REVIEWS

2002, Part C: March

2002, Christian Sauvé

Reviewed this Month:

 

For the Defense
William Harrington

Pinnacle, 1988, 508 pages, $5.95 Can. pb, ISBN 1-55817-303-X

Let us be brutally frank: Pinnacle Fiction has never been known as an editor of fine literature. As far as publishers go, it's definitely a second-tier house, known nationally but not with the name-recognition of Bantam, Pocket or the other big-names. At least it's a real publisher and not a vanity press. Still, you'd be hard-pressed to recall at least one author published by them.

Even as an avid reader, my database lists only three of their titles, all very average genre fiction book. For the Defense is a surprising little exception to the norm, an enjoyable piece of legal fiction as gripping and amusing as anything I've read in the genre lately.

It has the good fortune of starring a bigger-than-life heroine. As the novel begins, Cosima Bernardin is a young lawyer in a high-powered New York legal firm. She's got everything lined up to succeed. In the first chapter, though, she's asked to cede control of her most visible client -a rock group- to her senior partners. She not only refuses, but quits and decides to establish her own law firm in direct competition with her old colleagues. A few plucky lawyers join her fight, and For the Defense is the story of that David-versus-Goliath fight.

Everyone is sucker for such a story, but For the Defense wouldn't be half the novel it is if it wasn't for the gallery of fun characters introduced in its pages. Even weeks after reading the book, some of the minor characters resonate more strongly than the protagonists of other novels read subsequently. Cosima herself is a wonderful heroine; a female protagonist with a good control on her destiny, unbounded ambition and considerable skills.

She's surrounded by rock stars, a ballerina, a frightfully powerful father, a senator sister, actors and actresses as well as other lawyers. There's a lot of casual sex in this novel; Cosima herself sleeps around with a few men during the course of the novel, but to Harrington's credit this never seems like an exploitative technique. (You know, like those so-called "feminist" male authors who just really like to play around with a wish-fulfilling promiscuous heroine.)

Harrington's writing is crisp, clean and compulsively readable. Cosima's legal cases overlap and compete for her attention, but our own attention remains rigidly focused on what she's doing. I was particularly impressed by For the Defense's ability to juggle multiple storyline, some of them impacting other, and some of them remaining stubbornly separate.

I was also impressed by the versimilitude of the legal manoeuvring in the novel. From the author's note ("I have the privilege of being a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York."), we can assume that Harrington is a professional of the field, and his experience in such matters really shine through, as is his talent to vulgarize complex notions.

Most of all, even though this is "merely" trashy genre fun, there is a definite pleasure in reading such novels from time to time; protagonists all get what they deserve, and that goes for antagonists too. For the Defense's universe is a richly moral one, and a contemporarily moral one too. Casual sex is acceptable, but sexism definitely isn't!

A compelling heroine, memorable characters, a boffo against-all-odds premise, convincing background details, clear writing... is there anything else we'd want from a genre novel? I don't think so, and that's why I recommend For the Defense if ever you can find it.

 

The Secret of Life
Paul McAuley

Tor, 2001, 413 pages, $35.00Can. hc, ISBN 0-765-30080-X

Paul McAuley's previous novels had all left me mostly indifferent. I'd sit there at the word processor after reading them, trying in vain to find something interesting to say about them. It never happened—hence the absence of McAauley reviews elsewhere on this site. I could recognize a certain level of quality in his work, but it never translated in a strong positive or negative reaction. Pasquale's Angels had an interesting uchronic premise but an overly florid execution. Fairyland had a good grasp of biological hard-SF, but a plot that floundered in nothingness. I couldn't muster any interest in checking out his other novels.

The Secret of Life is the kind of breakout book that makes me want to re-evaluate an author's entire output. Like Kim Stanley Robinson, McAuley had to return to Mars in order to produce an accessible top-notch SF novel. (Like Robinson's Icehenge, McAuley had set one previous story there, Red Dust)

As with many recent SF novels, The Secret of Life presents a future where corporations trump government regulations and are well on their way to become the dominant political power. In the opening pages, an espionage operation goes wrong and dangerous alien micro-organisms are spilled in the Pacific Ocean. Months later, the micro-organisms have grown into a dangerous slick that is posing a significant ecological danger. Though she doesn't know it yet, our heroine Mariella Anders is going to be drafted in an expedition of essential importance.

Not that you'd want to entrust anything of importance to her; Mariella is a brainy but rebellious scientist, given to body piercing, casual sex and generally bad attitude. Her résumé is impressive but her asocial tendencies are worrisome. Still, some people think that she's the best candidate for an emergency mission to Mars in order to spy on a recent Chinese discovery. Corralled in restrictive non-disclosure agreements, forced to work with her scientific nemesis, Mariella goes to Mars halfway screaming and kicking. Contrived? Well, yes, but not as much as what pleasantly follows. Her subsequent adventures will make her an interplanetary fugitive, hunted down by federal and corporate forces as she's trying to piece together a fundamental scientific mystery.

Clocking in at more than 400 pages of finely-detailed hard-SF extrapolation, The Secret of Life is amply worth its paperback cover price for readers thirsting for authentic science-fiction. McAuley was a professional research biologist and his latest novel is packed with the kind of insider detail that contributes so much to convincing SF. As biology becomes the primary science of the twenty-first century, it's about time that SF moves beyond physics as its intellectual field of choice.

What makes The Secret of Life so much fun is, in the end, how clearly it's written. Despite the heavy dose of hard-science, it reads with the narrative power of a thriller. Granted, it's a touch too leisurely to be entirely compelling (whole sections of the novel could have been condensed without too much impact), but it's much more effective than McAuley's previous novels. (Amusingly enough, there's even a reference to Fairlyand's main character, though it's unclear whether The Secret of Life is taking place in the same universe as the previous novel.)

An unexpected element of The Secret of Life is the political message against corporate science and for open research. As real-world research becomes more expensive and hence increasingly affected by monetary concerns, it's about time that open science becomes a major thematic component of SF. The Secret of Life isn't the first book to do so, but it's one of the first to make it an integral part of the narrative. McAuley can now claim to write truly mature SF in a vein similar to the latest works by Bruce Sterling and Kim Stanley Robinson. (There's also an extended "ultimate hack" sequence that is reminiscent of a similar awe-inspiring segment in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, though in molecular biology rather than computer science.)

The Secret of Life is not only one of the major SF novels of 2001, but it's also a breakthrough for McAuley, who finally manages to combine his scientific expertise and writing talents with an accessible elegance that will win him many more readers. I should know; I'll be one of them.

 

Food
Susan Powter

Pocket, 1995, 542 pages, $7.99 Can. pb, ISBN 0-671-56756-X

Food is a deceptively simple title for such a complex book. Everyone needs to eat. Whole industries have been created around one of humankind's most basic desire. Heck, there's even an industry with the goal of teaching people how to eat less.

Susan Powter's follow-up to Stop the Insanity! remains primarily an unusually-detailed diet book, but that doesn't stop it from providing the reader with a holistic look at food; what it is, how it comes to be in supermarkets, how it's sold to us and how we use it as much more than simple fuel. Though it would be dangerous to suggest Food as an "ultimate" book on nutrition, it's certainly provocative enough to strike fear, doubt and uncertainty in even the most convinced couch potatoes.

It's not as if Powter doesn't know what she's talking about, couch-potato-wise: As she relates to us again, and again, and again, a series of emotional disasters made her bloat up to 260 pounds before she got a grip and made herself melt back down to her current 130-odd pounds. Susan Powter's relationship to food is more complex than most of us but don't worry; by the end of the book (heck, by the end of page 25) you'll be told her whole story in excruciating detail. Over and over again.

We'll come back to Powter's particular manias in a short while, but let's mention right away that Food is akin to the most unpleasant dietician you'll ever meet. Organized in three part, Food gradually hammers down the usual American diet until nothing is left beyond tofu and organically-grown vegetables. "Stage One" is simple enough; spell "less fat" and you've mastered the essential of it. It's not so simple, of course; Powter explains in tedious detail the "fat formula", the wily ways of the fat industry and the insidious lure of fast food. There are recipes, calories tables and checklists: Food can be used as a reference book. It's nothing you haven't heard before, which if course doesn't mean you'll be any more receptive to it.

Don't worry yet; it gets worse. In "Stage Two", Powter goes beyond the Fat paradigm and takes a chainsaw to the dairy industry, protein, sugar, chicken and everything else that makes eating good and just. If you're not depressed by the end of that section, you haven't been paying attention.

I'm not sure if it gets worse in "Stage Three", where Powter turns her attention to chemicals, psychological issues related to food and other jolly topics. On one hand, the eat-well message gets more and more rigorous; on the other, Powter's own tics and motifs become so intrusive as to trivialize what she's saying.

Part of it is the Powter writing style; chatty, breathless as well as HEAVY ON CAPITAL LETTER AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!! It's accessible, but best absorbed in small doses; otherwise, it's like being stuck with a nagging shrew. What doesn't help are the constant (and I mean constant) references to Powter's life history, which eventually smacks of deeper problems than simply food addiction. (This isn't as much of a catty comment as you might think; Powter herself acknowledges this, though it doesn't make it any less annoying.)

It's difficult to describe the ultimate impact of the book. On one level, yes, it's hard to continue eating in the same way after reading the catalogue of potential horrors trotted out in Food. Most of her recommendations make a lot of sense. Heck, I even find myself somewhat sympathetic to casual vegetarians, which is something I never thought I'd write in a public forum.

On the other hand, I'm not seeing any behaviour modification in my own life after Food: You'll only pry my red meat out of my cold dead mouth. (A potentially ironic statement, that!) Food is also, despite the breezy humorous tone, a deeply depressing book; post-Powter, food becomes not an obligation or a pleasure, but a chore and a highly complex chore at that.

Given the massive amounts of partisan disinformation in the food arena, it's dangerous to suggest that there's an ultimate source of information out there. Powter's Food certainly isn't, though it's an exemplary piece of argumentation. If nothing else, that's a good start.

 

Hello, He Lied
Lynda Obst

Little, Brown, 1996, 246 pages, $31.95 Can. hc, ISBN 0-316-62211-7

We've seen quite a few books about Hollywood actors. We've seen an substantial number of books on Hollywood directors. Screenwriters take delight in writing books about themselves. The only "big" credits we seldom read about are producers.

(With one important exception: The flashy crash-and-burn career of Don Simpson -TOP GUN, FLASHDANCE, etc...- has resulted in one chainsaw biography (Charles Fleming's High Concept), but there was nothing typical about the drug-fuelled life of excess he led, nor anything ordinary in his producing career.)

This paucity may be justifiable. Producers don't have a set job description: They buy scripts, finesse stars until they extract a commitment, put together an offer for studios, arrange for financing, supervise operations on the set, arrange marketing campaigns, try to ensure awards for their movies... it just goes on and on. Maybe producers just don't have enough time for writing books about what they do.

Now, at least one producer has slowed down and published an autobiographical account of her own experience in Hollywood. Lynda Obst's account is in many ways a disappointing account of what a typical producer does, but at least it's better than nothing.

After a perfunctory introduction that explains how she came to land in Hollywood (in short; her then-husband moved), Obst starts to explain the pre-movie life of producers. It may very well be the most heart-wrenching thing I've read about Hollywood this year. Turns out that the life of a producer is enough to make a casual cinephile wonder in awe at how anything gets done in Hollywood. Producers will buy scripts, try to interest stars, go in meetings with studio head, try to satisfy large groups of people and get them to agree to spend million of dollars on creative projects. The tiniest things can cause a deal to collapse, sending everyone back to square one. When you factor in the fact that everyone is on tight schedules, well, things have a tendency to become very complicated. Obst's frustrating experience with the OUTBREAK project is enough to make you swear off ever moving to California.

All of the above has to be accomplished in cooperation with people with more power than intelligence, using a highly sophisticated set of social codes and ritualized small-talk. Obst thinks she's being witty in describing how things get done in Hollywood, but for any outside reading up, it's just disheartening; if government was run like this, there would be a revolution in a matter of days. (Oh, wait...)

The rest of the book is a mixed bag: Obst includes a chapter on the place of "Chix in Flicks" that, again, is as depressing as it's self-serving. It's immediately followed by a chapter about life on location, which is actually funny and informative; I don't recall reading about these things elsewhere, and that's worth something.

As far as the whole book goes, though, it's not a completely satisfying reading experience. Throughout the book, Obst includes segments and anecdotes she obviously finds funny. Alas, you must have to be an insider in the industry to be amused, because everything comes across as markedly less amusing that she must think it is. A few anecdotes fall completely flat. Others simply don't make sense. Sign of the author's place in the Hollywood food chain, there isn't much here that's self-critical or even highly critical of the industry. You'd think that a really shrewd observer could be able to step back and point out the problems... but Obst actually seems to enjoy all of the insanity. Furthermore, would it be cynical to point out that Obst's Hollywood oeuvre isn't anything worth crowing about? It's not as if her movies (BAD GIRLS? ONE FINE DAY? Even THE FISHER KING?) are exceptional or uniformly better than others...

Still, Hello, he Lied is an interesting book. It focused on an under-appreciated role in the Hollywood machine and might even serve to illuminate the dark recesses of the industry. It's not much of a funny book, as much because of its stylistic shortcomings as for its discouraging subject matter. I just wish there was a better book on the subject.

 

Manifold: Time
Stephen Baxter

Del Rey, 2000, 440 pages, $34.00 Can., ISBN 0-345-43075-1

Stephen Baxter is a hard-SF author with quite a few outstanding deficiencies, but one thing he'll never be accused of is lacking ambition. In his previous novels, he imagined an alternate manned expedition to Mars (Voyage), wrote a sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (The Time Ships) and collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke on a novel about the end of privacy and history (The Light of Other Days).

It's an impressive résumé, but with the first volume of the Manifold Trilogy, Baxter demonstrates that he's not going to stop there. Manifold: Time's plot focuses on Reid Malenfant, a business tycoon with a fascination for space exploration. In only a few pages, Baxter takes us back to a familiar hard-SF situation: Feeling betrayed by NASA, a rich entrepreneur tries to establish a private space program but is hampered by the overregulated government agencies. It's all very comfortable.

But soon afterward, the novel takes a turn towards originality. Our protagonist is warned that the human race will end in two hundred years. A space mission is to be manned by a squid. Hyper-intelligent children are popping up everywhere on the globe. As if that wasn't enough, an attempt to receive messages from the future actually succeeds. It heavy stuff, instantly addictive for anyone -you know you you are- looking for their next big crunchy hard-SF novel. There are physics lectures, lumps of explanatory narrative, evil Luddites, a reformat-the-universe ending and other genre staples.

It all ties in together, in what is occasionally a very loose fashion. Manifold: Time is a fascinating novel, but I don't think you can say it's a tightly-focused one. For one thing, I happen to think that the intellectual climax of the book happens mid-way through, as the protagonists get a glimpse at the future of the galaxy. Promising elements that could yield another book's worth of material -the biggest single example being the squids- are dropped unceremoniously as the novel advances.

For another, Manifold: Time relies heavily on frustrating clichés of the genre. Reid Malenfant is one; while I can appreciate SF's need for multicompetent Heinleinian characters, Malenfant isn't particularly well developed beyond being an icon of how determination can be a palliative for a bunch of skills. He's a bit too caricatural to work well in this environment, and has done too much in his life to be believable in the context of the novel.

Baxter, like many of his hard-SF colleagues, doesn't really believe in the goodness of humankind, and once again manipulates his vision of humanity to irrational extremes. In this novel, hyper-intelligent children are beaten up, thrown away and forgotten, then threatened and nuked by governments. It smacks of personal trauma (Was Baxter beaten up for being too smart in grade school? Magic Eight-Ball says yes.) but as for myself I'm getting tired of seeing religious nuts and irrational cults spring up in reaction to change in every single g'damn hard-SF novel. On a related point, I found the mass social reaction to the Carter catastrophe to be far too extreme and simplistic. Humans have an unlimited capacity for self-denial and I happen to think that we've immunized ourselves to "end of the world" scenarios with Y2K event and such.

But never mind my last little rant. Truth be told, I had a lot of page-turning fun while reading Manifold: Time, and I will be reading the next volume in the series shortly. It's easy to target Baxter for his usual tics and problems, but on the other hand, it must be pointed out that there's a lot of good fun extrapolation elsewhere in the book. I may not believe in the Carter Catastrophe at all, even from a statistical standpoint, but it does bring a delicious urgency to the novel up to its spectacular finish.

 

The Art & Science of Web Design
Jeffrey Veen

New Riders, 2001, 259 pages, $67.95 Can. tp, ISBN 0-7897-2370-0

As a technical professional with a deep interest in web design, I was pleased, over the last year, to see the emergence of a new type of how-to books. More focused on the theory and bigger issues of web publishing than hands-on coding concerns, these books exemplify the emerging maturity of the web. Whereas before the field was moving too quickly and hapzardly to allow for any formal (written) literature, the recent stabilization of standards and depth of past case studies is having an impact.

Jeffrey Veen is one of those old-timers with a lot of experience to share. He's been working for Wired Digital, involved in web standards work and is generally recognized as pretty hot stuff in web design communities. Now he's ready to spill the beans and share his experience in The Art & Science of Web Design.

It's a heterogeneous book divided in eight sections that can be read more or less independently. Rather than to generalize excessively, I'll cover the book section by section, and so...

[1]: Foundations starts the book with a conceptual bang. In less than thirty pages, Veen provides a historical context for the web, as well as a solid theory on why and how to develop the web. This is easily the book's highlight, with its emphasis on bigger issues rather than nitty-gritty.

[2]: Interface Consistency is a case study of other sites, and a powerful theoretical argument in favor of navigational standards. This section is complementary to the work of Jakob Nielsen. Again, it's wonderful stuff if you like to think on a higher plane of design.

[3]: Structure is another good theoretical primer on how to organize information, how to differentiate between various organizational schemes and why some are more appropriate than others.

[4]: Behavior starts promisingly enough with a good argument in favor of rule-based design, but slowly peters out with an interesting but incongruous technical demo of a headline-resizing piece of code.

[5]: Browsers helps to understand the awesome responsibility of web designers in accomodating users through their browsers. A good technical overview, maybe a bit too short.

[6]: Speed is an argument for clever simplicity, well-needed at a time where designers tend to assume high bandwidth for everyone.

[7]: Advertising is a short but interesting primer on how to advertise -and to accomodate advertising- on the web.

[8]: Object-oriented Publishing is somewhat of a let-down as a final chapter, being mostly a case study of one sample web site presumably done by Veen. It lacks the oomph required to send off such a book and also piles up a lot of technicalities at once.

Overall, though, I was impressed by Veen's chatty style and overall grasp of the bigger picture of web design. There was a lot in there that I already knew, but reminders always help, and they're not overly annoying when they're backed-up by good arguments.

I wasn't so fond of the book's latter half, which seemed out-of-place in a paper-media reference work. If I want Javascript code that will resize my headlines based on their length, I'll head out to a web site. It doesn't belong with the theoretical information that should be contained in a book destined to remain on my professional reference shelf. It's almost as if past the first few chapters, Veen had to use filler in order to satisfy a publishing contract...

In the same vein, it's hard to say who's the target audience for the book. Its scattershot approach make it more efficient as a periodical refresher than a reference source. It's mixture of theory and coding puts in in reach of both managers and tech weenie; maybe it'll help both realms understand each other, or maybe it'll confuse them forever. It's a worthwhile read, sure, but unfortunately it's also unsatisfying. A lot of good stuff, improperly tied in together. Maybe it'll all be fixed in the upgrade...