How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu is a novel about a time machine repairman (named Charles Yu) who ran into a future version of himself, and then this future version gave the younger Charles Yu a book that Yu will have written at some point in the future called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.  Oh, and the younger Yu shoots his future self in the stomach during this meeting out of panic, sticking him in a time loop and giving him a limited amount of time to live before he becomes the older version of himself and gets shot.

I’ll give you a second to think about that.

I didn’t really know much about this book going in, and I’m not really sure that I know all that more coming out.  The “Science Fictional Universe” in question is a small and incomplete universe currently owned and operated by Time Warner Time (a division of Google) where everyone apparently goes around in a state of existential despair most of the time.  The original creators of the universe ran out of money and the eventual build-out was done on the cheap.  Another possible solution for the problem of evil, I guess.

This book has a lot of SF elements, but on the whole I’d say that it generally aims for and usually succeeds being more of a straight literary fiction work.  The fictional Yu’s use of a time machine is more of a metaphor than a serious examination of time travel.  In fact, the book that I would most compare this to would be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, only done for dramatic purposes rather than comedy.  In HGTTG, Douglas Adams used comedic sociopathy pretty frequently, and in this one, Yu uses it to create despair.  For instance there’s the fictional Yu’s encounter with a lonely and out-of-date sexbot, who wants some money so that she can buy herself for a while, or when the fictional Yu tells his software program boss that he doesn’t actually have a wife and kids and they’ll never be able to hang out after work.

I have a lot of respect for this work but somewhat ambiguous personal feelings about it.  It’s exceptionally well written and filled with a lot of dark comedy, so that’s good, but where I’ll give the real Yu high marks is in his command of tone.  He sets the stage right from the beginning about how he wants the book to read, and everything flows out of that.  That stuff with the sexbot could be played as drama or as comedy, and Yu allows you to see the humor in it while still playing it totally seriously.  I wouldn’t really expect such great command of the non-textual elements of a novel like this from a first-time author.

Now, at the same time, the title of the book – How to Live Safely – has a double meaning in that “Living Safely” can mean either overcoming risk or simply avoiding it.  The time travel elements are used to drive home, repeatedly and not especially in a subtle fashion, how people dwell on their past and avoid taking risks.  You’re sitting there wasting your life, the book tells you, and you don’t really have a lot of choice about it.  From the fictional Yu’s mother, who has retired into reliving a single hour of dinnertime (because she couldn't afford the higher-priced packages allowing her to repeatedly relive an entire day or longer), to the fictional Yu who spends as much time as possible in his time machine avoiding having to help people go to the worst days of their lives over and over again, every single person in this novel is running away from something while going forward one second per second.

So when I say that I have mixed feelings about it it’s because the novel is highly effective at creating emotions, but that mostly this book made me feel really crappy about myself.  If that’s what the real Yu was striving for, then success!  If not, then channel your obvious powers for good next time, man.

City of the Lost by Stephen Blackmoore

I’m kind of torn about this one.  I mean, I thought it was all right, it kept me entertained enough on the train ride to work.  But I feel as if I could have really liked it, and simultaneously I feel like I did really like it, when it was the Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey.  Perhaps it’s my fault for reading books of such close genre affiliation and tone so closely back to back.  Or maybe I’ve just OD’d on urban fantasy novels at the moment.  Permit me to explain.

This book examines one Joe Sunday, who’s an enforcer for a gangster in Los Angeles.  So he’s a big thug type guy, he goes around taking care of problems and/or people that his boss tells him to deal with.  Now I’m not necessarily against having a morally dubious protagonist, in fact I’m fairly willing to overlook this.  But Sunday doesn’t really seem to have any sort of inner life which would lead me to root for him exactly.  He doesn’t live by some sort of messed-up Bushido code, his boss didn’t save his life and now he swallows his pride and does the dirty work out of obligation, he’s not stuck in some situation and is now bound to a life of crime, or so on.  He gets pretty well paid and he doesn’t seem to have any particular moral values so even though he could apparently quit any time he doesn’t.

Although maybe that would have been a good idea because on this particular occasion his boss wants some sort of gemstone stolen from an old Italian guy, and Joe’s partner gets killed, and it turns out that the boss actually killed this Italian back in the 1960s and he was old even then, and the stone has magical powers.  Then the Italian guy kills Joe too, but uses the stone to bring him back as a zombie or revenant or something to that effect, but Joe gets the stone, then loses it, and finds out that without it he loses control of himself and eats people’s hearts, and they also turn into zombies and he has to destroy them.

Like every novel of this kind once Joe’s down the rabbit hole he ends up finding all the modern-day cabal of magic practitioners that operate in this day and age, plus the usual complement of monsters, demons, hangers-on, and so forth.  This stone is a real big deal, so he ends up dealing with a bunch of people who want it for one reason or another, and some of them try to help Joe out, others try to cut deals with him, others hunt down his associates like dogs.

There were some things that I did really like about this book.  It had some really engaging action sequences, which I appreciate in a story of this type, and some of the characters were also well developed.  I especially liked Gabriela, who is a former sociology major who has a talent for witchcraft and runs a halfway house for street monsters.  She’s funny enough, but her low-tech approach to magic is pretty inspired.  For instance she has T-shirts that say things like “You can’t see me” or “I am a paramedic”, which actually work on normal people.  She implies that she could do a lot more flashy type stuff but that this is easier.

My real beefs with this book are basically outside the actual story on the page.  If you’re creating a work where the lead character is a bad guy, then there are a couple of things that you can do in order to pad the blow a little or make it work anyway.  Blackmoore didn’t do some of them and made some of the others a little obvious in my opinion.

For instance, you can give the main character some redeeming characteristics, like he’s got some family that he cares about or a cause he believes in or he’s nice to his cat or something like that.  In this case, Sunday doesn’t have any stuff like this at all, he’s a complete mercenary, gets into a fistfight with his only close friend, if he has any family he doesn’t mention them, and so on.   So this is something of a missed opportunity.  He also doesn’t have some of the other sort of virtues that might make you overlook his bad qualities; he’s not really that attractive or charming, and he’s not really smart either, he’s always having things explained to him.  So I think really that the author dropped the ball by making Joe too successfully lowlife and forgetting that you have to actually want to support this guy.

Something else you could do is make the bad guys have a really evil plot that you want them to fail at.  This may be the issue where the narrative failed for me in the biggest way.  Now, the stone may be able to provide immortality if you approach it right, and at the least it’s pretty magical, so it makes sense that all these magicians want to get their hands on it.  But what they are going to do after that point isn’t entirely clear.  The Italian, for instance, wants to get immortality, but he’s already been able to use magic to live a really long time and is essentially indestructible already.  If he gets the stone he’s probably just going to keep doing the same thing he’s been doing already, he’s not going to take over the world.  The same is true for most of the rest of the people who want it.

Joe wants to retrieve the stone because otherwise he is compelled to eat people (and because he may die if someone else uses it), and while I support his decision to try and avoid random killing, he’s not filled with horror and remorse about it like many people in this situation might be.  In fact he seems to consider it something of an inconvenience more than anything, like getting rid of the bodies is such a pain in his ass.  Which I guess it would be, I’ve never tried to stuff an undead hooker into an industrial rock crusher, it’s probably hard on your shoes.  But the point is that Joe’s also not going to use the stone for any good purpose, he’s going to use it for his personal convenience.  So what are the stakes exactly?  Why should I care that Joe gets it rather than one of the other people looking for it?  I want Gabriela to get it, she wants to help all the junkie vampires out.  It’s bad for your narrative if the reader is indifferent to the protagonist’s horrible death.  And even if he does prevail, it’s not going to make a lot of difference to anyone except him.  These low stakes make it hard to root for a bad guy.

One other trick you can do which is used here is to make the bad guys really bad so that your bad protagonist looks better in comparison.  I think some of the other magicians are inexplicably super evil to try and make Joe look better, but it didn’t really work for me because it actually goes too far to be believable even in this universe.  One of them is even said to be a former Nazi.  And while the only thing worse than a Nazi is a Nazi occultist, he’s really given that trait only so you can feel OK about Joe killing him.  I mean, that’s not a part of his character that he has those views necessarily; it’s just a shorthand label so you know this guy’s a bad guy and you should root against him.  The same thing is true of the Italian guy, who everyone is inexplicably making deals with although he inevitably betrays them.  No one would ever trust this guy, since he’s screwed over literally everyone he’s ever met or worked with.  If you’re shooting for immortality then you have to assume that having this reputation is not going to be useful to you.

There are also some illustrations in the book by Sean Phillips, whose work I like, but if you’d told me that these particular drawings were drafts for Sleeper I would have not questioned it.  He’s not exactly breaking out some new character designs here.  I also didn’t really see it adding anything to the story.  Maybe they’re friends?  I’m not actually sure and I don’t care enough to go find out.

To sum up – pretty well written and reasonable enough for what it was, but big metatextual issues prevent me from really recommending it, and I’m not really interested reading the sequel which is heavily suggested.  Really big fans of this genre might appreciate it more than I did, though, and I didn’t hate it, so take that as you will.

7th Sigma by Steven Gould

7th Sigma is a coming-of-age story examining your everyday typical young man who has a genius level intellect, phenomenal social cunning and goes on spy missions for the government while being raised in a martial arts dojo in a frontier setting filled with robotic monsters.  It’s also a sort-of retelling of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.  I’d claim expertise in textual analysis, but the truth is it’s been a long time since I read Kim, what clued me in is that the protagonist has the same first name, uses the same last name as a code name when he’s doing secret missions, and there are quotes from Kim in the section headers.  So that sort of tipped me off there, no cunning required.  Nonetheless I enjoyed it for what it was, and for other reasons which I’ll elaborate on as I go.

If you’re at all familiar with statistics then you’ll recognize “sigma” as the symbol for standard deviation.  Something that’s seven standard deviations away from the mean is very rare indeed (exactly how rare is helpfully explained in the introductory quotes).  That said, statistics plays no part in the narrative at all and I’m not sure why it’s the name of the book.  Just lets you know something highly irregular is going on, I guess.

The highly irregular thing is that the American southwest has been infested by these little self-replicating robot bugs.  They fly around and consume all metals, making additional bugs with the materials so consumed.  The bugs are after elemental metal, they don’t rend living beings down for their hemoglobin or anything.  They are dangerous enough anyway, though.  Through trial and error the people around have figured out there are basically four things the bugs do – 1) if any bug is destroyed, every bug in a pretty big radius comes to consume it, swarming erratically and moving through any objects (or living creatures) in the way; 2) swarm to and consume anything emitting EM radiation; 3) consume free metals; 4) sit around and charge their batteries with photovoltaic wings.  So although they’ve got the power to kill people they’re mostly background, and there’s been enough time passed since their appearance that everyone’s mostly used to them by now.

The bugs have completely taken over New Mexico and Arizona, parts of Utah, Nevada, Texas, some of the northern Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, and possibly a little more.  It’s not explicitly set forth anywhere.  The US Army has set up a barrier which they claim contains the infestation, but one of the characters claims that’s bullshit, that he was with the Army when they tried to fight the bugs originally and they never were able to stop the outbreak.  Of course, he might be wrong.  In any event, the infestation isn’t actively spreading anymore, the bugs’ territory is clearly established.

One of the things I like very much about this book is the care that Gould has to just let this develop.  Various characters have different theories about the nature and cause of the bugs.  Most people think that it was an industrial accident caused by experiments in mining technology that went awry, although some think it was a terrorist attack.  Others believe that it wasn’t terrestrial in origin at all, although whether or not it was deliberate in that case isn’t established either.  Gould has enough confidence in his writing to just let this be the backdrop without throwing in someone or other to give a lot of random exposition.  (That said there are clearly some people who know more than others and this knowledge can be costly.)

I also really like the fact that he’s done his homework and it’s there on the page.  I guess that the states of New Mexico and Arizona have been dissolved, and the whole zone is once again a federal territory.  The day to day workings of the territory aren’t really elaborated on, but at one point some characters are discussing a particularly nasty court case that started in the territory and worked its way up into the federal court system, and that the attorney for one of these parties was sanctioned under Rule 11.  It’s hard for me to overstate how happy this made me, since that’s exactly how such a case would progress and Gould even cited the right rules.  It’s far more typical for authors to mess up jurisdictions and procedural rules than not, since it’s usually not significant to the plot.  But Gould went the extra mile here.  I also know a little bit about livestock and gyrojets, both of which match what is said about them.  I don’t know a whole lot about aikido or building adobe ovens, but I’m more inclined to trust him on those matters since he’s proven himself trustworthy in world building.

Something else that is nice is that people in the Territory are still US citizens; you can move more or less freely in and out of the checkpoints.  If you’re coming in then they make you sign a release and watch a horrific video of the bugs killing somebody, but it’s not a horrible dystopia if you live there, you can just leave whenever you want to and come back as you like (assuming you can afford it).  Kimble Monroe, the hero of the book, used to visit his relatives in the Midwest all the time, so he’s familiar with television and video games and all that sort of thing.  And supplies like ceramics and fiber composites come in too, although it’s not entirely clear what the Territory produces in trade.  But most of the people who live there are still there because they want to be.  There’s also a good examination of what kind of people might choose to live this way, you’ve got some regular people, some crazy survivalists and malcontents, and then some well-organized religious extremists who are fairly well adapted for this sort of lifestyle and think that they should run the place.  Some of this is a little straw mannish, but not to a great degree.  And one thing I did really like is that they’re talking about making Bible study mandatory in the public school, a proposal which goes down 3-2 after an impassioned speech by Kim’s sensei in defense of the First Amendment, but that’s not what swayed the board – they were all in favor of the proposal really but couldn’t agree on what translation to use.  Little details like this are really nice to me, since it’s how real people actually behave.

Kim’s father had to leave the Territory and have a pacemaker installed, which means he can’t ever go back.  Kim’s mother is dead, and since his father is a mean drunk Kim sees no reason to go live with him, so the book starts with him at age 11, living as a street kid and trying to avoid the law, which would forcibly reunite him with his father whether he wants to go or not.  Enter the aikido master Ruth, who’s starting a dojo in the territory as a means to recover from her failed marriage, is impressed by the martial arts skills he already learned at the local YMCA equivalent, and takes him in as student and foster child.

At this point I’ll observe that the structure of the book is more of a series of vignettes in the life of Kim as he grows up.  The first section takes place when he’s roughly 11, the second at about 14-15, and the third at around age 17.  In addition to Ruth he runs into a federal marshal early on, who recognizes his intelligence and ability and uses him as an asset in law enforcement missions, which mostly involve him sneaking around and/or spying on people.  The crimes they’re investigating are pretty pedestrian and not at all outlandish.  For instance, there’s people involved in smuggling methamphetamines in from Mexico, in running gyro-jet composite guns in from the US, and just generally being bandits.  Kim also references a bunch of other adventures he has in between these that we never find out all the details for, for instance he’s recovering from nearly being killed by a group that sounds like that FLDS sect run by Warren Jeffs as the third section starts.  So if you’re looking for some sort of tight, overarching plot building to a huge climax then this isn’t the book for you.  It’s more of a study of these characters as they do various things.  However there are some really good mysteries as well, and a sense of discovery, such as when Kim and some other guys are tracking a pack of sheep-killing feral dogs and they gradually discover that one of the dogs may not actually be a dog at all, which leads to a question about whether the robotic bugs are the only weird thing going on out there.

I’m not going to say that Kim isn’t realistic exactly, since he does do a lot of things that a normal person his age would do, and he’s used to having to work hard in the dojo/farm.  But I will say that he seems sort of implausibly awesome and poised.  He’s smarter than everyone else, he’s got infallible social awareness, his martial arts training allows him to kick ass at will, he’s sufficiently mysterious and alluring that some cute girl who’s taking a break after her freshman year at Berkley wants to give him an erotic massage, etc.  He does seem to have an inexplicable attraction for adventure and danger.  It’s more fair to say that Kim would be at home in a 1950s boys’ adventure serial.  Perhaps, in fact, that’s what it is.

Also, I’m disappointed that given the option to attend Rice University he nonetheless decided to go with Stanford, although doubtless the erotic massage girl had something to do with that choice, and that is the sort of consideration that a 17-year old would of course have.

So I found this book highly readable and I really liked the characters and the setting.  There would seem to be an inevitable sequel hook here, which I basically disapprove of in the sense that if there’s more plot I wish this book was just longer rather than just ending on the note that it does.  Nonetheless this was a lot of fun when approached in the intended spirit and it’s a great way to kick off 2012.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Before turning to the topic at hand, a brief digression (that will end up being somewhat relevant to the review itself, so bear with me here.)  I, along with who knows how many other people, am the owner of a Kindle.  As regular Kindle users know, it recently became possible to use the Kindle to check out library books, joining the modern ranks of e-readers.  My local library is pretty on the ball with technology and has access to Overdrive, which is the publisher-required middleman for e-book content.

You may be thinking that this is how I obtained my reading copy of Ready Player One, and that is correct.  But I’m also really wondering about my own personal moral standing and the future of the library.  As it happens, you can only check out three Kindle titles at a time – you also can’t forget to return it, since the book simply evaporates after your time is up.  Also, the library has to buy an e-book license for each digital copy, so if the library only has one license then only one person at a time is allowed to have access to the e-book.  If you want you can put yourself on a hold list.  And some publishers have requirements that the library must re-purchase the license after the book has been checked out a certain number of times (HarperCollins earlier this year set the number at 26, I don’t know if they ever backed down on that or not.)  Librarians obviously hate the idea that they have to continuously shell out money for a digital book which has a marginal cost of zero and isn’t suffering the degradation that a real book will if it ends up in the wrong place such as anywhere in the vicinity of a toddler.

So let’s recap here – we’ve got the technology to instantly magic the complete text of any book in existence to anyone who’s got a computer or an e-reader and to do this with no additional cost, and yet the process sucks.  The publishers are intent on making this a more painful and less pleasant prospect than physically going to the library and more expensive to the library than actually buying a physical copy of a real book.  Which means that the future is less about awesome technology than about the laws, regulations and social norms that constrain everyone’s use of that technology.  And then there’s people like me which are lending credibility to this asinine system by participating in it, which probably means that despite all my complaints I’m still part of the problem.

Anyway.

Ready Player One is a book about nostalgia for nerd culture of the 1980s.  Everything else about it is what you would call an Excuse Plot, such as when you’re watching a movie and the cable repairman turns out to be played by Karl Hungus, and then you know that cable repair is probably not going to be a critical plot element exactly.  So in evaluating this book you have to keep in mind that every single thing that happens in this book is designed around composing cool setpieces of vintage nerd references, and everything else is pretty secondary to that.  This could be done in a truly terrible and/or cloying matter, at which point this book would be complete crap, which I fortunately report is not the case.  But at the same time I’m not totally sold on it either.

Now, I was a nerd in the 1980s, although I think I’m maybe 5-7 years too young to really be the right-on-target demographic here because I was also teething and learning the alphabet during a lot of that period.  (Although my first video game was a Space Invaders clone for the Kaypro II).  I was really a nerd of the 1990s if you count the ability to do reasonably independent stuff.  Why waste a paragraph on my own circumstances when describing someone else’s book?  Simple, any analysis of nostalgia is going to be self directed because that’s the whole point of it.  If you’re going to reference, say, The Legend of Zelda for the original Nintendo, then the only reason that anyone would care is their own experience playing that game.  Maybe you remember your friends taunting you because you kept getting killed by an Octorok, or the hassle involved in getting down into the seventh dungeon, or endless arguments over A Link to the Past or whatever.  If you’ve never played any of those games and don’t have any personal experience with them then a reference/homage to them isn’t going to give you any warm fuzzies and might even be incomprehensible.

The action in the novel revolves around, essentially, treasure hunting, since the creator of OASIS has died and left his $240 billion fortune (still the greatest personal collection of wealth in the 2040s, take that, future inflation) to the person who can complete his online Easter egg hunt.  What is OASIS, you ask?  Something of a combination of Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse from Snow Crash, a little bit of World of Warcraft, some Facebook, and a few elements of blazing a butterball-sized crack rock.  Everyone’s on OASIS pretty much all the time, and why not?  The world has hit peak oil, so there’s constant wars, riots, global climate change, dogs and cats living together, etc.  So it’s a pretty crappy time to be alive.

Enter our hero, Wade Watts, alliteratively named by his father who died while looting a convenience store, and raised by a single mom in an Oklahoma trailer park.  And who is obsessed with nerd culture of the 1980s because that’s what the creator of OASIS was into, so that’s the secret to finding the clues to the Easter egg.

Now I mostly like Wade, he’s a pretty good portrayal of what someone like this would actually be like.  He’s not physically intimidating and he’s smart, but in a pop-culture and game-centric sort of way.  So he’s not going to be winning any fights or turning heads at the Sorbonne.  Nonetheless I’ve known some dudes like this, he’s basically a decent sort and I didn’t mind spending time with him.

Do you think there is any chance that you’re going to get through this book and find out that Wade doesn’t manage to outwit, out-game and out-trivia the murderous cabal that’s also after the prize and become the world’s richest man, and that he won’t get the girl?  I’m sure there’s someone out there who’s never read a book or seen a movie about an underdog before and it will come as a surprise to that person.  Other than that, you basically know what’s coming, and there’s a bunch of really fun nerd references in there.

I liked it.  It was pretty good.

Now, having praised this book, let me go ahead and bury it.  Remember all that business at the beginning about Kindle library loaning?  Wade learned to read and write through OASIS since every kid is apparently allowed free access to all the public libraries and Sesame Street.  And all through this, in the back of my head, I was thinking – that would certainly be cool, but really?  The book publishers are going to allow unlimited access to all their books and CTW is going to just let everyone spend unlimited time with Elmo without a royalty?  For that matter, did AT&T and Verizon not try to strangle OASIS’ bandwidth, charge extra fees, demand a cut of the action?  Did the movie studios and television networks go gentle into that good night?

I’m not going to shill for Paolo Bacigalupi’s vision of the future, but his harrowing post-peak oil collapse stories and novels paint, I think, a better version of what that crisis might be like.  I don’t really think that in the face of what’s going on in this story that keeping the power on to a trailer park in Oklahoma would really be a big focus of anyone in power’s priorities.  I felt that there’s a much greater chance that all his potential would go to waste – well, even more so.

So, as much as I wanted to get into this book, I kept feeling a huge tension between the story that was going on and the fairly well done setting and backstory.  It appeared to me that what I was being told about the world made all the events at best extremely unlikely, probably impossible, and that mismatch made the whole thing feel even more artificial than something dealing with the 80s should be.  Nonetheless, this is a pretty interesting first novel and I’m interested to see if Cline can get something in better focus with the next one.

Trouble is my Business by Raymond Chandler

I get unaccountable pleasure from reading crime and detective novels, especially those in the prewar era and extending into the 1950s.  I’m sure that a lot of this is selection bias, since anything that’s going to be available at all these days will have stood the test of time and be way better than most of the pulp fiction written in the actual era.  Anyway, Raymond Chandler is one of my favorites, but his work is inexplicably difficult to find.  I’ve been searching the used book stores for years trying to find the twelve-story version of this book, since there are two different collections; one contains twelve short stories, the other just four.  But I had to settle for the four story version, because that’s what I could find. 

The Philip Marlowe contained within these stories is a little different than the character that we know and love from Chandler’s novels, and well he should be, since these stories were originally written with other detectives in mind and then re-edited to put Marlowe’s name in there after the novels became hits.  But Chandler was writing about an archetype and the Marlowe novels themselves vary in quality immensely (Playback, for instance, is really not very good), so these could just as well have been written for Marlowe originally.  Why not?

Perhaps the pleasure I get from reading these comes from the slightly through-the-looking-glass milieu that is contained there.  Everyone’s speaking English and it’s allegedly America but it’s really not the same place we live in today.  You can get a beer at a drive through window and even a street bum is wearing a suit, there’s everyday casual racism but everyone’s surprisingly polite and eloquent about everything.  For instance, suppose you’re coming back from a business meeting and get jumped by two armed gunmen in your apartment.  Could happen to anyone, I guess.  And since you’re in something of a bad mood and a little drunk you decide to take them on anyway and beat them up.  Afterwards the ringleader gives a little explanation and a compliment, noting that you’ve got “nice arm action there, pal.  I will say that for you.”

I’m pretty sure in all times and places a real-life lowlife thug would throw in some cursing there as well, no matter how pretty your swing is.

The portrayal of the cops is pretty astounding too.  They’re not all corrupt or on the make – although some are – but it’s pretty typical for them to manhandle every perp after every arrest, just on principle.  They also smack around anyone who is suspicious, looks suspicious, or may become suspicious in the future.  Or anyone who wise talks, which is everyone.  No one’s surprised at being threatened with violence or death, at learning of the deaths of their associates, of being beaten into unconsciousness.  Just give a stoic or smartass remark and go on.

I won’t lie, this is great stuff, and Chandler does it better than anyone.  Except maybe Dashiell Hammett.

And it’s good that the writing and atmosphere is so excellent, because, with all due respect to Marlowe, he’s a terrible detective and no one should read these stories for the mystery.  Marlowe almost never has to do any actual detective work since everyone comes to him.  Seriously, it usually pans out that he doesn’t have a clue where to begin until some shadowy thugs come to try and menace him, and this gives him the information that he needs to find the next thug, and so on up the chain.  A word of advice to any villains who discover that Philip Marlowe’s on your tail – do nothing.  He’ll never find you.  And if he does suspect you, then the mere fact that you haven’t hired some goons to hit him in the head with a blackjack and dump him in a ditch somewhere will throw suspicion off you.  I think Chandler did realize that he tended to abuse these sorts of situations, so he tried to make the confrontations as exciting as possible; he also throws in a couple of deadpan internal critiques as to why he even bothers carrying a gun, since everyone takes it off him and beats him up anyway.  Although someone who had sustained as many blows to the head as Marlowe did might not be capable of much abstract reasoning.  Just saying.  (There's also a famous story that while filming the movie version of The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart asked the director who had killed one of the victims, and the director contacted Chandler, who didn't know either - so definitely an author who didn't get little things like that get in the way of the plot.)

Marlowe’s a great character because he’s such a pain in the ass.  There are plenty of times when, if he would just leave well enough alone, he could get out of a situation with no liability, no bruises, and occasionally some money as well.  He doesn’t have a commitment to justice in the abstract and is just as likely to help cover up a murder as bring a murderer in, so that’s not it – he just absolutely hates to not have a situation resolved to his satisfaction.  Also he reads poetry and plays chess, that’s a fighting man I can get behind.  But what exactly drives him is never really gone into or explained, you just have to puzzle it out from his actions, which are infuriatingly contradictory sometimes, as he’s just as likely to perform some sort of altruistic act as to use sarcasm or violence.

In possibly the best of the four stories, “Red Wind”, Marlowe is drinking in a cheap bar when a man walks in, looking for a woman.  No one’s seen her, but a drunk gets up and shoots the man dead, then leaves.  Soon, both the woman who was being sought and the shooter end up at Marlowe’s apartment, the woman to ask for help and the shooter to eliminate the witness (see what I said about leaving well enough alone?)  This one’s a little unusual since Marlowe, for once, wasn’t looking for trouble, and he ends up doing something pretty nice for no particular reason other than it is a good thing to do.  For some reason, I enjoyed that best of all.  “Goldfish” was the weakest of the four in my opinion, it felt the least like Marlowe and was somewhat more of a gimmick than you usually see in Chandler’s work.  The other two are pretty solid and have a lot of double-crossing and violence in the best pulp tradition.

I still don’t know what makes Marlowe tick and I certainly wouldn’t want to live in his world, but I did enjoy this collection.  When your greatest complaint about a story collection is that you want eight more stories, that’s a good use of your entertainment dollar.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

I consider it inexcusable that as big of a Blade Runner fan as I am, that I’d never gotten around to reading this.  Consider it my love-hate affair with Philip K. Dick.  I love almost all his short stories, but I haven’t really liked many of his novels, or at least not very much.  I know, everyone likes The Man in the High Castle, but I wasn’t fond of it; I didn’t really like Dr. Bloodmoney, I found VALIS too strange even for me, and although I did enjoy A Scanner Darkly and thought We Can Build You was OK, I decided to move on to other things at that point.  Just saying I gave it a stab is all.  Nonetheless, I finally picked this one up and was pleasantly surprised if not entirely won over – and it’s pretty short too, so there you have it.

It’s probably not entirely reasonable to bring up points of comparison to Blade Runner, because these are pretty obviously different takes on the material.  The core of the story is the same, you’ve got Rick Deckard, bounty hunter of androids, who aren’t allowed to be on Earth; they’re used as manual labor, soldiers and sex slaves on offworld colonies, but that’s about all the book and movie have in common besides the character names and job titles.  The novel’s setting is explicitly post-apocalyptic, not just noir; there’s not really a lot of people left on Earth, and many of the ones who are left are “chickenheads”, folks who have had exposure to fallout and have suffered mental/physical impairment as a result.  Most of the best and brightest have gone offworld or died in the war.  It’s implied that the ones who stayed and are more or less of normal capacity have pretty bad emotional issues.  And you get a touch of that typical Dick surrealism in that all the men walk around wearing designer lead codpieces, although if there was really that much residual radiation that this was advisable then that probably wouldn’t be the first thing I’d want to protect anyway (although putting one on Harrison Ford might have been pretty funny, I guess they didn’t have one in the prop department or something).  Another effect is that most of the non-human life on Earth has died, so having any sort of real animal is a status symbol and harming one is deeply shocking.

The action opens on Deckard as he’s having something of an argument with his wife, who is using something called a “mood organ” to give herself periods of depression and anxiety.  I say something of an argument because they’re both using the mood-altering device to affect their mental states; Deckard at first thinks about dialing up his anger on the device but thinks better of it when his wife threatens to retaliate, so they both eventually just dial it down and he goes to work.  I get it, this bounty hunter of human-like machines is at the mercy of emotions he gets from an external source.  Kind of heavy handed, although handled in a pretty funny manner.  There’s also the issue of Mercerism, which is a quasi-religious belief system that allows the user to be with Mercer as he gets killed by an angry mob, and an ongoing and unresolved plot about a somewhat sinister media personality who appears to make more programming per day than there are hours in the day.

Deckard may be a bounty hunter but in the story the androids are actually pretty sociopathic.  They aren’t capable of emotional response to the suffering of others and that’s the basis of the test that can detect them.  However, one of the newer models, the Nexus 6, does appear to be able to have at least some regard for other androids, since one of them seduces Deckard and tries to get him to stop bounty hunting.  Which he doesn’t.  And this doesn’t seem all that bad because although the androids that he’s after haven’t exactly done anything wrong, they’re also pretty unpleasant, since they basically trick a lonely chickenhead into giving them shelter and don’t think much about tormenting the weak.  This Roy Baty isn’t a tragic character, and his desires don’t drive the plot.  He’s basically just a jerk.  In a way this is too bad, because I thought Dick might be trying to mirror human bounty hunters who have regard for biological life but kill synthetic life without remorse and question whether we have the right to judge androids as sociopaths, but in fact the androids really don't seem to be very pleasant at all.

I didn’t love this book.  It has a couple of fundamental problems in my opinion, one of which is that Dick’s real strength as an author is in mind-bending prose and weirdness, not action; so when there are action sequences they tend to fall flat as Deckard just shoots androids and kills them.  This is also a rare case in which I think that the book should have been longer, as its size makes some of the plot threads terminate abruptly.  One of the stronger scenes is when Deckard finds himself in a police station he didn’t know existed which turns out to be staffed by androids, and this plot basically just drops, and the same is true of some of the other subplots like Mercer.

However, I did like it more than I thought I would, primarily because of the dark humor and the matter-of-factness of the plot.  Dick was on his game here and creating nice point-counterpoints on what it means to be human exactly, which was his major area of expertise.  I’d say that the characters were flat, but that’s the point, I think.  Anyway, fairly short and enjoyable, so it’s worth a look.

The Cold Commands by Richard K. Morgan

Sorry I’ve been so late with the updates; had some sort of plague and then had to take care of my plagued family, and that plus getting my work in does tend to take time.  Anyway, this will contain some spoilers for The Steel Remains, as this is a sequel.

Richard K. Morgan, British SF author, hardly needs an introduction.  Since jumping onto the scene with Altered Carbon in 2002 he’s been churning out books of better than average quality at an impressive rate.  Altered Carbon plus its two sequels is one of my all-time favorite SF series, and although awards bodies were sort of stingy to them I think they’ll be strong contenders for lasting the test of time.

If you’ve never read them, the Altered Carbon trilogy deals with the exploits of Takeshi Kovacs, a memetically-programmed ex super soldier turned (variously) private eye, mercenary, and freelance vigilante who is disenchanted with his government and tries to act by his own morality in a world full of corruption and double dealing.  Morgan’s other works explore similar themes; Market Forces discusses a business executive who happens to have to fight other executives to death while immersed in a world full of corruption and double dealing, and Black Man (titled Thirteen in the US) deals with a genetically modified super soldier who is disenchanted with his government and tries to act by his own morality, etc.  I guess he’s sticking to what works for him.  At any rate, the Altered Carbon trilogy achieves greatness and the other two aren’t exactly bad, although frankly I didn’t like Market Forces all that much and thought that the first three quarters of Black Man was pretty mediocre before picking up substantially toward the end.

The Steel Remains, which came out a couple of years ago, was the first book of a new trilogy entitled A Land Fit For Heroes which is something of a departure for Morgan.  Okay, as a matter of fact the main character Ringil is a famous ex-soldier turned disenchanted veteran who tries to act by his own morality in a world full of corruption and double dealing.  Nonetheless.  Unlike Morgan’s previous works this one is straight fantasy, although it may take place on a far future Earth (possibly even in the same universe as Altered Carbon; there's a 'god' by the name of 'Dakovash') and its magic is indistinguishable from technology that the characters don’t fully understand.  Ringil makes a pretty interesting character.   He is a homosexual but lives in an incredibly repressive culture.  His father is an important man and is thus able to save a teenage Ringil from suffering horrific execution alongside his lover when they’re caught, although as one might expect this makes their relationship pretty spotty after that, the father thinking that Ringil’s ungrateful and Ringil believing that his father probably could have done something to save both of them.  Ringil’s also got the feeling that he personally is a coward and should have taken the same punishment, although he’s practical enough to realize that it really wouldn’t have made much difference if he had.  So with this combination of aggression and self-loathing it makes sense that he volunteered to go to war when one broke out (with either monsters or aliens, it’s not entirely clear), and he turned out to be enough of a survivor to become quite good at it indeed.

This is all in the backstory, though, since the real events of that novel open with Ringil slowly going to seed in a backwater town where they don’t ask many questions about his sexuality, drinking too much, telling war stories, and lowering his standards.  Then his mother asks him to rescue one of his cousins from slavers, which he does, and inadvertently discovers that this is connected to a proposed invasion of the world by what are essentially elves, portrayed in Pratchett style as psychopathic fashionistas.   Ringil enters a torrid affair with one and then stops the invasion anyway, along with the help of some old war buddies of his.

The friends are pretty interesting but sort of woefully underused in The Steel Remains.  One, Egar, is essentially a stereotypical barbarian, who decided that hanging out on the steppes in a yurt wasn’t really all there was to life and jumped at the change when he heard that you could make lots of money as a mercenary in the big city.  This actually worked out well for him, and then he parlayed all the cash and experience into becoming the chief of his tribe, although mostly this meant that he spent his time sleeping with stupid young women, since he basically caught too much sophistication to truly go home but never really got all that civilized.  He was pretty interesting and didn’t get enough screen time.  The other friend, Archeth Indamaninarmal (and doesn’t spell check love that) is half-human, half-Kiriath (sort of dwarves/technomages/etc. and otherwise absent), a lesbian, and names her throwing knives.  Also pretty cool and got a little more screen time than Egar, mostly doing political-type stuff but also stabbing people occasionally.

I mentioned in my last review that the book required previous knowledge of the series, and you can double down on that here.  Morgan throws you right into it and God help you if you don’t remember everything that happened in the previous one.  I recalled most of the big details, but some of it I just had to say, okay, there was probably a reason why Ringil wanted to get revenge against that particular person, I just can’t remember what it was.

I was prepared to like this book a lot since I was hoping that it would fulfill the promises made by the first volume, which actually created a fairly interesting venue for the surprisingly well-developed characters and then just didn’t ever quite catch fire for me.  So I thought that maybe the second volume would really hit it out of the park and make up for the meh feeling I had about the first one.  Sadly, no.  Morgan's writing is compelling, there’s a lot that should be going on here, and yet it failed to connect once again.

This may have something to do with being the middle book of a trilogy, since there’s a lot more setup than resolution here, and then you end up reading a lot of backstory about characters you didn’t remember all that well to begin with and then they don’t get around to having the promised adventure.  This is too bad, since the promised adventure sounds pretty cool.  It’s the elves again, and they may be rallying back to the world at the side of an undead sorcerer on a mysterious quasi-real-disappearing island.  Archeth spends a lot of time getting an expedition fitted out to this island but they never actually get around to going, there’s a bit of sidetracking and the narrative has to get all the three Musketeers back together again, throw in a few daring escapes, couple of brutal killings, etc.

It’s intense, to almost a ludicrous extent.  Morgan does excel in writing action, but this gets turned up to eleven here in scenes of violence, sex, violent sex and sexual violence.  I’m neither faint hearted nor squeamish (for a good cause, anyway), and yet the frequent murders, tortures, executions, rapings and desecrations get to be excessive after a while.  In one sense I get it, this is a response by Morgan (and other folks like George R.R. Martin) to attempt to show the dark sides of fantasy staple cultures which get conveniently left out by traditional fantasy literature; but done to this extent you wonder how there could even be anyone left in the whole world after six months of this Grand Guignol.  It also makes it really, really hard to root for anyone at all.  Archeth’s people apparently felt that one particular empire was the best hope for civilization on whatever planet this takes place on, but the Emperor is a real jackhole and likes to feed his political opponents to carnivorous octopuses.  Ringil starts the book fighting against slavery, but he’s pretty pathetic at actually saving anyone and lets his mercenary band commit some pretty horrible atrocities.  You get the sense that the world might actually be better off if the elves did take over, although they are also pretty free with the war crimes and genocide.

The two characters of Archeth and Egar do get more page time in this one.  Egar gets a couple of action scenes but primarily exists to get into trouble.  I still kind of like him, it’s too bad.  Archeth continues to be interesting and gets to do a lot more this time.  She’s only half human and is a couple of hundred years old at this point, it gives her a very unique perspective and she also gets to deal with the other most interesting characters, a trio of artificial intelligences made by her people who have their own agendas and also appear to know what’s going on.

At least someone does, since a lot of the action takes place in the Grey Places, where everything is a little wonky and other potential realities are always right next door.  Ringil spent some time there in the previous novel (it’s where the elves hang out, and it’s what makes them so screwy) and plenty more in this one.  There was a prophecy in the first one which suggested that Ringil himself might be some sort of embryonic Dark Lord in the making – an interesting enough conceit – and in this one he appears to be rocking some sorcery and periodically runs across supernatural beings who make some gnomic statements and move on.  I still don’t really know what the deal is here and I feel that this isn’t really acceptable at this point in a trilogy.

So, I can’t really recommend that anyone run out and get this one.  Still, it’s very well written and contains some compelling setpieces, so I’m not really that down on it either.  The third volume may very well pay for all, but at this point I’d suggesting waiting to see before reading the first two.