Book Review: Room to Swing

Ed Lacy
1957
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This novel just goes to show that you can’t judge a book by its ridiculous cover – or its teensy size.

It proves that just because a book is short (a tidy 128 pages) and just because it went out of print and had to be resurrected by a tiny publisher who obviously scanned in the original text and then didn’t edit it afterwards so that there are typos, skipped sentences, and "& pound; s" scattered throughout the text, and whose extensive cover design consisted of reprinting a tiny picture of the original 1957 cover artwork (shown here) surrounded by an enormous plain black border, and who jammed the text so close to the tops of the pages that the headers and page numbers are practically cut off, doesn’t mean it can’t be action-packed and establish great characters.

The plot is tried-and-true mystery fare: the main character, Toussaint Moore, is a New York detective hired to track a man who quickly winds up being murdered. Moore is the first to find the body and is of course mistakenly accused of the crime; he then has to solve the murder in order to prove his own innocence.

I loved Moore’s style. He doesn’t take any guff and doesn’t go out of his way to make other people feel comfortable. He is abrupt, snappy, and slangy, like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe at his best. But Moore is also human, and his fears are plain.

Lacy’s writing is fast-paced, clear-headed, and straightforward–which is the only way the book can be this complex and this short and still work. I liked that he starts by dropping you right smack in the middle of the story, so you have to put the background together for yourself as he gives it to you. And what I liked even more was that you got the clues and solved the mystery at the same time Moore does. It seems like this might make it less suspenseful, but it actually makes it more so.

What makes this novel unique for 1957 is that Moore is black. (He is, in fact, described on the back of my copy of the book and in several reviews as “the first credible black detective” in popular mystery fiction.)

For Moore, a black detective in the ‘50s, racism is never far away. Especially when most of the people he has to deal with in the story are white, including the people who hired him, the police who are chasing him, and the man he was trailing and is accused of murdering. This is a constant additional tension, to say the least, that a white detective would not have had to cope with.

In the course of solving the crime, Moore ends up traveling from New York to Bingston, Ohio, a small town just north of the Kentucky border. The contrast is educational for him. Bingston is plainly, overtly racist; Moore can only make phone calls from certain gas stations, can't eat at the cafeteria or stay at the hotel, and is constantly called “boy” and treated with hostility.

New York is certainly better than Bingston on the surface; black people have a wider choice of professions, have at least the legal right to eat and lodge anywhere they want, and night clubs often have both black and white patrons. (It even has out-of-the-closet Lesbians (capitalized), whom, by the way, Moore is totally okay with.)

But even with the most “liberal-minded” white New Yorkers, Moore constantly walks a tightrope of behavior, judging when to put up with insensitive remarks or outright insults and when to defend himself. And he still has to fight the pressure, even from his girlfriend and his own pesky conscience, to give up his risky detective agency venture and run to a safe civil service job.


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

Book Review: The Hours Before Dawn

Celia Fremlin
1958
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This was an unexpectedly enjoyable and well-crafted book. It was scary and suspenseful but also funny. And it did not disappoint at the end. 

The book takes place in 1950s London. The main character is Louise, a harried housewife and mother with a new baby who can never get enough sleep so she is constantly tired and making mistakes and losing things (including her baby). 

To earn some extra money, Louise and her husband take in a boarder who appears at first to be a mild-mannered schoolmistress but who becomes more and more sinister throughout the story.

I love the way Fremlin writes: very matter-of-fact-ly. She is sympathetic to Louise and her family but also shows their faults. She has surrounded Louise with neighbors and "friends" who constantly gossip and criticize and offer advice, but who never are actually any help. Among the "friends" are some "progressive" mothers who advocate the latest in child care (which in the '50s apparently means being as uninvolved as possible and leaving it up to your neighbors to feed and entertain your children). It all creates a perfectly crafted atmosphere of stress and chaos that makes Louise feel like she's going off her rocker.

Many of the Edgar award winners I have read start out strong, with a great and original idea, but then falter. This one does not have a super-original plot, but it was engrossing and satisfying right up to the very last sentence.


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

Book Review: The Eighth Circle

Stanley Ellin
1958
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The cover of the 1959 paperback edition of this book makes it look like a trashy piece of pulp fiction. It has a drawing of the main character, handsome private detective Murray Kirk, being leaned on by a lovely young lady who is half out of her satin dinner dress and matching heels. A block of text next to the pair describes the book as “a story about the special world of a private detective.”

But it’s actually a perfectly decent detective story.

And, as far as I could tell, Kirk never actually sleeps with any of the ladies he runs across. Not one. Oh, sure, one falls asleep on the rug in front of his fireplace and stays the night there, and he has to help another off with rain-soaked clothes and warm her up in his shower to prevent her from passing out from the cold, and there is certainly a lot of racy talk and innuendo, but no major hanky-panky.

And not only that, but the case doesn’t revolve around a murder; it’s just a book-keeping scandal. And I think only one or two of the bad guys even has a gun.

What happens is that Kirk, who runs a successful detective agency in New York, gets personally involved in a minor case, the arrest of a policeman accused of taking payoffs, because he’s madly in love with the cop’s fiancée. He’s hired by the cop’s lawyer to dig up information that will prove his client’s innocence, but he actually hopes that his client is guilty so the fiancée will call it off and go out with him instead. Of course the case gets extremely complicated and pulls in plenty of characters from both high society and the unsavory underworld.

While it wasn’t fantastic, it was generally a well put-together, mostly page-turning mystery. It definitely stayed true to its genre and vintage; I wouldn’t read this book expecting anything unusual or stereotype-flouting.

For the most part, I liked Kirk. He doesn’t always guess right about clues and certainly has bad days. He’s no-nonsense and savvy but not quite as hard-boiled and gruff as, say, Philip Marlowe. He’s a little slicker than that. He’s also relatively kind to the women in his life (for a 1950s P.I.).

The men, both good and bad, are pretty well developed characters. The women, on the other hand, are completely one-dimensional. Each one is absolutely beautiful and in dire need of his help except for his (naturally) super-efficient, loyal, middle-aged secretary (who used to be absolutely beautiful).


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: The Progress of a Crime

Julian Symons
1960
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book is not a stereotypical murder mystery with a lot of drama and gore. As advertised, it follows the progress of a crime very closely and realistically, from the murder to the trial of the chief suspects. You experience the investigation from the point of view of several people trying to figure out what happened – reporters, policemen, and lawyers. Sometimes they get information through good detective work, and sometimes they get it accidentally. You find out what they know as soon as they know it, and you put the story together with them.

The story had twists that I did not expect, precisely because the twists were caused by what would happen in real life – people being confused, people saying things inarticulately, people not knowing quite what they want or what they are doing.

The story is set in a small city outside of London. A gang of youths acts rowdy and gets thrown out of a dance by a prominent local citizen. A short time later, amid the confusion of a Guy Fawkes Day fireworks and bonfire celebration, the youths come back and manage to stab the prominent local citizen to death. It so happens that Hugh Bennet, a reporter for the local paper, was covering the Guy Fawkes Day bonfire when the murder happened. He thus simultaneously becomes not only an investigator of the crime but also a witness to it.

Bennet isn’t a typical lead character; he is unsure of himself and gets confused like any normal human being. He is a relatively new reporter and tends to romanticize his editor, his job, and his co-workers. He becomes disillusioned with them when a big-time reporter from a London paper comes out to cover the case and gives him a little more perspective. Then, in turn, he gets disillusioned by the big-time reporter as he learns more about his world.

Bennet’s girlfriend is a real person as well; she gets frustrated and doesn’t always act in the best or most attractive way.

The lead detective on the case, Twicker, mishandled a previous case and Scotland Yard has given this one to him as a sort of a test. I thought the whole time it was going to be a stereotypical Hollywood-type story where he was going to pull it out of his hat and dramatically redeem himself to the Yard but, as with everything else in this book, things don’t always go exactly as Hollywood would have you expect.

The lawyers for the prosecution and the defense are charismatic characters but they're not superhuman or brilliant like the ones on Law & Order. They have moments where they shine and moments of trouble, and none of them care particularly about the boys they are prosecuting or defending; they care primarily about their jobs and reputations.

The case does make many of the characters reevaluate their lives and their careers, especially Bennet. But it doesn't tie up neatly or end terrifically happily for everyone. Things come out better for some, worse for others; some find their resolution depressing and others try to make the best of theirs. Just like real life.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Beast in View

Margaret Millar
1955
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This murder mystery takes place in Los Angeles in the 1950s. A wealthy, antisocial woman, Helen Clarvoe, starts getting weird, threatening phone calls from an old acquaintance. The calls scare her, so she hires her family’s financial advisor, Mr. Blackshear, to try to find out who is calling her and why. This leads Mr. Blackshear on a nice investigation in which he uncovers all sorts of interesting secrets about Helen’s past and the other members of her family, and during which one of the people he is investigating commits suicide and another is murdered.

What I liked about this book most of all was the author’s clear, straightforward style. It was a pretty complicated story, and Millar certainly doesn’t use a simple vocabulary, but her writing is nevertheless easy to read. She is not deliberately obscure or pretentious or too obvious about trying to create suspense.

The book was also small, a tidy 156 pages. I think that Millar knew the story she wanted to tell and didn't feel that she needed to add a lot of unnecessary fluff around it. Which I appreciate.

I also enjoyed reading a mystery about post-war non-Hollywood society in Los Angeles by somebody with a very different take on it than Raymond Chandler.

One notable aspect of this book is that one of the key characters, Helen’s brother Douglas, is gay. I thought that his character was handled amazingly well, considering that this book was written in 1955. Douglas is a full, complex person, not a monster or a silly stereotype. And when his mother finds out and wants to take him to a clinic to get “cured,” he explains to her (and the reader) that this is a part of who he is and it isn’t anything that he can be cured of.

The back cover of the 2000 edition of this book advertises that it pulls the main characters into a world of “extortion, pornography, vengeance, and murder." I don't know if it's really all that exciting, but it was a good read, with a clear style and plot twists that kept me interested through to the end.


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

Book Review: The King of the Rainy Country

Nicolas Freeling
1966
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book is a detective story along the lines of Raymond Chandler, but it takes place in Europe instead of Los Angeles.

The main character, Van der Valk, is a police detective from Amsterdam who gets assigned to track down an eccentric millionaire who has run away from home. The hunt involves a lot of competitive skiing and car chases through the Austrian alps, west across France and finally down to the western border with Spain.

Throughout the book Van der Valk endeared himself to me by comparing himself to Philip Marlowe and James Bond and other fictional detectives that he felt he should be more like, but wasn't. 

I liked the story a lot but sometimes it was a struggle for me to follow Freeling's writing, what with all of the author's European 1960s-era historical and literary allusions. I read it with Wikipedia at hand and it was quite an education. 

For example, I didn't know that bleach was originally called "eau de Javel," after the town where it was first invented. Or that "blackwater" is an awful complication of malaria that brings on chills and jaundice. I learned that the gentian flower can be used to flavor liqueur and that Lethe is the name of the river of forgetfulness in Hades. I also got to learn all about the "Incident at Mayerling," an 1889 murder-suicide scandal involving the heir to the Austrian empire, and about an infamous bloodbath of a battle that was fought in the French town of Malplaquet during the War of Spanish Succession.

It's a fun read, but be prepared to pull out the encyclopedia.


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

Book Review: All the Birds in the Sky

Charlie Jane Anders
2016
Awards: Nebula, Locus (Fantasy)
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

All the Birds in the Sky is a story in the old traditional pattern of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl become central figures on opposing sides in a potentially world-ending conflict. It had a lot of potential, and certainly some funny, endearing, and dramatic moments. But, on the whole, it did not wear as well as it might have.

The novel is the story of two kids, both outcasts, who meet in elementary school and become frenemies. Patricia is a nascent witch who loves the outdoors and, at least at one point, learns how to talk to birds. Laurence is a techno-nerd who is building an artificial intelligence in his bedroom closet. Their parents are hopeless and the other schoolchildren taunt them both mercilessly.

Saddled with talents they don’t yet know how to control, they struggle through junior high and high school, unaware that they’re being stalked by a ninja assassin posing as their guidance counselor, whose plots they keep escaping by accident.

Eventually they each respectively find groups of people who understand and support them, and who train them to focus their powers in productive but opposing directions. In Patricia’s case, it is a group of witches, and in Laurence’s case, it is a group of astrophysicists working for a multizillionaire inventor patterned a little too obviously after Elon Musk.

Both Patricia and Laurence are trying to solve the problem of global climate changes from their own angles. But Laurence’s team’s experiments go horribly wrong and send one of his co-workers into another dimension of space-time. Patricia helps him out by rescuing the co-worker with witchcraft, but her help, as is the case with most powerful spells, comes with unintended consequences, and unintentionally ratchets up the simmering tension between Laurence’s team and the team of witches.

Eventually the whole thing culminates in a somewhat contrived apocalyptic battle royal of magic versus science, with Patricia and Laurence on opposite sides. The fate of the Earth hangs in the balance while they try to figure out how to end the conflict and how to admit how they feel about each other.

As a coming-of-age romance, it is generally effective and enjoyable. As a science fiction story of an Armageddonish duel between two formidable sides, it is wanting.

There are certainly funny episodes in the book. The first time the birds talk to Patricia is hilarious. And it’s amusing when Patricia jokingly identifies their guidance counselor as an assassin based on his shoes, because, of course, he really is an assassin.

But the way the kids think and talk doesn’t always ring true or consistent; in particular, Laurence is a little too precocious and snarky when he talks to his parents, compared to the way he talks and thinks the rest of the time. Anders also tries just a little too hard to be funny in Laurence’s internal dialog, and most of the time it ends up clanking, like when he interprets his dinner as “turnip slurry.” (FEED author Seanan McGuire does this sort of thing much more skillfully, in a somewhat similar genre with somewhat similar main characters.)

The wealthy inventor Laurence works for is a little too obvious a carbon copy of Elon Musk. Anders relies too much on the cleverness of the very slight changes she makes to his image and company, rather than using him as inspiration and putting her own unique twist on the character.

And although Anders puts all she has into the Transformers/monster-movie-style climax, it is more workmanlike than actually exciting. In general, the backstories of the kids—especially Patricia—and the ramp up to the final confrontation are more interesting than the confrontation itself. In the end, I'm afraid to say that the book falls disappointingly flat.

Book Review: Project Pope

Clifford D. Simak
1981
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I like Clifford Simak’s novels a lot, and I think part of the reason might be because he started out as a journalist. His writing is clear and accessible without being simplistic. His main characters tend to be thoughtful loners who still care about other people. And he is able to use his kind, thoughtful little stories to raise big questions about big topics, without being didactic about it.

Project Pope’s big questions all revolve around the reconciliation of faith with science in the search for truth. And as a framework for these questions, Simak invents a paradoxical thing: a society of robots trying to build a religion.

The actual plot is a little peculiar. There are certainly moments of violence, danger, and even at least one murder. But his main characters are generally trying to do the right things even if they mess up sometimes. And even though they face threat, they face it with kindness and an earnest interest in puzzling out the solution.

---

The book starts with a pretty darned exciting scene. On the remote planet of Gutshot, doctor Jason Tennyson has just run afoul of the law for the crime of having his boss, a city bigwig, happen to die on his watch. In a daring escape, he stows away on the next vessel leaving Gutshot’s spaceport, which turns out to be headed to the planet End of Nothing.

As the name would suggest, End of Nothing is the most remote planet in the known galaxy. And, for that reason, it was chosen by a group of cast-off robots from Earth to be the site of their project to create a new robot Vatican, complete with a robot Pope.

On Earth, robots were forbidden from developing their own religion So the ones who founded End of Nothing are extremely skittish about visitors and publicity, and this has piqued the interest of the only other human passenger on Tennyson’s ship, reporter Jill Roberts. Having received no response to her many written requests for information from the new Vatican, she is headed there in person to get some answers.

When they arrive at the End of Nothing, one of the human residents has had a severe accident, and the only human doctor there has recently died. So the robots, who don’t ask too many questions about legality anyway, ask Tennyson to stay and be their new doctor. He assents, not having too many other options. And, in an attempt to make things more palatable for Tennyson and to co-opt Roberts, they offer her a position as Vatican historian.

Roberts and Tennyson learn that the new Vatican employs a select group of semi-telepathic humans as sort of cosmic scouts; these people are able to travel in their minds to other worlds, and they do so, searching one world after another for Heaven.

They do this in service of the new Pope, who is convinced that religion can be derived from science. He believes that if he is able to search wide enough and far enough, he will discover the physical location of Heaven, and then he will be able to have a scientific basis for his faith.

But there is an underground faction of robots that believe that this is the wrong way to approach it; that faith must come first, and science must come after. This is the fundamental tension of Project Pope: the conflict between robots who believe faith must be derived from science, and those who believe science must be derived from faith. And, unbeknownst to our main characters or the Pope, both sides have adherents that are willing to make deadly cases for their beliefs.

While this dispute is simmering, Tennyson strikes up a friendship with Decker, a cabin-dwelling loner who has been on End of Nothing for most of his life, and Decker’s close companion, a sparkly trans-dimensional being named Whisperer that can also itself travel telepathically to other worlds. Whisperer takes Tennyson and Roberts on several journeys to meet the various wacky inhabitants of different worlds, and there they make the acquaintance of a group of aliens that look like giant dice that can print mathematical equations on their surfaces.

Eventually, one of the Vatican’s scouts finds Heaven--or is at least convinced that she has. She suffers a nervous breakdown as a result, but Whisperer is able to read enough of her mind to trace the scout’s journey back to the world she thought was Heaven, and to bring Tennyson and Roberts there.

What they discover there is not actually Heaven but instead a strange city world peopled by a motley group of aliens--including a duplicate of Decker, a furry alien shaped like a haystack, and an octopus-being that constantly plops up and down making a sound like liver being slapped on a countertop. One of these creatures turns out to be one of the faith-firsters, and it is determined to destroy Heaven, and possibly the rest of the universe along with it, by blowing itself up. There is a simultaneously tense and funny climactic scene in which Whisperer, Tennyson, and Roberts are able to avert catastrophe by bringing in their equation-surface-dice friends, and everybody lives, if not happily ever after, at least to see another day, albeit with lingering questions about God, the Devil, Heaven, and the nature of the universe.

---

In the introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin explained that the great thing about descriptive science fiction is that each piece is a “thought-experiment.” She said:

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed. 

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

To some extent, Simak does this with Project Pope. It is not the world’s greatest piece of science fiction. But, at the end, if he has done his job for you, you wind up having enjoyed a somewhat quirky story about robots and aliens, while also simultaneously engaging your mind on questions that might not otherwise be easy to conceptualize. Is it better, he asks, to search for universal scientific truths, and to allow religious belief to develop from that? Or to grab hold of a religion--to search for Heaven--first, and then to use that idea of truth to frame your search for scientific knowledge?

Each reader is going to have to answer that question for themselves, of course. Simak provides the framework that enables you to think about it, but does not (and cannot) provide an answer. As Tennyson tells the robot Pope: if you asked a hundred humans whether faith should come out of knowledge or knowledge out of faith, you’d get all sorts of different answers, and any of them may be right.

But, being humans, we still want to ask the question. “We grasp for knowledge;” says Simak, through the thoughts of his main character. “Panting, we cling desperately to what we snare. We work endlessly to arrive at that final answer, or perhaps many final answers which turn out not to be final answers but lead on to some other fact or factor that may not be final, either. And yet we try, we cannot give up trying, for as an intelligence we are committed to the quest.”

Book Review: The Three Body Problem

Cixin Liu
2010
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Three Body Problem is the first book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Its events are set in motion by a Chinese astrophysicist who, because of the atrocities she witnessed during the Cultural Revolution, has become so disillusioned with humanity that she invites a race of ruthless alien overlords from Alpha Centauri to come take over Earth.

If you like quick, tidy resolutions in your fiction, you may want to be aware that you won’t get anything of the sort in this novel. You will need to read the trilogy’s next two installments to find out what happens to the protagonists (not to mention humanity as a whole) But the ride of this book is worth it: it has an excellent, engaging premise, and this first part of the journey is filled with sometimes puzzling, sometimes disturbing, often funny, and increasingly surreal imagery, events, and characters.

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The book opens with a one-two punch of gut-wrenching scenes from the 1960s civil wars that followed the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The first is the shooting of a fifteen-year-old rebel by Red Union regulars. And the second is the beating death of a professor of physics during an anti-intellectual show trial, during which his wife is one of the key witnesses for the prosecution.

The physics professor’s daughter, Ye Wenjie, witnesses the whole trial, including her mother’s betrayal and her father’s death. The traumatized Ye goes to her university mentor for help, only to have her mentor commit suicide shortly thereafter. And then Ye herself, who refuses to denounce the beliefs of her dead father, is judged an enemy to the revolution and is sent to a reeducation camp in Mongolia. There, she is caught with reactionary propaganda (a copy of Rachel Smith’s Silent Spring), framed for writing a letter reporting the camp’s deforestation of the area, and thrown in prison.

However, Ye is an astrophysicist, and the military needs her expertise. So she is given a reprieve of sorts: her life is spared, and she is sent to work on a top-secret radar installation called Red Coast Base. But by this point, Ye doesn’t care. And any shred of faith she might have had in humans is long gone.

Ye’s story pauses here, in the late 1960s. The narrative fast-forwards forty years or so to 2006, when Wang Miao, an unassuming professor of applied research working on nanotechnology, is pressured by the army to try to infiltrate a secret physics society called the Frontiers of Science—a society where several prominent members have recently committed suicide.

After reluctantly accepting the assignment, strange things start to happen to Wang. Most disturbingly, he starts to see a countdown appearing in strange places: like on a roll of negatives he shot from his camera, and in the corners of his eyes while reading. The tiny numbers show up everywhere, relentlessly counting down. It is driving him crazy. So he goes to the Frontiers of Science for help. His key contact there, physics professor Shen Yufei, tells him to stop his nanotech research, and the countdown mysteriously stops.

Then, on one of his visits to Shen’s house, Wang happens to catch her playing an immersive game called 3body. Curious, he plays it himself. The game puts him onto an alien planet with three suns. The suns are sometimes big, sometimes small, never moving in a consistent direction or at a consistent speed. Sometimes they disappear for weeks or years (which he can observe because time passes much more quickly in the game than in real life). The planet is also populated by other, usually quite quirky players who take on avatars of characters from history like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. The players are all trying to find some formula that will allow them to predict the movement of the suns, but they never do. And with every play, Wang is only able to see civilization advance just a little bit further before some combination of the suns’ movements burns the planet to the ground and the inhabitants have to dehydrate themselves, waiting out the heat until the next period of solar stability.

Wang realizes that the game is an illustration of the three-body problem, a classic physics puzzle. The problem is that when a planet has three suns, the suns’ competing gravitational behavior will make them behave so erratically that their movements cannot be predicted by any known formula—and will periodically result in unexpected destruction of the planet. The game’s creators hope that it will help people to come up with an algorithm that will predict the movements of the suns, and thereby find a way to avoid the carnage that results from unfortunate solar combinations.

And when Wang attends a user group meeting, he learns that this is not just a theoretical concern. The world of the 3body game is a real place: a planet near Alpha Centauri that really does have three suns, and where the native population of “trisolarians” lives in constant danger of being wiped out by an unlucky sun alignment.

Which brings us back to Ye Wenjie’s story. Because when she was at Red Coast base in the 1960s, she discovered that she was able to use our sun’s radiation as a natural amplifier. So one day, furious with humanity, she sneaked into the control room and bounced a message off the sun in the direction of Alpha Centauri, saying, basically, “we are useless; come take over.” The trisolarians received it, and began preparing to come and take over our planet as their own.

Ye couldn’t be more strongly in favor of this idea. And, in fact, has co-founded an organization with a radical millionaire environmentalist to welcome the trisolarians with open arms. They are closely affiliated with the Frontiers of Science, and the 3body game is one of their brainchilds.

I should say at this point that I do most of my reading on the subway, on the way to and from work. I was innocently reading on the train one morning, minding my own business, when the guy sitting next to me said, “Is that The Three Body Problem? That book is crazy. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier. I read it in one night straight through, and then I read the other two books in like two more days. I can’t get enough of his writing. It’s completely nuts.”

And my traveling companion was correct. After the message gets through to the trisolarians, the book does start to get odd, eventually ramping up to the point where it is indeed pretty nuts.

For one thing, we become privy to the trisolarians’ preparations for the invasion of Earth, including their launch of a science-disrupting bombe surprise—a set of instructions encoded on the inner surfaces of two protons—which will get to Earth many light years before they will, and which they have to test with often hilarious results on their home planet first.

For another, simultaneously, Wang teams up with an international task force to gather (or steal by force) intel from the Frontiers of Science, which culminates in an effort to saw a supertanker into pieces using a device that is essentially a gigantic egg slicer.

And the 3body game keeps getting progressively more and more bizarre, with the repeated, inevitable destruction of the planet by one or another sun causing increasingly demented historical avatars to come up with increasingly wacky ideas to solve the sun problem, and to deyhdrate themselves into little people-prunes over and over again.

It all builds up intense anticipation for the arrival of the trisolarians...which, unfortunately, we have to wait until a later volume in this trilogy to see.

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This book does require a little bit of familiarization with the history of the Cultural Revolution, for those not already aware of its complexities. I took Chinese history in college, and still needed quite a bit of help, what with the confusing civil wars after the revolution, and the references to reactionaries and the material dialectic. The translator’s footnotes help a lot here.

The physics can also sometimes be difficult, and so advanced as to be almost surreal. But there is enough explanation in that area, too, that with just a little effort it’s still very possible to follow the main stream of the story.

The characters—human and alien, real and virtual—are engaging and quirky. They can be earnest, dedicated, and smart, but also sometimes inappropriately, sweetly frank and obnoxious. (The  message sent out by the Chinese equivalent of the SETI program to announce themselves to whichever alien race is listening, for example, is adorably imperious.)

Most of all, I loved the clever, off-the-wall situations in the 3body game, which do allow scientists to conduct thought experiments they never could do when constrained by Earthly physics. One of the best is when in one of Wang’s forays into the game he encounters the emperor Qin Shi Huang, who uses his vast army to create an enormous, human-scale computer processor, including a CPU, memory, system bus, and hard drive, and processor messages sent by semaphore and horseback.

It was brilliant in a way similar to the binary language instruction scene in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. And, indeed, this book had many elements in it that reminded me of Stephenson’s best work—combined with the funny and accessible multi-dimensional physics of Edwin Abbott, the surreal settings of Roger Zelazny, and the alien invasions of H.G. Wells.

Book Review: Radiomen

Eleanor Lerman
2015
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This novel is...okay. It gives a somewhat new twist to the aliens-are-among-us genre, and kept my interest up a reasonable amount of the time. But it reads a little too much like a young adult novel trying to be grittier and more hard-boiled than it actually is. It’s like Judy Blume trying to be Raymond Chandler. And some of the writing gets a bit sloppy.

The main character, Laurie Perzin, is directionless and isolated. She lives in a down-at-heel part of Queens near warehouses where shady activities go on in the wee hours of the night. Every day she shuttles back and forth from her home to her job as a night-shift bartender at Kennedy airport, keeping her head down, uninvolved in everything around her.

The one interest she has is in ham radio, a hobby borne out of her close childhood relationship with her now-deceased radio enthusiast uncle Avi. But even that hobby is soured by the memory of a vivid dream from that childhood. In the dream, she and Avi were outside the family’s summer vacation rental in Rockaway, trying to listen to signals from Sputnik. Avi lost the signal and went up to the roof to fix the antenna. While he was gone, a gray, fuzzy humanoid form appeared in front of Laurie, telling her not to make a sound while it fixed the radio.

The dream has always disturbed her. So, at the start of the book, without really intending to, Laurie calls in to a psychic appearing on a late-night radio talk show. The psychic, Ravenette, repeats the dream to Laurie unprompted. Laurie hangs up, but the psychic tracks her down and tries to get her to talk about the dream humanoid, and also tries to convert her to a cult-like religion that is almost an exact copy of Scientology called The Blue Awareness.

Ravenette won’t leave Laurie alone. So Laurie turns to the radio show’s host, Jack Shepherd, for help. Jack is sane and sympathetic, but suggests that maybe her “dream” was actually a real incident that she is repressing. Jack thinks that the gray humanoid she saw was an alien, and that there are others on Earth besides the one she saw, and that other people have seen them, and that her uncle might have known about them, too.

In fact, Jack thinks that, Howard Gilmartin, founder of the Blue Awareness, knew about the aliens too, and built his cult around them. Jack’s theory is bolstered when thugs from the Blue Awareness start harassing Laurie, insisting that she submit to “tests” using their “blue box,” which is basically just a box with an electric field in it. She makes the mistake of telling them that she has her own box—one her uncle built to prove that theirs was fake—whereupon they break in and ransack her apartment to steal it.

After the break in, Laurie’s Malian neighbor gives her a watchdog; a very strange but cute and loyal dog that protects her from other incidents and seem to have its own knowledge (and distrust) of the creepos from the Blue Awareness. Jack suspects that the dog is descended from a long line of dogs cared for by the Dogon people of Mali, which may have been given to them originally by the aliens hundreds of years ago as a gift.

Eventually, Laurie is contacted by Raymond Gilmartin, son of Howard and current leader of the Blue Awareness. Raymond thinks she has another piece of her uncle’s radio equipment, a repeater, and he wants it and won’t leave her alone about it. Then there is a weird incident where Ravenette channels an alien who says that it is the aliens who actually need the repeater.

Jack is curious about all of this, so he builds a new repeater when they can’t find Avi’s, and then Jack and Laurie agree to meet Raymond and Ravenette at Laurie’s family’s old vacation rental in Rockaway to give them the repeater, in exchange for them leaving Laurie alone. The Blue Awareness thugs show up and it all threatens to go bad until like a bazillion dogs show up to protect Laurie. And then who should show up but the alien himself, amazing everyone and silencing the Blue Awareness for good.

Lerman’s thesis is an interesting one in principle: that in spite of their superior science, the aliens visiting us are as much in the dark about god and the meaning of life and all that as we are. This could have been turned into a thought-provoking statement about how technology won’t answer those sorts of questions for you, and that no matter how smart you are, you still have to look inside yourself to find meaning in your life. But that does not happen in this novel.

Lerman tries hard to make Laurie tough, but she just doesn’t have the gravitas and attitude to pull off the noir persona it seems that Lerman is going for. She always comes across like a continually disillusioned kid. And many of her movements seem pointless, or at least needlessly slow; like her first visit to her family’s old beach rental on Rockaway, or to her uncle’s grave.

In keeping with a noir atmosphere, Lerman includes huge amounts of gritty scenery description, especially of the seedier parts of New York City, which in a Dashiell Hammett novel would give the story a crucial atmosphere, but which here get, well, boring. Everything is continually soggy, gray, forlorn.

And there are a ton of similes, often combined with comically long run-on sentences, that are pretty hard to read. To wit:

“Dr. Carpenter turned to look toward the window, where a block of dusty summer sunlight seemed to sit on the sill like a package someone had forgotten to bring inside.”

“The structure resembled a pile of dark concrete whose colonnaded facade had been stripped bare and refurbished to emanate a steampunk look that someone must have felt represented the aesthetic of early twentieth-century manufacturing even better than the name of the long-departed box-making firm still chiseled above the entranceway.”

The Blue Awareness is a little too bare-facedly and disappointingly an imitation of Scientology—even down to the Ted Merrill / Tom Cruise star spokesman—without any real significant alteration.

And the ending is awkwardly unsubtle. Characters are supposed to grow and change over the course of a novel, but it is supposed to be self-evident; not proclaimed. At the end of Radiomen, Laurie comes right out and tells the reader that she has changed from a person plodding head down through life to a curious person alive with possibilities. (Which isn’t actually all that apparent.) And, as a bonus, Laurie lists the other key characters and tells us how they have changed, too. It clanks hard.

If anything rescues this novel at all, it is the dogs. They provide the moments of real heart and meaning; they have their own agendas and personalities, and are some of the best characters in the book. If only they were the protagonists as well.