Friday, May 31, 2013

Book Review: The Snow Queen

Joan D. Vinge
1980
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

After having read several disappointing novels by Joan Vinge’s ex-husband Vernor, I have to admit I was kind of dreading The Snow Queen.

The story takes place on the rustic, undeveloped planet Tiamat, where the seasons are centuries long. The people of Tiamat are divided into two populations: “Summers,” unsophisticated, backwards fisher-folk who live in the rural south, and “Winters,” savvy cosmopolitans who live in the urban north. The Summers are deeply religious and their most powerful deity is the goddess of the sea, who they believe speaks to them through a few of their own people who have been called to be “sibyls,” a sort of oracle. Their religion is dismissed as blind superstition by the Winters and the offworlders alike.

As the book opens, the long winter is just ending and summer is about to start. When the seasons change from winter to summer, several things always happen. The areas of the planet where the Summers live become too hot for human habitation and they all migrate north to the cities to jostle for space with their northern Winter brethren. The proximity of the sun makes conditions too unstable for the nearby interstellar transport wormhole to stay open, so all the “offworlders” visiting and working on Tiamat pack up and head home to their own planets, taking all their advanced technology with them. And the Snow Queen, the ruler of the planet during the wintertime and traditionally a native member of the Winter population, is ritually thrown into the ocean to die and is replaced by the Summer Queen.

This winter, however, the people have been ruled by a particularly power-mad and ruthless Snow Queen named Arienrhod. Arienrhod has never wanted to give up power and die in the sea like she is supposed to. So a couple decades ago, she implanted nine embryo clones of herself in nine unsuspecting Summer women visiting her capital city for a festival, hoping that at least one clone turned out okay and she could choose that girl to be the Summer Queen. This doesn’t really prevent her from dying, of course, but at least she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that she will be the Summer Queen, too, in a way.

Of the nine clones, the only one that survives to the end of winter is a girl named Moon Dawntreader. Moon is a good-natured and unambitious girl raised among fishermen on the seaside, who thinks she’ll be able to continue living indefinitely in blissful happiness with her beloved cousin Sparks. Except that one day, to everyone’s surprise, including Arienrhod's, Moon is called by the sibyls to become a sibyl herself. 

Sparks had wanted to be a sibyl, too, so when Moon is chosen instead, he leaves in a jealous rage for the big city in the north. There he hooks up with Arienrhod and becomes a twisted, Darth-Vader-like, dark side version of his former self.

The rest of the book then follows Moon’s subsequent quest to reunite with Sparks and fulfill her destiny as a sibyl, and Arienrhod’s attempt to find Moon and achieve immortality, both of which affect the lives of a wide assortment of secondary characters and build to a climactic showdown during the end-of-winter celebrations.

In contrast to Vernor’s books, Joan Vinge’s Snow Queen at least kept me generally interested in reading from one chapter to another. She weaves her themes, characters, and technological inventions consistently and intelligently throughout the book, giving them depth and background, so that when they are used, you feel like they are coming to fruition (rather than popping them in for the first time only when they are needed to save the story line).

I also got a bit of a kick out of the matriarchal society Vinge created for Tiamat. Although the foreign offworlders were prejudiced against women in any kind of powerful position, the people of Tiamat were traditionally ruled by queens, rather than kings, and prayed primarily to an all-powerful goddess of the sea.

The matriarchy only goes so far, though. Under the woman-centric overlay, the actions of the two main female characters (and some of the secondary ones) were determined largely by their pursuit of (or escape from) a man. Most of their crushing agonies and triumphant successes revolved around whether they had gotten the male object of their affections (or ire) to do what they wanted. In particular, although Moon’s destiny does have something vaguely to do with bringing better times to her people, at every key decision point she chose her course of action by whether or not it got her closer to Sparks.

It also didn’t take me long to get fed up with the book’s romantic fantasy style. There is advanced technology available in the universe but it is withheld from the planet’s native inhabitants. So, by necessity, they resort to rustic, labor-intensive clothing, food, work, traditions, and religion straight out of the Dark Ages. People do their hair up in various forms of braid, drink ale and eat honeycake, and work as farmers and fisherman and oracles and itinerant healers. They tend to be superstitious, and like to attend large community festivals, and are partial to cries of agony and/or passion when roused in either of those ways.

Every other noun has to be archaically capitalized: the Hunt, the Change, the Transfer, the Street, the Festival, the Death, the Sea.

Otherwise ordinary nouns become romanticized by sticking an adjective onto them:“The [ship] dropped through a flattening arc, like a slingstone skimming an infinite pond.” “I’ll stay here at Street’s-end until you come out of there.” “How do you know what anybody did before the firstships sailed down out of the Great Storm?”

I’m the first one to admit that fantasy can be really fun when it is done well. I like to be carried away by it, unselfconscious of how silly the language and costumes and monsters might be to the uninitiated. But it can be giggle-making if not handled right. And I’m afraid The Snow Queen qualifies a little too often for the latter.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Book Review: Mirror Dance

Lois McMaster Bujold
1994
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

 

Once again the Hugo voters force me back into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.

The Saga is a multi-book series set in a universe of planets interconnected by trade and internecine political struggles. Space travel and warfare are at a Star-Trek-level of speed and sophistication.
                                                                                
Mirror Dance is one of the later books in the series. Its plot centers on Miles Vorkosigan, the son of the plucky, beautiful starship captain Cordelia Naismith and the handsome, strong, passionate, wise Count Aral Vorkosigan of the planet Barrayar. Enemies of the Count attacked Cordelia with a neurotoxin when she was pregnant, so her son Miles was born with an extremely small stature and brittle bones that break easily. He spent most of his first years in an incubator and later had to go through uncounted types of painful therapy.

Fortunately, Miles was also born with a quick wit, fantastic intelligence, and an innate ability to lead others. This allowed him to compensate for his physical disadvantages and he grew up to be a brilliant military tactician, a beloved ship captain, and irresistibly attractive to all ladies and hermaphrodites of intelligence.

Mirror Dance is a book about Miles in his prime and at his most powerful. It is a time when he is living a double life as the dutiful heir of the Count on Barrayar and the brilliant, daring Admiral Naismith of Barrayan Imperial Security.

It turns out that when Miles was a baby, an evil group of the Count’s enemies stole some of Miles’s cells and created a clone of Miles, whom they named Mark. In an impressive display of long-term plotting, they raised Mark from a baby and trained him to be an assassin, the idea being that they would eventually substitute Mark for Miles and he would then be able to get in and kill the Count.

The sinister lab where Mark was created and raised is also a facility that raises clones for rich people and performs brain transplants on them when the progenitor grows aged and wants a new, younger body. Unfortunately for the Count’s enemies, the head of the cloning facility has been abusive to Mark. By the time of Mirror Dance, Mark has had enough of it. He steals a spaceship and tries to free all the other clones. But his escape attempt fails and lab security clamps down. Miles comes after Mark and rescues him and the other clones, but gets shot and left behind in the process. Miles’ crew, Mark, and the rest of Miles’ friends and family spend the rest of the book trying to rescue Miles and also trying to destroy the clone lab, if they can, as a nice side project.

I’m sure if you’re a fan of the Vorkosigan Saga, you will love this book. For me, the saga is too much like a romance novel or a soap opera to get very excited about, and the plots are overly convoluted and not terribly original, and this installment is basically par for that course.

Bujold's characters are divided cleanly between those who are unjust and evil and horrifyingly ruthless, and those who are completely in love with Miles. Miles always knows exactly the right thing to do in any social, diplomatic, or wartime situation. As Admiral Naismith he is theoretically in danger of his life almost every minute, but you also never for a moment forget that he’s secretly royal and that gives him a lot of advantages in staff and equipment that others would not have. Also it lets him bestow lavish and perfect but anonymous gifts on his friends and loyal subordinates.

There is also a lot of time spent on how tedious and wasteful all the glamorous royal ceremonies are, and the primary characters spend a lot of time being forced to go and dress in fancy uniforms and stand around making cynical comments about the other guests, but underneath it all you feel like they really love it. No one could force the Count and Countess Vorkosigan to hold their own Winterfair Ball if they didn’t want to, after all, so it seems kind of hypocritical to have them standing around being snarky about it the whole time. 


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Book Review: The Healer's War

Elizabeth Anne Scarborough
1988
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The Healer’s War is a moving real-life account of one woman’s service in the Vietnam war in the guise of a good science fiction story.

The main character, Lieutenant Kitty McCulley, is a nurse at a U.S. Army hospital near China Beach. Her hospital treats wounded American GIs as well as South Vietnamese civilians. McCulley isn’t always great about keeping her cool or doing things exactly by the book but she genuinely cares about her patients and tries her best for all of them, whatever color they are.

The American soldiers usually stay for only a short time and then are shipped to better-equipped hospitals back home. The Vietnamese civilians, having nowhere else to go, tend to stay longer, and McCulley develops something of a bond with several of them.

One of her Vietnamese patients is a holy man, a healer, who had both legs blown off by a bomb. She cannot save him but before he dies, he gives her his magical amulet. The amulet reveals auras – clouds of color around people and animals that show how they are really feeling and where their pain is – and it also focuses her energy to give her tremendous powers of healing.

Both of these powers come in very handy when she is transporting one of her patients to another hospital and their helicopter is shot down, leaving her and her one-legged, ten-year-old patient to slog their way through miles of Vietnamese jungle until they are eventually captured by the Viet Cong.

While the jungle section contains most of the adventure in the book, my favorite parts were the first section, in the hospital, and the last little section, after McCulley gets back home to the States, because they are both so clearly based on the author’s own experiences as an Army nurse in Vietnam and as a returning vet.

In the first section, Scarborough paints vivid pictures with details. Everyday life at the hospital is largely miserable for McCulley, with the smells (disinfectant, pot, latrines), the heat, the rain, and the bugs. Her nylons fuse to her legs with sweat and the plastic earpiece on the telephone has been melted by the bug spray everyone wears. She deals with so many angry, aggressive, and/or flirtatious soldiers that the nice ones can actually be the most unsettling. But, at the same time, Vietnam can be beautiful to her, with misty mountains covered in hundreds of shades of green.

The last section of the book is equally powerful. It doesn’t give away anything about the book’s central plot to say that when McCulley comes home from Vietnam, she is suffering from shock and trauma and is isolated from those around her. She has real trouble adjusting to life with relatives and friends who have no concept of what the war was like. It is very hard to watch her go sluggishly through the motions of trying to repair herself until she finally realizes she can’t do it all on her own.

I also very much liked McCulley’s personality. She’s a realist and she makes it easy to put yourself in her shoes. She’s exhausted and depressed by the war but she doesn’t make too many excuses for herself. She thinks of herself as an inept, incompetent nurse who isn’t doing a terrific job, and sometimes she does screw up, but her compassion and care for her patients come through loud and clear.

The only major knock I have on this book is that the power of the amulet goes a little too far; in particular, it eventually allows her to understand Vietnamese perfectly. This makes communication with her VC captors conveniently easy but it seems inconsistent with the amulet’s other attributes, which are more vague and impressionistic.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Rules of Victorian Mystery Novels

"[Victorian mystery novels] always take place in a country house...and the butler did it, at least for the first hundred mystery novels or so. Everyone's a suspect, and it's always the least likely person, and after the first hundred or so, the butler wasn't anymore--the least likely person, I mean--so they had to switch to unlikely criminals. You know, the harmless old lady or the vicar's devoted wife, that sort of thing, but it didn't take the reader long to catch on to that, and they had to resort to having the detective be the murderer, and the narrator, even though that had already been done in The Moonstone. The hero did it, only he didn't know it. He was sleepwalking, in his nightshirt, which was rather racy stuff for Victorian times, and the crime was always unbelievably complicated. In mystery novels, I mean, nobody ever just grabs the vase and runs, or shoots somebody in a fit of temper, and at the very end, when you think you've got it all figured out, there's one last plot twist, and the crime's always very carefully thought out, with disguises and alibis and railway timetables and they have to include a diagram of the house in the frontispiece, showing everyone's bedroom and the library, which is where the body always is, and all the connecting doors, and even then you don't have a prayer of figuring it out, which is why they have to bring in a world-famous detective."

Rules of Victorian mystery novels as explained by Verity Kindle
in To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Friday, May 10, 2013

Book Review: Slow River

Nicola Griffith
1996
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –


I was generally impatient with this book.

 

It is set not too far in the future, when all of our sewage is processed and recycled by bioengineered microorganisms. The main character, Lore Van de Oest, is one of the heirs to a wealthy family that made money by creating and patenting many of these microorganisms.
 

At the beginning of the story, Lore gets kidnapped and the kidnappers demand ransom, but her emotionally-removed, dysfunctional family refuses to pay and basically writes her off as dead. Lore manages to escape from her kidnappers but ends up badly hurt in the process, lying an alley in the bad part of town. She is rescued and nursed back to health by a small-time cyber-crook named Spanner with whom she inevitably becomes romantically involved.
 

While recovering at Spanner’s apartment, Lore decides that this is her chance to escape from her family and all the baggage tied to her famous name. Spanner helps Lore get a new identity and for a while the two of them live a grimy life of cyber-crime.
 

Eventually Lore decides to investigate why she was kidnapped and why her family refused to pay her ransom. In order to figure it out she has to go undercover in one of the sewage treatment plants that uses her family’s microorganisms. This was the best part of the book. The water treatment plant uses a multi-stage ecological system to break down the sewage naturally, from pools of toxin-eating algae at the beginning down to fish farms at the end of the line. The technology behind it was really neat and not all that far off from what we could do today.
 

Unfortunately, I just didn't get into the rest of the book. Spanner is a pretty harsh and unappealing person who is willing to do just about anything for money including sell out her lover. And I didn’t really feel all that sorry for Lore as the poor little rich girl who is so beleaguered by her wealth and fame (even if she does uncover an awful history of abuse in her family). 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

The Furry Mirror

"It's no wonder they call you man's best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we have ever known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition."

Ned Henry's unfinished tribute to dogs in
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Friday, May 3, 2013

Book Review: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Connie Willis 
1997
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –   


To Say Nothing of the Dog is another fine, fine piece of work by Connie Willis. 

As in her novels Blackout/All Clear and Doomsday Book, the story revolves around the history department at Oxford University in the late twenty-first century. By that time, time travel has been invented and historians use it to research the past up close. The time-travel device they use, which they call the “net,” has safeguards built into it to prevent anyone from traveling back to a place or time when they’d be able to cause a significant incongruity in the historical continuum. For example, if someone tries to go back to murder Lord Wellington so Napoleon would win the battle of Waterloo, the net may not open to let them through. Or, if it does open, there will be temporal or locational “slippage” and they will be dropped several days too late or in the middle of a field hundreds of miles away from the battle.

Theoretically, at least. The safeguards have never actually been conclusively proven to prevent incongruities. So there is always the chance of slipping up…

In To Say Nothing of the Dog, a bossy and opinionated force of nature (and wealthy donor to the university) named Lady Schrapnell has decided to rebuild the Coventry cathedral, which was destroyed in World War II. She insists on commandeering all of Oxford’s historians to help her get the details right for the grand opening, sending them back in time to check facts or to bring back more accurate descriptions of the décor. It means everyone is completely preoccupied with her project and has no time for their own regular research.

One of these historians, Ned Henry, is suffering a serious case of exhaustion caused by too many time-travel drops. His adviser, Mr. Dunworthy, prescribes a couple days of rest in the English countryside in the Victorian Era where Lady Schrapnell won’t be able to find him.

Dunworthy chooses the year 1888 for Ned’s vacation because Verity Kindle, another historian, has just returned from a research assignment in that year, rashly bringing back a cat which she rescued after a butler had thrown it into the river. Dunworthy is furious at Verity because bringing something back from the past is likely to cause an incongruity. So he gives the cat to Ned to bring back to its Victorian-era owners (or meet its Victorian-era fate) and sends Verity back separately to complete her assignment.

But, unfortunately, Ned, addle-brained from time lag, doesn’t hear the instructions about the cat that Dunworthy yells to him as the net is closing.

Ned then drops into the summer of 1888, and the story that follows is a fast-paced romp through continuously barely-controlled chaos as Ned and Verity try to return the cat and end up causing all kinds of other historical incongruities which they then have to try to fix. (Among the worst, potentially, is that they accidentally prevent a young man and woman from meeting each other whose son is supposed to have become an RAF pilot flying key sorties over Germany in World War II.)

Along the way they have to navigate the tricky waters of Victorian propriety, church jumble sales, and country estate living. They run into great characters: a crusty colonel, an eccentric Oxford don, a simpering, be-ruffled prima donna, a séance-holding medium. Ned and Verity have nothing but the best intentions but are always just barely this side of destroying their contemporary world as they know it.

There are also some really nice moments when Ned is able to pause amidst all the chaos and appreciate scenes that he’ll never be able to see again—like the peaceful streets of Coventry as they were in 1888 before they were destroyed by German bombs, and the banks of the Thames before they were covered with highways and factories.

As with every Connie Willis book, this one is packed with colorful, but not ostentatious, historical and literary details. It is also extraordinarily well put together—an amazing feat considering how many complex, intertwining sub-plots and mysteries she is juggling simultaneously, across several eras in the same temporal location. And Willis is, as always, equally good at giving us moments that are truly hilarious, and moments that are poignant and moving.