This isn’t the first time I’ve had Reynolds up here (I actually think it’s the third, but I don’t really feel like trawling the archives to look at the moment). I generally like his work, although as I believe I’ve said before, sometimes he writes some flat dialogue and occasionally his characters are simply horrible for the sake of being horrible. I’m happy to say that neither of those are especially the case in Century Rain, although as of yet I don’t know if he’s written a truly great novel, except possibly House of Suns.
This one is from 2004, so I’m a little late to the party here. As far as I’m aware, this work doesn’t tie in to any of the universes from his other novels, such as Revelation Space or House of Suns. In fact, I found large parts very refreshing, and something out of the ordinary for what I would have expected from a Reynolds work. A large portion of the novel takes place in 1960s-ish Europe, although it’s a different world than ours. In this particular universe, the German offensive through the Ardennes got blunted and thrown back in 1939, so World War II was over almost before it really began. As a result, the Nazis got overthrown in a military coup and many lives that ended in our world were saved. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Without the ultimate discrediting of the war, there’s still rather a lot of virulent anti-Jewish and nationalist yahoos throughout Europe and they’re beginning to make their bids for power again. And whatever else the war destroyed, it also served as the impetus for a lot of technological change. This world doesn’t have electronic computers, a space program, or the atomic bomb. You might say that sounds all right if you don’t have to worry about ducking and covering, but as it happens it’s sort of a shadowy conspiracy to retard technological development so that it’s easier for a bunch of other humans to conquer it.
The other half of the book takes place in the ruins of the actual Earth we’re familiar with, where the humans that remain are split up into two spacegoing factions due to the accidental destruction of the Earth’s biosphere with rogue nanotechnology and subsequent corruption of most of the data archives of humanity’s history (whether that was also accidental or a deliberate attack is not clear). The Threshers live in near Earth orbit primarily and control access to what’s left of it; they’re more hidebound and avoid the use of nanotechnology. The Slashers live in the outer system and are more hedonistic and somewhat more advanced than the Threshers, made up for by the fact that they’re also more factional. The Slashers control access to the galaxy at large through a mysterious warp gate which was discovered out there, which was apparently made by alien(s) unknown at some point in the distant past. You’d be hard pressed to say that either side is the good guys or the bad guys, since they’ve got something of a nasty history of both hot and cold wars, often resorting to various sorts of doomsday weapons.
This is something of a departure for Reynolds, who often eschews the implausible or the impossible in his work. In this one you’ve got these alien artifacts that do stuff like allow FTL travel or contain entire planets, and although he does try to explain a little bit he mostly just lets them be. So this one is much softer than some of his other works right off the bat. Nonetheless, he does retain the concept that space is big, so the fact that the Slashers can get out into the universe doesn’t really help all that much since there’s not really much out there to do. At least not until they discover that the same mysterious aliens who created the warpgate networks also took a “snapshot” of Earth circa 1936 and put it somewhere out in the universe in a box.
And that’s how the two stories come together. Some of the Slashers think it would be a good idea to wipe out the existing humans on the copied world and then talk real estate with the Threshers. Of course there are a couple of problems with this plan, namely that the Threshers won’t approve of this, secondly that they can’t bring anything sophisticated through the warp gate that leads inside the box, and thirdly that they aren’t sure where exactly the box is. Nonetheless they think there may be ways around these obstacles.
I generally liked this, it was entertaining enough. There are a couple of chase scenes of course, that being something that Reynolds either really likes or just feels like he does well, possibly both, so I figured that would turn up at some point throughout the work. Even though these characters were reasonably well defined and not really at all horrible, I still found myself not quite able to connect with them. The villainous plot is pretty cool but, I don’t know, it didn’t entirely gel for me that a whole planet was really going to be scoured of human life. It seemed like there were much easier ways to do what they wanted to do aside from the mass genocide.
Nonetheless, not bad, some good action scenes and also contemplation. I can’t say that this is my favorite Reynolds work but it’s probably better than some and it didn’t put me off his work either, so definitely worth a look if you like his other stuff.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
John Dies at The End & This Book is Full of Spiders by David Wong
I’ve been meaning to read John Dies at the End for a while but finally got inspired when I found out that it had been optioned and made into a movie directed by Don Coscarelli. Now I’m not going to say that Coscarelli is a great director or anything, but he did direct The Beastmaster and Bubba Ho-Tep, so let’s give him high marks for material at least. (Actually I think Bubba Ho-Tep is a fantastic movie and if you don’t think so then there’s probably something wrong with you. At any rate I think anyone would concede it’s the best movie ever made about Elvis Presley fighting a mummy in an East Texas nursing home.) Also the movie has Paul Giamatti in it, which is pretty cool. I like Giamatti, since he’s in all these solid, award winning films and then he’ll take some role as a crazed gunman or hammy villain or something, it’s clear he just loves to do that stuff.
I guess that’s just tangential to the book itself, which is by David Wong and features David Wong as protagonist, or at least the fictional Wong, since that’s really the pen name of Jason Pargin. He chose the pen name to keep his online writing and personal life separate, but it says so right on the back cover, no breach of trust required. I was familiar with Wong’s writing from cracked.com, and generally consider him one of the stronger (and funnier) writers in the stable over there, one of the others being John Cheese, which isn’t his real name either but is the basis for the fictional John of this book. Anyhow, David Wong.
I had no idea he could write like this.
This is a fantastic debut novel and an excellent seasonal choice, being both silly and scary as hell. Again, I’m not going to say that this is great in every sense of that word, there are some pacing issues and spots where it’s maybe not as tight as it should be – but this is pretty solid. Well done, Wong.
Despite the fact that it is almost entirely unlike Illuminatus! in plot, theme, or structure, that was the comparison my mind kept throwing up while I was reading it. There’s some of the same neo-Lovecraft pastiche, and a lot of similar mind screws, plus stupid puns and low humor. Reading it also gives you the same impression that you’re reading something by some poor guy who has completely lost his mind. It’s immersive in the same way that Illuminatus! is; you’ve got the (perhaps) unreliable narrator who’s telling the story, and they keep going back and maybe what happened is just a little different than what he said the time before, and even though Wong keeps pulling that trick you think you’re on more solid ground than you are. No matter how many rugs he pulls, you figure you’re on the last one. And you never are. Even after I just said that.
There’s also extremely effective use of alternating comedy and horror. You’ve got this poor teenage kid who gets covered in demonic hell worms or something, and he’s shrieking and screaming as they burrow through his skin, and the description could be right out of Steven King. Then it’s over, he’s fine. Okay, he’s possessed by these demons or whatever, but he generally manifests this by going around punching people in the balls for a while, making him pretty low on the threat level and playing for laughs. And then when you’re used to the dick-punching he goes and does something really bad. That’s pretty good storytelling right there.
There’s also just some really effective horror elements throughout, and Wong puts you right in the middle of it. There’s a great part where the fictional Wong comes to in his room after work, but it looks like it’s been ransacked and someone stole his gun, but then it turns out he’s actually holding the gun and the barrel is a little warm and there aren’t as many bullets as there should be in there and if he just came in from the garage he shouldn’t feel like he’s been walking around in the snow outside for half an hour and he’s pretty sure that if he goes out in his tool shed there’s going to be a dead body there. Or when he’s with a guy and told not to look in the mirror, but he does anyway and there’s nobody there, and then the guy starts smiling and comes to choke him to death.
Stuff like that.
The frame story itself is not so great, I guess. Wong is meeting a journalist at a restaurant to tell him about all the crazy stuff he’s gotten mixed up in, which means that we end up hearing the origin story maybe a few more times than strictly necessary. Suffice to say that David and his friend John got the ability to see things Man Wasn’t Meant to See as the result of taking some drugs, or rather a drug, by a wacked-out Rastafarian who probably wasn’t really a Rastafarian, and maybe not even a person. They call the drug “soy sauce”. It isn’t soy sauce. Instead, it unlocks the secrets of the universe. Or kills you. Sometimes both, not necessarily in that order.
In short, I liked it. Funny, scary, well paced and surprisingly literate, it’s a great tale of the supernatural as narrated by a guy who sits around his house eating cheap burritos and playing video games.
I also got the sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders, and that one is head and shoulders better. Wong’s writing is more assured, the plot is tighter without as much screwing around, and it’s both more funny and much scarier. I don’t scare easy, but I actually found myself clenching up a couple of times.
Instead of the more freewheeling narrative of John Dies, this one is more of a coherent narrative about how the town gets infested by invisible, possibly extradimensional spiders that attack people, turn them into zombies and, you know, eat their soft parts and whatnot. I’ve mentioned before that everyone feels compelled to do a zombie story these days and that I’m pretty much sick of it, but this very well may be the best take on the genre that I’ve seen yet. For one thing, the scariest sequence isn’t actually about the zombies, but rather the one where Wong wakes up in a quarantine facility after losing a week of his memories, and then finds that the other inhabitants have been making use of his supernatural abilities to detect which other inmates are infected with the spiders. The prisoners also come into the quarantine in either a red or green jumpsuit and have segregated themselves accordingly, for very little good reason. One of the Reds has the only gun but the Greens have the best territory. Eventually you find out there's more going on than you might have initially imagined, but even then the issues are not necessarily cut and dried. As one of the characters points out, at any point past toddlerhood it's usually not that easy to know who to shoot at.
Like any good zombie story, the zombies aren’t really the issue. Wong wrote a very good article about the monkeysphere at one point; that’s what is going on here. And while the extradimensional parasitic infestation is certainly a problem, it’s really the forces demanding its eradication that get out of hand. It’s actually got a lot of seriously weighty stuff going on regarding social dynamics and the human condition, while still being laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely creepy.
I guess it’s a sequel in the sense that John and Dave are still in it and still basically assholes, but if you’d never read John Dies you’d simply pick the story right up. It’s less of a continuing adventure and more of a stand alone, with a better novel structure to boot. Also back is Dr. Marconi, who I’d say is something of Dave and John’s rival in the supernatural biz, except that he’s educated, poised, wealthy and somehow always wearing a tailored suit, even during the apocalypse. I bet Dave and John would hate him if he wasn’t so awesome. (In the movie I see they cast Clancy Brown in this part, which seems about right; or that guy from the Dos Equis commercials.)
These aren’t perfect, and they’re not for everyone, but I like this blend of low humor and research, so there you go. There aren’t many books that I’ve read that have both explanations for video game logic as well as velvet paintings of Jesus Christ, but here I’ve found one. If you just read one, read This Book is Full of Spiders, but both are worthwhile in their own way. Or if you have a kid that is sleeping excessively, you could try using either as a bedtime story. I guarantee that they won’t be sleeping much after that.
I guess that’s just tangential to the book itself, which is by David Wong and features David Wong as protagonist, or at least the fictional Wong, since that’s really the pen name of Jason Pargin. He chose the pen name to keep his online writing and personal life separate, but it says so right on the back cover, no breach of trust required. I was familiar with Wong’s writing from cracked.com, and generally consider him one of the stronger (and funnier) writers in the stable over there, one of the others being John Cheese, which isn’t his real name either but is the basis for the fictional John of this book. Anyhow, David Wong.
I had no idea he could write like this.
This is a fantastic debut novel and an excellent seasonal choice, being both silly and scary as hell. Again, I’m not going to say that this is great in every sense of that word, there are some pacing issues and spots where it’s maybe not as tight as it should be – but this is pretty solid. Well done, Wong.
Despite the fact that it is almost entirely unlike Illuminatus! in plot, theme, or structure, that was the comparison my mind kept throwing up while I was reading it. There’s some of the same neo-Lovecraft pastiche, and a lot of similar mind screws, plus stupid puns and low humor. Reading it also gives you the same impression that you’re reading something by some poor guy who has completely lost his mind. It’s immersive in the same way that Illuminatus! is; you’ve got the (perhaps) unreliable narrator who’s telling the story, and they keep going back and maybe what happened is just a little different than what he said the time before, and even though Wong keeps pulling that trick you think you’re on more solid ground than you are. No matter how many rugs he pulls, you figure you’re on the last one. And you never are. Even after I just said that.
There’s also extremely effective use of alternating comedy and horror. You’ve got this poor teenage kid who gets covered in demonic hell worms or something, and he’s shrieking and screaming as they burrow through his skin, and the description could be right out of Steven King. Then it’s over, he’s fine. Okay, he’s possessed by these demons or whatever, but he generally manifests this by going around punching people in the balls for a while, making him pretty low on the threat level and playing for laughs. And then when you’re used to the dick-punching he goes and does something really bad. That’s pretty good storytelling right there.
There’s also just some really effective horror elements throughout, and Wong puts you right in the middle of it. There’s a great part where the fictional Wong comes to in his room after work, but it looks like it’s been ransacked and someone stole his gun, but then it turns out he’s actually holding the gun and the barrel is a little warm and there aren’t as many bullets as there should be in there and if he just came in from the garage he shouldn’t feel like he’s been walking around in the snow outside for half an hour and he’s pretty sure that if he goes out in his tool shed there’s going to be a dead body there. Or when he’s with a guy and told not to look in the mirror, but he does anyway and there’s nobody there, and then the guy starts smiling and comes to choke him to death.
Stuff like that.
The frame story itself is not so great, I guess. Wong is meeting a journalist at a restaurant to tell him about all the crazy stuff he’s gotten mixed up in, which means that we end up hearing the origin story maybe a few more times than strictly necessary. Suffice to say that David and his friend John got the ability to see things Man Wasn’t Meant to See as the result of taking some drugs, or rather a drug, by a wacked-out Rastafarian who probably wasn’t really a Rastafarian, and maybe not even a person. They call the drug “soy sauce”. It isn’t soy sauce. Instead, it unlocks the secrets of the universe. Or kills you. Sometimes both, not necessarily in that order.
In short, I liked it. Funny, scary, well paced and surprisingly literate, it’s a great tale of the supernatural as narrated by a guy who sits around his house eating cheap burritos and playing video games.
I also got the sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders, and that one is head and shoulders better. Wong’s writing is more assured, the plot is tighter without as much screwing around, and it’s both more funny and much scarier. I don’t scare easy, but I actually found myself clenching up a couple of times.
Instead of the more freewheeling narrative of John Dies, this one is more of a coherent narrative about how the town gets infested by invisible, possibly extradimensional spiders that attack people, turn them into zombies and, you know, eat their soft parts and whatnot. I’ve mentioned before that everyone feels compelled to do a zombie story these days and that I’m pretty much sick of it, but this very well may be the best take on the genre that I’ve seen yet. For one thing, the scariest sequence isn’t actually about the zombies, but rather the one where Wong wakes up in a quarantine facility after losing a week of his memories, and then finds that the other inhabitants have been making use of his supernatural abilities to detect which other inmates are infected with the spiders. The prisoners also come into the quarantine in either a red or green jumpsuit and have segregated themselves accordingly, for very little good reason. One of the Reds has the only gun but the Greens have the best territory. Eventually you find out there's more going on than you might have initially imagined, but even then the issues are not necessarily cut and dried. As one of the characters points out, at any point past toddlerhood it's usually not that easy to know who to shoot at.
Like any good zombie story, the zombies aren’t really the issue. Wong wrote a very good article about the monkeysphere at one point; that’s what is going on here. And while the extradimensional parasitic infestation is certainly a problem, it’s really the forces demanding its eradication that get out of hand. It’s actually got a lot of seriously weighty stuff going on regarding social dynamics and the human condition, while still being laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely creepy.
I guess it’s a sequel in the sense that John and Dave are still in it and still basically assholes, but if you’d never read John Dies you’d simply pick the story right up. It’s less of a continuing adventure and more of a stand alone, with a better novel structure to boot. Also back is Dr. Marconi, who I’d say is something of Dave and John’s rival in the supernatural biz, except that he’s educated, poised, wealthy and somehow always wearing a tailored suit, even during the apocalypse. I bet Dave and John would hate him if he wasn’t so awesome. (In the movie I see they cast Clancy Brown in this part, which seems about right; or that guy from the Dos Equis commercials.)
These aren’t perfect, and they’re not for everyone, but I like this blend of low humor and research, so there you go. There aren’t many books that I’ve read that have both explanations for video game logic as well as velvet paintings of Jesus Christ, but here I’ve found one. If you just read one, read This Book is Full of Spiders, but both are worthwhile in their own way. Or if you have a kid that is sleeping excessively, you could try using either as a bedtime story. I guarantee that they won’t be sleeping much after that.
Monday, October 22, 2012
The First Emancipator by Andrew Levy
Robert Carter III played in a band with Thomas Jefferson (and sent bill collectors after him a few times too), was active as a patriot during the American Revolution and may very well have been the richest man in Virginia, which would have made him one of the wealthiest men in the newly-fledged United States. He corresponded with a bunch of folks you’ve heard of from history class and would have been widely known by his contemporaries. He also decided to free his nearly five hundred slaves during his lifetime, an event which was the single largest act of manumission in the United States until the Civil War ended slavery in the United States altogether.
So why hasn’t anyone ever heard of him?
Andrew Levy’s analysis of Carter and his times is a fairly masterful work that tries to figure out why he’s a forgotten figure. Levy’s conclusion is that he simply doesn’t fit anyone’s narrative and therefore everyone just sort of nervously shies away from talking about him.
At the risk of painting with a broad brush, let me . . . actually, let’s just get out the broad brush here. You’ve basically got two different pictures of antebellum slavery. One side (the apologetic) portrays it as bad but not too bad; slaves were valuable property after all and the owners had incentive to look after them, slaveholders would have really liked to let their slaves go but just economically couldn’t manage to, and the social mores of the day were different. On the other side (the abolitional) you’ve got a wicked institution that separated families, embraced authoritarianism and cruelty, and was overseen by moral monsters who were perfectly capable of telling right from wrong. Personally, I’d lean more towards the second viewpoint, but the fact is very little that humans do is perfectly crystal clear. (I would also state that given the lack of volunteers to become slaves, this particular area is clearer than most.)
Carter actually wasn’t too likeable, being insulated by his immense wealth from practical concerns and thereby not especially being able to relate to other people, even his peers. This paradoxically helped him out in his later endeavors when he basically didn’t care what his neighbors thought of him, although he did try to space out the manumissions to not cause undue concern. He really loved his wife and they had seventeen children, although many of them didn’t survive. He had a series of religious epiphanies throughout his life, including at least one near-death experience, which caused him to join up with non-established churches like the Baptists at a time where there was an established church in Virginia and such things were Not Done.
In fact, some of the best things in this book simply deal with the sort of everyday life in colonial and immediately post-colonial Virginia that tend to get elided from the history books. Baptist preachers got thrown in jail and beat up but kept on drawing crowds anyway; men and women spent their nights drinking hard and partying harder every single day until the scandals couldn’t be contained. Everyone was suing each other and taking offense at everything all the time.
Anyway, Carter himself was a pretty paradoxical figure. His religious leanings may have made him believe that he was theoretically equal to his slaves, but he never really acted like anyone at all was his equal. Carter may have allowed his slaves to have more autonomy than most other slaveholders did, but he also didn’t really discipline his sons too much for sleeping with the house slaves (although he apparently never did so himself). At some point he did send some of his sons out of Virginia so they wouldn’t be exposed to all the immorality around, and toward the end of his life he ended up leaving himself, eventually being buried in an unmarked grave.
At the same time you really want to commend Carter for what he was doing in deciding to free all his slaves, he never really gave a good explanation for it, treating it more like some task he had to complete rather than a moral crusade. And he was still really, truly rich. It’s not like he gave away everything he owned to end up in penury and he seemed to be personally offended when slaves he freed decided that they would really rather not work for him as freemen any more. This strikes at the heart of why no one really likes to talk about him. To the apologists, he’s a living counterexample to the notion that slaveholders didn’t know better and/or simply couldn’t make it without slavery. To the abolitionists, he never gave any good justifications for his behavior and it didn’t exact a huge personal toll on him, plus he still seemed to have pretty reactionary attitudes.
Shortly after his death, the rules were changed so that manumissions of this sort wouldn’t have been possible any longer. It doesn’t seem that it was a response to him as such, although his contemporaries would have certainly known about it and didn’t exactly approve. There was just a general retrenchment in the slaveholding societies that eventually culminated in the Civil War. It may seem strange to describe a system of slavery as a more gentle time, but Carter hit a particular window where he was able to do some good in an unusual way.
For students of colonial history, this is an engaging story that really humanizes some figures that could use some of that treatment. It raises some bigger questions about modern society that I don’t think it necessarily addresses that well, and some parts do drag a little, but this is one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year.
So why hasn’t anyone ever heard of him?
Andrew Levy’s analysis of Carter and his times is a fairly masterful work that tries to figure out why he’s a forgotten figure. Levy’s conclusion is that he simply doesn’t fit anyone’s narrative and therefore everyone just sort of nervously shies away from talking about him.
At the risk of painting with a broad brush, let me . . . actually, let’s just get out the broad brush here. You’ve basically got two different pictures of antebellum slavery. One side (the apologetic) portrays it as bad but not too bad; slaves were valuable property after all and the owners had incentive to look after them, slaveholders would have really liked to let their slaves go but just economically couldn’t manage to, and the social mores of the day were different. On the other side (the abolitional) you’ve got a wicked institution that separated families, embraced authoritarianism and cruelty, and was overseen by moral monsters who were perfectly capable of telling right from wrong. Personally, I’d lean more towards the second viewpoint, but the fact is very little that humans do is perfectly crystal clear. (I would also state that given the lack of volunteers to become slaves, this particular area is clearer than most.)
Carter actually wasn’t too likeable, being insulated by his immense wealth from practical concerns and thereby not especially being able to relate to other people, even his peers. This paradoxically helped him out in his later endeavors when he basically didn’t care what his neighbors thought of him, although he did try to space out the manumissions to not cause undue concern. He really loved his wife and they had seventeen children, although many of them didn’t survive. He had a series of religious epiphanies throughout his life, including at least one near-death experience, which caused him to join up with non-established churches like the Baptists at a time where there was an established church in Virginia and such things were Not Done.
In fact, some of the best things in this book simply deal with the sort of everyday life in colonial and immediately post-colonial Virginia that tend to get elided from the history books. Baptist preachers got thrown in jail and beat up but kept on drawing crowds anyway; men and women spent their nights drinking hard and partying harder every single day until the scandals couldn’t be contained. Everyone was suing each other and taking offense at everything all the time.
Anyway, Carter himself was a pretty paradoxical figure. His religious leanings may have made him believe that he was theoretically equal to his slaves, but he never really acted like anyone at all was his equal. Carter may have allowed his slaves to have more autonomy than most other slaveholders did, but he also didn’t really discipline his sons too much for sleeping with the house slaves (although he apparently never did so himself). At some point he did send some of his sons out of Virginia so they wouldn’t be exposed to all the immorality around, and toward the end of his life he ended up leaving himself, eventually being buried in an unmarked grave.
At the same time you really want to commend Carter for what he was doing in deciding to free all his slaves, he never really gave a good explanation for it, treating it more like some task he had to complete rather than a moral crusade. And he was still really, truly rich. It’s not like he gave away everything he owned to end up in penury and he seemed to be personally offended when slaves he freed decided that they would really rather not work for him as freemen any more. This strikes at the heart of why no one really likes to talk about him. To the apologists, he’s a living counterexample to the notion that slaveholders didn’t know better and/or simply couldn’t make it without slavery. To the abolitionists, he never gave any good justifications for his behavior and it didn’t exact a huge personal toll on him, plus he still seemed to have pretty reactionary attitudes.
Shortly after his death, the rules were changed so that manumissions of this sort wouldn’t have been possible any longer. It doesn’t seem that it was a response to him as such, although his contemporaries would have certainly known about it and didn’t exactly approve. There was just a general retrenchment in the slaveholding societies that eventually culminated in the Civil War. It may seem strange to describe a system of slavery as a more gentle time, but Carter hit a particular window where he was able to do some good in an unusual way.
For students of colonial history, this is an engaging story that really humanizes some figures that could use some of that treatment. It raises some bigger questions about modern society that I don’t think it necessarily addresses that well, and some parts do drag a little, but this is one of my favorite non-fiction books of the year.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks
T.C. Vilabier’s 26-th String Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, catalog number MW1211 (a.k.a. "The Hydrogen Sonata"), is best played on an instrument informally called the antagonistic elevenstring, which ideally requires the player to have four arms and sit inside the cavity of the instrument itself. One of the protagonists of this novel has had the extra arms fitted so that she can try to get through the piece, which is notorious for its complexity and also for being thoroughly unpleasant to actually listen to. Incidentially, the elevenstring has more than eleven strings. So that’s the sort of thing we’re dealing with here.
If you’re not familiar with the Culture series by Banks, then this being the tenth volume in said series may not be the best place to start. If you are familiar with it, then this one will probably be pleasant enough, but somewhat more insubstantial than some of his other works.
The Culture novels have always been somewhat unique in their actual epic scale. A lot of ostensible galaxy-spanning empires in fiction seem to have a relatively small cast of characters which actually accomplish everything which needs doing. In contrast, the Culture is so vast that even if events are referenced from earlier novels, there tends not to be any overlap in personnel. In fact the galaxy is so big that not even the alien species show up more than once or twice, so it’s not a Federation vs. Klingons kind of thing – each book can introduce whole new problems that you’ve never even heard of before since there’s just so much there. In terms of continuity, this one takes place sometime after Excession and probably sometime before Surface Detail (they mention needing a Contact section which is actually in existence in Surface Detail).
The focus of this novel is on Sublimation, the ultimate end state of most advanced civilizations in Banks’ work, wherein they withdraw from the physical universe we’re familiar with and hang out in higher order dimensions. For all intents and purposes it’s a one way trip. The very, very few entities that do come back find themselves somewhat limited in what they are able to convey about it, but apparently no one ever suggests that it’s a bad idea to go. The Culture is highly suspicious about the whole thing, and it’s not them talking about taking this trip; in this case it is the Gzilt, a humanoid civilization that was actually one of the founding members of the Culture but didn’t join in at the last minute. The reason that the Culture has been down on the idea is that it smacks of coercion; as we discover in this one when a species decides to Sublime it's all over in about an hour after the process begins. The Gzilt have set a time to departure, and they're wrapping up what matters they have left to tend to in the span they have remaining (about three weeks).
In terms of plot structure, this one reminded me a lot of Excession. There’s the cabal of Minds that comes together as an ad-hoc committee to try and solve a potentially high-profile problem (although this cabal is not quite as aggressive or murderous). And let me say that the reason I can’t entirely get behind this book is because of the fact that I considered this story, somewhat like Excession, to be kind of a shaggy dog tale.
I won’t spoil the secret, because that would be unfair. Suffice to say that there is a bit of information out there related to the Gzilt that some of their high-ranking members don’t want known, and will go to pretty extreme lengths to conceal, especially just before the Sublimation. Nonetheless, both the reader and most of the Culture characters have a pretty good idea what the secret is right from the very beginning. When the wild goose chase gets especially frustrating about halfway through, the Minds that are working on the problem actually have a vote as to whether it’s actually worth even trying to figure out the mystery anymore, or if they should just assume they know the score and go back to what they were doing beforehand. The vote comes pretty close to passing. Towards the very end they have another vote regarding whether they should actually make use of what they’d learned or not, and that one sort of sums up what they actually accomplished here. When even the characters are openly questioning whether what they’re doing is actually worth their time, you’ve got to wonder if the story is really going anywhere.
There’s also a fair bit of plot digression, as in Banks’ last couple of Culture novels. You get characters set up, asked to help out in doing something or other, and then their participation abruptly ceases or just sort of peters out without resolution. This can be somewhere between irritating and soul-crushing, depending.
I also have to say that there’s a little bit of a missed opportunity in the subject matter. One of the plot threads centers around an individual who claims that he was actually there at the negotiations which resulted in the formation of the Culture about ten thousand years prior to the events of the novel, a claim which, if true, would make him older than any other Culture citizen (even drones or Minds). I thought we might get some insight around how the Culture actually came together. There have been hints here and there throughout the series about the heartless steel behind the Culture’s space-hippie veneer - even over and beyond the obvious retaliations that they make against those who interfere with them. I've always felt that there was more skullduggery and outright violence behind the Culture’s founding than anyone lets on, and possibly even quite a bit more unpleasantness going behind the scenes in the current Culture era than even Special Circumstances wants to acknowledge. That’s still maybe true, but if so, we don’t find out here. It’s not the Culture’s secret that is at stake, at least this time.
Reviewing the previous paragraphs, I realize that this is all pretty negative stuff, and that’s maybe unfair. I tore right through the book, and generally enjoyed it anyway. Banks is on form here, and there’s a lot of outright humor. This is possibly the outright funniest Culture novel to date, at least in parts. In addition, while there is some occasional grimness, on the whole the work doesn’t dip into the darkness of some of his Culture works where everyone is suffering from ennui and existential despair. Sure, nothing of much consequence happens, but at the same time it’s a pretty entertaining romp. And aside from a cranky old drone and a couple of humans, most of the Culture characters are Minds, who are always more interesting to hear about. There aren’t any characters quite as memorable as the Falling Outside the Usual Moral Constraints from the last one, though the Mistake Not . . . has its moments.
So, summing up, my frustrations with this one are mostly based around the fact that this could have been a great book, but ended up being just okay. Banks is such a good writer that he can get away with a mess of a plot and still have something worth reading. But although I’m happy to see him writing Culture novels again in fairly rapid succession, I do have to wonder if he’s ever going to give his universe a proper challenge. I know it’s hard to surprise the Minds, but still.
If you’re not familiar with the Culture series by Banks, then this being the tenth volume in said series may not be the best place to start. If you are familiar with it, then this one will probably be pleasant enough, but somewhat more insubstantial than some of his other works.
The Culture novels have always been somewhat unique in their actual epic scale. A lot of ostensible galaxy-spanning empires in fiction seem to have a relatively small cast of characters which actually accomplish everything which needs doing. In contrast, the Culture is so vast that even if events are referenced from earlier novels, there tends not to be any overlap in personnel. In fact the galaxy is so big that not even the alien species show up more than once or twice, so it’s not a Federation vs. Klingons kind of thing – each book can introduce whole new problems that you’ve never even heard of before since there’s just so much there. In terms of continuity, this one takes place sometime after Excession and probably sometime before Surface Detail (they mention needing a Contact section which is actually in existence in Surface Detail).
The focus of this novel is on Sublimation, the ultimate end state of most advanced civilizations in Banks’ work, wherein they withdraw from the physical universe we’re familiar with and hang out in higher order dimensions. For all intents and purposes it’s a one way trip. The very, very few entities that do come back find themselves somewhat limited in what they are able to convey about it, but apparently no one ever suggests that it’s a bad idea to go. The Culture is highly suspicious about the whole thing, and it’s not them talking about taking this trip; in this case it is the Gzilt, a humanoid civilization that was actually one of the founding members of the Culture but didn’t join in at the last minute. The reason that the Culture has been down on the idea is that it smacks of coercion; as we discover in this one when a species decides to Sublime it's all over in about an hour after the process begins. The Gzilt have set a time to departure, and they're wrapping up what matters they have left to tend to in the span they have remaining (about three weeks).
In terms of plot structure, this one reminded me a lot of Excession. There’s the cabal of Minds that comes together as an ad-hoc committee to try and solve a potentially high-profile problem (although this cabal is not quite as aggressive or murderous). And let me say that the reason I can’t entirely get behind this book is because of the fact that I considered this story, somewhat like Excession, to be kind of a shaggy dog tale.
I won’t spoil the secret, because that would be unfair. Suffice to say that there is a bit of information out there related to the Gzilt that some of their high-ranking members don’t want known, and will go to pretty extreme lengths to conceal, especially just before the Sublimation. Nonetheless, both the reader and most of the Culture characters have a pretty good idea what the secret is right from the very beginning. When the wild goose chase gets especially frustrating about halfway through, the Minds that are working on the problem actually have a vote as to whether it’s actually worth even trying to figure out the mystery anymore, or if they should just assume they know the score and go back to what they were doing beforehand. The vote comes pretty close to passing. Towards the very end they have another vote regarding whether they should actually make use of what they’d learned or not, and that one sort of sums up what they actually accomplished here. When even the characters are openly questioning whether what they’re doing is actually worth their time, you’ve got to wonder if the story is really going anywhere.
There’s also a fair bit of plot digression, as in Banks’ last couple of Culture novels. You get characters set up, asked to help out in doing something or other, and then their participation abruptly ceases or just sort of peters out without resolution. This can be somewhere between irritating and soul-crushing, depending.
I also have to say that there’s a little bit of a missed opportunity in the subject matter. One of the plot threads centers around an individual who claims that he was actually there at the negotiations which resulted in the formation of the Culture about ten thousand years prior to the events of the novel, a claim which, if true, would make him older than any other Culture citizen (even drones or Minds). I thought we might get some insight around how the Culture actually came together. There have been hints here and there throughout the series about the heartless steel behind the Culture’s space-hippie veneer - even over and beyond the obvious retaliations that they make against those who interfere with them. I've always felt that there was more skullduggery and outright violence behind the Culture’s founding than anyone lets on, and possibly even quite a bit more unpleasantness going behind the scenes in the current Culture era than even Special Circumstances wants to acknowledge. That’s still maybe true, but if so, we don’t find out here. It’s not the Culture’s secret that is at stake, at least this time.
Reviewing the previous paragraphs, I realize that this is all pretty negative stuff, and that’s maybe unfair. I tore right through the book, and generally enjoyed it anyway. Banks is on form here, and there’s a lot of outright humor. This is possibly the outright funniest Culture novel to date, at least in parts. In addition, while there is some occasional grimness, on the whole the work doesn’t dip into the darkness of some of his Culture works where everyone is suffering from ennui and existential despair. Sure, nothing of much consequence happens, but at the same time it’s a pretty entertaining romp. And aside from a cranky old drone and a couple of humans, most of the Culture characters are Minds, who are always more interesting to hear about. There aren’t any characters quite as memorable as the Falling Outside the Usual Moral Constraints from the last one, though the Mistake Not . . . has its moments.
So, summing up, my frustrations with this one are mostly based around the fact that this could have been a great book, but ended up being just okay. Banks is such a good writer that he can get away with a mess of a plot and still have something worth reading. But although I’m happy to see him writing Culture novels again in fairly rapid succession, I do have to wonder if he’s ever going to give his universe a proper challenge. I know it’s hard to surprise the Minds, but still.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Double Cross by Ben Macintyre
I’ve been doing some non-fiction World War II related reading lately; first up is Double Cross by Ben Macintyre, who has apparently written several other books on WWII deception, but none read by me. I heard him discussing this book on NPR about a year ago and noted that it sounded interesting, so when I came across it I picked it up.
It’s generally known that during the war the UK and US had broken the major Axis encryption systems, and most people also know that Britain captured, turned, or invented all the German agents on British soil. So in that respect, writing a new book on the subject seems a little unnecessary. What Macintyre attempts to do here, however, is to tell the personal stories of some of these double agents as well as to try to connect them to the eventual success of the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. In general he succeeds, as this is a well-written, fast paced read with a lot of human interest.
However, while this is a pretty vast subject and I wouldn’t expect a volume of this size to do it justice, I also felt like there was a lot of complexity here that got basically rolled over in the attempt to make the impressive achievements of British intelligence sound even more amazing than they already were.
Through reading several other books on the subject, I’ve come to understand that the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, could charitably be described as “dysfunctional”. What would be a really interesting book would be the post-war memoirs written by Wilhelm Canaris (the Abwehr chief) about what he knew or suspected, but seeing as how he was executed for complicity in plots to kill Hitler, that book doesn’t exist. Actually, a lot of high-up people in the Abwehr met similar fates, and the organization was actually wiped out entirely by the end of the war. Macintyre does mention a memoir written by a mid-level German intelligence officer and is casually dismissive of his claim to have suspected the loyalty of one of his agents; honestly, I think this may be unfair.
One of the most fascinating stories in Double Cross deals with Johnny Jebsen, an Abwehr officer who came over to the British side and spilled the beans on the German agents operating in England. This was both good and bad from the British perspective; it was good because Jebsen was a potential intelligence gold mine, but if Jebsen was a double agent or if he was subsequently arrested, the fact that he’d told British Intelligence who the agents were and they were still operating (since the British already knew who they were and didn’t actually need Jebsen to tell them), then the Germans would be able to determine that their agents were double agents or simply fictitious. So it could be a trap from the get go.
Jebsen did eventually get into trouble, but almost less for his treasonous activities than because of optics. There’d been a high-level Abwehr defection that made the agency look bad and seriously eroded their influence. When Jebsen’s superiors caught wind that he might be defecting too, they took steps against him because if they Abwehr was dissolved it would derail their own plot to kill Hitler. Of course they couldn’t just invite Jebsen into the conspiracy, although he probably would have gone for it. Talk about your wheels within wheels. Nonetheless, for a sort of unreliable and rakish fellow Jebsen ended up being quite the badass, telling his Gestapo torturers that he expected them to provide him a new shirt.
In addition to political machinations, some of the Abwehr officers were skimming payments intended for their agents and had no intention of giving up their gravy train. And for that matter, some intelligence was simply politically impossible in a totalitarian regime and failure was most certainly not looked upon well – might as well simply tell your boss what he wants to hear anyway.
Meeting that sort of perfect storm of corruption and perverse incentives, the British really rose to the occasion and did all kinds of wild stuff. Like many things that occurred in the war, a lot of stuff here would be considered too outlandish for fiction. For instance, Joan Pujol, a man with training in chicken farming, who decided to become a double agent for very little discernible reason and possibly was the most successful of all the World War II spies. Or the Frenchwoman who nearly spilled the Allied invasion plans because she was upset about something which happened to her lap dog.
On the whole I found this to be a very entertaining tale, which I only wish went a little more in depth in some areas. Still, in dealing with unsung heroes of the war, it’s certainly a unique perspective.
It’s generally known that during the war the UK and US had broken the major Axis encryption systems, and most people also know that Britain captured, turned, or invented all the German agents on British soil. So in that respect, writing a new book on the subject seems a little unnecessary. What Macintyre attempts to do here, however, is to tell the personal stories of some of these double agents as well as to try to connect them to the eventual success of the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. In general he succeeds, as this is a well-written, fast paced read with a lot of human interest.
However, while this is a pretty vast subject and I wouldn’t expect a volume of this size to do it justice, I also felt like there was a lot of complexity here that got basically rolled over in the attempt to make the impressive achievements of British intelligence sound even more amazing than they already were.
Through reading several other books on the subject, I’ve come to understand that the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, could charitably be described as “dysfunctional”. What would be a really interesting book would be the post-war memoirs written by Wilhelm Canaris (the Abwehr chief) about what he knew or suspected, but seeing as how he was executed for complicity in plots to kill Hitler, that book doesn’t exist. Actually, a lot of high-up people in the Abwehr met similar fates, and the organization was actually wiped out entirely by the end of the war. Macintyre does mention a memoir written by a mid-level German intelligence officer and is casually dismissive of his claim to have suspected the loyalty of one of his agents; honestly, I think this may be unfair.
One of the most fascinating stories in Double Cross deals with Johnny Jebsen, an Abwehr officer who came over to the British side and spilled the beans on the German agents operating in England. This was both good and bad from the British perspective; it was good because Jebsen was a potential intelligence gold mine, but if Jebsen was a double agent or if he was subsequently arrested, the fact that he’d told British Intelligence who the agents were and they were still operating (since the British already knew who they were and didn’t actually need Jebsen to tell them), then the Germans would be able to determine that their agents were double agents or simply fictitious. So it could be a trap from the get go.
Jebsen did eventually get into trouble, but almost less for his treasonous activities than because of optics. There’d been a high-level Abwehr defection that made the agency look bad and seriously eroded their influence. When Jebsen’s superiors caught wind that he might be defecting too, they took steps against him because if they Abwehr was dissolved it would derail their own plot to kill Hitler. Of course they couldn’t just invite Jebsen into the conspiracy, although he probably would have gone for it. Talk about your wheels within wheels. Nonetheless, for a sort of unreliable and rakish fellow Jebsen ended up being quite the badass, telling his Gestapo torturers that he expected them to provide him a new shirt.
In addition to political machinations, some of the Abwehr officers were skimming payments intended for their agents and had no intention of giving up their gravy train. And for that matter, some intelligence was simply politically impossible in a totalitarian regime and failure was most certainly not looked upon well – might as well simply tell your boss what he wants to hear anyway.
Meeting that sort of perfect storm of corruption and perverse incentives, the British really rose to the occasion and did all kinds of wild stuff. Like many things that occurred in the war, a lot of stuff here would be considered too outlandish for fiction. For instance, Joan Pujol, a man with training in chicken farming, who decided to become a double agent for very little discernible reason and possibly was the most successful of all the World War II spies. Or the Frenchwoman who nearly spilled the Allied invasion plans because she was upset about something which happened to her lap dog.
On the whole I found this to be a very entertaining tale, which I only wish went a little more in depth in some areas. Still, in dealing with unsung heroes of the war, it’s certainly a unique perspective.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Devil Said Bang by Richard Kadrey
This is the fourth book in the Sandman Slim series; I’ve previously looked at Aloha from Hell, the third book, sometime last year, and I said that it was compulsively readable but perhaps not all that great. I also said that I’d be open to the further adventures of Sandman Slim, so here we are. As it happens my opinion is mostly unchanged since the last one, with all the good and bad that this entails.
As something of an aside, I got the Kindle edition of this book and I was fully prepared to condemn it as being practically incomprehensible. It started off pretty good and then went wildly off the rails, with new characters and plotlines appearing out of nowhere, apparently at random. But then I realized that this was a publishing error, where the last third of the book was printed twice and the middle third was completely absent. An e-mail to Amazon support, a patch and a hard reset later and everything was all right. It still sorta messed up my impression of the book though, knowing where we were going to end up throughout the middle section. Sorry Kadrey, I realize that’s not your fault. Still, I ended up wanting to take a mulligan on this one.
Now all that said, as the novel opens our hero Stark is in residence in Hell, where he is (somewhat to his displeasure) in charge. Samael, the previous head honcho, has reconciled with his Creator, and Stark’s angelic other half absconded with the magical doohickey that Stark needs in order to leave. Now it may or may not be better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, I don’t know, but it’s definitely better to reign in Hell than be forced into arena pit fighting in hell for a bunch of psychopathic fallen angels, so there you go. Now in the previous paragraph I said that I felt like stepping back and starting over with this book, and the vibe that I got throughout this one is that Kadrey maybe felt the same way. Over the last three books, Stark managed to accomplish pretty much everything he had in mind, and while he is definitely a strong character he doesn’t exactly scream growth or anything. Making him the Lord of Hell has kind of painted him into a corner, since he’s not a political type.
Therefore, a lot of the Hell sections are pretty slow, where he’s trying to figure out who he can trust, which considering we’re talking about the demons of Hell here is pretty much nobody. About the best that he can do is have a job that no one else particularly wants to do, and the psychology of the denizens of Hell is pretty interesting. (They basically do a bunch of rituals all the time to avoid going stark raving mad.) But Stark’s not really into it, so after a while he finally manages to leave and go back to Earth. Once there he gets involved in a typical (for him) plot involving some magical conspirators, a nigh-invulnerable ghost assassin, and the tantalizing story of how the universe actually got made.
While Stark manages to more or less save the day, a lot of questions are left unanswered here and the end basically puts him back at the status quo of the second novel, rather than progressing. I got the sense that the whole thing was basically a bridge novel to put him back in a position to have “normal” adventures in future volumes, and therefore reacted accordingly. There are some great setpieces here, like when he’s quoting Epicurus on his souped-up Hellion motorcycle, but really this seems like a way to get from the third book to a future sequel and not really all that special in itself. That said, I thought the second book was the best so far so if they’re all going to be like that it’s worth it. Guess I’ll wait and see.
As something of an aside, I got the Kindle edition of this book and I was fully prepared to condemn it as being practically incomprehensible. It started off pretty good and then went wildly off the rails, with new characters and plotlines appearing out of nowhere, apparently at random. But then I realized that this was a publishing error, where the last third of the book was printed twice and the middle third was completely absent. An e-mail to Amazon support, a patch and a hard reset later and everything was all right. It still sorta messed up my impression of the book though, knowing where we were going to end up throughout the middle section. Sorry Kadrey, I realize that’s not your fault. Still, I ended up wanting to take a mulligan on this one.
Now all that said, as the novel opens our hero Stark is in residence in Hell, where he is (somewhat to his displeasure) in charge. Samael, the previous head honcho, has reconciled with his Creator, and Stark’s angelic other half absconded with the magical doohickey that Stark needs in order to leave. Now it may or may not be better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, I don’t know, but it’s definitely better to reign in Hell than be forced into arena pit fighting in hell for a bunch of psychopathic fallen angels, so there you go. Now in the previous paragraph I said that I felt like stepping back and starting over with this book, and the vibe that I got throughout this one is that Kadrey maybe felt the same way. Over the last three books, Stark managed to accomplish pretty much everything he had in mind, and while he is definitely a strong character he doesn’t exactly scream growth or anything. Making him the Lord of Hell has kind of painted him into a corner, since he’s not a political type.
Therefore, a lot of the Hell sections are pretty slow, where he’s trying to figure out who he can trust, which considering we’re talking about the demons of Hell here is pretty much nobody. About the best that he can do is have a job that no one else particularly wants to do, and the psychology of the denizens of Hell is pretty interesting. (They basically do a bunch of rituals all the time to avoid going stark raving mad.) But Stark’s not really into it, so after a while he finally manages to leave and go back to Earth. Once there he gets involved in a typical (for him) plot involving some magical conspirators, a nigh-invulnerable ghost assassin, and the tantalizing story of how the universe actually got made.
While Stark manages to more or less save the day, a lot of questions are left unanswered here and the end basically puts him back at the status quo of the second novel, rather than progressing. I got the sense that the whole thing was basically a bridge novel to put him back in a position to have “normal” adventures in future volumes, and therefore reacted accordingly. There are some great setpieces here, like when he’s quoting Epicurus on his souped-up Hellion motorcycle, but really this seems like a way to get from the third book to a future sequel and not really all that special in itself. That said, I thought the second book was the best so far so if they’re all going to be like that it’s worth it. Guess I’ll wait and see.
Friday, August 17, 2012
Spatterjay Trilogy by Neal Asher
I’ve got a complicated relationship with Neal Asher, which basically boils down to the fact that I keep reading his books although I don’t necessarily like them all that much. (So this is one of those reading relationships, not a personal relationship or anything. I don’t know the man or even that much about him, but after perusing his website at one point I doubt that we’d have all that much in common.) Asher’s got a lot of talent and he’s ridiculously prolific, but sometimes I wish he’d maybe slow it down and do a little more editing. Nonetheless, I remembered liking The Skinner, recently discovered that there were a couple of sequels, and decided to pick up The Voyage of the Sable Keech.
Having done so, I almost immediately put it back down and got a copy of The Skinner to refresh my memory, since it literally picks up as soon as The Skinner ends and it’s been a few years since I read it, and I’ve slept a few times and have a toddler now and don’t necessarily remember absolutely everything I’ve read in the past half decade. You know how it is.
Perhaps I should lead off by noting that Asher’s works are sort of a throwback to an earlier SF era, and are really in the pulp tradition (in the best sense of that word), where men were real men, women were exactly like the men, and horrible alien critters were hostile, befanged, and inexplicably immune to puny human weapons. Many of his novels and short stories are set place in the universe of the Polity, which is a group of human worlds run by mostly-benevolent AIs. The planet Spatterjay, where most of the action of the first two volumes of this trilogy occurs, is not a member of the Polity as such, but there’s a Polity presence and the strong hand of Earth Central is felt even this far out.
Asher likes to write about horrific ecosystems, and the planet Spatterjay is somewhere that you probably wouldn’t want to take the kids for a vacation unless you didn’t like them all that much. The oceans are filled with a series of increasingly large predators so if you fall in then the most positive thing that will happen is that you get eaten whole. If you just get attacked by the smaller carnivorous leeches then you’ll get infected with a virus too, which will make you gradually stronger and basically immortal, but will also have the side effect of transmogrifying you into a grotesque monster if you go too long without eating good old fashioned Earth food.
This of course is basically impossible, that a “virus” could not only infect all these different species on one world, but on completely alien species such as humans, and also on a completely other alien species altogether, the nightmarish Prador. So scientific plausibility is taking a hit here. Also, you've got to take some pretty large grains of salt with everything. The humans infected with the Spatterjay virus call themselves Hoopers, after Jay Hoop, the original human discoverer/colonizer of the place. They also hate Hoop, who was a genocidal pirate who presided over tens of millions of deaths at the behest of evil aliens. Since all the humans who survived his extermination camps hate him and all his associates, it's unclear why they've chosen to honor his name in this way. There are a lot of "huh"? moments like this if you apply three or four brain cells to the narrative.
Nonetheless, The Skinner was pretty much as good as I remembered it. There are a couple of outsiders, Janer and Erlin, each on the planet for different reasons, so they get to have a lot of things explained to them. There’s also a police officer, Sable Keech, who is relentless running down the last of a series of human war criminals from the interstellar conflict with the Prador. He’s single minded in this determination, in fact so single minded that he didn’t let the fact that he got killed seven hundred years before the main events of the novel slow him down much – he’s got a zombie body and keeps what’s left of his brain on a memory crystal. And Janer is actually working as the agent for an intelligent hornet nest. There’s a bunch of Old Captains, humans who have been virally infected for centuries and practically unkillable as a result, a black marketeering war drone, and a prissy artificial intelligence monitoring the planet. And then there’s a Prador who may be losing his mind and has returned to Spatterjay to clean up some loose ends. Chaos ensues.
With all that stuff going on, there’s minimal time for people to talk to each other, which I’m sorry, but is generally a good thing. In The Voyage of the Sable Keech, there’s a lot more conversation going on and it is painful in parts. Asher is very strong when writing action scenes, but all of his characters tend to have very flat affect and talk very strangely. At one point in this book a demagogue is telling a bunch of rowdy people on a boat to go to their quarters because “this is a vessel upon which a crew has to work”, which may look good on paper – although I’d dispute that – but imagining it as something a native English speaker would say in conversation is a little questionable. Also, the various characters rarely “say” anything, although they do leer, sneer, interject, speak ironically, and so forth.
Most of the characters who didn’t die in the first book are back for the second, doing very similar stuff, but mostly spinning their wheels and not accomplishing very much. The main actor is actually a Prador, Vrell, who was given up for dead toward the end of the first novel but actually makes it in this one. In fact, he spends most of the book trying to fix his dead father’s spaceship and there are quite long passages of him doing mechanical repairs and wiring work on fictional spaceship systems. I’m not going to say that this couldn’t be exciting, but here it’s not exciting. And the dialogue is just truly bad.
There were many similar textual issues I had with that second book in the trilogy, almost to the point where I didn’t even bother to read the third one, Orbus, at all. Nonetheless, it was probably a good idea to finish it because the series actually ends up pretty strong, assuming you aren’t looking for thermodynamic plausibility. Pretty much all the characters from the first two novels stay on Spatterjay, and the ones that do come are some of the more distinctive ones (such as the snarky, homicidal war drone). Asher ventures into the present tense for what I believe may be the first time as well, and abandons the clunky conversations of the second novel for what he is best at, a knock down, drag out space battle between a force of giant monsters and some other, smaller monsters. I think that the events somewhat contradict his other Polity novels, but they were fun and that’s what I was looking for by that point anyway.
In short, I’m not 100% sure I’d recommend the entire trilogy, mostly because I didn’t like the second one very much at all, but the first one is actually okay as a stand-alone and it’s some good rollicking pulp SF if you’re into that sort of thing.
Having done so, I almost immediately put it back down and got a copy of The Skinner to refresh my memory, since it literally picks up as soon as The Skinner ends and it’s been a few years since I read it, and I’ve slept a few times and have a toddler now and don’t necessarily remember absolutely everything I’ve read in the past half decade. You know how it is.
Perhaps I should lead off by noting that Asher’s works are sort of a throwback to an earlier SF era, and are really in the pulp tradition (in the best sense of that word), where men were real men, women were exactly like the men, and horrible alien critters were hostile, befanged, and inexplicably immune to puny human weapons. Many of his novels and short stories are set place in the universe of the Polity, which is a group of human worlds run by mostly-benevolent AIs. The planet Spatterjay, where most of the action of the first two volumes of this trilogy occurs, is not a member of the Polity as such, but there’s a Polity presence and the strong hand of Earth Central is felt even this far out.
Asher likes to write about horrific ecosystems, and the planet Spatterjay is somewhere that you probably wouldn’t want to take the kids for a vacation unless you didn’t like them all that much. The oceans are filled with a series of increasingly large predators so if you fall in then the most positive thing that will happen is that you get eaten whole. If you just get attacked by the smaller carnivorous leeches then you’ll get infected with a virus too, which will make you gradually stronger and basically immortal, but will also have the side effect of transmogrifying you into a grotesque monster if you go too long without eating good old fashioned Earth food.
This of course is basically impossible, that a “virus” could not only infect all these different species on one world, but on completely alien species such as humans, and also on a completely other alien species altogether, the nightmarish Prador. So scientific plausibility is taking a hit here. Also, you've got to take some pretty large grains of salt with everything. The humans infected with the Spatterjay virus call themselves Hoopers, after Jay Hoop, the original human discoverer/colonizer of the place. They also hate Hoop, who was a genocidal pirate who presided over tens of millions of deaths at the behest of evil aliens. Since all the humans who survived his extermination camps hate him and all his associates, it's unclear why they've chosen to honor his name in this way. There are a lot of "huh"? moments like this if you apply three or four brain cells to the narrative.
Nonetheless, The Skinner was pretty much as good as I remembered it. There are a couple of outsiders, Janer and Erlin, each on the planet for different reasons, so they get to have a lot of things explained to them. There’s also a police officer, Sable Keech, who is relentless running down the last of a series of human war criminals from the interstellar conflict with the Prador. He’s single minded in this determination, in fact so single minded that he didn’t let the fact that he got killed seven hundred years before the main events of the novel slow him down much – he’s got a zombie body and keeps what’s left of his brain on a memory crystal. And Janer is actually working as the agent for an intelligent hornet nest. There’s a bunch of Old Captains, humans who have been virally infected for centuries and practically unkillable as a result, a black marketeering war drone, and a prissy artificial intelligence monitoring the planet. And then there’s a Prador who may be losing his mind and has returned to Spatterjay to clean up some loose ends. Chaos ensues.
With all that stuff going on, there’s minimal time for people to talk to each other, which I’m sorry, but is generally a good thing. In The Voyage of the Sable Keech, there’s a lot more conversation going on and it is painful in parts. Asher is very strong when writing action scenes, but all of his characters tend to have very flat affect and talk very strangely. At one point in this book a demagogue is telling a bunch of rowdy people on a boat to go to their quarters because “this is a vessel upon which a crew has to work”, which may look good on paper – although I’d dispute that – but imagining it as something a native English speaker would say in conversation is a little questionable. Also, the various characters rarely “say” anything, although they do leer, sneer, interject, speak ironically, and so forth.
Most of the characters who didn’t die in the first book are back for the second, doing very similar stuff, but mostly spinning their wheels and not accomplishing very much. The main actor is actually a Prador, Vrell, who was given up for dead toward the end of the first novel but actually makes it in this one. In fact, he spends most of the book trying to fix his dead father’s spaceship and there are quite long passages of him doing mechanical repairs and wiring work on fictional spaceship systems. I’m not going to say that this couldn’t be exciting, but here it’s not exciting. And the dialogue is just truly bad.
There were many similar textual issues I had with that second book in the trilogy, almost to the point where I didn’t even bother to read the third one, Orbus, at all. Nonetheless, it was probably a good idea to finish it because the series actually ends up pretty strong, assuming you aren’t looking for thermodynamic plausibility. Pretty much all the characters from the first two novels stay on Spatterjay, and the ones that do come are some of the more distinctive ones (such as the snarky, homicidal war drone). Asher ventures into the present tense for what I believe may be the first time as well, and abandons the clunky conversations of the second novel for what he is best at, a knock down, drag out space battle between a force of giant monsters and some other, smaller monsters. I think that the events somewhat contradict his other Polity novels, but they were fun and that’s what I was looking for by that point anyway.
In short, I’m not 100% sure I’d recommend the entire trilogy, mostly because I didn’t like the second one very much at all, but the first one is actually okay as a stand-alone and it’s some good rollicking pulp SF if you’re into that sort of thing.
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