→ October 22, 2018
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A Deepness in the Sky.

Vernor Vinge has won three Hugo Awards for Best Novel, including A Fire Upon the Deep, the first book in his so-called “Zones of Thought” series, as well as the cyberpunk-lite Rainbow’s End, but in both cases Vinge focused more on the hows of the science in his science fiction than on the story or characters. The third winner was his longest, A Deepness in the Sky, the second book in the Zones of Thought series but taking place hundreds of years before the preceding book, and despite its length and Vinge’s usual prolixity, for once he gives the reader a plot with some teeth and a few truly intriguing, three-dimensional characters. At a girthy 775 pages, it’s not for everyone and perhaps not worth the time investment, but compared at least to the other two Vinge novels I’ve read, it was the best and most enjoyable read.

The long and often confusing setup to the A Deepness in the Sky boils down to two storylines. Two human forces have both reached a new star system, with the star referred to as OnOff for its bizarre cycle of going dark every hundred years* or so, and with one planet occupied by a sentient non-human race known colloquially as Spiders. One force is the Qeng Ho band of interstellar traders, who also appear in A Fire Upon the Deep, while the other are the Emergents, a belligerent group unafraid to use violence or coercion and, as becomes clear a bit later in the book, willing to use humans as high-tech slaves by reprogramming their minds to Focus on specific tasks. The two sides agree to work together and almost immediately betray each other, with the Emergents coming out on top, leaving just a handful of Qeng Ho characters, including the mysterious old man Pham Trinli, the younger leader Ezr Vinh, and the precocious young Qiwi Lin Lisolet, who grows from annoying child to central character over the course of the novel, to try to free their side from the Emergents’ grip.

* Vinge is too clever by half with his way of telling time in the book, referring to everything in terms of seconds, so thus using Ksec (kiloseconds) or Msec (megaseconds) rather than weeks, months, or years. It may have some veneer of accuracy, since our definition of a year is tied specifically to this planet, but it is annoying as hell to read, and it’s not as if Vinge adheres to this idea of planet-independent language throughout the book.

Meanwhile, on the planet in question, the Spiders themselves are growing into a high-tech civilization, led by the eccentric polymath Sherkaner Underhill, who develops technologies that allow his specific country to survive the Dark years when their sun goes dim and the planet experiences a deadly deep freeze. Unaware that they’re being observed by aliens, Underhill and his colleagues are also pushing a cultural change that threatens the ‘natural’ order of things, defended by a right-wing religious group called the Kindred. The Emergents view the Spiders as a culture to be exploited, even more so when the Spiders discover a mineral that contains anti-gravity properties, while the remnants of the Qeng Ho hope to save themselves and the Spiders from that and the massacres that would precede the Emergents’ invasion.

Vinge’s specialty has always been his ability to conceive futuristic technologies and incorporate them thoroughly into his plots – although, again, that can work to the detriment of the story – and that’s especially true here of the “localizers,” a sort of smartdust tech that Pham Trinli trades to the Emergents, with an ulterior motive, and that allows the Emergent leader Tomas Nau to create a police state aboard their ships as they orbit the Spiders’ planet. These nanodevices, some floating and some embedded on people or objects, allow Nau and his sadistic enforcer Ritser Brughel to monitor everyone under their command and even to sense changes in mood or sentiment, including whether someone is lying to them. While slightly farfetched, the technology allows Vinge to ratchet up the tension within the story by creating a razor-thin margin for Trinli and Vinh to overthrow their leaders. The Focus technology is probably even less realistic, but introduces an advanced sort of slavery, one where the enslaved become obsessed with their specific task, losing their free will and their emotional selves but allowing the Emergents to solve bigger problems faster and thus push their civilization forward, creating philosophical conflicts within the story about the morality of such practices (although for the reader it’s hardly much of a debate).

There’s still no reason for Vinge to drone on as long as he does in A Deepness in the Sky, with maybe 500 pages of real story in a 775-page book, bloated again by descriptions of future tech and irrelevant asides, along with some subplots that just aren’t very interesting (Ezr’s attempts to save his former lover Trixia Bonsol from Focus are particularly weak). Vinge also isn’t great at creating female characters; the most prominent woman in the story, Qiwi, starts as a child, is manipulated by Nau into a not-really-consensual relationship, and only regains true agency in the last few pages of the book. It’s a sort of hard science fiction that has fallen somewhat out of favor today, with good reason, as we have more diverse voices writing in the space and an increased awareness that better prose and character development can work in genre fiction. If you’re looking to pick up a Vinge novel, this would be my pick of the three I’ve read, but I think sci-fi still has much more to offer than A Deepness in the Sky provides.

Next up: Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke.

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→ August 25, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/25/18.

I had one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week, scouting notes on Tampa wunderkind Wander Franco and some Yankees & Rangers prospects, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the gladiator-themed deckbuilding game Carthage for Paste this week. That’s the last of my pre-Gen Con reviews; I believe everything I review the rest of the year will either be from games I got/saw at Gen Con or that were released afterwards.

I’m about due for a fresh edition of my free email newsletter, to which you may wish to subscribe if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

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→ August 13, 2018
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The Fall of Hyperion.

Dan Simmons’ Hugo-winning novel Hyperion is one of my favorite science fiction novels ever, a totally unexpected epic story that creates a new universe in a distant hyper connected future and gives the reader five absolutely fascinating character backstories … but doesn’t give the reader any kind of resolution. The five people in question have all traveled to the world of Hyperion, a planet at the edges of the dominant galactic federation, about to be threatened by the invading Ousters, to journey to a portion of Hyperion inhabited by a mysterious and deadly creature known as the Shrike, who lives among the Time Tombs where entropy goes through the roof and time itself moves in inexplicable ways. The nature of the Shrike, the outcome of their journeys, the potential for war between the global confederation and the Ousters – these are all left hanging at the end of Hyperion. It’s still so powerfully written, with erudite prose and meticulously and thoughtfully crafted characters that I could easily recommend the book as a one-off read, even with its cliffhanger ending; but I concede I still wanted to know what would happen to some of those characters and what on earth the Shrike was.

Simmons returned to the story in The Fall of Hyperion, which breaks the plot up into multiple threads, one of which is narrated by a ‘cybrid’ who is the reincarnated consciousness of the poet John Keats, but also provides the reader with a more conventional finish to the story. The series of novels in this universe continues, but you can read these two book as a diptych and get a complete self-contained story. And I think that might be enough for me for now; Simmons’ writing is wonderful, but I’m not driven to get back to this universe the way I have been with some others.

The five pilgrims on Hyperion are as we left them, running out of time, stymied by the very forces who helped them reach the Time Tombs, and in perpetual fear of the bizarre creature who stalks them but whose intentions are entirely unclear. The pilgrims have a purpose in the passion play at work here – the Keats cybrid is a rather obvious Christ surrogate – but that purpose, beyond the sheer opening of the Time Tombs, is unknown to all of them. Simmons layers on top of this the greater question of war between the federation of humanity, aided by the sentient and independent artificial intelligence unit called the Core, and the Ousters, whose goal is also unknown beyond mere territorial conquest. The CEO of the ‘good guys’ is Meina Gladstone, a woman surrounded by men who doubt her, with scarcely any support from the politicians below her, and with her own personal interest in the movements of the pilgrims.

That combination of stories along with the need to just wrap the dang thing up meant that The Fall of Hyperion didn’t have the same sort of narrative greed as its predecessor, even though the prose remains superb, replete with references to 19th and early 20th century English poetry, because of the fractured nature of the narrative itself. Only in the last few chapters does Simmons spend more time in each location before shifting focus, and that’s because by that point in the book the stories are converging. The most riveting of the pilgrims’ stories, that of Sol Weintraub and his daughter Rachel, who is aging in reverse after her visit to the Time Tombs, remains so – but it’s also fairly easy to see what her role in the greater drama will be, and that she’s not going to die even though Sol and the other pilgrims, who all become emotionally invested in her survival in a beautiful flourish of writing from Simmons, believe she may.

Saying that The Fall of Hyperion doesn’t live up to its predecessor is not a criticism, or even necessarily a measure of disappointment. I wanted to finish the stories given in the first book, and I truly enjoy Simmons’ writing, so I had little doubt I’d find the sequel a great read. The first book was such an immersive read, one that reminded me of getting lost in Jonathan Strange or the Harry Potter novels, that no second book was going to live up to it.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women.

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→ July 27, 2018
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Perdido Street Station.

I didn’t love China Miéville’s Hugo Award-winning novel The City & the City, but I was and still am awed by its inventive setting – a city-state that is divided in two, but where the two independent entities overlap and intertwine, like a Baarle-Nassau taken to an extreme not just of geography but of thought. The story didn’t live up to the creative setup, but the mere idea has really stuck with me in the years since I’ve read it.

His imagination is on display in his sprawling novel Perdido Street Station, which goes so much further in the direction of bizarre science fiction, set on an unnamed planet in a city that feels like it’s from somewhere after civilization has fallen and risen a few times, populated by strange and biologically improbable alien races, including humanoid insects who have to speak in sign language. The novel starts out as if there are going to be a pair of mysteries around the two central characters, but most of that is just a red herring for what’s really coming – an invasion of sorts by giant moths that feed on the dreams of sentient creatures, leaving their bodies functioning but their minds useless. The stories that occupied Isaac and Lin, the human and insect couple (yeah … put a pin in that), turn out to be related to the larger plot but get pushed way to the back burner once the moths show up, and Isaac in particular becomes the reluctant hero who leads a motley crew of outcasts to try to stop the infestation before the moths can breed and ultimate wipe out the entire city. (Not mentioned, however, is what the moths would do for sustenance once they ate everyone’s souls.)

If you get the sense that I didn’t buy any of this, well, good job, because while the prose moved along well and Miéville can certainly keep the pace of the plot quick enough when he wants to, to do so, Miéville piles detail upon detail and twist upon twist, to the point where I found my interest in the story waning from sheer plot fatigue. Isaac’s side project, which turns out to be relevant to the moth quest, is to build an engine that can harness “crisis energy,” a fictional but functionally limitless energy source. There’s a lot of handwaving and “I have to make the math work out” sort of writing here, but it ends up feeling like juvenilia: Great science fiction either explains its fictional science in terms that tie it to real science to keep it credible, or it pushes the fictional science under the hood and tells you not to worry about it. Perdido Street Station does neither.

And then there’s the whole alien races thing, not least of which is the utterly creepy human-insect love story, which Miéville really goes well out of his way to explain, both in how it happened and in how they have sex, a scene that definitely had me reaching for the Raid. Alien species are hardly novel in the world of science fiction, and they’re often quite ridiculous (David Brin, please step to the front). Miéville here seems to have deliberately created extra-weird species, just for the sake of weirdness. There isn’t any compelling reason here to have an intelligent, evolved, humanoid-insect species in the book. It just makes it all weirder and kept puncturing my suspension of disbelief.

One thing Miéville does get right here, however, is make the stakes high. Central characters are injured and killed. There are certainly points where it seems like the moths might eke out a partial if not total victory. By the end of the book, even though the good guys sort of win, the cost has been very high. More writers operating in this space need to work like that – if I know everyone is going to survive to the end of the book (or movie or TV series), then every crisis or potential tragedy you show me feels forced.

I stuck with this through all 700-plus pages in some vain hope of a big payoff to the main plot, but Miéville didn’t quite deliver that either. There were some parts of the heroes’ plan that were extremely clever, and some that didn’t translate well to the page – to the point where I had a hard time picturing any of what was going on. (The moths, by the way, exist in multiple dimensions, as do some other creatures here, making them exceptionally hard to kill.) And for as much as Miéville seems to want the city itself and Perdido Street Station to sit at the heart of the story, I never got much of a picture of the setting, either. The whole book just ended up feeling like a dumping ground for the products of the author’s prodigious imagination, but there just wasn’t enough meat to the story to make it work.

Next up: Almost through Maryn McKenna’s Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats

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→ July 22, 2018
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The Stone Sky.

N.K. Jemisin became the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and I believe the first woman of color to win it, when she took the prestigious (but generally white-dominated) prize home for her 2015 novel The Fifth Season, the opener of the Broken Earth trilogy. The story continued with The Obelisk Gate, which also took home the Hugo, and finished with last summer’s The Stone Sky, which is one of six nominees for this year’s Hugo and won Jemisin her first Nebula Award earlier this year. Continuing the saga of Essun and her daughter Nassun, two ‘orogenes’ who can control seismic movements in an earth subject to massive tectonic upheavals that cause lengthy climate disasters, The Stone Sky explains the origins of the post-apocalyptic setting and combines the parallel narratives – Essun’s, Nassun’s, and the nameless narrator of Essun’s sections, who is identified near the end of this book – into one story that answers all of the questions from the first two books. Wrapping up a series of this magnitude is difficult, and Jemisin, who has authored many other books, including series, seems to wobble as she tries to conclude this one. (UPDATE: This novel also won the Hugo, making Jemisin the first author to win the prize for all three books in a trilogy, and the first to win three straight Hugos for Best Novel.)

In the Broken Earth trilogy, humanity is in dire straits, as relatively unpredictable “Seasons” occur that produce catastrophic weather conditions that make survival extremely difficult, driving most humans, especially those near the Rifting (which I sense is by the equator), underground for the duration. If they don’t have food stores to survive, then they die. Somehow, enough humans have survived that the race persists, including some humans with the strange power of orogeny, allowing them to move the earth’s plates enough to try to stop some of those catastrophes from occurring. They also can draw on the power of the planet for combat, defensive or offensive, and there’s some overlap between the orogenes and people with a power the book refers to as magic, of even more obscure origin. And then there are the stone eaters, humanoid creatures who do as their name implies, can move through rock, and are effectively immortal.

Essun and Nassun are mother and daughter, but have been apart since the very beginning of The First Season, when Nassun’s father killed her little brother because he showed signs of orogeny and then absconded with her, leaving Essun to come home and find her son’s body with her family gone. Essun is part of a new ‘comm,’ which is trying to reach a distant haven before the imminent Season arrives, but is also still hoping to find her daughter, and in this book, she becomes aware that Nassun is doing things with her own nascent orogenic powers, driving Essun, herself one of the most powerful orogenes on the planet, to try to stop her daughter from wreaking unimaginable destruction on the world.

Nassun, meanwhile, has now lost her brother and father, and is separated from her mother, leaving her only with her Guardian, Schaffa, who acts as a father figure but also has ambiguous responsibilities beyond protecting his young charge. When his life is threatened, Nassun sets off on a quixotic mission that might save him but bring about an eschatological crisis from which humanity and the planet would never recover.
Although the series’ post-apocalyptic setting appears in the first novel to be the result of unchecked climate change, the cause of the Seasons turns out to be more fantastical than that, and any indictment of man’s reckless misuse of the planet and its environment is strictly metaphorical. The stronger metaphor, played out in parallel with Essun and Nassun, is one of man’s relationship with ‘Mother’ Earth, and the changes in the nature of that relationship over the course of the lives of both mother and child. Nassun needs her mother, but resents her absence (feeling abandoned, although that’s not fair to Essun). Essun is torn between her responsibilities to her comm – which is what’s keeping her alive – and her responsibilities to her daughter. Nassun eventually takes a course of action that reflects her youth and the poor judgment of humans whose brains have not yet fully developed, and it takes a heroic effort from Essun to try to stop her. The parallel with the man/Earth relationship here – there’s a hint of Gaia theory underneath the novel – is not perfect, but similar ideas, like man taking the environment for granted, using it up and discarding it when finished, appear in both the literal and figurative aspects of the novel.

The problem with The Stone Sky and the trilogy as a whole is the resolution of the main storyline, which seems to require Jemisin to create some new magic to complete it. The first book conceived a world that, while strange and often vague, felt self-contained: You didn’t know all of the rules of the environment, but you could trust that the author knew them and worked within their limits. By this third book, however, it seemed like Jemisin had expanded her own rule set to get to the finish line, including the transport method – like a hyperloop train through the earth – that is essential to get everyone in the right place for the slam-bang finish, and I found my suspension of disbelief starting to fall apart. Between that and some plodding prose – Jemisin is clearly brilliant and creative, but I found her style sluggish to read – I finished this book because I felt an obligation to it, but wouldn’t say I enjoyed it to the end.

Next up: still reading John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents.

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→ July 20, 2018
→ By

Ice.

I get a daily email from a site called Bookbub that highlights ebooks on sale each day, slightly tailored to my tastes by books or authors I’ve indicated I like; I probably buy 20-25 books a year that way, sometimes picking up titles I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. One of those was Anna Kavan’s final novel, Ice published shortly before her death in 1967, a book and author with which I was completely unfamiliar until I saw the cover in one of those daily emails and thought it sounded interesting enough to pick up (and, at maybe 150 pages total, a small investment to make). It is interesting … and absolutely one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read, defying all conventions of narrative in how it treats characters, time, or even physical reality, giving the reader (well, this reader) the sense of watching or reading someone else’s dream.

Ice is told from the perspective of an unnamed man who is following and possibly trying to protect a frail young woman, also unnamed, in a post-apocalyptic world of nuclear winter, where an ice shelf is pushing civilization back towards the equator. The girl is often with a character called the Warden, who by turns seems to be her lover, her captor, or her protector. But the narrative itself is far from straightforward; the girl is lost, injured, or killed multiple times in the story, only to reappear in the next chapter as if those things never happened. The narrator himself becomes increasingly incoherent as the book progresses, and begins to question his own sanity as the story moves along, and what exactly his feelings are for this girl, who also seems less than happy to be ‘rescued’ by him at several points in the book. Kavan herself called the story a fable, but even that fails to quite prepare the reader for what is now known as slipstream literature, which mimics the jarring, nonlinear nature of dreams or subconscious thought; it’s easier to follow than James Joyce’s attempts to write as the brain thinks, or subsequent authors who’ve done the same (like Eimear McBride), but still brings the sense of being on a rollercoaster in the dark, where you can’t anticipate the turns, drops, or the end of the ride.

Part of what makes Ice simultaneously compelling and offputting is that Kavan never tries to distinguish between what’s real and what is a delusion, dream, or hallucination of the narrator; the prose simply slips from the realistic to the bizarre without any notice to tell you that things have changed or that we’re in the narrator’s head. It’s more than just an unreliable narrator – the narrator here doesn’t seem to know he’s unreliable, and he jumps time and place in dizzying fashion. You have to enjoy that kind of writing to appreciate Ice, and if it were twice the length I would have found it frustrating, but at close to novella size it becomes a sort of thrill ride through a fever dream.

Kavan died mere months after the book’s publication in the UK and a week before its publication in the U.S., so the years of conversation and interpretation that might have followed its release never happened – and the book itself may have come to greater attention because she’d died. There’s an obvious Cold War theme to the story and the setting, both the post-nuclear aspect and the analogy of a frozen world to a war described by temperature, but more interesting to me is the exploration of woman’s agency through the eyes of a man who sees himself as her white knight but may in fact be operating entirely against her wishes. The story starts out in traditional enough fashion, with the Warden the antagonist who is threatening the girl with imprisonment, rape, or death, but it’s never even clear that the narrator and the Warden are on opposing sides, or what the girl, never named and often on the run, actually wants at any point in the book. Her story is actually the pivotal one, yet Kavan gives us barely any details on the girl herself, which seems like a perfect metaphor for the invisible women throughout human history who’ve been ignored by the men who wrote the books.

Next up: I’m reading John Wray’s 2016 novel The Lost Time Accidents.

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→ July 1, 2018
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Annihilation.

Paramount made some curious decisions earlier this year with the release of the film Annihiliation (amazon • iTunes), loosely based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name (which I have not read yet), including an off-period release date in the U.S. and the sale of the film directly to Netflix for most of the world (other than the U.S., Canada, and China). Marketing of the film wasn’t great either; I saw the trailer before its theatrical run, and the trailer doesn’t represent the film well at all, overselling the horror elements and underselling the story. The result is that the movie didn’t fare that well at the box office despite positive reviews, undercut somewhat by Paramount’s machinations and I think the failure to push this film as a smart sci-fi flick that overcomes some modest flaws with a big finish.

The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) in medical isolation, being interrogated by a British scientist (Benedict Wong) about what happened to her on a mission that went wrong and from which she is the only survivor. She’s somewhat vague on details, after which we flash back to before the mission and see that she’s a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School and that her husband, a special forces Sergeant (Oscar Isaac), has been missing for a year and is presumed dead. He shows up at the house one day, but is totally vacant and almost immediately begins hemorrhaging, which eventually leads to Lena volunteering to lead a mission of five women soldiers and researchers into a mysterious, growing region called the Shimmer, into which the military has sent many missions but from which only Lena’s husband has ever returned. The women find a seemingly impossible environment where animals and plants are swapping DNA, with increasingly horrifying results the longer the team stays within its boundaries.

Annihilation has two main conceits in its story: the ongoing mystery of what the Shimmer is and what it’s doing, and the fact that previous teams have all disappeared and are likely dead, a Lovecraftian mystery trending towards horror since we know from the start that Lena is the only survivor. (The Wikipedia entry on the movie notes the script’s similarity to a Lovecraft short story, “The Colour of Space.”) The former is revealed gradually at first, but proceeds in fits and starts in accordance with discoveries the team makes and with Lena’s examinations of blood and other cells under her microscope. The latter builds as the story progresses and the team moves through the Shimmer with increasing disorientation; they encounter animals that loosely resemble familiar creatures but that have evolved at impossible speeds. Eventually Lena reaches the lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer and discovers something more of the nature of the anomaly in a gorgeous special-effects sequence right before her final battle to escape.

The script does waste too much time on irrelevant details outside of the mission, including Lena’s affair with a colleague while her husband is missing, a subplot that is neither germane to the main story nor resolved in any satisfactory manner during the film. And while screenwriter/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) tries to give the team members some identities as individuals, none but Lena comes across as much more than a redshirt, not even ostensible team leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), so none of their losses is particularly tangible to the viewer. One team member cracks under the stress after the first death and another attack, which is foreshadowed in earlier dialogue but really not well explained by her character at all. Lena’s decision not to reveal to other team members that her husband was on an earlier mission is played up as a major issue, but without justifying why that’s a big deal or why the team member who cracks is so angry about the omission.

There are two scenes of gore in Annihiliation, more than enough to earn its R rating but not so much that I’d call this a straight horror film. There’s more of an intellectual undercurrent to the script than the trailer gave it credit for having; the way the Shimmer evolves, and then affects the members of the team, poses real questions about what it means to be human or even conscious, ones the film doesn’t try to answer even as characters directly ask what the Shimmer “wants.” Maybe it was just too hard to market on its own merits, but Annihilation is intense and smart enough to deserve to find an audience now that it’s more widely available.

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→ June 15, 2018
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Crosstalk.

I adore the prose of Connie Willis, the brilliant and prolific American novelist whose Oxford time-travel stories include some of my favorite sci-fi novels, including To Say Nothing of the Dog, Doomsday Book, and the diptych Blackout and All Clear, which as a group won three Hugos, two Nebulas, and two Locus awards. She has, however, written other speculative fiction outside of the Oxford universe (which began with “Fire Watch,” a short story that also won the Hugo-Nebula parlay), including the light novel Bellwether and, most recently, the 2016 novel Crosstalk, which builds an entire comedy of errors on a single technological twist while also prodding questions about just how much we really want to connect to other people.

Bridget “Briddey” Flanigan is the very lucky protagonist, a rising employee of mobile phone manufacturer CommSpan who happens to be engaged to the extremely desirable bachelor and top executive Trent, who then convinces her to get an EED, a neural implant that is supposed to allow two people with a strong emotional connection to feel each other’s emotions even more potently. Her fiancé is in a terrible rush to have the procedure done, and Briddey agrees to it even though her family members warn her not to do so, as does the eccentric programmer C.B., who works at CommSpan in a dungeon-like basement office. When she has the implant, however, she finds that she’s suddenly telepathic, and the first voice she hears isn’t Trent’s, leading to a series of misadventures around trying to stay afloat amidst the deluge of voices in her head, to avoid letting Trent know what’s going on, and, hardest of all, to keep anything private from her unbelievably intrusive family.

Figuring out how Crosstalk would end was the least of its pleasures – it’s obvious she’s going to end up with someone other than Trent, and I thought it was obvious what side character was pulling many of the strings throughout the book – but, as with so many Willis novels, the fun is in the journey. She has a classic comic novelist’s knack of creating side characters who are exaggerated just to the edge of realistic, like Briddey’s sisters, both of whom classify anything as an emergency, one of whom is referring to her awful dating choices while the other is convinced that her daughter Maeve is into everything from Disney princesses to online terrorism. (She’s mostly just watching zombie movies.) They’ll exasperate you as they exasperate Briddey – and I often wondered why she even talks to her great-aunt, who seems to have less respect than anyone for Briddey’s privacy – but they’re all just slightly embellished versions of people you probably know in your own life, and watching her evasive maneuvers provides a good chunk of the book’s humor.

Willis can craft a clever mystery as well, and in all of her novels she tends to reveal the secrets of the main plot very gradually, which works extremely well in the time travel stories, but a bit less so here because she has characters who know the truth deliberately holding it back from Briddey. The EED doesn’t make everyone telepathic, or even close, so why does Briddey become so after the surgery? Why does she hear that one other character first, even though that person hasn’t had an EED? Once the specific character trait in question is revealed, it’s easy to figure out who’s pulling many of the strings and to walk all the way back to the first chapter to understand certain characters’ motivations, but I also left with the sense that Briddey herself had a right to know what was happening to her. Several people who profess to care about her don’t share what they know, and she’s left worse off until they come clean. That’s not a factor in the Oxford novels, where something generally goes wrong with the time travel mechanism and no one, not even the Professor running the program, can figure out why.

The time-travel novels and even the much lighter Bellwether all sucked me completely into their worlds, because Willis writes so well – like P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis with a dash of Jane Austen thrown in – and because she creates so many three-dimensional characters in all of her books. Crosstalk is a half-grade down for me, because of the issue with characters not telling Briddey what they know, and because the moral and philosophical questions Willis seems to explore here don’t feel very fresh even two years after the book’s publication. We’re all online too much if we’re online at all. We’re replacing personal connections with digital ones, at apparent risk to our emotional well-being. Willis takes that to its logical extreme, that two people who are glued to their devices decide to make their romantic relationship a direct, digital one instead. It was probably a risk Willis knew she was taking while writing the book, but reality has raced forward to the point where the book seems like a debate we might have had three years ago, replaced today by so many more social media worries and changes to how we all communicate with each other (or fail to do so) instead. It’s worth reading, because Willis is such a fun writer, but I would rate it at the bottom of the novels I’ve read from her so far.

Next up: Still reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.

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→ March 30, 2018
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

I’m a bit late to the Star Wars party, but I finally watched The Last Jedi (now available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes) on Thursday evening, which I believe makes me the last person in the United States to see this movie. I have seen The Force Awakens and would agree with what I think is the consensus that this movie is better than that one was; if TFA was the greatest hits album, TLJ is the album after that where the band tries to recapture the sound of its best output, and intermittently succeeds.

I imagine most of you have seen this already, so here’s a briefer than usual plot summary. The movie picks up right at the end of TFA; Kylo Ren is still Mad in Space, Rey is still with Luke Skywalker on the island planet, Finn is still boring, Leia still kicks ass, and the Rebels are still lucky to exist given the firepower and numbers the First Order brings to the fight. After a Pyrhhic victory to open the film, the Rebels find themselves chased even through lightspeed travel, which we’re told is impossible (the tracking through lightspeed, not the lightspeed part, which is actually impossible), and must thus find a way to disable the First Order’s tracking capability so they can escape to a safe hiding spot to regroup. Meanwhile, Rey wants to grow up to be a Jedi and find out who her parents were, and Poe Dameron still has problems with authority and is a poor judge of what constitutes acceptable losses in battle.

The women absolutely carry this film, and I don’t think that’s entirely by design. Daisy Ridley stole the first film in this trilogy as Rey, apparently to the surprise of the studio, and she remains a riveting, central figure in this film. Kelly Marie Tran debuts as Rose, another character like Rey – it’s hard to imagine these films without them – and just underscores the point that casting more women even in roles that studios would historically have handed to men adds something, rather than just avoiding negative PR. Creating female characters who are tough and resourceful, who can fight but who also think well on their feet, isn’t any harder than creating male characters who are or do these things, and it’s no less credible. If anything, The Last Jedi gives Rose short shrift by dropping her into the film without much character development, but it’s possible she’ll play a larger role in the next installment, too. Carrie Fisher’s final turn as Leia may come across as even more powerful because we lost her before the movie was even released, but the increased role the writers of these last two films gave her character has also helped put them above The Phantom Menace trilogy. Laura Dern also appears as Admiral Hodor … er, Holdo, another Resistance leader who takes over when Leia ends up in a coma, and while Holdo’s plan is kind of terrible, Dern, a generally tremendous actress in any role, does a superb job of threading the needle between stern by-the-book authority to contrast with Poe and presenting herself as a thoughtful, strong leader willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Rebels alive.

This was also the funniest Star Wars movie by a wide margin, with some dopey physical comedy (that still made me laugh because inside I am just a 12-year-old boy who laughs when people in movies fall down), a good bit more sarcasm than I’m used to from these films, and an utterly brilliant nod to the now ancient Star Wars parody short “Hardware Wars.” Johnson is absolutely playing with viewers’ expectations throughout the film, and where TFA gave viewers the answers they wanted, The Last Jedi goes in the other direction, setting up an obvious answer and then responding to it with sarcasm or a twist. Given the reverence afforded to this saga, a little nose-tweaking here is warranted and does help avoid the self-seriousness that permeated both TFA and especially The Phantom Menace.

The Force Awakens was a perfectly cromulent film – entertaining, but nothing new beyond the special effects. We got our cantina scene, our flying through narrow passages battle scene, our light saber fights, Jedi mind tricks, a Kessel Run joke, and too many other allusions to the original trilogy. It worked, but it felt too much like a nostalgia play, and perhaps a plea to forget the intervening trilogy of films. The Last Jedi is less derivative of the series, but now we’re devolving into this pattern of “let’s put the heroes in extreme jeopardy, kill off a bunch of redshirts, and save the characters with names” over and over in the films, and that becomes a bit tiresome. It invokes adrenaline fatigue and tends to come at the expense of story and/or character development. There’s a real lost opportunity here when Rey is with Luke Skywalker and, in theory, learning about the Jedi religion and traditions; the biggest revelation she gets about her character comes not from Luke, but from Kylo “my parents didn’t love me enough” Ren.

And that’s the other aspect of both of these new films I haven’t really bought. I’m all for changing up the archetype of a villain in space epics, but “goth kid” isn’t all that compelling, and Driver’s mopey delivery comes across as depressed, not depraved. This script does a better job than its predecessor in explaining Ren’s backstory, and how the son of Han and Leia could become the most dangerous person in the known universe, so I’m holding out hope we’ll get more of his character development in the third film. This film was replete with plots and subplots and probably more named characters than it could really handle in 150 or so minutes, but there were still arcs that could have used more exploration.

They also could have cut Finn’s story substantially to make room for further depth in the narratives around Rey or Kylo. I know Finn is a popular character and John Boyega is likable, but I don’t think he has any charisma at all in this role – certainly not next to Oscar Isaak’s Poe, who is drawn with some very sharp lines but that at least let Isaak tear up the proverbial fucking dance floor. I’m still unclear on what Finn’s role in the greater story arc of these two new movies is, and the side plot where he and Rose go off to the gambling planet to find a master codebreaker (master … breaker?), played in fine scene-chewing fashion by Benicio del Toro, is the weakest part of the film by 12 parsecs.

This movie looks incredible, as you’d expect given the studios behind it and the money invested in it, but Rian Johnson has also clearly given consideration to how he can use things like color or establishing shots to contribute to the feel of the story. There’s a lot of red in the film, including Supreme Leader Snoke’s henchpersons and the tracks left in the salt on the rebels’ disused hiding planet. (I know we’re supposed to think ‘blood,’ but it kept making me think of Australia’s Simpson Desert, where iron oxide in the sand turns the entire landscape a deep red.) There’s also a lot of moving water in the film, including some stunning waterfall shots, designed to give you the sense of descent and to feel several characters fighting the current, especially Rey as she resists the dark aspects of the Force within her and the pull of Kylo’s own darkness. Such small, subtle additions to a script that often feels bombastic and certainly doesn’t shy away from huge battle sequences or grand gestures by its characters may be lost on viewers caught up in the extensive plot, but they do help set the tone and, I think, establish a more complex worldview than any of the preceding films offered.

At 153 minutes, The Last Jedi is probably both too long and too short; Johnson had enough thematic material to go three-plus hours, but the repetitive nature of some of the plot details wore on me by the end, and there really isn’t much doubt who’s going to live to see the end of the film and who’s not, so the question becomes “how will Johnson write them out of trouble this time,” rather than the more intense question of “who’s going to survive?” Unfortunately, Johnson isn’t involved in the as-yet untitled Episode IX, which will be written and directed by JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio, which I don’t interpret as a positive sign given some of their recent projects (The Cloverfield Paradox, Batman vs. Superman) and the wealth of material bequeathed upon them by The Last Jedi. With principal photography set to begin in just four months, it’s probably vain to hope that they’ll get another voice in the room to help give these arcs the resolution they might deserve.

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Speaker for the Dead.

My annual post predicting breakout players for the upcoming season is up for Insiders.

I read – more precisely, listened to – Orson Scott Card’s Hugo-winning novel Ender’s Game back in 2006, before this blog existed, and somehow have only referred to it once in all of the posts on science fiction I’ve had on the site since then. I thought it was fine, certainly entertaining, with an ending that felt tacked-on (because it was), a good young adult sci-fi novel that followed a fairly typical storyline of “outcast kid saves humanity” but that ended somewhere unsupported by the story that came before. I just read the book’s sequel, Speaker for the Dead, which won the Hugo the following year and takes that tacked-on ending and blows it up into a full-length novel in its own right. It holds together much better than its predecessor, and this time around Card manages to create a few more well-rounded characters, but Ender has become a little bit insufferable, Card’s admirable philosophy comes across in ham-handed style, and if anything this book feels even more like it’s written for a teenaged audience.

Ender, born Andrew Wiggin, has become the Speaker for the Dead after defeating the “buggers” in a war that he learned never needed to take place at all. He now travels through portions of space inhabited by humans delivering funeral orations that attempt to sum up each deceased person’s life in full, rather than, say, delivering the sort of encomia we expect when someone dies but that fail to do the subject justice. Because of the relativistic effects of faster-than-light travel, however, he arrives at planets years or even decades after his services have been requested, which allows much of the action of Speaker for the Dead to take place in his absence.

In this book, humanity has encountered another sentient species, called “piggies” due to their porcine facial appearance, on the Portuguese Catholic-controlled planet of Lusitania. The human scientists on the planet observe the piggies, more formally called pequeninos, and operate under fairly strict rules on non-interference, including avoiding exposing the piggies to any human technology so they don’t accelerate the latter species’ evolution in any artificial way. A plague wiped out much of the earliest human settlement, and Novinha, the daughter of the two scientists who found a cure but still died of the disease, calls for Ender to Speak for the scientist who raised her but was killed by the piggies in some sort of religious ritual after he discovered the secret of the plague’s place in the planet’s ecosystem. By the time Ender arrives, however, twenty more years have passed, Novinha’s former lover (the dead scientist’s son) has also died in a similar ritual, while her son and her former lover’s daughter have fallen in love while also studying the piggies. Ender walks into this quagmire just as the all-powerful “Congress” prepares to sanction the humans on Lusitania for illegally sharing technology with the piggies.

Speaker for the Dead swept the big three sci-fi awards (Hugo, Nebula, Locus) in 1987, beating out, among others, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and William Gibson’s Count Zero (the sequel to Neuromancer; my only review of a Gibson novel is of the third book in the trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive), which I can only assume from this vantage point was in response to its popularity. Card is offering a sort of pop philosophy in this book about tolerance and understanding – at odds with his longstanding opposition to gay rights – of other cultures and religious traditions, one that is admirable even if he does beat you over the head with that particular hammer. Ender was a regular if precocious kid in the first novel, going through the same kind of boarding-school experience that would later show up in Harry Potter and the Magicians series, but here he’s like a new Dalai Lama with a bit of an ego. (I suppose when multiple planets know your name and you’ve founded a new religion, you probably get a bit of a big head about it all.)

The big advantage of this book compared to Ender’s Game is that Card seems to have learned how to create compelling characters, even complex, difficult ones. Novinha is fascinating, even if there was a note about her that sounded off key to me, but one that involves something everyone has a hard time understanding – why women stay in abusive relationships. The kid scientists all have distinct personalities as well, even if they don’t get the page time of the adults, and there’s at least an attempt to distinguish the various named pequenino characters even though they cycle in and out of the story rather quickly.

There’s some graphic violence in this book – the ritual mentioned above would never make it to a theater if someone filmed this story – that is truly at odds with the overall tone. Card writes like he’s talking to a teenager, and as if his characters are all stuck in teenage modes of expression. Nicknaming the alien species “buggers” and “piggies” comes across as puerile. He also has a simple idea of atonement or redemption, one that I don’t think fits with the events that come before those moments, as if doing the right thing today wipes out all the wrong things you did before. I wish life worked that way, but it doesn’t.

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