Emperor Kitteh

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: The Islanders

Christopher Priest
2011

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Islanders has a clever and unique set up: it is written in the form of a travel guidebook. It is a guide to the Dream Archipelago, a vast and diverse collection of fictional islands ringing the equator of a fictional planet.

It should be explained that, in addition to the Dream Archipelago, the planet has two continental land masses—one at each pole. The primary powers on the northern polar continent (Faiandland and the Glaund Republic) have been at war with each other for the past three hundred years, and, by mutual consent, they have been fighting that war almost entirely on the southern polar continent, so as not to destroy too much of their homelands.

Sitting as they do between the two polar continents, the islands of the Archipelago are necessarily affected to varying degrees by the continental wars. But they try to stay as uninvolved and independent as they can, relying on a long-standing Covenant of Neutrality.

No one knows exactly how many islands there are, or where they all are, or what all of their real names are, or if they even all have names. Part of this is because of (sometimes purposefully) imperfect record-keeping on the part of the inhabitants, and part of this is because of planetary temporal and locational distortions that make accurate mapping impossible.

The best one can do, then, if one wants to create a guide to the Archipelago, is to write a selective, anecdotal directory like this book. It gives a sampling of some of the islands, one chapter per island, in alphabetical order.

The guidebook treats each island differently. Some islands have very short chapters, with their history, geography, and governance described in a relatively straightforward gazetteer way. Other islands are described less traditionally, in the form of a letter or memoir about a particular time or incident by a resident or visitor.

What this means is that the book ends up being a series of sketches, vignettes, and short stories, rather than a single narrative tale. Some islands’ stories stand completely alone, and some have weaker or stronger connections to others.

On the plus side, this format gives Priest an opportunity to demonstrate his undeniable creativity. Each island allows him to explore a new plot line or setting or character, in as much or as little detail as he wants. Each island is also a chance to momentarily freeze the timeline at whatever point he wants.

Because the islands' chapters are organized alphabetically, the stories have a sort of dreamlike temporal disjointedness. And it means that the connections between different islands pop up somewhat randomly, adding unexpected richness to earlier stories.

Some of my particular favorite themes and stories:

• The thrymes of Aubrac: the thryme is an unassuming-appearing insect whose lethal venom at first makes its home island uninhabitable to any other form of life. It is eventually supposedly eradicated and its island is turned into the Archipelago’s silicon hub, but the tenacious thrymes keep finding ways of popping back up.

• The towers of Seevl: The island is dotted with mysterious ancient towers that seem to exude powers of evil mental suggestion. The towers are investigated by a scientific team in a story that has strong Lovecraftian echoes.

• Dryd Bathurst, painter of epics: Bathurst is not only a great artist but also a notorious rogue. As we progress from island to island, we seem to keep just missing him as he is forced by jealous husbands and irate fathers to flee to somewhere else.

The down side of the semi-connected short-story format is that it ends up making the book as a whole feel disjointed and unresolved.

                                                                                              

As a rule, I prefer novels to short stories. I like a plot I can really sink my teeth into. I am disappointed when a good story ends just when I’m getting into it and I have to switch to another. The guidebook format of The Islanders necessarily makes it a collection of short, scattered sketches, with no time to get into the specificity or character development that would bring more depth to them. I was often left with frustrating unanswered questions: What was in those paintings? What was that character’s job? What were that famous novelist’s books all about, anyway?

The short chapters made me feel negatively buffeted by the vicissitudes of Priest’s whims. The islands I liked the most seemed like they were left behind too soon, and the characters I found the least interesting—like a mime who is murdered in a small-town theater—were the ones that seemed to crop up the most often. And so many of the stories were centered around artists—novelists, theater performers, and installation artists in particular—that it actually got tiresome, and I was wishing for a couple more stories about scientists or politicians.

One more minor thing that bothered me was the way the largest cities on the islands were often just the name of the island plus “City” or “Town.” The largest city on Sentier is Sentier City; the largest city on Siff is Siff Town; and so on and on with Emmeret Town, Muriseay Town, Derril City, etc. If we did that at the same rate in real life, we’d have Hawaii Town, Cuba Town, Ireland City, and Japan City.

Book Review: A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

Lawrence Block
1991
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I am a huge, huge Lawrence Block fan. My love affair with his books started about twenty years ago when my dear great aunt lent me her copy of Eight Million Ways to Die. Since then I’ve read everything Block has written that I could get my hands on.

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse is the ninth installment of the Matt Scudder series, which is Block’s best series by far. The Scudder books are not only extremely gritty murder mysteries but also a complex and realistic record of the main character coming to grips with his alcoholism.

Matt Scudder was a brilliant, if sometimes ethically questionable, detective in the NYPD who resigned from the force after a bullet he fired (while drunk and on duty) ricocheted and killed a little girl. Since then, he has been working as an unlicensed private detective and struggling to stay sober.

By the time of Slaughterhouse, Scudder is has been in AA for several years. He has a stable relationship with his girlfriend Elaine, resists drinking through the whole book, and pursues two cases at the same time: tracking down the producers of a snuff film and figuring out whether a wealthy lawyer did or did not kill his wife.

It’s a shame that this is the only Edgar that Block has won. Slaughterhouse is a perfectly good book, but my favorite Scudder stories are the ones earlier in the timeline (like Eight Million Ways to Die and When the Sacred Ginmill Closes), when he is in the initial fits and starts of his recovery from alcoholism. Block makes you suffer right along with Scudder as he goes through agonizing backslides which only make it that much harder for him to climb back up onto the wagon.

No matter how long he has been sober, Scudder is (and you are) always, always conscious of alcohol around him. He’s confronted with it all the time, like when he goes out to dinner and the dinner menu says, playfully, “A day without wine is like a day without sunshine!” When his cases aren’t going well, or he’s under stress, it’s doubly hard; the first thing he always fantasizes about is a glass of bourbon. Or a bottle of bourbon.

At one point in Slaughterhouse, Scudder meets a contact, a young cop, in a bar. The cop is drunk, argumentative, and clearly on the same path Scudder himself was on. After making one attempt to get their meeting to happen somewhere else, Scudder eventually chooses to leave the cop there in the bar. He feels guilty about leaving without making more of an effort, but his sponsor reminds him that, as an alcoholic, your first responsibility is not to drink. You cannot always save others because it may take all you have just to do that.

Blurb writers are always comparing Block to Elmore Leonard. I don’t know why they think this is a compliment, given how great Block is and how annoying Leonard is. I wish that Hollywood would stop making movies out of Leonard’s books and make a good movie out of one of Block’s. Eight Million Ways to Die was made into a movie, and it does star Jeff Bridges, who of course is fantastic, but the adaptation is disappointing. Instead of New York, it takes place in Los Angeles, where Matt Scudder definitely doesn’t belong, and Scudder has resigned from the police force because he killed a drug dealer, rather than a little girl, which is not quite the same thing when it comes to mental anguish.

For those who like mysteries but for whom the Matt Scudder series is a little too dark and/or explicit, Block’s Burglar series is tamer but just as well-written. The central character, Bernie Rhodenbarr, is a used bookstore owner by day and a burglar by night. He always manages to stumble across corpses while on his night job and has to solve the murders himself to prevent them from convicting him of the murder.


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

List of Craters on Venus Named for Women

Lists (11)

Annie Oakley Crater, Dorothy Sayers Crater.

                                       Also craters named for:

Madame Sévigné, Shakira (a Bashkir goddess), Martha Graham, Hippolyta, Nina Efimova, Dorothea Erxleben, Lorraine Hansberry, Catherine Beevher;

also the Mesopotamian fertility goddess, the Celtic river goddess, the Woyo rainbow goddess, the Pueblo Indian corn goddess, the Vedic goddess of plenty, the Roman goddess of the hunt (Diana), the Latvian goddess of fate;

also Anna Comnena, Charlotte Corday, Mary Queen of Scots, Madame de Staël, Simone de Beauvoir, Josephine Baker.

Also Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar. Tezan, the Etruscan goddess of the dawn. Alice B. Toklas. Xantippe. Empress Wuhou. Virginia Woolf. Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Evangeline, Fátima, Gloria, Gaia, Helen, Heloise.

Lillian Hellman, Edna Ferber, Zora Neale Hurston.

Guinevere, Nell Gwyn, Martine de Beausoleil.

Sophia Jex-Blake, Jerusha Jirad, Angelica Kauffman.

Maria Merian, Maria Montessori, Marianne Moore.

MuGuiying. Vera Mukhina. Aleksandra Potanina.

Margaret Sanger. Sappho. Zoya. Sara Winnemucca. Seshat.

      Jane Seymour. Rebecca West. Marie Stopes. Alfonsina Storni. Anna Volkova. Sabina Steinbach. Mary Wollstonecraft. Anna von Schuurman. Jane Austen. Wang Zenyi. Karen Blixen.

Sojourner Trouth. Harriet Tubman.

Hera. Emily Dickenson.

 

From 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, p. 352-353

For the complete list of cytherean craters, see Wikipedia