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.

1. Mmm. Numbers…

According to Google Analytics, the crucial metrics for the month are…

Good news all around; even the increased Bounce Rate and lower Pages/Visits is indicative of more visitors via the search engine.

At the same time, my old-school Urchin stats are still around, and here’s what they are telling me, for comparison’s sake:

Harrumph.  I was about to joke that the decrease in activity must be because of fewer spammers, but as a matter of fact June has been a quiet month on the spam front.

According to Google, here are our ten most popular pages:

Solaris-explained appears unkillable at the top of the ranking, although the more interesting entry here is the review of “Nest of Spies”, given the media attention given to the authors following this month’s back-to-back interest in foreign spying in Canada and G20 security.

Since I know you care, here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors), as provided by the clever gerbils at Google Analytics:

Stability and good news at the same time.

2. Where do these people come from?

According to Google Analytics, here are our main sources of visitors:

(Lingo key: “Organic” is Google’s way of saying that no one has paid for links leading back to christian-sauve.com on those search engines. “Referral” is supposed to be a direct link to this site.)

Anyone doubting that the increase in this month’s numbers came mostly from Google indexing the new XML sitemap should take a look at the table above.

Google now gives 12,800 results for “Christian Sauvé”, up sharply from last time I checked. Somehow, christian-sauve.com went back on top of the results after a few humiliating weeks spent in #2 after a Facebook page. I’m thinking that the raft of updates to the site over the last week of June had something to do with this.

3. Ohhh! Visitor comments!

Not much spam, but the ones I got were from “ethical SEOs” (ah-ah-ah) trying to send me to the top of the search rankings.

4. Search Queries Oddities

According to Google Analytics, here are the month’s most popular search keywords:

My amazing powers of deduction tell me that Solaris was shown at least once on a popular TV channel somewhere in the anglosphere in June. Maybe it would be more interesting to show you the 11-20 spots from now on.

Other odd, special, amusing or unexplainable search keywords:

• i dont get solaris movie
• la vie exemplaire et héroïque de l’employé de bureau
• search babylon web vache

Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.

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?

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.)

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.