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: 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: Brittle Innings

Michael Bishop
1994
Awards: Locus (Fantasy)
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Using a somewhat Lovecraftian scheme, Brittle Innings tells a story within a story within a story. It is the story of a man (a sports reporter) telling us the story of another man (a former pro baseball player) telling him the story of yet a third man (another former pro baseball player…who has a terrible secret).

In the first (and most literally and figuratively parenthetical) of these stories, sports writer Gabe Stewart tracks down Danny Boles, a reclusive but brilliant scout for the Atlanta Braves, to write his life story. Boles agrees to be interviewed, but says he will only talk about his one and only year as a player in the minor leagues. Stewart is skeptical, but says okay.

For most of the rest of the book, Boles then tells the story of his year as a shortstop with the Highbridge Hellbenders, a farm team for the Philadelphia Phillies, in 1943. As he does so, he is able to get out the real story he wants to the world to know: the story of his former friend and teammate, Hank Clerval.

Boles’ own story is about baseball in the dirt-poor, racist and definitely not integrated American South during World War II, and it is the one that (unfortunately) takes up the vast majority of the book. Clerval’s story is much more unique and much more riveting, and (unfortunately) gets much less time. The two stories are told in almost completely separate parallel narratives for quite a while, barely touching until relatively late in the book.

In 1943, Boles is a big-eared, stammering, 17-year-old kid from a farm town in Oklahoma. He is recruited by the Phillies to play shortstop for the Hellbenders, a minor league team in Georgia that is filling out its ranks with high school students and hobbling has-beens now that all able-bodied male adults have gone off to the war.

Boles’ life is a miserable one most of the time, starting with him being raped by a G.I. on the train to Georgia, an incident which renders him completely mute for months afterwards. Once he makes it to Highbridge, Boles is bullied by most of his new teammates as well, who saddle him with the lovely nickname “Dumbo” because of his big ears and because of his muteness. It doesn’t make his social life any easier that he is a scrappy, speedy, base-stealing, great-fielding, good-hitting player who very quickly boots the existing shortstop out of a job.

One of the few players to treat Boles with civility is his roommate, 7-foot-tall infielder Hank “Jumbo” Clerval. Clerval is intimidatingly enormous and has a strangely misshapen body, but is also well-mannered and well-spoken (albeit in an oddly antique way). The fans are afraid of his appearance, but revere him as a local hero because of his home-run hitting power and his vacuum-cleaner-like fielding at first base.

We track the team’s slogging progress over the summer of 1943 as they rise (largely with Boles’ and Clerval’s play) from the basement to the top of the standings. Boles suffers one personal indignity after another off the field, only gradually proving himself to his teammates, the manager, and the fans. The daily sadness of his story is, frankly, pretty painful to get through most of the time.

Meanwhile, as Boles bonds increasingly with Clerval, he starts to notice strange things about him—like that he reads dozens of library books a week, consuming them like a house afire. And that he keeps all the retired game balls, peeling the leather covers off of them and keeping the stripped leathers in a box by his bed. And that the manager occasionally lets Jumbo use his own personal car, during a time of severe wartime gas rationing, to drive to Alabama, and that he takes the baseball covers with him when he goes, and comes back without them. And Boles also witnesses an odd incident where Jumbo is accidentally zapped when the electric lights are turned on before a night game at an away ballpark—but instead of killing him, the shock actually appears to give Jumbo a jolt of new energy.

About halfway through Boles’ agonizingly gritty narrative, the story finally starts to take on some real speed and interest when Boles finds Clerval’s diaries. The contents of the diaries are the third (innermost?) story line in the book, which is by far the most magnetic. Written in Jumbo’s antiquated voice, they reveal that Jumbo has had a very interesting past—a globe-spanning life, from Europe to the Arctic to America—stretching back more decades than would seem possible.

And Boles starts to realize why Clerval has such a misshapen—almost, one might say, patched-together-looking—body; and why his speech seems to come out of a much earlier era; and why electrical shocks seem to revitalize him instead of kill him; and Boles starts to realize that the unassuming, lonely Jumbo might, just might, be the real-life basis for one of the most famous monster stories of all time.

Bishop has done an impressive job of writing Boles’ and Clerval’s intertwining stories in utterly different and yet totally authentic and internally consistent voices. Boles’ writing is rural Oklahoma vernacular, and makes copious use of 1940s-era slang and colorful similes, metaphors, and adjectives. For example:

“A couple of players sniggered. Guys with sense, though, hung on bent tenterhooks and bided their time.” 

“They’d pull eight-hour second shifts and get back to their homes or to McKissic house around midnight, limp as boiled asparagus and almost as pale.” 

“We revved for revenge in the so-called nightcap and shellacked them three to zip in about ninety minutes. We got some nutritious shuteye that night and ambushed the poor saps again on Sunday.” 

Jumbo’s writing, on the other hand, uses the style, vocabulary, and even attitude of an exceedingly well-read and diligently self-educated 19th century gentleman. For example:

“I ached for death, for the surcease of unappealable extinction, and hopefully I commended my spirit to that bleak demesne.”

“Even had my face shone as comely as Apollo’s, my great size would always speak to the timid or the wary my undeniable potential for inflicting ruin.”

“Turning, he threw the ball in a low arc to a teammate at one congested corner of the ‘diamond.’ This disciplined heave and its skilled reception by a teammate excited the local enthusiasts to even louder approbation.” 

This double-voiced narrative is a true triumph of writing, and Bishop deserves serious kudos for it. The really disappointing thing about this book, though, is that it takes so long to get to its delicious meaty core. Far too much of it is focused on Boles' heartbreaking pursuit of an ultimately hopeless baseball career, and is filled with unrelenting cruelty. It didn't help that I didn’t really like Boles, or his teammates, or the setting, or the sweaty heat, or the idiotic and angry and defensive supporting characters. The hunt for the championship of the Highbenders' little minor league did wake me up a bit, but it wasn’t until a couple hundred pages or so had gone by that Clerval’s story really opened up and things got more exciting.

Because Jumbo’s diary entries are the absolute jewel of this book. They are suspenseful and engrossing, and he comes across as an intelligent, sympathetic, appealing character (or creature) struggling to get by in a world that rejects him. It’s a captivating misunderstood-monster story straight out of the Romantic era. It’s just too bad that Boles’ story sinks it, all but burying it in depressing, dragging peripheral context.

Book Review: Trumps of Doom

Roger Zelazny
1985
Awards: Locus (Fantasy)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Trumps of Doom is the sixth novel in Zelazny’s ten-novel Chronicles of Amber series, and it is the first novel in the second five-novel sub-saga of that series. So it’s really not a stand-alone book; you have to have read the first five novels to make heads or tails of it, and you have to read this one before being able to make heads or tails of any of the subsequent books. Zelazny is no fly-by-night author.

In spite of the fact that it comes smack in the middle of the Chronicles, Trumps starts out as if it is a whole separate story, unrelated to anything Amberific. The main character is different; it has a different tone, almost like a murder mystery; and—at least at first—there are no trumps, no mythic creatures, and no psychedelic hellrides.

The main character of Trumps of Doom is “Merle Corey.” To all appearances, “Merle” is just an everyday guy on contemporary Earth. When the book opens, it is the day he has quit his job of eight years to do some “wandering.”

It is also a day when he also feels certain that someone will try to kill him. Because it is April 30, and someone has tried to kill him (unsuccessfully, of course) on April 30 for each of the past seven years.

Before he heads out of town, he has drinks with Luke, one of his former coworkers, who is convinced that Merle has been working on a special secret new product idea outside of work, and he wants in on it. In spite of all Luke’s pumping, Merle denies any knowledge of such a thing. Luke then suggests to Merle that he might want to say goodbye to his old girlfriend, Julia, too—and then slips in, oddly, that Julia has become involved with some weird people and may be “in trouble.”

Merle goes to Julia’s building and finds her dead on the floor of her apartment. And then Merle is attacked by the beast that killed her: an outsize, three-toed, wolf-dog monster. This is the first clue we have that we’re not really dealing with an everyday Earth murder mystery.

Merle kills the wolf-dog and then searches Julia’s apartment for clues, only to find a pack of trumps. He pockets the pack and goes to see her current boyfriend, who tells Merle that Julia had recently joined a sort of cult. This cult is apparently into dark magic and is led by a guru of sorts, a painter named Melman, who starts to sound suspiciously like another magic painter we know.

At this point, Merle realizes he probably has started this whole thing, and flashes back to a time when he showed Julie around Amber. For Merle is, of course, not an ordinary human, but is actually Merlin, the son of Corwin of Amber and Dara of Chaos. He took Julia on a trippy trip around Amber in a fit of romance, and, after that, she was perfectly aware that magic was real, and went in search of somebody who could put her in touch with it again.

Merlin goes to see Melman to find out who killed Julia (and who likely wants him dead as well). And, of course, Melman tries to kill Merlin by pulling him into swirling Chaos, and Merlin has to kill Melman in self-defense before he can find anything out. At this point we go into full-blown Zelazny mode, with a scorpion woman coming in from Chaos to try to disable Merlin with a paralyzing sting; she almost succeeds, but he escapes through a trump of a Shadowland sphinx. After beating the sphinx at its riddle game, he runs through a dreamscape of trees, flowers, and streams back to Earth.

Troubled and annoyed, he tracks down Luke again. They dance around for a while, pretending they’re talking about normal non-magical Earth stuff, but finally they drop the pretense and Luke describes a crazy evening with Julia and Melman, in which Melman conjured monsters out of nothing. They are then shot at by somebody; Luke kills the shooter, but is then possessed by something and tries to kill Merlin himself, and Merlin has to escape again.

Merlin really would like to consult with his father, but Corwin went missing after the great “Patternfall Battle” at the end of the previous book, and nobody knows where he is.

So, to get his head on straight, Merlin goes to see someone he trusts—Corwin’s old friend and neighbor in upstate New York, Bill Roth. (At this point, because of his connections, Bill is now not only a country lawyer on Earth, but also the Counsel to the Courts of Amber.) They have a good time; Merlin amuses Bill (and us) by pulling cigars and cold beers out of Shadow for both of them, and Bill tells him everything he knows about Corwin, including some funny reminiscences about digging through his old compost pile with a fine tooth comb for some fancy jewel.

Merlin reveals to Bill that, as a child of royalty of both Amber and the Courts of Chaos, he has some advantages that the regular Princes and Princesses of Amber may not have. First, he has sets of trumps from both kingdoms. And he has also walked both the Pattern and the Logrus, the Pattern’s equivalent in Chaos. Theoretically you can’t keep both patterns in your head at the same time without going crazy, but apparently that doesn’t apply to Merlin.

At this point, they answer an emergency trump call from King Random of Amber. Someone has been taking pot-shots at princes and has killed Merlin’s uncle Caine. Everyone is wondering if it is yet another internal family vendetta—after we thought that had all been resolved!

Thinking it may help the king, Merlin shows him the special secret project he actually has been working on outside of work. He calls it a “Ghostwheel,” and it is a sort of computer that monitors all activity in the Shadowlands. It can be accessed by remote terminals, and can be used to observe or to conjure up storms and other forms of energy from anywhere, to anywhere in Shadow.

Random is appalled and tells Merlin to shut it off. But when Merlin then tries to approach his Ghostwheel, which has been running for months on its own, he is attacked by a crazy assortment of phenomena: nasty purple and red beasts, a living prison made out of giant coral-like crystals, an earth-shattering earthquake. The whole time, he hears voices warning him to go back. What has happened is that the Ghostwheel has become sentient; it doesn’t want to kill its creator, but it doesn’t want to be shut down, either.

Just as Merlin is just about to reach the Ghostwheel, who should appear again but… his old coworker Luke. For Luke is actually his cousin Rinaldo, and he’s the one with a vendetta against the royal family of Amber, because Caine killed Rinaldo’s father. Luke is hoping the Ghostwheel will be the weapon he needs to destroy all of them. He is unable to get the Ghostwheel himself, fortunately, but he imprisons Merlin in a cave nearby, and Trumps of Doom ends somewhat anticlimactically with Merlin pacing and pacing around in his cell.

It’s no wonder Trumps of Doom is the one in this series that won the Locus award. It is a more solid and consistent story, with a tightly crafted plot, and better pacing and characters and action than the other five so far.

And, for all that, it is just as beautiful and imaginative and totally out of left field as any of Zelazny’s other work, and contains plenty of the trademark synesthetic imagery that makes Zelazny’s work into art. Here is just one small portion of Merlin’s journey to the heart of the Ghostwheel:

    Three days in as many heartbeats…I breathe the air spicy…Swirl the fires, descend to purple earth…Prism in the sky…I race the course of a glowing river across a field of fungus the color of blood, spongy…Spores that turn to jewels, fall like bullets…
    Night on a plain of brass, footfalls echoing to eternity…Knobbed machinelike plants clanking, metal flowers retracting back to metal stalks, stalks to consoles…Clank, clank, sigh…Echoes only, at my back?
    I spin once.
    Was that a dark figure ducking behind a windmill tree? Or only the dance of shadows in my shadow-shifting eyes?
    Forward. Through glass and sandpaper, orange ice, landscape of pale flesh…
(p. 683)

In spite of the fact that the major battle for the survival of Amber happened in the last book, The Courts of Chaos, to me it also feels like this one is the novel where every major piece of the previous five actually comes to fruition. It is the culmination of everything we have learned about so far: Amber and Chaos, the royal families of both, the Shadowlands, the trumps. I might even venture to guess that this is the one Zelazny may have thought of writing first, and then wrote the others to set this one up.

Book Review: The Many-Colored Land

Julian May
1981
Awards: Locus (Science Fiction)
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Many-Colored Land opens with the spectacular crash-landing of an alien spaceship carrying alien colonists to a prehistoric Earth. The passengers escape in pods that bring them safely to the ground while their ship is smashed to bits.

The scene is riveting. But for a long time yet we won’t know what it means, which turns out to be a bit frustrating. Because the next thing that happens is that we fast-forward into our near future, to a time when Earth is part of a Foundation-like set of colonized planets and moons, and has tolerably civil relations with several alien races.

It is also a future in which a French scientist, Théo Guderian, has invented a time portal. The portal is a huge scientific breakthrough, of course, but there is a catch: it only goes one way. Once you go through, you can’t come back.

This would seem to be an insurmountable down side. Especially when you also find out that his portal goes to only one place and time: France in the Pliocene Epoch. In the Pliocene, Europe was closer to the equator and much hotter than it is now, covered with lush jungle, and populated by man-eating sabretooth cats, giant rhinos, and our early ramapithecine ancestors.

But for many hopeless and desperate people, the portal seems like the best option short of suicide. After Théo dies, in response to overwhelming demand, his widow Angélique starts to let people go through the portal in very small batches, after a rigorous screening and preparation process. And after she herself goes through the portal, an oversight committee continues her work.

Over the next hundred or so pages we then meet a series of eight people, from various parts of Earth and its outlying colonies, who are all at the ends of their ropes for one reason or another. All of them have decided to leave their current lives for whatever awaits them beyond the portal—popularly known as Exile.

These people include a profit-driven, reckless cargo ship captain alienated from his family; a Canadian ring-hockey champion shunned by her teammates; a nun questioning her faith and her purpose; an anthropologist who has just lost his wife of decades; an impish criminal; a heartsick man whose beloved went through the portal a while before; a telepath who lost her abilities in an accident; and an anger-prone Scandinavian who has proven himself too violent to last long in any Earthly job.

It takes a long time to meet all these people, and they are introduced without much sense of why they’re important or what their relationship is to each other. It was interesting for a while, but eventually I started getting fidgety and bored with all of the backstory.

Finally, though, the book moves to the next stage and the action starts. All eight of the people we’ve met go through the portal together…and run smack into the clutches of the aliens who crash-landed in the opening scene.

Because, as it turns out, there is already a society on the Pliocene side of the portal: a society of ruthlessly tyrannical aliens. These aliens call themselves the Tanu. Every time a new group of humans arrives, the Tanu capture them, confiscate their weapons and tools, evaluate their abilities, and slam a mind-controlling metal torc around their necks to ensure their obedience.

The torcs amplify the aliens’ telepathic abilities, enabling them to control humans (and our ramapithecine relatives) with psychological punishments and rewards. There are three tiers of torcs: iron, for low-level people the aliens just want to control like automatons; silver, for somewhat useful middle-manager-type humans who need to retain some level of initiative; and gold, for a privileged few who have particularly valuable skills and who proven their loyalty, but who still need to be kept under the threat of punishment or death just in case they stray. The golden torcs also have the ability to enhance telepathic abilities for those humans who have them naturally.

This psychological enslavement might actually not be worth fighting against most of the time—since many of the humans lead relatively pain-free lives and most are provided with free food and shelter—if it wasn’t for the fact that the aliens are also forcing the female humans to be incubators for their alien children. When they got to Earth the Tanu found that they were sterile, so they use the women as surrogate mothers against their will. So this sets up a nicely appalling reason for all but the most self-interested humans to unite and rebel.

After the eight humans we have been following are snatched by the Tanu they are provided with appropriate torcs, split into two groups of four, and sent off to two separate cities with many other captives. For the rest of The Many-Colored Land we mainly follow only one of the groups (the other group is the focus of the sequel, The Golden Torc).

Our primary group includes the cargo ship captain, the nun, the anthropologist, and the ring-hockey champion. As they are being transported, they plot and execute a courageous, creative escape using keen observation of the Tanu’s weaknesses, and what few tools and abilities are left to them. They break away, only to be faced with a back-breaking (and arm-breaking) slog through the Pliocene jungle to a safer location.

After they have been on the run for a while, they run into a band of free, underground humans, and are convinced to change their goals from simply escaping to defeating the Tanu and freeing all enslaved humans. And they also encounter face to face for the first time the dreaded, mind-warping Firvulag, the lower-status mutant kin of the Tanu, who might be, just possibly, more aligned with the humans’ goals than they think at first.

Humans and Firvulag embark on a daring plan to acquire the weaponry and allies that may enable them to defeat the seemingly undefeatable Tanu. The build up to the confrontation is suspenseful and nerve-wracking in the best way; it is complex and hard, but if it all works, they might—just might!—be able to save humanity.

The whole thing culminates in a satisfying onslaught on one of the largest Tanu cities. The climactic battle is impressively well done. Wars in novels too often end up being either overdramatic or incomprehensible or both, with vague micro-fights and ill-defined macro strategy, and often ridiculously magical reprieves from defeat. But May’s attack on the city has none of these weaknesses; he paints a very clear picture of the execution of the overall strategy (so you know exactly why each person is participating in the way they are), and at the same time he spices the fighting up with exciting details of individual bravery and creativity. I particularly liked the scene when a group of humans taught their Firvulag allies how to fight a mounted opponent, and the molten destruction of the barium reserves used in torc-making.

All in all, this novel tells a unique, exciting story. May has an easy-to-follow, almost Ursula-LeGuin-like, psychologically-oriented, deceptively calm style of writing. And he has clearly carefully structured his plot at all levels.

But the book did give me a number of stumbling blocks to get over. One was, of course, the slow start. Another was that the periodic deliriously rapt descriptions of French goose liver pate and fine burgundy wines were more of a turn-off for me than the turn-on they clearly were for May.

And, most importantly, I kept being bothered by the potential for paradoxes and otherwise screwing up the time continuum. Isn’t it potentially endangering the course of evolution to send cuttings of modern plants and pregnant sheep and dogs through the portal? Not to mention the interbreeding of humans, ramapithecines, and Tanu? Can we really rely on the natural preservation of the timeline to prevent all this from changing Earth’s future (our present)? And the biggest question of all is, of course, what happens six million years from now if the Tanu still exist on Earth? And, if they are not there, how could they all possibly have been eradicated?

I guess that since this is just the first installment of May’s four-volume Saga of Pliocene Exile, I am probably going to have to read the sequel to find out.

Book Review: The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula K. Le Guin
1971
Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

For one of the later editions of her novel The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a beautiful essay about how science fiction is powerful because it allows us to perform thought experiments—following exploratory premises to their ultimate end to see how they might play out.

She is brilliant at this herself, coming up with wild kernels of ideas and packing interesting characters and plots around them so she can explore their full consequences. She takes your mind places you never could go in reality—and, in doing so, reveals much about our real life on Earth.

The Lathe of Heaven is a perfect example of this. And it is a relatively short novel, but it plunges you right into the story and moves along at a fast clip, with every chapter advancing the central plot one more major degree until the final resolution.

George Orr, our main character, is a sensitive man by nature. And he carries a terrible burden: he knows that his dreams change waking reality. For everyone.

When Orr dreams, his dreams change the past. So everyone except him knows only the new, altered reality. Orr is the only one who carries both the memories of the original, defunct reality and the new, changed reality in his head simultaneously.

And Orr’s is a world that would be tempting to try to change. In perhaps one of the first ever appearances of climate change in a work of fiction, Orr’s Earth of the near future is one wracked by global warming and crowded with too many billions of people. Polar ice is melting, seas are rising, and entire coastlines of cities are imperiled. The weather in Portland, where he lives, is hot and constantly rainy; the city gets an average of 114” of rain per year, and it is 70° Fahrenheit in mid-March.

But Orr knows he doesn’t have the right to change reality for everyone—whether they are aware of it or not. So his conscience is making him miserable, and he tries to suppress his dreaming by taking illegal pharmaceuticals. When he is inevitably discovered, he is sent to government-mandated therapy.

His therapist, Dr. Haber, is a big man with an ego to match his size. Orr makes the mistake of being completely honest with Haber about his dreams. At first, of course, Haber thinks Orr is crazy, but after seeing his surroundings change during an induced dream state controlled by hypnotic suggestion, Haber realizes that he is telling the truth.

Haber doesn’t admit to Orr that he believes him, though. He acts like a dispassionate professional, diagnosing Orr with a severe psychological problem needing hypnotically-controlled dream therapy. Treatment provided, of course, by Haber himself.

Orr soon starts to suspect that Haber is actually using their dream sessions to remake the world as Haber wants it. And it is a scary moment indeed when we realize Orr is quite right in his suspicions. With each session, Haber becomes just a bit more powerful and famous; eventually he has become founder of his own institute of sleep research and influential with politicians and business leaders. But as things get better and better for Haber, they get potentially worse and worse for humanity.

The problem is that, even with the best intentions, Orr’s dreams have unintended consequences. Each one does what Haber asks for, but in unexpected and almost always worse ways. Each dream pulls humanity out of the frying pan and into the fire. (For example, Haber asks Orr to dream that people stop fighting wars with each other, so Orr dreams that human wars all stop… because we have had to band together to fight a terrifying alien foe.)

Eventually, Orr brings in a lawyer to witness the therapy sessions. During the session, Haber asks Orr to solve the environmental problems the world is having, and Orr dreams of a plague killing off six of the seven billion people on Earth. The lawyer is looking out the window as it happens, and sees people and buildings disappear, so she believes him too. But neither she nor Orr know how to stop Haber.

Orr tries to run away, but he can’t stop the dreams, and he can’t force himself to stay awake forever. And the pressure is turned up when he learns that Haber wants to replicate his brain waves, so that anyone can have “effective” dreams like his. And by “anyone,” of course, Haber means himself.

We have no idea how Orr is going to fix all of this, since the changes happen in dream states during which he has no control over his conscious thought. But it may just turn out that the very monsters he created with his dreams will be the source of his salvation.

There are two things that make Le Guin a seminal writer of science fiction. One is that she thinks extremely deeply, pulling all kinds of perceptive, unexpected insights out of what might appear to be a simple premise. And the other is that she has a clear, unpretentious, emotionally evocative way with words.

The Lathe of Heaven is based on an intriguing question: what would happen if you could alter reality with your dreams? The question seems fun and playful at first, but the more the story goes on, the more you realize how horrifying it could be. Dreams are uncontrollable, unpredictable, and subject to no laws of logic or law. You can make anything happen in them. And in the hands of someone like Haber, who is completely convinced of his own power and righteousness, it could result in global disaster.

By the end, you realize that the power to shift reality is a very dangerous thing. And that even if you do have the ability to do it and you think you’re doing it for humanity’s benefit, you shouldn’t. No one has the right to destroy reality for others, no matter how bad their reality is.

The Lathe of Heaven has a beautiful—and, at first, seemingly irrelevant—opening which looks at the world from the point of view of a jellyfish. The jellyfish is buffeted by the waves and directed by ocean currents. It has no real volition and no control over where it is going. It exists almost in a dream state. And it has no real problem with that unless and until it runs into rocky land.

Gradually, you realize that Orr’s state of being is akin to that of a jellyfish. He has very little control over what he does and where he is going. He is directed by the currents of his dreams when he sleeps, and by the currents of humanity when he is awake. This is particularly vivid at one point when he is riding the subway, hanging onto the strap, surrounded by people; he is actually physically held up by his fellow passengers, uncontrollably swaying to the motion of the crowd, like his spirit animal.

We might think at first that Orr and the jellyfish are weak and aimless. But I think what Le Guin wants us to see is that sometimes it is best to realize that you can’t control the currents surrounding you, and that you should flow with them instead, letting their energy propel you, judo-like, to where ever you are destined to go. And that, depending on the circumstances, this actually can be the strongest course of action—as it certainly is in Orr’s case.

Book Review: The Innkeeper's Song

Peter S. Beagle
1993
Awards: Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This is one of those fantasy novels set in a medieval-style place and time in which technology has not progressed beyond swords and horses and carts, and there are wizards and strange mythical beasts. And it is well told: very human and accessible, occasionally action-packed, somewhat scary, a little poetic, and a little bit cute.
   
The story starts out with a pair of young lovers: a girl, Lukassa, and a boy, Tikat. The two are billing and cooing on a bridge over a river near their village when the bridge railing suddenly gives way and Lukassa falls into the river and drowns.

The boy, Tikat, is disconsolate, weeping by the river all the next night and day. But then a mysterious warrior woman rides up, raises his dead girlfriend out of the river, brings her back to life, puts her on her horse, and takes off.

Tikat rushes after them and chases them for miles and miles and miles, never catching up. Along the way he encounters a group of bandits who are harassing an old man. He rescues the old man from the bandits and they travel for a while together. The old man turns out, however, not only to be an associate of the warrior woman who raised Tikat’s girlfriend from the dead, but also a mystical beast himself, whose natural form is that of a red fox. Promising to leave a trail that Tikat can follow to find them all, he turns into his fox self and runs off to join the women.

One of the nice techniques Beagle uses is that he switches his narrator every chapter. Each one is narrated by whichever character is most appropriate to tell that part of the story, and every character gets a chance to be the narrator at least once (including the Fox, who has some of the best narration in the whole book).

This means that while we’re following Tikat chasing after the women, we also get to find out what’s going on with the women as they race across the countryside. It turns out the warrior woman, who is named Lal, is the former student of a wizard. On the road, they join up with a woman named Nyateneri, who is another student of the same wizard and who is just as much of a bad-ass warrior as Lal. The two of them are desperately searching for their former teacher; they believe he is somewhere in the area, hiding from a terrible rival wizard who wants to kill him, and they are determined to defend him.

The three women eventually stop at a crossroads inn. The fat, cantankerous innkeeper, Karsh, has been up to now perfectly happy whiling away his days running his inn and beating up his staff, including his teenage stable boy and semi-adopted son Rosseth. But these three women are destined to turn Karsh’s and Rosseth’s lives upside down—and the inn’s staff are destined to help the three women in their goals (albeit mostly unintentionally).

Lal, Nyateneri, and the Fox manage to find the old wizard hiding in the nearby town and they bring him back to the inn to live while trying to gather their strength for the coming confrontation. They have several smaller adventures including the killing of two men sent to kill Nyateneri, a fairly lengthy episode of gender-bending group sex, and an ill-fated journey to find the wizard’s nemesis, until finally it all culminates in an enormous, inn-destroying wizard-on-wizard face-off across both physical and metaphysical planes.

Sometimes I think there are two ways storytelling can be good. If the author does a great job creating and executing a riveting overall story arc, it doesn’t matter so much if the details aren’t perfectly described. And, on the other hand, if the author keeps our interest with entertaining conversations and richly detailed scene-setting, it can be okay to have a relatively basic, less inherently exciting plot.

(If an author can do both, of course, the book has the potential to be truly amazing, rather than just good—but that seems to be relatively rare.)

This book of the second type. The overall plot is simple and not all that exciting in itself. But Beagle keeps us reading along nicely with his colorful and detailed atmospheric, emotional, and scenic descriptions, as well as the interactions between the characters. And the strength of some of the main characters (Lal, Nyateneri, the Fox) helps to distract us from how tiresome some of the supporting characters (Lukassa, Tikat) can be.

He keeps us reading along nicely, that is, until the final showdown—which starts out with a lot of suspenseful promise and then blurs out into an ill-defined and overblown abstract supernatural scene that reflects none of the detailed physical grounding so present in the rest of the book.

Book Review: The Years of Rice and Salt

Kim Stanley Robinson
2002
Awards: Locus
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

The Years of Rice and Salt is something of a departure from the last books of Robinson's I read (his earlier hard-SF Mars trilogy). This novel has a similarly ambitiously enormous scope and similarly thorough background research to the Mars books, but it is set entirely on Earth and focuses almost completely on history and philosophy rather than science. The main problem with it is that it is a mile wide and an inch deep: it covers a ton of ground, both physically and temporally, but doesn't get deep enough into any one character or plot line to allow me to get invested in it.

Most of the plot summaries I saw for this book, both on the cover and on bookseller websites, tease solely with its initial premise, which is: what if, when the bubonic plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages, it had had a 99% fatality rate and wiped out essentially all of the Europeans? I thought that meant that the book was going to be set in Europe, during the time of the plague, and that we were going to see what life would be like during a cataclysm such as that. But the premise is really just a brief starting point, setting the stage for what the book really is: a sweeping alternate history of the world from the Middle Ages until the present, in which the major emperors, explorers, inventors, scientists, politicians, and eventually world superpowers are Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American.

Robinson tells his story through a pair of central characters who are reincarnated over and over again in different times and places. These two people are cosmically joined, always fated to live and work closely together in some way, regardless of who they are or when they are reborn. You can tell who they are in each incarnation because their names always start with the same first letters (B and K), and they retain much of their own distinct personalities. "B" is a soft-hearted, inquisitive person who tends to be optimistic and think the best of people, while "K" tends to be ambitious, opinionated, skeptical, and sometimes violent.

These two people, or spirits, or souls, or whatever, are born into more or less difficult situations depending on how they behaved in past lives. They are usually also reincarnated together with other more peripheral members of their jati, or larger spiritual family, so some of the same supporting characters crop up repeatedly (also identifiable from the first letters of their first names).

Between lives, B and K wait in the bardo, which is a sort of a purgatory-like holding area in which they discuss the lives that just ended and await their new ones. It is only in the bardo that they can really remember the long line of people that they have been--although occasionally they do have a sense, while alive, of having been somewhere or having met someone before that they have only been to or met in a previous life.

B and K move through history, appearing as people of any nationality in any land across the world. They switch back and forth between man and woman, gay and straight, Muslim and Buddhist and agnostic. They are never biologically related, instead showing up as lovers, best friends, student and teacher, or army comrades.

They are friends, an Islamic sultana and cleric, when they lead the re-population of Europe; they are a Chinese navy man and a native girl when the Chinese "discover" North America and give the indigenous people smallpox; they are an indigenous Hodenosaunee and a Japanese immigrant when the Iroquois found their confederacy of native nations; they are variously Islamic and Indian and Chinese and Tibetan when they invent telescopes and microscopes and the printing press and come up with the law of gravity and the theory of relatively and the atomic bomb.

The book is by Kim Stanley Robinson, after all, so everything geographical and historical is impeccably researched. The settings are vivid and rich and colorful and exotic, yet familiar; the characters are well developed and their motives are understandable.

You also certainly get a sense of the vast sweep of history, and of how much all of our technological advancements rely on earlier peoples' knowledge and experimentation, so that our current achievements are the result of thousands of years of thought and learning. His more academically advanced characters have a keen awareness of this, too: that they are tiny parts part of a much greater historical picture.

I also appreciated at least one of the lessons that I think Robinson was trying to get across: that humans are fundamentally the same, for good or for ill, across all of our cultures. That if there had been no white Christian Europeans to establish a world empire, someone else from somewhere else would have. That we would have had scientific and industrial revolutions in different places led by different people. That we would have invented weapons of mass destruction and had long, bitter, pointless world wars. And that we would still struggle with the same issues of slavery, poverty, equality, and environmental destruction.

I also appreciated Robinson's dips into overt self-awareness. He makes you very aware that he is very aware of what he is doing. For example, one of K's incarnations, a teacher in an Islamic city on the west coast of repopulated France, says that musing over alternate histories is a waste of time: it is "such a useless exercise," she says, to constantly debate "what if this had happened, what if that had happened." And during another episode, a Chinese scholar talking about reincarnation references an ancient anthologist who put together a "reincarnation compendium," in which his characters were always reincarnated with names that begin with the same letters.

But it is a frustrating format because you can never get truly invested in any single incarnation. It is less like a single novel and more like a very long series of separate short stories, where you only just get familiar with the location and the people, and then it's all over and you have to move on to the next story.

And the stories and characters were not distinct enough from each other to be immediately memorable in themselves. No one single episode really stood out enough for me to remember specific names and incidents, except for one in which K makes a major mistake in one life and comes back in the next as a tiger.

And the years go by, and the characters are reborn over and over, and the names and places change, but the lives of the individual incarnations never reach any kind of satisfying resolution. After B and K get out of slavery and are done with world exploration, and achieve a sort of comfortable professorial status, they don't make that much more progress. They seem to just stay at that level, expounding and philosophizing, making the necessary era-appropriate inventions and discoveries to advance the world as a whole, but their individual lives often are disappointingly short and unresolved. They usually die without really finishing that life's work.

Maybe that's another of Robinson's points--that most lives are somewhat unresolved. One of B's incarnations reflects at one point upon how most lives are wasted, cut short, lived in "ignorance, hunger, and fear." There really are very few real-life stories with Hollywood-level excitement.

But that doesn't make for a really gripping novel. This book would have been a real page-turner if he had taken any one of the incarnations of B and K, fleshed it out and given it more drama and suspense, and let them complete a major discovery or invention and then have a moment of celebration, rather than just having them work hard for a lifetime and then slip to the next life to start all over again.

I appreciate the idea, the premise, and the effort. I really do. And in many ways, Robinson executed the individual elements excellently. I just need more of a hook and more exciting storytelling to keep me at attention.

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: Kraken

China Miéville

2010

Awards: Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book begins as loads of fun. It starts with Miéville at his best: original ideas and a quirky, subtly comic writing style. It reads like a pulp detective novel, with snappy conversations and very short chapters, each one ending in a cliffhanger incident that pulls you into the next.

The book’s hero, Billy Harrow, is a curator in a London museum that has an enormous collection of biologically and/or historically significant dead animals preserved in glass bottles of formaldehyde. Billy is leading an ordinary tour group around the museum on an ordinary day when he finds that the museum’s prize specimen, a giant squid, has disappeared—glass bottle and all.

The police officers that come to investigate the crime are from an odd detective unit that deals with obscure occult religions. The only lead Billy can give them is a description of a man that he noticed on the tour because of the design of his lapel pin: an asterisk with two of the arms elongated and ending in squiggles. But fortunately these detectives know what to do with that information.

What the occult detectives know, and Billy is about to find out, is that London is chock full of obscure gods, ghosts, and other spirit-world powers, and that there are a large number of people in the city who are aware of it and have varying levels of ability to take advantage of it. And that there are also a number of people—including the krakenists, the wearers of the squiggly asterisk pins—who consider the giant bottled squid a kraken, a god. And that there are others who consider the squid to be at the very least a powerful ritual tool—one that can be used to start the chain of events that leads to an apocalypse—and who have the motivation to use it to that end.

At first Billy is an innocent and a pawn in all of this. The police figure he is in danger because of his status as the preparator of the bottled kraken, so they lock him in his apartment to protect him and enjoin him from talking about the incident to anyone. But of course he does, and because of that his apartment is infiltrated and he is almost killed by one set of cultists, and then he kidnapped by another set who think he can find the kraken for them, only to be re-kidnapped by yet another group. Some of the groups and sects and guilds have the world’s (and Billy’s) best interests at heart, and some don’t, and it is hard for him to tell which is which.

Eventually, though, it turns out that Dane, one of the guards at the museum where Billy works, is an elder of the krakenist church, and has secretly been keeping an eye on both the kraken and Billy the whole time. Dane seems to be one of the only people who truly (a) respects the kraken and (b) wants to prevent the world from ending, so Billy throws his lot in with him and goes from being an innocent pawn to being a fugitive believer. The two of them go on the lam, trying to find and save the bottled god kraken before whomever has it can finalize their planned apocalypse.

They are chased the whole time by all sorts of formidable pursuers, including Goss and Subby (terrifying semi-human assassins), the Tattoo (a power who exists solely as a tattoo on another man’s back, who has the power to make people into machines), and the occult police squad. And Billy learns more and more about underworld London, and learns that he has knowledge and powers he never knew he had—powers presumably given to him by his work on the preservation of the kraken.

How could this setup not be fun, eh? The trouble is that after the initial crime and the layout of the various factions, the plot careens from person to person and twist to twist without a sense of a real over-arching plan. We alternately follow Billy, Dane, the detectives, Goss and Subby, and Billy’s best friend’s girlfriend as they race back and forth across London hunting down one person or another. The entire time there are various apocalypses building, none of which is the real apocalypse, but none of which seem all that serious. I also didn’t get to know many of the characters well enough to hate, fear, or like them as I should have. It is a struggle to stay interested in the chaotic chase, and the finale is anticlimactically disappointing.

                                     

None of this is helped any by the choppy, disjointed writing style Miéville adopts more and more in the second half of the book, which is filled with arcane terminology and British-English slang. Reading it requires a vocabulary both deep and locally specialized, not to mention a willingness to overlook sentences with no verb. To wit:

                                                                                               

“Outside in the corridor furniture was tugged skew-whiff by a rubble of piscine bodies. The vivid colours of pelagic dwellers, the drabs and see-through oddities of deep water in hecatomb heaps.”

“Luckily Dr. Harris is a dab hand with Google.”

 “Those rozzers, eh! My name! My name, can you Adam and Eve it?”

“Grisamentum pops his clogs and now we’re all treading a bit softly around the Tat.”

I was predisposed to like a story about a tentacled god, so I was sorry to be so disappointed in this one in the end. I will say, however, that as a book involving personifications of ancient gods and other mythical beings, this is still a much better, less clichéd, and less seemingly self-congratulatory take on it than Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. It uses rarer and more interesting gods than the obvious Egyptian ones, fills in more information about them, and manifests them in ways that are not as trite.

Like, for example, Wati, a relatively obscure Egyptian spirit who has taken it upon himself to be a union organizer for the spirit world, and who can only take earthly form by inhabiting man-made representations of humans such as statues, dolls, and little crucifix Christs. He’s basically on Billy and Dane’s side and tries to help them out, but is constantly distracted by an ongoing strike of familiars that lasts nearly the length of the book.

And some specific bits and pieces of the story are certainly excellent, from a leaf minotaur created by an army of wizards with leaf blowers, to a sorcerer who can read what is going on in the city by pulling up chunks of sidewalk and looking at the entrails underneath. I thought Miéville was particularly clever with a character who has a knack for teleportation, and who has discovered that every time he teleports someone, he isn’t actually teleporting the actual person—he is killing them and copying a brand-new copy of that person into the new location. This man has teleported himself—and thus killed and recreated himself—so many times that he is surrounded and haunted by hundreds of spirits of his own murdered selves.

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.