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Book Review: Eye of Cat

Roger Zelazny

1982

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I’ve been taking a break from the old award-winner grind, reading books that I just want to read because they look like they’d be fun. I wasn’t planning on writing about any of them, but of course I can’t help it.

Eye of Cat is one of these non-award-winners that did, indeed, turn out to be fun. It has a suspenseful plot, with an appealing hero chased by a scary (and yet also oddly appealing) alien pursuer. The imagery is abstract and surreal, and yet still accessible.

The story takes place in the relatively near future, when space travel is common and humans have made contact with many alien races. The main character is Billy Singer, one of the last remaining Navajo on Earth.

Billy is an outer space hunter. He works as a sort of an independent contractor for a scientific institution (or maybe it’s really just a zoo), using a combination of traditional methods and modern technology to track and capture extraterrestrial life forms, and bringing them back to Earth for observation.

                                                     

Billy didn’t know it at the time he captured it, but one of the extraterrestrials he brought back, a Torglind metamorph, is actually sentient and highly intelligent. And it has been harboring a deep and ever-growing hatred of humans, and of Billy in particular, since he brought it to the zoo forty years ago.

When Eye of Cat opens, Billy is on the edge of retirement, but has been hired by the government for a one-off contract job. They have information that a dangerous alien assassin is somewhere on Earth and is planning to kill an alien ambassador who is visiting our planet on a diplomatic mission. Billy’s job is to track down the assassin and neutralize it. But he quickly learns that the assassin’s abilities to evade detection and capture are way above his head. And he eventually realizes that the only thing on Earth with the ability to catch it is the Torglind metamorph.

So he strikes a deal. If the metamorph helps him to catch the assassin, Billy offers to set it free—and to give it one week to try to hunt him and kill him if it can. The metamorph gladly accepts.

To survive the chase that follows, Billy learns that he must reconnect with Navajo tradition, something he tried to leave behind many years ago. It means that he has to go on not only a tough physical journey but also a trying psychological one. It becomes a semi-supernatural, often hallucinatory experience in which he faces his own life and also the history of his own people while simultaneously trying to outrun and, if possible, turn the tables on the relentless metamorph.

Zelazny is, as always, great at crafting the kind of surrealism necessary for this kind of a story. He sprinkles Navajo poems and songs throughout the book. He writes half-real, half-dream sequences with symbols full of double meaning. He presents the thoughts of both Billy and the metamorph as stream-of-consciousness passages with letters omitted, added, and misplaced. It is often disturbing and disjointed and confusing and yet still strangely understandable at the same time. I don’t know how he manages to come up with these things; I don’t know how he knows what to put where to make it have this effect.

I’ll admit that all this Native American imagery written by a Polish-Irish fellow might come off a little clichéd nowadays. But I thought he did a good job of it.  

A nice postscript to that end is that Zelazny dedicated Eye of Cat to detective writer Tony Hillerman and to his two (fictional) Navajo detectives. According to Wikipedia, Hillerman then "repaid the compliment by having one of his characters reading a Zelazny novel while on a stakeout."

Book Review: Dance Hall of the Dead

Tony Hillerman
1973
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

About fifteen years ago, I read three Tony Hillerman books in a row. I really liked the first, the second a little less, and, by the third, I have to admit I found them getting kind of repetitive.

I’m glad it’s been fifteen years, because reading Dance Hall of the Dead was like reading Hillerman again for the first time. Refreshed.

Hillerman’s novels are set in the Four Corners area of the U.S. where Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah all meet. It’s a dusty, desert-y region home to several Indian reservations – Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, and Acoma, among others. It’s also home to archaeological digs and (in the book, at least) a hippie commune.

Dance Hall was one of Hillerman’s earliest novels, and the second to use his really appealing protagonist Joe Leaphorn, a detective with the Navajo police.

Leaphorn is called in to help when a Zuni boy is found murdered and the boy’s best friend, a Navajo, goes missing. Zuni (which Hillerman spells Zuñi) and Navajo people are by no means friendly, usually, but in this case Leaphorn has to cooperate with the Zuni police and work with both Zuni and Navajo witnesses. He learns more about Zuni religion and tradition than he ever wanted to when it really starts to look like the Zuni boy was killed by a kachina – a Zuni ancestor spirit.

This book makes you very conscious of tempo. Joe Leaphorn moves at his own speed. He takes his time watching a location from far away through binoculars before going in to investigate close up. He works his way very slowly around to asking the questions at the core of his investigation. He’s very happy to let many seconds or even minutes pass in silence when he’s talking to someone.

It sometimes seems to be inefficient and slow, but he’s actually getting quite a lot figured out with this technique. So the investigation and the story progress deceptively quickly. And, towards the end, when Leaphorn gets closer and closer to solving the case, the story picks up speed quite smoothly and expertly, so where you originally felt like you were reading a kind of peaceful, slow-moving story, suddenly you find yourself rapidly turning pages and in the midst of quite a lot of suspense and Leaphorn in the midst of real physical danger.

It is really interesting to learn about Zunis through the eyes of a Navajo; partly because it means you end up learning about Navajos too. And Hillerman’s writing is calm and clear, just like his main character’s thinking. It never is self-conscious or gets in the way of the story.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Accelerando

Charles Stross

2005

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I’m angry at Charles Stross. I’m angry at him for making me like Apocalypse Codex, thereby gearing me up to be excited to read this book, and then having it turn out to be so annoying.

The story is set a couple hundred years in the future, just at the time when our computers are reaching the point of singularity. The combination of processors and circuits that make up our technological network is becoming alive; able to think, adapt, and grow.

Our computing power has also progressed to the point where we can spin off virtual, aware, thinking copies of ourselves. This lets us go off and do ten different things at once (all in virtual, networked environments, of course), bring our copies all back together and reintegrate their separate experiences into our main host body.

Oh, and, also, we have been able to make contact with an intelligent alien race by sending virtual copies of ourselves off into space and setting up a virtual meeting space in a common location with them.

In order to provide enough energy to support all this processing, unfortunately, we have to use our own solar system as a power source. We are dismantling the planets and asteroids, starting from Mercury and moving outwards, turning all the organic material into a ring of metallic, rocky debris surrounding the sun, each piece of which turns the sun’s light into energy. When we are finally finished, we will be left with no planets but only concentric rings of solar-radiation-conducting chunks of rock, acting as a massive power source for all our virtual environments. Stross calls this a “Matrioshka Brain,” and says it can keep us all alive—virtually, of course, in virtual environments—practically forever, after our “fleshbodies” are gone.

Into this situation steps our cast of characters. Main character #1 is Manfred Macx, an “Artificial Intelligence emancipationist.” He somehow makes his living by giving away information—variously and vaguely described by Stross as ideas, innovations, property rights, patents, future information, and paradigm shifts—for free. He does it for the principle of the thing, as sort of a white-hat hacker or an open-source activist. The grateful people to whom he gives these things often give him things in return in a sort of low-pressure, optional barter transaction.

Then there is main character #2, Manfred’s daughter Amber Macx. She is a technological whiz and a charismatic leader with a penchant for drama. She (or a virtual copy of her) spends a lot of her time flying around the solar system in a ship the size of a Coke can, holding audiences in virtual environments. She is the one who pioneered contact with the extraterrestrials, and she is one of the first to realize that the dismantling of the solar system might be a problem.

There are also others, of course; Manfred’s second wife, Annette, who wears mirror-shaded glasses and wearable computing in what must be a nod to Neuromancer, and a sentient robotic cat, Aineko, who is a little odd, in that he is a male calico.

                                                                             

Together this motley crew—under Amber’s leadership—must figure out what to do to save humanity (if, indeed, it warrants saving).

Accelerando uses the premise of unlimited technological possibilities to avoid having to craft a coherent universe for its characters. The concept of virtual reality allows Stross to suspend rules arbitrarily, breaking them and then re-applying them as needed in order to make the plot move forward. It inserts total virtualization into real life in a completely unfettered way that ends up feeling aimless and meaningless. And silly.

On the one hand, anything goes. One crew member on Amber’s ship likes to go around as a velociraptor, for some reason, and her stepmother chooses to appear as an orangutan for a while. Amber likes to decorate her virtual spaceship variously as a fifteenth-century castle or an ancient Persian market. Avatars and objects appear and execute complicated behavioral patterns with a gesture, a wave of the hand, with no apparent programming necessary by anyone, either in the present or the past.

But, at the same time, there are odd restrictions in this otherwise do-anything virtual reality world. At one point, for example, Amber goes virtually to Venus to talk to a virtual avatar of a Venusian entity in a virtual Venusian environment. But she still has to limit her time there, because her avatar won’t survive in that environment for long. Why is that? Why would an avatar need oxygen or heat shielding?

Why did this bother me? I don’t think it’s because it’s a little surrealistic. Roger Zelazny’s writing can be very surreal, and is a thing of beauty. I also don’t think it’s because part of it takes place in a virtual environment per se. Snow Crash and Neuromancer both did that too. But their virtual worlds held together dramatically because they existed according to rules that were internally consistent.

I think it is because it feels flippant. It seems too sloppy, too much like magic. Boom! That guy is now a lobster. Isn’t that funny? It is like a piece of abstract art that you’ve been told is a work of genius, but you have a sneaking suspicion that it’s actually been painted by a child.

It also makes me feel like he’s making the story up as he goes along. The plot wanders wildly from side to side and yanks you around. Key plot points are left extremely vaguely explained, from Manfred’s profession to the Matrioshka Brain. In the end, it made me not really care if the solar system was saved or not.

Five Worst Portrayals of Female Characters in the Nebula & Hugo Award Winners

Herewith, I submit, for your consideration, my choices for the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels that have the worst representation of female characters. 

The women (or girls) in these books are, for the most part, insipid, helpless creatures who are ignored, demeaned, depersonalized, objectified, or, at worst, victimized mercilessly by the male characters around them. Those who do acquire power or happiness do so through either marriage or quasi-religious devotion to a man. They tend to be one-dimensional, serving primarily as lovers, tools, or emotional supports for the main male character.


Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert A. Heinlein)

Heinlein is an easy target in this area, of course. But this book is probably the worst of the bunch. At least in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the main female character has a pretty large role and motivations of her own. And in Starship Troopers, the female soldiers are pretty much equals with their male counterparts. In Stranger in a Strange Land, all of the women who are not behind-the-scenes control fiends are (a) objects of sexual pursuit by, (b) worshipful adorers of, or (c) willing servants for the male characters in the book. They are also all gorgeous, calm and soothing at all times, and often clad only in filmy robes.

The Demolished Man (Alfred Bester)

One might argue that I should excuse this book, since it was written early in the 1950s when standards were different. And, don't get me wrong, I can overlook a little old-style sexism in the interest of a good story. But there were plenty of male writers working before women's lib came along who didn't write about women this awfully. The most sympathetically described woman in the book, Duffy Wyg&, is admiringly described as "the epitome of the modern career girl—the virgin seductress." When Duffy thinks she is being too silly, she tells her boyfriend, "punch me around a little." Another female character has a breakdown after witnessing the murder of her father and has to be re-educated as if she was being raised from infancy by one of the main male characters; as part of this "therapy," he pretends to her for a good long time to be her "daddy," and then, naturally, falls head over heels in love with her and seduces her, saying he loves her "mischievousness" and "urchin look." And there is no hope at all for the comparatively unsympathetically-portrayed women, who are described as flighty, superficial, gaudy, unattractive and "screeching."

The Fountains of Paradise (Arthur C. Clarke)

This book is actually a decent book with a pretty good story. And I really like most of Clarke's work; he just doesn't do all that well writing women, I don't think. He doesn't seem to be able to write them so that they seem like real people. Their conversations are stilted and they seem flat and one-dimensional. In this book, in fact, most of the female characters are literally one-dimensional: they are images of seductive, irresistibly beautiful, unattainable goddesses painted on a rock wall by a decadent, long-forgotten emperor. These paintings bewitch the various male characters to varying degrees, but seem essentially irrelevant as drivers of the plot, serving mainly as objects to admire and ponder meditatively. There is one named actual living human female character in the book, but she is used very minimally.

The Quantum Rose (Catherine Asaro)

 This book stands as evidence that female writers can also sink to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to writing about women. Our incredibly beautiful and intelligent Harlequin-Romance-style heroine, Kamoj Argali, is a provincial ruler on her planet; she is forced to get herself betrothed to a beastly but wealthy man in order to save her people from starvation; she then is rescued from said awful match by a handsome and virile stranger from another planet. Kamoj is an impossibly perfect, gorgeous, smart, kind, and generous woman beloved simultaneously by her people and her lover; she is purportedly strong-willed and powerful but yet she can't make up her mind about anything and keeps getting buffeted about by the controlling men in her life.

The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)

And this book stands as evidence that even though a book passes the Bechdel test, it doesn't mean that its characters are necessarily strong portrayals of women. The primary female, Emiko, is actually a robot—or, rather, a genetically-modified, semi-robotic human—built for the entertainment of men, and conditioned to obey and to serve, even at the cost of her total shame and extreme physical pain. Also, for those who have triggers in this area, the book contains two graphic rape scenes, both involving Emiko. I know I'm not the best person to judge the necessity of a rape scene, but these were very disturbing and seemed to me to go on well past the point where any point about brutality had been made.

Book Review: The Sculptress

Minette Walters
1994
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

This book was great, a real page-turner, up to the halfway point, when it abruptly started losing my belief and my patience and my interest.

The story revolves around Olive, an enormously obese woman who is serving a 25-year prison term for the gruesome murder of her mother and sister. A writer, Roz, is doing research for a book about the murders and ends up discovering evidence that suggests that Olive didn't commit the murders after all.

Olive is a disturbed, creepy person who makes voodoo dolls of clay and candle wax and has to be carefully drawn out to say anything of value. Roz's initial investigation into the murders was lively and kept my interest up, particularly when she was interviewing Olive.

But it all starts to go downhill when Roz gets involved with Hal, one of the policemen who arrested Olive, who is now retired and running a restaurant.

Roz’s ex-policeman/restaurateur boyfriend has problems of his own - a foreclosure-scam lawyer trying to get him to close his restaurant. As it turns out, the lawyer was Olive’s family lawyer and had invested in properties (including Hal’s restaurant) with Olive's inheritance assuming she'd be in jail for 25 years, and now that it appears she might be innocent after all he has to start breaking people's kneecaps to get the money back. All of this seemed like an attempt to be twisty that just got too complicated.

Also the relationship between Roz and the policeman is juvenile and annoying. When they got together, Roz suddenly became the stereotypical sassy but helpless heroine. Hal became her stalwart protector and kept referring to her as "woman", as in, "woman, you drive me crazy."

I also didn't buy Olive's character change over the course of the story. She went from being a tough, recalcitrant prisoner who insists she committed the murders to a soft mush-mouth who cries a lot and is practically falling over herself to explain everything that really happened.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the book, though, if I may hearken back to my politically correct college days, is its treatment of the Female Body Image. First there is the obvious contrast between fat, creepy, evil Olive and skinny, sassy, virtuous Roz. There are also a couple times when Roz gets beaten up – once by her ex-husband and once by thugs hired to take back Hal’s restaurant. There is a lot of lingering detail about Roz’s injuries, and her bruises bring out the lover and romantic protector in Hal in a way that I found less than comfortable.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.