BOOK REVIEWS

2000, Part B: February 2000

2000, Christian Sauvé

Featured this month:

 

 

Fight Club
Chuck Palahniuk

Owl Books, 1996, 208 pages, $19.50C tp, ISBN 0-8050-6297-1

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.

The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says, "We really won't die."

And so begins Chuck Palahniuk's exceptional first novel Fight Club. If the above lines don't already send you rushing off to the bookstore, keep reading.

Most readers, including myself, first heard about Fight Club from David Fincher's 1999 film, which starred Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. I was lucky enough to see the film at an advance screening, and cherish the memory of a darkly funny, nihilistic yet curiously uplifting piece of cinema. I awarded it the top spot on my "Best of 1999" list, and naturally began to hunt down the novel on which the film was based.

Consciously or not, -after all, this is a story partly about anti-consumerism- Owl Book didn't re-release Fight Club in sync with the film. I had to wait three months until I finally saw it in local bookstores. I hesitated a few seconds, started to read a few lines to pass the time and soon found myself beginning the second chapter without missing a beat. You can't ignore a book that pulls you in like that. So, faithful to Tyler Durden's subversive spirit, I paid by credit card... while also buying a book about Jerry Springer. I can already imagine the face of the government analyst sifting through bookstore credit records: "Oh no, an anarchist who's also stupid enough to like Springer!"

Reading Fight Club is nearly as memorable as seeing the film, and takes about as much time: At 207 pages, this isn't a big novel, and yet it feels as substantial as a full 500-pager for the sheer density of good material. Palahniuk writes with panache, but also with concision and the ratio of quotes-to-pages is truly astonishing.

Must most of all, Fight Club is an *angry* book. Far angrier than the sweetened-up version shown on screen. Critical reception for Fincher's FIGHT CLUB was polarized, with younger critics praising it and older critics hating the "violence" of the film. Well, these older critics obviously shouldn't even touch the book, because it's ten times worse. While the film has a body count of exactly one, the book makes no distinction between civilian and enemy, praises guns and exercises no restraint. From page two onward ("shag carpet of people"), Fight Club is one of the meanest books I've read.

I was in the mood to destroy... everything beautiful I couldn't have. Burn the Amazon rain forest. Open the dump valves on supertankers. Put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda. Don't think of this as extinction. This of this as downsizing. For years, humans had screwed up this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I wanted to burn the Louvre. This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead. [P.122-124]

It gets worse. So much worse, actually, that even though there's immense cathartic satisfaction in reading Fight Club, it's not as comfortable an experience as what I now think of as the "sweet Hollywood version." The endings are also considerably different: the book packs in an extra punch or two.

Edgy? Certainly, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Worthwhile? Absolutely, especially if you're a twenty/thirtysomething male. See the film then read the book? Yes, in this order.

(One final note: Screenwriter Jim Uhls' work in adapting Fight Club for the silver screen is absolutely phenomenal, carrying memorable quotes and scenes, adding more material in the same vein and toning it down just enough to make it palatable to audiences. Would have been well-worth an Oscar nomination.)

 

 

Renegades of the Empire
Michael Drummond

Crown Publishers, 1999, 297 pages, $38.00 Can., ISBN 0-609-60416-3

Microsoft has grown, in little more than twenty years, from a small unknown company working in a promising but modest field to a symbol of American Business. Through a lot of luck, at least one good decision, questionable market practices and some high-powered brainpower, Microsoft has not only made a lot of money, but had a significant impact on the evolution of contemporary computing. Computer experts curse Microsoft, but that's irrelevant, because the general public *knows* Microsoft.

As such, it's almost a given that several books a year are published about Microsoft. Despite ironclad nondisclosure clauses inserted in almost all Microsoft contracts, one can get a pretty good picture of the company's internal practices through the mass of information published about it.

In this context, Renegades of the Empire is both an interesting read and a disappointment. It stated purpose, at least on its jacket blurb, is to provide an insider's view of how three lone coders defied the rules of the company, developed a new ground-breaking technology and got it accepted by high management. Fine and well, except that this story, the "DirectX" episode, ends barely a hundred pages in the book. Then it's on to the "Chromeffects" follow-up, some coverage of Microsoft in court, and such.

The true value of the book is in describing the way projects grow or wither inside Microsoft. A company made of largely genius-level employees cannot work in the same fashion as the rest of American businesses, and so we get an insider's view of a company where going on vacation might mean finding your best colleagues gone by the time you come back. A company where big-boss BillG might argue with underlings just to see if they can hold under the pressure. A company where throwing books and walking around in Viking regalia might prove your point.

Renegades of the Empire is filled with anecdotes, from wild staff parties (to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars) to renegade demos to outside developers ("I know what you think of Microsoft" says the presenter, as an on-screen graphic behind him shows the Windows 3.1 logo being shot-gunned.) to how one of the book's protagonist fired off a raucous memo that did exactly what he wanted --get him fired.

But ultimately, the book loses a lot of steam at it goes along. The rebellious streak of the three heroes worked well on DirectX, but even as of this writing, Chromeffects seems moribund at best. Not exactly an happy ending here. This lack of resolution looms over the last half of the book, and might account for the diminishing interest of the book.

Fortunately, Drummond is an able vulgarizer; not only does the technical part make sense to a layperson, but they also make sense to technical people, which is essential to the text's credibility.

In a domain almost exclusively ruled by instant dispatches on the Internet, a book allows the luxury of lengthy exploration and analysis, as well as a more coherent version of events that is muted when reporting immediate events. Renegades of the Empire contextualizes various events (like the Department of Justice investigation, unfortunately still ongoing as this review is written) in a coherent whole. On the other hand, this synthesis is less than successful given the unfinished state of what's described in the account. Was Renegades of the Empire published too soon? Maybe.

And how does Microsoft fare in all this, a so-called insider's account from a third-party publisher? Quite well, actually. The Darwinian business practices at Microsoft are described as kind of a symbol of American innovation. There's a telling quote where Bill Gates complain that Americans can't stand help but be suspicious of absolute business success. Microsoft does makes mistakes -after all, that's why the book title contains the word "renegades"-, but is able to learn from its mistakes.

And that, industry veterans will tell you, is Microsoft's most valuable asset.

 

 

Day of Wrath
Larry Bond

Warner Books, 1998, 481 pages, 30.00 Can. hc, ISBN 0-446-51677-5

Almost every avid reader has a "buy-on-sight" list of especially meritorious authors whose books are of such invariable good quality that they warrant the 35$ gamble of a brand-new hardcover. Mine is composed of people like Tom Clancy, Greg Egan, Bruce Sterling, John Varley, Neal Stephenson... all of which can be depended upon for conceptually solid, physically thick pieces of entertainment.

Larry Bond holds the distinction of having been taken off my "buy-on-sight" author list after his 1996 book The Enemy Within. His first three books -four if you include his WW3 super-thriller collaboration with Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising- were grand spectacles of future war, hugely complex tales of nations run amok and superb set-pieces played upon technical, political and military battlefields. Red Phoenix, Vortex and Cauldron were deeply impressive techno-thrillers, brimming with unexpected rewards at more than 500 pages each. Cauldron was bought-on-sight.

So was The Enemy Within. But upon reading this limp thriller devoid of the sweeping scope of his earlier books, I was not tempted by the sequel, Day of Wrath. Two years later, Day of Wrath is available at dirt-cheap prices in used bookstores, and that's where Larry Bond and I meet again.

After reading his latest effort, Larry Bond stays off my A-list.

The problem is the same than with The Enemy Within: Is that it? Bond had proven his ability to send thousands of men in mega-battles, moving pieces off gigantic chessboards, meticulously describing capacities and weaknesses of high-tech hardware and in seamlessly integrating multiple protagonists.

Nothing of that sort in his "thriller" phase. Both The Enemy Within and Day of Wrath concentrate on a couple of protagonists: Colonel Peter Thorn and Agents Helen Gray. And despite the focus, these two characters combined can't equal the interest of any of the bit-players in Bond's previous novels.

Day of Wrath is bland. Predictable. Implausible. Déjà-vu. Limp. Nothing special. Once again, a gna-ha-ha grandmaster of evil hates the Americans for some trivial childhood trauma and badly wants to attack the United States. Once again, his diabolic plans are foiled by Thorn and Grey. Nothing we haven't seen before, even in the details.

To be fair, Day of Wrath isn't all that badly written in the confines of the thriller genre. The novel is obviously padded -did we have to frolic across most of Europe?- but I guess that intentionally done in an effort to satisfy beach readers. At least there is a heightening of tension by the end of the book -cruise missiles aimed at Washington are good at that-, though you'll have to wade through a lot of Commando-type silliness (Two humans! Against a compound filled with world-class terrorists!) in order to get to this point.

But even an okay thriller doesn't begin to match the level of Bond's earlier super-thrillers. Reading the cover blurbs for the paperback edition of Day of Wrath -and assorted comments from Amazon.com customers-, I'm amazed at how some readers seem to think that Bond has "matured out of the technothriller" genre, as if he did better stuff now than before.

Let me set those fools straight: Bond has declined. He isn't as much fun to read as he was before. It's not only the stories themselves, but also the details, the plotting, the characters that are worse than before. It's not as if we could blame a lack of time; he's still publishing at two-years intervals. It's not as if we could blame publishing pressures: Stephen Coonts and James H. Cobb are still publishing decent future-war novels.

It's almost as if we have to blame Larry Bond. ("Your name is Bond, *Larry* Bond".) Well so be it; he stays off my buy-on-sight list.

 

 

Spyworld
Mike Frost and Michel Gratton

Seal/Bantam, 1995, 275 pages, $7.99C pb, ISBN 0-770-42707-3

If you're like me, you tend to assume that the vast majority of modern spying is handled by the Americans. Dozens, hundreds of spy movies and semi-fiction technothrillers, most of them produced in the United States, have conditioned us to accept the FBI, CIA and NSA as undisputed masters of electronic spying. Compared to them, the very though of, say, Canadians trying out their luck at espionage is somehow completely ridiculous.

And yet, even masters need their apprentices. Mike Frost was one of them, an employee of Canada's NSA-equivalent, the Communication Security Establishment (CSE). From the early seventies to 1990, Frost was at the forefront of Canada's electronic spying initiative. As he makes it clear, it was all sponsored, equipped and suggested by the Americans... though the apprentice would eventually surprise the master.

Electronic spying isn't exciting in a cinematographic fashion. Instead of seducing enemy agents, photographing secret documents and shooting oneself out of trouble, it basically means intercepting, decoding and analyzing radio communications. All of which can be safely conducted from a more-or-less safe location, like an embassy.

But even if physical danger isn't a factor, the international spying game has its own sets of rules, where embarrassment can be the ultimate failure. It's simply not done to pack up electronic equipment and set it up in the embassy. Things have to be done stealthily as so not to awaken doubts, even among the embassy personnel itself.

Frost, along with collaborator Michel Gratton, clearly traces the evolution of Canadian electronic spying efforts, from amateurishness in Moscow (lack of preparation leading to funny anecdotes concerning the shipping of the electronic equipment, including sending a high-powered drill to pierce a safe, cutting up a five-foot dish antennae in shippable pieces and taking chances with an underpowered elevator.) to stealing profitable trade secrets from the Chinese.

This is heavy-duty modern spying, and each step of the way is meticulously detailed. Embassy selection, equipment installation, personnel training and data transmission are all crucial steps, described in here. And it all feels real, without too much sensationalism or outlandish claims.

Well, almost without too many outlandish claims. Like most general-interest books about the spying business, Spyworld raises issues of domestic privacy and government powers in communication interception. Should the CSE have the power to intercept domestic communications? Should it be overseen by a committee of elected officials? Unfortunately, these questions are nothing new; the book is more effective in demonstrating the powers of contemporary spying capacities than in explicitly decrying its possible excesses.

In any case, the end result is a non-fiction account that's interesting, not too technically obscure, with some great anecdotes and which lifts a small corner of the veil over some very real spying practices. Not a bad read, if only for a few moments of national pride.

 

 

Cosm
Gregory Benford

Avon EOS, 1998, 374 pages, $8.99 Can. pb, ISBN 0-0-380-79052-1

Even though "Science" is fully half of science-fiction, its representation in most SF stories is simply appalling. One cannot count the number of cheap stories in which The Answers seem to be held by one clever fellow who can also whip up a universe-saving device in five minutes and still get the girl. (Watch INDEPENDENCE DAY again.  Discuss your disgust.)

Real-world science truly doesn't work that way. Answers are found after messy, meticulous trial-and-error procedures that don't result in flashes of insight as much as in slow theoretical elaboration. And that's still in the lab, because outside the lab lies even more drudgery; endless paperwork to apply for research grants, constant academic or corporate social infighting, political pressures... The appalling state of today's science is matched only by our disgusting lack of knowledge about it.

All of this must have crossed Gregory Benford's mind as he sat down to write Cosm, his latest science-fiction novel. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, so he presumably knows what near-future hard science-fiction is all about.

At first glance, there's not much excitement in Cosm's premise: Almost by accident, an ordinary scientist creates a shiny meter-wide sphere in a particle accelerator experiment that goes wrong. She keeps the sphere and starts studying it. No big pyrotechnic displays, no mind-blowing SF concepts.

And, for most of the book, that's where things stay. The sphere proves to be an interesting phenomenon, but not one that has the inherent potential to arouse the jaded reader's interest.

Most of the novel's impact comes from other strengths, such as its insider's glimpse into contemporary science. The political battles, dirty academic tricks and real-world concerns of most working scientists are faithfully described.

Second is the attention that Benford brings to his protagonist. Alicia Butterworth is, simply put, one of the most impressively realized characters in recent SF. She's not a beauty queen (far from it), she's not a terribly charming person (her dismal dating record proves it), she's not supernaturally smart (part of her appeal is that she's an average scientist) and she realistically suffers from the twin handicaps of being both black and female in a white male environment. Her struggles and triumphs are made more real by being solidly anchored in the real world.

The result is, without question, Benford's best book. The prose is lively and compulsively readable, the pacing holds up, the supporting characters are well-defined, the book is peppered with great throwaway lines and as a result, the book nearly reads itself in less time than you'd think. Good scenes, believable dialogue, a few physics jokes and a lot of nifty personal insight: Cosm raises the bar for the rest of Hard-SF. Through exceptional writing, the appeal of the book goes well beyond SF territory, though fans of the genre will not feel any dumbing-down of the material.

There are still a few rough spots whenever it's time to place all the events in a greater context, like some knee-jerk media-bashing, and simplistic fundamentalist overreaction. (Though this leads to a typical kidnapping scenario that, for once, plays as if a smart kidnapee was involved.) General-interest readers might quibble that the science stuff is overwhelming (sheesh; a few graphs and everyone screams bloody murder!) and that the pacing is dull. Nothing that we're not led to expect, really.

But with Cosm, Gregory Benford turns out the novel we've been waiting to read from him: A purely hard-SF tale that's at the same time written with zest and a whole lot of skill. Recommended reading.

 

 

Teranesia
Greg Egan

Victor Gollancz, 1999, 249 pages, $21.95 Can. tp, ISBN 0-57506-855-8

Greg Egan is back, and this time he's offering something different.

Egan has made his enviable reputation in the Science-Fiction field ("One of the genre's great ideas men" --The Times) by delivering stories and novels with an unusually high concept density. It also helps that he's a hard-SF writer of the old school: All of his stories are built around one cool idea and the question "What if...?"

On the other hand, most critics have been prompt to mention that Egan isn't a good stylist, doesn't build compelling characters or writes lamentable dialogue. (To be fair, there's some truth to this: Egan often comes up in English-French translation discussions, as a case example of the trade-offs needed to remain faithful to the source material; most translators just itch to "improve" his prose style.)

Egan's previous 1998 novel, Diaspora, was a dense, fiercely original, quasi-unreadable work of impressive vision and frustrating writing. Any SF writer could justifiably take a break after such an effort. Most readers, however, won't expect the complete shift taken with Teranesia.

It starts with a lengthy prologue in which we're introduced to Prabir Suresh, a nine-year-old boy living with his sister and his parent scientists alone on Teranesia, an isolated Indonesian island. Stuff happens and Prabir is forced to seek refuge in Canada along with his sister. Years later, Prabir finds himself drawn once again to Teranesia, lured by reports of unexplainable mutations.

The first surprise of Teranesia is its pacing. Unlike the often-frenetic movement that characterized the first few pages of his first novels, like the breathtaking "digitalization" scene that opens Permutation City or the mesmerizing after-death-confession of Distress, Teranesia leisurely establishes Prabir's character before doing anything else. It's unusual for Egan, and not really practical in hooking the reader's attention.

The leisurely pace is maintained though most of the book, but the book's appeal picks up once the narrative moves to Toronto, just in time for vicious (and overdone, yet hysterically funny) attacks on new-age / feminist / post-modernist / anti-science rhetoric. If you pay attention, you'll notice by this point that the prose is more pondered, the characters more fleshed out than in Egan's previous work. There aren't as many idea, though, even if Egan fans will recognize most of the landscape. In representing a non-Anglocentric near-future scenario, Egan evokes memories of recent works by Bruce Sterling.

The late explosion of concepts, when it comes, is a lot of fun though there's a feeling that they arrive a little too late for full satisfaction. The unfinished ending ("AND WHAT HAPPENS *NEXT*??") is also disappointing, -yet a cut above Egan's usual reformat-the-universe conclusions- and adds to the feeling that for a writer who ventured in post-human territory as often as Egan, he's taking a curiously reactionary position...

The result is kind of a new Egan, one that seemingly set out to write an easygoing novel to address most of his perceived weaknesses: the prose, the characters, the ending... While Teranesia doesn't fully live up to Egan's previous body of work, it's a novel that shows promise for the author's next books. It's probably not coincidental that Teranesia is also the author's most accessible novel. It's always interesting to see an author grow...

 

 

Choosers of the Slain
James H. Cobb

Berkley, 1996, 338 pages, $8.99 Can., ISBN 0-425-16053-X

The publishing industry seems to work in booms and busts. One year, fat fantasy trilogies are the rage; others, procedural murder mysteries are what gets bought. These cycles usually dramatically affect the midlist catalogue, causing good times and bad times. Die-hard fans of one particular sub-genre may pine for "golden years" when their chosen genre was all the rage.

Among techno-thriller fans, this period is roughly between 1988 and 1992 (ironically enough; the last years of the Cold War), where big complex novels of imaginary wars underwent their apogee in terms of publishing attention. During that time, Tom Clancy wrote The Cardinal of the Kremlin and Clear and Present Danger, Dale Brown Day of the Cheetah, Larry Bond Vortex, with other authors like Harold Coyle, Payne Harrison and Joe Weber producing their best novels.

Now, Clancy feels bloated, Brown has lost its freshness, Harrison has turned UFO-nutso and Bond, Coyle and Weber have moved on to historical novels or -gack- plain thrillers. It's easy to say that the technothriller boom of the early has come and gone. But that's a simplistic view of things, because no publishing sub-genre ever dies; it may go underground, sustain less authors, but if you look hard enough, nothing ever prevents you from finding a steady trickle of good technothrillers in the late nineties.

James H. Cobb's first novel, Choosers of the Slain, is a perfect example of the kind of totally enjoyable technothriller to come by in the "lean" years of the technothriller. It's short, snappy, to the point, completely fluent in the conventions of the genre and genuinely thrilling. As with most memorable techno-thrillers, the setting has been chosen with maximum impact in order to provide chills to the reader: Antarctica.

This isn't the first time that the Southern latitudes have been mined by technothrillers authors. Payne Harrison's superlative Thunder of Erebus used the setting to maximum effect, producing a novel as exciting as it was memorable. More recently (ah-ha, another good late-nineties technothriller!), Judith and Steven Garfield-Reeves' 1998 Icefire used Antarctica's ice shelf as a pivotal plot device for a globe-spanning techno-thriller.

But Cobb brings new things to Antarctica, the most striking of them being a female military protagonist, USS Cunningham Commander Amanda Garrett. It is she who will have to hold sentry for the US Government, as a blockade is imposed on Argentina for the invasion of British bases on the south continent. While Argentineans prepare intimidation manoeuvres and, later on, all-out attacks on her stealth destroyer, Garrett also finds herself attracted to another member of the crew... already proving herself to be a notch above her automaton cardboard counterparts in most other technothrillers. Neither superwoman nor feminist poster heroine, Garrett is entirely believable, and it's to Cobb's credit that he's able to sustain her presence without resorting to easy clichés. Support human characters; buy the book!

Most importantly, Choosers of the Slain has everything you'd like in a technothriller: Great title, believable premise, sympathetic supporting protagonists, very cool gadgets, historical depth, optimized length (neither too short nor too g'darn long), spectacular combat scenes and limpid writing. It has its flaws (the romantic subplot grates somewhat, though it must be noted that this isn't the immediate down-and-dirty affair you'd expect, but a rather restrained, even mature, series of quiet scenes), but usually it's simply a lot of fun.

Cobb proves that the legacy of the technothriller's heydays is still alive and well. Choosers of the Slain is the first book in a series and bodes well for the other volumes. (The equally enjoyable Sea Strike is available in paperback, with another announced later in 2000) In the meantime, techno-thrillers fans will be able to get their escapist fix and discover a new hot author to replace the fallen ones.