→ March 28, 2025
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Stations of the Tide.

Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1990, beating out one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vor novels, Barrayar, and a William Gibson novel, The Difference Engine. Swanwick combines elements of fantasy and science fiction, including a significant amount of speculative writing that seems especially prescient today given the rise of (highly questionable) AI-powered bots. It’s a shame it’s undone by a trap that many white male sci-fi writers have fallen into: Swanwick is obsessed with sex, and writes about it like a teenaged boy.

Stations of the Tide takes place on a planet called Miranda, where the human civilization faces a catastrophic flood once a generation, for which they must prepare and evacuate while the ocean devours the land, destroying property but also helping renew the ecosystem. A rogue calling himself a wizard is promising residents that he can cast spells to help them survive the inundation, such as giving them gills to breathe underwater, and the interplanetary authorities suspect that he has absconded with proscribed technology stolen from them, so they send an agent, simply called the bureaucrat, to Miranda to track him down and retrieve it. This sets in motion a story that’s a blend between a spy novel and a paranoid thriller, moving through various settlements in tropical areas of Miranda that evoked Apocalypse Now for its contrast of a lush backdrop for social desolation.

The actual spy story within Stations of the Tide is its strength: The bureaucrat learns very early on that he can’t trust anyone, and his suspicions only deepen the further along he goes – except for any time a woman tries to seduce him, because he’s easier than Sunday morning. The small cadre of agents with and around him keep the circle of intrigue limited, as it’s clear early in the novel that someone has helped the wizard, named Gregorian, keep track of the investigation and the bureaucrat’s movements, but it’s not clear who’s behind it.

Swanwick’s speculations on technology include the use of holographic projections of people to allow them to be in more than one place at once, with the avatars able to act semi-autonomously and to even survive their creators. Not only does this allow the bureaucrat and his colleagues to work along several paths at once, but it allows the protagonist to operate across several (virtual) planes to try to figure out who’s double-crossing him. I imagine in 1990 this technology seemed fantastical, but today it seems possible, if undesirable, with Big Tech’s twin obsessions with LLMs and virtual worlds. Swanwick’s mind might have moved faster than his pen here, though, as his conceit of never using the bureaucrat’s name along with the fact that all of these officials using the technology are men can make it extremely confusing when real people and avatars are conversing.

The sex in this book veers from the unintentionally comic to the creepy, and it destroys the hallucinatory vibe that infuses most of the novel. Swanwick seems unable to conceive a female character who isn’t promiscuous, and the women in this book all exist almost entirely in their relationship to men. His descriptions of sex are awkward, at best, and betray the teenager’s fascination with anatomy over emotions, made worse by Swanwick repeatedly using the word “vagina” when he means something else. It reminded me of some of the worst sci-fi and fantasy novels I’ve read, like the later Dune sequels when Frank Herbert introduced the Honored Matres, or the first Game of Thrones book, or Snow Crash. Stations clearly came out in a different era, and it has aged extremely poorly.

There are some strong scenes in the book involving the bureaucrat and Gregorian’s agents, along with a reasonable climactic scene that uses something I probably should have seen coming but didn’t to resolve the final confrontation. Swanwick allows the bureaucrat to consider the moral implications of his actions and the authorities’ choices to limit technology transfer to these colony worlds, a theme that appeared here and there in the novel while becoming more prevalent near the end, opening up possible interpretations around paternalistic government, colonization, and regulations that tied the room together at the very end. It was enough to bump me up a half-grade or so, figuratively, to the point where I’d recommend the book if you don’t mind the bad sex writing. There’s enough suspense here to keep the story moving, and it turns out in the end that Swanwick did have some larger points to make. It’s not good enough to get me to pick up more of his work, but was worth the time I spent reading it.

Next up: Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper.

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→ June 5, 2013
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A Game of Thrones.

I posted my final top 100 ranking for this year’s draft, and had draft expert Jim Callis on today’s edition of Behind the Dish.

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I received George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones as a gift, and gave it a shot after many of you encouraged me to do so, even though I am generally not a fan of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Unfortunately, the book met my expectations, and while I finished its bloated length, I won’t be sticking around for book two.

The plot appears complex, but at heart is quite simple: two main factions are competing for control of the Seven Kingdoms, jockeying for position under the current King, the slightly naïve Robert, and preparing for an eventual succession. There are two separate plots only loosely integrated in this novel with that main strand – one leading to the possible birth of an heir to the previous king, the “mad king” Aerys II, the other set on the ice Wall that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the unknown denizens of the North. Martin based some of the plot on the English Wars of the Roses, which pitted the Houses of Lancaster and York against each other over a thirty-year period that ended with the rise of the House of Tudor.

The false complexity of the plot was not my main objection to A Game of Thrones, but it is one of the book’s three major flaws. Martin populates the book with far too many people, even requiring an appendix to list most of them by the houses to which they belong or have sworn fealty, and as a result almost no characters receive any kind of depth or development, and most of those outside of the central core are utterly disposable. Martin separates the book into numberless chapters, each of which revolves around one of the main characters, of which there are at least eight: Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell; his wife, Catelyn; four of their five children; Tyrion Lannister, a dwarf who belongs to the rival house of Lannister; and Daenaerys, the daughter of the mad king. King Robert, Tyrion’s sister Cersei, his brother Jaime (“the Kingslayer”), Daenaerys’ brother Viserys, her eventual husband Khal Drogo, Catelyn’s sister Lysa, and Robert and Cersei’s son Joffrey are all significant characters in terms of ink received, yet all are one-dimentionsal and their presence quickly becomes tiresome. The result is that Martin can weave lengthy plot strands, yet never has to do much more than set the swords in motion to advance any of the storylines, because he’s got so many people running around and never chooses to (or needs to) develop any of the characters.

The quality of the writing is also extremely poor, which I was warned about ahead of time; Martin spends much of the book forcing awkward middle-English phrasing on the reader, or altering spellings the way that bad bars and stores like to include “Olde” in their names to make them seem authentically crappy. His syntax is clumsy, and he spells far too much out for the reader in little details, both scene-setting – his descriptions of food are embarrassing if you’ve read any Murakami, and the made-up foods thing is just annoying – and emotions, where he explains far too much of what characters are thinking or feeling, which ends up leading the reader around by the nose. And I have no explanation for the line where he said a character was behaving like he had a “dagger up his butt.”

But nothing in the book was as awful as Martin’s obsessions with sex, violence, and especially sexual violence; it is the most rape-y book I have ever read, treating its women as objects and reveling in degrading them, especially female side characters, Martin’s equivalent of the red shirts of Star Trek. Women are raped, often, quite violently (not that rape is ever nonviolent, but Martin chooses to make it more violent), both in the present of the novel and in descriptions of the past. Victors in war in Martin’s universe engage in gang-rape, and it is accepted. Forced prostitution is rampant, and it is accepted. And when he describes rape, or even semi-consensual sex, Martin chooses to describe it in detail to further the degradation of the woman. (The idea that a woman might enjoy sex, or even assume an equal or dominant role in it, is completely foreign to him.) Martin’s women are props, and the only woman of clear strength in the book is a sociopath. That doesn’t even get at the incest in the book, made explicit in one scene but hinted at many other times.

On top of his loathing of women, Martin absolutely loves to devote ink to the carving up of the human body by knives, swords, and even weapons found along the way. Characters are cleaved, dismembered, burst open, disembowed, and eviscerated, and one can almost hear Martin panting at the keyboard as he describes these acts of violence. Given that he takes the rascal’s escape from a plot he can’t untangle – he sends everyone to war and kills a bunch of people off – there’s a lot of cleaving and disemboweling going on, and copious quantities of blood spilled, enough that you’ll need to wash your hands to get the damned spots out before you’re through.

When I commented on Twitter the other day that A Game of Thrones was one of the most misogynistic books I’d ever read, a few of you said that I needed to stick with the series to see some of the female characters develop. That may be true – the situation might improve in later books – but I should not have to read beyond the first 670 pages to see a female character with any kind of depth. That’s not to say that his male characters are much better developed, but they might reach two dimensions while his women are limited to one.

I’ve never seen the HBO series, so I have no idea how that compares or if it addresses any of the book’s flaws. A thin plot in a novel can often seem rich on screen with the right adaptation. All I can say is that I won’t be moving on to book two of the series.

Next up: Jim Thompson’s grim, darkly funny novel Pop. 1280.

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→ January 14, 2009
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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Suck.

I don’t think I have completed and hated a book as thoroughly as I hated Oscar Hijuelos’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. I can hardly decide where to start in listing what I disliked.

    • The two main characters. The Mambo Kings are two brothers who emigrate from Cuba to the United States. Nestor, by far the more interesting of the two characters, is either depressed or just lovelorn, and is dead before the book’s midpoint. Cesar, the older brother, is dissolute, obsessed with his penis, drunk nearly all of the time, and depressing as hell as he approaches his own death.
      The sex. I don’t mind if there’s sex in a novel as long as it’s well-written and not gratuitous, but this entire book was full of passages that would have won the Bad Sex in Fiction award had it existed at the time of the book’s publication. The novel must hold the record for the most uses of the word “pubic” in any publication that isn’t sold with a black wrapper around it. Hijuelous treats us to images like “the head of his penis weeping semen tears;” a woman’s “bad habit of yanking hard on his quivering testicles at the moment of his climax;” almost clinical descriptions of straight-up, oral, and anal sex; and – most disturbing of all – a reference to Cesar thinking about being in his mother’s womb while he performs oral sex on women.
      The story – or lack thereof. This isn’t about the rise and fall of the brothers’ band, called the Mambo Kings. When Nestor dies, the band dies; the book is almost two separate novels cobbled together, although neither would have been much better had it stood alone. It’s not about Cesar’s descent into a physical condition that matches his broken emotional state, or his lifelong struggle to overcome the abuse he suffered as a child at his father’s hands. It’s not about Nestor’s depression or melancholy, since he’s dead before we get much insight into that. It’s about Cesar whoring and drinking and eating his way through middle age into an early death.

    • The best explanation for this awful mess that I could conceive is that Hijuelos was trying to offer some sort of meditation on mortality, how potentially short our lives are (Nestor) or how we might look back when at death’s door and consider and reconsider our actions (Cesar). What we get, instead, is a catalog of Cesar’s sexual exploits and regular references to his acid reflux. Hijuelos even manages to make food boring, with lists of foods at the huge meals the Cuban brothers would eat but none of the descriptive language needed to bring those foods to life – although, given the crude and methodical descriptions Hijuelos gives us of sex acts, perhaps we should be thankful that he didn’t ruin food for his readers as well.

    I have actually seen the 1992 adaptation, The Mambo Kings, starring a then-unknown-in-America Antonio Banderas as Nestor, but the film was very loosely based on the book, and the interpretation of what comes after Nestor’s death bears little relation to Hijuelos’ text. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

    Next up: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, by Assia Djebar, named one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in 2001.

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