Dramatic tension comes from expectation of potential consequences, and the best way to show potential consequences is to demonstrate them on somebody. Hence if you need to establish a deadly threat to, say, Captain Kirk, and the team consists of Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy and some random unnamed extra, you don’t need an episode guide to tell you who’s gonna die. If you know what a “red shirt” is, you can probably guess what Redshirts is about, and be mostly right within an order of magnitude.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. This book is by John Scalzi, who probably doesn’t need any introduction, or at least if he does he doesn’t need one by me. He’s got a very prominent web site, appears to be omnipresent in the SF community, and has been blogging since well before blogging was cool. Furthermore he appears to be a guy who Gets It, whatever It happens to be (e.g., adapting to trends in publishing, getting his stuff accomplished on time, sympathetic toward gender issues, understanding that cats sometimes suffer lack of bacon, etc.) I’m not sure that I’d like to hang out with him as such, since we don’t know each other or anything, but he does seem to be awfully similar to people I do like to hang out with, and we share similar cultural markers. That said, while I certainly understand the love, I don’t always feel the love. My favorite works of his are The Android’s Dream, which I adore, and The God Engines, which I really enjoyed. I respect Old Man’s War, but didn’t really think that highly of the sequels, and I haven’t gotten around to Fuzzy Nation yet. (I do also really enjoy Judge Sn Goes Golfing.) However, even when I don’t personally enjoy something Scalzi writes, I can usually see the appeal.
The sample chapters of this one were intriguing so I took the plunge. Did I like the book? Yes. Did I dislike the book? Yes. Can I say, on balance, that it was a positive experience? Not sure. Let me quote the old nursery rhyme: “There was a little girl with a little curl on her forehead. When she was good she was very good, but when she was bad she was indistinguishable from an all-night freshman year bullshit session”. I will explain further below. Mild spoilers ahoy!
Although Star Trek may be a particularly egregious offender, the red shirt phenomenon is older than any of us, and probably older than dirt, considering that it shows up in the epic of Gilgamesh, which as far as I’m aware is the oldest existing story – when the gods decree that one of the two of Enkidu and Gilgamesh have to die for killing Ishtar’s bull, well, you know it ain’t called the Epic of Enkidu. Or all those Ithicans who didn’t make it back home with Odysseus. So this character exists to die in order to demonstrate how badass the hero is by eliminating the threat that the red shirt couldn’t, or to provide an emotional scene for the hero, just to establish that the hero’s in deadly danger, or even to goad the hero into a new paroxysm of hero-ness. I guess you could write a story where the hero dies 90% of the way through for no particular reason and someone unnamed solves the problem of the hour, but that probably would be deeply unsatisfying to read and probably hard as hell to write, and it would go against all narrative tradition while you were at it.
So when Andrew Dahl is assigned to the Universal Union flagship Intrepid, he quickly discovers that life is nasty, brutish, and short if you don’t happen to be one of five or so major officers, and that one’s odds of death when being around these officers go up to an alarming degree. As an aside, it’s also not that great to be astrogator Lieutenant Kerensky, who somehow manages to survive flesh melting plagues, being repeatedly shot, buried under debris, and alien possession on a regular basis and come back for more. Although he’s also had three rounds of sexually transmitted infections, so apparently it’s not all thorns for him. Anyway if you’re on an away mission with Kerensky then the same horrible thing is going to happen to both of you except he’s going to survive and you are not. The captain and the superintelligent, standoffish first officer are likely to emerge more or less unscathed. (Quick shout out - I really liked how Scalzi didn't go for the low-hanging fruit here. These officers actually aren't the terrible people that you might expect and seem as puzzled as anyone why they don't fix the consoles so they don't explode in the crew's faces all the time.)
Most of the stuff in the first third of the book deals with the characters, Dahl and four of his red-shirt buddies, coming to grips with the increasing weirdness of their situation and possibly their impending demise. Much of it is genius, especially to anyone familiar with SF television series. For instance, there’s an explanation of how, given a six hour deadline, the science section can come up with a cure for anything, but not until the five and a half hour mark. Also, the packed ship appears empty when a major officer comes around because the crew members sensibly hide, not being complete suckers. The ones that can’t get away stride purposely around hoping to avoid eye contact or being asked to do anything or, God forbid, be asked on an away mission.
I really liked this section of the book. I was really entertained and actually laughed out loud a few times, something I don’t often do while reading. Where it began to go off the rails for me a little bit was when they realize that they’re probably characters on a really derivative television series and decide to confront their creators. They decide to do this by commandeering a shuttlecraft and flying it into a black hole, an action which I approve of. However, at this point, I was aware of a metatextual issue which Scalzi (to his credit) later addresses as well, namely this: once you focus on a supporting character he’s no longer a supporting character, he’s a hero. Tom Stoppard dealt with this in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but only by the expedient of having the “main characters” accomplish precisely zip throughout the show. In the opposite vein, Terry Pratchett tried to write a book about the sort of guys who come out when the local tyrant yells for the guards and ended up creating Sam Vimes and Carrot and a large number of his best and most loved characters. So, while some random people might get horribly killed by Borgovian land worms and ice sharks, once Dahl starts being proactive you’re pretty sure that whatever he has in mind is actually going to succeed and he probably won’t just up and die. Especially after he manages to make it through a couple of “episodes” more or less intact.
I won’t say if Dahl actually makes it or not, but it’s not an unreasonable thing to think that he will by the midpoint. Scalzi actually toys around with this a little, by suggesting that whether it’s true or not is up to him, which is of course both obviously true and a little unfair to explicitly point out.
It’s also not that uncommon for fictional characters to meet their makers. Animal Man met Grant Morrison. Job met God. Many of the everyday details in this section were also funny and seemed very true to life in California circa 2012. But it sort of drifted closer to the event horizon of navel-gazing and then crossed over it at some point for me. Perhaps not everyone would have that same reaction, but as the story progressed I found myself guessing pretty accurately where we were going with the narrative (excuse me, Narrative) and at that point I found myself losing interest, although I will note that Scalzi did not himself appear as such, which was where I feared we might be headed with it.
Perhaps the source of some of my discontent was that the book itself (and the codas, especially) ended up being more of a manifesto on the proper treatment of fictional characters as opposed to a self-contained story in itself. As an extra, Dahl doesn’t have a lot of personality, just a thin veneer of a background story. The same is basically true for the other redshirts; they aren’t strong characters, although I do understand that they don’t want to die. Nonetheless, while the scenes of them sitting around being sarcastic at each other stopped being funny for me at about the point I realized that there wasn’t going to be a lot more detail given about them, and when the highly structured scenario meant that literally anything could happen at any point. The manifesto itself is sort of interesting, but coming from a man who once had his extra characters have to fight some advanced aliens in a death match, it’s probably more penance than anything else. I guess I’d be in a more forgiving mood if these questions were presented in a more novel way, but I don’t know, it just didn’t work for me.
I guess it does seem a little unfair to blame a novel about people who are extras by definition for being weak characters, but hey, they’re supposed to carry their own story here. And they don’t quite manage it. I couldn’t help thinking that I would have unreservedly enjoyed this if this had been a novella and stopped before we learned whether their stolen shuttle plot had any effect or not. So, take that as you will and make your own choice; happily, no Narrative is forcing you to read or avoid anything.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Runyon on Broadway by Damon Runyon
Before I begin talking about this book specifically, let me explain why I’m reading a vintage 1975 British edition of a quintessentially American author in the first place. The reason is the stupid copyright system currently in place; Runyon died in 1946 and did most of his writing in the 1930s, and the copyrights on his short stories will not expire (under the current regime) until 95 years after their publication date. Therefore the last of his short stories will enter the public domain in 2041. I’m not sure if this is intended to encourage Runyon to write more or what, but its practical effect is to prevent me from reading what I really want to read by him, namely a huge anthology of his entire short story output. Yes, I know that book would be about the size of an encyclopedia but I’d still shell out for it. And since nothing like that exists, I have to pick up these anthologies where I can find them, because Runyon was nothing if not a frequently collected and anthologized author, and hope that they contain a story that I haven’t seen before (since each editor has a slightly different idea about what constitutes the best of his output.)
Anyway, the book of Ecclesiastes states that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Runyon agreed with this, but pointed out that you should bet that way anyway since “all life is six to five against”. That tells you pretty much what you need to know about Runyon, who was a newspaperman and a short story writer and apparently excelled at writing about baseball and horse racing, but especially the short story writing.
Runyon’s not obscure, exactly, as everyone’s heard of “Guys and Dolls” and some of his stories still show up in collections, but I think it’s a shame that he isn’t more widely read (but some of it may be his own fault, as explained further below). I’m fond of short story as an art form and, to my mind, Runyon did it better than just about anyone else and certainly had his own inimitable style. If you’re not familiar with it, he wrote in a bizarre slangy argot which completely eschews contractions and all verb tenses except the present. It’s not so much dated as affected, since no one ever in the entire history of the world has spoken this way. It contains enough Americanisms that this British anthology contained a glossary, but the editor pointed out in the introduction that you’d have to be pretty dense to not understand what he’s talking about, except possibly if you don’t know that a G is a thousand dollars and a C is a hundred.
Ecclesiastes also states that there’s nothing new under the sun, and the naïve reader, not realizing that ironic detachment wasn't invented in the 1990s, may be a little surprised at how sociopathic these stories can be, although almost always to comedic effect. They don’t have any swearing and no explicit content besides a little bit of offhand kissing now and again, but man can they be cold blooded. Witness this exchange between the nameless narrator and a character by the name of Jack O’Hearts discussing why Jack gunned down a member of the narrator’s singing quartet in “The Lily of St. Pierre”:
In another case a problem gets resolved by a dude getting knifed in the neck, an unfaithful wife ends up in a sack, a group of citizens hires a scary Italian hit man to take out a local thug, and in general there’s quite a lot of mayhem going on, none of which surprises or unduly puts out anyone. In one story the narrator and one of his friends come across a loan shark who has been stabbed, and are very taken aback to see him this way – they figured that someone would shoot him and are “very angry to think that there are guys around who will use such instruments as a knife on anybody”.
All the Broadway stories are told from the first person perspective of an unnamed man who alleges that he’s no one in particular and that everyone and sundry considers him to be “just around”. He also claims to have a nervous disposition and hate the company of desperadoes, which must cause him much distress as apparently that comprises most of his associates. Nonetheless, he gets invited to swank parties and people make confessions to him all the time of all sorts of felonies, he’ll show up in the company of strong-arm men and although he never commits any crime of violence he manages to show up at a couple of robberies and swindles. But mostly what happens is he’ll relate a tale from some associate of his, of whom he has a large number. Surprisingly, some of them are even related to real events – “Lonely Hearts” is based on the true-life story of Belle Gunness, and there are other contemporary references in there that I’m sure sail right over my head.
Anyway, these stories are seriously funny in that classic New York deadpan way. The narrator never judges and only criticizes those that aren't around or can't fight back - maybe explaining why everyone wants to tell him their stories.
They aren’t perfect by any means, though. Although the slang dates these stories, they are so stylized that it’s not even really a problem; what really dates these works are some truly backwards social views that were unfortunately all too typical of the time. There are some bright spots – the author mentions that he speaks some Yiddish and there are some minority characters spoken of favorably (or at least are not any more unfavorable than all the other lowlifes), and in one story the author points out that you shouldn’t refer to Jews or Italians by various ethnic slurs since they are by and large as good as anyone else (and also because some are likely to take offense and beat you up). Unfortunately while this sort of tolerance also extends to Puerto Ricans it doesn’t exists to blacks, who are conspicuous by their rarity and in cruel, insulting dismissals when they do turn up.
Also Runyon’s gender relations are summed up by the idea that pretty much every woman is referred to as a “doll” without any exceptions that I can think of, and once they’re married their individual stories are more or less complete. Although at least one widow does get revenge for her dead husband by drowning three guys simultaneously in the ocean, and another waits for a cad to become a success and then shoots him in the head. The narrator is still somewhat coldly dismissive toward “dolls” and frankly I could see how women might be pretty turned off by it. As a straight white guy it’s pretty easy for me to just say to overlook it and enjoy the humor value in the writing, but I don’t know, maybe some people just can’t get past it. If it’s any consolation I’m not sure we’re strictly intended to take anything the narrator says at face value, since he’s pretty unreliable.
In any event, the only story in this collection which I don’t think I’d previously read was “Tight Shoes”, which was okay. If I ever do get my complete Runyon set I’d probably find that I’d read the best ones already, but that’s all right, it would be entertaining enough. At that.
Anyway, the book of Ecclesiastes states that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Runyon agreed with this, but pointed out that you should bet that way anyway since “all life is six to five against”. That tells you pretty much what you need to know about Runyon, who was a newspaperman and a short story writer and apparently excelled at writing about baseball and horse racing, but especially the short story writing.
Runyon’s not obscure, exactly, as everyone’s heard of “Guys and Dolls” and some of his stories still show up in collections, but I think it’s a shame that he isn’t more widely read (but some of it may be his own fault, as explained further below). I’m fond of short story as an art form and, to my mind, Runyon did it better than just about anyone else and certainly had his own inimitable style. If you’re not familiar with it, he wrote in a bizarre slangy argot which completely eschews contractions and all verb tenses except the present. It’s not so much dated as affected, since no one ever in the entire history of the world has spoken this way. It contains enough Americanisms that this British anthology contained a glossary, but the editor pointed out in the introduction that you’d have to be pretty dense to not understand what he’s talking about, except possibly if you don’t know that a G is a thousand dollars and a C is a hundred.
Ecclesiastes also states that there’s nothing new under the sun, and the naïve reader, not realizing that ironic detachment wasn't invented in the 1990s, may be a little surprised at how sociopathic these stories can be, although almost always to comedic effect. They don’t have any swearing and no explicit content besides a little bit of offhand kissing now and again, but man can they be cold blooded. Witness this exchange between the nameless narrator and a character by the name of Jack O’Hearts discussing why Jack gunned down a member of the narrator’s singing quartet in “The Lily of St. Pierre”:
'I suppose,' he says, 'I owe you guys an apology for busting up your quartet when I toss those slugs at Louie the Lug?'
'Well,' I say, 'some considers it a dirty trick at that, Jack, but I figure you have a good reason, although I am wondering what it is.'
'Louie the Lug is no good,' Jack says.
Well, of course I know this much already, and so does everybody else in town for that matter, but I cannot figure what it has to do with Jack shooting off ears in this town for such a reason, or by and by there will be very few people left with ears.
'Let me tell you about Louie the Lug,' Jack O'Hearts says. 'You will see at once that my only mistake is I do not get my shots an inch to the left. I do not know what is the matter with me lately.'
'Maybe you are letting go too quick,' I say, very sympathetic, because I know how it annoys him to blow easy shots.
In another case a problem gets resolved by a dude getting knifed in the neck, an unfaithful wife ends up in a sack, a group of citizens hires a scary Italian hit man to take out a local thug, and in general there’s quite a lot of mayhem going on, none of which surprises or unduly puts out anyone. In one story the narrator and one of his friends come across a loan shark who has been stabbed, and are very taken aback to see him this way – they figured that someone would shoot him and are “very angry to think that there are guys around who will use such instruments as a knife on anybody”.
All the Broadway stories are told from the first person perspective of an unnamed man who alleges that he’s no one in particular and that everyone and sundry considers him to be “just around”. He also claims to have a nervous disposition and hate the company of desperadoes, which must cause him much distress as apparently that comprises most of his associates. Nonetheless, he gets invited to swank parties and people make confessions to him all the time of all sorts of felonies, he’ll show up in the company of strong-arm men and although he never commits any crime of violence he manages to show up at a couple of robberies and swindles. But mostly what happens is he’ll relate a tale from some associate of his, of whom he has a large number. Surprisingly, some of them are even related to real events – “Lonely Hearts” is based on the true-life story of Belle Gunness, and there are other contemporary references in there that I’m sure sail right over my head.
Anyway, these stories are seriously funny in that classic New York deadpan way. The narrator never judges and only criticizes those that aren't around or can't fight back - maybe explaining why everyone wants to tell him their stories.
They aren’t perfect by any means, though. Although the slang dates these stories, they are so stylized that it’s not even really a problem; what really dates these works are some truly backwards social views that were unfortunately all too typical of the time. There are some bright spots – the author mentions that he speaks some Yiddish and there are some minority characters spoken of favorably (or at least are not any more unfavorable than all the other lowlifes), and in one story the author points out that you shouldn’t refer to Jews or Italians by various ethnic slurs since they are by and large as good as anyone else (and also because some are likely to take offense and beat you up). Unfortunately while this sort of tolerance also extends to Puerto Ricans it doesn’t exists to blacks, who are conspicuous by their rarity and in cruel, insulting dismissals when they do turn up.
Also Runyon’s gender relations are summed up by the idea that pretty much every woman is referred to as a “doll” without any exceptions that I can think of, and once they’re married their individual stories are more or less complete. Although at least one widow does get revenge for her dead husband by drowning three guys simultaneously in the ocean, and another waits for a cad to become a success and then shoots him in the head. The narrator is still somewhat coldly dismissive toward “dolls” and frankly I could see how women might be pretty turned off by it. As a straight white guy it’s pretty easy for me to just say to overlook it and enjoy the humor value in the writing, but I don’t know, maybe some people just can’t get past it. If it’s any consolation I’m not sure we’re strictly intended to take anything the narrator says at face value, since he’s pretty unreliable.
In any event, the only story in this collection which I don’t think I’d previously read was “Tight Shoes”, which was okay. If I ever do get my complete Runyon set I’d probably find that I’d read the best ones already, but that’s all right, it would be entertaining enough. At that.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett
So how on earth did I come to overlook this one? I suppose the answer is that I was only a casual Pratchett reader at the time, and I was a little busy in 2003, but I’ve read all the ones before it and all the ones since, only having a perfunctory glance through Monstrous Regiment. Until now.
It’s not really a regiment, as it happens, more of a squad, and a pretty run down and pathetic one at that. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. I mentioned in my review of Snuff that the later Pratchett works tended to lean more towards plausible horrible things as opposed to evil witches or the Fair Folk or whatever, and while Night Watch was probably the tipping point of that process by this point it’s fully in bloom. And while this made aspects of Snuff and I Shall Wear Midnight so realistically horrible that it diminished my enjoyment of them, this is one of the strongest standalone Pratchett novels that I’ve ever read. I’m actually embarrassed for not reading it sooner.
Also, fair warning – this book is nearly 10 years old and any in-depth discussion is going to involve massive spoilers. Don’t keep going unless you’ve already read it or don’t care.
The heroine of this novel is one Polly Perks, who lives in a crappy small town in the Discworld equivalent of Eastern Europe. Her nation, Borogravia, is provincial and constantly at war with its neighboring small countries over one thing and another, particularly religion, with which Borogravia is heavily afflicted. Their deity, Nuggan, has a living testament which is gradually declaring more and more things to be Abominations; going beyond typical stuff like women wearing trousers and other sorts of traditional bugbears into the deranged, such as forbidding jigsaw puzzles, crop rotation, rocks, and the color blue. It’s mentioned that since basically everything is an Abomination that daily life is something of a series of overlooking things and technicalities.
They’ve also got something like Salic law there, so Polly can’t inherit the tavern which is the only thing of note her father possesses (her mother’s dead). There’s an older brother, who is kind and somewhat mentally challenged, but he got drafted into the army and hasn’t been heard from in a while. If Polly’s father dies without the brother around then she’ll be either on the street or at the mercy of her worthless drunk uncle – possibly both. This is intolerable. Therefore, she resolves to join the army herself, find her brother, and bring him back home by any means necessary, and be damned to the fact that this is also an Abomination. So she goes to the next town to enlist and finds out that she passes for a male just fine, possibly because there aren’t many other young men around left to recruit and all the other recruits are just as skinny and nervous as her. And they also all turn out to be women in disguise too.
I can’t emphasize enough how in control of the narrative Pratchett is here. Borogravia is a crappy country that (probably) started this latest war; nonetheless the individual people are sympathetic without taking that left turn into maudlin. It’s pretty easy to remember that in many traditional books the Borogravians would be the bad guys, and they sort of are; at the same time they may have responsibility but they are not guilty. As such. In addition, the head of Zlobenia, the opponent de jure, is also portrayed as a huge asshole, for instance assuming that all women will be sufficiently impressed with his exalted position to want to sleep with him, and that protests that this is not correct are simply for show. At one point he attempts to molest Polly, who is ‘disguised’ as a male soldier disguised as a barmaid (it’s complicated), and so we’re pretty happy that he gets kicked in the junk and left naked and hogtied in an outhouse. At the same time you are painfully aware that if he succeeded in conquering Borogravia that things would probably be a lot better around there.
Polly’s squadmates are the motley crew you’d expect. Three of them are refugees from a reformatory for Bad Girls (think the Magdalene Laundries, including beatings and sexual assaults); one’s trying to find the soldier who impregnated her and ran off, and then there’s a troll, a vampire, and an Igorina, all of whom have their own motivations for joining the army. The actual males in the squad are a sleazy political informer and Lieutenant Blouse, a man of privileged upbringing who manages to cut his own sword hand while practicing but is somewhat smarter than he appears, at least regarding mathematics if not gender issues. (At one point he declares that his squad couldn’t convincingly disguise themselves as women and that he’d have to do it himself.)
Then there’s Sergeant Jackrum, a soldier of unascertainable age and considerable girth, one step ahead of some discharge papers, and who in the tradition of fine NCOs everywhere elides all simple moral concerns and simply tries to keep everyone alive. Mostly Sergeant Jackrum, of course, but if all the sqaddies make it that’s also ideal. Jackrum’s not easy to fool and spots all the women right away, but again in fine NCO tradition, doesn’t really care all that much as long as orders are followed.
Oh, and in the other corner is Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork, who’s been sent with some military forces to win the war on behalf of Zlobenia for the greater commercial benefit. Or in general to do whatever it is he feels necessary to restore order. You may remember that he once solved another war by arresting both armies, and although that may not exactly be an option for him here Vimes also figures out what’s going on pretty quickly and drives a lot of the action.
This book heavily subverts the idea that the world would be better if women did the fighting. Polly notes that it’s always the old women in town who turn out for the public executions and who lead the way in turning over other women to the religious police, and as it turns out to make it in the army the women have to be even better men than the men are. Polly’s squad isn’t the first set of women in the army, and it eventually becomes apparent that quite a few of the thickheaded senior commanders are also women in disguise. With the other gender disguising plot it quickly becomes apparent that women can more easily disguise themselves as men since they live in a men’s world and actually understand it, while the men think they understand women but really have no idea what women really have to go through in life. All of this is done fairly gently but the message is loud and clear.
There’s no peace as long as people are willfully stupid, so the ending of this book is probably a lot more bittersweet than most of Pratchett’s other works are. Nonetheless, things probably improve a little and they at least had relief for a season, so it’s not entirely bad. Still, this turned out to be surprisingly moving and memorable, altogether one of the stronger stand-alone Disc novels.
It’s not really a regiment, as it happens, more of a squad, and a pretty run down and pathetic one at that. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. I mentioned in my review of Snuff that the later Pratchett works tended to lean more towards plausible horrible things as opposed to evil witches or the Fair Folk or whatever, and while Night Watch was probably the tipping point of that process by this point it’s fully in bloom. And while this made aspects of Snuff and I Shall Wear Midnight so realistically horrible that it diminished my enjoyment of them, this is one of the strongest standalone Pratchett novels that I’ve ever read. I’m actually embarrassed for not reading it sooner.
Also, fair warning – this book is nearly 10 years old and any in-depth discussion is going to involve massive spoilers. Don’t keep going unless you’ve already read it or don’t care.
The heroine of this novel is one Polly Perks, who lives in a crappy small town in the Discworld equivalent of Eastern Europe. Her nation, Borogravia, is provincial and constantly at war with its neighboring small countries over one thing and another, particularly religion, with which Borogravia is heavily afflicted. Their deity, Nuggan, has a living testament which is gradually declaring more and more things to be Abominations; going beyond typical stuff like women wearing trousers and other sorts of traditional bugbears into the deranged, such as forbidding jigsaw puzzles, crop rotation, rocks, and the color blue. It’s mentioned that since basically everything is an Abomination that daily life is something of a series of overlooking things and technicalities.
They’ve also got something like Salic law there, so Polly can’t inherit the tavern which is the only thing of note her father possesses (her mother’s dead). There’s an older brother, who is kind and somewhat mentally challenged, but he got drafted into the army and hasn’t been heard from in a while. If Polly’s father dies without the brother around then she’ll be either on the street or at the mercy of her worthless drunk uncle – possibly both. This is intolerable. Therefore, she resolves to join the army herself, find her brother, and bring him back home by any means necessary, and be damned to the fact that this is also an Abomination. So she goes to the next town to enlist and finds out that she passes for a male just fine, possibly because there aren’t many other young men around left to recruit and all the other recruits are just as skinny and nervous as her. And they also all turn out to be women in disguise too.
I can’t emphasize enough how in control of the narrative Pratchett is here. Borogravia is a crappy country that (probably) started this latest war; nonetheless the individual people are sympathetic without taking that left turn into maudlin. It’s pretty easy to remember that in many traditional books the Borogravians would be the bad guys, and they sort of are; at the same time they may have responsibility but they are not guilty. As such. In addition, the head of Zlobenia, the opponent de jure, is also portrayed as a huge asshole, for instance assuming that all women will be sufficiently impressed with his exalted position to want to sleep with him, and that protests that this is not correct are simply for show. At one point he attempts to molest Polly, who is ‘disguised’ as a male soldier disguised as a barmaid (it’s complicated), and so we’re pretty happy that he gets kicked in the junk and left naked and hogtied in an outhouse. At the same time you are painfully aware that if he succeeded in conquering Borogravia that things would probably be a lot better around there.
Polly’s squadmates are the motley crew you’d expect. Three of them are refugees from a reformatory for Bad Girls (think the Magdalene Laundries, including beatings and sexual assaults); one’s trying to find the soldier who impregnated her and ran off, and then there’s a troll, a vampire, and an Igorina, all of whom have their own motivations for joining the army. The actual males in the squad are a sleazy political informer and Lieutenant Blouse, a man of privileged upbringing who manages to cut his own sword hand while practicing but is somewhat smarter than he appears, at least regarding mathematics if not gender issues. (At one point he declares that his squad couldn’t convincingly disguise themselves as women and that he’d have to do it himself.)
Then there’s Sergeant Jackrum, a soldier of unascertainable age and considerable girth, one step ahead of some discharge papers, and who in the tradition of fine NCOs everywhere elides all simple moral concerns and simply tries to keep everyone alive. Mostly Sergeant Jackrum, of course, but if all the sqaddies make it that’s also ideal. Jackrum’s not easy to fool and spots all the women right away, but again in fine NCO tradition, doesn’t really care all that much as long as orders are followed.
Oh, and in the other corner is Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork, who’s been sent with some military forces to win the war on behalf of Zlobenia for the greater commercial benefit. Or in general to do whatever it is he feels necessary to restore order. You may remember that he once solved another war by arresting both armies, and although that may not exactly be an option for him here Vimes also figures out what’s going on pretty quickly and drives a lot of the action.
This book heavily subverts the idea that the world would be better if women did the fighting. Polly notes that it’s always the old women in town who turn out for the public executions and who lead the way in turning over other women to the religious police, and as it turns out to make it in the army the women have to be even better men than the men are. Polly’s squad isn’t the first set of women in the army, and it eventually becomes apparent that quite a few of the thickheaded senior commanders are also women in disguise. With the other gender disguising plot it quickly becomes apparent that women can more easily disguise themselves as men since they live in a men’s world and actually understand it, while the men think they understand women but really have no idea what women really have to go through in life. All of this is done fairly gently but the message is loud and clear.
There’s no peace as long as people are willfully stupid, so the ending of this book is probably a lot more bittersweet than most of Pratchett’s other works are. Nonetheless, things probably improve a little and they at least had relief for a season, so it’s not entirely bad. Still, this turned out to be surprisingly moving and memorable, altogether one of the stronger stand-alone Disc novels.
Friday, May 18, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, May 7, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
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.
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.
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