Reviews

August 2006

2006, Christian Sauvé

Reviewed this month:

 

Jennie, Douglas Preston

Tor, 1994 (1997 paperback reprint), 312 pages, C$8.99 pb, ISBN 0-812-56533-9

This is definitely not the first novel you would expect from Douglas Preston. Now firmly established as a thriller writer (usually, but not always collaborating with Lincoln Child on yarns such as The Relic, The Ice Limit or The Cabinet of Curiosities), Preston can command a sizable audience and a regular spot on the bestseller lists: his readers can rely on his name for slick thrills and mass-market entertainment.

But his first novel, published one year before the runaway success of The Relic, proves to be a very different book. Though it's concerned about death, it's hardly a thriller. Its form and execution is very different from the rest of Preston's work.

Taking the form of an oral history, Jennie starts by putting its readers in a frame of reference that may or may not be our real world. Though careful pseudo-historical references and self-insertion in the story as the researcher pulling together the accounts of several witnesses, Preston manages to create a reasonable doubt that the story he's about to tell is historical truth.

It begins in 1965, as an anthropologist goes to Africa and brings back a chimpanzee, the titular Jennie. Thanks to the circumstances of Jennie's birth, the anthropologist decides to raise her as a member of his own family, applying his theories about primate intelligence to an authentic subject. As the book advances, we follow the family's efforts in dealing with Jennie's maturation, and the effects she has on the people surrounding her. People may not forget that Jennie isn't completely human, but what if Jennie herself doesn't realize it?

The real intent of the novel, of course, is to tug at readers' hearts and make them feel that the differences between animals and humans are far thinner than they can expect. You can probably fill in the blanks of the plot yourself, especially if you're familiar some of the more sentimentalist fiction about primates. Yes, Jennie proves to be just as smart as her human siblings. Yes, some humans act in a cruel and despicable fashion. Yes, the tale ends on a very somber note. Few will be surprised to find that the Author's Note at the end of the book has pages of contact coordinates for organizations dedicated to the protection of primates. I suppose that some readers will either find the "provocative questions about our relationship to, and treatment of, other species" (thanks, Library Journal) either trite or self-evident, depending on their own preexisting prejudices. Some of the story beats are repetitive or contrived (it's a handy thing to have a minister as a neighbour when you want to discuss matters of death and faith), especially given how the tale progresses toward its inevitable ending.

But if I'm less than enthusiastic about the novel's overall dramatic arc, there's no use denying that it's effective, in large part due to the way it's told. The fictional "oral history" of Jennie's life allows Preston some room for literary games and showy prose. The characters of the story don't speak the same way or reflect upon the events in quite the same manner. There's a fun sense of triangulation in trying to piece together the "real" story from the different viewpoints of characters who can't stand each other. Dr. Pamela Prentiss, the driven behaviourist who comes to act as a foil for the rest of the characters, is a particularly entertaining character to follow.

While Jennie is based on numerous case studies (and, in a sense, could be viewed as a romanticized compendium of such experiments), it helps a lot that a certain "Douglas Preston" is, from the beginning "Note to the reader", a character in his own book: a writer who tries to interview as many people as possible about Jennie, making significant efforts to track down and meet his subjects and (eventually) occasionally being shut off from any further contact. ("Turn that goddamn tape recorder off. I mean it. Now." [P.290]) The sense of two stories mixing together is very satisfying, and adds another level of interest in the book.

I may not personally understand the fascination with primates, but the book will find a natural audience with those who love stories featuring chimpanzees. And yet, while I'm obviously no fan of sappy "Aren't those animals just like us humans? Aren't us humans just like animal?" stories, Jennie still manages be a gripping read with a conclusion that is far more affecting that I would have thought from a description of the book alone. In that particular respect, at least, Jennie exhibits the qualities that would late make of Preston a best-selling authors. While Jennie is very different from his best-known thrillers, it's more than worth a look for fans of good popular fiction: even if you know where it's going, it's a memorable ride.

 

Archangel, Robert Harris

Arrow, 1998, 421 pages, C$10.99 pb, ISBN 0-09-928241-0

Robert Harris' early reputation was based on Fatherland and Enigma, two thrillers that delved deep into history for inspiration. Fatherland, of course, is the poster cover for accessible alternate history (Nazis triumphant! Fear the thought!) while Enigma used WW2-era Bletchley Park as a handy setting for a thriller. With Archangel, Robert Harris gets further away from WW2 by setting his story in the present, but don't think for a minute that he has shrugged off historical research: While contemporary, Archangel pretty much revolves around the legacy of Joseph Stalin.

The putative protagonist of the tale is one "Fluke" Kelso, a historian with credibility problems who, while passing through modern-day Moscow for a conference, finds himself the recipient of an unexpected barroom confession: Incredibly enough, a man tells Kelso about Stalin's secret diaries and where they may be buried. As Kelso gulps down information that could lead to a significant historical discovery, the plot is set in motion. It's hardly surprising to find out that other people are very, very interested in those diaries, and that their goals are dramatically opposed to academic research and publication.

But things are seldom simple, especially in contemporary Moscow. In the hall of dark mirrors that is post-communist Russia, who's being manipulated by who? In due time, Kelso find himself tracking down an man who has disappeared, running away from the state police along with two untrustworthy allies: a dangerously bitter woman and a journalist with an agenda of his own. Worse yet: what started out as a search for a historical document eventually becomes a confrontation with the ugly possibility of a resurgent Soviet empire.

It won't surprise anyone to find that Harris' third novel is heavy on historical research, and a bit softer in the thriller department. Even casual Soviet history buffs will find much to contemplate here, as Harris is able to dig down deep in the murk of Soviet history to wrap up an entertaining historical mystery with grave contemporary implications. The desperate atmosphere of present-day Russia is well sketched, with plenty of evocative details and believable characters, some of whom taken from the pages of history.

The more conventional thriller elements of the novel, unfortunately, aren't so satisfying. Harris often lets his sense of detail and his research overpower the need for forward momentum, and Archangel leaves the reader with the impression of a short book padded with too many side tangents. The beginning takes its time to heat up, and the ending is particularly long in coming after the final secrets have all been exposed, with an extra-special character who seems clearly too far-fetched to be credible given the authenticity of the rest of the novel.

More significantly, Harris is a bit too glib in supposing how his historical menace could become a future peril for all of Western Civilization: Politics have a way of never turning out how you would expect them, and it's not as if modern history isn't crammed with "sure-fire candidates" who ended crashing down with a whimper, especially if they're not quite sane.

Archangel also ends up on an abrupt ambiguity that doesn't really matter one way or another, so low is our attachment to the characters. Harris' novels are most notable for their Big Ideas rather than their talking-heads, and this one is no exception: Readers are more likely to raise their shoulders as the final shot goes off, sufficiently satisfied at the way the historical treasure box was unwrapped.

Generally speaking, it's a solid thriller –sufficiently interesting not to be forgotten the next day, but too plodding and generic to really make an impression. Harris doesn't step all that far away from his area of expertise with this story, so his regular readers are unlikely to find themselves in unfamiliar territory. It's probably a little bit more interesting than Enigma (time will tell), but still a distance away from Fatherland, which is likely to remain Harris' best-known novel for quite a while. But who knows? Maybe Harris' following book, Pompeii, will change everything...

 

Soundings, Gary K. Wolfe

Beccon, 2005, 415 pages, US$35.00 tp, ISBN 1-870824-50-4

As a dilettante critic/reviewer/guy who likes to sound off, I simply can't get enough book-length collections of SF&F reviews. Yes, I've got the entire John Clute oeuvre on my bookshelves: but what else is out there? The audience for such works of SF criticism probably numbers in the hundreds, which is about the size of the print runs for the rare books that are published on the subject.

Fortunately, small presses are made for that sort of narrowly-focused special-interest publication. After the critical and (slight) commercial success of John Clute's Scores, small British publisher Beccon is at it again with Soundings, a collection of Gary K. Wolfe's reviews for Locus Magazine between 1992 and 1996. Wolfe, of course, if Locus' reviewer-in-chief: He gets his pick of whatever interests him, and spins a monthly column that leads off the magazine's criticism section.

Amusingly enough, one of the book's least fascinating aspects is to illustrate his growth as a reviewer, mostly because there is very little here that could be considered a beginner's mistake: coming at reviewing from academia, Wolfe hit the ground running and even his first reviews are solid pieces of work. Perhaps the only remaining hints of early jitters are Wolfe's protests as he's asked to sum up the year and how he's unqualified to do so: pages later, he's busy knocking down the trends and clichés emerging from the genre.

Wolfe's tenure at Locus is well-deserved: He can talk intelligently about any genre or sub-genre, he's got the intellectual muscles to go head-to-head with John Clute (his argumentative reviews of Clute's encyclopedias are a wonder to read, as most reader -myself included- are content to simply gawk in awe at them) and his columns are frequently enlivened with touches of dry humour that cuts deep as much as it amuses. (A typical example: "Even though none of us are very good at articulating what SF is, we don't hesitate for a moment when it comes to selecting its best examples.")

Wolfe may not be as dazzling as Clute, but the underpinning of his reviews are just as solid. His usual approach is to combine reviews of several books in a single column, sometimes developing a common theme and sometimes not. This allows for a format that adapts to the material, through the column's expanding length also accounts for some of that flexibility. His approach is incisive, and his academic background gives him the vocabulary and rigour required to get to the essence of a book. (Compare and contract that to the seat-of-the-pants "Did I like this or not?" approach practised by yours truly.)

One of the book's best qualities is how it doubles as a critical capsule studying SF&F in the mid-nineties, as the genre was trying to redefine itself in the wake of cyberpunk. The whole New Mars movement occurs almost in real-time, the book being practically bookended by reviews of Red Mars on one side and Blue Mars on the other. Some writers don't fare too well in this compressed format: We get the sense, for instance, that Wolfe doesn't think as highly of Orson Scott Card in 1996 than he did in 1992. This is practically a half-generation of SF under the microscope, in a relatively comparable format that allows for easy comparison. (Even John Clute doesn't have this luxury: aside from the one-shot encyclopedias, his reviews are scattered over dozens of periodicals and use different approaches that aren't so readily unified.)

One thing that did bother me about the book was the inclusion of Wolfe's year-in-review pieces before the columns for that given year: It previews the coming attractions, but also lessens the surprise of some judgements. Perhaps worse, it introduces a number of temporal loops in the reading, and can complicate the summation or a few arguments developed over the year. I think that I would have preferred a strictly chronological approach, even with the inevitable repetition. (Of course, nothing was stopping me from reading the book in that order.)

But what I really want are the next volumes in the series, all the way to 2006 and beyond. Wolfe is still writing monthly columns for Locus and while I'm now a happy subscriber, I really would appreciate more collections of critical essays from him or others. If Beccon is good and lucky, Soundings will turn a better-than-modest profit, and the series will continue. Where can I pre-order my copies?

 

The Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon

Orbit, 2002, 424 pages, #6.99 pb, ISBN 1-84149-141-1

Few topics continue to frustrate and fascinate Science Fiction critics like the definition of the genre. Like most literary categories, "Science Fiction" means nothing and everything --from the stereotypical "stories in the future" to the more interesting "stories that SF fans love to read." The Nebula Award-winning Speed of Dark won't do much to calm down the debate given how it puts interesting fuel in the fire.

In a few words, it's a story about an autistic narrator, Lou, who comes to decide whether he wants to be "cured" or not at a time where such cures are medically feasible. Lou isn't your usual autist, though: functioning at a reasonably high level, Lou has been able to turn his condition in an asset, working as an analyst for a big corporation. For the longest while, Speed of Dark is a mainstream novel about autism taking place in a future world not terribly different from our own. Despite the high-tech details, this is chiefly a novel about autism: the strictly SF element is raised late in the story, and has a measurable impact only in the last few chapters.

Consequently, proponents of a "purer" definition of SF may have a hard time seeing this book as Science Fiction. It's very, very tempting to re-label this book as, essentially, a mainstream writing exercise in SF clothing: In this theory, Elizabeth Moon (herself the mother of an autistic son) wanted to write a novel about autism but knew it wouldn't sell ten copies on the mainstream market. A few conventional SF elements later -tada!- there's something fit to be sold to the usual genre markets where she made her reputation. Pure cynicism, but plausible enough. The Turkey City Lexicon even has an entry for the "Abbess Phone Home" syndrome: "Takes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream story with a gratuitous SF or fantasy element tacked on so it could be sold." And bang.

But such a glib dismissal fails to take in account that the relationship between SF and its audience if far more complicated than a checklist of elements that may or may not be present in the story. It also fails to take in account the power of Moon's writing in this novel. Lou, simply put, is a character with whom many Science Fiction readers will identify.

I myself could relate to Lou's impatience about the sillier elements of everyday life and so-called "normal" people. There is a fabulous grocery store sequence in Chapter Five which pretty much describes all of my pet peeves about going to the supermarket. I could certainly recognize in Lou's habits most of my own tendencies pushed to eleven. By making her protagonist a high-functioning autist, Moon has also made a savvy decision to go after the readership most likely to identify with her protagonist –Science Fiction fans.

It's well-known, for instance, that self-identified SF fans are liable to be measurably more obsessive than "normal people". Less patient with everyday trivia. More likely to identify with concepts than people. Less socially gracious, to put it mildly. The preponderance of people affected with Asperger's Syndrome is usually higher in SF fandom than any other normal sampling. We already know that: Obsessiveness has been a fundamental part of fandom (any fandom) since its very beginning.

And so we come to an amusing conclusion: the best possible audience for a novel about an autistic protagonist and his struggles with daily life is the existing community of SF fans, already quite used to the idea of "special" and "normal" people. If I could recognize myself in Lou, you can bet that I'm not the only one. In some ways, Speed of Dark is a novel about the SF community more than it is an SF novel. That it happens to be an exceptionally readable, warm and engrossing story is just a special bonus on top of a book that goes straight for its audience's throat. It doesn't matter that Speed of Dark may or may not be a mainstream story with a sprinkling of future fairy-dust: It matters that Speed of Dark is liable to be a book that SF audiences want to read.

 

Star Dragon, Mike Brotherton

2003, Tor, 352 pages, C$9.99 pb, ISBN 0-765-34677-X

Some comparisons can hurt as much as they help. If I say that Mike Brotherton's Star Dragon is a book in the purest tradition of Robert L. Forward's hard-SF, is that a rave or a rant?

Some some, it'll be a buy-on-sight commendation. Forward was long known as the hardest or the hard-SF writers, an author whose books could be enjoyed as pleasant diversions by College-level Physics students (as I myself found out while reading Dragon's Egg during a Physics 201 course dealing with high-energy magnetic field lines.) SF readers of the hardest variety can often be heard bemoaning the lack of "old style" Science Fiction where you really got your degree's worth of extrapolation.

But Forward's fiction has simultaneously alienated at least a generation of readers through shaky characterization, textbook dialogues (as in "reading from textbooks"), indifferent prose style, amusement-park plotting and lack of literary depth. This isn't a slam as much as it's an acknowledgement of Forward's intentions. Science Fiction is large and contains multitudes: if someone wants to push the envelope of rigorous scientific exploration, why not celebrate that achievement rather than criticize the book for a lack of virtues that neither author nor ideal reader particularly care for?

And that brings us to Star Dragon, Mike Brotherton's debut novel. Like Dragon's Egg, it's a novel about a bunch of humans investigating an exotic alien life form living in a very different environment. Like Forward's work, it's exquisitely well-researched and backed up by solid mathematical equations. Unlike Forward's work, it attempts characterization. Like Forward's work, alas, it will fascinate whoever is fascinated by this sort of things, and leave the rest of the audience groaning for some relevance.

It starts promisingly enough, on a future Earth where biotechnology has become a dominant science. Brotherton's imaged tomorrow is a wonder of icky soft surfaces, custom-grown biological tissue and easy body manipulation. Our protagonist is a top scientific mind who is offered an unusual mission: A centuries-long trip to another star where strange phenomenons (probably not entirely artificial) have been detected. It's a chance to do real science, but it comes at a price: a few years of travel spent with only a few other people, and a one-way trip hundreds of years in the future thanks to the marvels of relativistic space travel. As setups go, this is classic but promising. While the prose style has a certain initial stiffness, it suggests a fun hard-SF adventure.

But things start to sour between departure and arrival, as the six main characters are locked in a sentimental psychological drama that, blandly speaking, fails to engage. The AI is modelled after Hemingway while the five humans have serious psychological problems that proves that future personnel screening in this novel owes a lot more to psychological sadism than to mission objectives. (It's as if the HR director of the mission was trying to put together a cast for a reality TV show.) On one hand, I have to compliment Brotherton for attempting some human drama in a hard-SF tale. On the other, I have to wonder what was he thinking. Given the choice between flat characters and others that are flat-out insane (seriously planning to impregnate the entire human female population, for instance), I may pick and choose the dull ones, because I can at least empathize with dull people. This is one area where Brotherton may still have something to learn from Forward.

But that, as they say, it not the main presentation. That comes later, when our intrepid dysfunctional crew is faced with the alien life-form orbiting SS Sygni. There the comparisons with Forward kick in high gear: If you're fascinated with star dynamics and impact thereof on wholly hypothetical living creatures, then Star Dragon is the book for you. Others (myself included) are likely to feel their eyes glaze over and whimper "too much... too much..." In some sense, here's a favourable review: "This hard-SF will break even so-called hard SF fans." Sensawunda? Sensawhoaaah.

But I'll allow for some leniency, given how my reading conditions for this novel were less than ideal and how hard-SF tales often require a specific frame of mind. Star Dragon still feels like a bunch of good ideas ill-presented, in sore need of tighter editing and less psychological silliness. But as a debut, it's promising and not without its share of strengths. I may not rush out to buy Brotherton's second novel, but I'll pay attention to the reviews. Writers who write adequately are a dime a dozen, but writers who can play alongside Robert L. Forward are rare and precious, even if their work can be problematic at times.

 

Night Fall, Nelson DeMille

2004, 692 pages C$10.99 pb, ISBN 0-446-61662-1

Looking over my notes about Nelson DeMille's fiction, I keep seeing a common theme: DeMille is not just a reliable thriller writer, but he often manages to find success where other lesser writers would flounder. His books are regularly longer than they ought to be, deal with themes that shouldn't be interesting, use the same repertory of characters from one work to another –and yet DeMille is one of the surest values in the thriller market, churning out hit after hit.

With Night Fall, he comes perilously close to failing –although I haven't yet made up my mind about it, and I don't expect to for a long while yet.

The first and most important difference between Night Fall and the rest of DeMille's oeuvre is that he sets it against a very specific time period: The action begins on July 17, 2001, five years after the TWA Flight 800 explosion. Returning protagonist John Corey (Plum Island, The Lion's Game) heads out to a memorial celebration in company of his wife, but she's got a complete show-and-tell in mind. By the end of the day, Corey has determined that there's something rotten about the way the TWA investigation was wrapped up, and decides to investigate further. Warnings from superiors quickly come and are discarded at some peril.

The first question that readers should ask is why DeMille would want to pick Corey as a protagonist and very specifically why we would want to set a novel in 2001. The answer, of course, is obvious... and so the book takes on a very special quality of impending doom, a quality that becomes more and more obvious as the characters make plans that bring them to That Place on That Day.

As suggested above, Night Fall isn't an unqualified success. On one level, it certainly places the novel on a different register. DeMille knows that by his specific story choices, he can bring the reader to do most of the emotional heavy lifting of the novel. We know what's coming and the character doesn't (though the author certainly does, as demonstrated by the number of references that are obvious now but weren't then.) and that is the very definition of suspense and dramatic irony. The novel rushes along to its inevitable conclusion even as the reader hope against all other evidence that something will happen to prevent the inevitable.

But the very same factors that given strength to Night Fall also contribute to the impression that DeMille is blindly cheating his readers. Think back to the reasons why DeMille, after nearly a dozen novels loosely tied to contemporary times in general, would specifically tie himself to a specific time period. Why show a protagonist uncovering a conspiracy three years before the publication date of the book, if we know perfectly well (reading the morning newspaper) that the conspiracy is not going to be exposed in time for 2004? As the novel started building steam toward an ending and the days were counting down to That Day, I found myself contemplating the upcoming crash and muttering darkly that DeMille really shouldn't go there nor do that.

But he does, and arguably negates the preceding investigation, burning up 600 pages in smoke because Something Else happens that, of course, Changes Everything. Did he lock himself in a box and only thought of burning up the box because nothing else worked? I can't say. I can only testify that Night Fall left me unsatisfied, which is probably a first in the entire DeMille oeuvre. Worse yet is the feeling that this is completely deliberate: DeMille knew what he was doing, and it falls to the reader to decide whether it worked or not.

If I've spent so much time discussing the ending, it's because everything else is up to DeMille's standards: The crystal-clear prose, the engaging characters, the sardonic narration, the beautiful integration of exposition... it's all there, slickly developed. There are a missteps or two, like the unlikely reappearance of a character for pure pummelling purposes, but the rest is DeMille solid gold.

It's just the ending that stick out like an undigested bone, and it's not inconsequential because it hangs over the book like an albatross. The date tells you to expect it and dramatic theory suggests that it's going to be pretty tragic. But it's hard to avoid the feeling that DeMille has chosen the easy lazy way out.

In this light, I'm really curious to see if DeMille's next book, Wild Fire, will acknowledge or even confront some of those issues. It's said to feature the same characters in (once again) a free-flowing contemporary setting: we'll see if Night Fall will have any lasting impact on them, or if the big Reset button will be pressed.

 

Digital Knight, Ryk E. Spoor

Baen, 2003, 378 pages, C$11.99 pb, ISBN 0-7434-7161-X

Nowadays, everyone struggles under the shadow of Buffy.

Hey, it's what happens when a sub-genre gets strip-mined. Vampire hunters (or, more generally speaking, monster-slayers) have been with us for a long time in popular lore: As you imagine horrors, the next step is someone who will protect you from it. But as the nineties evolved, as Buffy and The X-Files took over the fantastic sub-genres for easily digestible weekly stories, it became simultaneously trivial and impossible to re-imagine the genre. Suddenly, you couldn't walk into a bookstore's horror section without being clobbered by dozens of sexy vampire hunters who may themselves be vampires, alongside other furry tentacled critters who may or may not be prime relationship material.

Half a decade later, the situation isn't much different. Anyone tackling the contemporary monster-slayer sub-genre has to contend with the dozens, maybe hundreds of other writers who each had their own unique take on the idea. And so it goes with Digital Knight, a contemporary monster-slaying book with its own particular strengths that still feels as if it's playing with well-worn material.

I may not respect that sub-genre too much, but I didn't pick up the book by accident: Ryk E. Spoor, under a different alias, has been a long-time contributor to the Usenet literary SF community, and I was curious to see if his incisive commentary on genre fiction would carry over to original fiction. Would he manage to escape the shadow of Buffy, or not?

"Maybe" ends up being the most charitable assessment I can give.

First, the good and favourable impressions: Spoor can write the type of accessible prose that has come to exemplify the Baen line. His hip and sarcastic tone carries well to his chosen protagonist, an information specialist with a number of similarities to those most likely to read the book. If nothing else, Digital Knight is a lot more information-aware than most of its brethren, and that give it a nice little edge, a truly contemporary flavour that seems to be missing from a lot of vampire-hunting stories seemingly stuck in a Stoker mindset. Better yet: Protagonist Jason Wood is a geek, and I can identify with that.

What's more, Spoor's approach to his stable of critters is a lot more science-fictional than fantastic: Among the biggest strengths of the book is the acknowledgement that actions have consequences. One of the early stories sees Wood develop a werewolf sensor: later on, the devices are selling briskly as the world realizes that there are such creatures out there. As far as monster-slaying stories go, this is pretty much the way things should be.

But.

But this is a first novel, and an episodic one at that: More fix-up than sustained narrative, Digital Knight is consciously structured around what we could call episodes, each one developing and extending the mythology of the series. It could work as a miniseries, but as book form it leaves readers with an assortment of unfinished or hastily-tied plot threads. On the writing front, the book never totally shakes a certain lack of grace in the prose, which isn't as important as you may suppose, but does nothing to enhance the experience. Beginner's stuff, probably less intrusive in the next novel.

Then there's the Buffy factor, or (broadly speaking), the idea that despite the neat touches and the contemporary gadgets, we've seen all of this before --ad nauseam. Jason Wood can be the best and hippest monster-slayer on the block, he's still working in a clearly identifiable mythology mash-up where everything is readily recognizable despite the twisted allegiances and careful justifications. If you've had enough of "that stuff", Digital Knight remains "that stuff", however well it's handled.

I suppose readers with a higher tolerance for this sub-genre will enjoy Digital Knight a lot more than I did, much like I tend to be far more generous to hard-SF books than to other types of stories. Otherwise, well, I'm happy to see Spoor working professionally and earning money for the wit he demonstrated on Usenet... and I'll certainly consider any hard-SF book he cares to pen. But as far as monster-slaying is concerned, I'll stay on the side-lines a while longer.

[December 2006 update: Ryk E. Spoor wrote to clarify a few details, some of which I knew but didn't acknowledge properly in the review. With his permission, here are excerpts of his message...

[Digital Knight] *was* written as separate stories originally (the first three were "Gone in a Flash", "Photo Finish" and "Viewed in a Harsh Light"; the other three sections were added in two months after Jim Baen expressed interest in it but said that it was too short). I felt (and Eric and Jim agreed) that given the type of story it worked reasonably well in an episodic format and thus I didn't do a huge amount of work to somehow try to integrate it into some overarching plotline.

"Gone in a Flash" was written in ... 1989 - 1990, I think, while "Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies", "Live and Let Spy", and "Mirror Image" were all written in one short stretch of 2002. (From my PoV, of course, it's the X-Files and Buffy who are the latecomers; the two genre influences I would credit with Jason Wood's birth would be the Nero Wolfe novels (for Jason's tone) and Kolchak the Night Stalker (for the basic concept).

[Digital Knight] is also, as I've also put it to other people, a sort of "compressed intro" to my multiverse. Jason Wood intersects (sometimes unknowingly) with just about every important aspect of my multiverse in his career, and his stories get correspondingly more complex as time goes on. Even apparently quite minor events have more significance than may appear at first glance.

Mr. Spoor's graciousness in dealing with my review was enough to make we go out and finally buy his follow-up novel Boundary, which I'd been meaning to get for a while.]

 

Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi

Subterranean Press, 2002 (2005 hardcover reprint), 286 pages, ISBN 1-59606-020-4
(Also available online at
http://www.scalzi.com/agent/ )

Trunk novels. Just about every writer in the business has at least one: those early efforts that weren't good enough to warrant publication and so await patiently, in the trunk (so to speak) to be reworked or abandoned entirely. Some writers eventually manage to revise and publish them while others seem happy to let them age away unseen. I know of one red-hot hard-SF writer who reportedly has ten of them, which is the kind of stuff that makes me feel better when I read his stuff and wonder how his "first" book out of the gate was so unbelievably good.

But in these wild and woolly Internet times where information actively schemes to be free, more and more writers are turning to a third alternative: Releasing the novel on the Internet as a free sample of what they can do and a piece of must-read history for their fans. Campbell Award-winning John Scalzi is now officially one of SF's most sensational new writer, but the runaway success of Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades masks the fact that those weren't his first two novels: Another one, Agent to the Stars, was written in the late nineties and and released as a free download on his wildly popular web site in 1999, where it attracted attention and some generously donated money.

But then Scalzi sold other novels, which did quite well on the marketplace. This, in turn, raised Agent to the Stars' profile high enough that the fine folks at Subterranean Press crunched some numbers and figured they could make a profit re-publishing the novel as a special limited edition. There are rarely second chances for books, but there are also exceptions: this is one of them.

Those of you worried about quality can rest easy: While Agent to the Stars doesn't quite make it as a first-rate SF novel, it's good enough by itself, and quite reasonably good for what is, after all, a trunk novel. Scalzi is such a professional that it's hard to imagine him releasing anything that wasn't good enough for public consumption.

It's also one of those relatively rare creatures: A light-hearted Science Fiction novel. The hook is simple: Successful Hollywood agent Thomas Stein is a bright young darling at his agency, and he's lucky enough to have at least one rising superstar under his wing. Things are looking up for him, until he's called into his boss' office for a special assignment: Find a way to "sell" a race of slimy smelly aliens to the human public. The agent job of a lifetime... if Tom can handle it. Fortunately, the aliens are friendly (pretty funny, actually) and Tom seems reasonably confident that he can crack the problem. But this is Hollywood, and things have a way of not going quite right.

Before long, tragedy occurs and Agent to the Stars heads to grounds that will feel familiar to seasoned Scalzi readers: Ethical dilemmas arise, and with them the ideal excuse to use SF as a tool to explore a few big "What If?"s. The warm and gooey aliens end up teaching two or three things to Tom about what it means to be human, bringing the novel to a conclusion that will satisfy everyone.

On a writing level, Agents to the Stars is deceptively simple: The prose is immediately accessible, and Scalzi knows how to put his characters in genuinely amusing situations. The balance between comedy and drama is tricky to get right and if the tonal shifts can rough at times, the skill of the conclusion more compensates for it. Scalzi has a lot of experience writing about movies and he uses that knowledge to paint a convincing portrait of the daily life of a Hollywood agent: Movie buffs won't be the only ones who benefit from Agent to the Stars, but the novel will pack a special fun for them.

This being said, it remains a trunk novel, even if it's exceptionally pleasant to read. It's a bit linear and fluffy (though less so than you can imagine, thanks to the dramatic turn taken in the second half of the book), with a few dramatic shortcuts that make sense in a comedy but wouldn't pass inspection in a more rigorous tone. The speculative elements are few, though well-developed and reasonably consistent.

But as a Scalzi fan, I'm just thankful that he's been generous enough to allow random readers to have a look at his first effort. In some ways, I suspect that Agents to the Stars reflects Scalzi-the-author a bit better than his first "official" novel Old Man's War: it's funnier, looser, a bit more explicit in its ethical concerns and not as worried about mass-market appeal. As time passes, I think that Agents to the Stars will find its place not just as an unusually good "free novel on the web", but as an essential piece in the Scalzi bibliography, the one piece that announces a strong career.