More Parker Novels by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake)

While on vacation I also caught up on quite a few of the Parker novels by Donald Westlake (writing under his pen name, Richard Stark).  Since they tend to clock in under two hundred pages they’re excellent travel material, and their potboiler construction makes them effective there as well.  I’ve previously talked about The Hunter, where Parker made his debut, and with the new Kindle editions of the entire Parker oeuvre I managed to knock out The Mourner, The Score, The Jugger, The Seventh, The Handle, The Rare Coin Score, and The Green Eagle Score.

If I want to finish the series, that leaves only fourteen more to go.  What can I say, Westlake really liked to write.

Some of these stories are more effective than others, but they are all at least pretty good.  I probably liked The Mourner and The Seventh best out of the bunch, but The Jugger also had some very nice bits, and the rest were by no means terrible.  Although I do have to say that some of them do have some slow parts.
I really appreciate the effort that Westlake went through to try to mix up the formula from time to time, although for dramatic purposes they do tend to have common elements.  In no case does the proposed crime go off without a hitch, since then there would be no particular point in the story.  The most common theme introduces Parker going to a meeting where someone suggests doing a crime.  Parker’s not sure about the job or about one or more of his co-conspirators, but he agrees to do it anyway either because he needs the money or (one assumes) because of some sort of professional pride.  Then the job is executed, and either fate intervenes or someone flakes out and Parker has to try to escape with the loot, his freedom, and his life.  This isn’t to say it always happens that way; The Seventh takes place after the job has already taken place, and The Jugger doesn’t involve a crime at all (or at least not a typical sort).

I mentioned in my last review that Parker is basically a private eye who works on the wrong side of the law; he’s got his own idiosyncratic code of conduct and essentially no other moral values.  He’s kind of an asshole, isn’t good at making small talk, and has a completely alien perspective on most human interactions.  In one of the books he suspects he’s being followed and confronts the guy, who stupidly pulls a knife.  Parker immediately kills this sucker with his bare hands and later finds out he was working for the guy who Parker was on his way to meet up with to ensure he made it to the meeting.  Everyone is horrified by this but Parker points out that you shouldn’t pull knives on people unless you mean it.  Then he sits down and waits for the sales pitch.  He's also open to robbing just about anyone - coin collectors, an illegal casino, an Air Force Base, an embassy, and even an entire town.  If you can make a pitch that it's possible, he'll at least listen.

In one setup he’s told by an associate of his that a wannabe amateur criminal has hit on the perfect heist.  Parker’s not so sure about this, and then asks if maybe the job checks out but the amateur doesn’t, does the associate have any strong feelings that they shouldn’t kill him afterwards.  As it turns out he’s dating the associate’s ex-wife and it might upset her if they get rid of this guy.  Parker gently feels out the guy on how he feels about his ex-wife, which sort of shocks the associate – Parker then points out that he wouldn’t ask the associate to kill the mother of his child.  The associate, in relief, states that he thought Parker might suggest bumping off the kid too.  “I didn’t think you’d go for it”, says Parker.  That’s a pretty dark joke for the reader but I’m not 100% sure that Parker’s kidding, he’s never shown to have much of a sense of humor whatsoever.  On another occasion he’s feeling out someone to see if he needs to kill her or not, and after deciding not to explains as much to her.  In relief, she asks him if he kills only in self defense; he responds that he’ll only kill if “it’s the only way to get what I want.”  Which of course isn’t the same thing at all.

In fact if these books have a weak spot it’s in this sort of contradiction in Parker’s character.  We’re told that he lives a pretty sybaritic lifestyle when he’s off the job, but then slows down and emotionally cools off as his funds run low and he thinks about going back to work.  However, we’re never really shown that particular aspect of his and it seems kind of hard to believe based on what we do see.  I guess he likes swimming and he does pick up rather a lot of women off the clock, but that’s about it.  He’s also a little bit weird about keeping his word – he’ll pretty much always do it, but sometimes he’ll just know that someone’s going to cross him and he’ll take them out preemptively.  He’s never wrong about this, so Westlake doesn’t have to deal with that particular complication of oathbreaking.  In fact, he basically just keeps his word to people he intends to work with again in the future, maybe meaning he’s playing some sort of game theoretic strategy without really understanding it himself.

These books are actually pretty funny, in a dark, dark way.  A lot of the humor comes from just following Parker around and knowing what he’s capable of doing when other characters don’t necessarily have that luxury.  We know that it’s suicidally insane to try to cross Parker or try to take something away from him, but other people don’t necessarily know that, even if they suspect he’s a pretty hard guy.  In fact they generally are making pretty reasonable assumptions about what would be an appropriate response to whatever it is they plan to do.  Imagine their surprise when Parker will take his beef with them far, far beyond what any reasonable person would expect.  Chapters from the perspective of these chumps are some of the highlights of the novels, who include such various foils as a Communist secret agent, a coin collector, and a psychoanalyst.  All of these folks assume that crime is easy and Parker is an idiot, and all end up pretty spectacularly screwed.

This isn’t to say that it always works out well for Parker; he (obviously) never gets killed and hasn’t been caught by the law since the first novel in the series, but that’s not to say that he always gets away with the score.  He occasionally doesn’t get anything, and more often than not gets less than what he was expecting for one reason or another.  In fact karma tends to bite him on the ass more than not, which I’m not sure isn’t Westlake putting the screws to him just a little bit for being such a heinous person.  In fact, in The Jugger, he isn’t trying to commit any crimes and in fact accomplishes some justice, only to end up very badly off in the end.  Try to do something nice, Parker, see where it gets you.  I’m not sure that these are great literature, but they demonstrate Westlake at his craftsman’s best, accomplishing what he can.  Just like Parker himself.

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Sorry about the lack of material, but I’ve been on vacation, which means that I actually had a chance to do some reading, but I’ve also been trying to dig my way into and out of my work obligations and haven’t had a chance to do a lot of writing, either.

Anyway, this was one that I read during my lovely and relaxing trip (to Ireland, which I’d recommend visiting; even their talk radio is awesome.  I could listen to those people speak all day long).  I’d been meaning to get around to it for a while and it seemed like good traveling literature, in the sense that I figured it was the sort of thing to read when I didn’t have just a whole lot of other options about what to do.  Not to harsh on Stross here or anything, but this material was pretty difficult to work with and I can’t really say that I really enjoyed it as such.  Nonetheless, I’m happy that I did stick with it because it was actually quite rewarding.  Eventually.

As it turned out I’d read the opening chapter of this book before in one of the Dozois collections, although I think it had been slightly modified for flow purposes.  After returning, I discovered that it had originally been published as nine separate short stories which do have something of an overarching narrative structure.  However, there is occasionally a bit of variance in the characterization between the stories and it can be a little bit hard to keep up.  For instance, Sirhan, the main character of the last three stories, is the son of Amber Macx and Sadeq Khurasani, major protagonists of the middle three.  However, the versions of Amber and Sadeq that we follow in their narratives didn’t get involved in any relationship, as they were forked versions of the individuals in question who were off doing galactic exploration in digital format while their physical bodies stayed home.  The explorers didn’t even really like each other all that much.  Imagine the surprise to come home to child support demands.

In the Singularity, this sort of thing happens all the time.

The characterization is also all over the place from chapter to chapter; sometimes characters really won’t like each other, and other times they will.  There’s also quite a bit of tension between different variants of people, for instance one version will be successful and another will be a failure.  Family reunions in the Singularity are no easy task either.

Describing “what happens” in this book is actually sort of pointless, since there is actually an amazing, outlandish amount of stuff that occurs.  Since I’ve been keeping this blog I find myself outlining reviews as I read novels now, and about halfway through I realized that summarization would be not only pointless but would cause my brain to explode.  So let’s just say that over the course of this novel the entire solar system with the exception of the sun is disassembled to form a computational framework called a Matrioshka brain, which is powered by the entire output of the sun, and is inhabited by various weakly-godlike intelligences.  These intelligences amuse themselves by constructing simulacra of people like H.P. Lovecraft and perpetrating complex financial schemes against each other.  After about the fifth chapter no one even bothers explaining what these entities want or what their objectives are, it becoming apparent that anyone who doesn’t want to become a digitized entity in the Matrioshka systems better get the hell out of Dodge.

The first couple of chapters could basically happen in the world we’re familiar with, even if everyone is a bit wired up and by the second chapter folks are keeping their memories outside their bodies to an increasingly large extent.  Still, the ideas just get thrown out there left right and center just to see if anything sticks; sentient lobsters running on old Soviet NT servers! Dominatrixes with encyclopedic knowledge of the Internal Revenue Code! Mind-jacking through tooled-up spectacles!  It just keeps coming.  Even the dismantling of the Solar System is just one of those things, it's happening in the background, nothing to see here.

In some senses this is rather silly.  In other ways the metatext is much more interesting than what’s actually on the page.  I’ve mentioned the Fermi paradox before – with all the planets, where’s the life?  Alastair Reynolds answered this question by postulating that there’s a malevolent force out there that wipes out the life, and the life that does survive ends up hiding as a consequence.  In this book it’s suggested that the end result of tool-using is the creation of the digitized environment, and that it’s more of a bandwidth issue that it’s not detected.

The post-humans who are running in virtual format don’t like to leave home, you see.  Everything’s going so fast in there that they have to keep going full out to not get left behind entirely, which means that they aren’t really interested in exploration.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the purpose of this book is actually a veiled critique of a lot of other post-scarcity utopian SF.  We don’t know what the digitized entities are up to exactly, but we do know that they’re running something called Economics 2.0 in there, which to an unaugmented sort of person is like Charles Ponzi crossed with every fictional riverboat gambler.  Some of the space explorers run into something similar in an alien computational framework and are lucky to escape without themselves being turned into a sort of virtual currency and obliterated.  It’s implied that the end state of a bunch of tool-using civilizations is to eventually be engulfed by their trading programs, since the processing power of the Matrioshka brain isn’t infinite, and these programs manage to trade for computational cycles and storage space.  What they want with that is to obtain more cycles and storage.  There’s no real end goal, it’s just that they’re really good at doing that, so they keep on going until they acquire it all.  Then they have nothing to do but wait for other rubes to show up and try to cannibalize them.

It would be easy to dismiss that as silly, but think of all the people right now on non-fictional Earth who die every day for lack of clean drinking water while computers trade stocks at one another.  The idea that similar programs might simply dismantle the planet out of pitiless indifference and different priorities isn’t that silly.  Also the idea that we’ll ever be able to have “enough” of any resource is questionable, and I’m interested to see Stross challenge that thought.  I'm not sure it's exactly a "take that" to anyone in particular, but I think it's quite reasonable to see it as a counterpoint to some stuff by Iain Banks, Vernor Vinge, or Greg Egan, which deal with similar sorts of scenarios in slightly more positive lights.

So I’m glad that I read this before some weakly godlike intelligence caused a vacuum metastability event, but it wasn’t the easiest read ever.

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson is a very famous SF author who’s won the Hugo several times (both for this work and a couple of volumes of the Mars Trilogy), which makes it a little strange that I’ve never read anything by him before.  Well, I don’t have time to do everything.  I started here because, as mentioned above, it’s a Hugo award winner, which is almost certainly a sign that something will be interesting, if nothing else.

After reading through it a bit, I checked the publication date against Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, and sure enough it came out about five years later.  I wouldn’t say that the two are related, exactly, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Robinson read Diamond’s book and took a little while to think through some alternate history.  Of course, it could be totally unconnected for all I know, but at least I found it a little plausible.  Guns, Germs, and Steel deals with the question of why European civilizations were the incubators for what we’d call modernity and exported it to the rest of the world, as opposed to the other way around.  In Robinson’s book, that doesn’t happen, since they’re all dead right from the very first chapter.

In this novel, the Black Death was way more virulent than in real life (or perhaps Europeans were just a little more susceptible to it) and instead of 30-40% fatality rates it was more like 99%, essentially depopulating Europe entirely.  Instead of a shock which took centuries to completely recover from, it was something so devastating that no recovery was possible.  Some pockets of Europeans survived, but in nothing resembling modern nation-states and the populations were vulnerable to raids and enslavement.  White people are extremely rare (one of the only “pure” populations are some Irish captives kept in a harem, and unless I’m mistaken no white character has a single line of understandable dialogue in the whole thing) and Christianity is a fringe sect with nothing resembling an orthodoxy, since the Christian populations surviving tended to be outliers anyway.

This leaves the world to be explored, and discoveries made, by other civilizations.  Which they do.

The scope of the book takes place through the remainder of human history up until an alternate 2002 (although with the Christian calendar not in use that’s not a date that people in the book would identify).  This leads to something of a narrative problem, namely, how one manages to have characterization in a 650-year narrative.  Robinson solves this problem by applying Tibetan Buddhism and the concept of the “bardo”; there are four or so characters bound together in a jati, or collective of souls, and they meet up in the afterlife before reincarnation.  In each incarnation they have the same basic personality and their names start with the same letter for ease of reference, I guess.

So you have B, who’s a basically gentle, practical go-along type of person; K, who is impetuous, hot-headed, and vengeful; I, who is something of a cold technocrat but means well enough; and S, who is a selfish jerk and causes more trouble than anything else.  These four are reincarnated repeatedly and run across each other time and again in different guises and forms; sometimes as allies, sometimes as enemies, sometimes as lovers (they tend to switch genders between incarnations) and sometimes as family.  This is kind of a weird plot element, but as an approach to have some sort of consistent characterization throughout it’s probably a good solution.  As a plot hook, frankly I find it a little weak, since it appears at times that something will come of all this time in the bardo, but it basically doesn’t happen; the characters constantly talk about the need to improve stuff in their next lives but they end up saying the same thing every time, I don't think they ever really manage to accomplish it.

So there’s sort of an overriding narrative arc, but the ten chapters are primarily self contained, and each one deals with events at a particular time and place.  The first one is told in the style of “Journey to the West”, and deals with introducing B and K.  In this incarnation B is a foot soldier for Tamerlane and ends up in slavery with K; starting a typical theme of the novel, K attempts to get revenge for something which was done to him and ends up making everything worse.

This chapter could have almost happened in real life, it deals with the appropriate Chinese emperors of the time period and other historical personages.  As the text diverges farther and farther from the world we know, the tales become more and more unusual; for instance the third chapter deals with the Chinese expedition that first discovers North America, and the fifth describes how Japanese refugees from the Chinese conquest of Japan teamed up with the Iroquois League to industrialize and hold off the colonizing Chinese from the west and Muslims from the east.  So clearly by that time we’re no longer in Kansas, or maybe we are but they don’t call it Kansas, or nevermind, you get the picture.  Some alternate history has recognizable figures show up, but past the first couple of chapters that doesn’t happen so much.  It’s a different world.

I really liked parts of this book, I can see what all the fuss is about.  At the same time, I found other parts of the book bland and tedious, and some other aspects that were by no means bland were so raw and emotional that it was almost painful to read them.  This sort of paradox may be inherent in the human condition but it isn’t necessarily enjoyable.  Robinson really looks into the idea that life for most people throughout most of human history has been nasty, brutish, and short, and really gets into that idea by taking an unflinching look at it.

For instance, in the first chapter of the second section of the book, B and K have been reincarnated as peasant girls in India who are friends.  K gets sold off into an arranged marriage at age fourteen and her husband’s family treats her as a combination of livestock and slave; B gets seduced by a cad who is related to K’s husband, then abandoned and dies in childbirth.  K poisons her husband and the other guy to death for revenge, immediately gets caught, and the village executes her as a witch.  Bam.  Right back to the bardo for another try.  For her actions K gets reincarnated as a tigress, then killed by villagers.  Bam.  Back to the bardo again.  Only in the third reincarnation of the chapter does the narrative really kick off, until that point it’s just study after study of human squalor and misery.  And then there’s still plenty of squalor and misery, or everything will be going pretty well and then suddenly there will be a political change, or an epidemic, or a natural disaster, and everyone will die horribly or get thrown into prison and die horribly there and that will be that.  Back to the bardo.  After one particularly galling chapter even the characters sit around in the afterlife bitching about how everything seemed to be going so well.

That’s also not talking about the treatises that start to populate the last half of the novel.  The idea of a samurai leading a Native American resistance against the Chinese is pretty neat, but really it mostly involves him getting drunk at a lacrosse game and giving a long (long, long) speech about all the stuff that they need to do.  Then the elders go off and say they’ll think about it.  Cue a brief epilogue assuring us that all sorts of cool stuff happened to them after a full life, but that which we don’t really get to see.  This also becomes a problem in the last couple of chapters which deal with an epic conflict between the world powers, and are described in a series of somewhat tedious academic lectures.  By the last chapter, B is literally an academic and gives a bunch of lectures of the sort that any self-respecting sophomore would want to sleep through.
I’m also not entirely sure that I buy some of the things that occur; the world ends up in the alternate 2002 very similar to our world, albeit through different paths.  I don’t know if it’s really that plausible that they had a similarly timed Industrial Revolution, or that they ended up with similar ideas regarding democracy and feminism through different routes.  I guess it’s possible.  I’d be more inclined to believe that things could have happened either faster or slower.  In any event, the jati is involved in some of the changes, but by no means all of them, and some of my favorite parts of the whole thing are when they are living normal lives and just trying to get by.

As far as I can tell, the point of all the lectures is that it’s good to take care of the earth and leave it in even better shape for your descendants.  Which I’m all in favor of.  But I feel that Robinson’s trying to get some sociological points across that don’t necessarily get conveyed clearly despite all the page space devoted to them, which is too bad.

So basically this one novel contained parts that I really liked and parts that I really didn’t, although the very strong opening chapters were enough to make me not regret it.  Therefore I can’t give this an unqualified recommendation, but it certainly does provide work outside the typical SF framework and it plays with some interesting ideas.

Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

I first got turned on to Cherie Priest by the buzz around Boneshaker, her 2009 novel which was on the Hugo ballot in a very strong year (the eventual winner was a tie between The Windup Girl and The City & The City, both of which are among the very best recent SF I’ve seen.)  She’s continued to make waves with her Clockwork Century works, including this one, as well as other projects.

I had very mixed feelings about Boneshaker.  I genuinely admired its craftsmanship – Priest is a devastatingly skilled writer.  In the words of Mark Twain, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between the lightning and a lightning bug, and Priest rarely missteps.  In addition she created very strong characters for her world and the plot deals with a mother-son dynamic that both felt right and isn’t a very common theme to see in SF works.  That said, I’m not a huge fan of steampunk.  And I’m pretty much sick to death of zombies.  Therefore a steampunk zombie novel is not, perhaps, the best way for me to spend my entertainment dollar.  I was left with the feeling that it was done well but not necessarily done for me, and I moved on.

But I was intrigued by it well enough to pick up Dreadnought more or less without knowing anything about it (especially since I got in off a big table at the Borders liquidation sale at a big discount), in the hope that it would contain more of what I liked and less of what I didn’t.  Alas, no.

So I guess in a sense this is the inverse of the review I had for Aloha From Hell, where I stated that I couldn’t personally vouch for the objective quality of the work but enjoyed the hell (sorry) out of it anyway.  In this case, the book is actually pretty good, has solid writing, nice command of tone, OK (but not outstanding) characterization, and admirable attention to detail.  I would say I think it’s a little weak in pacing in parts, but I’d honestly have to say that it wouldn’t be a deal breaker for me for a book whose subject matter I liked better.  Nonetheless, I just don’t like it very much, but this may say more about me than the book.

The first thing that simply doesn’t work for me is the suspension of disbelief required for an alternate history work.  In Priest’s Clockwork Century novels, it’s 1880 and the Civil War has been ongoing for twenty years.  Texas isn’t part of the Confederacy, though, although they are allied – in the 1840s the Republic of Texas discovered oil at Spindletop earlier than in our world and this began fuelling all sorts of coal and diesel powered machinery, for war and otherwise.  So, Texas never joined the US at all and has become an industrial power in its own right.  The Confederacy has, too, and both the Union and the Confederates have various airships, mechanized weapons, war walkers, and various other steam-powered armored horrors to inflict an early World War I style trench massacre upon each other.

But wait, you might say (as I did), if the sides are basically industrialized and evenly matched, then what was the Civil War being fought over in the first place?  We’re told that at this point it’s just a grudge match that is continuing because it’s there and no one has won yet.  We’re also told that the Confederates early on realized that mechanization was the way to go and gave up slavery so that everyone could pitch in to the industrialized war effort on a grand scale.

I don’t buy it.  Say what you will about the good aspects of the antebellum South, but any sort of racial equality was not part of it.  In the real Civil War, the idea of using slaves as soldiers was floated a few times throughout the real Confederacy, and rejected in horror as the concept of slaves with weaponry strikes terror into the collective hearts of all slaveholding societies (such as Howell Cobb’s famous line that if slaves could make good soldiers then it was wrong to keep them as slaves.)  The South was also famously lacking in railroads and factories of all kinds.  So as an alternate history, it doesn’t make any sense that things developed this way.  It seems like more of a gimmick so you can have more sympathetic Confederate characters for a modern audience, characters who are fighting for hearth and home (as they were in real life, too) but not necessarily defense of slavery, which is really the whole basis for the war in real life in the first place, and inextricable from the Confederate cause.  I mean, I don’t think Priest is a Lost Cause apologist or anything, I think she’s just trying to tell a good story, but I studied this era pretty substantially at one point and I just can’t get over its massive unlikelihood.  I’m far more willing to go along with the diesel powered war walkers than the 1860s American South collectively deciding that black people should be full citizens.  So an alternate history that tries to use an interesting setting but elides the bad parts is jarring for me.

The second thing that I didn’t really like about this is that the zombies are back.  Zombies are of course in every single goddamned thing these days, which started off okay in my opinion but now I'm just tired of it.  At this point I’m basically okay with zombies in comedy (such as Shaun of the Dead) or in straight-up supernatural works (Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels or Richard Kadrey’s Kill the Dead) where you can basically hand-wave the whole zombie thing away by saying it’s magic or just ignore it to tell a good joke.  But in allegedly realistic settings they don’t work for me.

If you read Boneshaker you know that the zombie epidemic began in Seattle after semi-malevolent inventor Leviticus Blue accidentally breached an underground pocket of some sort of gas with the titular badass steampunk excavation device.  Breathing in the gas makes you a zombie, being bitten by a zombie might make you a zombie also, but it’s not a guaranteed thing.  They’re decaying and dead, they pursue the living and eat them.  Apparently now there are pockets of the undead throughout the Southwest too, and of course some assholes are trying to figure out how to weaponize them.

I guess the reason that I’m all right with supernatural zombies but not with “realistic” ones is that this work is supposed to take place in a real world with rules we’re familiar with.  If the guy is dead, then his metabolic processes don’t work, so he can’t move at all, much less chase the living.  If he’s alive in some sort of form, then due to the laws of thermodynamics he can’t be a Perpetual Motion Zombie, just sitting around indefinitely waiting for some protagonist to come by and get chased.  He’ll starve!  The narrative purpose of Perpetual Motion Zombies is for them to be faceless, hostile antagonists like orcs, so that you can have thrilling violence without having to deal with the moral implications of actually committing violence against, you know, people.  It’s OK to do whatever you want to a zombie.

And so these are the reasons that I can’t get into the worldbuilding here; you’ve got a world cleanly excised of troublesome moral issues to set up a conflict with some enemies that you can kill with impunity.  I will say that in both this novel and in Boneshaker the zombies are not the primary threat, but instead people are the fundamental problem in both cases.  And that’s a good thing, so I like that.  But these are troublesome issues for my enjoyment of the book.

Now, all of that and I haven’t even gotten to the plot yet.  We join one Mercy Lynch, a nurse in a Confederate hospital in Virginia, who in short order finds out that her soldier husband has died in a POW camp, and her ailing father wants her to visit him in Seattle before he dies.  With the dead husband she’s conveniently unattached, so she packs her bag and heads off on a thrilling adventure.  Just getting to the train station requires her to navigate a war zone, and once she’s there the only available transport is a forbidding Union war train, but she bites the bullet and gets on board.  From there it’s a series of confrontations with bandits and Confederate raiders, not to mention saboteurs and the underlying question of what’s in the last car and why it’s more enticing than all the money and deeds stuffed in the train too.

Quite a bit of this is exciting, don’t get me wrong, but it’s interspersed with much quotidian concerns like queuing up at the ticket counter and engaging in polite conversation with other (occasionally stupid and dull) people on the train.  There’s a Texas Ranger in there too, which is pretty cool, and Mercy is an interesting character, but I don’t know, it just wasn’t my thing.  And I thought that the end was almost shockingly abrupt, although upon reflection it makes a little sense, as Mercy was trying to accomplish something and she did and there’s really no point in carrying on about it.  Still, not a lot of denouement here.

So after all of this I’m left with the same feeling I had about Boneshaker, which is that this is probably a really good niche book for its intended audience, which doesn’t include me.  If Priest ever writes something without zombies in it sometime I’ll probably be, if not first in line to get it, along presently.

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

 I just finished up this short story collection by my favorite former ESA research astronomer, Alastair Reynolds.  Reading these all in a row was an interesting experience, since as it turns out I’d read most of them before without really paying attention.  Out of the eight, I believe that five of them had been collated in Gardner Dozois’ yearly anthologies, which I’d read at a time when I hadn’t really been that aware of who Reynolds was and hadn’t read any of his other Revelation Space novels.

But now I’ve read the Revelation Space trilogy, and the two stand alone novels, and the side novellas, and so I actually knew what was going on this time.  Well, that’s perhaps unfair.  These stories are actually quite good, which is why I remembered them in the first place, but it was very interesting to come back to them with a better understanding of the back story.  For instance he’ll mention the Demarchists as a faction, but depending on the story he might not explain that they use neural implants to perform real-time polling and maintain an anarchic society.  Or, if he does, there isn’t necessarily the space to go into all the implications of what that entails, like the study of their golden era in The Prefect.  There’s also not as much background about the strange, sharp trading spacefaring Ultras or the hive-minded Conjoiners, nor is much explained about the hyperpigs or why all their dolphins are raving psychotics.  Interesting background detail, and it makes perfect sense in retrospect.

Most of the conflict in Revelation Space dealt with the encounter between humanity and the Inhibitors, a quasi-malevolent machine race which wipes out starfaring species.  I say quasi-malevolent because they’re not mustache twirling supervillains exactly, they simply have an more-or-less orthogonal sense of morality to anything humans would recognize and they’re trying to make it easier for everyone to survive the Milky Way’s collision with the Andromeda Galaxy – in three to five billion years.  They think long term.  (There’s some indication that the Inhibitors are beginning to glitch and slide somewhat into outright villainy by the time that humanity encounters them.)

Most of the these stories don’t deal with anything quite so dramatic, but instead deal with more human concerns.  In fact, some of the stories even take place in the Sol system (although none take place on earth), which isn’t something gone into much in the rest of the Revelation Space universe.

The stories, as far as I can tell, are arranged roughly chronologically by their occurrence, with the possible exception of “Galactic North”, which spans the vast majority of the Revelation Space timeline and then far beyond it.  So “Great Wall of Mars” begins (appropriately enough) on Mars, in the not-too-distant future.  This is an interesting choice, because it doesn’t match the publication or writing dates, meaning that some of the stories are less developed than others.  I believe “Dilation Sleep” was the first written, and in the afterward Reynolds says that he didn’t really have the backstory worked out then but decided to leave it the way it was.

I liked the majority of these stories, especially the first two, “Great Wall of Mars” and “Glacial”.  These deal with Nevil Clavain, a character from the novels, showing how he first got involved with the Conjoiners and detailing some of his adventures in the meantime.  These are really good traditional hard SF stories, and “Glacial” adds something of a mystery element.  There’s lots of good characterization, possibly even more than in some of the novels, and good resolution.

I mentioned in my review of Revelation Space that Reynolds has something of a predilection to throw in unpleasant characters in his writing whose horribleness doesn’t really seem to serve much purpose.  In this short story collection, there’s also a bit of that, and the stories that I didn’t like as much tend to go for Twilight Zone-style nasty twist endings to people who deserve it.  In “A Spy in Europa”, the main character is a secret agent for a faction called Gilgamesh Isis who goes around murdering people and generally causing havoc.  In “Grafenwalder’s Bestiary”, the story follows a security consultant who is really a total bastard and collects sentient beings.  In both of these cases the guy gets a suitably horrible punishment (and ironically enough they were on opposite sides of the conflict).

Normally I wouldn’t be against nasty twist endings quite as much, although they’re not my favorite and they can seem a little cheap and telegraphed.  The real reason to object in this instance is that “Nightingale” does it so much better.  This story starts out like a standard military SF setting and quickly shifts into a horror story, inflicting pretty bone-chilling results on people who don’t necessarily deserve what happens to them.  In comparison, the other two twist-ending stories don’t hold up as well.

Then there’s the eponymous “Galactic North”, which may have been a prototype for House of Suns and also involves a relativistic chase over unfathomable lengths of time.  In this case it also serves as an overview for the Revelation Space universe and follows the progress of the Greenfly, which the protagonist may have unwittingly released and which eventually destroys the entire galaxy by mistake.

Oops.  Talk about the ultimate kick in the teeth. 

I think it’s supposed to be hopeful because some people eventually escape, but since the Greenfly can follow them forever it seems like sort of a downer ending.  Well, Reynolds is all about confronting the unfathomable, and that’s about as hostile and unfair as it gets.  So if you don’t mind a bummer ending this is a worthwhile collection.

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

So here is the conclusion of the Sprawl Trilogy, begun in fine style by Neuromancer and continued in adequate style in Count Zero.  In my post on Count Zero I mentioned that one was almost entirely self-contained and didn’t really require any knowledge of or interest in the events of Neuromancer to understand.  In this final volume Gibson’s come full circle and I think you’d really have to have read the first two to understand what’s going on here – or at least to make the attempt.

This one continues Gibson’s strategy of split up plot elements which merge together in the end, only this time instead of three threads, we’ve got four.  The first follows Angie Mitchell, daughter of the Maas scientist that Turner was hired to extract in Count Zero.  Her father made a deal with the fragmented Wintermute/Neuromancer entities in cyberspace to help his career, in return he modified his daughter to access cyberspace without using a computer.  Somewhat creepily, the neural implants that allow her to do this aren’t detectible because the AIs in the matrix know if she has a brain scan and falsify the results.  She’s become a huge media star, and finds that the drugs she’s been taking interfere with her ability to commune with the AIs.

In the last novel, Angie was in a relationship with Bobby Newmark, a.k.a. Count Zero, who’s also back in this novel, although they’ve broken up in the interim and they’re both somewhat carrying torches for each other.  The specific reason that they’re not together at the moment – or at least why Angie can’t seem to locate him - is revealed in the second thread, which finds Bobby immersed in a comatose state in a vat, constantly accessing the matrix.  A raft of secondary characters finds themselves having to take care of him, and we’re left wondering why exactly he’s done this to himself and what it is that he's trying to access or discover in there.

The third thread deals with Mona, a young naïve prostitute with an uncanny resemblance to Angie Mitchell, who gets mixed up with some bad people in a plot to kidnap Angie.

And the fourth deals with Kumiko, the young and innocent daughter of a Yakuza high-up who is sent to London for a while so her father can get through a spot of unpleasantness.  While there, she meets up with a lady by the name of Sally Shears – formerly known as Molly Millions, who’s running around on her own, trying to get out of some of her own problems.

That’s just the main bits.  Each of these threads also contains a fair number of supporting characters who are all trying to jockey for position or achieve goals of their own.  Just listing all these people and what they want would make this post a surprising percentage of the original novel.  Perhaps the most surprising returning character is Lady 3Jane, whose body is dead but whose mind is still somewhat around – for a given value of around – in a device called an aleph, which theoretically contains a simulation of the entire universe.  (I believe that’s a reference to a short story by Borges, only in that case you could go to this one spot and experience the whole universe at once.  It appears in comic books fairly often too, most recently in Mike Carey’s Lucifer.)

I haven’t read Gibson’s entire bibliography, but none of the ones that I have read have quite so much going on.  My guess would be that this one proved to be a little much and he scaled back from here; it’s got so many characters all trying to accomplish so many different things that it is very hard to keep track of.  If I had one critique of this novel, and in fact I have several, it would be that it lacks focus.  But that’s sort of a big one, in my estimation.

The other major critique that I have is also simultaneously something that Gibson does really well, paradoxically.  In many cases, when some person or entity is supposed to have “a plan beyond human comprehension”, it turns out that it’s totally comprehensible, just sort of dumb and pointless.  Gibson obviously realizes this tendency, and veers out entirely in the other direction.  In this book (and in the others in the Sprawl Trilogy, for that matter), if some entity is said to have a plan beyond human comprehension they mean it.  In Count Zero, the AI entities in the Matrix wanted to kill a guy and went through a lot of hoops to do it, but this was just a sub-goal on their ultimate aim, which was unclear.  In this one, we’re told that they have some unfathomable reason for some of their actions, but Gibson never tells us what it is.  At the very end of the novel, some of the characters are going to go find out Why It Changed, but even the conversation leading up to that suggests that even with the new information they’re about to get they’ll still have to guess.  And then they go off and the novel’s over.  I felt at the end of Count Zero that I had some idea as to what happened, but here not only do I not have any confidence that I understood, but also think that the text affirmatively states that I couldn’t reasonably understand it.  I’m not even really sure who survived exactly, or if they did how long they will continue to survive in whatever form they continue to exist in.

Thematically, that’s all right, because the whole point of this novel as far as I can tell is struggling to understand your place in an incomprehensible world.  As literature goes, that’s cool.  As SF, perhaps not so much – I like to see people taking actions and solving problems.  But I have to give credit to Gibson for realizing that if the plan is beyond human ability to understand then he can’t know what it is, and if he somehow could then he wouldn’t be able to explain it to me.

Now that said, there are some nice setpieces here where people manage to solve human problems by more direct means, such as Molly kicking the ever living hell out of people who irritate her.  She’s an awesome character who’s developed quite a bit from the rakehell cartoon she was in Neuromancer.  Having lost her first love to the Yakuza and the possibility of love with Case to her own wanderlust, she’s thought a lot about her situation and matured remarkably.  She also gets to have one of the better endings on her own, human terms.

Some of the other characters I don’t think are as good.  Mona’s all right, but she’s kind of dim, takes a lot of drugs, and isn’t educated.  Even if the plot she is involved with was explained to her (which it isn’t), she probably wouldn’t really understand anyway.  I guess she gets a happy ending, if you consider celebrity to be something to aspire to (personally I'd rather jump off a bridge.)  Kumiko’s a lot sharper, but I found her to be so sheltered and reserved that I couldn’t really relate to her.  In both cases these characters are passive and having things done to them for reasons they don’t really understand.  The characters who are actually taking the actions have motivations which sort of make sense (e.g., they’ll get some money out of it), but they themselves are being manipulated by other, sinister forces, which are sometimes explained and sometimes not.

Angie Mitchell gets manipulated directly, when she’s not drug-blocked, since the AIs can take control of her body, which means that at any point they can intrude on the narrative directly, and sometimes they do so.  Nonetheless, Angie’s experience of a super-saturated media world is probably the most interesting story told here, and her desire to reunite with Bobby is both a human and comprehensible desire.  I liked both her and Bobby far more in this novel, not least of which because they had more to say and do.

This may very well be the best written of the trilogy, but it lacks the direct urgency of Neuromancer and the character moments of Count Zero.  There’s one especially interesting thing revealed here, which is the ultimate fate of Case – we find he made a couple of additional scores then got out of the game, settled down and moved on.  Gibson chose to do the same thing, moving on to other pastures, having given some sort of closure to this one, even if it’s not exactly what I’d like to see.  So I respect that, even though I thought this one was a little fragmentary.

Courtney Crumrin by Ted Naifeh

I promised Mona Lisa Overdrive, and I’m getting through it, but I recently got a birthday care package which included the most recent Courtney Crumrin story and I found myself going back through all the first ones as well.  I hadn’t read them in a while, and had somewhat forgotten how solid (and scary) they are.  Ted Naifeh is a familiar name in the comic book scene, and Courtney Crumrin is his best-known solo work (he does a lot of illustration for hire, this one is his baby.)  I didn’t realize this, but apparently there’s an ongoing series about to start in April, so this is probably a good time to look at this, in any event.

So stop me if you’ve heard this one before – Courtney Crumrin, aged somewhere between about nine and twelve, has to uproot herself from the life she’s familiar with and move in with her parents to her creepy great-uncle Aloysius’s house (or maybe it’s her dad’s great-uncle?  possibly even her grandfather’s great-uncle?  wait, how old is this guy anyway?)  While there she gets crossways with the local brats but discovers a secret world of fairy creatures and even discovers magical powers within herself.  Sound like just about anything you could find in the YA Harry Potter ripoff section at the local bookstore?  Uh-uh, not this one.

First unique thing about Courtney – she’s got a super well developed personality, and it’s informed by everything we know and see about her.  I’d be tempted to say that her parents “aren’t bad parents, but . . . “.  However, that would be wrong, since they are bad parents.  Well meaning, but inadequate to the task.  They’re small-minded wannabe social climbers, without any of the wit or resources needed to actually socially climb, and they find themselves utterly incapable of dealing with the daughter that they’ve actually got as opposed to the one they’d like to have.  They compensate by neglecting Courtney’s actual needs, and she, in turn, compensates by pretending not to care and acting like she doesn’t need the help.  She’s sullen, unpleasant, bratty, and doesn’t even take much comfort in the fact that she’s usually right.  Courtney’s so used to being alone that she pushes away even those who might be friendly, and is so used to being miserable that she sabotages herself at every opportunity so she won’t have to deal with the unexpected.

An altogether typical pre-teen, in other words, if a little bit more prickly than most.  It’s unusual to see a protagonist with this many relatable flaws in this genre.  What makes it even better is that her discovery of magical powers doesn’t actually affect any of this – she’s still equally unlovable and now she’s even scarier.
The series so far has comprised of a few limited series, compiled into four trade paperbacks, and a prequel story which focuses on Aloysius as a young man.  All of these are at least pretty good.  Actually, the first one is a little disjointed and features somewhat flat antagonists.  In my personal opinion, the second one, Courtney Crumrin and the Coven of Mystics, is so far the real standout.

There’s a great overarching antagonist in that one – it’s a hobgoblin that’s feared for its apparent bloodlust and imperviousness to any sort of magical assault.  Naifeh’s art style and character design match perfectly here – you almost never quite see it all in one shot, since it’s usually blending into the background, but what you do see is jaw-droppingly horrific.  It’s all hunched over, but still twice the size of a man, has ridiculously long limbs, looks to be dripping moss and/or gore, and has a skeletal face with too many incisors and what you imagine are sunken, glowing eyes.  It’s an excellent nightmare creature, and as it turns out it’s really as bad as you’d expect, although it’s also relatively urbane and has a sense of humor.  And although it’s certainly terrible enough, the real villains are the humans – it’s still a monster, but that’s just according to its nature.

Naifeh has a lot of control over the narrative in that one.  Aloysius doesn’t suffer fools lightly, nonetheless he’s the go-to guy when the other magicians in town have a problem that’s too tough for them to deal with, which makes them resent him even more.  Later on he manages to make a strong case very badly, essentially arguing that the magical council should find in his favor because they’re too stupid to understand what’s going on.  Naturally he manages to lose, dramatically demonstrating that being right doesn’t always mean you’re effective.

Another nice thing is that adults aren’t totally useless.  Aloysius isn’t (he literally wrote the book on dealing with Night Things), neither are a couple of Courtney’s other teachers.  Nonetheless, she decides to take matters into her own hands – something not entirely uncommon in YA fiction – but takes them perhaps a little bit too far.  Now, it’s certainly possible to argue that what she does is justified (after all, the person she does it to surely deserves it).  Nonetheless, she manages to ignore all that due-process stuff and go straight to vigilantism.  It’s also pretty profoundly disturbing, since you have to wonder about her mental stability at that point.  The book establishes that working around magic can make you a power-mad lunatic, and you have to wonder if Courtney’s not only a neglected girl but possibly just bad.  The book is surprisingly agnostic on the subject; it's certainly possible to argue either way.

Her actions end up having repercussions not just for her but for many other people as well; these are explored in the third volume, which is also pretty solid.  There will no doubt be ongoing problems for her as well as a result of her actions, since it’s not the sort of thing that can be undone or really ignored.  But she does manage to come out of her shell a little bit and possibly learn from her (and Aloysius') mistakes about interacting with people.  Even stupid, annoying people who don't know as much as she does and aren't nearly as powerful.

The fourth volume deals with her trip to Europe on vacation with Aloysius where they basically cement their relationship and deal with more traditional monsters.  I thought this one was OK, especially in its subversion of audience expectations regarding true love conquering all, but was not quite as strong as the second and third collections.

So with Courtney starting out in a reasonably good place, at least as far as she is concerned, I’m interested to see what Naifeh has in store for her in an ongoing series.