Ace, 2010, 312 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-441-01867-3

There are books I look forward to, and then there are new books by Charles Stross.  From the moment I saw The Fuller Memorandum in my local bookstore (a few days ahead of its official publication date), I knew that the rest of my day would revolve around finishing the book.  As an excuse to pull up a comfortable chair, a jug of ice tea and read uninterrupted for a few hours, I couldn’t have asked for anything better: I consider Stross’ two previous Laundry Files novels to be among the most enjoyable Science Fiction books of the past decade, and they’re only a part of why he’s one of the best SF authors working at the moment.

Initially launched at Golden Gryphon with The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue, Stross’ Laundry Files series blends together an unusual mixture of geeky humor, lovecraftian horror and espionage thrills.  Narrator Bob Howard starts as a geek whose explorations of higher mathematics landed him an irrevocable job within a British secret agency dedicated to protecting the world against para-dimensional Evil Ones.  The ideal target audience for this series is equally able to giggle at UNIX jokes, feel the vertiginous awe at alien horrors and appreciate the twists of spy-novel pastiches.  In short, the target audience looks a lot like me, and part of why I like the Laundry Files novels so much is the knowledge that I’m catching references that others aren’t –and missing out on quite a few as well.  (SF fans will be pleased to see The Fuller Memorandum nod briefly at David Langford, and give a much more substantial homage to Mike Ford.  Other chuckles include Bob’s weakness against shiny Apple products, and the real reason why the Laundry is so hilariously paranoid about paperclip requisitions.)

Still, the most interesting thing about The Fuller Memorandum as an entry in The Laundry Files is how it pivots Bob Howard’s adventures from two loosely connected larks to a much longer sustained series.  The narration is darker, the action stays close to the Laundry’s London HQ, Howard is physically damaged by the events of the volume and we’re starting to see how a number of threads are starting to fit together.  Many of them concern the terrifying Case Nightmare Green mentioned almost as a throwaway in the previous volumes, and that’s no laughing matter.  Among The Fuller Memorandum’s big revelations is the true identity of Angleton, and that has a number of unpleasant implications for the rest of the series as well.  Perhaps more significantly, it’s a volume that definitely exists as a part of a series: While The Jennifer Morgue could be enjoyed on its own as a Fleming/Bond parody, the Anthony-Price-inspired The Fuller Memorandum does its best to provide essential context but fits better in the continuity of the Laundry Files.

For instance, Howard’s growth as a narrator is best appreciated by those who have seen him discover the terrors out there during The Atrocity Archives and lose quite a bit more of his innocence during The Jennifer Morgue.  By the time this third volume ends, Bob has become something… very different and considerably more dangerous.  His relationship with now-wife Mo is further tested, and even his place as a narrator of the series isn’t quite so secure: Thanks to an elegant narrative sleigh-of-hand, Stross gradually trains us to be less reliant upon Bob’s first-person narration and that shift of perspective proves essential during the three-ring circus that is the climax of the novel.  The result, along with a far darker outlook on the universe of the series despite a just-as-light narration, is reminiscent of Stross’ other Merchant Princes series in how it chips away at the foundations of the series, and trends toward ever-grimmer plot developments.

The result is that even if The Fuller Memorandum doesn’t quite manage the kicks-per-page density of its predecessors, it’s very satisfying and lays down the groundwork for a promising series without locking the author in a repeating pattern.  Case Nightmare Green provides an anchor point for the next few volumes –and if Stross’ past stories are an indication, we may get a truly wide-screen apocalypse by the time the series reaches a conclusion.  Which is why, as I finally let go of the book after a pleasant afternoon of uninterrupted reading, I am satisfied but barely satiated by this third entry in the Laudry Files series.  Stross hasn’t even finished writing The Apocalypse Codex yet, and already I can’t wait for it.

Tags: Charles Stross
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Tor, 2009, 413 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1971-5

We’re all familiar with the disappointment when a book we were primed to like doesn’t live up to expectations.  But what about the surprise when a book that didn’t look all that good turns out to be quite a bit better than expected?

I steeled myself before reading Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock.  Even though I quite like most of what Wilson writes, the recent duds of Axis and the not-growing-any-fainter trauma of Darwinia temper certitudes about any new book of his.  Then there’s the fact that Julian Comstock is an expansion of a previous novella that had left me cold, along with my general lack of enthusiasm for post-apocalyptic futures.  None of this amounted to any burning desire to read the book, which helps explain why it was the last of this year’s Hugo-nominated slate to be taken off my shelves.

Most of my apprehensions were justified: Julian Comstock is, after all, an exercise in using a Science Fiction framework to tell another kind of story.  Set in a post-apocalyptic 2170s where America (and presumably much of the world) has regressed to late-nineteenth-century levels of technology and political sophistication, Wilson’s novel is really an old-fashioned Victorian adventure set in a future engineered to foster those kinds of stories.  Any attempt to criticize the world-building, the regression of current social values and the almost-complete lack of technology beyond 1870s sophistication takes a back seat to the realization that Wilson is manipulating his future to tell a story, not writing a dour prescription for everyone foolish enough to ride in an SUV.

It helps a lot that the story is told in a sympathetic faux-naif style that makes even the cruellest deprivations sound like just another character-building obstacle.  Julian Comstock may be the hero of the novel, but it’s being told by Adam Hazzard, a young man with literary ambitions who rides alongside his friend “Julian Conqueror” as major events happen to them both.  The style, entertaining and funny, polishes a depressing setting into a far more interesting second-level read.  This blend of ironic narration and bleak world-building is what prevents Julian Comstock from falling prey to the same air of déjà-vu that makes other earnestly catastrophic books so unpleasant to read –I’m looking at you, Hugo-nominated The Windup Girl.  For a future in which most of us would be condemned as heretics, it’s a surprisingly charming and funny novel.

So it is that within pages of starting Julian Comstock, I found myself unexplainably enthralled by the power of its prose, slowing down my usual reading speed in order to appreciate the subtleties of the sly humour, offhand references to hideous bits of future history and stone-faced put-downs of contemporary values (“Business Men, Atheists, Harlots and Automobiles” [P.211])  There’s nothing fun about much of Julian Comstock’s world, but the adventures narrated are gripping, and faithfully follow the form of classic adventure novels.  The story spends a bit of time in Montréal (with funny snippets of French) before setting out to the Saguenay and Newfoundland after a detour in New York.  In the background, weighty issues of political infighting, dynastic succession and church/state conflict play out: It’s quite a balancing act to put those into an otherwise light adventure of wartime heroics and coming-of-age discoveries.

But balance and subtlety are, after all, what Wilson does best, and the result this time around is an odd novel that dares to do things that others wouldn’t even consider.  There are allusions here to historical figures and genre literature that I’m ill-equipped to evaluate, but those won’t slow down readers who suspect nothing about Julian the Apostle and William Taylor Adams.  It’s also, again in the Wilson tradition, quite a bit different from anything he’s done before.  And while I don’t quite love the result (see above regarding residual concerns about the world-building), I respect it quite a bit more than I expected from early reports about the novel.  Considering a 2010 Hugo Best Novel nominee slate dominated by books with significant problems, Julian Comstock is the best-rounded of them all, with the added advantage of considerable charm.  Guess where my vote is going?

Tags: Robert Charles Wilson
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Tor, 2009, 416 pages, C$20.50 pb, ISBN 978-0-7653-1841-1

Anyone going to SF conventions this year has realized that the most popular costume themes of 2010 are zombies and steampunk.  Everyone loves zombies!  Everyone loves steampunk!  What if you tried combining both?  Ah, the possibilities…!

So it is that Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker takes place in an alternate 1870s Seattle where, sixteen years earlier, a mad science experiment has led to the release of noxious gases transforming people into… zombies.  The city core has been walled-up, but the zombies remain.  As the story begins, the teenage son of the scientist determined to uncover the truth about his father sets out to explore the walled-up city; his mother quickly follows, pursued by a healthy dose of swashbuckling adventure.  Zeppelins, zombies, mad scientists and post-apocalyptic landscapes are soon involved.

There are probably no more back-handed compliments as “fans of this stuff will like it”, but that’s still a pretty accurate reflection of what I’m left thinking at the end of the novel.

I should start by admitting that I have no particular affection for steampunk, either in content or form.  Content-wise, steampunk is a case of arrested technological development: There’s a reason why we got rid of (messy, unwieldy, dangerous) steam technology as soon as we found something better.  It doesn’t help that recent attempts to justify worlds in which Victorian technology endures are usually closer to contrived wish-fulfillment fantasy that any kind of reasonable SF.  I’m marginally more sympathetic to the aesthetics of steampunk, but my own preferences run along the clean neat lines of Apple/IKEA.  That leaves us with steampunk’s considerable potential as criticism of Victorian or contemporary social attitudes, but that aspect usually gets short thrift in the recent steampunk revival.  Add to that the idea of steampunk as a bandwagon and you’ll find me on the outside of the party, wondering when it will move on to something new.

Also: Zombies?  I’ve seen enough of them for the next ten years.  Played-out.  Give me something else.

But it’s a disservice to reduce Boneshaker to its simplest zeppelin/zombies components.  The raison d’être of the book is adventure, and I shouldn’t begrudge anyone their fun in riding hot-air machines to blow up the un-dead.  Cherie Priest is obviously having fun playing in the catacombs of Seattle and scratching a few irresistible creative itches.  If it doesn’t happen to run along my own obsessions, well, at least I can recognize the fun being had here.  My indifference to the result isn’t a reason not to mention the strong female protagonist (maternal action heroines are a rarity, and this one should be celebrated), the attention to racial diversity and the overall maturity of the prose.

On the other hand, maybe there’s an issue here if the novel hasn’t managed to reach out of its intended constituency.  At 416 pages, the book takes forever to get going and advance just as slowly once it has set up its plot.  The many peripheral characters could have been tightened, some of the early scene-setting is blunt to the point of being obvious (Oh, hello Mister Journalist; let me tell you everything readers need to know.) and the epilogue only reinforces how little has actually happened by the end of the novel.  (This may be explained by an announced sequel.)

It all amounts to a book that feels considerably less substantial than I could have wished for, which wouldn’t have been a problem if it had somehow managed to reach one of my own pet passions.  But Boneshaker remains what it wants to be, and not a lot more.  I can hear readers squeee in satisfaction at the result and am happy that they’re having as much fun as I do when I read a novel that does manage to hit my own squeee-points.  But I won’t feign enthusiasm either for something that leaves me curiously unsatisfied.

(One final note, so petty it shouldn’t even be mentioned except for the significant annoyance factor: Whoever at Tor thought that it would be a good idea to print this book in brown ink may not have spent enough time on public transit, where imperfect fluorescent lighting leads to a scatologically delightful brown-on-yellow low-contrast reading experience.  Don’t do that again.)

Tags: Cherie Priest
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Night Shade Books, 2009, 361 pages, $24.95 hc, ISBN 978-1-59780-157-7

Two definitions submitted for your consideration:

• Spring-loaded cat: In horror movies, a moment during which audience and characters alike are momentarily horrified by the sudden appearance of what turns out to be a cat.  Essentially: a cheap scare.
• Spring-powered future: In science-fiction novels, a moment during which the reader realizes the hollowness of a dystopian future thanks to a telling detail that turns out to be nonsense.  Essentially: a cheap scare.

Over the past few years, Paolo Bacigalupi has become the hot new Science Fiction writer of the moment.  A string of Hugo nominations for dour and depressing short stories paved the way, but in 2010 he finally hit the big time thanks to Nebula and Locus Awards for his first novel The Windup Girl (set in the same world as many of his short stories), along with a Hugo nomination for the same novel.  As I write this, he is the odds-on favourite to win the award.

It’s probably impossible to discuss Bacigalupi’s stature in the Science Fiction field without dwelling on the fact that the genre, as a whole, has grown much bleaker in the past decade.  Year’s Best SF anthologies filled with catastrophe stories, a fascination for fascism and environmental collapses, as well as a sharp uptick in both post-apocalyptic stories (often with zombies) and retro-looking steampunk are some signs of the times.  In this context, Bacigalupi’s bleak post-peak-oil stories and depressing themes fit with the contemporary tune of the genre.

Being temperamentally opposed to gratuitously downbeat futures, I had no plans to read The Windup Girl until it swept the awards raffles.  I did so out of duty, and mention this so no one gets any false ideas about my prejudices going into the novel.  The best that I can report is that Bacigalupi’s first novel is exactly what it attempts to do, and isn’t uninteresting to read.  Alas, it’s also a pile of nonsense that never engaged my suspension of disbelief.

The problems start early on: In The Windup Girl’s post-oil Thailand, humanity is forced to scrounge for energy sources having conveniently forgotten all about nuclear power.  So much so that we’re asked to believe in a “kink-spring the size of [a] fist that hold a gigajoule of power” [P.5]  Except that such a gadget is impossible: I had been warned about those magical springs by other savvier readers, but elementary calculations confirm how ludicrous an idea this is:  A gigajoule of power is equivalent to about 26.5 litres of oil, and would be enough to send almost 20 kilograms in geostationary orbit.  (Thank you Wikipedia.)  You can’t stuff that amount of energy in fist-sized metal springs, no matter the amount of hand-waving about revolutionary coating: the only way to get that type of energy density would be with a fist-sized fusion reactor.  But impossible springs charged through inefficient animal labour are only a symptom of bigger world-building problems.  This is a book that features bioengineering good enough to synthesize quasi-human characters, but nothing like biofuel-producing algae.  A book in which zeppelin shipping is somehow cheaper than barges.  A book in which bioengineered plagues that somehow escape national retribution co-exist with carbon taxes that are paid because (one presumes) national retribution still works pretty well.  Other contradictions multiply, but I would simply be repeating myself:  Coherent world-building, obviously, is best reserved for optimistic people.  Then again, I have higher standards for unreasonably pessimistic political viewpoints with which I disagree.

Not that the thin coherence of this bleak future is any surprise.  Bacigalupi has obviously tricked the deck in favour of his preferred outcome (which, to repeat, would be that we’re doomed, doomed, doomed) and written a novel around this thesis.  If humanity was as stupid as it’s made to be in The Windup Girl, then it would deserve to die.  Anyone who needs convincing only has to make it to the grim end of the book, which manages to pull off a downbeat ending out of a resolution that could have gone otherwise.  Oppressors and victims jostle for attention as characters, and it’s no accident if the most sympathetic of them is taken out early on.  The titular character’s role is to suffer abuse until she can’t take it any more… and given the leisurely pacing of the book, that means a lot of abuse.

This being said, readers who enjoy depressive episodes and bleak visions of the future will be charmed by the novel, in part because despite its other faults, it’s decently written and manages to fulfill every single one of its own objectives.  The prose is above-average for a genre that values simplicity, and some of the dramatic sequences have a good narrative kick to them.  (Great cover, too.)

Still, this is a novel that is carried by the quirks of our time, and will suffer for them as well.  Readers with long memories may recall a similar vogue in downbeat eco-catastrophism in the seventies –those novels haven’t aged very well, and despite the success that The Windup Girl may enjoy at the moment, I doubt that it will survive as freshly in a decade or so.  (About the time we will all go “Hey, remember the fuss about peak oil?  Wasn’t that a lot of short-sighted panic?”)  The Windup Girl is a novel of its time, but then again our times suck.

Tags: Paolo Bacigalupi
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Viking, 2009, 356 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-670-06741-1

[The usual disclaimer: I’ve known Robert J. Sawyer since 1995.  He knows me well enough to know that I take it as a compliment when he teases me in front of a crowd at one of his book launches.]

Every time I read a Robert J. Sawyer novel, I have to brace myself for frustration.

I know that I’m going to find enough fascinating material to justify reading the novel.  I also know that Sawyer’s writing techniques will run counter to my own preferences.  The usual suspense is whether the fascinating will outweigh the frustrating.  I’m usually left focusing on what’s interesting about any given novel rather than try to balance the positive against the negative.

So it is that the most interesting thing about Wake is its emphasis on its protagonist, a bright blind teenager named Caitlin.  As a budding nerd in the best sense of the word, she’s not completely dissimilar to the middle-aged scientists who usually form the bulk of Sawyer’s protagonists… but her blindness and young age set her apart.  Freshly emigrated from Texas to Waterloo, Caitlin is in many ways a typical high-school girl.  In others, though, she’s a Science Fiction fan’s favourite: an inquisitive geek who suddenly gets a chance to try an experimental procedure that may restore her sight.  Things don’t turn as expected, though, and before long she’s communicating with an entity that lives in the lost packets of the web, a brand-new intelligence who has to learn how to see the world at the same time as Caitlin.

Compared to previous Sawyer novels, what’s different about Wake is the time it spends playing around with a more restrained idea.  In what is almost certainly a symptom of a first volume of a trilogy, this novel explores a relatively limited premise in greater detail, and takes its time in developing its storyline.  It’s not exactly slow, but by the end of the book, not much has actually happened and at least one subplot doesn’t lead anywhere yet.  Readers looking for traditional conflict may have to wait until the sequels.

On the other hand, that pacing allows Sawyer to fully sketch out the process through which Caitlin learns to see, and the precise steps his native web intelligence uses to develop its own consciousness.  It’s not always credible (the reams of colloquial English writing available on the web makes it unlikely that an emergent web intelligence would speak in older public-domain cadences, however amusing the idea) but it occasionally leads to impressive scenes: Caitlin’s vision breakthrough is a fine piece of scene-building, compensating for a number of overdone first-person passages best read using William Shatner’s voice.  (“Being… but not becoming.  No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in the boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception…” [P.1])

Of course, many of Sawyer’s usual tics remain obvious: As with many of his latest novels, it’s deeply stepped into cultural references (both pop and geek) that immediately date it to 2009.  Sawyer’s obvious nationalism also pops up thanks to a heroine whose seemingly sole reason for being American so far in the trilogy is to provide a running commentary on what’s different between the US and Canada.  Furthermore, Sawyer’s tendency to not just make lousy jokes, but explain them immediately betrays a grating amount of hand-holding for readers who may not be familiar with his references.  This, to me, is the most frustrating aspect of Sawyer’s writing these days: I don’t doubt that it’s a conscious set of techniques to appeal to a far larger readership than just the core genre SF readers, but it does make the reading experience far more frustrating for those who are already a step ahead of others.

Still, who am I to complain about techniques that have obviously proven successful?  Sawyer seems to be outselling most of his core-genre colleagues, and earning far more mainstream attention than genre-oriented writers usually get.  He’s also, significantly, earning quite a bit of popular affection within the SF genre community as well –Wake won the Aurora Award, and is now nominated for the Hugo as well.

All of this is a useful reminder that even if Sawyer’s writing style is often annoying enough to send me gnawing on the nearest chill-pill, his core strengths remain unarguable: Intriguing speculations, accessible prose style, optimistic outlook (something that Hugo voters can only appreciate this year) and an addictive quality that makes even frustrated readers coming back for just one more book.  Or two more, as this new trilogy would have it.

Tags: Robert J. Sawyer
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Andrew McMeel, 2007, 338 pages, C$20.99 pb, ISBN 978-0-7407-6366-3

As a reviewer, I’m not sure how I feel knowing that unfavourable reviews will be more popular than favourable ones.  Roger Ebert has made significant contributions to film criticism, but why is it that the first book of his I’ve bought new is a book of the film he hates?  What does that tell me about the value of reviewing in an entertainment-driven world?

Still, such doubts don’t last long once racing through Your Movie Sucks, an anthology of nearly 150 of Roger Ebert’s least-favourite films of 2000-2006 from Battlefield Earth to The Hills Have Eyes.  (For earlier stinkers, refer to Ebert’s similar I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie) The blunt title and Ebert’s hangdog expression cover photo set the stage for seven years of terrible films, each rated one-and-a-half-stars or less.  The selection is generally made of dumb comedies and terrible horror films, but it also has its share of art-house misses, big-budget action stinkers and manipulative dramas.

The opening section of the book has a few of Ebert’s greatest feuds, from the slam-dunk that is his infamous review of Rob Schneider’s Deuce Bigalo: European Gigolo that titles the book (“Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.” [P.xi]), to the spirited exchange after Ebert’s no-star review of the horror film Chaos, to “The Brown Bunny Saga” in which an Ebert pan of a preliminary cut shown at Cannes ends up becoming a three-star review of a much-improved film.

It’s impossible to read through Your Movie Sucks without gaining an appreciation for the elements of a good movie, even if only by opposition to what Ebert describes here.  Movies that have no redeeming qualities past their shock value; movies so ill-conceived that they lower the entire level of moviemaking; movies that don’t work despite their intentions, and movies made for a crass buck rather than any artistic or popular worth.

As it happens, I have been reviewing films fairly consistently during the period covered by the book, and it’s a particular experience to be reminded of films that I hadn’t thought about in years (or, worse, being led to wonder if I had in fact seen said movie before a quick check of my own web site cleared that up.)  It doesn’t prove or even mean anything, but Ebert and I don’t often completely disagree: At most, he’ll hate pieces that I consider to be decent little genre pictures (such as Resident Evil or Behind Enemy Lines).  But even in disagreeing, we often see the same flaws: we just weigh them differently.  (On the other hand, I wouldn’t dare compare “Best movies” list with Ebert.)

As you may expect (and as every reviewer knows), it’s far easier to be cutting, sarcastic and plain-out funny when slamming something worth hating.  So it is that Your Movie Sucks could have been subtitled “More than a hundred of Ebert’s funniest reviews” without missing a beat: There are quite a few gems in his invectives (ah, that Freddy Got Fingered passage about finding the bottom of the barrel and then digging even lower… “This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.” [P.111]) and there’s nothing quite like reading him rip into a film that deserves it: I had forgotten a good chunk of his classic Battlefield Earth review, but reading it again made it all come back.

While the gimmick of the book may wear thin after a while, there’s no denying that it’s interesting enough to read cover-to-cover, and makes great bathroom reading.  Now, to atone for my sins of only paying attention to Ebert’s bad reviews, I have ordered Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert from Amazon.  It seems the very least I can do.

Tags: Roger Ebert
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L.A. Weekly Books, 2002 updated edition of 2001 original, 344 pages, C$19.95 pb, ISBN 0-312-29145-0

If you’ve read one actor’s autobiography, you’ve read them all.  They’re all ghost-written, self-serving and bland enough not to offend any fans, no matter their political or social persuasion.  Dull childhood narrative until the actor gets his first major role; a few plates of photos sandwiched in the middle of the volume; a conclusion that always makes it sound as if success was inevitable and the best is yet to come.  It’s entirely possible that they’re all coming from the same factory, a search-and-replace program being used to insert the proper names, small towns and movie titles

But as Bruce Campbell tells readers in the introduction, If Chins Could Kill isn’t that kind of book.  For one thing, the pictures are generously scattered throughout.  For another, it’s really not boring.  You know how those celebrity biographies are usually dull until they hit the big-time?  Not so here, as Campbell talks about making home movies (with, among others, Sam Raimi), entering the world of theatre, struggling through a variety of menial jobs and raising money for a film that would eventually be known as The Evil Dead.

The shoestring shooting of the film itself is detailed in all of its masochistic glory: A tiny budget and a lengthy backwoods late-fall shoot involving a bunch of nonprofessional actors can only end in painfully amusing anecdotes, and Campbell’s skills as a storyteller get a workout in telling us about fake blood, freezing conditions, an ever-smaller crew and the perils of balancing ambitions versus a budget obtained from dentist investors.  Those who primarily know Campbell as the square-jawed hero of the Evil Dead trilogy will learn a lot more about his role behind the scenes of the films.

But Campbell has the added advantage of being a cult celebrity, which means that his approach in “telling all” is quite a bit closer to ordinary readers than most stratospheric superstars.  His self-effacing charm and constant outsider’s relationship with Hollywood (even today, he lives one state away from Los Angeles) lead him to talk frankly about the meagre financial rewards of acting, the scourge of studio interference and the tradeoffs in the business.  The highlights of the book are the making of the three Evil Dead movies, but there’s a lot of fascinating material about other projects and almost-projects.  His description of shooting the Hercules and Xena TV shows in New Zealand is just as entertaining to read as his big-budget features experiences. (Although he tends to be more scathing in telling us about studio projects from Crimewave to Congo, including his almost-was starring role in The Phantom.)

Campbell’s style is superbly entertaining, unpretentious and has the hallmark of a seasoned raconteur.  There’s seldom a dull moment, and the feel from the book is very different from the usual celebrity “autobiography”.  This being said, there are still a few noteworthy lapses here and there: we know that Campbell doesn’t live near Hollywood, for instance, but the book doesn’t dwell a long time on the reasons that led him to Oregon –or the issues that such a home location presents for him.  But he’s writing to please fans, and the book does tackle most of the subjects that they must have been wondering about.

The autobiography is considerably enhanced by the savvy design of the book, which blends photos, mementoes and diagrams alongside the text.  (As the back-cover claims, “If the book sucks, at least there are gobs of pictures, and they’re not crammed in the middle like all those other actor books.”)  This paperback edition includes a one-year-later afterword about the hardcover’s publicity tour.  Unfortunately, from 2010 the book itself doesn’t have the extra nine years’ hindsight over Campbell’s career, a decade that saw a typical mixture of B-movie roles going from the critical acclaim of Bubba Ho-Tep to the somewhat less successful Alien Apocalypse.  I’m sure that Campbell must have another decade’s worth of stories in him: I’d read a sequel without asking any questions.

Tags: Bruce Campbell
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Harper Collins, 1997, 227 pages, C$28.00 hc, ISBN 0-00-224562-0

As a political junkie working in Ottawa, I’m more interested than most in Canadian politics and the idea of a roman-à-clef describing mid-nineties power struggles in the capital is the kind of thing I’m predisposed to like.  That it comes from one of my favourite political operatives is a bonus… although it wasn’t possible to know that at the time the book hit bookstores twelve years ago.

Party Favours was published in 1997 as from one pseudonymous “Jean Doe”.  It describes a civil war inside the then-reigning Liberal Party of Canada, between the factions of a populist French-Canadian Prime Minister and a scheming “Liberal-in-name-only” upstart who wants to be the PM in lieu of the PM.  Any half-aware Canadian political observer could see that this was a thinly-veiled fictional take on the rivalry between the Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin camp as of the mid-nineties.  Given the novel’s overwhelmingly positive portrait of Prime Minister “Bobby Laurier”, it seemed obvious to most that Party Favours came from a Chrétien loyalist.  But which one?  When it was revealed that “Jean Doe” was none other than the “Prince of Darkness” Warren Kinsella, a Liberal strategist and staunch Chrétien loyalist often compared to the US’s James Carville, few were shocked.

The Canadian political/journalistic complex being so small and vicious, the book was savaged upon publication.  And, in some ways, it deserves its knocks: From a purely narrative viewpoint, Party Favours isn’t all that refined:  An umpteenth political thriller about a semi-innocent protagonist who comes to understand how things truly work in the world, the novel doesn’t break any new grounds nor narrative twists.  Our hero is a likable young journalist who works on a government-shattering scoop, finds love and manages to bring down those who deserve it.  In the conclusion of the story, he is apparently naïve enough to be shocked –shocked!– at the way he has been used by political antagonists… after spending an entire novel cynically explaining the nature of what happens to journalists in Ottawa.  Elsewhere in the book, the narrator takes an actual guided tour of the city to tell us about it (subtle!), large portion of the narrative just give way to exposition and the identity of a mysterious source is so obvious that it’s embarrassing that a mystery is made about it at all.  This is not an accomplished novelist’s masterpiece.

But where Party Favours shine far more brightly is in its insider’s commentary about Ottawa and the people who go there to seek power and/or glory.  Kinsella has a lot of fun taking on lobbyists, journalists and politicians, not to mention public servants in one of the book’s most amusing passages:

“The pools [seen from the airplane] conjured up an image of the classical Ottawa bureaucrat: an overweight white male killing time as an information systems analyst somewhere deep in the shadowed recesses of Statistics Canada, let’s say, scrambling home at 3:30 P.M. every July afternoon to slouch by his pool.  He carried a briefcase, purchased at the Bay, that almost always contained little more than his lunch and the Ottawa Sun.  He drove to and from work in a dented three-year-old Pontiac Sedan.  He voted Liberal. He earned much more than I did.  And he had a swimming pool nestled alongside his suburban split-level, where he and his wife and their offsprings congregated in the muggy Ottawa summer.” [P.16]

Perfection itself.  (And I refuse to tell you how much this description matches me, because it’s too close for comfort.)

The above paragraph being the worst thing in Party Favours about me and my place in the national capital, I was free to enjoy the rest of the novel for what it was: a splendidly entertaining chainsaw job on political Ottawa.  For a country with a vigorous publishing and political industry, it’s surprising that there haven’t been that many political thrillers and satires –although the grants that most Canadian publishers receive from the government may be enough of a cynical answer for that mystery.  Suffice to say that Party Favours in an entertaining book, even when it doesn’t work as a novel: Kinsella had fun writing it, and readers without grudges (and with a good working knowledge of mid-nineties Canadian politics) will enjoy at least good chunks of it.

The added advantage of reading it now is that we now know who, in the great Chrétien/Martin face-off, ultimately won.  Hint: It was the guy who won three successive majorities.

Tags: Ottawa, Warren Kinsella
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Ace, 2010, 303 pages, C$29.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1673-8

When Charles Stross says he’s going to destroy something, believe him.

If The Trade of Queens is notable for something, it’s the finality with which this sixth volume upsets the nice fantasy universe introduced at the beginning of the Merchant Princes series.  As the narrative has moved away from comfort-fantasy elements to a harder-edged techno-thriller mode (not your usual genre-shifting progression!), Stross seems determined to eradicate his starting premise with a vengeance…

…but a more general assessment seems appropriate before touching upon spoilerrific considerations.  As the sixth entry in the Merchant Princes series, and the fourth-and-final volume of the current story arc, The Trade of Queens is pretty much all payoff for the various subplots launched in the series so far: It begins with the nuclear destruction of a large portion of downtown Washington, and then moves on to bigger things as the US government, motivated by the political calculations of a surprisingly influential figure, moves to definitely retaliate against the Gruinmarkt.

As an arc-closing volume, it ties together a number of threads while leaving readers begging for a follow-up a few years down the line.  The most immediate problems are resolved (sometimes less-than-favourably), even though larger issues still have a lot of potential for exploration.  There’s an offhand description of a few new parallel worlds that packs a lot of ominous ideas in a few sentences, but those new universes will have to wait until another volume for exploration, as The Trade of Queens seems justifiably preoccupied with taking care of what’s happening in the known ones.  The techno-thriller tone of the series grows even stronger this time around, as it tackles political fiction and a strong critique of US foreign policy during the past decade.  As a nod to savvier Nobel-winning fans of the series, its thematic underpinning (the “development trap”, or what enables some societies to advance more quickly than others given the availability of superior technology) is even explicitly stated late in the narrative.

Even though Stross has to juggle dozen of characters, a handful of parallel Earths, an apocalyptic scenario and the conclusion of a four-book cycle set in a six-book series, most of the characters of the series get a payoff of sorts.  Miriam finally comes a little bit closer to the forefront as the one who best understands what’s happening and how to react: it helps that she grows more comfortable in the new identity that has been pressed upon her for the last few volumes.  The conclusion is satisfying in a very dark fashion, and it does mark a reasonably comfortable stopping point for readers wondering if they can start reading the series so far.

Now that the entire cycle is available, one notes a weaker third quarter (The Revolution Business) due to overwhelming plot-juggling and a somewhat linear fourth quarter that inexorably leads to its concluding passages.  Still, the overall success of the series is undeniable: I found it impossible to let go and finished most volumes of the series on the same day I began them.  This is delicious high-end SF, smart and compelling.

In more spoiler-laden territory (turn around now if you don’t want to guess), I was gobsmacked at the way Stross goes about destroying the comfortable fantasy universe he could have milked for several more volumes.  Or, as I thought toward the end of The Trade of Queens: Wow, I’ve never even imagined a thermonuclear carpet-bombing before.  The science-fiction fan that I am can’t help but impose a gleeful reading of “fantasy worlds delentia est” over events that upset the nature of this series forever.  For all of the apocalyptic nature of this fourth volume (there’s an affecting side-show description of a major nuclear exchange midway through the book), it’s satisfying in its uncompromising nature… and it helps that a good chunk of the series’ sympathetic characters don’t exactly win, but certainly live to fight another day.  The scathing criticism of the Bush administration mindset is another layer of enjoyment that may not be equally appreciated by US readers, making it all the more amusing for everyone else.

While I wish the second arc of this series would have been delivered as one massive book (which may have helped with some pacing issues), The Trade of Queen is a volume that wraps things up as well as it can, while promising much for an eventual follow-up.  There’s a reason why I look forward to every new Stross book, especially if they leave entire worlds destroyed in their wake.

Tags: Charles Stross
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Ace, 2009, 320 pages, C$27.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1672-1

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: If you’re going to start reading Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series, don’t crack open the first volume unless you know you can get every other book in short order.  Not only is it the kind of addictive storytelling that makes it difficult to stop reading once things get underway, but the combination of high-concept genre-blending, plot twists, large cast of character and complex intrigue makes it essential to keep going as so to keep the entire story alive in our heads.

I am writing this with some experience in the matter: I made the mistake of reading the first four volumes of the series in rapid succession in 2008, marooning me two books away from a satisfying conclusion.  I managed to restrain myself when the fifth volume appeared last year, but now that the sixth is in stores and concludes the series’ current story arc, I had to face the daunting prospect of re-immersing myself in a complex series two years later.

It’s an uphill climb at first, because The Revolution Business picks up briskly after the events of the fourth volume: The Clan of world-travelers previously introduced is besieged by enemies in two different worlds: Stuck in a civil war on a parallel Earth, they’re being viciously hunted down on this side by the US government after a failed attempt at nuclear blackmail by a renegade element.  The already slim chances of negotiation between our heroine Miriam and the elements of the American government charged with tracking down the world-walkers are getting slimmer as Miriam is trapped by the actions of her family and the US discovers that the Clan has stolen six portable nuclear weapons from its military inventory.  Things escalate steadily over the course of the novel until no less than two nuclear bombs are detonated before the last page is over.

After two years away from the series, I won’t try to claim supernatural powers of recognition: It took me about a hundred pages in The Revolution Business to be comfortable once more with the lengthy cast of characters, their multiple agendas and their unfolding plans.  Miriam, the character through which we entered this universe and with whom we spent so much time during the first two volumes of the series, gets very little screen time as Stross is busy moving the various pieces of his plot in place for the conclusion in the next book.  If The Revolution Business has one problem, it’s that it’s very obviously the third quarter of a longer four-book arc and, as such, is stuck in the narrative trap of escalation.  The wild inventiveness of the first three volumes, which introduced one new parallel Earth per book, slows down considerably: this may be Stross’s least idea-driven book so far, so busy is it with the plate-spinning mechanics of storytelling.  In fact, The Revolution Business spends nearly all of its length setting up the fourth volume, and doing so through about a dozen character streams.  Sometimes, it feels as if there is a lot of activity for the characters, but little actual progress in the overall plot.  On the other hand, the payoff is breathtaking: The last paragraph alone kills off one major sympathetic character and destroys a major city.

As you may guess, this isn’t a particularly hopeful passage in the Merchant Princes series.  A cycle that started off as fantasy before being revealed as Science Fiction gets remade in techno-thriller mode as more attention shifts to the American government reaction to the parallel-world intrusions.  As a terrifyingly creepy character takes over the reins of the official response and comes up with increasingly sophisticated devices to replicate the world-traveling capabilities of the Clan, the stakes get higher and higher.  Add to that the evidence of civil war between the Clan and the conservatives of the Gruinmarkt and no wonder this series gets darker at every page.  Some chilling snippets of intercepted conversations hint at even more depressing events to come.

Still, grimness can be exhilarating in Stross’ hands and part of the appeal of the series as it starts winding down is to wonder at how far he’ll push it.  This is an author who has already destroyed the world a few times in other stories: we can justifiably be concerned for his characters as they try to escape from events spinning out of control.  Now that the nuclear genie has been uncorked twice by the end of this volume, it’s anyone’s guess where this will go.  What seems clear is that the narrative arc started in The Hidden Family is ready to wind down, and I defy anyone who’s made it so far in the series not to start reading volume six as soon as they’re done with The Revolution Business.  If you’re about to start reading the series and you don’t have it nearby, don’t tell me I haven’t tried to warn you.

Tags: Charles Stross
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Avonova, 1992 reprint of 1991 original, 290 pages, C$5.50, ISBN 0-380-71876-6

I don’t know much about anything, but one thing I’m starting to understand as an avid reader is that over a sufficiently long time, there isn’t such a thing as “the book that got away”:  Whatever books captured my imagination back when I didn’t have enough money to buy them all keep popping up in the strangest places.  As long as I’m patient enough, chances are that I will end up reading every book whose cover ever struck me as interesting.

So it is that I’ve been fascinated by Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede for a long time, on the sole strength of its title.  Never mind the content of the novel itself and contemplate the title once more.  Isn’t it wonderful?  Isn’t it the kind of title that lodges itself in your brain and pops up occasionally to roll off the tongue?  Can you imagine Christopher Walken gravely intoning “Buddy Holly… is alive… and well… on Ganymede”?  Even if you can’t or won’t imagine such a thing, you at least have to admit that any novel that sports that title is worth a look.

It begins in 1989, as one regular guy named Oliver Vale sets down to watch TV and finds out that all channels are showing the same thing: Buddy Holly, strumming his guitar while telling people that he’s stuck on Ganymede, and that Oliver Vale is the one who can explain why.  Vale takes it in stride: after all, he’s been conceived to the sound of a Buddy Holly song on the radio, at the very same time the singer died in a plane crash.  Raised as a rock-and-roll messiah by a single mom with seemingly crackpot ideas about aliens, Vale knows that he’s not the most stable of people, and his first reaction to the TV broadcast is to congratulate himself on the inflated self-esteem of his hallucinations.  But when the telephone starts to ring, it turns out that all channels around the world are showing the same thing… and that everyone has heard Vale’s name and address.  Now they want answers, and Vale doesn’t have a clue what to tell anyone.

It gets weirder.  Much weirder, what with Vale riding his motorcycle to Buddy Holly’s grave site, being pursued by his own psychotherapist, mobs of unhappy TV viewers, a ruthless enforcer from the FCC, two sets of aliens and a cyborg dog.  (The dog belongs to one of the alien couples, which explains at least one thing.)  Every chapter alternates between Oliver’s first-person narration and third-person viewpoints: the technical juggling of those points of view in portraying the story as it happens is impressive, especially given Vale’s frequent flashbacks to his childhood.

An extended chase sequence set in the American Midwest, Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede is the kind of novel that ends up delivering an experience no one even imagined they wanted.  It’s fun, it’s pleasant to read, it’s inventive and it seldom stops for breath.  The characters are memorable (just wait until you meet Grechen), the prose is delicious and the tone is an unusual blend of light-hearted whimsy, pop nostalgia and a few surprising action scenes.  The lead character manages to be sympathetic despite a grab-bag of issues, something that largely owes to Denton’s affectionate attitude toward his characters.  It ends curiously well.

For a narrative that features a lot of references to fifties rock-and-roll music, Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede is nonetheless accessible to readers who may not recall the era or the music first-hand.  Even the messy conclusion doesn’t do any damage to the impression left by the rest of the story.  The result is an interesting time-capsule of a comic SF novel, something worth reading even today –and a confirmation that the 1991 Campbell jury was on to something when they named it the best Science Fiction novel of the year.

I ended up finding my copy of Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede in a small used bookstore in Winnipeg after nearly 17 years of not-so-assiduous looking, but you don’t have to wait that long: A fact-checking Google trawl ended up revealing not only that a movie adaptation is slated for release sometime soon, but that the entire content of the novel has been freely made available online under Creative Commons licensing.

Tags: Bradley Denton
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Pantheon, 2009, 269 pages, C$27.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-37847-7

Science Fiction comedy is rare partly because it’s difficult to do well.  For every Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a book that even Adams found hard to top), there are ten other guys who think that slapstick in zero-G is enough farce to go around.  The best comic SF comes from setting the strengths of the genre against each other, most frequently by using ridiculous iconoclasm to undermine the more sublime tendencies of SF.  Adams understood this (perfect example: the Babel Fish), and embraced the national British notion that underplaying something is quite a bit more enjoyable than being a buffoon mugging for laughs.

But it’s really unfair to compare anyone to Adams, except when it tells us something about when a story doesn’t work.  As it happens, Michael Rubens’ The Sheriff of Yrnameer does work, but not without a soft reboot, some error-correction and a bit of indulgence.

It took me two attempts to really get into the story.  A first read ended less than fifty pages in, stuck on a complete lack of interest.  Something about a deadbeat adventurer, a debtor who wants to use his body as an incubator and a flurry of tedious detail.  Stop.  Shrug.  Go back in the to-read pile.  Blame the weather.

Things went much better the second time around.  The Sheriff of Yrnameer follows the adventures of an engaging rogue named Cole, who is seriously, unarguably, dangerously in debt.  A temporary reprieve from a very competent bounty-hunter creditor named Kenneth –who can’t wait to find a living body for his eggs and has an ovipositor ready to go past the first indebted eyeball– only buys him enough time to hijack a space freighter and have a few adventures before crash-landing on Yrnameer where he’ll get to help a small town threatened by criminals.

If nothing else, The Sheriff of Yrnameer is competent funny SF: The tone is ridiculous, Rubens plays with a few classic SF concepts (I was particularly fond of the sentient AI who’s too stupid to trip the sentience-destruction routines) and while the laughs are few, the book at least manages to earn a semi-permanent grin.  The narration is charmingly elliptical, slyly undersells the jokes and rarely mugs for attention.  There are a few good characters in the mix, and their interactions become increasingly more important at generating the punch-lines.  Never mind why such a competent bounty-hunter as Kenneth would hang around a dead-end planet for weeks at a time: He gets one of the best lines of the book with “there’s no need to keep saying ‘Hello, Kenneth’ each time you enter a new room.” [P.223]  If the story wraps up a bit bitterly for the hero, there’s always the chance of a sequel to make it up to him.

What the novel doesn’t master so well is sustained build-up.  There are three broad acts to The Sheriff of Yrnameer and each one seems at best semi-linked to each other.  While the first-third setup of Cole’s troubles tortuously leads to a midway sequence set on a training station where corporate drones have been turned into zombies, there’s a clear cut between those first two-third and the last act spent defending a small town from bandits.  It explains why the novel’s sub-genres also keep switching on us: The SF-heavy first scenes eventually lead to horror parody and then to western comedy.  This tendency to punch the reset button every ninety pages weakens the novel by making it a string of disconnected vignettes more than a sustained narrative.

It’s noteworthy that this is a science-fiction comedy novel published outside the usual genre publishers and, as far as I can tell from a casual trawl through blogs, didn’t get much attention from SF genre readers.  There are a few explanations for this (Rubens hails from comedy TV writing, not genre fiction) but no real excuses.  While it’s true that the SF elements in The Sheriff of Yrnameer play off generic devices and so have very little to contribute back to the SF genre discourse, it’s still a fairly entertaining take on elements that should be dear to SF readers.  Still, even though a familiarity with dystopian space operas, egg-laying parasites, corporate zombies and far-west bandits certainly doesn’t hurt, Ruben’s first novel is also a book that should appeal to readers who aren’t necessarily steeped into genre conventions.  No matter how you look at it, it’s a book that reaches its own expectations and delivers a good time along the way.  Not every book can be a new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; sometimes, it’s just fine to make references to it.

Tags: Michael Rubens
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Random House Canada, 2008, 374 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-35696-3

If you don’t like where you live, maybe it’s not you, but where you are that’s the problem.  Go ahead and leave!

That, in a nutshell, is where Richard Florida leads readers with Who’s Your City, a book that not only argues that globalisation makes physical location even more important than ever, but that we should expect to move from one place to another according to our interests, or even our stage in life.

As ideas go, this is relatively uncontroversial.  Alvin Toffler discussed nomadic lifestyles decades ago in The Third Wave, whereas most college-educated North Americans are well-acquainted with the phenomenon of leaving home to go study at post-secondary institutions, and then relocating in yet another city to find gainful employment.  Anyone interested in certain industries knows that the best place for movies is in Los Angeles; that book publishing jobs are in New York, that computer geeks cluster around San Francisco or Boston, that oil executives can opt for either Calgary or Houston, that political wonks end up in Ottawa or Washington.

It takes a few dozen pages of statistics for Florida to make his point, but once he’s done the statistical evidence looks unarguable: Geographical location is crucial even despite modern telecommunications, and the tendency for super-clusters is to become even more specialized as people move to take advantage of this specialization.  In this context, why ignore the evidence that moving to another city may make you happier?  Grab Florida’s evaluation criteria and go pick your city off the menu of available choices!

It doesn’t mean that I have to like his thesis, mind you: In Florida’s jargon, I’m one of those “rooters” who have settled down somewhere and won’t even think of leaving.  I’m pretty happy in the Ottawa area, which combines a right-sized city with easy access to both Montréal and Toronto, with weather I like (yes, even the snow), a close relationship to nature, a well-educated population from which I can easily make friends, and an opportunity-rich environment for my chosen profession.  I’ll let others speculate on how much Ottawa has shaped me versus how much of a fit I would have been for other cities had I been raised elsewhere, but what I know is that the more I travel, the more I find myself coming home knowing why I like it.  I may not be a rooter as much as Ottawa fits my own list of things that I consider essential to my daily happiness; in other words, I may be living Florida’s thesis despite not liking its implications.

My other personal lesson from Who’s Your City is that Florida’s work confirmed a few impressions about why, as a tourist, I liked some cities more than others.  Apparently, if I can’t identify with the urban density of Ottawa (in Denver or Calgary), can’t enjoy the combination of smarts and money (in Boston or San Francisco), can’t benefit from the superlative quality of world-class cities (in New York or London) or can’t see plenty of nature (in Vancouver), then I’m liable to start turning on my host city like I did in Los Angeles, Miami or Winnipeg.  Again, this tends to prove Florida’s work more than I care to admit: Much like people, cities have personalities.

More seriously, I do wish that Florida had spent less time telling people where to move and more time discussing the potential pitfalls of self-segregating urban areas.  We can study Detroit as a dramatic illustration of what happens when smart rich people do pick up and leave for better pastures.  Brain drains are serious business, as is the political stratification caused by the clustering of like-minded people.  Red states, blue states, anyone?  What about well-balanced social classes?  Aren’t the upper-classes always more mobile than the lower ones?  Florida’s “pick up and go” triumphalism is less than useful to people who are either too poor or too stuck in obligations to leave; there is some acknowledgement of all of those issues, but not quite enough when balanced against the latter “Escape Kit” portion of the book that is meant to help readers pick a better city for themselves.

As you may gather from a “review” that’s two-third musings and personal confessions, there is a lot food for thought in Who’s Your City?, which only confirms something that’s already obvious to anyone with friends and family who moved elsewhere.  It’s well-researched (although focused almost exclusively on the US), accessibly written and provocative in its conclusions.  Don’t necessarily start poking at real-estate ads in other states yet, but think about it: What if your city really wasn’t the city for you?

Tags: Richard Florida
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Crown Business, 2010, 279 pages, C$26.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-46374-6

The 37signals blog Signal vs. Noise is an interesting read, one of the few corporate blogs worth reading even if you don’t even want to use the company’s products.  37signals has made its reputation providing simple but well-designed web applications and they take delight in doing thing contrary to fashion.  When competitors offer more features, 37signals offers fewer but makes sure that the ones they have are working as well as their customers want.  They have stayed small, shared their accumulated knowledge widely and focused on their core expertise rather than branch out too quickly.  To put it simply, they do things differently.

So when comes the time to offer advice in the form of a business book, they also do things differently.  Rework weigh in at a slim 27,000 words, padded to 279 pages by use of iconic illustrations, big font size, generous line-leading, wide margins and content chunked in nearly 90 chapters.  (The original length of the book’s first draft was about 59,000 words, we learn at the end of a passage on why it’s better to build half a great product than a complete product with half of what it needs. [P.70])  But don’t dismiss the book because of its size: Rework is about staking counter-intuitive claims and letting minds free to imagine better business models.  A longer, more soundly documented book wouldn’t have been any better.  In some ways, this is a book-sized blog post of ninety counterintuitive ways businesses can improve by rejecting conventional wisdom.  Holding fewer meetings; ignoring the competition; letting customers go; avoiding being a hero; refusing outside investments; ignoring résumés: Rework tells us that everything we think we know about business is wrong.

Such attention-getting claims are, of course, 37signals’ mode of operation.  As long as it has worked once for them, it can become a triumphant new way of doing business from now on.  (Perhaps my favourite story from the book is how when 37signals launched their flagship program Basecamp, they didn’t even have a billing system: “Because the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a thirty-day gap to figure it out. So we used the time before launch to solve more urgent problems that actually mattered on day one.  Day 30 could wait.” [P.93])  Of course, 37signals isn’t an ordinary company.  Free from manufacturing, it can exist as a fully virtual organization, adapt its business process to the online application model and operate on smaller budgets than many other companies.  They don’t conform because they don’t have to conform.  It’s good to take their self-serving advice with a grain of salt.

But then again maybe not a whole salt shaker: While Rework is best enjoyed as 279 pages of bite-size motivation smothered in special counterintuitive sauce, it’s also a thought-provoking collection of ways in which prevailing wisdom can be questioned.  Following all of their advice to the letter is probably disastrous, but by showing ways to think outside the box, Rework’s authors are enabling business thinkers to be less comfortable with the status quo.  Much of their suggestions (“Send people home at 5”, “Forget about formal education”) leads to a better, more respectful workplace that places more value on the individual strengths of each employee.  Rework is also a refreshing business application of the Unix philosophy of “Write programs that do one thing and do it well”, one that runs counter to the kind of corporatism fever that leads to conglomerates doing too many thing not very well.

It’s also very entertaining.  I started reading Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline at roughly the same moment as Rework, and finished Rework before I was done with Senge’s first chapter.  The tone of the book is conversational, compelling, and impossible to put down even though this is a book best read in small doses fit for contemplation.  It’s better not to adopt all of 37signals’ advice in all situations, but with Rework they make an interesting contribution to business culture, and their book will impress even those who can’t stomach most business books.

Tags: David Heinemeier Hansson, Jason Fried
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DC Comics, 2009 re-edition of 2003 series, C$29.99 hc, ISBN 978-1-4012-2425-7

I don’t have much use for the standard superhero comic-book, which is too often an exercise in comfort reading, featuring melodrama that never amounts to much real growth and useless fight scenes thrown in to satisfy fan-boys.  Someone who stops reading a series and picks it up again years later misses out on little: The same archetype will continue to battle it out for as long as there is demand for it… and now that superheroes are big in Hollywood, you can bet that no one wants to upset the moneymaking genre, as narratively stale as it can be.

I’m not completely immune to the genre’s charm (I’ve got too many Batman trade paperbacks on my shelves to claim otherwise), but I won’t pick up superhero stories unless they’re sold at a bargain, they’re particularly striking examples of the form (Identity Crisis) and/or they’re different.  And Superman: Red Son is certainly different enough.  The premise is suggested early on: What if Superman, rather than landing in a Kansas cornfield, had landed on a Soviet farm?  Audaciously blending Cold War history with the DCverse, writer Mark Millar delivers an alternate history that ends up veering far from ours, and reflecting upon Superman’s innate potential for fascism.

It’s quite a change from the usual quasi-moronic goody-two-shoe persona that writers often impose on Superman.  This Man of Steel eventually takes up political power, shamelessly uses friends until their breaking point, has a few significant control issues and ends up remaking the planet to his liking.  Brainiac, Lex Luthor and Lois Lane plays important (and unusual) roles in the story, Batman goes against Superman, we get to feel sorry for Wonder Woman and even the Green Lantern corps makes an intriguing appearance.  On top of everything else, Red Son also ends up being an occasional critique of US imperialism and inner power struggles –Millar, of course, is not American.  Best of all, the ending actually wraps everything together, delivering a resolution, an utopian epilogue and a poignant coda.  For a three-book miniseries, it certainly contains a lot of material, even though some of the fights (most particularly the final one) seem a bit gratuitous.  The artwork is fair, although a bit more consistency would have been helpful –along with a better respect for Batman’s aesthetic preferences (you‘ll understand once you see the hat.)

This vision of Superman is intriguing in part because it plays upon the Superman archetype itself.  A symbol of American power becomes its opponent, and Lex Luthor becomes the noble (and arrogant) genius taking up the task to preserve American Hegemony even as the United States starts seceding.  Millar’s Sickle-and-Hammer Superman also gets free reign to indulge his gift for invention, the genius of which is an aspect of Superman that has often been forgotten in recent incarnations of the character.  After taking up the reins of the Soviet Empire, Superman is free to impose his own version of peace, order and good leadership –as long as it goes through him.

Red Son is also refreshingly told in shades of gray.  Free from years of accumulated history, Soviet Superman makes mistakes, over-coddles the planet and goes up against enemies that are led by pure and honourable motives.  Lex Luthor is a study in genius-level intelligence tainted by easy cruelty, but he ends up doing good despite his methods.  Wonder Woman is destroyed and discarded.  Batman, well, you’ll have to read it to see for yourself.  Despite the somewhat optimistic tone of the story, terrible things happen along the way.  Superman’s always been about power fantasies, but Red Son tackles the flip side of raw unchecked power.

The result is something I wasn’t expecting: A Superman story that manages to make a believer out of a confirmed superhero sceptic.  Superman: Red Son is about as good as superhero comics get, even acknowledging that it gets most of its power from upending what everyone knows about Superman.  The 2009 deluxe edition is serviceable enough and while the end sketches don’t add much, the entire package is a good showcase for a series that is actually worth reprinting in hardcover.  Don’t miss it, even if you think you don’t have any interest in Superman.

Tags: Dave Johnson, Mark Millar
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