. And entire neighborhoods, mostly non-white ones, are unsafe to walk in, with riots breaking out frequently when the mostly-white police officers (in “prowlies”) come through.

The structure of the book follows John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy in feel and structure, with mini-chapters between the narrative chapters that offer us headlines or snippets from news stories, or vignettes of side characters whose lives are unrelated to the main plots but still reflect the declining world of the novel. Some of them are simply unreadable, coming as lists or stream-of-consciousness nonsense, while others provide useful context for the events in the narrative chapters to follow. But the constant interruptions break the flow of the overall narrative and add to the disjointed feel of a novel with two unrelated core plots that are merely set in the same world.

The one exception to everything I just wrote is the introduction of Chad Mulligan, a sociologist and commentator who, in this novel, is a successful author of popular, anti-establishment books that argue in favor of mostly libertarian values, showing very little trust of government or corporations. Mulligan’s Hipcrime Vocab is an updated Devil’s Dictionary for this fictional universe, and like Bierce’s work the entries are often very funny.

Brunner created his own vocabulary for this book, mostly to its detriment, in part because it feels very derivative of the Russian-English hybrid Anthony Burgess used in A Clockwork Orange. Terms like “shiggy,” “biv” (a bisexual person), “mucker” (someone who runs amok – a domestic terrorist, in modern parlance) are distracting enough, but his replacements for a.m. and p.m., “anti-matter” and “poppa-momma,” reek of an attempt to sound contemporary to late 1960s readers. Most sci-fi novels attempt to incorporate some sort of new vernacular, but it’s far more effective when the neologisms represent new things or ideas, rather than simply renaming something for which we already have multiple terms.

Where Brunner succeeds, however, is with the two stories; either one would have stood well on its own as a shorter novel, and together they do at least present a more complete picture of this world toward which Brunner likely saw us descending. The novel would be a sociology student’s dream, as Brunner’s focus was less on characterization (it’s not weak, but hardly a strength) than on painting this world and moving the forces within it to explore the effects. That produced a novel that is certainly readable but is even more one to ponder long after finishing.

Next up: Still working on Hugo winners, so I knocked off Robert Heinlein’s Double Star last week and have now started Dan Simmons’s Hyperion.

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→ November 3, 2015
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Starship Troopers.

My latest review for Paste covers the app version of Camel Up.

Robert A. Heinlein was both a prolific and critically-lauded writer of science fiction, with an emphasis on keeping the science somewhat grounded in the possible and using it as the platform to explore themes of liberty, individualism, and the role of government. Yet as far as I can remember, I’d only read one of his books, one of his young adult novels called Between Planets, and none of the four core Heinlein works that won Hugo Awards for Best Novel. (What I remember most strongly about that book was the absurd notion that humans could colonize Venus, but apparently at the time Heinlein wrote it scientists were unaware of that planet’s hellish atmosphere and climate.)

Starship Troopers won Heinlein the second of those four Hugos, four years after he won for Double Star and two years before his magnum opus, Stranger in a Strange Land, did the same. I was turned off from reading the book after seeing the trailer for the apparently very unfaithful 1997 film adaptation, but the book is nowhere near as dumb as the movie. (Casper Van Dien, who starred in that film version, was most recently spotted in a straight-to-DVD film called Avengers Grimm that holds a 13% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) Heinlein’s book, written as a first-person memoir of the protagonists youth and first few years serving as a space marine, touches on many of the themes I mentioned above, while also apparently drawing controversy for its overtly militaristic setting … although I don’t agree with criticism of the work as somehow pro-war or even pro-fascism.

Johnny Rico is the space marine and narrator of Starship Troopers, having defied his wealthy father’s wishes and signed up for the service, only to find himself in a boot camp of unimaginable intensity, one designed to weed out most of the recruits. In this future society, Earth is ruled by a single government, and is engaged in war against sentient ant-like creatures just called “Bugs” from another solar system, and only retired veterans of the armed forces are allowed to vote. Rico’s personal philosophy is shaped by his experiences at boot camp and through “moral philosophy” professors he encounters (although he also takes a lot of math), but his presentation is hardly such that the reader should take his views as Heinlein’s. The one-world government arose after western societies collapsed due to rampant crime, much of it committed by undisciplined juveniles, and gave rise to this military-focused regime, one that seems built to feed the machine even when no conflict exists and thus to extend any conflict when one arises.

That bit of cynicism is more mine than Rico’s, but led me to believe that Heinlein was presenting a somewhat extreme scenario – a veiled dystopia – to show one potential outcome of contemporary social and economic trends. While Heinlein seems to come down on the side of harsher discipline of errant children, he also clearly presents the one-world government as one that sees war as the answer to many questions, and thus is somewhat unable to find non-conflict resolutions. If Heinlein is praising the military at all, it is for the way that such experiences can shape the character of an undisciplined young person or one who feels no sense of personal responsibility – although in Rico’s case, it wasn’t so much a lack of discipline or responsibility as a case of teenaged rebellion and a lack of motivation to work because of his father’s wealth. The world of Starship Troopers is hardly utopian; while individuals have a wide degree of personal liberty, the lack of the franchise is a significant debit, and the war-torn world where Buenos Aires and San Francisco are “smeared” by alien attacks is hardly one to appeal to any readers and make them want to sign up for the space marines.

If anything, Starship Troopers comes across as lighter fare than the discussion around its themes might indicate; Heinlein gives Rico a colloquial tone and matter-of-fact delivery that breezes through the philosophical lectures and lets the tension of the book’s few military encounters take over. There isn’t a single central narrative; the plot is the memoir itself, rather than a single military mission or even a story of the war with the Bugs. You could just as easily read the book without worrying about whether Heinlein was promoting fascism or capital punishment or revoking most citizens’ right to vote.

Next up: Still slogging through William Faulkner’s A Fable.

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→ October 27, 2015
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Hominids.

Robert Sawyer’s name might be more familiar to those of you who watched the short-lived ABC series Flash Forward, based on his novel of the same name, but his one Hugo Award for Best Novel came four years after that book with Hominids, the first book in a trilogy that posits a parallel universe where Neanderthals won the evolutionary battle over Cro-Magnons and have since become the dominant species on their version of Earth.

The two parallel Earths are joined briefly during a quantum computing experiment gone awry in the Neanderthals’ universe, opening a portal that rather rudely deposits Neanderthal physicist Ponder Boddit in our world, smack in the middle of an underground heavy-water tank at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s real, located in the Creighton nickel mine a bit north of Lake Huron, and the director of the neutrino-detection experiment just won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics earlier this month. Sawyer grounds everything in the Homo sapiens world in reality, using real place and brand names, although some of them (Palm Pilot? Handspring?) already sound comically out of date.

Boddit’s appearance in our world and sudden, unexplained disappearance in his creates two separate storylines: one here, focusing on the mystery of his arrival and the very short-term impact on him from a substantial shock to the system; and one there, where his coworker and sort of life-partner (sexual orientation in Sawyer’s Neanderthal world is fluid) Adikor Huld finds himself accused of murder because he was the only one present when Boddit left the building. The latter story ends up the more interesting one despite what would appear to be a simpler premise, as Sawyer uses it to explore both the Neanderthals’ culture and the individual personalities of several characters, primarily Adikor himself. Boddit’s adventure on our side – which, it is clear from the beginning, can only end properly with the opening of a new portal and his return to “his” earth – feels rushed and somewhat rote, as if Sawyer had a sort of checklist of things he wanted to cover and felt compelled to hit them all.

For example, Sawyer has made the Neanderthals a nontheistic and nonreligious society, primarily to set up a scene where he attacks the Catholicism of the main female character, Mary Vaughn, who develops feelings for him during the few days they spend together; it feels forced, and a bit unlikely that the entire culture of Neanderthals would be without religion even before it had a scientific explanation for the existence of the universe or of consciousness. Mary’s character herself is also problematic – her first appearance on the pages is as a rape victim, which serves no purpose within the novel as a whole except possibly to make her more open to seeing Boddit as a fellow human because he is, in our terms, more of a “gentleman.”

Sawyer’s Neanderthals fall too much into the “noble savage” cliché, as their universe has no war, pollution, poverty, or even crime, with a global population of just over 150 million and all citizens equipped from birth with a Companion, an electronic device implanted in the wrist that measures vital signs and records locations, movements, and actions for later storage. It’s a crime-prevention device, a walking encyclopedia, and a near-complete abrogation of individual privacy in the Neanderthals’ Marxist society. It’s also terribly convenient because it allows Boddit to communicate with the people who find him on our side of the portal within a matter of hours, as the Companion can “learn” English and translate for him. (Granted, without that, the book would be a very frustrating read and probably quite boring.)

The two plots are so thin, in fact, that Hominids feels more like an extended prologue for another story than like a standalone novel. While Sawyer’s explanations of quantum mechanics and the existence of this second, parallel universe are quite clever and mostly grounded in real science, once he gets Boddit here, not a whole lot happens either in terms of action on the pages or exploration of the many ramifications of such a discovery, both scientific and anthropological.

Oh, by the way: Not that anyone should take my predictions seriously, but I’ll say Mets in 5.

Next up: Graham Greene’s first novel, The Man Within.

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→ October 18, 2015
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Lord of Light.

I’m en route to Arizona to cover the Fall League this week, so I’ll be at games Monday to Friday and hope to see many of you out there. That also means I won’t be commenting as much on the LCS till I get back home.

I have a vague recollection of someone telling me while we were both in college that he loved Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, winner of the 1969? Hugo Award for Best Novel, because it was so funny. Perhaps the memory is off, because the book is intensely clever and sardonic but only rarely funny. It’s also a bit inscrutable and, while very intelligent, it didn’t seem to have a clear point to me – if its intent was metaphorical, which I can only assume it was, I had a hard time relating its players to forces in the modern world.

The book is set in the distant future in a world other than Earth that has been populated – or, really, invaded – by humans, the first of whom are now known as the First and who have used advanced technologies to achieve a sort of immortality, where they can transplant their personae, including their memories, knowledge, and even some special abilities that I have to think inspired Gary Gygax at some point, into new bodies when their old ones are injured or wear out. These humans have taken on the identities of Hindu gods, and have used their powers to subdue the native species of the planet and deny the humans and other denizens, the rights to any advanced technologies, even the printing press, that might lead to a popular revolt against their powers.

Into this comes the Lord of Light, the reincarnation (so to speak) of the one we know as the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, Mahasamatman, or, as he prefers to be called, “Sam.” Having been divested of his mortal coil by the gods in a previous era, Sam returns to the physical realm, brought back by Yama, the “deathgod,” to challenge the status quo and perhaps return power to the people. (Deathgod is the name of my new black-metal project with members of Puig Destroyer.) This leads to a series of intrigues and bloody battles, not to mention numerous body switches, as Sam’s return leads to the revival of Buddhism, albeit with a lot of killing that the real-life Buddha would not have liked one bit.

Some of the repartee between Sam and his various Hindu-pantheon antagonists is indeed humorous, but I sensed more satire or even farce in that and in the cartoonish violence of the numerous clashes between Sam and whoever’s fighting on his side in that particular melée and the main “gods” on the other side who will stop at nothing to maintain their grip on power. Was Zelazny, a lapsed Catholic, mocking the religion-fueled wars that define so much of human history? Or merely taking aim at tyranny and the increasingly brutal steps any dictatorship must take to maintain its hold on power, especially once technologies take hold in the populace and allow for the faster spread of information? (Witness how closed North Korea must remain to keep its people in the most abject state-mandated poverty.) Is he calling into question the historicity of key religious figures, like Gautama or Jesus? Or is there nothing more to this than a giant free-for-all that features power-hungry people playing with weapons that no single person should possess?

I think I got more from Lord of Light as an obvious influence on the work of Neil Gaiman, who’s quoted on the cover of the book, than as a story in its own right. It’s impossible to read this work and not immediately think of what Gaiman did in American Gods, and did far more successfully, not just stealing names but repurposing myths and then writing his own legends, an exponential improvement on Zelazny’s work but one that may have needed Zelazny to come first and open the door.

Evaluated on its own, however, Lord of Light seemed rather soulless, no pun intended. (Okay, pun intended.) Although the reader is obviously supposed to side with Sam, he comes across as a disinterested revolutionary, one driven neither by self-interest nor selflessness, only pushed by the desire to topple the gods themselves. None of the characters earns much development or depth, which is disappointing in cases like Tak, the ape with an apparently human brain and personality, who deserves a back story here as much as any more central character. The gods want power because they want power. They desire their immortality (as opposed to the “real death”) because, hey, immortality – but allowing the proletariat to reincarnate themselves via mind transfer won’t end that practice. Without fleshing out his characters, Zelazny presented us with a work of great ingenuity that ultimately isn’t much less cold than hard science fiction works like Rendezvous with Rama that focus so much on the technical details that the authors forget the need to craft characters with whom the reader can identify or at least to whom they can relate.

Next up: My posts are a bit behind my reading but I’m currently about ¾ of the way through Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, which I already like more than I liked either of the other two Pynchon novels I read, including the impenetrable Gravity’s Rainbow.

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→ September 8, 2015
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Red Mars.

I have a scouting blog up with notes from three games I saw last week, covering Jeff Hoffman, Gleyber Torres, Matt Strahm, Spencer Adams, and Brad Markey.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy won a Nebula Award for the first book (Red Mars), Hugo Awards for the second (Green Mars) and third (Blue Mars), and Locus Awards for the second and third, as well as a passel of other awards and nominations. I just finished Red Mars, the dense 570-page opener, on Friday, and I can’t fathom why it won the Nebula or has spawned a cult following that appears to be leading toward a scripted series on Spike TV.

The Mars trilogy covers the first human attempt to colonize Mars, with a mission leaving Earth in 2026 (heh) with 100 colonizers chosen largely for their scientific and engineering skills. The goal is merely to establish a permanent settlement that may open the door for further research and potential economic activity like heavy-metal mining, but as conditions on Earth deteriorate due to war, pollution, and overpopulation, emigration to Mars becomes a reality and accelerates beyond the point that the red planet can handle it – especially since Mars is freezing and its thin atmosphere comprises mostly carbon dioxide. This in turn exacerbates the initial philosophical divide among the “first hundred” of whether humans should attempt to terraform Mars and make it suitable for long-term human settlement, or if humans have any responsibility to maintain the planet’s environment and, if present, any ecosystem that might exist at a microscopic level.

Red Mars is hard science fiction, very heavy on the technical aspects of its subject, with painstaking attempts to keep it as scientifically accurate as it can be. That means the book is about as dry as the Martian equator, as Robinson devotes paragraphs and even pages to details that contribute nothing to the plot and only serve to show that the author has indeed done his research. I can understand the desire to convince the reader that something like the space elevator transportation system is feasible, for example, but the point of including it in a work of fiction should be to show its effect on the characters within the story, not merely to say, “hey, cool, a space elevator!”

Robinson seems so caught up in demonstrating the technologies required for the mission and his mastery of their specifics that he spends very little time developing the book’s central characters, roughly a dozen of the first hundred who play significant roles in the novel’s multistranded story arc. Two of the most significant ones are dead before the book even ends, as are a few characters of less importance, and while many dramatic works benefit from the uncertainty around characters’ fates, Red Mars isn’t one of them. There’s no sense of impending jeopardy to raise tensions, and when the novel ends with a lengthy journey where several of the first hundred escape from Terran forces, I never doubted that they’d succeed in reaching their destination. And, most damning of all, I didn’t really care if they didn’t, so long as Robinson didn’t bore me to death first with details of how their little rovers worked or more about that bizarre flood that, even with all his descriptive text, I still could not for the life of me manage to picture in my head.

So my question to those of you who’ve braved this series is whether it’s worth it to continue, as I’ve been reading past Hugo winners, which would include both of the next two books in the series. My instinct is no, that the issue was Robinson’s writing style, and that seems unlikely to improve from book to book, at least not enough for me to plod through another 1200 pages.

Next up: I just finished A Bell for Adano, a wonderful satirical war novel by John Hersey (author of the famed New Yorker piece Hiroshima) and have begun Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.

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→ July 13, 2015
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Ringworld.

My Futures Game recap is up for Insiders.

I read six books on my vacation – fortunately, my wife and I both subscribe to John Waters’ philosophy on lovers and books – including four of my favorite authors/series (Poirot, Nero Wolfe, Flavia de Luce, and a standalone P.G. Wodehouse novel), as well as two new authors, including Larry Niven’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel Ringworld. Like Arthur Clarke’s similarly-acclaimed Rendezvous with Rama, Ringworld is a work of hard science fiction, in this case playing off a popular concept in physics and speculative science (the Dyson Sphere) and turning it into a lengthy adventure story involving the discovery of a distant world. It’s also surprisingly dull for a story that has as much action as Ringworld does, perhaps because most of the plot elements are so hackneyed.

Set in a distant future where man has explored a wider corner of the galaxy, encountering at least three alien races, the story has four explorers setting off on a mission to reach the structure of the story’s title, an artificial planet of sorts shaped like a ring around a distant sun. The crew is assembled by a two-headed creature called a puppeteer, who has deliberately selected three specific members – two humans, and one giant feline creature called a kzinti – for this mission, itself a response to the discovery that the Milky Way’s core is going to break down in a massive chain reaction in about 20,000 years. The puppeteers have already begun a massive migration, but it becomes clear that they want to see if copying Ringworld would accommodate them in another system.

Niven has explicitly said that he modeled the world after the Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical structure built around a star capable of capturing all of that star’s energy to supply the needs of the species that built it. Dyson recognized that per capita energy usage rises as a civilization becomes more technologically advanced – how many devices are you charging at the moment? – and conceived this structure as a totally crazy, speculative solution as well as a theoretical maximum on the energy available to that civilization, given that solar energy would dwarf any energy from nonrenewable sources. Niven has the unfortunate tendency to give the reader too much of the physics, generally in awkward dialogue between these impossibly-educated crew members, which doesn’t do much to help keep the story moving. Where Niven has to deviate from known or even hypothetical physics – the familiar “hyperdrive” of most science fiction gets stretched even further than normal – he spares us the details, which works much better because you’re only reading this book if you’re already willing to suspend your disbelief in things like travel at or faster than the speed of light. (Niven actually has an amusing bit of handwaving about this that I won’t spoil.)

Science fiction that relies this heavily on the science portion for seizing and maintaining reader interest worked for me when I was a teenager, but now it leaves me cold; I want fiction that tells me a story, preferably one that examines some fundamental aspects of human nature. (Granted, that’s tricky with a kzinti who might eat his shipmates or a puppeteer who rolls into a ball when scared as part of the crew.) Niven could have used his plot device as a way to consider the eventuality that we will fill the planet, or reach a point where we can’t increase our per capita energy consumption, but he blows right past that to get his quartet on Ringworld, where they find … well, not very much. And what they find is bizarre, often inexplicable, and impossible to picture with Niven’s rather stolid prose.

Ringworld isn’t a slow or arduous read, however – the writing isn’t complex, the sentences are pretty short, and most chapters function as self-contained stories. It may have been more praiseworthy in its day, but given some of the recent Hugo winners that have put storycraft over the sci-fi or fantasy elements, it feels very dated.

Next up: I just finished Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle and started Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours on the flight back from Humid City this morning.

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→ June 14, 2015
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The Graveyard Book.

Neil Gaiman won his first Hugo Award for Best Novel for his modern epic American Gods, a masterful blend of pagan mythology and magical realism that breathes some life into the generally-overused Chosen One plot structure, thanks in large part to Gaiman’s prodigious imagination. After withdrawing the related book Anansi Boys from consideration for the same honor in 2006, he won the prize a second time for his young adult novel The Graveyard Book, which brings his same charming prose style and clever world-building mind to a gentler story without most of the violence or sex that populate those two earlier works.

There’s an exception to that last bit, and it’s at the start of the book, perhaps the most overused trope in all of young-adult literature (and not a few Disney movies): The orphaned child protagonist. The toddler to soon be known as Nobody “Bod” Owens wakes in a house where his parents and sister have just been knifed to death in their sleep, escaping only due to happenstance and his own wanderlust, ending up in the local disused graveyard where the deceased denizens protect him from the killer. Bod grows up in the graveyard, raised by the Owens (dead for a few hundred years), watched by the not-quite-dead guardian Silas, forbidden to leave the cemetery grounds for fear it will expose him to his would-be murderer, Jack.

Of course, you know the story has to end with Bod facing Jack one final time, and since this is a children’s book, Bod’s going to come out all right, so the onus is on Gaiman to create tension within each of the episodes leading up to the 80-page chapter where the final confrontation occurs. Gaiman infuses Bod with the curiosity of most children, only partly sated by the attempts of the graveyard’s dwellers to educate him, leading him to various excursions outside of and underneath the cemetery itself, setting up the series of events or points of interest that will all come into play in the last battle.

The core story is straightforward, as you’d expect in a self-contained, 300-page young adult novel, but Gaiman has populated his necropolis with a small cast of eccentrics – I suppose expecting the shades to be simply drawn was unreasonable – that bring to mind everyone from Robert Altman to Jasper Fforde. They’re not weirdos, just dead and a little outdated, and have much to teach Bod (and the young reader) about the value of life and living it with just as much (or little) fear as is necessary.

But the book is just as much for the parent reading with or alongside the child; this is very much a book about rearing a son or daughter and learning to let go the older the child gets. Bod’s search for independence and agency is far from unusual; all things considered, he’s a rather compliant child, curious but only occasionally reckless, bailed out a couple of times by Silas or one of the other spirits who’ve been raising him. He touches something hot (metaphorically speaking), gets burned, and learns not to do it again; no matter how many times you say “don’t touch that,” you know the child won’t really believe you until s/he tests your admonition out in the flesh. And when Bod has to fight the final battle without Silas’ protecting, albeit with lots of help from his noncorporeal family, he comes of age right before us in a satisfying but far from entirely happy ending.

My daughter just turned nine, but I think the traumatic introduction where Bod’s family is killed offscreen might upset her a little too much; she was fine with Lily and James Potter dying, but that occurred before page 1 and it’s a lot less real to read of someone dying via spell than dying via blade. I’ll keep the book and leave it to her own judgment to decide when she wants to tackle it.

Next up: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

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→ February 17, 2015
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Ancillary Justice.

My latest boardgame review for Paste magazine covers the 2014 engine-building game Evolution.

Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch) ran the table of major sci-fi awards, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards for Best Novel (among other prizes) in 2014 and spawning two upcoming sequels to complete the “space opera” trilogy. Leckie devised a clever twist to give Ancillary Justice a different flavor from any novel I’ve seen before, but that didn’t infuse the story with the narrative greed I’d expect from an award-winning science-fiction book.

The protagonist of Ancillary Justice is an “ancillary,” a human body with an AI cognitive function, one recently separated from the ship that previously ruled its actions. In the world Leckie has created, spaceships run on powerful, all-seeing systems with their own artificial intelligences, and they extend their reach and powers via ancillaries – various prisoners who’ve been placed in cryogenic suspension, reanimated, and fitted with various technical implants, from armor to the system that connects them to the ship’s central nervous system. That means that each ancillary functions as a small part of a larger whole – Breq, the protagonist, can recall seeing with dozens of pairs of eyes when she was still part of the ship Justice of Toren. These ships and ancillaries are all under the command of the Radch, a mysterious authority that rules a large swath of its galaxy, adding to its dominion via ruthless “annexations” that tend to involve a lot of killing of innocents.

Breq’s ship is gone, described in one of the book’s many flashbacks, essential to understanding why Breq is trying to obtain a rare weapon and go kill one of the many bodies of the Radch’s monarch, Anaander Mianaai, even though such a move won’t actually destroy the ruler herself. The novel itself begins with a long tangent where Breq, arriving on the snowbound planet of Hilt (why is there always a frigid, snow-covered planet in these books?), comes across a dying woman named Seivarden lying face-down in the snow. Recognizing the former lieutenant, Breq chooses to save the woman’s life, further complicating her own mission yet giving Leckie more room to explain the Radch’s history.

That lengthy introductory section lasts maybe a third of the book, and while there may be a payoff later in the trilogy, it contributed to the novel’s lack of plot interest. I understood why Breq wants to kill one of the many Anaander Mianaais running around the galaxy; I just couldn’t bring myself to care all that much, at least not to the point where I was reading because I wanted to know what happened next. The plot is antiseptic, fully functional yet without color or emotion – befitting a story that is ultimately about a battle between artificial intelligences, I suppose.

Leckie’s use of an atypical protagonist likely contributed to the slew of awards she won for Ancillary Justice, and it allowed her to touch on a pair of themes that resonate quite strongly today, perhaps also boosting her stock with judges. One such theme is the question of privacy in an increasingly wired, digital era. Every ship and space station is “alive” via AI, and sees and knows everything that’s going on within, to the point of monitoring individuals’ heart rates and facial expressions, analyzing them for potential threats. The Radch continues to annex more territories, giving the targets no choice in the matter, forcing them to cede their land and any individual freedom they may have had prior to the Radch’s arrival.

Leckie also explores the question, although I suppose it’s settled within the novel, of how much control we’re willing to surrender to our computers. AIs rule every ship, station, or planet we encounter in the book, and there’s very little thought given to whether this is optimal because it’s been that way for at least a thousand years. The Radch is ruled according to a quasi-mystical (rather Confucian) set of principles, including Justice, that considers the Greater Good without giving any visible weight to the individual. On the one hand, that means personal freedom gets trampled by the Radch whenever there’s a conflict. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure everyone in the Radchaai empire is vaccinated.

Leckie gets too cute by half with her forays into language and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, never committing to it enough for a real exploration of its relevance, choosing instead to toy with questions of gender or Arabic/Korean-style questions of declensions that vary based on the level of respect due to whoever you’re talking to. It reads like an idea she had early in the novel’s development, then gradually abandoned as she became more enmeshed in the broader AI-focused plot.

Ancillary Justice reads more like a novel you’d analyze and discuss than one you might read for pleasure. The lack of any emotional connection between the reader and Breq, or even to the specific incident that triggered her rebellion against Anaander Mianaai, makes it a desultory read, failing to generate enough interest in getting to the book’s conclusion – a strong one, easily the book’s best segment, but not enough to make up for what came before. If you’re more invested in the backstory of why Breq ended up severed from her ship, and why she’s engaging on a seemingly futile one-ancillary mutiny against a ruler who can’t be killed – and as I type that I think that sounds like a pretty good story – you’ll likely enjoy the book more than I did.

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The Diamond Age.

Neal Stephenson won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1996 for his novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, a postcyberpunk bildungsroman that can’t survive under the weight of its own self-importance. While Stephenson managed to create a credible Gibsonian universe in his earlier hit, Snow Crash, here his worldbuilding detracts from the story about the titular book that might be able to reprogram the future of humanity, and his hifalutin language doesn’t meld well with the story’s focus on a child protagonist.

The “primer” of the book’s title is a “ractive” book (short for “interactive” … I’m not a fan of this kind of conlang/argot shit, which ends up little more than an annoying distraction), designed by the engineer John Hackworth for Lord Gussie Fink-Nottle (close enough) using nanotechnology and I think what we’d now call a 3-D printer, designed to raise a young girl – the Lord’s granddaughter, and, via a pirated copy, Hackworth’s daughter – to be a hypereducated, worldly, creative young adult. The copy intended for Fiona Hackworth ends up in the hands of an impoverished, abused girl named Nell, brought to her by her scapegrace brother, Harv, setting in motion a great and possibly unintended sociological experiment pitting nature against nurture – not a mother’s nurture, but a surrogate in the form of the actress, Miranda, who performs nearly all of the “ractive” functions in the Primer for Nell.

The Primer itself is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure hepped up on nanotech; in fact, Stephenson’s whole universe here revolves around nanotechnology, where static objects can be built in Matter Compilers, and nanosites – microscopic entities designed to perform specific functions in the air or within someone’s body – abound, including security infrastructures that must have the NSA seething with envy. (The book’s very title was coined by cryptography pioneer and nanotechnology researcher Ralph Merkle, whose great-uncle made a certain boner with which you, being a visitor to this particular blog, are likely familiar.) Stephenson’s vision of an age of nanotechnology, combined with a dark post-nationalistic viewpoint where communities are organized in “phyles” that called to mind the guilds of early RPGs, is so overly and unnecessarily complex that it overwhelmed the core storyline of Nell’s education and maturation through her experiences with the Primer. The “Drummers” hive-mind phyle is one of the novel’s bigger messes, ambiguously-described yet central to the operation of the Primers and, ultimately, to the resolution of the plot.

My other, secondary problem with The Diamond Age was the absurd vocabulary Stephenson used in it – perhaps a nod to its underpinnings in Victorian literature, but coming off as stilted and sometimes inappropriate to the characters in question. Nell is only about eleven or twelve years old when she has this thought:

It was just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications the more closely she read it.

Now, maybe all of you knew the word “anfractuous” from childhood, but I only encountered it sometime in the last two years, somewhere in The Recognitions or Gravity’s Rainbow or some classic from the 1800s that routinely sent me to the dictionary. It’s a valid English word, actually a pretty useful one, but you’re never going to hear that or “ramifications” in the internal monologue of a preteen. Stephenson’s either showing off or incapable of capturing the vernacular of someone that age – and the whole book is full of maddening word choices like these.

The shame of this incoherence is that Stephenson buried what might have been a remarkable novel of ideas, one that merely uses the platform of his nanotech universe to explore the roles of community, government, family, education, and religion in a world where we’re that much closer to the singularity. Even one of those topics would make the foundation for a good novel, although I can’t blame Stephenson – who’s not afraid to be prolix in his prose – for aiming high. Unfortunately, the resolution of the story is so muddled, both in plot and in philosophy, that by the end of the book it wasn’t even clear how we’d gotten there, much less whether there was a point to any of this.

Next up: As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m tackling Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and it is indeed an excruciating read.

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