Book Review: Rainbows End

Vernor Vinge

2006

Awards: Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I find myself extremely unmotivated to write this review. It is neither a book I feel good enough to recommend, nor a book I hated enough to slam.

I did end up liking this book better than Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky. Mainly because it was shorter than either of them. And also because the plot was a touch tighter and less randomly free-associational. Rainbows End is set in the near future, and starts out with several semi-coherent separate plots which inevitably converge at the climax of the book.

One story line follows the recovery of an elderly man, Robert Gu, from Alzheimer’s disease. Robert had been a brilliant, world-famous poet until he developed Alzheimer’s and descended slowly into dementia. Then, one day, at the beginning of the book, he wakes up again to find that modern medicine has cured him and given him a brand-new start on life. He goes back to school to learn all of the things that he missed out on during his decades of decline, including how to use the ubiquitous “wearables”—wearable computers that let you issue commands through gestures and see feedback displays and virtual images overlaid on the real world through contact lenses.

Another story line is about high-level international internet security personnel trying to track down a hacker-terrorist somewhere in the net who they think is designing a dangerous semi-biological,/semi-technological virus. Their problems multiply when it turns out there is not just one hacker-terrorist but at least two, one of whom may be one of them, and one of whom may be an artificial intelligence, and who are sometimes working together and sometimes working at cross-purposes.

And still another story line is about a group of UCSD professors who are trying to prevent the shredding of all the books in the main library on campus.

                                                             

All of the story lines eventually come together around Robert Gu. Robert lives with his son and daughter-in-law; they are both Marines working for Homeland Security and are trying to track down the hacker-terrorist(s). Several of Robert’s former colleagues are involved in the subversive anti-shredding movement. And several of Robert’s current schoolmates have been recruited—wittingly or unwittingly—to work for the hacker-terrorist(s). It all comes to a head when there is a big save-the-library-books riot at the UCSD campus, which the hacker-terrorists have arranged to cover up their nefarious viral activities.

Robert Gu is a more interesting main character than the similarly-aged protagonists in Vinge’s other books. He is a touch more well-developed; he has a unique back story and understandable, powerful motivations for his actions. 

But the strength of Gu's character is unable to overcome Vinge's flippant, careless storytelling style. Vinge is, as ever, too clever for his own good. Zillions of new technological ideas spew out all book long like water from a lawn sprinkler. But he doesn’t develop their function enough so that you care about, identify with, or remember most of them. Some are pulled magically out of his hat (or, in one case, from a scientist’s bag) for the first time at key moments when they are needed to solve some immediate problem. And most are left behind, unresolved and partially used, falling forgotten into the background when the next page is turned. 

Many of Vinge's ideas are evocative of earlier works by other authors. Rainbows End draws, of course, from William Gibson's virtual realities and artificial intelligences. But there are also echoes of Neil Stephenson in the avatars that populate the net and the digitally dynamic nanotech "paper," not to mention the appearance of hundreds of thousands of mice as a key plot point. And white westerners lapsing into Asian languages always reminds me of Philip K. Dick.

I did like Vinge's idea of wearable computing (even if it is somewhat derivative of Neuromancer). But I found it preposterous that his characters could be doing so many things at once with their wearable computers without being completely catatonic. Vinge has them occasionally looking distracted for maybe a moment while they’re researching, reading, or silent messaging. But given how in real life people are unable to walk in a straight line while having a conversation on their smartphones, I don't think there's any way humans could be doing all that simultaneously without being totally zoned out and inattentive of the real world.

And his occasional descents into silliness come at just the wrong frequency and strike just the wrong note. They aren’t consistent enough to be Douglas Adams, and aren’t clever enough to be Connie Willis.

Book Review: The Vor Game

Lois McMaster Bujold

1990

Awards: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

The Vor Game is yet another installment in Bujold’s lengthy Vorkosigan Saga and it is the fourth book in that series to win either the Hugo or the Nebula. In the saga’s internal chronology, it comes after Falling Free and Barrayar, and before Mirror Dance.

I’ve already gone into some detail about the Vorkosigan Saga’s setting and main characters in my reviews of those other three books, so I won’t repeat all of that here. The summary is that it takes place in a universe where humans have colonized many planets and can travel many light years in a single jump by using wormholes. The Vorkosigan family is one of the more influential branches of the Vor, a powerful military caste living on the planet Barrayar, which is ruled by the young Emperor Gregor.

This book stars Bujold’s oft-recurring protagonist Miles Vorkosigan, the son of the superlatively titled Admiral Count Aral Vorkosigan (who is, in turn, arguably the most powerful man on Barrayar next to the emperor). 

The important thing to know about Miles is that his mother was attacked with poison gas when she was pregnant with him, and the result was that he was born extremely small with fragile bones that are easily broken. What Miles makes up for in physical stature and robustness, however, he more than makes up for in brains, charisma, and ego.

At the beginning of this story, Miles is a lowly ensign just graduated from the Barrayaran military academy. To teach him humility and cure his rampant tendencies toward insubordination, the military assigns Miles to Kiril Outpost, a bleak, frozen base on the arctic circle, where his job is to monitor weather data.

In short order, Miles’ unwillingness to blindly do what he’s told manages to get him in deep trouble with his commanding officer and hauled in front of Imperial Security (“ImpSec”). ImpSec decides it’s doing nobody any good to have Miles at the weather station and that someone of his talents would be better used clearing up a military and diplomatic mess at one of the major wormhole hubs.

In his new assignment, Miles discovers that the Barrayaran’s enemies, the Cetagandans, are planning a sneak attack on the wormholes that connect most of Barrayar’s key worlds. Mercenary fleets are being hired by both sides to, on the Cetagandan side, set up an invasion force and, on the Barrayaran side, to counteract it. It gets even more complicated when some of the mercenaries turn out to be double and even triple agents.

While all of this is going on, Miles stumbles across the young emperor Gregor, who escaped from his security people in order to have an adventure, but who has gotten himself in way over his head on a ship with some of the aforementioned double-agent mercenaries. In addition to exposing the Cetagandan invasion plans, Miles is then also responsible for delivering Gregor back home safe and sound. The two of them escape death and/or the brig by only a hair’s breadth several times on several different space stations and ships.

This story was faster paced and more entertaining than most of the other books in the Vorkosigan Saga. It had adventure, close shaves, and conflict with authority. But it still had some of the key disappointing characteristics of the others.

One of the problems is that Vor politics are almost as convoluted and uninteresting as those in Cyteen. There are some sizeable hunks of the Vor Game during which you can ignore the diplomatic minutia and focus on the adventures and spies and captures and escapes and re-captures and re-escapes. But the politics keep reappearing to drag the story down.

The other problem is that Miles is an irritating main character. He has the potential to be a great hero; he has charisma and personality and he’s had to overcome prejudice and physical limitations almost solely by force of will. But I find him annoying.

I think it’s partly because Miles presents himself as a disadvantaged lowly ensign in public, but he can—and does—whip out his high-caste status and use it to threaten people or to get out of dangerous situations whenever he needs to. His flippant insubordination is treated like a funny joke that he can get out of by playing one of his many trump cards at any time. He can pretend to be a grunt in the infantry, but at any moment he could get called by his dad’s buddy, the head of Imperial Security, or his childhood playmate, the Emperor, to be hauled out of the arctic and command his own flashy fleet. It makes it seem like he’s just playing at danger and self-sacrifice.

Book Review: Riddley Walker

Russell Hoban
1980
Awards: Campbell
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ – 

When I originally set myself the project of reading all the Nebula and Hugo award-winning novels, I told myself I would get through all the winners of those two awards before reviewing those that had won others or were “just” nominees.

But when this book came across my transom, I could not resist breaking my own rules for it. I’m so very glad I did.

This book is set in England thousands of years after a 20th-century nuclear war destroyed most life on earth. Almost all literacy and technical knowledge was lost with the war, and humanity—what’s left of it—has reverted to Iron-Age-level hunting and gathering and some agriculture. The history-turned-mythology of the war is passed on through a sort of confused puppet show put on by traveling actors.

In general, the populace has a natural hostility towards education and what they call the “clevverness,” or scientific knowledge, which led to the war in the first place. But there are nevertheless people here and there who are surreptitiously working to regain that lost knowledge.

The narrator of the book, Riddley Walker, is a somewhat slow but sympathetic character who isn’t actively pursuing knowledge, but whose natural curiosity makes him want to make sense of the myths he’s being fed. This is one of the reasons he is our narrator—he is one of the few who had the desire to learn how to read and write. At the age of twelve, Riddley sees his father killed on a foraging job and has to take over his father’s role of “connexion man,” a sort of seer or interpreter of events. This special status separates him subtly from his peers and further encourages him to analyze and question what he sees around him.

Eventually, through a series of misadventures partially brought on by his inquisitiveness, Riddley discovers key pieces of information and material that could help to restore bomb-making knowledge and he has to go on the lam to escape from those who would kill him for it and/or use it for their own nefarious purposes.

The most striking thing about this book is not the story, however, but how it is written. The book is written by Riddley in his own native post-apocalyptic language, which is a semi-literate jumble of phonetic spelling, altered grammar, and long words broken down into shorter one- or two-syllable words. Some examples of the language used by Riddley and his peers:

"Down it come that girt big thing it made a jynt splosh and black muck going up slow and hy in to the air. That girt old black machine fel back in to the muck with my dad unner neath of it."

"'If you cud jus suck your thumb qwyet for a wyl and stop giving me inner fearents I cud tune in better.'" 

"'To have them boats in the air which they callit them space craf and them picters on the wind which that wer viddyo and going out beyont the sarvering gallack seas.'"

It is pretty darned hard to read, especially at first. When I try to imagine why this book didn’t win the Nebula in 1981, all I can think is that the voters that year didn’t have the patience to make it through the first twenty pages or so to get used to Riddley’s speech, so they gave up and gave the award to a lesser book that was easier to read (Gene Wolfe’s Claw of the Conciliator). Fortunately, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award committee had a little more perseverance.

Hoban said that he wanted to write the book this way to slow the reader down to Riddley’s level of comprehension. And it does give you time to think about what is going on at the same pace Riddley does; it brings you into his mindset—and his world—in a way you wouldn’t necessarily get if he used contemporary English.

I found myself, naturally, comparing this book to other pieces of post-apocalyptic literature. It reminded me a tiny bit of The Road, in its desolation and occasional cannibalism, but (unlike The Road) it wasn’t so nightmarish as to be unreadable.

No, happily, the book it reminded me of the most was the great Canticle for Leibowitz. Like Leibowitz, it takes place on Earth after a devastating nuclear war has set society back several thousand years. As in Leibowitz, the story of the war and resulting devastation had been turned into barely-remembered, largely misinterpreted, and often pretty funny legend and myth. And both books suggest that humanity has a scary homing instinct; that even after such an awful war, the survivors will eventually try to regain the scientific knowledge that caused the war in the first place. You get the gnawing feeling that we will keep destroying ourselves over and over in a dreadful cycle.

I didn’t realize until after I had read Riddley that I had already read one of Russell Hoban’s other books long ago: The Mouse and His Child. That book was pretty dark and disturbing, too, especially for a children’s story, and I loved it. 


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

Why People Don't Rebel Even When It's In Their Own Best Interests

"Most people simply aren't unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown."

Elsevier in The Snow Queen
by Joan D. Vinge 

Book Review: The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick
1962
Awards: Hugo
★ ★ ★ ★ -

I am a big Philip K. Dick fan anyway but this book is a particularly good one of his.

It is an alternate history set in 1962 in which the Axis won World War II. The western states of the U.S. have become the Pacific States of America (PSA), which are run by Japan, and the east coast and Midwest states are run by Germany.

In between, the Rocky Mountain States (RMS) are a tenuous neutral zone that neither Germany nor Japan has yet moved to take over, but relations between the two powers are strained because each suspects the other of wanting to do so. (Italy has been relegated to a second-class power.)

In the RMS lives an author who has written a novel that is an alternate history in which Germany and Japan lost the war. The novel is wildly popular because it makes the former Americans think about What Might Have Been. It has been banned by Germany but is, for the time being, tolerated by Japan.

Dick’s book has several separate story lines that sometimes intertwine - American artisans in the PSA trying to introduce a new line of jewelry that does not appeal to the dominant Japanese aesthetic; spies playing on the hostility between Germany and Japan; and a woman who accidentally gets involved with an assassin bent on killing the author of the alternate history novel. My favorite character was Mr. Tagomi, a well-meaning businessman in the PSA who unknowingly coordinates a meeting between a German double-agent and a Japanese general and gets involved in foreign intrigue way over his head.

I enjoyed all the stories in this book but the best parts, for me, were the little details of life in the occupied USA. The takeover by the Axis powers affects everything in the occupied regions of America including speech patterns, religion, style, and sometimes even thought.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Gollum Puppy

Book Review: The Snow Queen

Joan D. Vinge

1980

Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

After having read several disappointing novels by Joan Vinge’s ex-husband Vernor, I have to admit I was kind of dreading The Snow Queen.

The story takes place on the rustic, undeveloped planet Tiamat, where the seasons are centuries long. The people of Tiamat are divided into two populations: “Summers,” unsophisticated, backwards fisher-folk who live in the rural south, and “Winters,” savvy cosmopolitans who live in the urban north. The Summers are deeply religious and their most powerful deity is the goddess of the sea, who they believe speaks to them through a few of their own people who have been called to be “sibyls,” a sort of oracle. Their religion is dismissed as blind superstition by the Winters and the offworlders alike.

As the book opens, the long winter is just ending and summer is about to start. When the seasons change from winter to summer, several things always happen. The areas of the planet where the Summers live become too hot for human habitation and they all migrate north to the cities to jostle for space with their northern Winter brethren. The proximity of the sun makes conditions too unstable for the nearby interstellar transport wormhole to stay open, so all the “offworlders” visiting and working on Tiamat pack up and head home to their own planets, taking all their advanced technology with them. And the Snow Queen, the ruler of the planet during the wintertime and traditionally a native member of the Winter population, is ritually thrown into the ocean to die and is replaced by the Summer Queen.

This winter, however, the people have been ruled by a particularly power-mad and ruthless Snow Queen named Arienrhod. Arienrhod has never wanted to give up power and die in the sea like she is supposed to. So a couple decades ago, she implanted nine embryo clones of herself in nine unsuspecting Summer women visiting her capital city for a festival, hoping that at least one clone turned out okay and she could choose that girl to be the Summer Queen. This doesn’t really prevent her from dying, of course, but at least she’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that she will be the Summer Queen, too, in a way.

Of the nine clones, the only one that survives to the end of winter is a girl named Moon Dawntreader. Moon is a good-natured and unambitious girl raised among fishermen on the seaside, who thinks she’ll be able to continue living indefinitely in blissful happiness with her beloved cousin Sparks. Except that one day, to everyone’s surprise, including Arienrhod's, Moon is called by the sibyls to become a sibyl herself. 

Sparks had wanted to be a sibyl, too, so when Moon is chosen instead, he leaves in a jealous rage for the big city in the north. There he hooks up with Arienrhod and becomes a twisted, Darth-Vader-like, dark side version of his former self.

The rest of the book then follows Moon’s subsequent quest to reunite with Sparks and fulfill her destiny as a sibyl, and Arienrhod’s attempt to find Moon and achieve immortality, both of which affect the lives of a wide assortment of secondary characters and build to a climactic showdown during the end-of-winter celebrations.

In contrast to Vernor’s books, Joan Vinge’s Snow Queen at least kept me generally interested in reading from one chapter to another. She weaves her themes, characters, and technological inventions consistently and intelligently throughout the book, giving them depth and background, so that when they are used, you feel like they are coming to fruition (rather than popping them in for the first time only when they are needed to save the story line).

I also got a bit of a kick out of the matriarchal society Vinge created for Tiamat. Although the foreign offworlders were prejudiced against women in any kind of powerful position, the people of Tiamat were traditionally ruled by queens, rather than kings, and prayed primarily to an all-powerful goddess of the sea.

The matriarchy only goes so far, though. Under the woman-centric overlay, the actions of the two main female characters (and some of the secondary ones) were determined largely by their pursuit of (or escape from) a man. Most of their crushing agonies and triumphant successes revolved around whether they had gotten the male object of their affections (or ire) to do what they wanted. In particular, although Moon’s destiny does have something vaguely to do with bringing better times to her people, at every key decision point she chose her course of action by whether or not it got her closer to Sparks.

It also didn’t take me long to get fed up with the book’s romantic fantasy style. There is advanced technology available in the universe but it is withheld from the planet’s native inhabitants. So, by necessity, they resort to rustic, labor-intensive clothing, food, work, traditions, and religion straight out of the Dark Ages. People do their hair up in various forms of braid, drink ale and eat honeycake, and work as farmers and fisherman and oracles and itinerant healers. They tend to be superstitious, and like to attend large community festivals, and are partial to cries of agony and/or passion when roused in either of those ways.

Every other noun has to be archaically capitalized: the Hunt, the Change, the Transfer, the Street, the Festival, the Death, the Sea.

Otherwise ordinary nouns become romanticized by sticking an adjective onto them:“The [ship] dropped through a flattening arc, like a slingstone skimming an infinite pond.” “I’ll stay here at Street’s-end until you come out of there.” “How do you know what anybody did before the firstships sailed down out of the Great Storm?”

I’m the first one to admit that fantasy can be really fun when it is done well. I like to be carried away by it, unselfconscious of how silly the language and costumes and monsters might be to the uninitiated. But it can be giggle-making if not handled right. And I’m afraid The Snow Queen qualifies a little too often for the latter.

Vulcan Kitteh

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: Mirror Dance

Lois McMaster Bujold

1994
Awards: Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
 
Once again the Hugo voters force me back into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.

The Saga is a multi-book series set in a universe of planets interconnected by trade and internecine political struggles. Space travel and warfare are at a Star-Trek-level of speed and sophistication.

                                                                                
Mirror Dance is one of the later books in the series. Its plot centers on Miles Vorkosigan, the son of the plucky, beautiful starship captain Cordelia Naismith and the handsome, strong, passionate, wise Count Aral Vorkosigan of the planet Barrayar. Enemies of the Count attacked Cordelia with a neurotoxin when she was pregnant, so her son Miles was born with an extremely small stature and brittle bones that break easily. He spent most of his first years in an incubator and later had to go through uncounted types of painful therapy.

Fortunately, Miles was also born with a quick wit, fantastic intelligence, and an innate ability to lead others. This allowed him to compensate for his physical disadvantages and he grew up to be a brilliant military tactician, a beloved ship captain, and irresistibly attractive to all ladies and hermaphrodites of intelligence.

Mirror Dance is a book about Miles in his prime and at his most powerful. It is a time when he is living a double life as the dutiful heir of the Count on Barrayar and the brilliant, daring Admiral Naismith of Barrayan Imperial Security.

It turns out that when Miles was a baby, an evil group of the Count’s enemies stole some of Miles’s cells and created a clone of Miles, whom they named Mark. In an impressive display of long-term plotting, they raised Mark from a baby and trained him to be an assassin, the idea being that they would eventually substitute Mark for Miles and he would then be able to get in and kill the Count.

The sinister lab where Mark was created and raised is also a facility that raises clones for rich people and performs brain transplants on them when the progenitor grows aged and wants a new, younger body. Unfortunately for the Count’s enemies, the head of the cloning facility has been abusive to Mark. By the time of Mirror Dance, Mark has had enough of it. He steals a spaceship and tries to free all the other clones. But his escape attempt fails and lab security clamps down. Miles comes after Mark and rescues him and the other clones, but gets shot and left behind in the process. Miles’ crew, Mark, and the rest of Miles’ friends and family spend the rest of the book trying to rescue Miles and also trying to destroy the clone lab, if they can, as a nice side project.

I’m sure if you’re a fan of the Vorkosigan Saga, you will love this book. For me, the saga is too much like a romance novel or a soap opera to get very excited about, and the plots are overly convoluted and not terribly original, and this installment is basically par for that course.

Bujold's characters are divided cleanly between those who are unjust and evil and horrifyingly ruthless, and those who are completely in love with Miles. Miles always knows exactly the right thing to do in any social, diplomatic, or wartime situation. As Admiral Naismith he is theoretically in danger of his life almost every minute, but you also never for a moment forget that he’s secretly royal and that gives him a lot of advantages in staff and equipment that others would not have. Also it lets him bestow lavish and perfect but anonymous gifts on his friends and loyal subordinates.

There is also a lot of time spent on how tedious and wasteful all the glamorous royal ceremonies are, and the primary characters spend a lot of time being forced to go and dress in fancy uniforms and stand around making cynical comments about the other guests, but underneath it all you feel like they really love it. No one could force the Count and Countess Vorkosigan to hold their own Winterfair Ball if they didn’t want to, after all, so it seems kind of hypocritical to have them standing around being snarky about it the whole time. 


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

Fly You Fools

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