BOOK REVIEWS

1998, Part G: August

1998, Christian Sauvé

From SF to Fantasy, from Super Tanks to Pop Divas through Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Hollywood, here are the books read during the last month of Summer'98:

 

 

How Like a God
Brenda W. Clough

Tor, 1997, 287 pages, 32.95$Can., ISBN 0-312-86263-6

While "superpowers" are usually the province of comic book superheroes, Science Fiction also touches on the subject from time to time, usually from a much more "realistic" perspective. Compare Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside to any issue of the X-Men for a good shock.

Brenda W. Clough seemed to be aware of this as she wrote How Like a God. It's the story of an ordinary husband, father and computer programmer named Rob Lewis who suddenly acquires the power to read and shape minds. Clough's protagonist makes several explicit references to the numerous comic books he had read at a younger age, while undergoing a descent through the lowest levels of society.

Unfortunately, How Like a God combines attempts a science-fiction sensibility with comic-book plotting to create a book that's pleasantly readable, but also disappointing in its unevenness.

For instance, there is almost no scepticism about the powers of Rob Lewis. Even he seems to arrive fairly easily to the conclusion he's a super human. People around him also seem to believe him quite easily.

The psychology of the characters seems suspect. When Rob's wife starts sprouting presidential ambitions, when Rob callously leaves his family, when Edwin Barbarossa starts helping a strange-looking hobo, when Rob almost assaults a young girl... they all seem like forced choices.

Which brings us to the numerous coincidences that make up most of How like a God's plot. The two worst are the meeting of Barbarossa and Lewis, and the fire that destroys Lewis' workplace. No explanation is provided. These two things simply happen. While worse fault have been seen elsewhere, there are ways of bringing coincidences in a story in an acceptable manner. (This reviewer's favourite example is in Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, where twenty pages are devoted to explaining how a beam of solid American wood comes in contact with the screw of a nuclear-powered submarine in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Amazingly, it works.)

The Atlantic City passage is also incredibly weak. Couldn't Lewis just try his hand at poker instead of blackjack?

Then there's the last third of the book, which abandons all pretence of scientific verisimilitude, and goes full-throttle in magical fantasy-land where Gilgamesh (yes, that Gilgamesh) is a full-featured character. The novel drags on for another fifty pages after what should have been the final confrontation and has the gall to end on the steps of what should have been the book's most powerful scene!

Is there anything else to say? Well, the title alone is a source of countless nanoseconds of fun: Apart from the obvious parodies (How? Like a God!, How Like a Dog, How so Very Very Much Like a God, How to Like a God, Show Like a God, How Licks a God?, etc...), you can spend some time trying to find ways of saying "How Like a God" in normal, everyday conversations.

The cover illustration by Rick Berry is oddly attractive, suggesting both personal power, pain and transcendence. (That ugly mug in the upper right corner has to go, though!) [September 1998: The ugly mug is gone from the paperback edition, although the resulting illustration loses some power.]

Nevertheless, How Like a God isn't nearly as bad as the above might presuppose. The writing is brisk, and the story flows along at an acceptable pace once you accept the succession of coincidences. Not one of SF's shining releases for 1997, but reasonable entertainment as long as you don't spend too much money on it.

 

 

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:
How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
Peter Biskind

Simon & Schuster, 1998, 506 pages, 35.00$Can., ISBN 0-684-80996-6

In the classic Brave New World, Aldous Huxley took a certain pleasure is describing the inane entertainment ("feelies") perpetrated by Hollywood in his imagined future. It was obviously intended to be a parody of the lousy movies of the thirties, with its simplistic plot, stereotyped characters, obvious racism and happy expected ending.

Fast forward half a century: We're still being fed pap by Hollywood. From a storytelling standpoint, cinema is the mentally retarded cousin of prose fiction. Most of the time, it does simplistic things, only to be applauded when it does something decent. The average novel on any shelf -including romance- is a better story than the average movie.

And yet, for a brief time in the seventies, it seemed as if Hollywood was re-inventing itself. Young film-makers like Hopper, Coppola, Friedkin, Bogdanovich, Scorsese were making challenging movies like EASY RIDER, APOCALYPSE NOW, THE GODFATHER, THE EXORCIST, RAGING BULL... But then came JAWS and STAR WARS, and the blockbuster mentality that now prevails.

At least, that's the history that Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tries to tell. A fairly fat book, this non-fiction account remains unusually readable while also being formidably well-researched. (There is an excellent 23-pages index, as well as 35 pages of notes, most of them referring to personal interviews between Biskind and the people concerned.)

There is a lot of dirt in this book. The Seventies are described by Biskind as an era of unbridled hedonism, where everyone slept with almost everyone else, drugs were supplied by the bowls and rock'n'roll defined a generation. Biskind spares no punches in describing the descent through hell of most of the film-makers of this era, their troubled love lives and their constant flirting with auto-destruction. This should be a source book for anyone trying to portray South California as the modern Babylon.

Most of the book is in the details. It's a shock to read about the behaviour of some now-quite-conservative personalities. This accumulation of anecdotes helps to sustain our interest in a book that could otherwise be stuffy. This is one great book for party anecdotes: "Did you know that Coppola once said to..."

Beyond the dirt and the shocking stories, though, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls fares less well at convincing the reader that there was indeed a "New Hollywood" in the seventies. A look at the most popular movies of the time probably reveals a bunch of movies that were neither superior, nor particularly innovative. We remember THE GODFATHER and THE EXORCIST... but the rest? If drugs, sex and rock'n'roll were necessary for better movies, was the price worth it? Or was the "New Hollywood" of the seventies only an new extension of the general climate of revolution that swept through the sixties?

It is ironic, though, to find out that the main perpetrators of the blockbuster mentality (Spielberg, Lucas, Don Simpson) were encouraged -even nurtured- by the "New Hollywood". Biskind's chapters about the success of JAWS and STAR WARS take on a bittersweet quality that's well developped.

On the other hand, Biskind's conscious silence about some latter work is surprising and self-defeating: Why not mention that of all these film-makers, only Spielberg and Lucas have managed to take control of film-making means (Lucas with ILM, Spielberg with Dreamworks)? Why conveniently forget Spielberg's brilliant and artistic SCHINDLER'S LIST? Why not mention Coppola's THE GODFATHER III? Or the good movies of the eighties and nineties? Or the bad movies of the seventies?

You could say that Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a book to read for all the wrong reasons: For the dirt and the scandals; for an unbiased history of STAR WARS; for the self-destructive paths of a few brilliant film-makers... An interesting book in its own right, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls nevertheless fails to convince that the "Sex, Drugs and rock'n'roll generation saved Hollywood."

Imagine that.

 

 

Céline Dion: Behind the Fairytale
Ian Halperin

Boca Publications, 1997, 9.95$Can., 191 pages, ISBN 0-9659583-0-2

Nowadays, it seems like every two-bit celebrity has a biography on bookstores' shelves. Even being a celebrity isn't a requirement any more; just being a megastar's ex-girlfriend can now net you a fat publishing contract. But as ever, there are two very different kinds of biographies. Authorized, and not-so-authorized ones.

Authorized biographies are written by the celebrity, or most likely by a writer with bills to pay and the celebrity's cooperation. However "honest" they claim to be, it's no surprise that these authorized biographies end up painting a rather positive portrait of the star.

On the other hand, unauthorized biographies are usually perceived as being written by malicious, talentless money-grubbing hack without any ethics, scruples or restraints. Many fans, pundits and managers are quick to characterize unauthorized biographies as unmitigated lies on paper, and readers of these putrid pages as only slightly below unicellular slime.

They fail to mention that these biographies are much more interesting.

Céline Dion is, like me, a French-Canadian. It would be a common error to assume that given this shocking similarity, I would be a die-hard Dion fan.

Not quite. From a musical standpoint, Dion mostly sings ballads, which are definitely not my favourite kind of music. Furthermore, most importantly, I've never been too impressed by... ahem, let's stay polite... the cognitive abilities of Miss Dion. As female signers so, I have much more respect for Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow or Lisa Loeb (who compose, write and sing, not to mention can hold their end of a conversation) that for the pretty voice that is Céline Dion. Dion is a pleasantly packaged set of vocal chords. Nothing more.

[Unrelated anecdote: There was a TITANIC special on French-Canadian TV at the end of 1997, where Dion and ditzy talk-show host Julie Snyder were interviewing an expert on the Titanic disaster. It was a lot like watching the protagonists of DUMB & DUMBER interviewing Einstein.]

The fascination of my fellow French-Canadians for "le clan Dion" is nothing short of mystifying for me. Why glorify a not-especially-pretty woman whose only talent is to sing? The gushing acceptance of her marriage to slimy manager René Angelil (almost thirty years his senior) still manages to creep me out. Is this how we want the world to perceive French-Canadians?

Now that I've come clean both on the subject of Céline Dion and unauthorized biographies, let me be honest enough to say that if you like going through trash, you will love Behind the Fairytale. It's a collection of gossip, just-this-side-of-libelous assertion and veiled half-truths mixed with saucy innuendoes. I could have lived a few more years without knowing about Dion's suicide attempts, anorexia, unhappy marriage, nervous breakdowns and raging nymphomania.

One the other hand, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the holier-than-church portrait of Dion that is spoon-fed to and by the media. I believe that there is more truth in this book, warts and all, than the official story. Halperin doesn't quite establish himself as a credible journalist (he did co-author a book on the "assassination" of Kurt Cobain), but does not shies away from revealing his disgruntled sources, his personal favorable opinion of Dion (in the foreword) and that, in his opinion, the true villain of Dion's life is manager/husband Angelil.

It is very unlikely that any fan of Dion will agree with Behind the Fairytale (just read the vitriolic comments on Amazon's web site if you're not convinced), so this biography will probably please most those readers not -yet- converted by the massive Sony/Angelil publicity machine. This is worth a look at the library (I couldn't manage to buy such a book), if only to be able to see Behind the Fairytale.

Just remember: Trash can be fun, but at the end it's still trash.

 

 

King of the Killing Zone:
The Story of the M-1, America's Super Tank
Orr Kelly

Berkley, 1989, 288 p., 5.75$C., ISBN 0-425-12304-9

With a title like that, you can bet it's not a book about fluffy rabbits.

No, King of the Killing Zone is definitely a book for the intellectually macho guys among us, the ones who also devour Hustler magazine for the military hardware articles, who buy Tom Clancy novels in hardcover, who don't quite think that an obsession about military hardware is somehow unhealthy.

(Am I describing myself? Ahem...)

King of the Killing Zone is definitely a dream come true for military buffs among us.

(Which reminds me of the old saying: The difference between a fan and a buff is that the buff in interested in stuff where dying is involved. Witness Military buffs, WWII buffs, history buffs, etc... Are there Spice Girls buffs? There you go.)

There is a special magic in the creation of an expensive machine. The process leading up to the design, debugging and manufacture of your car is sufficiently fascinating in itself. Now imagine the whole story behind the introduction of a completely new tank in the U.S. Army. That's the subject of King of the Killing Zone.

During your reading, you will not only learn about the M-1, but also about tanks in general, major figures in the U.S. Army since WWII, the military equipment acquisition process, intelligence work, tanks warfare strategy and hundreds of small details that you wouldn't necessarily associate with tanks at first glance.

This could have been a long, dry read. The drudgery of military administration can be terribly annoying if you're outside the system. Fortunately, author Orr Kelly has mastered the none-too-obvious trick of writing a densely packed, yet easily readable prose. He obviously knows his subject, and the notes on sources are very complete. A useful index completes an already-great non-fiction account. As a result, King of the Killing Zone moves briskly, yet satisfies the reader.

Among the highlights of this book are the incredible tale of Chobham armour, the competition between GM and Chrysler to decide who would build the tank, the tactics revolution brought by the M-1's speed, quiet and manoeuvrability, the man who made "all the right decisions for the wrong reasons", the debugging of the tank's most obscure flaws...

Behind the whole book, though, stands the question: Is the M-1 Abrahms a good tank? To that, Orr answers with a cautious optimism. The publication date (1989) of the book is ironic, coming two years before one of the most significant military event of the late twentieth century. The Gulf War proved to sceptics that the M-1 could deliver what had been promised. Despite heavy use of fuel and problems due to the infiltration of sand in machinery, the M-1 swept the battlefield and erased most doubts concerning the tank's worth in combat. It would be interesting to see a post-1991 revision of King of the Killing Zone.

It is only too rare to find a book that lucidly and knowledgeably explains the steps by which new weapons systems are developed, tested and put into service. In an age where the easy 30-second clip on the evening news can weigh more heavily than a thoughtful report, King of the Killing Zone demystifies the process and takes the time to explain. A must-read for techno-thriller fans, and military hardware buffs.

 

 

Trader
Charles de Lint

Tor, 1997, 464 pages, 8.99$C., ISBN 0-812-55157-5

Many cinephile will remember a spate of body-switching "comedies" around 1988: BIG, LIKE FATHER LIKE SON, VICE VERSA, 18 AGAIN... Along with 1977's FREAKY FRIDAY, these movies used body-switching as an excuse for character-driven comedies of, mostly, mutual redemption. (The latest film of note in this sub-genre, 1997's FACE/OFF, used slightly-more-plausible face switching as an excuse for a rather good guns'n'mayhem movie.)

Charles de Lint's Trader is markedly different. Not only is it decidedly not a comedy, but it actually treats the improbable subject of body-switching with a certain realism that always seems to be sorely lacking is the afore-mentioned movies.

For one thing, this isn't a kid's story: Trader is mature, comfortably adult fantasy. The hero of the tale is Max Trader, a renowned, introvert maker of guitars. When he suddenly wakes up in the body of an unemployed, despicable loser named Johnny Devlin, he has to face the fact that he has not only inherited Devlin's problems, but that Devlin (now Trader) doesn't want anything to do with him. After a fight with Devlin's old girlfriend, being kicked out of Devlin's apartment and being unable to return to his old home, Trader finds himself on the streets. What follows is his journey toward redemption.

In a lesser story, Trader could have been faultless; a quiet, introspective man not given to meanness. But part of what gives Trader its power is the realization that Trader himself isn't as perfect as we could think. We realise that even as average and mild-mannered as Trader is (or we are, for that matter), he still has things to learn to enjoy life at its fullest.

Trader doesn't only tell a story; without bashing the reader over the head with it, it also contains a surprising amount of not-so-conventional philosophy. Trader is about life, what you make of it, and the friendships that let you go through it.

de Lint's prose is typically engaging, effortlessly drawing the reader into the story. Characters are very well handled. While this critic isn't a de Lint reader, the comments read elsewhere about him returning to old friends in Newport seem dead-on accurate.

The novel does have its flaws: part of the last third venture more in some sort of fantasy dreamland where almost anything can happen; a departure from the relatively realistic remainder of the novel. In retrospect, one character's aggression also seems unwarranted.

With good characters, easy prose, a lot of heart and an undeniable maturity, Trader shows why de Lint is at the top of his field. A strong contender for this year's Auroras, and a worthwhile read, it is hard to ask much more of this book.

 

 

Tesseracts^6
Ed. Robert J. Sawyer & Carolyn Clink

Tesseract, 1997, 297 pages, ISBN 1-895836-32-8

Next step in my Aurora-nominee reading program this year: The sixth Tesseracts anthology of Canadian Speculative Fiction. A tradition has been established that each successive Tesseracts volume has a different set of co-editors. This year, the husband-and-wife team of Robert J. Sawyer and Carolyn Clink are serving their tour of duty at the forefront of what has become Canada's most celebrated SF anthology series.

They say that an anthology is well-served by great stories in the opening and closing slots. In this regard, Tesseracts^6 succeeds admirably well. The opening fiction is by Eric Choi, a promising hard-SF author. "Divisions" tackles a very-hard-SF story upon an alternate history where Quebec secedes in 1981. The result is very satisfying. At the other end of the book, Robert Charles Wilson delivers the kind of fiction that has made his reputation with Protocols of Consumption, a character-based tale with adequate scientific content and a surprising amount of paranoia.

For the most part, you get what you expect from Tesseracts^6: The top authors keep their level of quality. I have yet to read a boring story from Andrew Weiner, as he proves with "Bootlegger". James Alan Gardner is also a reliable author, and his "Love-in-Idleness" is one of the best stories of the volume. "What Goes Around" (Derryl Murphy) doesn't quite lives up to its premise but remains a fun read. Yves Meynard enhances his reputation as a fantasy author with the curiously pleasing "Souvenirs".

But there's also some good material from newer names (at least to me): Catherine McLeod's "Skulling Medusa" is an excellent hard-boiled action featuring a futuristic Private Eye. Douglas Smith's "Spirit Dance" does interesting things with a love triangle, were-animals and the CSIS. (!) Additionally, Tesseracts^6 might make you realize that some of the latest novels seen in libraries are in fact from Canadian authors, like Scott Mackay (Outpost) and Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring).

Four of the stories are from French-Canadian authors, although it seems like two of them (Yves Meynard's "Souvenirs" and Jean-Louis Trudel's "Where Angels Fall") were written directly in English. Annoyingly, like the previous Tesseracts anthologies, there is no mention of where the two translated stories (Sylvie Bérard's "The Wall" and Élisabeth Vonarburg's "The Sleeper in the Crystal") originally appeared.

Due to poet Carolyn Clink's co-editorship, this Tesseracts volume contains a fair amount of poetry. As a reader, I have seldom been attracted to this genre, and have to report that I have not been convinced by what I have seen here. Readers with different background can feel free to disagree.

On another register, I am happy to report that the interior typesetting is greatly improved over the past few Tesseract publications: The font is crisper (though still not heavy enough) and the margins are adequate. It's a shame that the page header doesn't indicate each story, though. The curiously unfamiliar paperback format (halfway between mass-market and trade paperbacks) takes a while to get used to. Unfortunately, the cover illustration is one of the worst I have seen in recent memory. It's probable that the awful colour balance and the amateurish collage of elements will keep this book away from a few prospective readers. An unfortunate change from the beautiful cover of the previous volume.

Tesseracts^6 proves, if it was still left to be proven, that Canadian SF is strong enough not only to be fill a volume of good stories, but to do so at a yearly rate of publication and with different sets of editors. It also provides good reading... so what more is there to say? Bring on the next volume!

 

 

Welcome to Callahan's!

(A global review of the Callahan Chronicles, Spider Robinson)

Somewhere along highway 25 in Suffolk County, Long Island (Spider Robinson tells us) once existed an inauspicious bar called Callahan's Place. That bar wasn't your average neighbourhood drunk-hole, however. Robinson chronicled the weird, strange and marvellous incidents that happened there: Time-Travellers, Aliens, People with special talents... or just plain unfortunate folks in need of cheering up.

As a non-drinker, non-bargoer, non-whatever, I'm far from being the ideal target audience for Robinson's own brand of uber-hedonistic philosophy that permeates his work in general and the Callahan chronicles in particular. Despite his well-meaning tone of desolation, I like being a product of the conservative eighties, with all its petty monetary concerns, monogamous sexual relationships and cautious attitude toward alcohol.

And yet, there is a definite charm about the Callahan sequence that is very, very hard to resist. Although it's a definite possibility that reading these books will infuriate you, you will still come away from it with a sense of goofy satisfaction.

Not least among Robinson's many talents is the effortless prose and the engaging characters. Simply put, it's a pleasure to read these books. When this pleasure fades -see below-, we can see the holes in the stories.

The sequence is composed, quite neatly, of three epochs:

The first one comprise the stories contained in the three earliest books. It's the Callahan's Place era. This period is characterized by a collection of several short stories setting up of the divergent rules that eventually coalesce to make up the universe in which the Callahan sequence takes place. In many respects, this is the best Callahan's period: It's fresh, exciting, invigorating and not too silly. (Fortunately, it is now contained in an omnibus volume from Tor called The Callahan Chronicles.)

The second era takes at about the same chronological time, but at another place: Lady Sally's House, the best... er... house of pleasure in New York. The two "Lady" books are far more prurient than the opening trilogy and written as novels, not an assembly of stories. The result is more coherent but less impressive. For some reason, Robinson decides to save the world from nuclear terrorists late in Lady Slings the Booze, and that particular plot clashes badly with the remainder of the sequence. Generally speaking, Callahan's works best when dealing with small-scale weirdness and personal problems: It's when it tries to be too ambitious that the problems arise.

Finally, the narrator of the first trilogy decides to go in business for himself, and the two more recent books of the series chronicle his time at Mary's Place. In a way, these two are a return to the familiar environment of the first three books. While written as novels, they're far less linear than the Lady Sally books. Unfortunately, silliness happens (like the cluricaune and the oh-so-sensual-group-telepathy/orgy-to-save-the-world) and the effect is more ridiculous than uplifting. A curious tendency to showboating and unarguable sermonning by Robinson also diminishes the effect of the later books.

(Off the wall at Callahan's is a compendium of quotes, puns and jokes from the first five books. It's recycling, but great recycling.)

Still, readers will be hard-pressed to find this sequence other than enjoyable and refreshing. Reading another Callahan book feels exactly like coming back to a place where everyone knows your name. And that's probably exactly what Robinson intended.

Cheers!

 

 

The Moon and the Sun
Vonda N. McIntyre

Pocket Books, 1997, 421 pages, 31.00 $ Can., ISBN 0-671-56765-9

I'm mad, and I'm going to tell you about it.

A few months ago, members of Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) decided that The Moon and the Sun was the best Science-Fiction or Fantasy novel published during the preceding year, beating out such contestants as A Game of Thrones (George R. R. Martin), Ancient Shores (Jack McDevitt), Bellwether, (Connie Willis), City on Fire, (Walter Jon Williams), King's Dragon, (Kate Elliott) and Memory (Lois McMaster Bujold).

Leaving alone the issue that these were most definitely not the worthiest books published in the oh-so-confusing Nebula period of eligibility (which here seems to go at least from April 1997 to September 1998), was The Moon and the Sun the best of the seven books? Of course not. Let me tell you why.

The Moon and the Sun is the story of a young woman in King Louis XIV's court in 1693. Her brother has captured a sea monster, and various royal things happen around her. Eventually, she figures out that the sea monster is intelligent. Of course, she'll try to free it.

I have seldom had as less motivation to read a book. It takes almost half the book to get out of the historical details and get on with the "fantasy" element. Despite a certain elegance of the prose, this novel is a colossal bore. If this hadn't been a Nebula-Winner, I would have likely abandoned it well before the end. McIntyre mentions in her after-word that this has also been written as a movie screenplay: I would have rather read that than the book.

The overemphasis on explicit feminism is annoying. The problem isn't with the idea of feminism, but the treatment. McIntyre should have remembered to show, not tell. Far better to keep the heroine trying to acquire freedom and go against obstacles rather than make a few speeches about it. It's ridiculous to see concerns of the nineteen-nineties clash with the historical atmosphere in this way.

Then we come to the difficult question of the genre. The Moon and the Sun is a novel billed as an alternate history that won an award by and association originally founded by Science-Fiction writers. Problem is, it's neither SF nor alternate history.

There is nothing "alternate" about the history presented here: What are the repercussions of the sea monsters? The divergences with our history? Unseen, untouched, unimagined. This is historical fantasy.

Then there's the astonishingly positive advance blurbs on the back cover of the book, by author friends of McIntyre who should know better. "The finest alternate history ever" (Le Guin), "One of the best novels I've read" (Preuss), "engrossing story" (Gabaldon)... ack, ptui! Even granted that I don't even like these authors, what were they smoking?

In a sense, you could say that it's fortunate that The Moon and the Sun won the Nebula: Otherwise I would not have read, or finished, the book and would not have anything to complain about. It still doesn't erase the boredom and the pain.

The Nebulas have a substantial history of choosing The Wrong Book as a winner; boring, stuffy fantasy novels that are neither remarkable or especially meritorious. Years later, who still remembers the unspectacular Where the Late Birds Sang (Kate Wilhem) or the incredibly boring The Falling Woman (Pat Murphy) or the rotten The Einstein Intersection (Samuel Delany)? I confidently predict that The Moon and the Sun is headed straight for this memory abyss. The infuriating thing is that the novel will bore generations of Nebula completists. Forever and ever.