Reviews

2004, Part F: July

2004, Christian Sauvé

Reviewed this month:

Also, a look at the 2004 Hugo nominees!

 

The Shores of Tomorrow (Chronicles of Solace #3)
Roger MacBride Allen

Bantam Spectra, 2003, 493 pages, $9.99 pb, ISBN 0-553-58365-4

It's not uncommon for third volumes of trilogies to make up for lacklustre middle tomes. Heck, it's not unknown for conclusions alone to save entire series. But what's not as common is for trilogies to dissolve as blandly as the Chronicles of Solace does in The Shores of Tomorrow.

Actually, allow me to rephrase that: There is nothing strictly wrong with the way The Shores of Tomorrow wraps up the material first explored in The Depths of Time and The Ocean of Years. Nothing at all; the story of Solace is decently concluded, there's a happy ending, characters get what they deserve and we finally see the logical implications of the series' pet concepts.

But what could have been done in fifty pages was stretched out to nearly ten times that. Worse: beyond the obvious waste of time, this lack of concision ends up harming other areas of the trilogy.

If you can muster up the courage to go read my reviews of the trilogy's first two volumes, it's obvious that even from the first book, the series had serious pacing problems. Developments that could have been shown in a few lines took entire chapters to unfold, with preciously few marginal gains as far as pure entertainment was concerned. This tendency reaches an apex of sorts in The Shores of Tomorrow, especially when you consider the NovaSpot ignition sequence, a tense plot point that ends up spread over 90 pages of fluff.

It gets worse when you consider the useless plot threads that are carelessly thrown in the mix. Despite the "Chronicles of Solace" designation for the entire series, there's little doubt that the real story told here is the one of Anton Koffield and his quest to uncover and then understand Oskar DeSilvo. All else is sideshow, which becomes increasingly intrusive as the third book unfolds and the action is indefinitely delayed. Book One had its share of sideshows, and they make a return here; Any competent editor would have cut the "Elber Malloon" scenes, so peripheral are they to the book's main story. But no; they're all there along with even more filler. I buy trilogies with the assumption that they contain enough material for three books; here, it becomes obvious, after the fact, that the Chronicles of Solace is a two-book, maybe even a single book's worth of intrigue.

I can understand a deliberate and careful pacing when it's leading up to something worthwhile, or when it's sustained to enhance suspense. But there's no real reason to delay anything in this story, especially given its race-against-the-clock quality as a failing world is at stake.

But this slow-poke pacing has another effect that may be even more disastrous: It allows the reader to think about the story as it goes along, and even start to out-think the writer. When Oskar DeSilvo outlines his grand unified theory of terraforming, cultural stagnation and technological development, we've been waiting for it so long that it comes off as obvious and maybe even trite. The "solution" to the terraforming crisis was implicit at the end of volume one, and the characters were just too blind to see it. Allen stretches his central concept so much that he nearly snaps it. The whole "Chronological Patrol" concept, already iffy at first glance, suffers a lot from the extended story treatment; I doubt that it would have been as unconvincing in a single zippy 400-page novel.

The other thing that bothered me about the trilogy's intellectual climax is that it acknowledges humanity's thirst for knowledge and innovation, and then immediately says that it can be delayed indefinitely. Not bloody likely, and that reflects badly on the series. Again; I doubt that I would have been so severe in the context of a short story or a single novel, but trilogies demand a higher degree of scrutiny.

Take scissors, start cutting, end with a 500-page singleton and maybe the Chronicles of Solace would be worth a recommendation. As it stands now, there's far too much build-up for too little pay-off. There are a few good ideas, the second volume has nifty material and the ending is suitably optimistic, but frankly, you could read three better single novels for the time and money you'd otherwise spend on this series. It's no wonder if the last two volumes didn't even get a hardcover edition.

 

The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature,
Neal Pollack

Harper Perennial, 2002, 205 pages, C$20.95 tp, ISBN 0-06-000453-3

I suppose that there's something to be said about blogs when it comes to self-marketing: Had I not already been under the spell of Neal Pollack's prose and his pleas to buy his books, it's unlikely that I would have picked up his stuff at the local remainder sale. Hurrah for shameless self-promotion!

Now, keep in mind that Neal Pollack is the very definition of shamelessly self-promoting writer. (And I don't say this as if it's a bad thing) His latest book, Never Mind the Pollacks, is a rock-and-roll novel telling the story of Neal Pollack, famous rock journalist and confidante to rockstars from Elvis Presley to Kurt Cobain. His first book, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, is a mock collection of snippets from the decades-long career of Neal Pollack, greatest American writer. While Never Mind he Pollacks is best left to those with enough knowledge of rock to appreciate the fine in-jokes, the Anthology is something else.

For one thing, I suspect that it's a bit more accessible to everyone. In this book, Neal Pollack's character is that of a writer as a rock star, a fantastically self-absorbed man's man whose universe revolves around him. It may be useful to be an avid magazine reader to piece together the pieces of his parodies (I kept flashing back to Sebastian Junger's Fire pieces myself), but the bombastic quality of Pollack's alter-ego is amusing enough that even people unaware of, say, Norman Mailer, will laugh along.

The biggest wonder of the Anthology, surprisingly enough, is that it sustains this simple satiric concept for a full two hundred pages. Pieced together as an anthology of "Pollack"'s forty-year-long journalism career, it's merely an excuse to explore different themes and subjects as a knuckle-busting, hard-drinking man's man. "Pollack" has been everywhere from the USSR to Mexico, has written back from countless wars, has seduced hundreds of women (most of whom just have to hear his name before cooing "take me!"), is best buddies with this world's leading figures (but especially John McCain) and has stopped at least one dastardly plot against the USA. Whew! Just take a look at some of the chapter titles: "I Am Friends With a Working-Class Black Woman", "The Burden of Internet Celebrity", "Why Am I So Handsome?"... An interview with his sister is, of course, all about him. Hubris seems too small a word for this oversize personality.

(The "real" Neal Pollack, should you be spoilsport enough to ask, is in his thirties and is only beginning to take the literary world by storm. If he exists at all. But the real danger in reviewing Pollack is in either trying to be as funny as him, or doubt nothing.)

In some ways, this is reminiscent of Mark Leyner's Et tu, Babe?, another delicious piece of humour writing in which the author was left free to push the limits of literary self-disillusion to insane levels. While Leyner's book was funnier (c'mon; visceral tattoos?), Pollack's Anthology holds better as a unit. As a parody of those other "anthologies of literature", it's pitch-perfect... from the ancillary material (chronology, family tree, study guide...) to the tapestry of the star protagonist's imagined career. Faked photos included.

From what I can gather, the original hardcover version of the Anthology, as published by McSweeney's, was a superb design parody of this type of book. (Head over to Amazon, and "look inside" the hardcover for a few extra laughs) While the Harper Perennial edition isn't quite as respectable-looking, it does contain a third more material, and even brings up "Pollack"'s career to the Post-WTC era. It also includes Jack Shafer's New York Times Book Review piece on the Anthology, which says everything I wanted to say about it, and better. (Bastard.)

I'm always a sucker for satire, and this one is better than most. While the book didn't make me laugh out loud constantly, I had a hard time wiping a constant smirk off my face; The only reason not to read it in a single sitting is running out of time. (Hey Neal; you can use this as a blurb: "There aren't enough hours in a day for Neal Pollack.") Witty, well-executed and liable to make you look at literary celebrities in a whole new light, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature is well-worth a look. Even if Neal Pollack's ceaseless stream of self-promotion hasn't yet reached you.

 

Rules of Engagement
Gordon Kent

Berkley, 1998, 474 pages, C$10.99 pb, ISBN 0-425-17858-7

If you read a lot of military thrillers, you may feel as if you can know everything about this book merely by reading the cover jacket: A young naval aviator following the footsteps of his celebrated father. A mysterious accident during a combat mission. The hunt for a traitor. Ah-ha.

Reading the first few chapters, in which our protagonist comes to learn about life on-board an aircraft carrier, you may even feel that your assumptions are correct: This is going to be yet another average military thriller, with plenty of military details and vignettes, all leading up to a confrontation with the evil traitor. With a few combat scenes.

Well, the above summary is not entirely incorrect (especially the part about the final confrontation), but the twists and turns in the tale make it a little different from the usual military thriller.

For one thing, the biggest departure takes place as soon as the protagonist ends his tour of duty and goes back stateside for an assignment in naval intelligence. Yep; no more aircraft carrier life for us as we're thrown, unusually enough, in the mechanics of intelligence analysis at home. While you'd except a fictional traitor to be exposed within days, Rules of Engagement stretches out over weeks, then months, then years. The death of the protagonist's father is investigated, then dropped, then raised again.

Rules of Engagement is, at times, a military thriller, a procedural mystery, an adventure novel and a spy suspense. The story twists and turns, characters are introduced or dropped (I especially liked the sudden revelation of the hero's initial love interest as a promiscuous, coke-addled schemestress. Whew!) as the story is told over years, spanning the Gulf War (carefully kept in the background, if you can believe that of a military thriller) and the evolution of a career. Even the usual right-wing slant of most military fiction seems carefully leashed here, a smart choice that will broaden the book's appeal to all sorts of readers.

The focus on desk-bound analysis and intelligence work is certainly interesting: Apprehending a traitor takes a lot of work from several people, and it's a treat to see this treated as a bureaucratic endeavour, with a team of investigators and the usual amount of red tape. The way this is mixed with spycraft and military protocols is quite intriguing and does a lot to distinguish this novel from countless other similar novels. Gordon Kent (actually a pseudonym for Ken and Christian Cameron, a father-and-son team whose web site can be found at www.navnow.com) knows his stuff and shows an impressive ability to ground his fiction in believable reality. It all moves more slowly than usual, but there are a lot of good details in this book.

That's good, but is it good enough? Well, it all depends on your tolerance for drawn-out plots. At some point near the novel's two-third mark, things are proceeding too rapidly: The villain has been identified and all that's left is to apprehend him. But, just as the novel should slide smoothly to a perfect finish, complications arise, and an unwelcome fourth act springs from the third, transforming the cloak-and-dagger intrigue to an adventure in a dangerous foreign land. It may sound intriguing, but once it happens, it's hard to keep going the extra mile along with the author; a shorter finish would have done much to keep the best parts of the novel intact. As it is, the pleasantness of the book is almost stretched beyond reasonable indulgence by the last hundred pages.

It's still a pretty good book, mind you. But the lengths are barely justifiable in the context of a genre novel which should move as quickly as possible. It doesn't help that the conclusion requires the involvement of another major character who really shouldn't have been involved. Still, if that's the kind of thing unlikely to bother you, there are certainly worse novels out there than this intriguing debut.

 

Tilt,
Nicholas Shrady

Simon & Schuster, 2003, 161 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-7432-2926-6

Designers will be the first to tell you you that design isn't about funky colours, outlandish forms or eye-splitting typography. Design is, more than anything else, the art of solving problems. A well-designed chair is, simply put, more useful, more comfortable, more perfectly a chair than a badly-designed one. Granted, design can also be beautiful (ugliness is just another type of problem, after all) and not all problems are solvable at the same time (a chair designed to "solve" high manufacturing costs may not present the same solutions as a chair designed to "solve" lack-of-comfort), but those are minor issues when measured against the goal of good design.

In publishing, the biggest problem is simple: How do you sell a book? How to you convince your average book-buyer to take hard-won money and exchange it for a mixture of paper, ink and glue? Success is measured both individually (has at least one individual been convinced to buy a book that, with an inferior design, would otherwise have been left on the shelves?) and collectively (has the publisher made more money on the book than would have been the case with a lesser design?)

While I can't say anything about the overall success of Nicholas Shrady's Tilt (I did, after all, find it at a discount bookstore), I'm the living example of individual design success: Had the book been ordinary, I would have left it on the shelf without a second thought. The subject isn't that compelling to me. But throw it a little bit of inspired design and, whoops, there I find myself at the cash register.

You see, Tilt is no ordinary book-as-a-physical-object. Rather than being as square as most of the other books you'll see in your life, this short history of the Tower of Pisa is... skewed. It's a parallelogram. The edges of the books don't meet at 90 degrees. Open the book flat, and it looks like a fat chevron. Put the book upright on the table and it tilts... just like the Tower of Pisa (albeit at a sharper angle).

It's a gimmick, of course, but also an inspired piece of design. Everyone knows the tower of Pisa because it's skewed, because it's unusual, because it looks as if it's not supposed to exist like that. Well, Tilt is exactly like that.

As a "biography" of Pisa and it's infamous campanile, Tilt is slight but serviceable. At a scant 161 pages, it's not very profound, and even pads its subject matter with (not uninteresting) digressions on Galileo and Italian history. It's readable, features a few fascinating facts, includes a fair number of illustrations and pictures (though not quite enough to my own liking) and does its share to debunk many rumours about the Tower's history (not built for skewing, not an experimentation site for Galileo). Even readers with a casual interest in the subject will get what they seek. If nothing else, it's a lovely little (too little) piece of engineering non-fiction.

But let me go back to the subject of the book's design, given that it has its share of problems. For one thing, the interior design of the book hasn't been optimized to take advantage of the tilt: The recurring page numbering and book titles are uncomfortably close to the edge, and copious amount of blank space is left in the "extra" areas. Maybe that's part of the point (if the campanile wasn't built to be skewed, why should it be the case with the book?), but it leads me to suspect that the skewed design was finalized after the interior layout of the book. The dust jacket itself is skewed.

The second issue is that in Tilt's case, the design doesn't just overshadows the content of the book; it stomps on it and leaves it as a mere afterthought. Just look at this review; I've spend one mere paragraph on the book's content, and the rest of the words discussing the actual physical object. An ordinary version of Tilt may not have been bought, but it would have been reviewed with a greater attention to the actual quality of the text.

Yes, sometime design can be too successful. And I'm not just saying that because I bought the book knowing fully well that I will never figure how to position it on my bookshelves.

 

Hacking Matter,
Will McCarthy

Basic Books, 2003, 222 pages C$40.00 hc, ISBN 0-465-04428-X

Oh sure, you know all about nanotechnology. The science-fiction you read describes atoms being rearranged all over the place and you've already put a pre-order on Amazon for the first prototype of the HomeNano universal assembler brewing kit. Good for you.

But wait a minute: Not only is high-end nanotech a while away from Wal-Mart, it's not even clear if it will solve everything we expect it to fix: Issues of energy requirements, information transfer, safe control and speed of operation continue to confound even the sharpest thinkers on the subject. Even when you're done doing all you can, nanotech simply rearranges atoms around; it can't create new elements and probably will take a while to work.

Programmable matter is something else. A theoretical concept based on real-world research in the strange properties of quantum dots, it bridges the gap between straight-up nanotech and coarser material sciences. In theory, one could end up with a silicon material that could be programmed at will to emulate the characteristics of other elements, maybe even elements we haven't yet discovered. While the actual real-world implementations of the technology are still a far way away, the theoretical underpinning seem reasonably solid. Hacking Matter is an overview of the subject, from the labs to the theory to the speculations.

Fortunately, a uniquely qualified author is at he helm. Wil McCarthy is best-known in some circles as a capable science-fiction writer, one whose career has progressed from run-of-the-mill SF adventures (Aggressor Six) to meatier fare (Bloom). But McCarthy is also a tech journalist and an engineer and Hacking Matter is the ideal book for someone at the intersection of those three fields: Not only is he capable of vulgarizing the subject matter, he's able to speculate on where it's going, and even make useful contributions to the field himself.

After a whiz-bang intro featuring some of the most outlandish speculations about programmable matter (including what happens when you bash artificial iron with a golf club), McCarthy settles down to the painstaking business of explaining the science behind the speculations. Don't worry if your high-school physics are too far away to be useful; just keep reading until you reach the conclusions. It boils down to an arrangement of silicon in such a way that electrons are made to behave in unnatural ways. How unnatural? Well, unnaturally enough to recreate the properties of other elements that don't exist. Unnaturally enough to change behaviour at the flick of a switch.

Thanks to descriptions of the Boston-area research centres where this is taking place, interviews with the concerned scientists and the other usual tools of good scientific journalism, McCarthy efficiently illustrates the field's current state of the art. But the book truly hits its stride when McCarthy-the-journalist cedes the stage to McCarthy-the-SF-writer. After a meaty chapter on how architecture (houses, cities, etc.) will be revolutionized by programmable matter, it's hard not to wish for these cool toys, right away. There's more good stuff squirrelled away in the last chapter (along with a comparative examination of other life-altering technologies currently inching out of laboratories), and if you want even more, well, there's always McCarthy "Queendome of Sol" science-fiction trilogy.

How credible is that stuff? Though it certain sound credible, that's not neally for me to say. But simply consider this: McCarthy-the-engineer has his name on a patent application for a "Wellstone". He obviously believes in it, and so do the scientists currently working on the field. (Check the latest version of the "Programmable Matter FAQ" for more details.) The history of science has progressed from far less likely concepts.

And so Hacking Matter remains a tease of bigger things to come; clocking in at 175 pages without appendices and the index, it's leaves us hanging just as things get interesting. A fitting impression for a book describing cutting-edge tech: How are we going to perceive this book in twenty years? As an overly-optimistic pop-science work, or the first mention of a commonplace technology?

 

Blind Lake,
Robert Charles Wilson

Tor, 2003, 399 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30262-4

The most interesting thing about Robert Charles Wilson's career is how he's been able to re-invent himself and raise the quality of his work from very ordinary first novels to his current Hugo-award level. While Blind Lake may not be as good as The Chronoliths (even though opinions will certainly differ), it's still a solid work of modern science-fiction from an author who knows what he's doing.

It doesn't start out all that promisingly, if by "promisingly" you mean "Ooh! I have to read this right away!": We've seen top-secret scientific bases elsewhere in fiction, we've seen "remote viewing" elsewhere and we've seen marital strife elsewhere too. But just wait: From the first few pages (in which one of our protagonists lives the morning aftermath of a one-night stand copiously sprinkled with illicit substances), it's obvious that this is one novel that is going to take its time and avoid the usual clichés of bygone SF. The novel quickly shapes itself around four characters: A divorced scientist chafing against the restraints of objectivity, her manipulative ex-husband, their troubled daughter and a journalist with plenty of accumulated guilt.

When those four characters are isolated from the real world, along with the rest of the staff at the "Blind Lake" scientific facility, tensions are left free to rise and boil over. The strife between the heroine and her ex-husband keep worsening, dragging along the sympathetic journalist. People are left to wonder why the entire world has cut them off. The daughter resumes having unusually persistent hallucinations. And the very purpose of the scientific facility changes when their subject of study (an alien they can track on its own planet thanks to a quasi-magical technology) dramatically changes its daily habits.

It's not a story that can be summarized in a few exciting lines. But don't worry: Wilson makes it ridiculously easy to be engrossed in the lives of its characters, and milks a lot of effective scenes out of low-key events. To an unusual degree, the characters take as much space as the plotting... not that the plotting is in any way deficient once things start rolling. The mysteries of the book are sustained just long enough to make us interested in reading the next page, then the one after that, and yet another... before you know it, you've read the whole thing in a straight afternoon.

Technically, Wilson has seldom been better, and it's little tricks of the trade that show how much he has progressed since his early books. While he's not a scientist, his novel is about scientists and he creates a believable bunch of them, along with the required technical and administrative support required in a modern research facility. He slights the jargon just right, with enough detail to satisfy and yet not too much to bore. (I was especially impressed by the way he described how the "mysterious" technology at the core of the book's science got so weird: It's still mysterious to the scientists in the story, but at least we as readers know exactly why it's mysterious.) By shutting the real world out of the novel's setting, Wilson is also able to use small hints and references (such as the "Saudi conflict" and the none-too-pleasant-sounding "North American economic confederacy") to suggest a plausible future society without actually spending too much time describing it.

Not that the entire novel is so credible, of course; it's hard to imagine the feasibility of a complete shutdown of data transfers, even less so an extended one. The ending of the book is also surprisingly tepid despite the scope of the revelations and the sense of a good story well-told. I suppose that different readers will have different impressions.

This being said, I found a delicious parallel between the plight of the isolated scientists, watching an alien far way, and the possibility that they themselves had to be watched by the rest of the world outside their perimeter. And yet another parallel with us, readers, watching them in their fishbowl...

I wouldn't have read the novel so quickly after its release had it not been nominated for the Best Novel Hugo Award. But having done so, I find it ranking pleasantly high on my list of 2003 SF novels. After such great books as The Perseids and The Chrononolith, Wilson continues his winning streak with Blind Lake. I wonder: what's next for him?

 

Web Bloopers,
Jeff Johnson

Morgan Kaufmann, 2003, 329 pages, C$75.00 pb, ISBN 1-55860-840-0

As someone with more than a passing interest in web design (I know enough about what I don't know enough to avoid calling myself a "web designer"), any book that wants to tell me what I shouldn't do will be met with a mixture of eagerness and wariness: Yay for the hints and tricks, but really, who are you to tell me what to do?

For Web Bloopers, usability expert Jeff Johnson scoured the web for examples of bad design and collected the worst examples. Government sites, educational sites, even commercial sites are all implacably dissected for lousy usability features in sixty "common web design mistakes", themselves split in three parts ("Content and functionality", "User Interface" and "Presentation") and eight chapters. Aside from the mandatory screen-shots, Johnson describes and dissects the bloopers in detail, then presents solutions to avoid them. Most of the examples are illustrations of things to avoid, but some others are highlighted as best practises worth emulating.

Like most technical books destined to a professional audience, this one doesn't come cheaply at nearly 75 Canadian dollars. But the flip-side is that few expenses have been spared to give the book a generous design. There are enough illustrations in here to satisfy even the most demanding readers. (Though the accompanying text often tends to run ahead of the illustrating material) The layout is free enough to accommodate illustrations, annotations, cartoons, footnotes and very generous amounts of text.

Perhaps too much text, in fact. Johnson has a tendency to repeat material and describe things in too much detail. His straightforward writing style works well when comes the time to present straight-up information, but it's a fair thing to say that no-one will read this book for the style alone. Furthermore, the solutions he offers to solve the mistakes he describes are often implicit in the description of the problem. A lot of them simply boil down to "don't do this", which is a bit useless after an entire page of "this is not right because..."

Now don't get the wrong impression: "Too much detail" is a very minor sin in the litany of problems a technical book can suffer from. While Web Bloopers doesn't have the same density of information-per-square-inch as Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think!, not everyone can be Steve Krug. (Nor can everyone get Steve Krug to pen the foreword to their book, as Johnson has been able to do here.) If you assume that the book will more frequently be read by non-technical web managers rather than actual webmasters, the repetition almost becomes essential.

As someone with a fair bit of web design experience, it was almost inevitable that I would have objections to some of Johnson's "bloopers". Non-standard link colours (#53), for instance, aren't always a mistake; well-used, they can be a boon to the site's design. (But a cursory recognition of this is included ) Redundant navigation schemes (#16) can, once again, be immensely helpful when properly used. Johnson's perspective may be influenced by his experience in application GUI design; the web is evolving its own usability standards, and those often run at odds with the "usual" common wisdom. Then you have to consider the target audience of Web Bloopers, more likely corporate web managers than independent web designers willing to push the envelope and purposefully break rules.

But a few disagreements here and there shouldn't be interpreted as a dislike of the whole book: By and large, Johnston succeeds in presenting an invaluable collection of web design mistakes to avoid. The web would be a much better place if the principles of the book could be drilled into the heads of those wacky webmasters poisoning the experience for all of us. Yours truly included.

 

Ilium,
Dan Simmons

EOS, 2003, 576 pages, C$39.95 hc, ISBN 0-380-97893-8

Anyone who's been paying attention to Dan Simmons' career know that the man can write anything in any genre, from horror (Carrion Comfort) to thriller (Darwin's Blade). But even with impressive credentials in other genres, Simmons started out as a science-fiction writer, and it's still in SF that he produced his most impressive work, from dozen of excellent short stories to the massively successful Hyperion quartet. So any new SF work from him is a major event: Expectation for Ilium ran high as soon as the book was announced.

At first glance, it appears that Simmons has delivered the goods with Ilium, the first part of a duology to be concluded in Olympos. (In a rare feat of honesty, the American EOS hardcover edition says as much both in the liner jacket and on the back cover. Hurrah for honesty!) An adventure tale set in a far-flung future packed with nanotech, quantum tunnelling, moravecs and other exotic technology, Ilium alternates between three plot threads: The story of a Greek scholar resurrected to report on the real-life recreation of the Iliad, the travels of two robots going from the Jovian system to a mysterious terraformed Mars and the adventures of a small group of humans on a very different future Earth.

The first thing of note in Ilium is Simmons' considerable literary ambition in telling a story which almost-literally takes place during the Iliad, featuring robots likely to quote from Shakespeare and Proust, and minor characters named "Caliban" for relevant reasons. The amount of research involved in writing this book must have been staggering; as a relatively ignorant reader (who had to rely on memories of TROY and visions of Brad Pitt as Achilles) it's easy to be snowed under the weight of paragraphs packed with references to the Iliad, from character names to interpretations of Homer's intentions to the complete back-story of even unseen characters. (Heck, this novel even has Greek gods as major characters.) Other literary allusions are just as likely to fly high above any non-scholarly heads, though the presence of such allusions is unlikely to be missed. In short, it's easy to see classics-loving non-SF readers go nuts for Ilium's depth, even as it may not be totally successful in other areas.

Things like pacing or plotting, for instance. Yes, it's a long book, and one which doesn't start to cook until well after the halfway point. There's a ton of exposition (it's difficult to do otherwise when quoting from Homer), a lot of scene-setting and plenty of description. For Ilium is first and foremost and adventure tale in which plenty of words are spent describing how characters go from point A to point B. There is a complicated plot, oh yes, but for the longest time it's hard to see the difference between movement and progress.

All of this is complicated by the fact that Ilium is, after all, the first half of a bigger novel. The three hundred pages of setup are for the 1100-pages entirety of the duology, not just for a single book. Some things don't make a lot of sense; we can only hope that they will once the second half comes out. Similarly, the sense of pointless exasperation sure to strike any reader during the last few pages has to be tempered by the knowledge that the answers so preciously withheld should be coming up in early 2005. (Few of the book's lines are so ominous as Zeus's "We're not?" [P.522]) Frustrating; it's not for nothing if I usually wait until all the books of a series are out before digging in.

Stylistically, it's a Dan Simmons novel, so you can bet that there's plenty of good quotes throughout the entire thing. I was particularly taken by the mixture of Greek mythology and easy swearing from scholic Hockenberry's narration. (As a proud 20th-century representative, he's our champion in this post-humanistic tale). The squabbling gods are a lot of fun to read about, though the "post-human" plot line is more often that not an exercise in impatient finger-thumping.

All in all, a solid book but (at this point) not an essential one. I have a feeling that the sequel will deliver on more than enough intriguing suggestions, but a more definitive assessment will have to wait until Olympos.

 

2004 Hugo Nominees

Well, well, well. Once again this year, thanks to my Torcon3 membership, I find myself with the terrifying ability to vote for the Hugo Awards. Neat.

I might as well take this opportunity to push forward my own vision of SF as a way to pick my choices for nominees: Hugos should go to authentic SF, not fantasy that happens to be popular with Hugo voters. Bring on the social extrapolations, the technical gadgets and the pro-science agenda over fine characters, sophisticated writing and literary values. So here are my choices from this year's batch of Hugo nominees:

Best Novel: Right off the bat, one book is eliminated from consideration. Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls is fantasy, hence out of the voting as far as I'm concerned. I didn't even make an effort to read it. As far as the rest goes, well, the odds-on favourite seems to be Dan Simmons' Ilium, which didn't grab me as much as I had hoped for. Sure, it's quite good (and it's miles better than the dismal Humans by Robert J. Sawyer, an author who has done much better in the past), but is it Hugo-good? There's a lot of competition out there: Ilium is too long and too rambling, a problem that Robert Charles Wilson's limpid Blind Lake certainly didn't share. Still, I had a lot more fun reading Charles Stross' Singularity Sky, which strikes me as the kind of pure-SF that we should be seeing more often. It's certainly not perfect (it suffers from a few useless subplots, for instance), but it's one of the most entertaining SF novel I've read in a while.

Best Novella: I have this amazing tendency to be bored at the drop of a page, so you can stuff Catherine Asaro's sub-standard "Walk in Silence" (Yet another dull Harlequin romance in space, by the mistress of the sub-genre) in the "couldn't care less" airlock. I was mildly amused by Connie Willis' "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know" and Kage Baker's "The Empress of Mars", but not all that much: They're cute, but slight stories. Worth the read, but not the Hugo. As a computer science geek, I found Professor Vernor Vinge's "The Cookie Monster" far more to my taste, but somehow lacking. Madcap pacing (by which I actually to mean walking from one place to another), but the conclusion is a letdown. Walter John William's "The Green Leopard Plague" takes a long time to rev up, but at least it leads somewhere even though I fundamentally disagree with the main "food equals work" reasoning. Not bad, not great, but close enough to my definition of Hugo to take the category.

Best Novelette: One nominee couldn't be easily downloaded from the web, and hence remained unread. Of the remaining five, I found "Bernardo's House" (James Patrick Kelly) rather dull and overdone: sentient houses? Yawn; at least there was enough gratuitous sex to make up for it. Robert Reed's "Hexagons" fared a little bit better with its tasty alternate reality and skewed viewpoint. For a while, I thought that Jeffrey Ford's "The Empire of Ice Cream" wasn't going anywhere, then that it was, then got to the ending and said "meh". So, meh. Against all odds, I was a bit disappointed by Charles Stross' "Nightfall". I was a bit... simple coming after the author's earlier work. And so "Legions in Time" (Michael Swanwick) takes the cake, with a tale that could have been written at any time during the past decades (with shades of van Vogt, even), but graced with plenty of good humour and a nifty "time-calibration" interview.

Best Short Story: I was truly disappointed by this category. One often hears that short stories are the real avant-garde of the genre, but there wasn't anything like that here: Merely a few perfunctory efforts that all had problems here or there. Couldn't get interested in David D. Levine's "The Tale of the Golden Eagle", for instance. Ditto for "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman (Heresy, I know; maybe I should re-read it) Mike Resnick's "Robots Don't Cry" interested me for its duration, but no longer than that. There was something solid in the "Four Short Novels" of Joe Haldeman, until they (rapidly) degenerated in his usual simplistic cynicism: Maybe three short novels would have been enough. And that leaves Michael A. Burstein's "Paying It Forward", a story custom-calculated to rub SF fans in the right way. So be it. I'm (unenthusiastically) charmed.

I'm going to skip the Best Related Book category for lack of knowledge about it (though I did fill out the ballot so that the scientologists don't get something to crow about).

As for the Best Editor; enough already with Gardner Dozois; the others also deserve to win, you know!

I'm always somewhat annoyed by the two "Best Artist" categories. What are we voting for? Artists or a body of work published in 12 months? Can we actually see the artwork produced by these artists during the calendar year in question? Otherwise, well, it's just a name-calling contest. Bleh.

There is a real problem with the Best Fan Writer and the Best Fanzine categories: Checking links about the nominees, it's simply astonishing that a number of them have had no appreciable production in 2003. What the heck? Oh well; David Langford (and Ansible) is an international treasure, but at Torcon3 he ended his acceptance speech by asking us to think about voting for someone else and so I did. Good thing that Cheryl Morgan and Emerald City have become some of my favourite things over the past year.

I don't watch a lot of TV, so the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category is a mystery to me. On the other hand, I did see all of the nominees in the Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) category (in theatres, no less). Not a bloody SF film in the bunch, though 28 DAYS LATER came closest. After that, X-MEN 2, RETURN OF THE KING (which you just know is going to win), PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN and (what is it doing here?) FINDING NEMO.

Finally; I've read material by four of the five John W. Campbell nominees, and Chris Moriarty strikes me as having the most interesting potential of them all. But then again I'm a cheap hard-SF fan.

Onward to Boston, then, and a seat at the Hugo Awards ceremony!