The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oops.  Talk about the ultimate kick in the teeth. 

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

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtney Crumrin by Ted Naifeh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Count Zero by William Gibson

I guess this is the red-headed stepchild of the Sprawl trilogy – everyone has heard of Neuromancer and I’d heard of Mona Lisa Overdrive, although I’d never read it.  But this middle volume connects the two and is a pretty good read in its own right, although hadn’t even known about it until poking around some resources for my last blog entry.

But it’s unfortunately not as good as Neuromancer.  Sorry, Mr. Gibson, it’s true at least in this instance.

Right off the bat there are a couple of unique things about this sequel.  First off, it’s set in the same universe approximately twenty years after Neuromancer, but aside from one fairly minor support character (the Finn), there aren’t any of the same human characters involved, and even the Finn doesn’t have a whole lot to say about what went on before.  He wasn't there when the final action went down and he basically says that he knew this group of crazy people who were up to some insane plan and he's not sure how it eventually worked out.  So it’s not the further adventures of Case, Molly, and the Jamaicans.  From my perspective this is a win; sequels have their place but they also lead to sloppiness in some cases.

Structurally this is where Gibson begins to create the meta-plot that he tends to use in his later works.  So instead of one protagonist, this time we’ve got three.  Also as in Gibson’s later works, these three are basically doing their own thing and then these plot threads come together at the end for a resolution.
The three protagonists are:  Turner (no first name given), a mercenary; Marly Krushkova, a disgraced former art gallery owner; and Bobby “Count Zero” Newmark, a wannabe cowboy.

I mentioned in my Neuromancer review that Gibson has a thing for people being approached for Faustian deals, and this is fully matured here.  Marly, in particular, is given a corporate job and an expense account by one Josef Virek, who has a pretty nice setup in cyberspace but in real life is something like the captain in Revelation Space, a big cancerous mass kept alive in some vats.  He’d like to get out of those, if he can.  He’s hired Marly ostensibly to track the location of some unusual artworks, but she doesn’t think that it could realistically be worth what he’s paying her just to find some art.  And of course she is right.

Turner is a mercenary specializing in corporate extractions.  The corporate structure first introduced in Neuromancer is fleshed out here – these companies are fictionalized 1980s Japanese scare-corporations, where you have a job for life, but as a downside have a job for life.  Once you sign up you’re indentured and can’t leave.  Therefore headhunting in this world is a little more intense than meeting for coffee – it’s sort of a paramilitary affair which results in your extraction from one place of business to the protective cocoon of the security forces of your new employer.  In previous jobs Turner is stated to have used truck bombs and gunfights, and it’s not too surprising that someone tries to assassinate him before the events of the novel.  (There are actually quite a few targeted assassination attempts in this novel, which actually suggests why you’d want to use a pay phone this far in the future – when people know where you are they can blow that location up.)  Anyway, Turner’s got a new gig to extract a scientist working at a somewhat shady company named Maas, which has been making astounding biotechnological breakthroughs as a result of a research scientist who wants to leave.  Turner’s got some bad feelings about this job, and of course, for good reason.

Then there’s Count Zero, who is what we would call a script kiddie, got some software from a guy he knows, followed a suggestion to try and hack a particular installation, and nearly gets himself killed with black ICE like an idiot.  He’s saved by a young girl avatar in cyberspace and spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out what’s going on.

Let me say that I actually like the Count.  He’s young, he grew up in a bad part of town, so he’s semiliterate and kind of a dumbass.  Nonetheless by virtue of not dying during his stupid stunt he attracts the attention of some connected and powerful people.  He quickly realizes this, shuts up, and tries to learn something.  He has some cowboying potential, and does make a pretty awesome run toward the end, but he also realizes that he’s out of his depth and is much, much less obnoxious than almost all characters of this archetype are.

I said that there aren’t any human characters that come back.  But the Neuromancer/Wintermute gestalt entity sort of does.  It’s not entirely clear what happened, but the union didn’t stick; instead of separating back into two components, now there are lots of them.  These entities apparently aren’t as powerful as the gestalt, but they also don’t seem to have the limitations that Neuromancer and Wintermute had, in other words they are complete personalities.  In interacting with humans they tend to take on the forms of Voodoo spirits because that’s what our puny minds can comprehend.  People who deal a lot with cyberspace have noticed the changes since the reunification and subsequent split, in that it used to be filled with human data only but now it’s basically an ecosystem with a bunch of crazy non-human oriented stuff flying around.  They don’t like to talk about it with outsiders because it seems crazy and they don’t like to talk about it too much with each other either.  Sort of a trade secret.  There are rumors that you can meet these entities in cyberspace and do deals with them, which is what the cowboys both hope and fear is true.  These spirits are connected with Maas, but their ultimate purpose isn’t exactly a human purpose at all.

I’m pretty sure that I figured out what was going on in this novel and what everyone wanted, but you really have to pay attention in order to keep up here – even more so than in Neuromancer.  Many characters keep their motivations secret, and you just have to infer what they’re up to by what other characters guess they’re trying to do.  It also ends somewhat abruptly, almost in the middle of the resolution – having started Mona Lisa Overdrive, I understand that’s because the third book in the trilogy is more of a direct continuation of this one.  I’m torn about this to an extent.  I don’t need everything spelled out for me, but it also seems like Gibson was experimenting with just how much he could remove and still be coherent, and may have stopped just a little short of the line.  I couldn’t recommend this one to someone without a pretty extensive SF background just because so much is left unsaid.

Nonetheless, Gibson’s writing here is more surefooted and there’s less random action.  It’s definitely worth looking into if you have an interest in cyberpunk at all.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Blast from the past time.  I’m revisiting Neuromancer with Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive next in line, because why not.  I hadn’t read Neuromancer in many years and for whatever reason I’d never read the other two at all, so this seemed like as good a time as any.

Anyway, Neuromancer was Gibson’s first novel and swept all the relevant awards, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick all in the same year, something which hadn’t happened before and I don’t think has happened since (although I could be wrong about that).  Gibson was coming off a pretty promising start writing short stories, so everyone was expecting good stuff from him, and he didn’t disappoint.  Apparently Gibson’s somewhat distanced himself from this work, calling it “adolescent”, which I guess is accurate but maybe a little harsh.  After all, adolescence is the time in your life when you are capable of doing almost anything but before you realize why it’s probably a bad idea to, and some of these things turn out really horrible but others are good things that more reasonable people wouldn’t have thought of.  So it’s not without uses, at any rate.  And of course Gibson’s had a successful career and is continuing to write some pretty good work, so it’s probably pretty frustrating to have everyone consider the very first novel you ever wrote to be the pinnacle of your abilities and always think you’re coming down from there.  But it’s also one of those very, very rare works that is so absolutely foundational that everything which comes afterwards is influenced by it.  There’s nothing written subsequently that hasn’t taken a little bit from it or from something else which did.

Make no mistake, Neuromancer is a little adolescent.  It’s not a model of character development and contains a bunch of random violence and sex scenes which don’t necessarily flow that organically.  One of the things which I found most interesting, though, is the start of the theme which is nearly universal in Gibson’s work, namely the Faustian bargain between someone with a skill and a rich, powerful character who needs something accomplished.  It doesn’t necessarily cost the poor person their soul but that’s generally only because the Mephistopheles character isn’t into something as tawdry as that, having been isolated by their great wealth into finding such petty concerns as of no account.

In any event our hero here is Case, what we’d call a computer hacker but who is called here a console cowboy.  Gibson writes in milieus filled with technology but isn’t really into details of it, apparently being a cowboy requires certain animal cunning, fast reflexes and a good computer but not lots of tedious math classes or algorithm design or anything like that.  And that’s OK, this is literature, not a systems manual.  Your average cowboy enters into the matrix of cyberspace via a neural link and interacts with the data directly, as well as various security systems (ICE).  Like any magical world, screwing up here can actually kill you for real.  Case wasn’t average, he was much better – until he embezzled some money, and his employers generously let him keep it but messed up his ability to enter cyberspace by poisoning him with some sort of neurotoxin.  So he burned through his doubly ill-gotten money in black-market medical clinics trying unsuccessfully to find a cure for his condition, and as the novel opens is in deep with some scary dudes and probably a couple of days or weeks away from being killed as an example to other deadbeats.

So when he’s approached by a fellow by the name of Armitage who says they’ll cure him in return for him performing a job, he doesn’t take too long to sign up.  First fishy sign – Armitage pays for his medical treatment by giving the clinic the technology to actually perform the treatment, which allows them to file a bunch of patents and become world-renowned in neuroscience.  Second fishy sign – after they’re done, Armitage tells Case that while the doctors were in there anyway they implanted more toxin bags, and if Case tries to run he’ll end up right back where he started.  You know, just in case he was having any second thoughts about this.

Also on the team is a “street samurai” going by the name of Molly Millions, who takes something of a liking to Case and sleeps with him for no particular reason (see ‘adolescence’, above).  She’s the muscle of the operation, being filled up with various sorts of combat enhancements.  The three of them also collect a couple of other items and people for the team, all at the behest of their mysterious employer, who is fairly quickly revealed to be an artificial intelligence by the name of Wintermute, who’s trying to boost his intelligence by merging with another artificial intelligence (the titular Neuromancer).  This is strictly against the law.

A couple of words of praise for Wintermute here.  It’s often hard to write characters like aliens and artificial intelligences, things which have (at least) the mental abilities of humans but not necessarily the same sort of perspectives.  Many times these differences are glossed over, but not here.  Wintermute wants this unification because it’s in his programming, he can’t really rationalize it and he doesn’t try to, just says it’s something he has to do.  (Molly says pretty much the same thing about everything she ever does too – claiming it’s just the way she’s wired.  Ooh – symbolism!  Shiny!)  Anyway, Wintermute’s actually kind of funny in a cynical, sociopathic way, even more so because he’s basically got a legitimate gripe against the powers that be which threaten to execute him for trying to increase his intelligence further.  He’s got access to lots of money and resources, so he could try to hire some lawyers to take his case to court, maybe hire a PR firm to make the public think better about AIs in general, something like that.  One of the perks of intelligence is that it gives you options.  But no, instead he goes straight for the shadowy special ops team and physical violence.  His reassurances to Case are, in fact, hilarious.  At one point he is telling Case that everything is all right after he massacres a bunch of cops with robotic gardening equipment.  At another point Wintermute ejects one of his own team members out an airlock into space then tells Case there’s a change in plan, that Case needs to go somewhere and kill a guy and that everything will be fine after that.  There’s also the small side-effect of conversing with Wintermute in cyberspace, namely temporary brain death.  And he concedes that if he succeeds then he will probably cease to exist as he currently does and can’t 100% guarantee that his successor will follow through with the promised payments.  Given all this it’s pretty funny that Wintermute actually expects people to go along with his plans.

But what separates this from a lesser novel is that there’s actually good reason for them to.  Wintermute’s pretty good at predicting people’s reactions and he’s chosen his team not necessarily for their strengths but for their psychological manipulability, something which was much more apparent to me on this reading.  Case is the weak link so Wintermute throws in the extra implanted-toxin-sacs thing; Molly’s easily influenced by her pride, Armitage for plot reasons, one of the characters is dead and entirely predictable.  And so on.

Another spanner in the works is Neuromancer, who is Wintermute’s opposite in most ways.  Wintermute tends to treat people as science projects, dissecting their motivations and manipulating them, but he doesn’t have much of a personality of his own, simply directives and goals.  Neuromancer is capable of running accurate simulations of humans in RAM that grow and change and does have his own personality.  For whatever reason the drive to unify wasn’t programmed into Neuromancer and he’s not really that excited at the idea of being absorbed into some sort of gestalt.  However, while he has the capacity to deal with people far more effectively than Wintermute’s threats and manipulations, he doesn’t have the same sort of ability to directly interfere with events in the so-called-‘real world’.  So his attack, when it comes, is far more subtle than an automatic weed whacker.

For a book that I dogged a little at the beginning for its juvenile tendencies, this book contains quite a bit of this subtlety.  Neuromancer’s psychological attacks are just one element; the whole world is another.  Gibson quite deliberately eschews exposition in most cases and simply lets the characters trade references to things that they’re all quite familiar with.  We know there was some sort of armed conflict between the US and the USSR, which ended with the nominal victory of the latter – there are references to trials of various Pentagon officials afterwards, but the US wasn’t conquered or anything.  (Armitage was a veteran of this conflict.)  Bonn was destroyed by nuclear weapons, presumably in this war.  There were also plagues that exterminated various animal species, particularly horses, although whether this was natural or caused by humans isn’t explained.  And generally, Gibson doesn’t waste words explaining exactly how things are working, it’s expected that the reader will figure it out and can keep up.  Thematically it’s great, since Case has been out of the game for a while and is struggling to catch up too, and the narrative puts you right there with him.

As a product of the 1980s it’s sort of surprising how not-dated this is.  There’s the USSR reference, of course, and a little bit of the scare idea that Japan’s culture would dominate the future, but since Gibson’s more interested in concepts rather than technology as such most of it doesn’t exist in any particular time.  (Possible exceptions – the reference to the sky being the color of TV static, which is now a solid blue, not the grey he’s looking for, and the one actual number given, when Case has three megabytes of stolen RAM, which is portrayed as being something pretty impressive.  I mean, I guess we can just assume there was some pretty astounding data on it, after all they’ve got artificial intelligences running simulated people.)

And in the end it comes to a great climactic showdown aboard a space station where Case argues that they should do something which is probably not a great idea and may kill everyone but at least will accomplish something.  Not such a great argument, perhaps, but against a bored aristocrat insulated by her wealth into a kind of eternal stasis – indeed occasionally the literal kind – perhaps the best persuasion of all.  It also contains a really great wrapup wherein a shuriken isn't used at all as expected and Case finds out the limits of godhood.  Things are, apparently, still things, no matter what you know.

All in all this was a lot better than I remembered it, and definitely deserving of its reputation.  I feel a little bad that I’d never read the sequels, and will be correcting that posthaste.