Year: 2005

  • The Engine of Recall, Karl Schroeder

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Robert J. Sawyer Books, 2005, 271 pages, C$26.95 hc, ISBN 0-88995-323-6

    There are books whose very existence is enough to make me want to pump my fist in the air and shout “Yes!” Karl Schroeder’s Engine of Recall is one of those: before labelling me a fist-pumping yes-shouting weirdo, take a look at the author, the publisher and the fact that this is a short-story collection of ten hard-SF stories.

    Karl Schroeder is one of the best hard-SF writers in the world today. He may not have a long publishing history so far, but his first two novels speak for themselves: Ventus and Permanence both feature rich characters, top-notch extrapolation and beautiful writing. Schroeder understands the nature of genre SF like few others (he co-wrote the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, after all) and his material integrates science with fiction like few other writers.

    Robert J. Sawyer Books, as the grandiose name suggests, is a small press imprint edited by hard-SF writer Robert J. Sawyer. Already one of English Canada’s two biggest genre publisher (along with Edge/Tesseracts), RJS Books confirms the emergence of a strong genre industry in Canada and now allows the publication of books that may otherwise go nowhere in today’s increasingly consolidated publishing environment. The very thought that Robert J. Sawyer may allow Karl Schroeder to publish a short-story collection (never a viable commercial project) is enough to cheer me up.

    Finally, consider the promise of ten short stories by Karl Schroeder. Most of them had previously appeared in small magazines, so it’s a real treat to see them enjoy a wider distribution in book format. All of those stories conform to some definition of Hard-SF, though some of them extend from “supernatural events that are described in what must be a rational fashion” to “near-contemporary techno-thriller”.

    “The Dragon of Pripyat” is one of those techno-thrillers, set in a near-future where the UN employs a specialized troubleshooter, Gennady Malianov, to investigate disturbances in dangerous places such as Chernobyl. I remember reading this story with great pleasure when it first appeared in Tesseracts 8 and I re-read it with the same fun here. A loose sequel featuring the same lead character, “Alexander’s Road”, appears for the first time in this collection. It’s a fine and exciting story, and we can only rejoice when Schroeder promises that there will be more stories in this series.

    Five of the stories (including “Halo”, set in the same universe as Permanence) take place in extraterrestrial settings and show Schroeder to be a skilled inheritor of the classic hard-SF story in the Clarke or the Niven mold. Schroeder’s prose is far more refined than his predecessors, though not quite as limpid as it should be. Hard-SF fans will recognize those stories as the pure-SF meat of the book, and rightfully delight in seeing all of them brought together.

    Three stories are set on Earth in near-contemporary times and carry a decidedly more fantastic edge. “Hopscotch” looks at supernatural phenomenons with a sceptical eye, but ends on a conclusion that may not be entirely rational. “Allegiances” takes a fantastic premise and treats it with both rigour and meanness. “Making Ghosts” is halfway between cyberpunk and horror, with a mournful tone

    All short story collections manage to give a good idea of the author’s pet obsessions, and The Engine of Recall is no different. In the introduction to “Alexander’s Road”, Schroeder maintains that his stories all revolve around the theme of the inaccessible place. Reading them, I was struck by the fact that most of Schroeder’s characters are true and unashamed loners. (Stephen Baxter alludes to the same thing in his laudatory introduction.) They seldom work well with others and they love to find places where they can be alone. Perhaps fittingly for a genre optimized for intellectuals, Schroeder’s stories are often inner mind games set against the universe: the measure of success resize in figuring out how to win, even if “winning” means “getting away from everyone else.”

    In the case of Schoeder’s fans, however, “winning” means “seeing this book in print.” Schroeder’s novels have deservedly attracted a good amount of praise and attention, and so this short story collection lives up to those expectations. It’s not often that I have to praise an author for editorial work, but Robert J. Sawyer has done some good in publishing this collection. Hopefully, there will be more of them.

  • Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2005, 404 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-50948-0

    By now, we all know that Chuck Palahniuk is one sick puppy. His fans, his publicists and his editor all thank him for it. But at some point, believing one’s own press releases becomes a dangerous thing. A feedback loop is created in which reputation takes over and self-parody soon follows. While that tendency has been obvious for most of the author’s past books, Haunted comes closest to crossing the line at which the myth of Chuck Palahniuk may be consuming the real author.

    Haunted is arguably a departure for Palahniuk. Obviously, it’s his longest book to date: Whereas his previous novels all nestled comfortably under 300 pages, this one goes above 400. But this is not really a novel. It’s more accurate to call this a fix-up, a short story collection thinly disguised by a framing device that becomes increasingly more clumsy as the narrative advances.

    As a short story collection, hey, it’s classic Palahniuk: humour and horror mixed together with a heady side-order of sadism, cynicism and post-modern detachment. Palahniuk’s universe is crammed with sociopaths and the whole point of his fiction is seeing this world through completely depraved minds. It takes a special kind of reader to appreciate what he’s doing with his fiction: kind of a who-blinks-first game of gross-out. Readers now expect the extreme from Palahniuk, and the man cheerfully obliges.

    So we get stories like “Guts”. If you’re a Palahniuk fan, you already know about it: It’s the infamous story that has caused, so far, over four dozen people to faint at public readings. Strong advance notice and if readers are liable to just read it and go “ewww/coool”, it’s not difficult to image how a public performance could make people swoon. Other stand-out stories of the book include “Foot Work” (about the dark side of new-age, though its final conclusion is telegraphed pages ahead), “Slumming” (acting like hobos is fun until people get killed), “The Nightmare Box” (in which the ultimate truth drives people crazy; I’ve got my hunch on what “it” may be), “Product Placement” (a story that may make you re-think putting a bad review on-line: Uh-oh!) and “Obsolete” (perhaps Palahniuk’s first foray in outright SF, even as outdated fifties-style Science Fantasy.)

    As with all other short story collections in the history of literature, there are a number of other stories that don’t work so well. “Exodus”, for instance, is almost unbearably disturbing in its depiction of a child abuse police squad turning out to be latent child abusers themselves, but at some point the story becomes so extreme that the only reaction is a chuckle and a “Oh, Chuck, you’re just trying too hard now”. At least a handful of other stories are similarly too much. Once you figure out that people are going to die in nearly every story, it’s not difficult to guess the ending pages before it happens. It doesn’t help that the cumulative effect of Haunted is closer to repetition than horror. Grand Guignol style works, but it may work better in thirteen stories rather than twenty-three.

    What’s also unfortunate is that the framing story isn’t as strong as it could be. In a few words, it’s about a group of “writers” isolating themselves at a retreat in order to spend three uninterrupted months writing a perfect masterpiece. But things go wrong (or right) when everyone involved in this retreat (including the organizer and his assistant) are revealed to be latent psychopaths. They kill each other, they tell stories (the twenty-three short stories) and they kill each other some more.

    On one level, you can certainly read the framing device as a warped take-off on reality television. This becomes especially obvious when the collective narrator (the “I” of the framing story is meant as a royal singular) admits that all of them would rather survive through a harrowing ordeal and write that up rather than spend any effort creating something original. As long as the others do the dying, why not sabotage the heating, burn the place, spoil the food and enhance the suffering? What’s a little self-mutilation, cold-blooded murder and outright cannibalism when you can emerge from the experience with a fat film contract about your life story? Why not select a role and try to kill each other according to dramatic logic?

    It’s twisted, it’s quirky, it’s original and it’s even a little bit of fun. But that fun disappears quickly once the demolition derby starts and it becomes obvious that none of the characters are worth saving. Heck, they’re not even up to the talk of being honest writers, let alone survivors. What’s a story without heroes? ponders Palahniuk, knowing fully well that his own novel doesn’t have any. It’s not that the book doesn’t have any interest (for all it’s fault, it’s impossible to stop reading), but that the reader clearly emerges on top of the author in this game of gross-out. Once readers figure out where things are going, it’s hard for Palahniuk to pop any more surprises out of his twisted mind. And it’s a shame, because there are some really good moments in the framing story. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t really work as the framework of the novel.

    And that brings us back to the stories, which don’t really fit in the framing device any better than the framing device holds up together: A number of them suppose apocalyptic experiences that don’t lead back to the framing situation. The device of punctuating the straight prose segments with “poetry” about the characters doesn’t work either: the “poetry” reads like regular prose with quirky line breaks and it’s not those line breaks that improve the content.

    All told, Haunted isn’t truly satisfying, but it’s more of a disappointment than a failure. Palahniuk’s style remains as hypnotically readable as ever before, even as you find yourself smirking over the content. Should you be able to shake the book hard enough to send all the weaker parts flying away, you’d be left with a decent 200-250 pages volume of savvy shocks and thrills. The main mistake of the book is in trying too much, breaking the suspension of disbelief so important in reading about Palahniuk’s peculiar world.

    Disbelief is so unsuspended, in fact, that Haunted may the Palahniuk book that may make sceptics out of regular fans. I even found myself snapping out of the stories at some point, muttering stuff like “now I know that you’re making this up.” (Movie studios don’t pay “line people”, Chuck. Heck, save for Star Wars, there aren’t even any “line people”, Chuck.) And once you step back, even slightly, from the gross-out game so crucial in appreciating the nihilistic charm of Palahniuk, it’s hard to get back in the proper mindset. Suddenly, the puppet lines of Palahniuk’s fiction become a little too obvious. The body count loses its importance. The horrors become pleas for attention. The gross-out becomes tedious. And Haunted loses its power to haunt by trying too hard.

  • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bloomsbury, 2004, 782 pages, C$29.95 tpb, ISBN 0-7475-7411-1

    It’s not every day that a fantasy novel by a first-time author ends up on the best-seller lists and the Hugo Award ballot. It’s ever rarer to see mainstream critics falling over themselves in praising the book and find out that the first-time writer in question is familiar with the core fantasy genre. But here’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, a big fat book that makes all of the above come true.

    The first obvious thing about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, even before cracking open the pages of the book, is that it’s meant to be a throwback to another time. Save for the hefty price, the cover design is deliberately unrefined, suggesting a time where dust jackets were actually meant to protect against dust, not act as marketing instruments. And, whaddaya know, the book is about another time: An alternate early-nineteenth century England in which magic returns after a much-discussed absence. Shy and reclusive magician Mr. Norrell emerges as the nation’s preeminent magician. He’s not alone, though. Despite Norrell’s best efforts at discouraging other magicians, he is soon joined by another gifted wizard named Jonathan Strange. Given their opposite temperaments, the two will share a complex relationship…

    There is a lot to like and admire in this massive fantasy novel. The flagrant Englishness of the book is one of them; the narrator of the story quickly becomes a character in her own right, tut-tutting events she finds distasteful and reminding the readers of the proper way to act as proud Englishmen. The style is accordingly tweaked, giving the impression that we’re reading something that may conceivably have been written back then. Some of the spelling is altered in consequence (a quirk that is sure to annoy some readers) and the narration takes on a meandering, discursive quality that is not without considerable charm.

    Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell also does well with its story, characters and atmosphere. If nothing else, Clarke proves to be impressively ambitious with this first novel: Not simply happy to create a historical portrait of England slightly altered to accommodate magic, but she sends her characters in the middle of the Napoleonic wars and alters (not very much) the course of history. The completeness of her vision is impressive: The narrative is studded with lengthy footnotes (some extending over multiple pages) that, taken together, add an extra layer of depth to the world of the novel. References to fake works discussing the history of English magic are interspersed with richly-imagined side anecdotes and commentary, putting the novel itself in the middle of a (fictional) mini-continuum of English literature.

    Techno-geeks are even liable to see a Microsoft/Open Source parable in the way Norrell and Strange each consider magic: One wants to buy off all competitors, close the spells to neophytes and keep everything firmly under his control, whereas the other wants magic to be used as widely, as openly and as freely as possible. Hmm…

    Take all of the above together, and it’s difficult not to be impressed by Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It’s big, it’s bold and it’s unusual.

    However, since there is always a however…

    For readers used to a snappier pace (and I suspect that the usual fantasy-reading target audience is more tolerant about these things), the book eventually takes its toll. As the narrative advances, the initial charm of the first few hundred pages wears off, and before the reader knows it, he’s stuck on page 550 with too much energy invested to quit, yet still a discouraging number of pages to go before the end. It doesn’t help that some subplots never take off despite their importance to the plot. The Stephen Black passages, for instance, never gel into something interesting despite a promising start. Every page spent away from the two titular characters seems like a forced digression.

    This being said, few 800+ pages books are likely to escape the charge of being too long. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell does a better job than most at staving off the inevitable exasperation. It even manages something even stranger: Sell millions of copies, enrapture critics around the world and deserves every bit of its success. Well done… but please, no sequel.

  • Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

    Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2005) Director Doug Liman should be stopped. After a middling performance on The Bourne Identity, he comes and singlehandedly destroys what could have been a fantastic action/comedy romp through a heavy-handed “realistic” approach. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is, at its heart, a fantasy: How else can you interpret a story in which husband and wives are both members of rival assassination teams? How else do you show a story with big guns, fast cars, thick sexual tension and a sly take on matrimonial strife? This calls for a Bruckheimer/Bay sheen of glowing cinematography where not one single detail is left to realism. But Liman has other ideas, and Mr & Mrs Smith struggles with useless grit, leadening something that should have been more light-hearted. Even the action sequences suffer from too-rapid cutting, ugly cinematography and a lack of graceful charm. In sticking close to an unattainable reality, Liman also brings too much attention on the distasteful “conjugal violence” aspect of the story: However fun and cool the rest of the picture is, there remains a distinct discomfort in seeing husband and wife shooting at each other, and then moving on to punches, kicks and low blows. Summer action comedy? Not quite, no. Fortunately, it’s not all bad when you see the good work that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie bring to their role. Each play according to their media image: Pitt as the slightly-doofus handsome guy, and Jolie to the fatal seductress icon in which she has gradually evolved since her goth-cutter beginnings. As entertainment, Mr & Mrs Smith hits and misses. But one can see the potential for a far better film buried in the rubble.

  • Batman Begins (2005)

    Batman Begins (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2005) Now this is a welcome change of pace after the contemptuous ludicrousness that Joel Schumaker brought to the Batman series. Director Christopher Nolan and writer David S. Goyer do their best to anchor Batman in a more plausible reality, and if the result doesn’t quite transcend the typical superhero silliness, it brings to the film an aura of respectability. Christian Bale finally gets his blockbuster starring role after impressive performances in a string of smaller movies, Liam Neeson continues his streak of mentor figures and Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman all get wonderful supporting roles. (Sadly, Cilian Murphy is unremarkable as Dr. Crane and Katie Holmes is completely miscast as a character supposed to be tough and resourceful.) Batman Begins remains an origin story, but it flies by so quickly that it’s just a pleasure to watch. The mythology of Batman is rethought, retooled and revisited with good details, even if a lot of it seems awfully convenient at times. But no matter; while not a great film, Batman Begins is a lot of fun and even makes one curious about the inevitable sequel. Batman Reset, in other words… and the reboot hasn’t crashed yet.

  • Iron Council, China Miéville

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2004, 564 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-345-46402-8

    Sooner or later, the law of diminishing returns always applies to any fantasy series. The point where the new world, once so shiny and so new, starts to look faded and dull. The change is usually gradual, with plenty of warning signals to stop reading while the books are still reasonably good. China Miéville’s third Bas-Lag book, Iron Council, is one such warning signal; while it’s still an impressive novel, there are signs that the Bas-Lag universe may be running out of steam.

    By now, no one needs to be told about the wonders of Perdido Street Station or The Scar: With those, Miéville created a brand-new fantasy playground and used it for superlative monster tales. With Iron Council, Miéville tries something new, doesn’t completely succeed, but manages to finish the book with his reputation intact.

    Simply put, Iron Council is the book where revolution comes to Bas-Lag —or more specifically to the city of New Crobuzon, arguably the central protagonist of the trilogy-so-far. In this book, New Crobuzon’s atmosphere has become actively oppressive; so much so that the citizen are openly mulling open insurrection, spurred by the promise of a legendary group of revolutionaries named the Iron Council. The Council escaped, decades earlier, by hijacking a train and leaving in the wilderness. Now, they’re ready to come back, and bring the revolution along with them.

    Miéville has never been shy about his political tendencies, but neither of the first two Bas-Lag books made much of it. In Iron Council, though, he’s left free to study the roots and the mechanism of social unrest, even make it the central theme of his book. It’s a risky departure from the material in his first two books, but it works well in sending the series in another direction. At the very least, Miéville should be commended for his willingness to stretch the boundaries of his series.

    Sadly, it’s an unsuccessful experiment dogged by its execution. The biggest problem with Iron Council isn’t with the quality of the prose (once again superb, though perhaps a touch too verbose) but with the way his narrative unfolds. Perdido Street Station and The Scar each depended on strong protagonists with a clear voice. Iron Council, unfortunately, struggles without a sympathetic narrative anchor. Jubal is too removed from the action and too powerful to sustain much interest. Cutter is annoying. Low-level criminal Ori shows promise, but he remains offstage for most of the novel.

    Lacking a way in the heart of the story, the reader struggles through the book. There is a lengthy flashback that doesn’t quite work. The storytelling is fractured between places and time, never achieving the deliciously compulsive readability of Miéville’s previous novels. There is also a sense that the ending, while completely deliberate, betrays a lack of nerve in going to the end of the path he has made for the story. It stops in mid-track, perhaps to be elucidated in another novel.

    And that’s where the law of diminishing return kicks in. For all of Miéville’s sustained imagination (the last image of the book is one that will stay with me a long time, to say nothing of the Iron Council’s initial bid for freedom), Iron Council is starting to repeat itself and betray the limits of the Bas-Lag universe as shown to the readers so far. There is less to this novel than the previous ones, and over-critical readers may see in this book the beginning of the end.

    It doesn’t have to be, of course: Maybe the next novel in the series will tighten up the writing, feature a fascinating central character and meld Miéville’s political themes with a rousing story. Certainly, this may even be a minority opinion: Iron Council itself has been warmly received elsewhere, even earning a Hugo nomination. But as far as I’m concerned, there’s something missing: a little bit of fun.

  • Benedict Arnold: A Drama of the American Revolution in Five Acts, Robert Zubrin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Polaris Books, 2005, 103 pages, US$9.95 tpb, ISBN 0-9741443-1-2

    I’m sure that regular readers of these reviews are perplexed: What am I doing, reviewing a historical play about the American Revolution? A good question, almost as good as “What is a space scientist and science-fiction writer like Robert Zubrin writing a play about the American Revolution?” I suspect that the answer is be the same in both case: Because it’s interesting. Why not?

    It also helped that this slim volume showed up in my mailbox, unannounced, even as I was wondering how I’d make my review quota this month after spending two weeks not-reading and two more week not-reading-much. Zubrin has been on my shortlist of interesting authors since his SF novel First Landing, and I guess I’ve ended up on his shortlist of interesting reviewers. It’s a fair thing to say that I’ll read anything bearing his name, and when he makes it so convenient to do so… (Sadly, christian-sauve.com has recently announced a “no-review-copies” policy, so this -falling under a twisted grandfather clause- may be the last such author-solicited review you’ll see here.)

    You won’t be surprised to learn that, being French-Canadian, my knowledge of the American Revolution mostly comes from Hollywood movies. Still, even one country and hundreds of years away, the name “Benedict Arnold” is familiar, if only as a synonym for “traitor”. (It helps that the American political class, with its tradition of reasoned discourse, has lately taken the habit of using the name to describe anyone they don’t agree with.)

    To its credit, the book is exactly what it title claims: a play, in five acts, describing the infamous actions of Benedict Arnold as he betrayed the nascent American republic to the British. There’s romance, there’s plotting, there’s cloak-and-dagger intrigue and there’s even selfless bravery coming from unlikely heroes. Whew!

    But reading a play is, at best, only a partial experience: Until some enterprising troupe decides to select Benedict Arnold as its next project, one can only comment on the text. The full impact of the piece depends on its performance by real live actors. The inclusion of songs in the play can be interesting in a final production, I suppose, but their effect on readers will be limited. (It doesn’t help that the play begins by a lengthy monologue that could be set to music, leading one to the awful impression that it’s going to be “Benedict Arnold: The Musical!”)

    The back cover boasts that the play is “historically accurate”, and one is led to give it the benefit of the doubt given the lack of exploding chariots. Aside from some creative license in crafting scene construction and dialogue, supplemental reading indicates no major inconsistencies between Zubrin’s take on Arnold and other version of the stories. (This being said, non-American sources tend to be a lot more lenient toward Arnold’s actions, pointing out that there wasn’t yet an America to betray at that time, and that Arnold was only one of many to choose England over the revolutionaries. Most of the others weren’t celebrated soldiers, though.)

    On the production side, a number of historical illustrations enliven the book. The play is followed by a short but essential essay on Benedict Arnold and his place in American History. It also comments and contextualizes the play; an ideal way to cap off the book.

    Clearly, I’m out of my league in reviewing Benedict Arnold: No knowing much about American History or plays, my comments will be of limited usefulness. Still, the book is short, the story is interesting and I can even claim to have learnt a thing or two about Arnold in the process. Heck, there’s even a Canadian connection, Arnold having invaded Canada (unsuccessfully, one relishes to add) two hundred years before I was born.

    I believe that there’s a good future for this book in high schools across America, as a relatively painless way to learn about that particular episode of history: A simple group reading could do wonders to enliven a class or two. Other potential audiences include American History buffs and high-school libraries. I’m also oddly pleased to see Zubrin stretch in this unexpected direction as a writer, and wonder what’s next on his schedule.

  • The Year of our War, Steph Swainston

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2004, 290 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07610-0

    While the old saw “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” is excellent advice for life in general, it’s not much use to a reviewer trying to meet his monthly quota. In this spirit, allow me to present a mostly negative, rather tangential, entire content-free review of Steph Swainston’s The Year of our War.

    Swainston fans may not wish to read any further. In fact, most casual surfers reading this right now (this means you) may want to skip to the next review entirely. This is not going to be pretty: I usually don’t review books that make me shrug, but I’m desperate for content this month and I have no better candidate for commentary than this book.

    Obviously, I didn’t think much of The Year of our War. Didn’t love it, didn’t hate it. Just didn’t care for it or even spent much time thinking about the book when I wasn’t actually reading it.

    I suspect that part of the problem is my built-in lack of interest for run-of-the-mill fantasy. While I’m an obsessive Science-Fiction genre fan (see review of The Algebraist, above) and while I am not, in theory, opposed to imaginative fantasy (see review of The Scar, above), most of the genre tends to run into the same dull background of medieval eras, kingdoms, anti-technology, self-consciously heroic characterizations and so on. Typical fantasy’s little pocket universe was mined empty years ago; isn’t it time to move on?

    While some blurbers have been prompt to describe Swainston’s debut novel as “incredibly inventive”, “boldly imagined” and “breaking out of the elvish-straightjacket”, I’m not so sure there’s anything dramatically new in here. Once more, we’re back to the Olde Continent Mappe that fits neatly in one single page of the book. Once more, we’re back to a pre-industrial era with Kings and Queens and a constant war with An Enemy Too Hideous To Befriend. Once more, swords and bows and arrows rule the day. Bold imagination? Well, there are newspapers and a steady stream of swearing.

    There’s also a severely imperfect protagonist. Our narrator, Jant/Comet, is capable of flight, but as the novel opens he’s struggling with a drug addiction that may come to jeopardize his standing as the kingdom’s hero and -more importantly- his place on the Circle, a select group of fifty experts made immortal by the reigning Emperor. To add to his burden, the war against The Insects (that’s right: The Insects) isn’t going too well even as the tensions are rising amongst the immortals.

    If I was sarcastic (and you know that I am), I’d say something akin to “junkie angels don’t make a novel original.” Not when a lot of the novel is boilerplate transitional fantasy. Well-written and not without its share of striking images, sure, (there’s your cover blurb right there) but hardly enough to reconcile me with the sub-genre. Or even make me care about the entire thing.

    After a valiant attempt at being interested in the novel, I felt myself slide back in apathy after a hundred pages, disappointed that this was going to be Yet Another Swords-and-Stuff novel with added touches of soap opera and the odd interesting scene. The rest of the novel simply slid past without much impact.

    I realize that this is certainly a minority view. On-line reviews have been uniformly positive, almost to the point of over-hype. I suspect that these critics are all coming to the novel with a far better attitude toward the type of fiction The Year of Our War is supposed to re-invent. Or it may be that after a steady diet of Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction, it’s going to take a lot more than a junkie as a narrator to make me say “wow”. In fact, the announcement that this is only the first book in a series was sufficient to make me go “eergh”, which you may loosely interpret as a lack of interest in reading further volumes.

    Fortunately, as “some guy with a website”, my credibility is laughable and my commercial influence is nil. As it happen, don’t perceive this as a declaration of war against the author, the genre or you as a reader: Long life to Steph Swainston, may she enjoy a sustained run of acclaimed and best-selling novels. As far as I’m concerned, though, I’m going to continue avoiding traditional fantasy. If nothing else, it’ll prevent further interest-free reviews like this one in the future.

  • The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Orbit, 2004, 534 pages, C$30.00 tpb, ISBN 1-84149-239-6

    Space opera is no simple thing. In its purest form, it’s science-fiction for science-fiction’s sake: Tales of rocket-ships and squids in space, written by genre SF writers for hard-core SF fans. Give a space opera story to someone who doesn’t know anything about the clichés and assumptions of science-fiction (even in its most distilled Star-Wars fashion) and they won’t understand a thing about it. It seldom relates to today’s world, isn’t meant to represent a likely future and seldom has any intention other than entertain the reader. Space-opera is to SF what sword-and-sorcery is to fantasy. While I may not be the ideal fantasy reader, (see review of The Year of our War, below), I’m an outspoken (outwritten?) science-fiction fan. Space Opera is the distilled essence of my favourite genre.

    I surely found what I was looking for in Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist. At its core, it remains pure science-fiction for SF fans, riffing with common SF ideas like playing a variation on a well-known tune. In this case, it’s a tale of space empires, strange aliens, galactic secrets and big weapons. The antagonist is pure caricature, the aliens are suitably inscrutable and the plucky hero does his best to hang on from adventure to adventure. Plot is almost irrelevant when the real kick of the novel are the throwaway ideas and the way Banks uses well-worn tropes in a slightly different fashion.

    Indeed, perhaps the best thing about The Algebraist is how it casually throws away a bunch of neat ideas, as if the novel had better things on its mind than to spend more time on this kind of stuff. In this space-operatic universe, the galaxy is a buzzing hive of sentience, with slightly-different spheres of consciousness co-existing alongside each other. The very notion of galactic empire has a well-worn feeling to it in this novel, as galactic history is filled with dozens of successive regimes, flaring up briefly when set against a backdrop of a million years. Even Earth-borne humanity end up in a fascinating position, being confronted with another human empire designed by alien abductees. Eschatology (with Tippler-point refinements) makes its way in the novel as the religion of choice for this current galactic empire. And so on: ideas are the raw stuff on which this novel runs.

    Banks’ centrepiece creation in this novel are obviously the long-lived Dwellers, gas giants-based aliens with a very different outlook on, well, everything. They regard children as nuisances fit to be hunted down. They live unimaginably slow lives, letting empires rise and fall around them (in theory; for dramatic reasons, you won’t be surprised to learn that they don’t do much of that in the novel). They may look slothful and ritualistic and anarchic, but don’t push them too far… One of the novel’s best scenes shows what happens when omnipotent Zen masters meet an ultra-aggressive tyrant: British unflappability has a long future ahead of itself. (“Hmm, I do hope you have enough people.” [P.489])

    My previous experience with Iain (M) Banks’ fiction had been mixed. The amusing thing about his novels is that they invariably sound better when they’re explained than at the moment of reading them. The Algebraist isn’t an exception, though it’s better than most: When Banks gets cracking, the results can be amazing. Funny, literate and slick top-notch SF. But too often, the novel loses steam for pages at a time, until another good idea or another interesting scene grabs our attention once more. I never gelled to the “four teenagers” historical subplot and I found that the novel could have lost fifty, maybe a hundred pages without too many problems.

    But that doesn’t matter much when the rest of the novel is so rewarding. For a serious space-opera, it’s often unbearably funny. While it may not be accessible to just anyone (and so remains a pure SF novel, destined and limited to ghettoized genre readers), The Algebraist is close to being the state of the art in genre SF. It reconciled me with Banks’ output, gave me a few laughs, expanded my ideas, forced me to forward a lengthy quotes to a few friends (see below) and entertained me for a while.

    While most of Bank’s SF output so far has been set in the so-called “Culture” universe, The Algebraist is an exception: A standalone novel set in a brand-new far-future universe, this novel allows new readers to hop on the Banks train and see why few other writers do space opera better than him. Few surprises, then, if it managed to earn a spot as a Best Novel Hugo Award Nominee for 2004.

    Still not convinced? Read this perfect one-sentence paragraph:

    Picking a fight with a species as widespread, long-lived, irascible and -when it suited them- single-minded as the Dwellers too often meant that just when -or even geological ages after when- you thought that the dust had long since settled, bygones were bygones and any unfortunate disputes were all ancient history, a small planet appeared without warning in your home system, accompanied by a fleet of moons, themselves surrounded with multitudes of asteroid-sized chunks, each of those riding cocooned in a fuzzy shell made up of untold numbers of decently hefty rocks, every one of them traveling surrounded by a large landslide’s worth of still smaller rocks and pebbles, the whole ghastly collection traveling at so close to the speed of light that the amount of warning even an especially wary and observant species would have generally amounted to just about sufficient time to gasp the local equivalent of `What the fu-?’ before they disappeared in an impressive if wasteful blaze of radiation. [P.160]

  • River of Gods, Ian McDonald

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2004, 583 pages, C$27.00 tpb, ISBN 0-7432-5670-0

    Wow. And to think that I didn’t want to read this book.

    You have to understand that I’ve got a checkered history with Ian McDonald’s fiction. Liked Chaga/Evolution’s Shore. Couldn’t get into Necroville/Terminal Café. The thought of another door-stopper novel set on the eve of India’s centenary didn’t do much for me given all the other recent stuff I’ve got to read.

    And yet, I should have known. Haven’t I been bleating about the need for world-aware near-future Science Fiction lately? Haven’t I been looking for writers whose understanding of the world goes beyond the usual SF clichés? I didn’t pay attention, but others certainly did: The blogoSFere raved about River of Gods immediately upon publication. Then it got nominated for the Hugo Award, making it jump immediately on my reading stack. As it turns out, McDonald’s latest easily ranks as one the best SF novels of 2004.

    At first glance, it read like a kaleidoscopic vision of India, circa 2047, through the viewpoints of roughly a dozen characters. It’s a divided nation on the brink of war, haunted by ancient superstitions and future nightmares, where Ganesh co-exists alongside Artificial Intelligences and Shiva is incarnated by US-built killbots. McDonald vividly begins the novel by a scene in which a “Krishna Cop” tracks down an animal-grade Artificial Intelligence that has become slightly too smart for its own good.

    But there’s more. In fact, one of the wonders of the novel’s first hundred pages is in seeing how many elements in SF’s traditional bag of tricks are re-used in this complex vision of India’s future. AIs, military robots, environmental problems, genegineered humans, trans-gender neuters, high-tech street criminals, spaceships, virtual pop-stars, high-energy physics are all used here in a kaleidoscope that feels, yes, far more credible than many other recent SF near-future extrapolations.

    Slowly, as characters intersect and mysteries are gradually revealed, a plot emerges. But the plot isn’t so nearly as fascinating as its components, and especially the environment in which it evolves. I’d love to read what Indian readers will think of the novel, but it’s instantly fascinating to American readers. To Western eyes, India stands as an accessible alien society: Substantially different, yet sufficiently Anglicized during the British occupation that it’s not completely incomprehensible. But there’s a lot more to it: India’s mix of traditional and modern values is endlessly intriguing, showing a society with deep historical roots, yet open to technology like few others. Most futurists point to China as the emerging superpower of the twenty-first century, but my money is on India.

    Geopolitical speculation aside, Rivers of Gods is a technical tour-de-force backed with plenty of stylistic flair. McDonald juggles a dozen characters with apparent smoothness, and cleverly layers the elements of his plot through separate plot threads. If you do the math, each characters gets around fifty pages of plot (the equivalent of a novelette), and yet most of them emerges as complex and fascinating characters. I was especially fond of Vishram Ray and Mr. Nandha, but there’s probably a favourite for everyone in this book. In fact, my only significant problem with the book (apart from a few passages that seemed for perfunctory than interesting) is that the book ends with a spectacular revelation, without an epilogue letting go of the fascinating characters we’ve just met. There is resolution, but not satisfaction.

    But that mild annoyance seems trivial when considering what River of Gods does best: it feels like a real future stemming from today’s reality. There is nothing small, simple or old-fashioned in this novel: It embraces the complexity of the world, spins hard-SF speculation like the best of them and adds so much texture that it’s impossible to remain unenthusiastic about it. It is, in many way, exactly what I want from contemporary SF: Something that uses the tools of traditional SF to make sense of today’s world and deliver an engrossing story. Heck, it even has a good grasp of politics, which is more than I can say for most of American SF.

    River of Gods was judiciously nominated for the “Best Novel” Hugo Award for 2004. If the other books are as good as this one, I’m going to be overwhelmed with SF goodness. At this point, I can’t imagine anything beating it out of the first spot of my voting ballot.

  • The Scar, China Miéville

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2002, 638 pages, C$28.95 tpb, ISBN 0-345-44438-8

    Perhaps the most astonishing thing about China Miéville is how he manages to delight both highbrow critics and all-average readers by writing… monster books. Despite the critical acclaim, the superb prose and the strong characterization, Miéville has built his reputation on Perdido Street Station , a monster-hunt book, and followed it with The Scar… another monster-hunt book.

    Granted, lumping both books in the cheap horror genre bin is disingenuous. It fails to do justice to the craft of Miéville’s writing, the wild invention of his setting, the attention paid to his characters or the touch of humour and tension he weaves into his novels. There is nothing in common between, say, Perdido Street Station and Dean R. Koontz’s Phantoms, even if both feature nightmare-sucking giant moths. Miéville’s stuff is an odd blend of horror intrigue in a fantasy setting approached as a science-fiction world. Add to that the requisite action and adventure, and you’ve got yourself a total entertainment package.

    Billed as a sequel to Perdido Street Station, The Scar is more of a subsequent story set in the same universe. It begins in the aftermath of the events of the first novel, as linguist Bellis Coldwine flees the city of New Crobuzon in fear for her life. Following the unsettling events described in Perdido Street Station, friends of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin have started disappearing as government operatives start taking far too much interest in what they might know. An ex-lover of der Grimnebulin, Coldwine decides to take matters in her own hands and flee by sea to a far-away colony. But stuff happens, her ship is boarded by pirates and she finds herself shanghaied to Armada, a floating city where she is left free… but unable to get away.

    There’s more. Much more. A gigantic sea creature. A race of man-sized mosquitoes. Vampires, humanoid cactaes, remade men, spies and other horrors and marvels. Much as he did with Perdido Street Station (and, presumably, King Rat), Miéville continues to stretch the definition of urban fantasy in all sorts of directions. This time, The Scar takes place mostly at sea, bringing along plenty of echoes from other nautical adventures even as it delights in describing the inner working of a very special city made out of ships loosely tied together. New Crobuzon it ain’t, but it’s certainly a neat idea. Miéville has a skilled eye for description, and if The Scar does something surprisingly well, it’s to survive the absence of New Crobuzon (perhaps the central character of Perdido Street Station) by presenting us with another creation that’s just as fascinating.

    As with all good horror stories, The Scar also features its quota of fascinating moments, from descriptions of the city to ominous hints about the monster at the bottom of the tale. If you hunger for well-written fantasy that doesn’t try to lose all of its readers along the way, this is the one.

    There’s also plenty of good things to say about the characters of the novel. The anchor is, of course, dry and intellectual Bellis Coldwine, who acts as a reluctant narrator to the events of the book. While a solitary person, she also comes in contact with a number of Armada’s other inhabitants, from fellow ex-New-Crobuzoners to Armada natives. Her uncanny knack for being at the right time at the right moment isn’t entirely accidental.

    If the novel has an annoyance (beyond a number of lengthy passages; skip the all-italics chapters), it’s the unconventional form taken by the ending. In some way, it flinches and shies away from the objective of the quest. In others, it depends on an arbitrary authorial decision, a decision that torments even the characters as they ask “of all the chances that this could happen…” It is potentially annoying without being too much so; you can actually read it, say “huh, neat”, be satisfied by the revealed visions of what didn’t happen and avoid disappointment. Maybe Miéville has something else in mind for one of his next books. Maybe we’ll re-visit The Scar some day.

    In the meantime, there’s more than enough stuff here to keep us entertained. Miéville’s talent at writing top-notch pulp fiction is just as good here than in the novel that established him as a major writer, and few will be disappointed by this follow-up. The writing is delicious, the characters are worth our interest and the narrative is packed with fascinating asides. What are you waiting for? An excuse to flee the city?

  • Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)

    Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, May 2005) Good? Bad? Does it really matter when it’s a film labouring under such expectations? A bridge between the much-maligned Episodes II and the classic Episode IV, Revenge Of The Sith just needs to be satisfactory. Which it is, but just. George Lucas’ shortcomings in matters of dialogue have been obvious before, but they’re even more glaring here, with wince-inducing romantic material and lines that don’t end up meaning what the writer intended (“Good relations with the Wookies, I have”: Thanks for an instant fan punchline, George!) He doesn’t fare much better with the overarching elements of his script either: the grandiose “fall of the republic” is too simplistic to be believable, and so is Anakin’s conversion to the dark side. The most tragic part of the story, though, is the shabby way it disposes of Padme (the luscious Nathalie Portman, now with added curls) as a porcelain doll who can’t live without her man. As a director, Lucas is doing better than ever with the way he moves the camera around (though one may wonder about the positive influence of his special-effects people or the rumoured involvement of Steven Spielberg), even though his grasp of actors remains as shaky as ever: Ian McDermid and Ewan McGregor do well, but Hayden Christiansen looks and sounds like a petulant brat who mumbles a lot. (“Darth Vader: The Sullen Teenage Years”). Fortunately, Lucas doesn’t come up with everything in the film, and so the design work and special effects remain as deeply impressive as ever: ILM truly brought their A-game to this film, with particular praise heaped upon the first twenty minutes of the film, the epitome of what a “Star Wars!” film should feel like. I have my doubts about other elements of the film (such as the inconsistent use of Force powers), but bitching about “Episode III” is no better than beating a dead horse. Revenge Of The Sith manages to satisfy what we expected from a film whose ending we already knew, but no more.

    (On DVD, December 2005) You know, this film is a whole lot better with the commentary track turned on. I may still not think too highly of the dialogue or the pedestrian fashion with which George Lucas capped off his wholly unnecessary trilogy, but the special effects are nice and there’s interesting design touches here and there. With the multi-source audio commentary, you can at least give points for effort and technical prowess as the filmmakers explain what they intended to do with even the silliest sequences. Fittingly, the best thing on the DVD may be “Within a minute”, an exhaustive making-of documentary covering what goes into making only one minute of the finished film. Neat concept: there doesn’t appear to be a single production team left untouched by the end of it. A fair number of other targeted featurettes complete the portrait. Star Wars fans already know that the DVD is the essential missing part of their collection going in between volume II and IV; others may want to wait until the inevitable cash-in box set.

  • Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Delta, 1973 (1999 reprint), 302 pages, C$21.00 tpb, ISBN 0-385-33420-6

    (Experienced as an audio book, as performed by Stanley Tucci) Caedmon, 2003 , 6.5 hours (unabridged): ISBN 0-06-056497-0

    Meet Kilgore Trout, perhaps the worst SF writer in the known universe. Meet Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., creator of perhaps the worst SF writer in the known universe. Meet Dwayne Hoover, a man at the end of his sanity, uniquely predisposed to mistake Kilgore’s stories for the awful truth. Meet the town of Midland CIty, a city in the mid-west where the id of America is hideously exposed. Meet a bunch of characters without secrets to you, the reader, thanks to him, the writer.

    By now, Breakfast of Champions is a minor classic of American literature, and Kurt Vonnegut one of its undisputed demigods. This novel shows why he’s held in such high esteem: Breaking every rule of conventional fiction, it still manages to entertain and remain relevant more than thirty years after publication. It helps that it’s often laugh-out-loud funny in a deadpan fashion.

    In some ways, it’s the story of a successful middle-age man going mad. In others, it’s a road trip by a rotten SF author throughout the wasteland of twentieth-century America. It’s about Vonnegut, it’s about modern culture, it’s about life as lived by those strange human creatures. And so on.

    While the comparison may send some Vonnegut fans into early graves, there’s some similitude between his stylistic quirks and the type of prose favoured by later writers such as Chuck Palahniuk. In Breakfast of Champions, three recurring motifs quickly become apparent.

    The least significant of those is the recurring enumeration of items, habits, names, quickly followed by “…and so on.” Vonnegut himself explains the significance of that particular quirk in-text, but it does bring to mind similar prose tricks in other authors.

    That Vonnegut would himself (as the author) comment on that recurring pattern of writing is in itself an example of a stylistic trick. Vonnegut sometimes (presumably) slips into autobiography with this novel, establishing parallels between his live and elements of his characters, but that’s not the least of the author/work transgressions in this book. Vonnegut tells the reader, in advance, what’s going to happen and why. He plays with the omniscience of the narrator if it was a toy, telling us things about his characters and their surroundings just for the heck of it. Near the end, he practically disengages from the story, allowing us to read about the author commenting his story rather than the story itself.

    This, in turn, feeds into the constant sense of detachment exhibited in the novel. Cultural detachment, especially. He chooses to tell the story almost as if he was narrating to an alien in one of Trout’s stories. Facets of early-seventies pop-Americana are laboriously explained, with constant reminders that however weird it sounds, that’s the way things were there and then. Early readers of the novel must have felt the dissonance with pleasure. Thirty years later, it acquires another layer, as we readers born after the novel’s publication date have become, in a sense, aliens to the period thus described. Those laboriously explained cultural markers become historic footnotes required to understand the universe being described.

    It all amounts to, well, a lot of fun. Deliciously weird, and not without its dark sarcastic laugh-aloud moments, Breakfast of Champions demands a certain energy from its readers, but rewards them richly. I have often been bemused by Vonnegut’s work, but seldom less than satisfied. The pattern holds true here. Plus, any novel starring a science-fiction writer (even if he’s the worst one in the universe) gets mad props in my ratings.

    I experienced the novel as an unabridged audio-book as performed by character actor Stanley Tucci. I didn’t do so by choice (I was suffering from the after-effect of eye laser surgery, hence being unable to read “real” books), but it was certainly an occasion to experience Vonnegut’s prose and not rush through the book. As a result, several of Vonnegut’s recurring motifs became clearer, and the steady ploughing ahead of the “story” was most clearly felt. I also loved Tucci’s voice performance as Kilgore Trout, as he infuses the character’s speaking cadence with an oddly likable mischeviousness. A perfect reflection of Vonnegut’s own text.

    [December 2005: …but not a perfect reflection of Vonnegut’s book, which includes a number of naive illustrations that add another layer to the narrative.]

  • Kingdom Of Heaven (2005)

    Kingdom Of Heaven (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, May 2005) It strikes me that with the latest historical epics, the only worthwhile question is “how’s the Big Battle?” In this case, director Ridley Scott has been handed a juicy target: The Crusades! The siege of Jerusalem! Armies against armies! It’s how we get to that point that just isn’t as interesting: Here, we follow a humble blacksmith-farmer as he improbably learn to be a knight, does everything right and ends up leading an entire population against the attackers. Slow at first, Kingdom Of Heaven finds its footing on the Holy Land: Protagonist Orlando Bloom becomes a gentleman-farmer, somehow becomes the favourite of both a king and his sister (in entirely different ways!) and quickly earns the respect of his fellow knights. Still, the film remains of shaky interest until the third act. One can blame the plot shortcuts on the rumoured cutting of several scenes, but it’s hard to imagine that a longer version could improve on the pacing of this lumbering monster. I suppose that we should be thankful that the end Big Battle is, indeed, worth the 90 minutes leading up to it. It’s not a bad film. At least it skilfully navigates a path between warring faiths without resorting to cheap racism. (Indeed, the most compelling character of the film is Ghassan Massoud’s Saladin) But Kingdom Of Heaven remains a bit slow, a bit improbable, a bit ordinary. Ridley Scott is a gifted director, but he seems to have phoned in this one. But really, in historical epics, why ask for much more than one Big Battle?

  • Aliens (1986)

    Aliens (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Fourth viewing, On DVD, May 2005) This is one of my all-time favourite films, and even a Xteenth viewing fails to dispel its magic. On a script level, it’s written with attitude and skill: usually billed as an action film, it nevertheless contains only three pure action scenes, with the rest of the film being dedicated to buildup, tension and stark terror. The last act grabs by the throat and never lets go. Fantastic stuff, ably supported by excellent performances and generally excellent special effects. Perhaps the most accomplished special-effects film of the pre-digital era, Aliens has survived admirably well to the passage of time and increased technical sophistication. (I have some issues with the back-projection work, but that’s pretty much it. Oh, and the 1.78 aspect ratio, but even James Cameron regrets that today.) Great, great film; the epitome of what a sequel should be. The “Alien Quadrilogy” box-set special edition is packed with supplementary material, including a good audio commentary, tons of documentaries and -hurrah!- an extended special edition that’s even better than the original. See it now and see it again soon!