REVIEWS

2003, Part G: July

2003, Christian Sauvé

Featured this month:

 

Darwin's Blade,
Dan Simmons

Morrow, 2000, 368 pages, $37.95 Can hc, ISBN 0-380-97369-3

If you've been browsing the web for longer than six months, chances are that you've heard of the Darwin Awards, those dubious honorifics posthumously given "those who improve our gene pool... by removing themselves from it" (see their web site at www.darwinawards.com) or, more prosaically, to people so stupid they deserved to die. Darwin Awards lists get forwarded through the Internet regularly, cramming stories of fatal mishaps in countless email boxes at depressingly predictable intervals. (There is an interesting lack of self-awareness in blindly forwarding stories of stupid behaviour to everyone on your contact list, but I digress.)

Darwin's Blade begins with a fictionalization of what may be the Darwin Awards' most famous stupidity-induced death. I won't spoil it, but this bizarre accident manages to showcase the deductive skills of one Darwin ("Dar") Minor, an accident investigator with far more skills than one may suspect. Chapters later, as Darwin out-drives a pair of Russian thugs, he finds himself thick in the middle of a sordid insurance-scamming business where families die and billions of dollars are defrauded. Firefights, dogfights, sniping, romance and more wacky insurance cases are quick to follow.

Dan Simmons hops from genre to genre with great skill and success: Hyperion and its sequels rocked the science-fiction world and Summer of Night blew away more than one horror reader. Now, Darwin's Blade is Simmons' entry in the (techno)thriller genre. The action moves furiously from one thing to another, there is a pleasant density of technical details for just about every new gadget, military matters are mixed with detective work and the action ratchets up to (no kidding) a mano-a-mano duel in the middle of a grassy plain. Mixing high technology with primitive human stupidity, Darwin's Blade is one tasty book for readers with a penchant for thrillers about unusual knowledge. As with his previous novels, Simmons has studied a genre and understood what readers want. Also obvious is Simmons' penchant for recycling: Darwin's Blade immediately evokes the similar accident-investigator story "Entropy's Bed at Midnight" (from Lovedeath) and at one point echoes an idea from his short-short horror story "Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds" (in Prayers to Broken Stones).

Like most thrillers, the appeal of Darwin's Blade depends a lot on its protagonist. In Darwin Minor, we've certainly met a capable hero, perhaps even a little bit much so. For he's not simply a top-rated accident investigator (one whose eponymous aphorism states that "the simplest solution is usually stupidity.") Oh no; Excellent driver, PhD-holder (in nuclear physics, no less), Vietnam veteran Marine, expert sniper, champ sail-glider, world-class chess player, literature-lover, Darwin Minor packs enough interests to fill a full trilogy. But in what may be one of Darwin's Blade most amusing flaw, his multiple talents are uncovered as the story requires them. By the time a flashback describes how a 19-year-old Darwin, already PhD in Nuclear Physics, defends a Vietnamese nuclear power plant against attack without it having a link to his academic background, well, it's not hard to feel as if Simmons has crammed one too many talents in his stoic hero. Fortunately, there is a point to all of those skills besides the demands of the plot... but it's made a bit too late to comfort the least indulgent readers.

The other not-quite-so-amusing flaw of the novel may be glaring to some and transparent to others, depending on their degree of familiarity with, yes, the Darwin Awards. Many well-known stories are simply transplanted in Darwin's Blade with scarcely any winks to the knowledgeable audience. Besides the first few pages, the worst instance of this takes place at the end of Chapter 14, where the punchline of the whole sequence is obvious as soon as we read the words "chicken cannon". Nearly everyone who knows what a chicken cannon is and how it's used is also familiar with the one single famous anecdote about it. Unfortunately, Simmons takes five pages to spell it out.

But no matter: those quirks aside, super-protagonist Darwin Minor is one heck of a hero and the density of ideas, concepts and gadgets in Darwin's Blade more than outweighs the faults it may have. Thanks to Simmons' delicious prose and efficient plotting, the book roars along with the speed of an Acura NSX and delivers plenty of fun thrills despite the occasional disbelieving giggle or two. Simmons fans should be comforted; the man has successfully genre-hopped again.

 

American Gods,
Neil Gaiman

Harper Torch, 2001, 592 pages, $10.99Can pb, ISBN 0-380-78903-5

This is a protest review.

My formative years in reading Science-Fiction were shaped by a checklist of Hugo-winning novels. Whatever won, I read and in doing so, gained an appreciation for most of SF's greatest works. Hence my somewhat sentimental belief that Hugos should be given to... wait for it... the best science-fiction novel of the year. Not horror. Not fantasy. Not pseudo-literary pretentious crap. True, honest, unabashed science-fiction.

In the past few years, I have often been disappointed in the collective judgement of Hugo voters. (Forever Peace? What the hell were they thinking?) It got worse in the past two years: Harry Potter? Why? Aren't there World Fantasy Awards for this kind of stuff? I love the little wizard, but he's clearly not starring in SF novels.

Then came American Gods. Folks, Neil Gaiman may be a god amongst writers, but this stuff isn't SF. And yet, grudgingly, I came to accept (after a lengthy period of denial, anger, depression and bargaining) that sooner or later I'd have to read the novel for completion's sake. So I held my nose, bought the paperback (I may be a spiteful purist, but I'm not a cheap spiteful purist) and read the darn thing.

It's not a bad book at all.

But it's not Science Fiction.

Oh, one almost hesitate at times. The story involves a gigantic battle between the gods (who are, incidentally, living among us under various disguises), pitting old deities against newer ones. Upon his release from prison, protagonist "Shadow" is hired as an assistant by one of the most influential gods and gets to see most of the struggle. Where American Gods is meaningful to the Hugos is in its all-too-brief depiction of the modern gods. We get a fleeting glimpse of technology replacing mysticism, but also of belief carrying over. When people stop praying, it doesn't necessarily mean they're less superstitious; who hasn't felt a little frisson of simple belief when confronted to the incomprehensibility of modern technology? Don't we worship what we don't understand? For that matter, what is Science Fiction's responsibility in creating those new gods/archetypes (aliens, AIs, cyberpunks or time-travellers) taking over the older ones?

Alas, that particular SF novel remains to be written, for Gaiman seems far more interested in dealing with the old gods in all of their bloodthirsty furor. The "opposing side" of technoweenies and Men in Black is teasingly mentioned when strictly necessary, creating unfulfilled expectations. While strictly speaking an urban contemporary fantasy novel, American Gods is too enamoured with old folklore to let go. This causes unnecessary lengths (the various passages describing the arrival of gods in America struck me as being particularly dull) and also locks the novel in an old-fashioned fantastic mentality. A science-fiction novel might have explored the relative merits of those newer gods and conveyed a more contemporary feel. (along with a lesson in memetic evolution, I bet)

We can only assume that this wasn't Gaiman's intention. But whenever I could let go of those assumptions and enjoy the story for what it was, American Gods proved to be enjoyable on its own terms. The protagonist is enough of a blank slate to be interesting (curiously enough) and Gaiman is adept at extracting some wonder out of today's world. The writing is usually crisp and clear --with some intentional exceptions. At times scary and hilarious, profound without being inaccessible, this is an epic novel with a off-beat tone and a lot of affection for modern-day ordinary America.

In short, American Gods is a perfectly respectable piece of contemporary fantasy. I certainly don't regret reading it and you can now even consider me as being mildly interested in Gaiman's work. But--and you can certainly see this coming--it's not science-fiction and I certainly regret its selection as the winner of the 2002 Best Novel Hugo Award. Science Fiction, dammit! I protest!

 

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Volume 1),
Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill

America's Best Comics/DC Comics, 2002, 192 pages, $24.95Can. tp, ISBN 1-56389-858-6

One of these days, I will write about copyright and the public domain and how corporations are holding real human intellectual achievements for ransom in exchange for imaginary monetary gains. I will discuss how our culture feeds on itself and how unlimited copyrights are choking vitality out of it. And whenever I do, I will reference Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at length.

But not today, because I want to spend some time just discussing Moore's remarkable work. It's not the first of his stories to find its way on my bookshelves (already furnished with a copy of Watchmen and V for Vendetta), but it's well worth some attention even for non-comics fans. A steampunk fantasy in which some of the best-known fictional heroes of the Victorian era are brought together to fight threats to the British empire, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is indeed an extraordinary piece of work mixing superhero fantasy, literary allusions and historical flair.

On the eve of the release of the July 2003 movie adaptation, I scoured local comic shops and managed to get the last available copy in the Ottawa area, fresh out of the "new arrivals" box. The trade paperback edition of the first series (a second is currently being published, with a third one announced) contains all six episodes of the story, plus miscellaneous art and a collected "serial" short story written by Moore in the style of H. Rider Haggard.

Why Haggard? Maybe because he's the author of the Alan Quatermain stories, and Quatermain is one of the five "extraordinary gentlemen" of the title. Completing the cast are Mina Harker, Captain Nemo (Woo! My favourite!), Doctor Jekyll (including Doctor Hyde) and the invisible man. All of which are safely out of copyright by now, hence available for play. (Allusions to their contemporary detective Sherlock Holmes are also sprinkled through, though by 1898, Holmes is still presumed dead from his Reichenbach Falls showdown. One also suspects that Moore has steered away from Holmes in reaction to the endless Holmes pastiches found elsewhere in steampunk.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen essentially reprises superhero comic book fantasies: the story is strictly comic-book stuff, complete with a climactic battle aboard a flying fortress. But superhero fantasies have rarely been this emotionally extreme. This is from a script by Alan Moore: it's not for kids. The Invisible Man is an amoral psychopath and a serial rapist capable of casual murder. Mr. Hyde doesn't appear to be any better. Alan Quatermain is introduced while in a deep heroin-induced stupor and spends most of the story re-learning how to be heroic. Even Nemo has a rich past as a pirate. All of which makes for a fascinating group dynamic, with portentous implication for their next adventures. (Indeed, I'm told that one particular conflict is settled in a grisly fashion in Volume Two.)

But the real reason to read this graphic novel is in the intricate historical and literary allusions. Moore has performed some heavy-duty research to enhance the credibility of his imagined universe and it shows. From the second page onward, we're treated to a richly-detailed alternate-universe Victorian England, complete with a bridge across the Channel, cavorite, the Nautilus, Moriarty and references to just about every single known (or less-known) Victorian-era character. This is one comic book worth re-reading, certainly with a concordance in hand. (Check out Jess Nevins' Heroes & Monsters, an earlier version of which can be found on-line.)

It all amounts to one impressive graphic novel. While I'm not a fan of Moore's ultra-violent sensibilities nor of Kevin O'Neill's flat and angular artwork (which, at least, has the merit of looking like a hypothetical Victorian-era comic book), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is definitely something else, a work of brilliance that stands apart from just about anything else you've read before. The historical tone is nearly perfect, and the sense of playful storytelling is contagious.

It's not a surprise to find out that the 2003 film is nothing like the graphic novel. A poor re-imagining without any of the depth in Moore's writing, the film aims for cheap thrills over intellectual satisfaction. Worse; in botching a good concept and delivering a flat adventure film, it ends up being a less interesting, less exciting work than the original material. You don't need my recommendation to grab a copy of the graphic novel; just do, already.

 

In Enemy Hands,
David Weber

Baen, 1997, 544 pages, $7.99Can. Pb, ISBN 0-671-57770-0

We readers are a sadistic bunch. Oh, we seem mild-mannered enough, sitting there with a book in our hands, the occasional smirk on our lips. But in our heads, ah, it's a completely different attitude. We like characters, but we want a reason to like them. We want to see how they react when rocks are thrown at them. We're not interested in some happy-but-dull guy without a care in the world; we want to see explosive action, heart-wrenching drama, death-defying adventure and against-all-odds comebacks. Make no mistake; everyone loves a happy ending, but such endings are meaningless without some prior suffering.

David Weber certainly belongs to the rock-throwing school of characterization. His flagship heroine, Honor Harrington, is a character defined by crises. In novel after novel, she's thrown in impossible situations, but always emerges triumphant as both an officer and a lady.

Still, apart from the occasional curve ball in volume 4 and 5, Honor has always done pretty well in military engagements. Hadn't lost a fight despite some tense moments. This changes in this seventh volume of the Harrington saga: In Enemy Hands. For the Harrington fan, three noteworthy things happen in this novel.

First, the Admiral of White Haven is gets a sudden crush on Honor. Much eeewing ensues as readers realize that he's a ninety-years old admiral of the fleet married to a crippled ex-actress and she's a forty-year old captain with only one previous lover to her credit. Further eeewing ensues as we realize that Weber almost never does anything for kicks or occasional passing mentions, which means it'll probably be a more-or-less permanent fixture of the series until the death of one of them. Egawd. Now that's a promising thought for the next novels. (Almost as promising is the mention of the treecats engaging in colonial expansion, ensuring that we'll see much more of them in books to come.)

Second: the ongoing Manticore/Haven war is not going well for the Manticoran empire. Despite their superior educational system, superior technology, superior moral fortitude and, well, overall superiority to those evil Havenite socialists (whose name are more French than ever, despite their Soviet-style regime), the Manticorans are not making any significant progress in the war, which threatens to turn into a contest of attrition. And that's a type of the battle the Manticorans can't win. Everyone is getting a little bit desperate, and that, in no small part, is why Honor is brought back in full service.

Finally, --and this is the biggie that relegates even the White Haven romance to the background--, something new and delightful happens to Honor at mid-book this time around: She loses. She surrenders. She's taken prisoner. She's stuffed in a vessel by a power-mad Havenite, tortured (along with her treecat), abused, judged guilty of whatever crime is required to kill her and sent to her execution. Woo!

That's when the readers' sadism come in: After books of successful space battles in which Honor wins by the tiniest margins, it's somewhat of a welcome change to see her fail at something, for once. By this time in the series, she's such a super-woman character that a little reader backlash is almost inevitable. For the first time since her Grayson exile, the novel doesn't follow the usual template.

Unfortunately, the price to pay for this new development is to spend far more time with the Havenite antagonists and as usual any time spent away from Honor is usually time wasted. (There is, however, a neat subplot involving Officer Harkness.) In Enemy Hands is never terribly dull (Weber's writing style is brisk enough to keep us interested, no matter what), but it's hard to avoid the thought that in terms of density of action, Weber's last few Harrington books are suffering from a great deal of over-writing.

Oh well: It's not as if we can stop now. As far as this volume's conclusion is concerned, what you think will happen, happens. By the end of the book (the clearest cliffhanger the series ever had), the situation is still critical (Baen has to sell the next novel, after all) but Honor has once again given one big black eye to Haven. On to the next story!

 

Perdido Street Station,
China Miéville

Del Rey, 2000, 710 pages, $27.00Can. Tp, ISBN 0-345-44302-0

I don't read a lot of fantasy, in part due to a feeling that it doesn't have much to offer: locked-in traditional high fantasy is almost as rigidly defined as today's contemporary world, and that's a straight trip to boredom. Granted, this is less a reflection on epic fantasy than it is a reproach to the writers unwilling to re-invent a genre fatally tainted by Tolkien.

But wait! China Miéville is a writer willing to shake it up and Perdido Street Station is the novel I've been waiting for. A smart blend of science-fiction and fantasy in an environment quite unlike anything ever written before, this is the kind of book that leaves a deep impression on neophytes and jaded cynics alike.

Some novels are about characters and some are about stories, but this one is about a city: New Crobuzon. Set in an imaginary universe where kinds of magic work nearly as well as Victorian-era technology, New Crobuzon is a vast playground, a place where rivers converge, races commingle and all railways end at the gigantic Perdido Street Station.

One character will introduce us to the city: Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, an eccentric human with an insectoid girlfriend and an interest in a magical science called Crisis Theory. His reputation has already travelled some way and so one day he is accosted by a stranger, a mangled bird-man who has crossed half a world in order to be able to fly again. Helped along by a generous quantity of gold, Isaac soon finds himself tasked with re-creating the gift of flight. In a universe equally shaped by science and technology, this would seem to be an easy task. The only problem would be to pick only one method. But Isaac is more meticulous, and before long he's collecting all types of creature in order to study how they fly, and how he may be able to re-create the effect.

If Perdido Street Station has one flaw, it's that the early part of the novel is riddled with coincidences. Isaac's call for creatures just happens to net him a caterpillar than just happens to feed on something that her girlfriend's manager just happens to have when he visits, and naturally his girlfriend just happens to receive a commission from someone who may know a lot more about this situation, but then Isaac just happens to be contacted by something that just happens to know of a betrayal... and so on.

But whereas in other novels the heavy hand of authorial influence would be too obvious for comfort, it doesn't seem to matter all that much in Perdido Street Station. This, after all, is a novel of discovery, a novel of a place rather than of plot. Not that the plot doesn't start moving after a lengthy set-up: Pretty soon, thanks to some unfortunate events, New Crobuzon is plunged in nightmarish terror and its denizens race feverishly to find a solution. Their appeals to the lowest powers are rejected (!) and so they must appeal to an even stranger force... even as Isaac discovers an occult conspiracy he did not suspect.

The delights of this novel are many, but few are as satisfying as the gradual discovery of the city and its inhabitants. Cactus-people, automatons, terrible dream-suckers, a dimension-shifting entity called the Weaver, insect humanoids and scores of other creatures all figure in Perdido Street Station, splendidly shown by Miéville as he delights in showing off the wonder of his world. There is a lot of material in those 710 pages.

In some ways, this is like a dream setting for a role-playing game. In others, it's a pleasure to see Miéville introduce all of these elements, then use them all in the road leading to the spectacular climax of the piece. There are striking images throughout the novel, whether it's the description of the city, scenes where our characters travel through dimensions or when they witness, helplessly, creatures feeding on a victim's mind.

This, by almost any measure, is a major novel. Written with skill and reasonable clarity, it cuts right to the heart of fantasy to show us an original world. Characters are well-drawn, wonders are unleashed at regular intervals. There is deep horror, unconventional twists of fate, satisfying developments and heart-breaking conclusions. Modern and classical at once, Perdido Street Station combines the technological love of SF with the possibilities of fantasy and the unnerving tension of horror to deliver an experience unlike any other. Make a place in your reading stack for this book; it's more than worth it.

 

The Lessons of Terror,
Caleb Carr

Random House, 2002, 272 pages, $29.95Can. hc, ISBN 0-375-50843-0

The events of September 11, 2001 had such a deep impact, in part, because they were a relatively new phenomenon. Isolated from the rest of the world by two oceans, America had seldom known the reality of terrorism. After a brief period in the seventies when airliner hijackings were the rage, terrorists seemed on their way to become an amusing shorthand for action movie villains. But surely not an actual threat, right?

That notion collapsed along with the World Trade Center. Suddenly, Americans started to ponder important questions: Why did this happen? How do you ensure that this doesn't happen again? In The Lessons of Terror, Caleb Carr defines terrorism, takes a look at the history of the concept and suggests a way out of terror.

You've heard his name before: Among other things, Carr wrote two well-received historical thrillers (The Alienist and a follow-up, The Angel of Darkness) and one science-fiction novel (Killing Time)... which wasn't so well-received. But Carr's first advocation was military history and so The Lessons of Terror is a bit of a professional book for him, an historical exploration of past events in order to better understand the mechanics of terrorism.

Far from being limited to the stereotypical bomb-packing religious fundamentalists, terrorism -according to Carr-- is nothing less than the use of violence against civilian populations in order to exert pressure on a political entity. As he demonstrates, terrorism defined as such has a long history, one that has an intricate relationship with more traditional military history. The Roman empire, for instance, waged war against enemy garrisons, but then often extended the benefits of Roman citizenship to the conquered populations. When it lost sight of this good treatment of civilians, well, Carthage burned and the empire later fell, victimized by internal rebellions and stuck in a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks.

The Lessons of Terror is largely a treatise on the history of war and its impact on civilians. It stems from terror, but touches upon subjects like the justification for war, the innocence of civilian populations, military discipline and guerrilla warfare. Carr's (oft-repeated) main theory is that terror never succeeds: Through more than two thousand years of military history, everyone who has resorted to terror tactics has inevitably been defeated, sooner or later. It's an encouraging statement when applied to enemies (given that the only rational solution to terrorism is to make it obvious that it's a self-defeating tactic) but also a troubling one considering any response to terrorism; in fighting against it, the worst method is to adopt its tactics -something well worth remembering these days.

The Lessons of Terror is billed as a military history book, but I suspect that it's closer to a mass-market vulgarization than to a serious treatise: while the depth of Carr's knowledge of history is impressive to laymen, the argumentation, at times, seems to rely a lot on definitive adjectives rather than a complete train of thought. For us dumb readers, it's easy to be swayed by repetitions of "terror never works", but not as obvious to find the crucial missing information that may argue against his thesis. One suspects that, in some ways, this is "the feel-good military history book of the year!"

At the same time, there is no doubt that this is a book that aims for controversy. While I was rather distressed by Carr's constant put-down of all things French at first, I felt much better when it became obvious that he's an equal-opportunity agent provocateur: His casual inclusion of key American figures (Sherman, Jackson, Kissinger, Nixon, etc.) in his gallery of terrorists is a nice little tweak to just about everyone out there, and his sceptical view of American foreign policy is bound to get a rise from most quarters. Not to mention his badly-integrated screed against the American intelligence community.

While I'd be ill-informed to say whether The Lessons of Terror are truly those derived by Carr, there's no doubt that this is an entertaining, detailed and argumentative treatise well worth reading. A short book packed with a steady stream of provocative ideas, it's as infuriating as it is fascinating. At a time where too many knee-jerk reaction to terror are being treated as sane threat responses, it's heartening to find that someone, at least, is willing to take a longer view of the situation. When current events serve us an unexpected curve-ball, it's reassuring to think that, on some level, it's merely another repetition of history. There is nothing new; just unfamiliar combinations.

 

Kiln People,
David Brin

Tor, 2002, 569 pages, $10.99 Can. Pb, ISBN 0-765-34261-8

The golem has a long and distinguished history in fantastic literature, from the Bible onward, up to the Capek's first "robots", men of metallic clay designed to do the work of humans. David Brin's Kiln People is a playful update on this concept, wrapped in a futuristic thriller and smoothed over with clear prose.

In the future, there will be dittos, states Brin as a starting premise. Clay replicas of people, temporarily imprinted with their memories and personalities for up to 24 hours until the chemical dissolution of the ditto. Re-assimilation of ditto memories is possible, but remains optional. Why spend a day cleaning up the house when you can simply replicate a ditto for this express purpose, then re-integrate their memories just to make sure you remember where you've filed everything? Why risk policemen's lives when you can just use dittos instead? Why subject your permanent body to sexual, chemical or physical abuse when you can send it to party all night long and then re-integrate their memories at dawn?

Mega "What If?"! The possibilities are limitless, and that's part of what makes the first half of Kiln People so compelling: This is a big Science-Fiction novel with a brand-new premise (does it sound like Laura J. Mixon's Proxies, though?) and the guts to take a hard look at the possibilities of the thing. For those who still cling to the comfortable notion that SF should be a literature of ideas, well, look not further than this book to make you fall in love with the genre all over again. Brin easily integrates plenty of neat derived possibilities and runs with them through the course of the novel.

There is a plot to tie everything together, and (perhaps unfortunately), it ends up being a complex, heavy-duty story of familial obsessions, criminal conspiracies, doomsday devices and fancy detection. The hero of the piece is one Albert Morris, private investigator extraordinaire with an uncanny ability to make very faithful dittos. (Most people have trouble creating completely-faithful versions of themselves, and occasionally create runaway dittos that don't identify with their creators.) In the course of his work, RealAl often generates clay duplicates of himself, sending them in dangerous or boring situations, always trying to nab crooks and corporate criminals. But on one particular day where he decides to generate four dittos to make care of ongoing business, well, let's just say that a lot of very bad things happen at once to all of him...

Fans of the author won't be dissatisfied by this effort, Brin's first stand-alone adult novel since 1993's Glory Season. His trademark blend of deep extrapolation, cheerful optimism and good humour is on full display here, in a novel that is more than worthy of attention. Those who have read Brin's non-fiction work The Transparent Society can expect some further discussion of privacy and accountability. Stylistically, the challenges in representing five different first-person variants of the same characters are significant. And yet it's one of Brin's greatest successes that the viewpoint-hopping is handled almost seamlessly. (Readers with a low tolerance for puns or cliffhanger chapters may not be overly pleased, though.)

As the novel advances, its challenges become even greater and Brin stumbles a bit. The carefully-constructed rules of dittotech are, as expected, bent and then broken by new technology. (Alas, a suggestion that dittos have their own subculture hidden from the real humans is sort of left unexplored) The progressive slide of the novel from light-hearted mystery to deeper metaphysical territory isn't completely unexpected, but it's a thematic departure from the initial feel of the story. It nevertheless evolves into an interesting dissection of identity and even of humanity.

Add to that the lighthearted tone, and you've got an old-school pure-SF novel that works on several levels at once, and provides a great reading experience on top of everything else. I don't ask for much more than that in my SF diet, and that's why I'm pleased to see that Kiln People made it on the 2003 Hugo ballot for best novel of the year. It certainly has my vote.

 

Hugo and Aurora Awards 2003: The Nominees

As I write this, less than a month remains before Torcon3, the 2003 World Science-Fiction Convention. Among five day's worth of pure SF goodness, the Worldcon is also where the Hugo Awards are given out. After years of bitching about the Hugo's wacky winners, I now find myself in a position to do something about it by virtue of my Torcon3 membership.

Fortunately, the pervasive growth of the Web had made it so that it's easier than ever to make informed choices about this year's voting -with a few exceptions, almost all of the short fiction nominees for both the Hugo and the Auroras are on-line, and one guesses that downloads of the dramatic presentations are theoretically available elsewhere (not that I'd do such a thing.) Thanks to an Internet connection, the "Plucker" freeware application, my PDA and a few bus rides, here are my choices for the 2003 Hugo and Auroras awards:

Hugo, best novel: While having read only two of the five nominees may not be such a good basis for decision, my choice still goes to David Brin's Kiln People. Sure, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt had more depth to it, but the uneven interest of the book make it, somehow, a less meritorious winner. (though I won't cry if it wins.) Given that I try not to read trilogies before all the volumes are out, I had to pass on Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids. Best of luck to China Miéville's The Scar and Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth... I'll pick them up some day. [September 2003: Sawyer's Hominids wins.]

Hugo, best novella: Neil Gaiman's "Coraline" was published as a real book and is thus unavailable for free on-line study, and so is Richard Chwedyk's "Bronte's Egg". Too bad. Among the rest, I had somnolent reactions to Ian R. MacLeod's "Breathmoss" and Charles Coleman Finlay's "The Political Officer", hence low ratings for both stories. Pat Forde's post-WTC novella "In Spirit" actually annoyed me by repeatedly pressing the 9-11 emotional button over and over again. Too bad it didn't have anything more insightful to say than "terrorist comes to realize the evil of his acts." Somehow, I thought SF was supposed to be more clever than that. So my vote goes, almost by default, to Paul Di Filippo's "A Year in the Linear City", a story that is only better than average (too episodic, almost too needy for audience approval) but features a few clever passages, including a cool meeting with a character modelled on the legendary SF editor John W. Campbell... [September 2003: The award goes to Neil Gaiman for "Coraline".]

Hugo, best novelette: Couldn't be interested by Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Wild Girls". At all. "Madonna of the Maquiladora" (Gregory Frost) and Maureen F. McHugh's "Presence" were two depressing tear-jerkers that threatened to go somewhere interesting but ultimately didn't. The classical old-school hard-SF fan that I am kinda liked Michael Swanwick's Jupiter exploration tale "Slow Life" , but the new-school socio-hard-SF punk that I am thought that Charlie Stross' "Halo" was a pretty darn good example of what modern mind-stretching SF should be. After a scattered start, it really got delicious. I laughed aloud at a few neat turns of phrases: Good jokes, good details, good stuff. (It would also count double as my favourite short-fiction Hugo this year.) [September 2003: Swanwick's "Slow Life" takes the prize]

Hugo, best short story: "Lambing Season" (Molly Glass) has a fitting title given that it put me to sleep at surely as counting sheep, and so did Jeffrey Ford's "Creation". Better luck next time. I had more fun with Michael Swanwick's "The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport", and even more fun reading his other story "Hello, Said the Stick." As of this writing, I'm not sure whether this last piece will get my vote, of if I'll go with the mean little future history tale in Geoffrey A. Landis' "Falling Onto Mars". [September 2003: Landis wins for "Falling Onto Mars".]

Hugo, dramatic presentation (long form): This one's easy: MINORITY REPORT is the only g'darn Science-Fiction film on the list, and it's worthy of a Hugo. You can keep your fantastic LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER films, or your comic-booky SPIDER-MAN for yourself. (I really should see SPIRITED AWAY some day, though.) [September 2003: ...and the award goes to LORD OF THE RINGS]

Hugo, best professional artist: Donato Giancola. Not just because he's cool, but because his stuff rocks. This being said, in a list along with other favourites such as Jim Burns and Bob Eggleton it's hard to pick just one! [September 2003: Bob Eggleton wins]

Hugo, best fan writer: David Langford's sustained dominance of this category has been one of the Hugos' longest-running gag, but it's hard to disagree after surveying the competition's web sites. The others are good, but Langford is just better. He's the Monty Python of SF fandom in a field full of adequate but unspectacular writers. [September 2003: Langford wins and suggests to start thinking about other nominees.]

I don't have enough information about the nominees in the other categories to make an informed choice. I may still vote just for the heck of it.

Moving on, we now pay attention to the Canadian contingent with the Aurora Awards. Here too, most of the short-fiction nominees are available on-line, which allows to to be very disappointed for free. But first, the novels:

Aurora, best novel in English: I've read only two of the five nominees, but here again, Karl Schroeder's Permanence easily ranks as one of the best novels of the year. I was rather unimpressed by Karin Lowachee's Warchild. Best of luck to Edo van Belkom's Martyrs (I may not have read it, but he's a dependable author.) Meanwhile, Sawyer's Hominids will have to wait until Hybrids comes out to be read, and I've sworn off anything by Julie E. Czerneda a long time ago when I realized I could read hundred of pages of her novels without caring for one single thing. [September 2003: Woot-woot: Schroeder's Permanence wins. Rumor has it that only one vote separated first and second place...]

Aurora, best novel in French: Tough choice, further complicated by the fact that I know all five authors on a first-name basis. That, and I still haven't read Esther Rochon's L'Aigle des Profondeurs nor Guy Sirois' Horizons Blancs. I have, however, read Le Revenant des Formalhaut by Jean-Louis Trudel and found it to be mere competent Young Adult SF. The same could be said of Michèle Laframboise's Piège pour le Jules Verne, but the good old dynamic space-opera feel of the book is unusual for a French-Canadian SF work, this is one of the most entertaining French-language genre book published last year. As such, it gives a run for its money to Joël Champetier's fantasy novel Les Sources de la Magie, a fun romp through a medieval society on the threshold of representative democracy. As a self-avowed SF snob, my vote is tilting toward the Laframboise novel, but not by much... [September 2003: Jean-Louis Trudel wins for Le Revenant des Formalhaut.]

Aurora, best short story in English: Let's tell it straight: I think this category is a disaster. Three nominees from instructional books geared toward teens, another borefest by Julie E. Czerneda and "Ineluctable", a decidedly average entry by Robert J. Sawyer who, (as is obvious to anyone who's read his collection Iterations, not nominated for an Aurora) does better work in long form. I'd put in "no award" except for the fact that I usually rather like Eric Choi's fiction and his teenage-geared "Just Like Being There" has a rather pleasant classical-SF feel. Should I be forced to do so (and I haven't filled my ballot yet), I'd say that Isaac Szpindel's "By Its Cover" is a decent second choice. But what a let-down, especially after the Hugo crop of stories. The rest is just dull or ordinary. [September 2003: The award goes to Robert J. Sawyer for "Ineluctable"]

Aurora, best short story in French: Aw, forget it; I read most of those when I sent in my nominations, and the only one I can remember is Michel Laframboise's "Les Femmes viennent de Mars et les hommes de Vénus." Case closed. [September 2003: Sylvie Bérard wins for "La Guerre sans temps"]

Given my strong lack of interest for the other categories, I think that's pretty much it. In other circumstances, I'd probably add a few extra comments about the dismal current state of SF, but it's probably more productive to just shut up and go read another book.