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: Cuckoo’s Egg

C.J. Cherryh
1985
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –

SPOILER ALERT...but does it really matter?

You just never know where your most excruciating reading experiences are going to come from. My most recent came in the form of Cuckoo’s Egg: a slim, 200-page novel that offers the reader a unique combination of boredom and pain, and which took me a good two months to force my way through.

Cuckoo’s Egg is purportedly the story of a rigorously dutiful, misunderstood warrior and the child he sacrifices nearly everything to raise alone. But it is really the story of a co-dependent, abusive relationship, thinly disguised by an abstract writing style and held together by the thinnest of plots.

On a distant planet orbiting a distant star lives an intelligent, bipedal dog-like species with nascent spacefaring technology and a highly developed social structure. Duun, one of our two co-protagonists, is one of these dog-creatures. He is a battle-scarred, tough-as-nails, high-ranking member of the hatani, a class of soldiers who are bound by tradition and duty to do the unpleasant but necessary work that more polite society won’t do itself. The hatani are on the fringes of respectability: needed and respected by the common folk for the work that they do, but, at the same time, feared because of their military skill, and resented for the fact that they have to exist at all.

For reasons we don’t learn until the very end of the book, Duun is assigned a human baby to raise as his own. The baby is called Thorn. Duun raises Thorn as his own son, on his country estate, with no one else around but the peasants he displaced to claim his ancestral lands, who are a bit ticked off about being displaced.

As Thorn grows from babyhood into teenagehood, Duun raises him to be tough—very tough. Dunn challenges him constantly, both physically and with tricky, hostile riddles. And the masters of the hatani also put Thorn through somewhat ridiculous Kung-Fu-like tests, which include things like having to scour his rooms for the tiniest pebbles that were put there to see if he could find them all. 

But Thorn is sensitive. He can’t really be as tough as Duun wants him to be. His heart is in his throat every time he is tested; indeed, his heart has been in his throat for almost all of his entire short life up to this point. And there is no obvious reason why his upbringing has had to be this harsh. He lives in seemingly pointless fear and suffers seemingly pointless cruelty from Duun and the hatani masters, all under the guise of it being for his own protection.

When Thorn is a teenager, he actually gets up enough gumption to run away. But he is almost killed by scared villagers, and Duun has to rescue him, and has to kill a villager to do it. Which, in turn, means that Duun and Thorn have to abandon the country estate for the city where there won’t be angry villagers at every turn waiting for either one of them to make a misstep.

I think Thorn believes that Duun loves and protects him. And I think Duun believes that he loves Thorn. And I think Cherryh believes that she’s portraying a loving and protecting relationship that has been forced into harshness by circumstance. But their relationship is really one of toxic abuse and manipulation.

When they move to the city, Thorn finally gets to have company his own age; he is put into an actual classroom with four classmates. But they are more his tutors than his peers; they stay aloof from him even as they teach him; and they reinforce for him just how different he is from everyone else. And when Thorn falls for one of his classmates and tries to kiss her, he gets in trouble and she is immediately removed. (To add insult to injury, she is also revealed to have been an agent of the ghotanin, unscrupulous mercenaries who are the rivals of the hatani and who are trying to gain information about Thorn.)

As the nearly irrelevant plot plugs along, eventually, as part of his education, Thorn is forced to learn to reproduce what seem to be nonsense vocalizations, played on tapes, sound for sound. Gradually, though, he realizes that the taped voices are actually speaking a strange language, and the only known source of that language is the tapes that they’re making him memorize. And the more he listens to the tapes, the more he starts to understand them. And his dreams start to match what he hears: he starts to dream about a space station, filled with people like him—humans.

Meanwhile, the ghotani step up their attacks against the hatani, forcing Duun to step up his Thorn timeline, and finally, mercifully, forcing Cherryh to reveal Thorn’s purpose. It turns out that the tapes Thorn was forced to memorize are indeed from humans. Apparently a ship of them arrived at Duun’s planet a very long time ago. Duun’s people accidentally killed them all, but the humans back on Earth are still sending messages in an attempt to reach their long-lost ship. So the hatani created Thorn as a clone based on genetic information taken from the original ship’s passengers, and they hope that he will be able to translate what the human messages are saying—so as to hopefully either serve as an ambassador to broker a peace, or at least warn them when more humans will be coming.

Duun takes Thorn up into space, to a space station, to interpret the new messages being received from Earth by the station’s radio. And there, after about 150 pages of the total 175 or so, Duun stops manipulating and playing needless mind games, and finally gives Thorn a little honesty.

But it is about 149 pages too late. And I barely was able to make it that far as it was. Most of the time, while reading this book, I would read one paragraph and then, before I got very far into the next one, find myself zoning out, looking up, reading the ads on the bus, making grocery lists in my head. 

Sometimes it was because of the unrelentingly, needlessly cruel relationship between Duun and Thorn. It was a life that kept Thorn constantly off balance, with Duun one moment seemingly on the verge of kindness and then the next moment spinning off into anger and violence. Thorn lives in desperation; he hates Duun, but is terrified of being abandoned on a world where he knows no one else. All of his needs for trust and friendship and kindness and love are denied and invalidated.

And other times it was because I just did not care. Neither one of the main characters is in any way appealing, and neither one gave me any reason to want to find out what happened to him. And, in fact, nothing ever really does. There is zero reward for sitting through the unremitting cruelty of this dysfunctional relationship.

Book Review: Earthquake Weather

Tim Powers
1996
Awards: Locus (Fantasy) 
Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

Earthquake Weather is the third novel in Tim Powers’ somewhat roughly connected Fault Lines trilogy. It is not really a sequel, but it continues some of the story lines from both of the previous two novels, Last Call and Expiration Date. And it pulls in several of the same characters, although the main characters in this one are new.  

It also takes place in the same world of magic as the other two books. Which is most definitely not the light, floaty, Disney variety; the magic of Powers’ trilogy is a hard-boiled, real-world, practical magic conducted using everyday objects. It is an impressive amalgamation of ancient gods, ghosts, spirits, religions, superstitions, rituals, faiths, totems, and traditions—old and new and east and west.

And it, too, is set against a backdrop of the grittiest parts of America: diners, bars, mental institutions, curanderías, big city streets. The cars are always big, old, beaten-up American models. The characters are people from the edges of society—the poor, insane, criminal, fugitive, orphaned, lost. They tend to drink a lot—mostly Coors, vodka, and cheap red wine. (It can tend to get a little gross.)

At the beginning of Earthquake Weather, Janis Plumtree, a woman with multiple personality disorder, has killed Scott Crane (the man who was crowned as the Fisher King in Last Call). She killed him on a lonely road near Los Angeles by jamming a trident into his throat.

A faction of Crane’s supporters and believers—the Fisher King’s army, if you will—found his body before the police did and are hauling it around with them, trident included, preparing for the day when they can perform the necessary rituals to resurrect him. They are also protecting a pre-teen boy, Koot Hoomie "Kootie" Parganas, who appears to have been spiritually designated as Crane’s successor to the Fisher King’s throne in the event of Crane’s permanent death, as evidenced by the constantly bleeding wound in Kootie’s side, and the fact that he needs to tie his belt in a Mobius strip and drink lots of alcohol to keep himself from being found and possessed by ghosts. 

Into this picture comes Sid Cochran, a man who checked himself into a mental institution because he keeps seeing random people turning into bull-headed gods, and hearing people speak in the voice of his dead wife. Except that he’s not insane; those things actually are happening to him, because he’s been chosen to be one of the vessels of the god Dionysus, after an accident he once had in a vineyard where he almost got his hand cut off trying to protect an old vine stump from being cut down. In the institution Cochran meets Plumtree, who was put there by the police when she came to them claiming to have killed Scott Crane (whose body they can’t find). 

Cochran and Plumtree strike up a friendship (she with him and him with most of her personalities), and eventually they break out of the institution, narrowly escaping the clutches of the evil chief psychiatrist Dr. Armentrout, who “cures” his patients by eating the parts of their souls that are misbehaving. Eating soul parts gives Dr. Armentrout lots of spiritual power, and the fact that it sometimes kills his patients doesn’t really bother him at all. 

Plumtree’s good personalities want to atone for the bad one that killed the Fisher King, so she drags Cochran with her to track down the band of people preparing for the Crane’s resurrection. It isn’t hard, given all the portents pointing to their house in Long Beach, and the people drumming and dancing in front of it twenty-four hours a day. 

Kootie and his adopted parents-cum-spiritual shields, Angelica and Pete Sullivan, and Crane’s old friend Arky Mavranos, take in Cochran and Plumtree as wary allies. They then go on a chaotic journey up to San Francisco filled with pretty random-seeming diversions and plot twists, to perform the king-restoring ritual. 

The whole time they are pursued by Armentrout, who has hooked up with some anti-Fisher-King zealot thugs. Armentrout’s aim is to capture Crane’s body and to keep it alive but in a perpetual coma, so he can feed eternally on the spirit of the Fisher King, making him super powerful in the magical world. He doesn’t mind the idea of kidnaping Kootie as well, holding him coma-hostage in the event Crane dies for good. And if Cochran and Plumtree die along the way as well, so much the better for him. 

The Cochran/Plumtree/Kootie allies race around San Francisco gathering the necessary materials to prepare for the awakening ritual. All kinds of things go wrong to cause them setbacks, not least of which is the fact that one of Plumtree’s personalities is the not-quite-dead ghost of her evil father--the personality that killed Scott Crane--who keeps telling Armentrout where they are. There is also a genuinely exciting car chase scene when a ghost steals the car that has Crane’s body in it, and Angelica and Pete and Arky have to race it down and leap on to it while hurtling down the highway to regain control (over the car and the body). 

It all eventually comes to a climax in a giant turbulent scene at the Sutro Baths, where the final battle for Crane’s life (or death) is fought out with both temporal and fearsomely magical weapons. 

One of the best things about this book is that Powers has a stupefying amount of knowledge of a hugely broad range of spirit world arcana. He brings in ghosts, spells, portents, charms, remedies, and rites from a wide variety of traditions from around the world. This is no American Gods lightweight gimmicky hack job. 

And the magic is cleverly done using practical, real-world objects; for a knowledgeable person in the world of Powers’ books, almost anything can have a magical use. His characters use wind chimes made of chicken bones and radio parts as alarms to warn of incoming malevolent entities. They hook up old television sets and record players to talk to spirits. They use ashtrays as substitutes for fireplaces to send ghosts, literally, up in smoke. They use clove and regular tobacco cigarettes as masking tools, but actual rubber masks (of clowns, in this case) can serve the same purpose, in a pinch. Wine is used for all kinds of purification, masking, and sacramental purposes—although Coors can work, too, sometimes. 

The main problems with this book (which was also true of Last Call) are that it is dense, complex, and seemingly, for the most part, unplanned. Although there was generally an anticipatory build-up, a climactic confrontation, and a resolution (of a sort), the plot trucks along largely haphazardly towards those ends. 

I rarely understood why any of the specific incidents over the course of the book happened; most of them seemed to come out of left field. It felt like the characters were dropped into situation after situation with little or no lead-up or connection to the next. They went from Chinatown to a maze-house to a car chase to a hotel with no apparent logic. 

I also didn’t understand why voices spoke to Cochran when they did, or why he saw the signs he did, or what the bull-headed god meant in any particular situation; it seemed like the god was just saying, “hi, I’m here, be afraid.” I didn’t understand why Plumtree changed personalities when she did, or how they knew to use this or that piece of equipment. 

I tried to go with the flow and let it all just soak into my head naturally. And that worked to some extent, but generally it was so hard to make connections and follow the characters’ non-logic—especially when so much of it was somewhat repellently fueled by Coors and vodka—that I ended up skipping a lot of text. 

And, at the end, it didn’t feel like everything finally connected together and made sense; it felt like it all fell together by accident, in spite of itself, and in spite of the chaotic actions of the characters. All in all, it was just too much reading whiplash.

Book Review: The Child Garden

Geoff Ryman
1989
Awards: Campbell, Clarke
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I don’t really know what the Campbell and Clarke committees were thinking when they gave these awards to this book.

I’ll grant that the premise and some of the scientific and setting details are great potential sci-fi fodder. But actually reading the novel is like being dragged along on someone else’s disorganized, depressing, maudlin trip that you desperately want to sober up from.

~~~~~

The Child Garden starts out well. It is set in a London of the relatively near future. The world lives under a single Marxist-Leninist regime governed by an amorphous body of pure thought called the Consensus. Citizens are “Read” by the Consensus at an early age, and their “Reading” determines where they will live and what their profession will be.

A revolutionary war in the recent past destroyed all electricity, most of the metal, and much of the other advanced technology on Earth. People use candles for light, walk as their main mode of transportation, and use couriers to deliver messages.

The only advanced technology society has left is biotechnology—but that is extremely advanced. Consensus-approved scientists have developed viruses that have not only cured all diseases, but are also used for assimilation and education: the viruses “infect” people with everything they need to know. Nobody needs to learn anything on their own anymore; they now learn everything—history, science, art, specific job skills, morality, happiness—through viruses.

As it turns out, one of the unfortunate side effects of curing all disease—specifically, cancer—is that it destroys something in the human body that had enabled people to live a long time. Now, people only live to be about 30 or 35 at the most. Children, with their brains pumped up by teaching viruses, start acting like adults and working at jobs when they are only 5 or 6, and don’t ever really have a childhood.

The book’s main character, Milena Shibush, is a Czech immigrant who lost her parents very young. She is also somehow physically unable to be Read. Her cells rebel against the viruses, taking them apart before they can teach her what she is supposed to learn. She lives in fear that she’ll be discovered to be Unread by the Consensus. And she is constantly made to feel stupid by smaller children who know more than her, because of their viruses.

The other disadvantage that Milena has is that she is a lesbian, which is not looked on kindly in this book’s society. If the viruses had worked, her lesbian orientation would have been programmed out of her, but of course it was not. So she lives in fear of being found out for that reason, too.

Milena’s Consensus-assigned job is in the theatre. Searching in a warehouse for a costume, she runs into a “polar bear:” a genetically modified woman who is large, furry, and engineered for cold, dangerous jobs in the Antarctic. She and the polar bear, whose name is Rolfa and who is also Unread, fall in love. Rolfa, as it turns out, is a beautiful singer and a brilliant composer. She has secretly set many famous manuscripts to music, including Dante’s Divine Comedy. But no one will listen to them or put them on, because they were composed by a genetically-modified polar bear who hasn’t been Read and whose artistic standards therefore don’t conform to those of the Consensus.

So far, so good, Child Garden. But the book becomes increasingly random and goes rapidly downhill from here on (with, unfortunately, about 250 pages still left to go). So, to try to make an agonizingly long remainder of a story short:
 
Rolfa runs away from her family. Her angry father sends a mind-reading “Snide” investigator after her to find her and Milena. Realizing there is no way for Rolfa to avoid being dragged back to Antarctica with her family, they strike a deal: the Consensus will be allowed to Read Rolfa, as long as they agree to put on Rolfa’s Divine Comedy. The Consensus agrees, and, to boot, will present the Comedy via hologram in the sky all over the world, so the entire planet can see it. 

However, the Reading “cures” Rolfa so she is no longer in love with Milena. Rolfa runs away, leaving Milena heartbroken.

The rest of the book descends into a herky-jerky set of disconnected and seemingly pointless remembrances, flashbacks, and flash-forwards while Milena doggedly goes on preparing to force her production of the Divine Comedy on the entire world, and then after she gets cancer and doggedly prepares to die (which is drawn out over about the last 100 or so interminable pages). 

Milena variously relives: her entanglement with a power-hungry rival holographer who makes her life a living hell for a while; glimpses of her very young childhood with her real mother and father; her friendship with an orphanage caretaker that is cut short simultaneously by a hurricane and the discovery of her lesbian nature; and her unique but caring relationship with the male astronaut who transports her into the upper atmosphere to project the Comedy’s world-wide holographic images and then later carries their baby.

In the end, the cancer kills Milena, but in this she feels victorious: she has brought back cancer so that people can live long, healthy lives, and children can be children again. 

It is all told in a disconnected, free-associational, hazy style, which I think is meant to make us feel like we are in the same dream state as Milena. But it felt instead like a collection of unrelated, haphazard, groundless micro-stories. For the most part, all of the stories have uninteresting plots, dippy characters with little or no character development, little apparent connection to or convergence with the other stories, and no real resolution or meaning in themselves.

~~~~~

As I said, this book definitely had potential. It had the elements of a groundbreaking science fiction novel, with its complex, Marxist-Leninist, Consensus-run dystopia and its highly advanced biotechnology. 

One of my favorite details was that to solve the post-war food crisis, people had been genetically engineered to be able to use rhodopsin in their bodies to photosynthesize food—which made their skin purple. The more they sat in the sun to eat, the more purple they got. I also liked that Ryman developed a way for men to carry babies to term. And viruses as tools of education and assimilation always add a nicely sinister spice.

So it’s sad that the novel ended up being such a loose series of seemingly aimless, ill-defined flashbacks with such low dramatic tension. And, as the story went on, it became more and more preoccupied with death, which I found depressing and hard to read. As she was dying, Milena found solace in the biological evolution of the human race—including a set of people who eventually begin transforming into plants, and one boy who seriously thinks he’s a dog. I think these were supposed to make me feel as much at one with the universe as Milena did, but they only made me feel hopelessness and disconnection.

~~~~~

Before reading this book, I’d just read the first three books of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series—all three of which are filled with Zelazny’s characteristic surrealistic, mind-bending imagery. The Child Garden made me wonder how one author can write such trippy scenes and also make them so vivid and riveting, while another can try to do the same thing but it ends up vague, scattershot and hard to follow.

Certainly part of it is that Zelazny is simply one of the best at what he does, and it’s hard for others to match him. I think part of it is also because, in the end, The Child Garden tells a prophet’s story, about a central character saving the world through self-sacrifice and passive martyrdom. While Zelazny’s Chronicles tell a hero’s story, about a central character saving the world through direct action and fighting bad guys and overcoming tough odds. And I have to admit I find the heroes far more intrinsically entertaining.

Book Review: The Alteration

Kingsley Amis
1976
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

The Alteration is a novel of alternate history that makes us think in new ways—as the best speculative fiction does—about our own real-world society. Its subject matter is extremely personal and emotionally intense, which really helps to drive home Amis’s message about the true violence of tyranny and oppression. It can be, on occasion, wryly funny. But the plot takes such unrelentingly cruel and ironic twists that I would find it hard to say that the book is actually enjoyable to read.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The novel is set in 1976, in an England where the Protestant Reformation never happened. Martin Luther, rather than being a heretic and a rebel, actually served as a pope himself. Since there was no split with the Catholic mother church, the entire English empire—which includes New England and Canada—is ruled by a king who answers directly to the Roman pope.

And the Catholic Church, in the person of the pope, rules with an iron hand. A rigidly hierarchical societal structure keeps everybody in line. High-status men are infallible and unquestionable; low-status men have next to no power, and women have even less. Science is prohibited by the severely conservative church, so people have no electricity, no advanced forms of communication, and only the barest approximation of motorized vehicles. And, to rub salt in everybody’s wounds, novels of science fiction—which Amis calls “time romances”—are banned as a form of entertainment.

Growing up in this world is Hubert Anvil, a ten-year old clerk in a primary seminary school near London. Hubert has the misfortune of having most beautiful singing voice anyone in the Catholic world has ever heard. Visitors come from all over the globe to hear him. And Rome is very interested in him as an exploitable resource.

So the abbot at Hubert’s school, seeing a way to weasel his way into favor with the pope, decides the boy should be castrated, so his voice won’t change and he can be farmed out to sing as long as possible.

The law requires the abbot to ask the permission of Hubert’s father for this to happen. Mr. Anvil is a little torn at first, having a shadow of a feeling that this might be somewhat bad for Hubert, but is won over by the idea that it will prove his faith absolutely to the church hierarchy.

Hubert’s feelings are, of course, irrelevant. And so are those of his mother, who objects strenuously to Hubert’s castration, and campaigns violently against it to her husband, but has no power whatsoever to prevent it. Hubert’s older brother also doesn’t like it, but doesn’t know how to help him.

The only person who really can and does step up to help Hubert is his family priest, who surprises everyone by publicly objecting to the idea, in courageous direct opposition to his superiors. (His squeamishness about it is probably largely due to the fact that he is perhaps a little more in touch with the taste of the carnal than a priest ought to be.) The priest tries to block the permission for the procedure, but is eventually brutally squashed (somewhat literally) by thuggish agents of the church.

Hubert himself is terribly confused. He has no real sense of what he’d be giving up. He is torn between the passionate objections of his beloved mother, brother, and priest on the one side, and, on the other side, the dictates of the church that he has been brought up to respect and obey above everything else. He has only vague feelings of resistance to the idea, which aren’t nearly strong enough to offset the fear that he will be eternally damned if he refuses.

To make the idea more palatable to Hubert and, perhaps, his father, the two of them get invited to Rome to get a glimpse of the cushy, opulent life he could lead. Unfortunately, this glimpse is provided by two aging eunuchs who aren’t very good examples of the long-term results of the procedure, and one of them even ends up begging Hubert’s father to reconsider; his father is freaked out by the whole scene and they flee back to London.

Meanwhile, while all of this is happening, Hubert gives a recital at the house of the New England ambassador, where he is exposed to a whole new possible attitude about the church and established authority. The New Englanders, living a little too far from the reach of the central church, tend to be a bit more irreverent towards authority and less strict about societal mores. They don’t seem all that bothered by the fact that disobeying the pope might endanger their mortal souls. And the ambassador’s young pre-teen daughter is particularly appealing to Hubert, giving him a bit of a glimmer of understanding about what he’d be losing.

At last, Hubert realizes he really doesn’t want this done to him, and that he has no option but to risk soul-damnation and to run away. When he does, he runs afoul of the criminal underworld, but is also helped by responsible strangers and friends, and he almost makes it to freedom—until an ironic turn of fate makes his whole plan fall apart with an awful thud.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Alteration is, on the whole, a well-crafted piece of fiction. Amis’s subject matter is certainly courageous. His characters are colorful and believable. And he creates a plausible 20th-century England that has evolved into its current form without almost any advanced science. Its technology is appropriate to his scenario; he does give the residents of this Europe express trains and some alternatively-powered omnibuses and dirigibles, but most people still primarily rely on horses and oxen for transportation.

Amis’s references to celebrities, both past and present, are sometimes smooth, sometimes jarringly cheeky. Alfieri Maserati serves as the pope’s chief inventor; Sir Francis Crick is a sad, mad, marginalized, heretical scientist; Benedict Arnold was not a traitor, but was instead a war hero, with a major town in New England named for him.

And Amis pays homage to alternate history legend Philip K. Dick with a really cheeky device: his most rebellious characters secretly read a banned alternate-history book called The Man in the High Castle, which is about an England where there was a Protestant Reformation, and where invention is allowed, and there are scientists and electricity and airplanes, and where its New England colony—called “America”—fought a revolution to gain its independence and became the world’s superpower. Needless to say, this book gives the rebels who read it much food for thought about how their own society could be.

This book-within-a-book is actually a relatively minor part of The Alteration, but it unfortunately seems to have obsessed William Gibson, who wrote about it in his introduction to my 2013 paperback version to the exclusion of most of the other, probably more important implications of the novel.

The most important implications of this novel being that tyranny and oppression will inevitably rely on a foundation of violence and cruelty, no matter how the subjects of that tyranny want to deny it, and no matter how the perpetrators of it try to sugarcoat it.

Amis’s characters desperately persist in going about their business as if everything was pleasant and idyllic. They are excruciatingly polite and deferential to each other. They use euphemisms to avoid talking directly about unpleasant or overly-personal topics (to the point where after about five people have tried to explain to Hubert exactly what will happen to him, he still has no idea).

But no matter how much the characters want to believe they live in a peaceful, painless society, the truth is that the church’s authority relies on unchecked violence and pain. At any moment, the men in control can strip away their subjects’ lives, liberty, and sensitive body parts. And if an individual resists, they are not just risking their body or their life; they are risking the damnation of their eternal soul.

The distressing truth of this novel is that Hubert never had a chance. I read in continual hope that he would find freedom. But the seeming inevitability of his fate—forced on him in the end, in spite of all his efforts, almost as if by God—casts a depressing, hopeless shadow over the whole book. And maybe that is Amis’s point, and his warning: in a tyrannical state, self-determination is impossible, and hope is pointless.

Book Review: Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Adam Roberts
2012
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

MINOR SPOILER ALERT

Adam Roberts says in his acknowledgements that in Jack Glass he was trying to blend Golden Age science fiction (the era of Campbell, Asimov, and Heinlein when space-exploration sci-fi first began to capture a larger audience) with Golden Age detective fiction (the era of the classic Miss-Marple-type misdirection whodunit).

He has done an able job of it. His novel is a series of relatively fast-moving brain-teasers, and the puzzling circumstances surrounding each of the murders are clever and creative. He has also created a credible science fiction environment in which humanity has colonized several planets, moons, and asteroids. And, for the most part, the storytelling keeps you turning the pages.

Roberts breaks the story up into three parts, each one centered on a different murder, with each murder involving the notorious, elusive criminal Jack Glass in some way. The first part of the book is definitely the most gripping (and also the most gory).

In the universe of Jack Glass, our solar system is run by a set of hereditary oligarchs, the Ulanovs, who rule with a firm hand. In their criminal justice system, if you commit any crime short of than murder, your penalty is to be taken out to the asteroid belt and sealed into a hollowed-out asteroid with an air scrubber, a drill, and some food spores. They come back to get you in eleven years and if you survive until then, you’re free. If you don’t, well—you don’t.

In the first part of the book, Jack Glass, the notorious, legless criminal who, some say, has killed thousands (or possibly millions) of people, is captured for a lesser crime and thrown into an asteroid with six other convicts. The story follows them as they scrabble for life during the first couple years of their term, drilling for ice, growing food, and establishing a somewhat tenuous and ruthless hierarchy.

It is a horrific situation, especially for Jack, as one of the lower men on the totem pole. He’s clearly the smartest of the prisoners, and he has flashes of anger when the others behave idiotically and cruelly towards him and each other. But, for the most part, he is able to hold himself in, maintaining incredible control, realizing his life depends on patience.

The story gets progressively harder to take emotionally, even as the men are able to achieve some stability in their physical comfort. But, finally, Jack is able to escape in a brilliant (if gruesome, twisted, and murder-filled) getaway.

Many years then pass between Jack’s asteroid escape and the second part of the book, which is the weakest section of the novel.

In the Ulanov’s solar system, many specialized functions are done by noble houses of elites bred specifically for their jobs: transport, commerce, science, and so on. The Ulanovs need these noble houses, but are also wary of them, since they are all potential rivals for power.

The story slows to a crawl as we follow 16-year-old Diana, one of the daughters and heirs of the one of these houses: Clan Argent, the Transport House. Diana has been bred for creative problem-solving, so when one of her servants is murdered while she’s vacationing on Earth, the police defer to her to solve the murder. But she is a typical bratty, privileged 16-year-old—breathless, impatient, haughty, inconsiderate, self-centered, and full of aristocratic prejudice and cruelty. It’s difficult to find the motivation to keep reading through most of part two when Diana is the one you have to follow.

If you keep plugging, the story finally does start to pick up a bit when someone bombs the compound where Diana is staying and she has to flee. Diana and her servant Sapho are bundled into a shuttlecraft and rescued—by none other than the notorious, unassuming criminal Jack Glass.

Diana doesn’t realize it, but rumors have been swirling around the solar system that her clan has the secret to faster-than-light propulsion. The three escapees theorize that the other clans—or possibly the Ulanovs themselves—are trying to kidnap her in an attempt to get the FTL technology.

During their escape, cut off from her ever-present technology, realizing people are trying to kill her and that she has no more control over her surroundings, Diana finally starts to grow up. She feels ashamed of how she acted, and starts to take more responsibility for herself and others. This starts to make it a lot easier to read again, and somewhat more appealing again as a story…

…Just in time for part three of the novel (the second-best part), which lopes along relatively easily (albeit not as excitingly as part one) to the end of the book. This part starts with Jack, Diana, and Sapho caught up in the circumstances of yet another murder: this time, the murder of celebrated police detective Bar-le-Duc.

The third part starts with Jack, Diana, and Sapho fleeing from Earth to Jack’s secret bubble house in the “Sump,” the haphazard settlements beyond the moon where the poor subsist on spore-based food and recycled air. The Sump is also a hive of rebellion against the Ulanovs, which is why Jack has his house there; it is at this point that we discover that he is actually a highly principled anti-imperial activist who cares deeply about the entire human race.

And, it turns out, his rescue of Diana was not a coincidence at all. Jack knows that the physics of any FTL drive—including the one that Diana’s house theoretically has—by definition put it at risk of being made into an enormous bomb that could wipe out the solar system and thus the whole human race. Jack is willing to protect Diana with his life to prevent anyone from getting hold of it.

Thus they plan to hide in Jack’s house to prevent anyone from getting at Diana. Celebrated police detective Bar-le-Duc catches up with them, but, before he can bring them in, he is shot from inside the house, but by no one who was in the house at the time. And it is all caught on video by a robot.

They are thus faced with yet another mystery to solve, in a race against time before they are caught by authorities and accused of Bar-le-Duc’s murder. And, while they’re at it, they have to figure out who is behind Diana’s attempted assassination/kidnaping, if the FTL device really exists, and if they can prevent it from ever being used.

All three murders are “locked-room” mysteries, and all three are pretty clever. On the whole, Jack Glass is a good blend of classic sci-fi and detective fiction, as the author intended. Jack is charismatic and a good character to follow; a touch sinister but with strong, valiant political ideals. (Although, as I say, Diana leaves something to be desired.) The plot does step along apace, for the most part. (Although, as I say, the first section is definitely the most riveting and might have made for an excellent novella all by itself.) And one fun thing is that Roberts certainly is not hesitant about describing gore in incredibly creative ways—particularly the behavior of blood in zero gee (or in one gee, from the point of view of someone who has lived their whole life in space, which is a mind-warping way to look at it).

Book Review: Little Brother

Cory Doctorow
2008
Awards: Campbell
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

MINOR SPOILER ALERT

Little Brother is a story about hackers. But it is not a cyberpunk novel. It is about innocent humans targeted by a repressive police state, fighting for their civil rights, their freedom, and sometimes their lives.

Yes, the main character, Marcus Yallow, has a wry, cocky, hacker-appropriate attitude. And, yes, he does lots of hacking, in which he uses real hacker techniques to burrow into the tightest security systems, and the techniques don’t come off as cheesy as they so often do in works of fiction. But Marcus’ unwarranted arrest, and the way U.S. government officers treat him while he is in their custody, and the way he is mercilessly hounded even after he is set “free,” are far from the world of cocky hacking, and very scary.

Marcus is a seventeen-year-old high school student living in San Francisco. He is irreverent and smart, mainly using his hacking skills for fun.

One day, Marcus and his friends cut class, as they often do, to join a live-action adventure game. Unfortunately, they happen to be out on the street with no legitimate excuse and a bunch of suspect-looking technology when terrorists attack the city. The group of friends are swept up in the Homeland Security crackdown that follows and are thrown into a secret prison, given no food or bathroom, hog-tied with zip cuffs, and interrogated with all the force the DHS has to muster.

When Marcus at first refuses to unlock his phone they accuse him of being a terrorist, torture him, and then leave him soaking in his own urine for hours. Eventually, he cracks—as the vast majority of us would—and agrees to give them all his passwords if they will just let him go home. They let him go, but they stay on his tail, threatening to bring him in again for good if he strays off the path of correct behavior.

Their degrading, dehumanizing treatment terrorizes and cows Marcus, and that fear stays with him. But gradually his fighting spirit comes back, too. His outrage grows as the security crackdown gets harsher and DHS surveillance gets more widespread and insidious. And, as time passes, one of his friends still is not released by DHS, and may be, for all he knows, dead.

Marcus decides he has to bring down the people who tortured him and his friends. He discovers that DHS has (clumsily) bugged his laptop, so he hacks his internet-enabled Xbox and turns it into a secure communication device, and spreads the Xbox crack code to his friends, eventually turning the Bay Area into a network of under-20-something hackers and gamers called “the Xnet” that are ready to help tear down the repressive regime with him: a scattered, disorganized, and passionate virtual army.

When the police and DHS become aware of the Xnet, they use it as an excuse to increase their strategy of harassment and surveillance. They send spy vans and helicopters roaming throughout the city, looking for Xbox signals; they track every person’s movements around the city through the RFID chips in their Muni and toll passes; and they install facial recognition cameras everywhere. Whenever someone is determined to have an “unusual” pattern of movement, they are questioned and intimidated.

In spite of all of this, the vast majority of the adult population are okay with having every one of their movements—online and off—tracked, recorded, and analyzed by authorities. This is one of the most frustrating and realistic parts of the book. Yes, it is inconvenient and can be annoying, they say, but it is all to keep us safe. If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

And the mainstream media does nothing to change that opinion, reporting on everything with a security bias—so, for example, a concert where a bunch of kids are beaten and gassed by police is reported as a “riot” started by the concert-goers. Even Marcus’ parents are convinced that these measures are there for a good reason, even as kids (and, increasingly, sympathetic adults) get pepper-sprayed, arrested, and subjected to “questioning” (a.k.a. torture, including waterboarding).

Ironically, the actual terrorists continue to escape justice, while more and more innocent people are bullied and jailed. Thousands of people are swept up in this security farce as DHS tactics grow more intense. And Marcus and his legions of Xnetters engage in steadily more confrontational hacks and actions—with varying amounts of success—until Marcus is finally face to face with his torturers once again.

Technically, Little Brother has a happy ending. But it also makes it clear that any victory for justice is always a temporary one, and that the defense of civil rights is a constant fight. The authoritarian forces that would ask us to give up our liberty in the name of security are always there, waiting for the least crack in our will to creep back in. Marcus and the hackers and the lawyers and the teachers and the reporters must remain ever vigilant to make sure it never happens again.

Part of the reason this book works so well is that Marcus’s hacker techniques are all completely authentic. The social engineering methods to discover passwords; the conduct of ultra-secure conversations by tunneling through DNS; the “borrowing” of RFID chip signatures from innocent bystanders nearby—all of those are real. And even though these techniques can be complicated, Doctorow explains them clearly and understandably without being superior or silly. He’s clearly someone who knows what he’s talking about (a fact backed up by the fact that he has hackers and security experts writing his afterwords).

Doctorow and his afterword writers also explain why hacking is necessary, and actively encourage his readers to think about how to hack things. For one thing, it’s fun. For another, it’s educational; you learn how things work. And for another, when you publicly expose security flaws, you make people have to tighten up their security, making security stronger. There’s no way to make systems as secure as they can be without testing their limits.

The other, more important reason that Little Brother is powerful (and anxiety-producing) is because it is set in a surveillance state that is very much real life. Doctorow wrote this book at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, when that administration was actively demolishing civil rights in the name of protecting us from terrorists, and doing it with the unquestioning support of most of the populace and mainstream media. It was very relevant then, and is, unfortunately, even more relevant now.

It’s a dangerous book, too, because Doctorow calls into question all the things we have had to adjust to following the formation of the DHS: increased x-ray screenings, ID checks, taking your shoes off at the airport. All of which, he says, are actually pointless in actually preventing anything from happening. These tactics are less about actually catching criminals and more about keeping a population intimidated and fearful so that they can be more easily manipulated.

The main question this book raises is, I think, one of the most important of our time: when you are faced with an unjust, militaristic, authoritarian regime, how do you respond? Do you keep your head down, trying to keep yourself and your family safe, and hope it gets better on its own? Or do you fight back, risking your liberty and possibly your life?

It’s critical to think about this now that the U.S. is faced with the most schizophrenic, authoritarian regime I’ve seen in my lifetime. I know what I’d like to think I would do. But I don’t honestly know how far I’d be willing to go if my life was at stake.

Book Review: Childhood’s End

Arthur C. Clarke
1953
Nominations: Retro Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

I just finished Childhood’s End, and I have to say I am really disappointed.

I am a Clarke fan. I really liked the Rama series, and Fountains of Paradise, and 2001 (the movie). I am in awe of how he seemed to be able to see decades into the technological future. But this book—which, to be fair, is one of his earlier novels—just seemed like a halfhearted warm-up for his later work.

Childhood’s End does contain several pieces of futuristic technology which stand up extremely well even now, more than fifty years later. But the story has very little in the way of character likeability, or suspense, or excitement. The plot meanders and drags badly. And, in many places, it also is a pretty embarrassing display of Clarke’s sexism—which is easier to ignore when the story is good.

The book starts out well, with a scene straight out of Independence Day (although it would be more accurate to say that Independence Day starts out with a scene straight out of this book). Sometime in the mid-twentieth century, on the eve of the launch of one of Earth’s first satellites, a fleet of enormous alien ships arrives at our planet. The ships position themselves in the sky over every major city in the world. The chief alien—Supervisor Karellen—broadcasts one speech, in English, over all of Earth’s radio frequencies, announcing that national governments are now irrelevant, and that the aliens will be enforcing peaceful and beneficial conditions around the world, whether the humans like it or not.                                                      

For five years the ships just hover and the aliens never show themselves, but they are able to enforce the kinds of behavior they want through drones and rays and other sophisticated pieces of technology. They are able, for example, to prevent us from killing each other en masse by destroying any missiles that we fire at each other.

The only contact the humans have with the aliens (whom the humans have begun calling the Overlords) is through the Secretary General of the United Nations, Rikki Stormgren. Stormgren is periodically brought up into the ship hovering over New York, where he converses with Overlord Supervisor Karellen through a one-way mirror.

Even though the aliens are supposedly benevolent and are theoretically helping humanity by preventing them from doing stupid things to each other, the humans, of course, rankle at being controlled. Some countries try to attack the ships with nuclear bombs, but the bombs just evaporate on the ships’ surfaces. There is a little bit of a minor kerfuffle when Stormgren is kidnapped by a fringe resistance group in an attempt to get the aliens to show themselves, but Karellen is able to bust Stormgren out relatively easily.

Finally, fifty years later, the aliens decide humanity is used to their presence enough to actually reveal themselves. And it’s a good thing the aliens waited, because they are terrifying: twice our size and shaped exactly like devils, complete with horns and bat wings.

By now, though, most humans don’t care. They have been lulled into a dead stupor caused by the complete elimination of any challenge in the form of war, disease, poverty, famine, or crime. This stupor, unfortunately for us (and, as it turns out, purposefully on the part of the aliens) extends to any expression of human creativity. There is hardly any more real effort to engage in art or music or writing, and there is no more serious pursuit of science. The aliens particularly discourage any kind of investigation into alien technology, or the aliens’ origins, or any kind of space travel or astrophysics.

One human, Jan Rodricks, clinging to a shred of scientific curiosity, stows away on one of the alien ships returning to the Overlords’ home world. The aliens discover him mid-flight, but let him continue his journey.

Another group of people tries to fight the boredom by founding an island colony of the last people left who are interested in art and science, but it doesn’t really amount to much. They mainly pursue dilettante interests and hold boring parties where they have interminably immature and gossipy conversations.

Eventually, after much screwing around, the Overlords reveal their ultimate purpose, which is to prepare the current generation of children to be turned into little conduits, mindless accessories to a universal Overmind. The children eventually stop talking to their parents and start spending all their time in little meditative comas. This leads, inevitably, to the end of the human race.

The book’s ending is told from Jan Rodrick’s point of view as he returns home. Because of the relativistic time distortion from near-light-speed space travel, he returns home after all of the people that he knew are long dead, and all that is left are the weird Overmind children. And as soon as he get there, they begin casting all water and life forms out into space, in preparation for joining the Overmind. In a psychedelic scene that seems like a less powerful, less coherent rehearsal for the ending of 2001, Rodrick describes the destruction of Earth and his unification with the cosmos with sweeping galactic scope.

As I said, one thing that Clarke does still have going for him in this book is his technological prescience. In one otherwise tedious party scene, for example, the host pretends to answer the door for his guests using a realistic holographic projection tool similar to those now used in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

Clarke also invents a nascent form of virtual reality as an entertainment tool for his artist colony. He (adorably) describes it as an outgrowth of the “art of the cartoon film:”

    “First sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old ‘moving pictures’ more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses...When the goal was achieved, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become—for a while, at least—any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary…and when the ‘program’ was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life—indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself.”

However, none of this makes up for the plodding, slow-paced story, which consists mostly of conversations between his characters. Isaac Asimov could pull off this type of narrative because the ideas his characters talk about are interesting and exciting in themselves. But Clarke's characters' ideas are not; the conversations are mostly sophomoric and do nothing to further the action (such action as there is).

It also does not make up for the seedy sexism. This ranges from relatively minor incidents, such as how the women in the artist colony are somewhat condescendingly described as all taking up knitting together and knitting sweaters for all their menfolk, to more egregious ones like the conscious resignation of wives to the “fundamentally polygamous” nature of men and the resulting public series of mistresses their husbands must have.

Forty-six years later, Greg Bear wrote a book called Darwin’s Radio, which also had a plot which included the near-instant change of humanity from one species to another within one generation. Bear’s new species also included a new breed of highly empathic, emotionally interconnected children. But Bear’s novel is much better at what it does, with a comparatively interesting plot and without the 1950s era baggage.

Book Review: A Clash of Kings

George R.R. Martin
1998
Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT (for A Game of Thrones)

A Clash of Kings is the second novel in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, continuing the epic story begun in A Game of Thrones.

When last we left Martin’s intrepid and voluminous collection of characters, several would-be kings were arming themselves for war against each other. This war erupts in sprawling, slow-moving, multi-front fashion in A Clash of Kings. The Baratheons war against each other, the Greyjoys war against the Starks, and everybody wars against the Lannisters. Daenerys Targaryen prepares for war against the Baratheon-Lannisters, but never actually gets to wage it (at least in this book).

Thus A Clash of Kings is exactly what the title says it is: a clash between at least seven major contenders vying to be king of all the land. The contenders are:

The evil, lunatic, fifteen-year-old Joffrey Baratheon, put on the throne after his father, King Robert, died. Except that his father really wasn’t his father; Joffrey is actually the product of his mother’s incest with her own brother Jaime, so Joffrey really has no legitimate claim to the kingship.

Joffrey’s primary opponent, and our hero, Robb Stark. He is the one we really want to be king. But we almost never actually see him in the whole thousand pages of this book because he’s off waging battles in the north.
                                                   
Stannis and Renly Baratheon, the dead king Robert’s surviving brothers, both of whom want to be king and both of whom have something of a legitimate claim. Stannis’s right-hand woman is a sorceress who uses witchcraft to gain the upper hand in battles and get rid of his enemies.

Daenerys Targaryen, who arguably has the best claim of all since she’s the last surviving descendant of the last king of all the land. But she has the disadvantage of being a woman, so no one sees her as a legitimate contender. She spends the entire book traipsing across the desert with her three dragons and the small remains of her dead husband’s army, trying to build up her forces and buy ships to get her across the sea to where all the real action is.

Minor players Theon Greyjoy and Mance Rayder, who don’t really have a claim to much of anything but nevertheless form their own armies and go in pursuit of castles.

The thing is, although we see plenty of one-on-one fights, throat-cuttings, beheadings, and other small-scale incidents of violence, we rarely actually see any real full-on battles in person. We mainly just hear about them along with other non-participants by hearsay or messenger raven. The story is mainly told instead in the setup for and the aftermath of war. And the plot unfolds not by following the narratives of the kingly contenders, but by those of the secondary players around them.

Which is good, because the secondary players are the best characters in the book. There are still many chapters where you have to go slogging through the horror that is Sansa’s life at King’s Landing with her increasingly brutal and crazy fiancé, or Dany’s endless travels through the desert far from the action, or Theon’s miserable excuse for a storyline, but in general the most interesting parts of the story are told through these people:

Bran Stark (Robb’s second-youngest brother). Whiling away his time at Winterfell without his father, mother, sisters, or older brothers, he is making his own friends, getting wiser, and growing more independent. He is also getting in touch with the magic world; he has more and more frequent dreams which foretell the future, and/or in which he is a direwolf for real.

Arya Stark (Robb’s youngest sister). The tough little girl continues her slow escape from King’s Landing towards the north, now disguised as an orphan boy headed to the Wall to join the Night’s Watch. She runs afoul of one beastly capturer after another in the war-ravaged, brigand-full land.

Jon Snow (Robb’s half-brother). After joining the Night’s Watch in book #1, Jon gets picked to go on a search party into the wild lands north of the Wall to search for his lost uncle and also figure out what Mance Rayder is up to (which, as it turns out, is forming an army in preparation for marching on the southlands).

Davos Seaworth (a former smuggler in the employ of Stannis). Davos doesn’t get much play in this book, but he makes the most of his few appearances. During a previous war, back when he was a smuggler, he helped Stannis by supplying him with food during a siege. When the siege was over and Stannis was victorious, he promoted Davos by making him a knight… but chopped the fingers off of his right hand to remind him of his criminal past. Davos is fiercely loyal to Stannis and, because of his position as one of Stannis’s bannermen, gets to witness the most colorful battle in this book.

Tyrion Lannister (Joffrey’s uncle). Tyrion is the only person who seems to have any kind of long-range strategy for anything. He plans the defense of King’s Landing using clever tricks and weapons of mass destruction, and meanwhile tries to keep his crazy nephew from wrecking any shred of diplomatic connections the Lannisters have left. Tyrion wheels and deals with everyone, promising wives, castles, money, and titles, in exchange for various devious acts.

As with the first book, some of the best things about A Clash of Kings are the unique scenes and settings and Martin’s vivid writing of them. I particularly liked his presentation of Pyke, the windswept, wave-battered castle of the Greyjoys. And I said earlier that we see very little of A Clash of Kings’ eponymous battles themselves, but one notable exception to this is the fantastic naval battle of King’s Landing, in which Stannis Baratheon attacks the forces of “King” Joffrey Baratheon, and which is waged brilliantly by Joffrey’s uncle Tyrion. I could picture every moment of the chaos, with ships in various stages of destruction dotted all over the river, and the glowing, greenish, terrifying, agent-orange-like wildfire creeping over attacker and defender alike. With this battle, Tyrion proves just how ruthless he can be in the pursuit of his goals, and how willing he is to cause horrifying pain and death (even to himself) in order to defend his family, whom he doesn’t even necessarily like.

The direwolves are also always a huge plus any time they appear in the book. And of course it is beyond impressive how Martin is able to keep all of his millions of intertwining characters and their motives—overt and secret, large and small—straight in the chess game that is the plot.

However… other aspects of Martin’s writing started rankling me more than ever. I don’t know whether it is just because my tolerance was worn down from reading the previous eight hundred pages of book #1, or if the negatives in book #2 really are more exaggerated, but on balance, this time, the parts that bugged me far outweighed the parts that I liked.

As in the first book, the pseudo-medieval language is stilted and self-conscious. I also started to get increasingly tired of the endless lists of colors, sigils, and waving flags that accompanied every army arrayed for battle, every group assembled for a banquet, and any audience waiting for any of the various kings. I got through the book much more happily once I started skipping the long descriptions of arrayed banners adorned with flayed men, krakens, flowers, and human hearts in lilac, crimson, pale yellow, and snowy white.

And, again, as in the first book, there is a frustrating lack of resolution of any of the major plot lines. Or even temporary, periodic, small resolutions on a small scale, for that matter. And, again, very bad things continually happen to good people. The book just goes on and on for thousands of pages with nearly unrelenting toughness and inhumanity. Our favorite people (those who survive, anyway) must soldier on, alone and lonely. We hardly ever get any vindication for any of the characters we are invested in—no long-awaited reunions, no long-lasting freedom, no easing up of the brutality.

Which leads directly to one more problem: rape. This book is chock full of rape, in addition to hordes of slightly less personal incidents of maltreatment. Women in this book (as well as some men) are beaten, stripped, sold, traded, and pimped. It is almost impossible to take. And even if some of the women grow to love their abusers, it doesn’t make it any more tolerable.

A Storm of Swords, the third novel in this series, also won a Locus. But in spite of Martin’s inarguable storytelling talent, I don’t know if I can deal with any more of this trauma.

Book Review: The Dervish House

Ian McDonald

2010

Awards: Campbell

Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Dervish House is a near-futuristic, somewhat surrealistic tale set in Istanbul in 2027. It follows the concurrent and interconnected stories of several residents of a single apartment building—a converted former home of Sufi ascetics, or dervishes—over the course of several days.

In 2027, Istanbul is, as it is now, a global crossroads. It is a polyglot city, filled with people of many cultures. It is incredibly old and traditional, and yet also jumping breakneck into the future. And the various stories of the main characters reflect this diversity, blending hyper-futuristic technology with ancient spirits and centuries-old city infrastructure.

McDonald’s writing is smoothly-flowing and colorful, almost impressionistic, for the first two-thirds of the book, as he gives life and backstory and motivation to his characters and moves them into the first phases of their respective plots. The writing then becomes harder and more concrete for a time, as the various stories ramp up into faster-paced climactic activity, and then downshifts again as the plot lines approach resolution. Sometimes the swirling imagery and abstractions got to be a little too much for me, but, for the most part, McDonald’s style fits the settings and the pacing nicely.

The book is first set in motion when a suicide bomber blows herself up on a tram in a crowded square. One of the witnesses to the bombing is a boy, Necdet, who has been illegally squatting in a vacant room in the dervish house. Since he is on the questionable side of the law already, he hightails it away from the tram before the police nanobots investigating the accident can arrive and track him down.

Unbeknownst to Necdet, he is followed by nanobots anyway. But these nanobots belong to Can, another boy living in the dervish house. Can has a heart condition that could be set off by loud noises, so he lives all his days trapped in his room, walled off from the outside by noise-cancelling earplugs. But he has outside eyes and ears in the form of a toy, a set of BitBots, nanotech robots that can morph themselves into different animals—a snake, a rat, a bird, a monkey. He uses them to spy on the outside world, monitoring their audio and video feeds on his laptop.

Can is having his BitBots follow Necdet home from the tram bombing when he realizes that both his BitBots and Necdet are being followed by another robot. It is not a police robot; it is a robot of unknown origin. When Can’s BitBots try to evade it, it pursues them, and they lead it a merry chase over the Istanbul rooftops before finally getting it to crash into an alleyway.

Can has his BitBots inspect the robot wreckage and bring pieces home to him. He shows the pieces to his friend, Georgios, a middle-aged former economics professor also living in the dervish house apartments.

Georgios is pretty much the isolated Can’s only friend, and the only person who treats Can with respect (perhaps because, being a Greek man in Turkey, he relates to being estranged from society). It turns out that Georgios is also a former member of a radical activist movement and a current member of a secret anti-terrorist government think-tank. As soon as he sees the robot wreckage Can brings him, he realizes something big and very sinister is afoot.

Georgios’ suspicions are heightened further when, after the bombing, Necdet starts seeing spirits—really seeing them—djinn and karins and the Islamic Green Saint Hızın. This, coincidentally, makes Necdet super-useful to his brother who is trying to become a religious leader of a new tarikat, and gives Necdet a growing reputation as a religious seer.

Meanwhile, while all of this is going on...

Ayşe, the owner of an antiquities shop in the dervish house, is recruited by a mysterious customer to find a legendary treasure: a Mellified Man, a man who was mummified in honey. The honey from such a coffin is reputed to have amazing healing powers. And one such mummy, thousands of years old, is rumored to have made its way to Istanbul. Tracking it down is a treasure hunt that takes Ayşe all over the city, opening her eyes to secret patterns in the original city infrastructure that only the truly alert can see;

And Ayşe’s husband Adnan, an oil trader, is planning a dicey money-making scheme to sell rights to gas pipelines in Iran that are technically illegal because they were irradiated decades earlier in a nuclear explosion;

And Leyla, another resident of the dervish house and a recent business school graduate, is working to get venture capital funding for her cousins’ nanotech startup. They have developed a technology that uses latent, non-coding DNA in the human body to carry information, like a cellular computer. This would let you store and recall every piece of information you amass; it would let you swap in whole new talents and skills instantly; it could enable brain-to-brain telepathy. Needless to say, this could change the world;

And everyone’s movements are observed by a group of older Greek men, friends of Georgios, who hang out at a tea house near the dervish house, and who spend most of every day doing nothing but gossiping about the goings-on of the residents. They seem to be just a group of lazy retired friends, but they really serve as a group narrator—literally, a Greek chorus?—for the reader: interpreting events for us, clarifying, explaining, and at the end, tying everything together in ways we can understand.

There is a lot to like about this book, and a few things to be irritated by. In general, it is a good multi-threaded detective story. It’s a bit like a treasure hunt, in which you gradually put together bits and pieces of the various story lines until they start making sense not only in themselves but also together.

The city itself, the people living in it, and its busy, vibrant, densely-populated atmosphere may be the best parts. I loved learning about Istanbul. And I always like it when I am so immersed in the language and culture of a book that by the end I am totally comfortable with concepts and pronunciations of words that were foreign to me before.

And McDonald exploits Istanbul beautifully. As I said earlier, his writing style is slow, disconnected, and sometimes almost dreamlike. He uses swirling, colorful imagery, and lush but at the same time somehow clear descriptions of locations, buildings, and natural features. Throughout it all you are always conscious of the global-warmed oppressive heat, always making everybody sweaty and itchy. Some of the images were beautiful, like this description of the Grand Bazaar:

Gold with silver; plaster-peeling domes. Yellow-roofed soks refuse to run true; every crossway reveals new alleys and corridors that slope unpredictably between coffin-tight shops and stalls before opening into dome-roofed plazas and bedestens. Tukish flags in all conceivable geometries. Red and white, crescent and star. No home for the starry coronet of the EU here. A painted finger-board points to a tiny mosque, tucked up a twisting flight of stairs. Men hurry high-stacked trolleys along the stone-flagged passages. Water spills down the tiled face of a fountain. Everything is very small, packed, wedged together. The shopkeepers are too big for their tiny stands, oppressed by their piled merchandise. The glare of white neon never changes by day or by night. The Grand Bazaar keeps its own time, which is time not marked by the world’s clocks or calendars. (p. 269)

                                                                                        

Like I said, most of the time it carried me along fine. Much of the time it was beautiful. Sometimes, though, it got to the point where I was frustrated by the incomplete sentences and the ephemerality and itched for something a little more solid.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that The Dervish House reminded me in many ways of Neal Stephenson’s books. For one thing, there’s the exotic location in a cosmopolitan international city, of which we get to see much of the seedy underbelly. There’s McDonald’s wry sense of humor, with his subtle pop culture references to Jack Bauer and Blue Steel, and his affectionately irreverent take on the sacred. And there is the near-futuristic nanotechnology with all kinds of uses: security enforcement, dynamic fabric decoration, smart newspaper pages, and stimulants. And Can’s doggedly loyal BitBots, which took the form of four animals and became his vehicles to wisdom, echoed little Nell’s four stuffed animal friends in The Diamond Age.

Book Review: A Game of Thrones (Part II: The Review)

George R. R. Martin

1996

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Note: For a brief-ish synopsis of the story of A Game of Thrones, please see the post immediately prior to this one. This one contains only my analysis.

PART II: THE REVIEW

In evaluating A Game of Thrones, I must begin with my admiration.

First and foremost, this book is a masterwork of planning, organization, and focus. Every story line for every character had something to contribute to the larger picture. No one’s narrative seemed like it was unnecessary, or just there for comic relief or love interest.

Martin excels not only at the structural big picture, however, but also in the tactical details. He writes specific scenes and incidents with great clarity. Physical confrontations small and large—from mano-a-mano swordfights to huge battles between armies—are so well described you can almost picture the exact choreography in your head. This is refreshing; there is almost nothing more frustrating than a murky battle scene (I’m looking at you, John Varley).

Speaking of battles, it’s interesting to me that the reader witnesses only about half of the key battles that happen during the timeline of the book. Sometimes you actually are there during the fighting (like Cersei’s bloody coup at King’s Landing), but other times you just hear it described by characters who were there (like a battle at Riverrun in which Catelyn’s brother is captured). It is a bit like in The Hobbit when Smaug is killed and you don’t even see it, you just hear it told by someone who was there. It’s a little bit frustrating, but it still works. And I guess if you saw everything, the book would be two thousand pages long.

Much of Martin’s ground-level imagery is striking and vivid. There is almost nothing so visceral as the scene where Dany Targaryen has to eat the entire completely raw heart of a recently killed horse so that her unborn child will have good luck. And I was particularly impressed with Tyrion’s prison cell in the Tullys’ castle Aerie: the dungeon is set into an impossibly steep mountainside cliff face, with one wall of each cell open to the air. Any prisoner rolling over in his sleep carelessly enough could roll over the edge and fall to his death.

The characters are distinct and memorable.  There are, of course, a large number of them, and I did lose track of most of the innumerable “smallfolk” (handmaidens and bloodriders and knights and servants and slaves). But with a bit of concentration and/or note taking, you can keep track of a surprisingly high number of the main players. There are those who are honest, appealing, and trustworthy (Jon Snow), and there are others who are sleazy or mean or power mad (Queen Cersei), and others who are harder to pin down (Tyrion). Over the course of a book this long, even the good guys often end up making mistakes that add to their complexity.

When I say that the writing is good, however, that is not to say I didn’t have any frustrations with the book.

Most of the time the fantasy language and the medieval terms aren’t so stilted that you’re overly conscious of it. I liked the direwolves and the dragons and the grumkins. But there are a few frequently words that really started to jar after a while (starting around page 245). The ones that particularly got to me were: 

• Ahorse (as in, “He was not walking, he was still ahorse.”)

• Mummer’s farce (as in, “This trial is nothing but a mummer’s farce!”)

• Whickering (in A Game of Thrones, horses do a lot more whickering than they do neighing.)

• Manhood (referring to a male’s genitalia, as in, “When next you bare steel on Shagga son of Dolf, I will chop off your manhood and roast it in the fire.”)

Then there is the brutality. The world of A Game of Thrones is rough and not for the faint of heart. Most of the characters are (or are forced by circumstance to be) anything from harsh and unkind to violent and cruel. It can be quite hard to take—in particular, the stories of Sansa Stark and Danaerys Targaryen, who are both stuck alone in abusive situations with little outside support. And there are innumerable women raped—whether it is as prisoners of war on the battlefield or as wives or servants or slaves going along with sex with their husbands or masters because they do not have the power to refuse.

And then there is the frustration I was warned about more than anything else when I first set out to read this book: BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO PEOPLE YOU LIKE.

Horrible things did happen to the characters I liked. All of them were forced through honor, or circumstance, or both, to be alone much of the time, fighting for themselves against evil and irrational and usually overwhelmingly powerful people. I wanted some kind of vengeance, justice, vindication, refuge, solace—for crying out loud, even just a resolution of one kind or another—for them. But after 800+ pages, I got almost nothing of that. And now I might have to read another 800-page book to see if the bad guys will get their comeuppance at last? And it might not even happen then? Damn you, George R. R. Martin!