Friday, March 28, 2014

Nebula vs. Hugo: An Unexpected Finding

When I started this whole book-review project, I predicted to myself that I would like the Nebula winners more than the Hugo winners. Presumptuous as I am, I thought that since the Nebula awards are awarded by science fiction writers, they must be of higher quality.

But, lo and behold, it turns out that I have rated the Nebula winners slightly lower, on average, than the Hugo winners. 

There are currently 89 novels that have won the Nebula and/or the Hugo award. 27 have won only the Nebula, 40 books have won only the Hugo, and 22 have won both. Here are my average ratings:

Nebula Only: 2.6 
Hugo Only: 2.9
Both Hugo and Nebula:  3.4 

You can see even more detail about the distribution of ratings by award type in the graph below:


Monday, March 24, 2014

Mission: Possible

Well, my dear readers, there it is. Finishing Redshirts means that I have at last completed my project to read all of the Hugo and Nebula award winning novels to date.

Thank you to everyone who read my reviews and commented, griped, agreed, and disagreed, whether online or in person. I love that there is a community of people out there who enjoy this stuff as much as I do.

This project has exposed me to so many new authors and ideas. I am particularly grateful to have read books by Connie Willis, Jack McDevitt, Roger Zelazny, Joe Haldeman, Elizabeth Moon, and Kim Stanley Robinson for the first time, and to have read more by Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, Arthur C. Clarke, and Neal Stephenson.

And I'm even glad to have had to read more Heinlein. Sort of.

So... I've done what I set out to do, and I'm pretty proud of it.

But, you know, the thing is, there still is a universe out there of books to read. There are three retro Hugos, awarded to SF classics that were published before the award was created. And there are all the Locus and Campbell award winners. And then, for crying out loud, there are all the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell nominees.

And not only that, but there are innumerable essays that could be written about the winners on gender, religion, technology, you name it. There are exhaustive statistical analyses to be done about star ratings by decade and award type.

And besides that, I have a backlog of reviews of Edgar award winners that I might want to sneak in here.

I am probably going to slow down on the reviews for a while; I won't be getting one done every week like I have in the past. But I will still be reading. And that means I'll probably still want to use this space to vent my opinions on the world a while longer. So stay tuned, fellow readers.

Friday, March 21, 2014

Book Review: Redshirts

John Scalzi
2012
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book is so fast and so fun, you could easily read all of it in one longish day at the beach. Or in one late night (to early morning) of uninterrupted indulgence. It’s a satisfying guilty pleasure, like a special double episode of your favorite awkward but lovable cult sci-fi TV series.

The book takes place in what is basically the Star Trek universe, except that Scalzi can’t call anything by any of the Star Trek names because of potential trademark violations. The setting is the starship Intrepid, the flagship of Space Fleet, the naval arm of the Universal Union of Planets. The Intrepid has a familiar line-up of senior staff: a charismatic and sometimes overly emotive captain, a serious science officer, a skilled medical chief, a resourceful chief engineer, and a plucky lieutenant.

And the Intrepid also has a large supply of miscellaneous, low-ranking, red-shirted crewmen, whom it seems to knock off at an alarmingly fast pace.

Redshirts is told from the point of view of one of these miscellaneous low-ranking crewmen, ensign Andrew Dahl, who has just been assigned to the Intrepid straight out of Space Fleet Academy. Dahl quickly figures out that things are weird aboard his new ship.

For example, the ship’s inertial dampeners always work perfectly—except when the ship is being fired upon, and then the entire bridge crew has to jiggle around ridiculously while they perform evasive maneuvers. And the science lab where Dahl works has a piece of equipment called “the Box” that can perform scientific miracles, like synthesizing an antidote to a hitherto unknown alien illness—but it only functions when one of the senior staff members is in a crisis and there is an impossibly short time to solve it.

But the strangest thing of all is how flaky the crew is when it comes to away missions. On the Intrepid, away missions have an abnormally high mortality rate for crewmen below the rank of lieutenant. Ensigns on away missions are often killed in awful, unusual, and sometimes easily preventable ways, like by catching grotesque diseases or being eaten by rare carnivorous alien creatures. So crew members have developed an intense paranoia about it, and avoid the senior officers like the plague when a mission is likely to be called.

Dahl, being unusually brave and curious for an ensign, refuses to accept the status quo and sets it upon himself to figure out what is going on. Which, of course, gets him into deep trouble.

It’s really funny to see the quirky aspects of the Star Trek universe called out: the silly lines, the implausible situations, the use of ensign death to heighten dramatic tension. And the conversations between crew members are hilarious—snappy, sarcastic, and brusque. Everyone is always nervous because they never know when it might be their time to die a hideous death, so they tend to be testy and irritated with each other. They don’t have time to mess around, or to be caught standing around talking when a senior staff member comes by.

It is a good thing that Redshirts reads so quickly, because I don’t think the book’s central conceit would survive being dragged out much longer than it is. As it was, I did start getting worried about two-thirds through that Scalzi wouldn’t be able to keep the humor and dramatic tension going all the way to the end. And I think he could have easily dropped at least one of his three codas (preferably the first one). As a funny but sensitive exposé of the Trek characters and plot contrivances we love, I don’t think it hits the mark quite as well as Galaxy Quest. But it’s still very good, and very fun.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Book Review: The Terminal Experiment

Robert J. Sawyer
1995
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Terminal Experiment reads quickly and easily, like a fast-paced thriller, zipping you effortlessly through the plot. It also has a fantastic initial premise.

Unfortunately, although the plot starts off following a tantalizingly interesting opening idea, it switches course about halfway through and plunges off into a much less interesting, almost completely separate story line for the remainder of the book. It ends up seeming like two independent stories stuck together with a minimum of connective tissue in the middle and at the end. And the writing can also sometimes be, well, juvenile.

The main character, Peter Hobson, is a brilliant Toronto-based biomedical engineer. At the beginning of the story he is in grad school and is asked to assist with an organ harvest from the victim of a traffic accident. From the donor’s body’s reactions, Peter thinks that the donor might still have been technically alive when they began the harvesting operation.

This gets Peter thinking. After he gets his doctorate, he invents a kind of a super EEG machine that will detect the instant a person is actually, really dead—no brain activity at all.

The thing is that when his machine reads a person’s brain activity at the moment of their death, it consistently records a powerful last electric impulse that travels from the center of the person’s brain out to the person’s temple where it leaves the head, still intact. It turns out that Peter has accidentally scientifically proven the existence of the human soul.

This, of course, changes the way everyone looks at everything. It gets especially interesting when other scientists using Peter’s machine are able to discover that (a) cows don't have a soul but chimpanzees do, and (b) the soul enters a fetus sometime between the 9th and 10th weeks of pregnancy (which makes both sides of the choice debate unhappy).

This is all great as a cool, thought-provoking plot line. But just as it really gets going, the story veers in a different direction. During a dinnertime discussion only tangentially related to the soul wave, Peter and his friend Sarkar, a brilliant software engineer, decide to do an experiment with artificial intelligence to figure out what it’s like to be dead and what it’s like to be immortal.

Using an invention of Sarkar’s, they create three identical copies of Peter’s brain patterns. One is identical to Peter (a control); one has had all impulses removed that are related to the physical body (this one is supposed to be the dead one); and one has had all fears about aging removed (this one is supposed to be the immortal one).

Then everything goes to hell in a handcart when the three Peter simulations escape out onto the internet and one of them arranges to have Peter’s wife’s former lover killed. The Toronto police start zeroing in on Peter and it becomes a race against time to see if Peter and Sarkar can identify and shut down the errant sim before either (a) they are both arrested or (b) the bad sim kills again.

If the book had just ended after the first half—hopefully after coming to some creative resolution of the soul wave story—it would have been great. The questions it raises are intriguing enough in their own right. But the second half of the book, the sim murder mystery, is awkward and much less interesting. It’s all a bit far-fetched as a scientific experiment to start with and the sims themselves are personally irritating. Plus, it is all centered around Sarkar’s invention while Peter’s invention has fallen, essentially forgotten, by the wayside.
                                                    
The other problem is that the writing, while easy to read and fast-moving, also sometimes feels klunkily immature. The emails that the bad sim sends to set up the hit on the wife’s lover are particularly goofy; they read like a teenager wrote them trying to sound like an adult. The news stories about the soul wave discovery that Sawyer sprinkles throughout the text don’t sound like stories serious reporters would actually write; they have too much witty joking around.

The dialogue of peripheral characters doesn’t always ring true to their professions. At one point, for example, a police detective asks a medical examiner about an autopsy, and the medical examiner says, “the gym teacher who combed his hair over?” it just klunked. I would think an M.E. would say, “the heart attack?” or “the car accident?” to identify a case, but not whether a guy had a comb-over. It seemed not only unrealistic but also needlessly mean.

And one final annoying thing is that Peter is constantly ogling and fantasizing gratuitously about every woman he comes across. The physical appearance of each luscious female character is described meticulously, while all we know of Peter is that he has a bald spot. (And we know nothing physically about his male friend Sarkar; all we know is that he is a devout Muslim and likes Star Trek and Agatha Christie.)

Friday, March 7, 2014

Book Review: The Apocalypse Codex

Charles Stross
2012
Awards: Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The Apocalypse Codex is a story told by Bob Howard, who is a field agent for the British intelligence services. Except instead of being a nice, normal spy for something like MI-5 or MI-6, Bob is an agent for the Laundry, the agency that protects the United Kingdom (and, often, the rest of humanity as well) from demons, zombies, evil entities from parallel dimensions, and other soul-sucking creatures.

The Laundry is so secret that absolutely no one outside of it even knows it exists. They use spells and wards and charms in combination with top-of-the-line hacker technology to make sure it stays that way. And if you stumble upon it by accident somehow, and become aware of it, you are drafted into it. Forever.

Bob is a funny character. In some ways he’s relatively hapless. He’s definitely not a powerful or experienced magician. He has little patience for actually reading his briefing material and has a tendency to plunge into situations that are way above his head. But he is also 100% loyal to the service and never abandons his allies in the field. He also has, thanks to accidents that happened during previous cases, a growing ability in creating magic containment fields and in sensing otherworldly presences with his third eye. His superiors generally like him, and seem to be grooming him for something big—which Bob fervently hopes is not a stultifying promotion to a desk job in middle management.

At the beginning of the Apocalypse Codex, Bob is assigned by his office to follow up on the activities of two “external assets,” Persephone Hazard and Johnny McTavish, who are something like independent contractors. Persephone and Johnny have been investigating an American evangelical preacher named Ray Schiller who seems to be quite rapidly building up an international cult following.

Schiller is, of course, actually possessed by an alien parasite that is using his body to lead a black magic movement that wants to sacrifice tens of millions of innocent people in a rite designed to awaken the Sleeper under the Pyramid, a horrifyingly evil and powerful Lovecraftian pseudo-deity.

It’s up to Bob, Persephone, and Johnny to stop Schiller from succeeding. Luckily, Bob's “external assets” are no newbies to this sort of work; Persephone is a powerful witch and Johnny is an elder in an extremely ancient and irregular church. But Schiller still leads the three of them on a dangerous and hair-raising chase across England and the central United States, as well as other dimensions and universes, all, of course, with the fate of humanity at stake.

The book is really a fun romp. It’s a combination of genres: espionage, modern hacker tech, and gothic horror. Stross makes references to all sorts of science fiction and horror classics, from Lovecraft, Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephen King, and Men in Black. And the references are overt: homages used consciously with love and respect, not stolen, or done with any sense of trying to one-up those who came before.

And Stross writes a bit like Douglas Adams: every sentence is dense with funny descriptions, rolling action, and very Britishly witty subuordinate clauses. I could imagine that the style could theoretically get tiresome after a while, but the story is short enough that that doesn’t happen.