Reviews

June 2007

2007, Christian Sauvé

Reviewed this month:

Plus!

 

Secret Justice, James W. Huston

Avon, 2003, 450 pages, C$10.99 pb, ISBN 0-06-000838-5

[Note from your usual reviewer: As I was reading in one of the departure lounges in Chicago's O'Hare airport, waiting for my flight back to Ottawa, a man sitting next to me finished his paperback novel, nudged me and said "You should read this one". I couldn't let that opportunity slip by and asked why: what follows is a transcription of what he told me.]

The problem with novels there days is that's they're just too soft. We're at war, all right? The camel-heads just want to blast us away and all these fluffy pinko authors can do is wring their hands about how it's not right to destroy them. I'm with the President on this: if we don't teach them a lesson, they'll never learn. It's just business. Capitalism, baby. In my line of work, we buy companies before they buy us. Kill'em first, that's what I always say.

I spend nearly half my time flying around the country, and with the stupid rules about "electronic interference", I end up reading a lot of books. You wouldn't catch me dead with romance, but these days it looks like females are writing half the thrillers out there. Me, I want the good stuff. Stuff written by military guys. Those who have been there and can tell it like it is. Huston's the real deal. He's been in the Navy. He also became a lawyer and I can't stand those bastards, but nobody's perfect.

I'm not sure what Huston's written before, but Secret Justice's just the kind of books we should force people to read. Starts somewhere out there in the desert, with US troops getting a bunch of terrorists. Not all of them, though: the big guy, the Osama of the gang has been able to slip out and the others won't tell what's happened to him. Well, guess what, the hero of the book doesn't wast his time meowing like those pussies I saw at our new factory yesterday: He grabs one of the terrorists and start dunking his head underwater until he starts blabbing. Five minutes later, wannabee-Osama's in the bag.

Of course, the first weak-ass terrorist dies because of some crap torture-related thing, but it doesn't matter: The hero comes back with wannabee-Osama and everyone's happy. For a while, everyone's able to focus on the real problem: The terrorists are about to attack America, and wannabee-Osama knows something. It's up to the hero to run around the world to stop the problem.

But when Fox News tells you that the real problem with our country is the liberals, they're not kidding: The doctors who discovered the dead terorrist starts emailing the euro commies over at Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders to complain about the torture. Pretty soon, the liberals are winning: the hero is accused of murder and he's stopped from going after the real terrorists. The dumb doctor even pays for a lawyer to defend wannabee-Osama, who suddenly starts saying that he's not the real kinda-Osama.

But that's all right, because the hero gets to go away on missions between breaks in his murder case. He briefs the presidents, romances his girl, fights the terrorists and tells the liberals to go screw themselves: that's a hero. Now, it gets a bit confusing after that, because wannabee-Osama isn't the real kinda-Osama and that makes the doctor feel better about his dumb no-torture attitude, but it doesn't matter: Pretty soon, the hero gets to torture the real kinda-Osama, and gets to stop a big terrorist plot.

And you know what? That's the real-world for you. Sometimes, even the good guys have to take a pair of pliers and cut off people's finger if that's what's needed to save the world. The lawyers, the bleeding hearts, the code of justice are just garbage we use to make ourselves feel better. That book knows that, and man I was happy to read a novel written by a real man for once: none of that "oh, we must be sensitive to the enemies, meow, meow, meow" bull. You know, sometime you've got to suck it up: Yesterday, I saw grown guys cry after being told their factory was going to be closed and shipped off to India. Hell, if you can't take it like a man, you don't deserve to live in America. We're a country that gets result; screw everything else.

I'm definitely picking up Huston's next book. Anyone with the guts to say that he's pro-torture will get money from guys like me.

 

Year's Best SF 12, Ed. David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

EOS, 2007, 484 pages, C$10.99 pb, ISBN 978-0-06-125208-2

"The theme of the year is catastrophe and how to recover from it" warn editors Hartwell and Cramer in the introduction to their latest Year's Best SF volume, and they're not kidding. Of the twenty-six stories assembled here, a good chunk deal with The End... regardless of whether it's followed by a new beginning or not.

Apocalyptic fiction isn't a new subgenre of SF, of course, but it's hard to escape the feeling that the chosen few of this anthology are writing about fresh horrors a privileged knowledge of what it feels to go through a catastrophe. Unlike the writers who wished the Cold War away by describing nuclear Armageddon, every writer represented here has seen the World Trade Centre fall; has waited for SARS to bloom into something bigger; has seen the United States invade another country on thin pretexts; has seen a tsunami wipe out hundred of thousands of people; has mentally scratched New Orleans from their holiday destinations. The first few years of the twenty-first century have been rough on everyone, and this Year's Best SF is showing the accumulating damage. The goal is no longer to triumph against adversity, but to cope with it.

In many ways, the opening story of the volume tells you everything you need to know about the anthology: Nancy Kress' "Nano comes to Clifford Falls" describes the economic dislocation that comes with the arrival of SF's archetypal nano-technology economy. It's both a fresh and fascinating shorty story, and a small wonder insofar as it has taken up to 2006 for someone to tackle an issue that's been obvious to everyone since the first glimmers of nanotech. The writing is crisp, and the story deals with real issues. The end state is unlikely to please everyone, which makes the story that much stronger.

But it's far from being the last good story of the volume, and even farther from being the last catastrophe story. I have discussed Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" in my review of his Overclocked collection, but the story remains the same: As catastrophic events mysteriously (some will say "arbitrarily") isolate a community of hackers from an outside world that stops responding, it's up to them to hold everything together... even if they're not too sure if that's the right thing to do. I still get a chill out of the last paragraph.

Other stories in the post-apocalyptic vein include Claude Lalumière similarly improbable "This is the Ice Age", in which quantum ice ravages Montréal. Michael Flynn's Hugo-nominated "Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth" hits a distinctly post-9/11 nerve despite being being about something very different: It's perhaps the clearest example of how, in the wake of September 2001, everyone has become far more adapted at seeing the ramifications of catastrophe. Darryl Gregory makes a welcome returns appearance with "Damascus", which goes all the way through coping with catastrophe to study those who embrace it. "Expedition, with Recipes" by Joe Haldeman isn't much of a story, but the conceit fits perfectly with the anthologists' thesis. On a smaller scale, Ian R. McLeod's "Taking Good Care of Myself" is about being confronted to one's death in a very literal way. The more we read into this Year's Best SF, the more we seem stuck in disaster. Even Robert Reed gets into the spirit of things with "Rwanda", which looks at the wreckage left in a curious post-invasion future.

Even the stories that don't directly feature some kind of apocalypse aren't a cheery basket of kittens. Heather Linsdley's "Just do it!" (which gets my vote as one of the volume's top stories) is pitch-dark social satire with a twist that's almost too mean to stomach. Superb. Meanwhile, Alastair Reynolds' detective story "Tiger, Burning" manages to temper a victory of sort with a strong sense of melancholy.

At some point, one starts to wonder if the apocalypses that lurk through the book aren't contaminating the rest of the stories. Even the usually jubilant Rudy Rucker seems down this year with a funny story that also happens to deal with ultimate catastrophe. It's amusing, uplifting and indescribably weird... but it still deals with the end of the world. Again.

But don't reach for that straight razor just yet: The last word belongs to Charlie Rosenkrantz's "Preemption", a darkly amusing catastrophe tale that seems even funnier give the grimness of the preceding stories. Hartwell and Cramer are seasoned pros at the anthology business, and the placement of that story alone earns em extra points for style.

But all you truly need to know is that for those who can take the depressing nature of the year's story, Year's Best SF 12 is once again a superior best-of anthology. The thematic component seems unusually strident, but that's almost a bonus feature. What's no catastrophe, though, is the selection of the stories. Once again, Year's Best SF trumps the official Hugo-nominated selection, with only a few overlaps.

 

A Princess of the Aerie, John Barnes

Warner Aspect, 2003, 319 pages, C$9.99 pb, ISBN 0-446-61082-8

Veteran John Barnes readers were shaken by A Duke of Uranium. the first volume of his "Jik Jinnaka" series: Here was a John Barnes with no horrid violence, no non-consensual sex, no last chapter that killed everyone in sight. In fact, the novel was practically a Heinlein juvenile with a bit more sex and action: an old-fashioned SF novel that tried real hard to please everyone and made a serious stab at the YA market. Knowing Barnes' tendency to drop the hammer on his characters when they least expect it, could he sustain such an atmosphere in further volumes of the series? Follow-up A Princess of the Aerie answers that with a resounding "Oh, you knew what was coming..."

But before explaining what didn't turn out so well, let's take a moment to be grateful for what has been carried over from the first novel. The quasi-Heinleinian narration is back, with its mixture of future world-building, unusual slang, snappy dialogue and efficient prose. It doesn't take much time to be sucked into A Princess of the Aerie, especially not when Jak gets a cry for help: His old girlfriend (previously established as a princess in the previous volume) needs his help in dealing with a big problem, and Jak's covert training is perfect for the job.

So far, so good. But the wind starts to turn once Jak gets to the Aerie: Much to his dismay, he avoids being killed, discovers that the cry for help was an authentic fake, and that his ex-girlfriend is now deeply into kinky domination games. Barnes' streak of books without non-consensual sex ends shortly in A Princess of the Aerie as Jak is manipulated into sexual mind-games for his ex-girlfriend's unabashed entertainment. (The unspoken moral of the story is something like "don't let a super-powerful girlfriend mess with your brain chemistry, despite the hot sex you may think you're getting out of it.") Suffice to say that the novel solidly establishes itself as one that all Young Adults will want to read... despite their parents' objections.

It's handled with a smile, but a bittersweet one. Jak eventually realizes the extent to which he has fooled himself, and what an absolutely corrupt person his ex-girlfriend has been all along. But he doesn't get much time to think about it: before realizing it, he's exiled on what's called an important covert operation on service to the Aerie.

That is the breaking cue for another interplanetary travel sequence that may bring back memories of the first volume. Some characters return and some familiar games are played, leaving readers with an impression not only of deja-vu, but also of a broken plot: why spend so much time on Jak's betrayal if the real story is going to take place elsewhere?

Jak and friends eventually end up on Mercury, where Barnes explains what he didn't have to in the first volume: In the world of Jak Jinnaka, Mercury ends up being the lowest rung on the lowest ladder, a hellish place where everyone is naturally exploited by physics and the way the economy is structured. The planet's only output is precious metals, and the working environment isn't for wussies: Everyone works hard and dies young. Police enforcement is practically non-existent. Amazingly enough, things are getting worse: The normally metastable power dynamics of the competing factions is upset by the arrival of a ruthless new faction, and it's up to Jak and his few friends to correct the problem. Class credits may be at stake.

Jak's universe constantly gets darker and more dangerous throughout the novel, and if the outcome of his mission is never truly in doubt, the real meat of the novel is in the sacrifices he has to make in order to settle the issue. Progressively, we come to understand the bitterness of the opening foreword in which Jak is dismissed by his ex-best friend. As Jak progresses, he finds out the lies and dangers in being turned into a hero. Poor guy: finds out his ex-girlfriend is a witch, loses his friends, has his reputation trashed on system-wide media...

And yet, one comes away from A Princess of the Aerie with the unaccountable feeling that this is, in fact, a pretty fun book. Despite the plot that goes awry, despite the gathering clouds, despite the foreboding that Jak is going to be way over his head in the third volume, the reading pleasure of this volume remains intact. I may still not be convinced by the girlfriend's abrupt revelation as a Machiavellian sociopath, but I'm not going to complain (much) either. What is noticeable, though, if how the series now seems more aligned to Barnes' known track record. Despite knowing better, I'm really looking forward to In the Hall of Martians Kings.

 

The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch

Gollancz, 2006, 505 pages C$24.95 tp, ISBN 0-575-07802-2

Hype is two-edged sword: If it's true that I wouldn't have read Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora had it not been lauded on-line, it's also true that it made it impossible to pick up the novel as "just another fantasy book". This is, after all, the novel that touched off the Great Blog Critic-Payoff Crisis of 2006, which contributed to the end of Emerald City and megabytes of bitter debate about the nature of on-line criticism.

It almost makes me want to avoid reviewing the book.

But I've got a monthly quota to fill, and The Lies of Locke Lamora has spent more than its fair share of time on my bedside table. So here goes.

The most intriguing thing about Scott Lynch's debut is how it marries the conventions of caper thrillers with the environment of a fantasy novel. Our titular hero is a master con artist, a man able to fool just about everyone into handing over their money. Locke Lamora isn't particularly smart or handsome, but he's got what it takes to be a gifted con artist: a gift for gab, a murderously effective education and a strong circle of friends with unique areas of expertise. The Lies of Locke Lamora is built around a structure that follows Lamora during a particularly stressful period, and interleaves that story with interlude that explain who Locke Lamora and his friends are, and what has made them the way they are.

This is where, as an infrequent (and, frankly, generally uninterested) fantasy reader, my impressions part ways with the critical consensus. While many have lauded the completeness of Lynch's vision of Lamora and the city he lives in, I found myself skipping ahead whenever I hit another historical interlude –which is to say every other chapter.

I have no major problems with the bulk of the novel's plot: As Locke thinks he's pulling off a grand coup by defrauding a rich merchant, troubles comes looking for him as a mysterious "Gray King" decimates the local criminal power structure. Blackmailed into doing the Grey King's bidding against his own boss, Locke has little time to figure out how to pull his own skin out of the fire. If he does manage to do so, it's not certain that he'll be able to do the same for his friends... Before the book is over, Locke finds himself rediscovering his conscience, using his illicit skills for the greater good and doing things he would never had imagined doing pro bono.

If The Lies of Locke Lamora had just been about that plot thread, chances are that I would have been far more upbeat about the book: the fusion between caper plotting and fantasy setting is interesting, and the low-key nature of the fantasy (save for the magicians, one could almost squint and imagine Locke running around a slightly different version of medieval Venice) doesn't overwhelm the particular nature of Locke's story.

But the constant flashbacks do drag down the story every couple of pages. They alone explain why the book spent nearly three months on my bedside table, even as I was tearing through other books: Though I was enjoying myself in Locke Lamora's world, I would close the book every time I'd hit another flashback, and feel no particular impulsion to pick it up again.

I can only hope that the further volumes in the Gentleman Bastard sequence are finished with the flashbacks and will proceed at a faster clip. The richness of Lynch's prose is satisfying, and the inclusion of modern sensibilities in the dialogue (which is to say: frank Anglo-Saxon swearing) is pleasantly honest in a sub-genre that often tiptoes around harsh expletives.

Not being much of a fantasy reader, there are definitely limits to how much I can like the book, but that's all right: such reactions come along with the Hype, and fantasy readers who somehow happen to read this review are far more likely to like this book than I did. I see with some satisfaction the The Lies of Locke Lamora landed Scott Lynch on the Campbell award shortlist: a fitting achievement for a novel that, despite its length, is already reasonably successful.

Not entirely successful, but if all it takes is a bit of selective skimming... the hype may have a solid basis to it.

 

Angels Flight, Michael Connelly

Warner, 1999, 454 pages, C$10.99 pb, ISBN 0-446-60727-4

One of the known problem of my Michael Connelly reading project (one book per month, in order of publication, until I'm caught up) is that I have already read many of the high points of Connelly's career. After The Last Coyote, for instance, I could skip over The Poet, Trunk Music and Blood Work. This landed me three novels later in Angel's Flights, with a slightly different Harry Bosch now re-integrated with the police force and struggling through a marriage I barely remembered. Having read Trunk Music nearly eight years ago, it took me a while to get back up to speed with the latest developments.

Fortunately, Connelly makes it easy to get back into Bosch's mind: his best-known protagonist is still as taciturn, still as clever, and just as likely to find himself at the centre of a complicated investigation. This time, Bosch is chosen by the LAPD's high management as the lead inspector on a case with the potential to revive racial riots: the murder of a black attorney who specialized in cases against the police. Worse: the victim was killed in a way that suggests a policeman with a score to settle. Already marginalized by his colleagues, Bosch finds himself stuck with investigators he can't trust and a mystery some people don't want to see resolved.

As the clock starts ticking, the investigation roars into gear. Bosch doesn't have much time: Already, the media is driven to a frenzy of speculation by the killer-cop angle. Before long, Bosch realizes that the investigation is a poisoned gift: No one inside the LAPD particularly wants it to succeed, and even Bosch's team may not be entirely trustworthy. As if that wasn't enough, it seems that the deceased attorney had a source deep inside the police force...

But it gets worse. Seemingly impartial people turn out to have a web of connections to the victim, including one of Bosch's ex-partners. Pulling on all the threads revealed by his investigation, Bosch starts paying renewed attention to a case that everyone thought closed, a sordid child murder that may not be as simple as everyone had figured. The title of the book eventually acquires another meaning as Bosch is forced to investigate something he'd rather leave to others...

This may not be among Connelly's best novels, but it's certainly up to his usual standards. The writing is clean and immediately absorbing. The characters are efficiently introduced and developed, which is of even bigger importance here as the cast seems much larger than in previous books. The plot keeps moving forward relentlessly, making it hard to stop reading once it gets going.

This technical proficiency makes it easy to forget about the thick density of issues tackled through the novel. Angels Flight is, first and foremost, a novel about Los Angeles in the nineties, as it recovered from the scars left by the 1992 riots. But it also weaves in themes of lost innocence, of police violence, of what makes good people go bad. Bosch has never been a happy character and Angels Flight seems grimmer than most, especially given how it really doesn't solve any of Bosch's romantic problems.

What doesn't work so well are some of the technical details: Written in 1998, Angels Flight still has a gosh-wow approach to the then-Internet, and some of the vocabulary used to describe the investigation as it move on-line is just wrong. Not a big deal for most, but frustrating to the knowledgeable readers in the context of a police procedural where details should sound right.

The other nagging element of the novel is the ending, which manages to be predictable and frustrating. Twenty pages before the end, you can practically predict what will happen to who, based on nothing but the situation and the knowledge that American crime fiction would rather kill a villain than punish him through the course of law.

But these are small issues in such a successful novel. While Angels Flight doesn't have the extra boost to propel it among Connelly's best novels (of which there have been more than a few), it holds its own as another decent entry in his oeuvre. The Michael Connelly Reader Project continues at a good clip with nary a misfire in sight.

 

Rant, Chuck Palahniuk

Doubleday Canada, 2007, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-66349-6

It's done. Chuck Palahniuk has finally turned to Science Fiction after years of teasing us with the possibility. The promotional material remains hush-hush on the issue and many reviewers will tiptoe around the evidence, but Rant is the novel where Palahniuk finally crosses the border into unarguable Science Fiction. After teasing us with a research-heavy writing style that often felt as hard-SF, after revelling in social extrapolations only one step away from SF satire, Palahniuk finally owes up to the genre.

Everyone saw it coming, of course. Palahniuk's stock in trade, from Fight Club onward, has always been to imagine the possible. The "What if?" so beloved of SF writers. It doesn't matter how unlikely it is, if it is possible. Not many people actually like beating up other people and getting beaten up in return, but it is possible, in today's world, in much the same way bodily modifications can twist a narrator's identity or how someone can fake choking for a twisted con game. Reading Palahniuk's fiction is already an exercise is suspension of disbelief.

It helps that Palahniuk has never been a rigorously mainstream writer. His last three novels, from Lullaby to Haunted, more or less dealt with fantastical concepts. Haunted even included two short stories that, squinting the right way, could be read as classic fifties-style SF. Rant, despite tackling the very science-fictional trope of time travel, is not such a big stretch: Palahniuk can't be bothered by technological or scientific explanation and reaches straight for the woo-woo bag of tricks. Time travel via the wish fulfilment of Jack Finney rather than the machine-aided rationality of H.G. Wells.

(I'm not spoiling much: A close reading of the first thirty pages of Rant pretty much give the game away.)

So this new infatuation with another genre may not be as interesting than it seems at first glance: This is just Palahniuk going further in one of his usual directions, after all. Far more interesting is the way he tells the story: Rant is written as an oral biography, a style of writing that allows Palahniuk to have some serious fun with the way he structures the novel. Nominally a way to present different perspective on a same subject, oral biography is here twisted to serve Palahniuk's style: He uses the "different voices" motif to create a collage of perspectives that each describe an aspect of the character and the world. The cacophony of voices acquires a pleasant montage-like effect, every bit player whispering something worthwhile in our ear, even if we can't recognize it at first.

Rant Casey himself ends up being a side player in his own "biography": From a strong Trickster-like presence at the beginning of the novel, Rant fades against the lively background that Palahniuk puts together as the book unfolds. Progressively, we're made aware that the world in which Rant exists is not our own: that substantial social differences exist, and that they mask something even more hideous lurking under the surface. In a way, that's always been one characteristic of Palahniuk's oeuvre: presenting a society that may superficially look like ours, but is really not. In this case, though, no amount of rationalization will manage to take in account the radically different world in which Rant exists, even if most of the concepts (party-crashing cars in each other, for instance, in an acknowledge nod to Fight Club's main conceit) are at least theoretically possible.

Those used to Palahniuk's style won't be shocked to find that Rant is once again all about, well, shock. Disgust, decency and logic are the three virtues one must learn to ignore in order to read a Palahniuk novel and this one is no exception. It doesn't always add up, naturally, but Palahniuk's books are rides more than they're sustained arguments. Part of the thrill of Rant is in seeing unfamiliar words, concepts and icons gradually become clearer and clearer as the book unfolds. Besides the SF elements, this is another sign of Rant's belonging to the Science-Fiction genre: Palahniuks wields exposition like a master and often lets slip strange blips before we're ready to understand them.

But also like a Science Fiction novel, the world of the novel eventually overpowers the main character. Rant, after our promising expectations, eventually become a shell of a character in a far more intriguing world. The repetitive ending grates a bit as it goes back to Rant to back-fill obvious parts of his back-story.

Yet it doesn't matter much: Rant is easily one of Palahniuk's most enjoyable piece of writing in a while. The acknowledged SF influence seems to allow him a bit more freedom that usual (which is saying a lot), and the oral biography form shakes up some of Palahniuk's stylistic quirk. A strong entry... but not for everyone.

 

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13, Ed. Chris Ware

McSweeney's, 2003, 316 pages, $C36.00 hc, ISBN 1-932416-08-0

I took years, but I finally snagged a copy of the quasi-legendary "McSweeney's 13", the "comics issue" of the relentlessly innovative fiction periodical from the fine folks at McSweeney's. Whoever says "periodical", after all, suggests a limited availability, followed by endless trips to used-bookstores in the hope of finding a copy.

But McSweeney's isn't a disposable sort of periodical, and so you may still have some luck, years later, finding latter printings shelved in the "literature" section of your neighbourhood monster bookstore. Don't look for a brightly-coloured onion-paged digest: Look for a massive saran-wrapped hardcover with a strange cover featuring muted iconic drawings. If you know Chris Ware's work, just look for his signature style: Not only has he edited the content of the issue, he also designed it –including the beautiful wrap-around cover.

It's impossible to review McSweeney's 13 without spending some time discussing its design. It's no accident if it costs more than the average hardcover novel: not only is the book solidly bound in a slightly bigger format than most hardcovers, it sports full-color pages and a dust jacket that is much more than a dust jacket. Unwrap it and you will find not only two bonus comic-books hidden within the folds, but also a full-colour, two-sided, newspaper-sized (gilded!) comic by Chris Ware.

The biting, cynical, nihilist, self-referential, vaguely historical nature of Ware's work sets the tone for what's inside McSweeney's 13: In assembling a special comics issue for one of the foremost literary periodical of our times, Ware has decided to play on two themes. First, that comics are good and literary and worthy of respect –a familiar tune for long-time fans. Second, that the type of comics showcased here would be almost absurdly literary in an autobiographical vein. If you're looking for good superhero comics, or even accessible genre adventures in a graphical format, well, look elsewhere: McSweeney's 13 won't allow such populist riff-raff to sully its pages. Peanuts gets a pass on account of being old and respectable, but otherwise the only time you 'll hear about superheroes is through the nostalgic prose essays scattered throughout the periodical.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. I'm coming to McSweeney's 13 through the comic-sized door, but an equal if not superior number of readers must be picking it up because it's the newest McSweeney's and it happens to talk about comics. This is the audience that has to be convinced, not the existing comic fans.

On the other hand, it leads straight to a theme anthology where you get your pick between a sad autobiographical tales of everyday life, and another dozen so-called edgy pieces whose meaning lurks out of context. Your choices: Be baffled or depressed.

If you're not happy with the newer material, you can always gawk at the perfect reproductions of historical pieces, from the first American comic book, to an early Mutt and Jeff, to sketches seemingly stolen from Charles Schultz's trashcan, to other pieces of American comicana. Also; a handful of essays from such notables as Michael Chabon, Chip Kidd or John Updike. (I suppose that I won't be the only one surprised to learn that Updike can sketch relatively well.) All of this material accumulates to leave the impression of an affectionate tribute to the art form, of a memento of interest to comic book enthusiasts with long memories.

Alas, despite the tremendous labour of love that this edition represents, many (most?) of the pieces are not original to McSweeney's 13 and can't even stand on their own. Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers is quoted here, as is Chester Brown's Louis Riel, to cite only two work with which I'm immediately familiar. Some other pieces leave us hanging, deprived of both context and resolution. McSweeney's 13 is least satisfying when it's acting as a sampler than an homage or a polemic.

But it's hard to truly being critical of this book. I have mentioned the design a couple of time, but McSweeney's 13 is truly that rarest of literary object: One that feels as if no effort was spared in order to make it as realized at possible. Time and time again, small touches remind us that several people have agonized over this as an object, not a disposable pop culture artifact. The sampler approach can work at driving newer readers to other works, introducing new and little-known artists to the McSweeney's readership. One can quibble with part of it, but the whole is much greater than the sum of its part. As a entity, McSweeney's 13 is close to its own kind of perfection.

It's not an accident if I can see myself pulling this book from my shelves the next time some one visits and say "You have to take a look at this..."

 

Brasyl, Ian McDonald

Pyr, 2007, 357 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-1-59102-543-6

It's hard to over-state the impact that River of Gods has had on Ian McDonald's career. A solid, but generally under-appreciated veteran author, McDonald suddenly became one of Science-Fiction's hottest authors: The book was nominated for the Hugo Awards, earned effusive critical praise and was snapped up by Pyr for republication in the United States, rejuvenating McDonald's American career years after Bantam Spectra's unsuccessful efforts. Pyr and McDonald benefited a great deal from each other, which may serve to explain why his follow-up Brasyl ended up published in the United States by Pyr, to significant critical expectations.

Like River of Gods, Brasyl is partly an attempt to recast familiar SF elements in new cultural environments. Surfing on the SF globalization wave first anticipated decades ago by Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net (and his own earlier books such as Evolution's Shore), McDonald imagined a sprawling SF novel in India for River of Gods and now does the same for Brazil with his latest. In doing so, he takes conventional SF ideas and restates them in a setting that is different in time and culture. The impact is more profound that one could think: River of Gods felt fresh and invigorating because it looked at familiar SF clichés from a different angle of interest, a particularity that added to McDonald's usually strong narrative and characterization skills.

Brasyl is not River of Gods Part 2, but it's definitely in the same vein. Here, somber quantum mechanics conspiracies unite three different sub-plots, taking place at three different eras in Brazil's history. But whereas River of Gods was massive and sprawling, Brasyl is dynamic and sprightly. This is not the same country, this is not the same culture, and this is not even the same prose: Brasyl's McDonald is nervy, fast and not particularly concerned by good grammatical form: He gets away with fragmented sentences that mix Brazilian speech with hi-tech slang and dispenses with commas. Reading Brasyl is, at times, like being stuck in a whirlwind of cultural and technical references that all accumulate to give the prose a dense texture that has a unique quality of its own. Beautifully written, Brasyl is another one of those contemporary SF novels that proves without discussion that cool techno stuff isn't necessarily incompatible with fantastic prose.

But even that prose style deliberately varies throughout the book: Divided in three temporal streams, Brasyl simultaneously takes place in Brazil's past, present and future. The current subplot concerns a reality-TV show producer who comes to realize that a Doppelgänger is ruining her life. Meanwhile in the eighteenth century, a Jesuit operative must go up the Amazon to find a renegade priest. Finally, a small-time hustler in 2032 São Paulo gets romantically involved with a dangerous woman who meets a violent end... only to re-appear a short while later. All of this comes together thanks to the magic of quantum mechanics and parallel universes, but not before a wild ride of sword-fights, superhero fetish sex and a present-day plot that seems even stranger than either Brazil's history or its possible future.

As a sustained narrative, Brasyl is not quite as successful as River of Gods for a few reasons: Not all three plot-lines are created equal, for instance: After the tornado-like intensity of the present and future segments, the historical subplot can seem like a lull in the action. And while the middle of the book is filled with intriguing mysteries, the resolution of the entire arc can feel like a more conventional let-down. McDonald's usual knack for describing conventional scenes with unconventional prose can often feel like a distancing mechanism when the book's action set-pieces occur.

But even with those slight flaws, Brasyl still ends up feeling like one of 2007's most vital Science Fiction novels. It's fresh, slick and exciting. It feels, simply put, like no other SF novel to date. When the pieces finally come together, the unusual nature of the plot and the prose lead readers straight to serious kick-ass coolness that wouldn't feel out of place in a big Hollywood blockbuster film. McDonald takes a serious option on award nominations with this book, and proves that his career renaissance is well-founded: Everyone who discovered (or rediscovered) the McDonald oeuvre thanks to River of Gods now have something new to enjoy, and Brasyl easily satisfies expectations.

 

Babylon 5: Ten years later (more or less)

Don't be fooled by appearances: I did my time in the geeky media SF fandom trenches. I was one of the very few people who got aboard the Babylon 5 train prior to the pilot, thanks to the fact that I got on the Internet just as series creator J. Michael Straczynski was spreading the word about his new show on Usenet newsgroups (Do I sound old, already?) I did just about everything a high school student could do to see the pilot, and for the next five years kept dealing with inconsistent schedules, faulty VCRs (I still have all of the series, save for one episode, on VHS tapes!) and the changing nature of the Internet to keep up with the series. (The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 was one of the first good reasons to "go on the web".) For years, a good chunk of my mental space was occupied by the series: I could rattle off trivia with absurd ease, and kept wondering where each new piece fit in the overall arc. Don't look in the Google Usenet archives, otherwise you may find embarrassing traces of me asking dumb questions on the B5 forums.

Once Babylon 5 ended after its five-year arc, I knew I would never be as much of a fanboy as I had been with Babylon 5. The investment in time just wasn't worth it (especially given how I had, by then, graduated to written SF in a big big way), and my hunch was that no other show would be worth it. Ten years later, it still looks as if I'm right: the new Battlestar Galactical is reportedly getting worse after only two seasons, the new Doctor Who is still up in the air and Lost sounds padded. I grabbed Firefly on DVD and quickly got over it.

Revisiting Babylon 5 seemed almost blasphemous. Would it hold up to the increased sophistication of SF in the past ten years? Would it still deliver the same jolts of wonder than it did the first time around? After receiving the first two seasons as birthday gifts, I realized that I would have to look at it once more.

Six months. That's how long it took to re-watch the series, at the rhythm of roughly two three-hour DVDs per Saturdays. In some ways, it's how Babylon 5 was designed to be seen: as a single story built using hour-long dramatic episodes. In other ways, it's a way of seeing Babylon 5 that highlights some of its worst flaws.

I'm certainly far more demanding in terms of dialogue and internal coherence than I was a decade ago. Though most of Babylon 5 holds up nicely compared to other contemporary series, it doesn't take a long time for the worst flaws of Michael J. Straczynski's writing style to come to the surface: a tendency toward lengthy pretentious monologues that mean much less than he thinks. A love for catchphrases ("when the time is right", "blow them straight to hell", etc.) that becomes repetitive. An underlying mysticism that undercuts the facade of his characters' struggles, such as Sheridan's whole "brought back from the dead" subplot, still unexplainable after five years. Revisiting Babylon 5 means a whole lot of eye-rolling as the characters keep telling each other mounds of soggy dialogue. At the time, it was a brilliant change from Star Trek (and it's difficult today to remember how the very concept of episodic TV Science Fiction was entirely slaved to Trek at the time), but we've seen much better since then.

The other thing that is likely to drive viewers up the walls when seeing Babylon 5 is what I call the "dumb plot of the week" syndrome. When the series truly clicks, from mid-third season to late fourth season (and again late during the fifth season), it does so in a way that makes individual episodes irrelevant: you can just sit down and watch an entire four-episode DVD and it feels like a sustained narrative. But once the dramatic arc quiets down and the series becomes a collection of episodes (such as most of the first and second season, as well as the beginning of the fifth), it's annoying to see Babylon 5 threatened with a series of assassination plots, alien attacks, equipment malfunctions or diplomatic misunderstandings. "Oh no! Another groups wants to kill Sheridan! I wonder if they're going to succeed?"

As far as the SF elements themselves are concerned, Babylon 5's scatter-shot approach to internal logic can mean more frustration. The extrapolation is strictly comfortable, with little in the way of truly innovative ideas. There is some nanotech, but not enough of it to matter much: the characters still live in the late twentieth century... in space. This is space opera, never cutting-edge SF.

At some point during my marathon, I started wishing for a Babylon 5 remake: All the arc, none of the filler. It should fit in fifty episodes. Maybe in fifteen years...

It's not as much fun to talk about what has survived the past decade without getting too old. The special effects started out rough, and steadily got better as the series evolved. The all-CGI shots from the latter half of the series still holds up decently, through the integration between live action and CGI still looks problematic.

Acting-wise, it's a mixed bag. Saddled with unwieldy dialogue, most actors do as well as they can. (Claudia Christian's Ivanova is the poster girl for that type of uneasiness.) The shining stars, of course, remain Peter Jurasic and the late Andreas Katsulas, as their characters take over and dominate just about everyone else. In retrospect, some characters never take off: Talia Winters is dull, Elisabeth Lochley and Lyta Alexander feels like they're wasted opportunities, Vir and Bester are annoying half the time and minor characters like Warren Keffler and Na'Toth earn their early disappearance from the series. Fans will forever wonder, of course, about the course of the series had casting changes had not shaken the series, if Ivanova had stayed around for a fifth season or if Sinclair had remained at the helm of the series for the entire five years. Some more grist for the remake mill...

Such a remake (preferably one that would be pre-financed from beginning to end) would probably go bonkers over the type of "virtual environment" techniques gradually introduced near the end of the series --and everywhere else since then. It would tighten the dramatic screws to truly focus of the best parts of the series. It would correct some of the many, many dropped threads ("Area 13", anyone?) that made the early years of Babylon-5 so different from the later ones. It would enhance the sometimes-shabby look of the sets and provide enough flat-screen displays to bring the feel of the show out of the early nineties.

The more I kept going through Babylon 5 for this second time, the more it looked to me as if the best part of Babylon 5's original broadcast was the community of fans that sprung up around it, even as the nature of the Internet was coalescing, even as we never quite knew if the series would stick around for its planned five-year duration. It was a pretty good time to be a fan, and I don't regret any of that.

On the other hand, I wonder if the experience is repeatable, and if the series stands alone. Are most of the DVD episodes bought by existing fans looking for another hit of that Babylon 5 goodness? Or is the series making new fans ever today?

Suffice to say that despite most of my annoyances with the series today, I enjoyed this second trip through the Babylon 5 universe. I had forgotten a good chunk of the latter seasons, and so some surprises still had an impact this time around. I certainly enjoyed seeing the characters once more. I realized that a surprising number of quotes from the series had stayed stuck in my mind, some of them even becoming a part of my philosophical lexicon. It felt good to tap my inner fanboy for another lap around the field, so to speak.

But in the end, it's the nature of looking at the series via DVD box-sets that makes me most aware of the difference between Babylon 5 then and Babylon 5 today. This complete and compressed view of the completed series makes it harder to enjoy as episodic television, and easier to watch as a solid dramatic unit. Babylon 5, to its creator's credit, was the first series to feel the prevailing winds and try a hybrid structure halfway between episodes and an arc. Nowadays, pretty much everyone can see the way DVD box sets are selling, and the unlimited potential of a complete series as back-list revenue generator. Babylon 5 was watched by an awful lot of people, and I can't be the only one noting the extraordinary experience of spending six months watching a story made out of hundred of hours of TV.

Which leaves only one question: When will we get to see something just as good, in its own updated way, as the classic Babylon 5?