Book Review: Millennium

John Varley
1983
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I made the mistake of starting to read this book while on a plane. This was a very bad idea. The plot revolves around a mid-air plane collision between a DC-10 and a Boeing 747 in the skies over Oakland, California. And the first two-thirds or so of the book describe various aspects of the crash in excruciating detail, from the charred, severed limbs of the victims to the play-by-play of both cockpit voice recorders as the crew realized the trouble they were in. I had to put the book down several times mid-flight before eventually giving up and finishing it after I’d gotten safely back on the ground.

Once I did, I found that Millennium is a compact, well-plotted, well-paced time-travel novel with big, prescient warnings for those of us living in the here and now. It predicts a horrifying potential future that is the natural result of our disdain for our planet, and the least advantaged people who live on it. And it does it in a hard-boiled way that doesn't come off the least bit preachy.

The book is told in the form of intertwining testimonies from its two major characters. One testimony is that of Bill Smith, the National Transportation Safety Board Investigator in Charge who had the bad luck to be on call when the plane collision happened. He is a struggling alcoholic with the usual associated family troubles. But he's also doggedly determined to unravel all the threads of the crash mystery until he figures out what happened, and why.

The other testimony is that of Louise Baltimore, the leader of a time-traveling clean-up crew from forty thousand years in the future. Her job is to do “snatches,” during which they use a time portal to board airplanes before they crash, pull off all the still-living passengers through the portal into the future and replace them with staged, faked dead bodies—why, we don't know yet—and then go back and fix anything that went wrong during the snatch that could alter the timeline between ours and hers.

Louise and her staff are on board both of the planes, attempting to remove all the passengers before they collide, when they run into unexpected trouble: a hijacker shoots one of the Louise's crew members, and, in the subsequent confusion, one of them loses her stunner on the plane.

During his investigation, Bill starts to piece together things that make him realize that this crash is an odd one. On the bodies he has recovered, for example, all the watches are set exactly 45 minutes ahead. And on the black box recording, one of the crew is heard yelling about how everyone on the plane is burned and dead—before the crash happens. And then Bill sifts through every piece of debris and finds the stunner. Which means Louise has to go back and find Bill before he finds the stunner, and retrieve the gun from the debris before it screws up the timeline.

Inevitably, Bill and Louise meet and develop a sympathy and attachment to each other that prevent them from doing their jobs as dispassionately as they should, and the timeline starts to get more and more screwed up, and Louise's present starts to unravel.

In the process, we learn just how painful Louise's present is. The earth is next to unlivable, ecologically. And everyone suffers from all sorts of defects and degenerative organ diseases, so that the lucky ones don't die until their late twenties, having had most of their organs and limbs replaced and their bodies covered with artificial skin suits. And we learn that the stolen passengers from the crashes are part of the future's desperate, last-ditch attempt to save humanity.

The time travel in Millennium has plausible governing principles surrounding paradoxes: big events matter to the timeline, but little details generally don't, which allows Louise's clean-up crew some much-needed wiggle room. The settings, especially the future forty thousand years from now, have a bare-bones, Dashiell-Hammett-type grittiness. And so do the characters; Bill and Louise are both reluctant to get emotionally involved with anyone. If anyone in this pair is the sensitive one, it is Bill; Louise, raised in a nearly hopeless world, is a tough, hard-boiled cynic. But both of them have hearts of gold buried under their alcoholic and/or sarcastic exteriors, and they somehow are able to see that in each other and to join forces to try to save a future neither one will ever see. The result is an unexpectedly moving story.

Book Review: Blackout

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)
2012
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

BEWARE… SPOILER ALERT FOR FEED, DEADLINE, AND BLACKOUT.

And at last we arrive at Blackout, the third and final novel in Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy.

Blackout has most of the same pluses and minuses as Deadline. It has the same engaging post-zombie-apocalypse setting and the same appealing cynicism and irreverence in its main characters. It’s got the same witty writing style, which is mostly still fun to read but at times, in this third book, seems to be getting a bit sloppy.

It has the same annoying conversational techniques for attempting to draw out the suspense. It has the same crazy Shaun hearing Georgia’s ghost in his head, and the same unnecessarily disruptive commentary about it. And the plot seems similarly haphazard and forced, especially when it comes to Shaun’s story line and the motivations of the evil CDC.

But at least Georgia is back, in the flesh, which makes a huge difference for the good. Georgia is by far the best character and narrator Grant has got, and it’s great to have her again.

Blackout picks up where Deadline ended, with Georgia waking up in a cell in a CDC facility. She quickly figures out that she is a recently-awakened clone of her original self with all her memories intact, right up to the moment Shaun shot her in the back of the head when she was about to turn into a zombie.

Aside from confirming that she is a clone, the CDC staff won’t tell her anything; they won’t tell her where she is or what’s going on or even let her go to the bathroom without an escort. But through secret messages passed to her she finds out that the EIS—the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a subdivision of the CDC—has undercover agents inside the CDC and that they are working on a plan to break her out.                

The EIS agents show her other Georgia clones being grown in the lab and explain that she’s just one of many. The CDC is trying to build a malleable, docile version of her that will do what they say, and then they will use that clone to lure Shaun in and imprison him. She herself is too much like the original Georgia, inquisitive and rebellious, so she is on a time limit. Once they are able to build a more brainwashable clone, she will be “decommissioned.”

She is also able to find out one key thing on her own. Her CDC doctors let her walk for exercise in an agricultural biodome attached to the facility, which, because of her knowledge of CDC installations, lets her know that she’s in Seattle.                                                                              

Meanwhile, her brother Shaun and the rest of the After the End Times blog staff are hiding out from CDC security at Dr. Abbey’s CDC-blacklisted lab in Oregon. Their main goal is the same as it was in Deadline, which is to find out why the CDC wants to kill people who have Kellis-Amberlee reservoir conditions when they are the best hope for adaptive immunity, and to publish the answer online for the entire world to know.

And Dr. Abbey also wants to know more about the Cuban mosquitoes that are now spreading Kellis-Amberlee through Florida. The virus is too large for a normal mosquito to carry, which suggests that the Cuban species was deliberately bred.                                                           

What follows is a series of contrived misadventures designed to get Shaun and Georgia back together so they can pursue the truth as a team again. It starts with Dr. Abbey sending Shaun and Becks on a mission to Florida to try to get a sample of the mosquitoes, so she can do genetic testing to find out where they came from. Shaun and Becks make the mistake of stopping first at his adoptive parents’ house in Berkeley to get a map—a questionable plan in the first place—only to find that the Masons have told the CDC they were coming. They escape from the CDC police and flee from Berkeley, not to Florida, but instead to…

…Seattle, of course, where they meet up with Mahir and Maggie, who have gone up there to get fake IDs from a shady character called “The Monkey.” The Monkey agrees to give them IDs if, conveniently enough, they first break into the Seattle CDC and plant bugs for him.

At this point, the EIS determines it is time to enact Georgia’s escape. They have just surgically removed all her tracking chips and self-destructing bio-bombs when Shaun’s invading team causes the CDC to go into lockdown. The EIS doctors think that the lockdown is because of them, and stay to distract security while sending Georgia off in the direction of the exit, where she runs smack into Shaun without either of them running into any CDC staff first.

After fighting off a horde of zombies and at least two more CDC security detachments, they make their way back to Dr. Abbey’s lab, where it is determined that they really need to go all the way to Washington, DC, to ask the president the truth about Kellis-Amberlee and the mosquitoes and all that.

When they finally make it in to see the president, he is, of course, there with an evil CDC doctor who tells them the truth about Kellis-Amberlee and the mosquitoes and all that, and then tries to enlist them into his evil PR machine to keep it secret. And, of course, when it turns out they won’t keep it secret, he tries to kill them, and they, the president, vice president, and a bunch of Secret Service agents have to escape by shooting their way out of the White House through another horde of zombies.

A bad guy whose motivation
I can understand

The main issue I had with Blackout, as with Deadline, is that I just do not buy the bad guys’ motivation. Usually bad guys are motivated by money, revenge, religious fervor, or a desire for world domination, all of which I can completely understand. But these CDC guys seem to really be doing what they’re doing because of an always vaguely and often incomprehensively articulated societal benefit argument that doesn’t have much convincing pull. I don’t understand how they could have been willing to spend millions of dollars and kill people, much less die, for their cause.

I’ve read and re-read the sections of Deadline and Blackout where the bad guys explain themselves. From what I can piece together, their thinking seems to go like this:

• In a very, very small minority of cases, some people with reservoir conditions can either develop immunity themselves, or convey immunity to people who are close to them.
• The CDC doesn’t want to tell people that there is a tiny possibility that some people with reservoir conditions could recover or that some people might be immune, because then people will hesitate to pull the trigger when somebody amplifies, and then more people will die. Most of the time the person will turn into a zombie and then will turn around and eat the person who should have pulled the trigger.
• So, for the time being, they are killing people who have reservoir conditions.
• They think they will eventually find a strain of Kellis-Amberlee that doesn’t cause reservoir conditions. When they do, they want to infect the entire world with it.
• The genetically-engineered mosquitoes were supposed to be their distribution method, once they came up with a strain they liked. But they got out too early. So, oops—they killed millions of people on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Killing people who have reservoir conditions seems like way too much of a leap, even for crazed evil CDC doctors. I cannot believe they would really do that just based on the fear that knowing that people have the potential to be immune would lead to a few more deaths by recently-turned zombies. How about developing a test for immunity instead? Maybe that would be easier than having a secret cloning program and a secret mosquito genetic modification program and finding subtle ways to kill thousands of innocent U.S. citizens?

Early on in Blackout, Georgia observed, almost in passing, that the CDC was keeping people controlled “through unnecessary security and exaggerated fear.” We see this in real life all the time when we are required to go through blood tests or loyalty tests or other security checks to go about our normal business, security checks that are more stringent and intrusive than the real odds of danger would warrant, as a way to keep us as a population cowed and obedient. There would be plenty of potential for realistic governmental evil and oppression by means of security theater; it seems like maybe that would have been a ripe area to explore further, instead of the medical mumbo-jumbo.

Book Review: Deadline

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)
2011
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

BEWARE… SPOILER ALERT FOR FEED

Deadline, the second book in Grant’s zombie-apocalypse Newsflesh trilogy, picks up the story about a year after where the first book, Feed, left off. It is 2041; Senator Peter Ryman has gone on to be president of the United States; and Shaun Mason is running the After the End Times online news agency by himself, following the assassination of his sister Georgia by former vice presidential candidate David Tate.

Like Feed, this novel opens with a gripping action scene. In this one, Shaun has to rescue his most seasoned reporter and a trainee out on his first field test from a sea of about thirty zombies.

The difference this time is that Shaun’s heart is no longer really in it. His sister's death has filled him with a profound loneliness. He has gone a little bit crazy, conducting frequent, extremely realistic two-way conversations with Georgia in his head. And he worries that, without her, maybe there’s no longer any point to any of what he does. To avoid endangering his staff with his distractedness and lack of enthusiasm, he has even taken himself out of the field work he was so good at before.

But, sure enough, something happens to suck him back in. At his office in Oakland, he gets a visit from Kelly Connolly, a CDC doctor who has faked her own death and escaped from her employers so that she could get to Shaun and have him expose a sinister conspiracy that she has discovered. And this conspiracy is related to Georgia’s untimely death, which is the only reason Shaun takes the case.

Dr. Connolly’s discovery is that people like Georgia, who have non-lethal “reservoir conditions” associated with the Kimberlee zombie virus, are dying of seemingly accidental causes at much higher rates than the average population. And anyone who notices this trend and tries to research it, or even bring it up to their superiors at the CDC, winds up dead themselves.

Not coincidentally, just as Dr. Connolly is revealing her discovery to the After the End Times staff, the entire city of Oakland is massively bombed by the U.S. military, which excuses the action by claiming it is trying to stop a zombie outbreak. Shaun, Dr. Connolly, and several of Shaun’s reporters barely escape to rural California with their lives.

They are then almost constantly on the run for the rest of the book. They visit rogue scientists unaffiliated with the CDC to have them look at Dr. Connolly’s data; they go to a branch CDC office in Portland to ask them about the results; and inevitably they wind up going to CDC headquarters in Memphis to confront the director. Everywhere they go, they are held at gunpoint, threatened, shot at, or “accidentally” shut into buildings with hordes of zombies. And after they finally get out of Memphis and head home to tell the world what they know, they have to survive a cross-country drive back to California during the middle of the largest zombie outbreak in recorded history.

Deadline is set in exactly the same world as Feed, has many of the same characters, and is similarly filled with near-constant action and suspense. But it is nowhere near as compelling a story.

For one thing, the characters aren’t as interesting. Grant killed off three of the best characters in Feed—two good and one bad—leaving us mainly with second-stringers in this second book. I wasn’t really attached to any of them, so when they are in danger or even die, there wasn't nearly as much of an emotional pull. The news agency staffers’ styles are not very differentiated, so most of their blog excerpts sound very similar to each other. And there are two short-lived romantic entanglements thrown in which serve only as pointless distractions rather than plot- or character-enriching experiences.

For another thing, the chief villain’s master plan is, well, weak. It’s a tremendous anticlimax when we learn what it is. It’s hard to believe that even he believes in his goals enough to kill for them.

The medical discussions and explanations—of which there are many in this book—are abstract and confusing. It’s hard to build up enough horror or suspense about substrains, reservoirs, chimera, and immunology when the explanations of them are so muddy. Grant said that while writing Deadline she got a lot of advice from real scientists and doctors about how to talk about virology, and it almost seems like maybe that was a mistake.

I also became irritated with Grant’s technique of having the characters realize something before we (the reader) do—usually because we don’t know all the information they know—and then excruciatingly slowly drawing out the reveal of what they know as a way to amp up the dramatic tension. One conversation in which Shaun knew perfectly well what Dr. Connolly was avoiding saying went on for three pages while he tried to get her to say it instead of just explaining it himself and moving on. It was filled with dialogue like this:

     “I’m going to ask you one question, Doc, and I want you to think really hard about your answer, because you’re legally dead, and if we want to hand you to this nice lady,” I gestured toward Dr. Abbey, “for her experiments, well, there’s really not much you can do about it. Don’t lie to me. Understand?”
     Kelly nodded mutely.
     “Good. I’m glad to see that we have an agreement. Now tell me: The reservoir conditions. What do they do? What do they really do?”

And then she wouldn't answer, and he'd try another tack. I think you should either have the characters tell us what they have figured out, or don’t tell us, but don’t tell us over and over that they’ve figured out something, and then make them go pale or have their eyes widen with horror, and then act all cagey about it for several pages. It doesn’t make it more suspenseful; it makes it annoying.

And Shaun, our lone remaining hero from Feed, who I really wanted to pin my faith on, is revealed to have a serious anger management problem. When he is stressed out, or anxious, or mad, he handles it by being nasty to underlings, slamming cell phones, punching walls, and shoving computer equipment. Once, in the past, he actually punched one of his employees in the face. It made me miss Georgia’s rational, steadying influence quite a bit.

And, finally, speaking of Georgia’s steadying influence: Shaun’s conversations with Georgia’s ghost do bring her back into the book a little and do mitigate his personality problems somewhat. But Shaun consistently interrupts the nice flow of those conversations by commenting on just how whacked out everyone must be by him talking to his dead sister. To wit:

     Don’t be so hard on yourself, said George. You’re tired.
     “That’s easy for you to say,” I snapped, before I could stop myself. Then I froze, casting a careful glance toward Maggie. I was expecting… I don’t know what I was expecting. I get a lot of reactions to the fact that I still talk to my sister. Most of them aren’t good ones.

     My eyes were normal until I was almost at the amplification threshold, said George thoughtfully. The retinal distortion didn’t kick in until then.
     “I know,” I mumbled, keeping my voice low, so as to hopefully avoid reminding my team that I was crazy. 

Commenting on it a couple times, early on, to show how people are reacting to his craziness, would be fine. But when every single time he talks to Georgia he also has to make some mention of how someone rolls their eyes or looks at him funny, or how he mumbles because he doesn’t want people to hear him, it distracts from these often crucial conversations and makes them herky-jerky. I'd rather just hear what Georgia's ghost has to say.

Anyway... while reading Deadline, I really thought I was going to be done with the Newsflesh trilogy. But then, of course, Grant added a twist—or actually two twists—at the end of this book that still made me want to read the next one. So forget everything I just said, and let’s go read Blackout.

Book Review: Feed

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)

2010

Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Feed is a zombie apocalypse novel. Zombies are trendy subject matter. And, as I’ve said before, zombies are the only fictional monsters that I’m terrified of enough that I studiously avoid watching even supposedly great movies and TV shows about them. But this book is really, really fun, and it’s making me rethink my sweeping anti-zombie-story stance.

The story takes place in 2047, three decades after a zombie apocalypse has killed off much of humanity and changed America into a shuttered, defensive, constantly vigilant society.

What happened was that back in 2014, medical researchers developed two separate helper viruses: the Kellis virus, a cure for the common cold, and the Amberlee virus, a cure for cancer. Both worked as planned on their respective targets. And, separately, the two cures would have been miracles for humanity.

But when the two came into contact with each other, as they quickly did, they combined to form the highly virulent hybrid Kellis-Amberlee virus, which not only spread like wildfire through the human population, but also had the unfortunate effect of causing people to die, and then after they were dead, to rise again as flesh-eating zombies, mindlessly seeking live people to gnaw on, until they eventually fell apart and died a final, permanent death

At first, most people didn’t really know (or want to believe) that a zombie apocalypse was really happening. It was George Romero fans and people in the sci-fi internet community who first recognized it for what it was and developed strategies for survival. They rapidly discovered that everything about the Living Dead movies was true, and the films became survival guides. To wit:

• To kill a zombie, you have to shoot it in the head (or otherwise decapitate it)
• A zombie bite will kill you and then cause you to become a zombie
• Recently-turned zombies are faster and slightly more intelligent (and thus more dangerous) than longer-turned zombies

The disproportionate survival of internet users meant that by 2047, the primary news medium has become internet blogging, which provides the world’s only real information lifeline. And, accordingly, the main characters in Feed are Georgia and Shaun Mason, brother and sister journalist bloggers, whose job it is to go out into the still-dangerous parts of the country to report what is going on to the majority of the population that is too afraid to leave their homes.

Georgia is the primary narrator of the story. She is snarky, witty, anti-establishment, and standoffish to all but her closest friends. She is also entirely devoted to her brother and to reporting the truth. The fact that she has a Kellis-Amberlee-related eye condition is a constant challenge for her to overcome, and a constant tension-raising reminder of the virus.

Georgia’s brother Shaun is a little wilder; he likes to go into the countryside and poke zombies with sticks to keep the viewers entertained. But underneath the daredevil image, he is devoted to his sister and to the team of support people who work for them, and would never seriously endanger them on purpose.

The book opens with a dramatic motorcycle zombie chase scene in which Georgia and Shaun barely escape with their lives. It hooks you in immediately and the action and/or suspense don’t really let up from there. Moments after returning from the motorcycle chase, Georgia and Shaun’s news team is invited to cover Senator Peter Ryman, who is running for president. They are embedded with the Ryman campaign and are thus in the middle of it all when, after a speaking appearance, the senator’s entourage is attacked by someone who sabotages the warning systems and injects some of the supporters and security personnel with the zombifying Kellis-Amberlee virus. Georgia, Shaun, and the remainder of the senator’s staff are able to fight off the recently-turned zombies, but then the senator’s home is attacked in a similar way, and one of his daughters is killed.

At that point, they all realize that someone is set on seeing the senator dead, and it becomes a race against time for Georgia and Shaun to figure out who and why before the election—and before they get killed themselves.

Feed is as fun and easy to read as a Stephen King novel, but with an extra Generation-X snarkiness that is really appealing. This book is proof that you don’t have to have an obscure writing style or a zillion ultra-clever intertwining plot lines to make for an absorbing and fulfilling read. Engaging characters, a well-planned plot and ending, snappy and funny dialogue, and near-constant suspense will do that just fine. And although the book reads mostly as a light horror-mystery-action adventure, there is a large twist at the end that adds a great deal of seriousness and depth to the plot—and probably kills any chance of it being made into a Hollywood movie.

                                                                                            

One warning: this book is the first in a three-part trilogy. (I'll be reviewing the second installment, Deadline, in my next post.) If you think this novel might be one you want to read, and you don't like spoilers, do not read the descriptions on the backs of any of the subsequent books or any reviews of any of them before you read this one.

Book Review: The Integral Trees

Larry Niven

1983

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Larry Niven has done it again: created a clever, original, self-contained, outer-space habitat of strange configuration and enormous scope. It may not be as fully realized as his Ringworld, but it is still unique and impressive.

                                                  

Niven’s new bio-zone exists in a binary star system thousands of light years from Earth. One of the stars is a tiny, almost defunct neutron star. The neutron star is orbited by an enormous torus of gaseous cloud, which is probably the remnants of a large gas planet destroyed when the star went nova. The whole package—gas torus and central star—orbits together around the system’s other star, a bright yellow dwarf.

The gas torus is filled with oxygen and completely hospitable to a wide variety of life forms. The only catch is that there is no real gravity in the torus, just strong winds blowing around it which create tidal pulls: west-to-east on the inner rim and east-to-west on the outer rim. All indigenous fauna have adapted accordingly, each species having their own form of winged or expelled-gas-driven locomotion. I loved the strange native beasties that Niven created for this gravity-less environment.

And there are a number of neat places for the torus’s inhabitants to live. There are ponds: large globules of water drifting slowly around in the winds. There are jungles: conglomerations of plants and vines held together by a web of their own roots and branches. And there are trees: trees with enormous trunks, some a hundred kilometers tall, growing radially out from the central neutron star to the outer edge of the torus. The trunks are completely straight and smooth except for a small tuft of leaves and branches at each end. These tufts blow in the wind, eastward at the inner end and westward at the outer end, so that from afar, the entire tree looks like an integral symbol.
 

These various habitats are home not only to many native species, but also to humans—perhaps hundreds of them. These humans are the descendants of a handful of Earth space explorers who emerged from cryo-sleep far from home, mutinied against their ship’s oppressive AI guardian, and fled in research modules to start a new life of freedom in the torus. Centuries have passed since the original mutiny and the mutineers’ descendants have forgotten most of their history and science and now live as rudimentary farmers, hunters, and artisans.

I have to admit that I thought this was all a bit goofy at first. But I was sucked in to the story despite myself.

The story starts on one of the enormous integral trees, Quinn Tree, which has recently been pulled into a dry lower zone of the torus by the gravitational field of a passing planet remnant. The tree is dying, suffering from drought, and so is the human settlement on its inward tuft. The chief administrator of the settlement orders a troupe of nine misfits to climb up the trunk to try to find new sources of food and water for their starving village. After the misfits cross the midpoint of the tree they run into another population of humans they never knew about, which has completely different customs and taboos. The two groups fight, but the rotting tree bursts apart during their skirmish, casting the Quinn settlement misfits and one of the strangers adrift. They are all left floating together in the air, clutching a large piece of bark as a life raft.

Through creativity and cooperation, the bark-raft refugees survive and eventually make their way to a jungle. They only just start making friends with the humans living there when the jungle is invaded by a more technologically advanced group of humans from another tree. The whole batch of them—the original Quinn Tree misfits, the same-tree adoptee, and their new jungle allies—are all taken prisoner, brought to the invaders’ London Tree, and made into slaves and/or prostitutes. There they all suffer to varying degrees, trying to survive and doing what they can to stay in touch with each other, and carefully waiting and watching for a time when they can make their escape and get to a tree of their own.

The Integral Trees is almost Asimovian in that there is very little actual action, and that the story keeps you involved instead by having characters that are sympathetic and interesting, and constantly giving those characters new and complex problems to solve to survive. When there is action, it is exciting, but most of the book is exposition, conversations, problem-solving, journeying, and discovery.

The one character that didn’t really seem to have much of a point was Sharls Davis Kendy, the cyber-copy AI on board the original colonists’ ship, who has been locked in orbit for the past 500 years, waiting for the mutineers to come back so he can discipline them. The Quinn Tree misfits come close to him at one point, and even talk to him briefly, but in the end nothing comes of it and he is relegated to his waiting role once again.

But the rest of the characters and the rest of the story more than make up for the Kendy dead end. And the best thing about the book is the message running throughout about the importance of inclusiveness and the benefits that diversity brings. The original nine from Quinn Tribe are continually thrust into new life-threatening situations, but they overcome every obstacle by opening themselves up to new friends and allies, by working together, and by learning about and making good use of everyone’s skills—even the oldest and the most seemingly physically incapable. Their journey is really all about building a new tribe that includes members from all the varied places they come across, where they all can be free and be themselves. It’s an optimistic and uplifting message, and it doesn’t really ever get too hokey.

Book Review: Boneshaker

Cherie Priest

2009

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

I am terrified of zombies. They are far more scary to me than anything else. I can handle (and enjoy) quite a lot of vampire, werewolf, or mega-monster horror. But when a story has zombies in it, it often tends to be too much for me.

So when the cover of this book said that it was going to be a “steampunk-zombie-airship adventure of rollicking pace and sweeping proportions,” I readied myself to be really scared.

The book takes place in Seattle in 1879. Priest alters history quite a bit to fit her story, which is fine, but it does mean that you have to accept that it’s not going to be an exactly historically accurate 1879 Seattle. The Civil War is still going on, for example; the Alaskan gold rush happened many years later than it really did; and Seattle’s population is about eight times larger than it really was at the time.

The prelude for the events in the book is this: in 1863, sixteen years before the story really starts, Russia held a competition to see who could invent a machine to let them mine their Klondike gold the fastest. A brilliant and somewhat crazy Seattle inventor, Leviticus Blue, won the competition with his design for “Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine.” The Russians pressured him to get it operational too soon, however, and on its first road test it went horribly out of control, destroying most of the financial district of downtown Seattle.

Not only did the Boneshaker’s rampage itself kill many people, but the machine also dug so deep that it opened up a subterranean vent of a hideous, heavy, toxic gas. The gas, which quickly became known as “the Blight,” poured out of the vent, killing almost everyone left in the downtown area. And then the Blight turned out to have an even lovelier side effect: it turned a large proportion of the recently dead people into “rotters,” or zombies, who of course had an insatiable appetite for living human flesh.

The survivors immediately threw up a wall around the downtown area to contain the zombies and the still-spewing Blight, and to protect the people who still eked out a meager living in the impoverished “Outskirts” neighborhoods right next to the city. 

No one knew what happened to Leviticus Blue after the accident. But his pregnant wife, Briar, escaped the city, and she raised their son, Zeke, alone in near poverty in the Outskirts for the next fifteen years.

The main story of Boneshaker is set in motion when Zeke, at fifteen years old, decides he wants to go to his parents’ old house in the walled city to try to find evidence to prove his father’s innocence. He packs a lantern, a gas mask, and Blight-seeing polarized goggles; leaves his mother a note; and sneaks into the city through a half-buried outflow pipe for what he thinks will be a quick day trip.

Whereupon, of course, there is a major earthquake, and it collapses the pipe, Zeke’s only known route of escape. His mother panics and goes in after him.

What follows is a romping chase (at a “rollicking pace,” as advertised) as Zeke tries to find the old house and Briar tries to find Zeke and both try to avoid the ravenous zombies, the ever-present Blight, and living humans who might do them harm. For, as it turns out, there are still plenty of people living in the city. They have sealed up buildings with wax and tar so the Blight can’t get in, and they pull in clean air with a system of bellows and pipes coming over the wall. They are well-masked and well-armed and they travel mostly through underground tunnels and roof-to-roof catwalks. And they’re not all nice.

There is also a small population of black marketeers who swoop in over the city in zeppelins, collect bags of the Blight gas, and turn it into a highly dangerous drug used by addicts on the outside. These illegal airships turn out to be very helpful to both Briar and Zeke more than once.

There is not much in the way of actual plot complexity in this book. What there is is a lot of breathless up-and-down rushing through basements, streets, and catwalks as mother and son try to find what they respectively came for and get out alive. They run into dangerous people and people who are kindhearted, and of course they run into zombies. And they gradually get closer and closer to a rendezvous with the mysterious, tyrannical Dr. Minnericht, an eccentric recluse who holds the citizens of walled Seattle in thrall with their dependence on his brilliant anti-zombie inventions, and who may or may not be Briar’s long-lost husband Leviticus.

I liked the premise and I liked the mid-19^th century steampunk aesthetic, which is manifested primarily in the quirky mechanical inventions and the characters’ names. Many of the characters are charismatic and appealing, like the mechanical-one-armed crossbow-toting bar-mistress Lucy O’Gunning, and the stoic, heavily armed zombie-fighting warrior Jeremiah Swakhammer. And much of the time it is a lively, page-turning ride.

But at the same time, the book has a lack of depth and direction that is frustrating. The challenges that Briar and Zeke face hardly ever seem to be as difficult to conquer as I thought they would be. There are too many times when fortuitous accidents land one of the other of them where they need to be just at the time they need to be there, and other times when they are fortuitously rescued by someone showing up out of the blue or a fortuitous piece of just the right type of equipment showing up in their hands at just the right time. And the sinister Dr. Minnericht turns out not to be pretty anticlimactic; he's not as much of a satisfying twist as I thought he was going to be.

I also have to say that the zombies were--dare I say it?--disappointingly non-frightening. Most of the trouble Briar and Zeke had was actually with living people, not the dead ones. And when they did encounter zombies, it was usually in the form of sudden, action-packed, almost silly scuffles with large crowds of them, and the battles were too frantic and over too quickly to be really frightening. Zombies are known not for their agility and fighting ability but for their mindless, unrelenting, predatory pursuit, and using a few of them in quieter, more suspenseful situations might have made them far more terrifying. There were occasionally times when I’d be scared by someone hearing a suggestive moan or a sliding shuffle down a dark tunnel, but not very often, and it usually didn't amount to anything.

Book Review: Helliconia Spring

Brian W. Aldiss

1982

Awards: Campbell

Nominations: Nebula, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

Sometimes it seems to me that every lengthy science fiction novel published in the ‘50s and ‘60s was promoted as “the greatest epic since The Lord of the Rings,” and that every lengthy science fiction novel published in the ‘70s and ‘80s was promoted as “the greatest epic since Dune.”

Very few of the books thus described actually measure up to either of these standards. Helliconia Spring is a case in point, advertised on its back cover as “the most magnificent epic since Dune.” It certainly is epic in its ambition, but as for its magnificence, I beg to differ.

Helliconia Spring is set on Helliconia, an Earth-like planet orbiting a binary star system. Helliconia circles its primary star once every 2,000 Earth years. During each of these Helliconian years the planet suffers through a devastating, icy-cold winter that is 600 Earth years long.

This means that the inhabitants are stuck in a stultifying cycle: civilizations flourish and advance technologically during the summers, but then any progress they make is wiped out when winter comes; the cold drives them back to a hunter-gatherer existence, leaving them to scrape out whatever kind of living they can.

The novel sweeps across hundreds of Earth years, starting in the middle of one of these prolonged winters and ending with the onset of spring. It mainly tells the life stories of three principal patriarchs of the same family, several generations apart (but there are plenty of digressions into other characters’ narratives along the way).

The first of these patriarchs is Yuli, a nomadic hunter living deep in the heart of winter. Yuli and his father are out on a hunting trip when they are attacked by a band of the other intelligent beings living on Helliconia: the horned, furry, goat-like, human-hating phagors. The phagors kill Yuli’s father but Yuli himself escapes. Eventually Yuli finds his way to Pannoval, a huge and relatively advanced but repressive underground city where he is adopted into a foster family. He gets the best education Pannoval can give him and even becomes a priest, but he never forgets his former life above ground. Eventually he runs away from Pannoval with a few friends and makes his way back up to the surface where he founds a new village, Oldorando.

The story is then taken up many generations later with Yuli’s direct descendant “Little” Yuli, who is the leader of the now much larger town of Oldorando. Little Yuli gets pretty short shrift; he dies soon after he is introduced, and we learn more about his life from the stories told by the citizens gathered at his funeral rather than seeing events happen for ourselves. The main contribution Little Yuli makes to the novel is that his death opens up a succession controversy; his only child is a daughter (and everyone knows that women cannot rule), and his only grandson, Laintal Ay, is too little to govern.

The rest of the book is a frustratingly aimless recitation of Laintal Ay’s twisting, turning early life story. He grows up under a series of interim town leaders, none of whom are model citizens. He becomes a trusted lieutenant of one of them, then falls out of favor; he falls in love and is rewarded, and then rebuffed; he goes on a heart-stricken pilgrimage far away during which he contracts a horrible disease, then he comes back.

I started out optimistically at the beginning of this book, moderately bored but hopeful that it would pick up steam, and ended up actively resentful at sitting through meandering story lines with little resolution to them. Time really whips along: people grow, marry, have children, and die, and you can barely keep track of them (and barely want to). At one point, in just six pages, Oldorando changed from a backwards agricultural settlement to a village that launched mounted raids on other villages to a trade economy using metal currency.

There are occasional tantalizing hints of more interesting things we could explore further—in particular, an approaching phagor invasion, a woman who revolts against traditional women’s work and founds an academy of learning, and an Earth observation satellite hovering unseen above all the action—but we get no real long-term satisfaction from of any of them.

I think Lord of the Rings and Dune worked as epics because, even though they are incredibly long and detailed, they also center on distinctive, charismatic characters that I really grew to know and understand and often care about. Helliconia Spring, on the other hand, is more of a dispassionate biblical litany, a string of names and places and incidents happening to people to whom I felt no particular attachment.

The tone isn’t helped by Aldiss’ somewhat formal prose and his frequent use of the passive voice, as in “the Vakka had been bridged” and “his figure could be seen.” The characters’ names also tend to be a little bit ridiculous, and are easy to confuse with each other if you aren’t paying close enough attention. To wit:

                                          

Raynil Layan

Laintal Ay

Loil Bry

            Loilanun

Eline Tal

Rol Sakil

            Dol Sakil

            Hrr-Brahl Yprt

Yhamm-Whrrmar

I think I am probably more disappointed in this book than I might otherwise be because I had higher expectations for Aldiss. His novella The Saliva Tree, which won the Nebula in 1965, was really very good. It just may be that the epic is not his best format.

Book Review: Stand on Zanzibar

John Brunner
1968
Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Stand on Zanzibar is set in the 2010s which, in 1968, was the relatively near future. The world has become severely overpopulated, which has serious effects on everyday life.

Internal combustion engines are banned in most large cities and have been replaced by fuel-cell and fly-wheel vehicles. Almost everyone has to share housing, even the rich. In jails, prisoners are tranquilized and stacked one on top of another on bunk beds which can be pulled in and out of cells like drawers in a filing cabinet.

Rich countries have enacted various forms of eugenic legislation to control birth rates. In the US, for example, you are forbidden to have children if you have genes for certain hereditary conditions like hemophilia, diabetes, phenylketonuria, or color-blindness.

~~~~~~~

The book has two semi-intertwined main plots, each of which is centered on one of the two somewhat asocial main characters, Donald Hogan and Norman House. Donald and Norman are roommates and are also probably as close to being friends as would be possible for either of them.

Norman is black, Muslim, and a VP at General Technics, the world’s largest technology firm. His company sends him to Beninia, a remote African country, to work out a deal to allow GT to mine Beninia’s natural resources before its neighboring countries can invade and do so. While there, Norman finds that Beninians are very strange – no wars, no murders, not even lost tempers – and he sets himself to learning why.

Donald is white, Christian, and a spy for the US government. He gets sent to Yatakang, a remote Asian country, which has announced that it is developing the technology that will allow it to clone embryos, select out the ones with undesirable traits, and then implant the best in any woman. This may have disastrous capacity consequences for governments, as it will allow anyone to get around eugenics laws and have a child. Donald’s mission is to either expose their claim as a fraud or, if it is not a fraud, to make it not come to pass.

~~~~~~~

Reading Stand on Zanzibar is a little like reading Shakespeare or A Clockwork Orange, in that it is pretty hard to follow at first. Brunner creates a whole new vocabulary for this future dystopia that you have to get used to. Some of the new terms are abbreviations (“dicty” for “addict”); amalgamations (“Afram” for “African-American”); free-associations (“codder,” from “codpiece,” for “man”); or just plain slang (“shiggy” for “girl”).

But if you persevere, by the time you’re halfway through the book, you can read and understand a sentence like “Sheeting hole, Frank, I’ll never forgive those bleeders!” without batting an eye.

Even the table of contents is wacky. Chapters are listed not in chronological order but by category, of which there are four:

“Continuity” (the main plot)
“Context” (explanations of the main plot)
“Tracking with Closeups” (side stories about minor characters)
“The Happening World” (jumbles of ads, gossip, conversations, and news)

The four types of chapters are interwoven throughout the book. It is a little chaotic, but that is part of what Zanzibar is all about. The combination keeps the plot going, helps you understand it, provides detail and color, and gives you an idea of the volume of stimuli constantly bombarding the populace.

~~~~~~~

Stand on Zanzibar is also similar to Neuromancer in many ways. It has a trippy style and a unique vocabulary. It has advanced technology such as fuel-cell cars and internet-like, real-time global media. It has widespread use of hard-core drugs. It has a massive self-aware computer that controls many everyday operations for all of humanity worldwide. And it even has a woman with metal eyes (in this case, chromed contact lenses).

The main difference (aside from the fact that Zanzibar came out 16 years earlier than Neuromancer) is that it is less about the self-aware central computer and more about humans coping with each other in a crazy, overcrowded world. Brunner is bitingly sarcastic and cynical and, at the same time, handles complex issues with a lot of sensitivity and understanding.

Brunner’s main focus is how the loss of privacy and property affects us psychologically and sociologically. Humans are social animals able to deal with each other pretty well...until we get overcrowded, and then we turn on each other. The world of Zanzibar is full of violence: individual killing sprees, terrorism, riots, and war. Many people try to escape from it all with drugs, most of which are legal or at least tacitly allowed: everything from marijuana to powerful, laboratory-synthesized hallucinogens with names like Triptine and Skulbustium.

Brunner shows that the pressure created by overpopulation both exacerbates the gap between rich and poor and, at the same, binds them more closely. His message (sent primarily through the character of the popular, cynical sociologist/commentator Chad Mulligan) is that even though you may think you are rich, you are not, really, if the rest of the world is horribly poor. And many elements of his analysis have come depressingly true; Mulligan (presciently) points out that water is eleven times more expensive than it was fifty years ago; that all our foods are prefabricated in factories; and that the fanciest new building being built in the world is a jail.

And throughout the whole book runs another brave, touchy debate about reproduction. In an overpopulated world, choosing to have a child is itself a political statement. There are a million different ways to have a child: donor eggs or sperm, externally-fertilized ova, adoption, cloning. Each option brings anxiety and pain. And when the Yatakangis announce their cloning program, it brings up new questions about tailored babies. Is it right to breed for certain traits and against others? And do parents really want children who are more advanced than them?

And whether or not you want a child, you still have to deal with complex emotional issues. Some couples desperately want to have a baby but are not allowed to because one partner has a bad genotype. Some have good genotypes but are infertile. Some people have excellent genotypes but don’t want children, and are constantly questioned (and constantly question themselves) why they don’t. Brunner handles all of this with perceptiveness and sensitivity, as well as humor.


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