Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Fever Dream, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    Fever Dream, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 2010, 405 pages, C$32.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-446-55496-1

    The very last page of Fever Dream’s hardcover edition is an important announcement from the authors (now listed without first names on the cover) telling us that they are about to launch a new series of thrillers.  That announcement couldn’t have come at a better time, since anyone who makes it to the end of their latest novel will understand the creative fatigue plaguing the Agent Pendergast series.

    Fever Dream isn’t a bad piece of work as far as summer thrillers go… but it’s certainly generic enough to make anyone wonder what happened to the creative team that hopped so brilliantly from one set of character to another in their first few novels.  Now that they have spent seven successive novels writing about Pendergast, everything is starting to feel like routine.

    Granted, Fever Dream is a bit better than their previous Cemetary Dance: They don’t kill off a major character, they avoid much of the pseudo-supernatural hocus-pocus of their last few books and even advance one or two overarching subplots along the way.  By digging into Pendergast’s history, and in particular the events surrounding his wife’s death twelve years earlier, we also get a chance to understand what makes his character tic while he stomps around his regular haunts.  Leaving behind New York for the bayou, the normally-cool agent is also quite a bit more emotional this time around… in his own fashion: the point is not just to find who killed his wife, but to avenge her as well.

    Much of the plot, unsurprisingly enough for a Preston/Child thriller, is an investigation trying to piece together a decade-old mystery.  From smoking guns to hidden art caches, redneck confrontations and southern mansions contaminated by madness, Fever Dream even manages a few thrills along the way.  An unexpected plot development midway through the book even forces NYPD agent Laura Hayward to team up with Pendergast despite having little personal liking for the man.  There’s a touch of The Cabinet of Curiosity’s urban archaeology in seeing Pendergast deduce the existence of a hidden crypt under a Louisiana doughnut shop, while an ugly scene between Hayward and rednecks late in the book leads to a supremely satisfying revenge by the normally-imperturbable Pendergast.  While his long-dead wife was scarcely even mentioned in the previous novels in the series, she here has a faint presence that does nothing more than reinforce Pendergast’s mystique.  Elsewhere in that fictional universe, Constance Greene also gets a small part in one of the book’s subplots: Depending on its follow-up, it’s either a disappointing resolution to a promising story thread or a set-up for something even more intriguing.

    Combine those particular traits with Preston/Child’s usual clean prose, high-tech/historical plot drivers, limpid scene construction and ongoing plot threads and you have the makings of a capable thriller, if not much more: Despite improving on the previous two novels, Fever Dream is still just another minor entry in the Pendergast series, and one that can’t even be bothered to wrap up its plot threads: while the story reaches a natural stopping point, there are at least two unanswered questions leading into the next book of the series…  almost as if readers couldn’t be trusted to come back to Pendergast once Preston/Child’s new “Gideon Crew” series is launched.  Fortunately, reading the industry trades tells us that the February 2011 publication of the first Gideon Crew novel will be followed in the spring/summer by another Pendergast novel.  As a signal that the Pendergast novels aren’t anything special any more, this one is hard to miss.  Hopefully, the break will help the two authors find another creative outlet and keep Pendergast employed doing what he does best.  If that means he can take an extended break while Preston/Child go about working on other projects, then that may be for the best.

  • The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

    The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, July 2010) The problem with Eclipse is that while it’s just good enough to avoid much of its predecessors’ most unintentionally hilarious moments, it’s not good enough to make it a compelling film experience if you’re not already part of Twilight’s target audiences.  Much of it stems from the thinness of its plotting, especially when compared to the languid pacing of its execution: By the fifteenth minute of the film, we know that vampires are coming to attack and that poor confused Bella isn’t any more decisive than before.  And that’s where things remain stuck for the next hour, the script seemingly happy to remind us of both plotlines until it’s time to wrap it up.  To director David Slade’s credit, the short fights between teen vampires and fluffy werewolves actually feel interesting.  Alas, there’s isn’t much else to enjoy elsewhere in Eclipse: even the hilariously awful dialogue of the first two films seems a bit better-behaved here.  There is still, fortunately, a bit of romantic universality in seeing Bella struggle between two pretenders who really want to kill each other.  The acting isn’t much better, though, and the casting may be a bit worse: It’s not just for French-Canadian pride that I regret Rachelle Lefevre’s replacement by Bryce Dallas Howard as Victoria (Go, Team Victoria!): Howard doesn’t quite have the feral intensity required for the role and a number of the latter scenes feel like she’s meowing a lioness part.  Ah well.  In terms of genre-bending, Eclipse continues the series’ tradition of being romance under dark fantasy masks: Forget this film’s value to the horror crowd since there’s nothing original to see here in genre terms, even though a scene featuring a snowstorm, a freezing human, a frigid vampire and a warm werewolf is good for a cute chuckle.  (It’s one of the only chuckles in a film that’s as dour as the rest of its series so far.)  But, at the risk of repeating myself, I’m so far away from Twilight’s audience that the only thing left to do is admit that this film isn’t for me.  That it doesn’t manage to go beyond its own fans isn’t much of a problem as far as box-office receipts are concerned… but those films will age quickly once its audience grows just a bit older.  No film immortality in store, here.

  • Despicable Me (2010)

    Despicable Me (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, July 2010) Seeing Despicable Me a bit too soon after Toy Story 3, I can’t help but notice how thin it feels compared to Pixar’s instant classic: It’s much simpler visually and even more simplistic from a story standpoint.  The backgrounds feel empty, and the scatter-shot writing seems all too ready to sacrifice tone and continuity for cheap gags.  (Seeing that much of the film was developed in France, I wonder if some of this inconsistency is a cultural artifact.)  Fortunately, Despicable Me finds its worth in earned laughter: Some of the most absurd slapstick is ridiculously funny, while the entire film is so good-natured that it’s easy to keep a smile in-between the laughs.  I’m never too fond of kid characters, but the three girls who (very) gradually come to change the mad-scientist antihero’s mind are surprisingly likable, which makes the overused “bachelor finds his inner parenting abilities” sub-plot far more bearable than you’d expect.  The same goes for the minion creatures, who hold up far better than their “let’s have an iconic toy” origins may suggest.  Much of the 3D is unobtrusive to a 2D audience, at the exception of end-credit sequences that feel tacked-on after a rush decision to re-render the film in 3D.  Despicable Me may not be much of a classic, but it holds its own as an entertaining feature for the entire family.

  • The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson (translated by Reg Keeland)

    The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson (translated by Reg Keeland)

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking Canada, 2009 translation of 2006 original, 503 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-670-06902-6

    Second instalment in the massively popular Millennium trilogy of Swedish crime thrillers, The Girl Who Played with Fire continues the adventures of Larsson’s duo of righteous avengers by following up threads left open in the first volume in the context of a new mystery.  It’s a different type of story, and it leads straight to the final book in the trilogy.

    It picks up nearly a year after the events of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as Lisbeth Salander comes back to Stockholm after some time spent travelling around the world.  This set up a chain of events that eventually send Salander on the run, suspected of three murders –including that of her sadistic guardian so memorably neutralized in the first volume of the trilogy.  Meanwhile, boy-scout journalist Mikael Blomkvist isn’t too far away from the story, as one of the victims was working for his Millennium magazine in exposing a prostitution network.  The strange collaboration between Salander and Blomkvist resumes anew as the stakes are raised ever higher for Salander.

    Much of the same strengths that made The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo such an enjoyable introduction to the series are in full display here:  The intricate procedural detail; the left-leaning look at modern Sweden society in all its flaws; the indignation at violence against women; the intensely genre-aware character-motivated plotting and (certainly not least) the two lead protagonists themselves.  Salander, newly refurbished and rich beyond belief, is still considered a crackpot by Swedish society at large, and The Girl Who Played with Fire goes much deeper in her personal history than anyone would expect.  This is her big novel in terms of back-story, and it cleanly illuminates a number of the character traits established in the first volume: why she’s so asocial, brilliant and driven.  Meanwhile, Blomkvist holds steady as a gifted editor/journalist, though he gets little more to do here than piece together the whole story and race ineffectually on Salander’s trail.

    That The Girl Who Played with Fire is Salander’s story is most directly reflected in its tone.  After a lengthy procedural first half, the novel gradually transforms itself in a revenge thriller, and the ending is nothing short of brutal for everyone involved.  While there is a mystery to solve, this second volume is more forward-moving than the first: it’s a thriller more than a mystery, and despite the Cold War flashbacks, we don’t go digging quite as deep in Swedish history.

    The price to pay for this story, unfortunately, the amount of sometimes-ridiculous procedural detail that Larsson crams into his novel.  This reaches an apex of sorts as we follow Salander during a page-long trip at IKEA: We get not only the specific models of what she buys, but a total of what it cost.  For all of the fuzzy warm feeling that readers may get in realizing that they’re reading the novel on the very same Poäng armchair that Salander has in her apartment, there’s a point where it’s possible to wonder How much of this is really necessary? The novel goes far beyond Salander and Blomkvist as viewpoint characters, involving an entire cast of protagonists, antagonists, friends, police and helpful bystanders.  The thriller plot itself barely begins before the first half of the book is over, and only starts cooking in the last quarter.  If nothing else, reading the novel will affirm how skilful the movie adaptation was in keeping the truly essential elements of the story.

    Still, seasoned thriller readers will find a number of interesting elements to savour.  The often-corrupt Swedish setting is just as interesting, whereas Larsson’s tweaks to the usual thriller plot templates can keep things interesting: Both heroes are kept physically apart until the very last moments of the novel, and two of the book’s big action moments go to secondary characters rather than the lead protagonists.  (In a note that will go unnoticed by most North-American readers, Larsson even gives a significant heroic role to real-life boxer Paolo Roberto, resulting in one of the best real-life cameo in any novel, ever.)

    Readers with sufficient patience and attention span to last through the often-lengthy but usually delicious exposition will only be pleased by this successful second volume.  But anyone with even the slightest interest in reading more about those two characters should keep the third volume close by, since the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire leads directly to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

  • Toy Story 3 (2010)

    Toy Story 3 (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In Theaters, July 2010) Making a sequel to a beloved film is usually a loser’s game: We can all name follow-ups to classics that were derided, pilloried or (worse) forgotten.  But if anyone can buck the trend, it’s Pixar, a studio so sure-footed in its choices since the original Toy Story back in 1995 that even their most disappointing films have been a cut above average.  So there is no surprise and considerable cheer if Toy Story 3 once again proves to be an extraordinary achievement.  Even its status as a sequel becomes an asset as the story ages along its characters, features long-running payoffs (“The Claw!”) and hits an emotional climax that wouldn’t be nearly so effective if it didn’t mark the end of a 15-year journey: its surprising thematic depth about loss and renewal actually depends on it being a sequel.  As for the rest, it’s classic Pixar top-shelf material: Thrilling action sequences, numerous sight gags, honest character development, inventive sequences and a rhythm that makes everything go by the blink of an eye.  Any comparisons with the previous two movies will highlight the exceptional quality of the computer animation, which is particularly effective in dealing with human figures –and fortunately so given the importance that they play in the narrative.  But it’s the emotional impact of the film that will remain long after the incredible detail of its visuals have been forgotten: Unlike Up, the script wisely keeps its bawling moments for the end, and thus caps a complete film experience that delivers everything one could wish for in a mass-market entertainment blockbuster.  As usual for Pixar (not that they should be taken for granted), Toy Story 3 is a solid choice for year’s end consideration and one of the finest “Part Three” ever made so far.  The only way it could be better is if there is no “Part Four”. Ever.

  • Ware Tetralogy, The, Rudy Rucker

    Ware Tetralogy, The, Rudy Rucker

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Prime, 2010 omnibus re-edition of 1982-2000 originals, 751 pages, US$24.95 tp ISBN 978-1-60701-211-5

    Some authors’ bibliography can be described using a single word approximation, and so Rudy Rucker’s fiction can best be labelled weird.  Even by the imaginative standards of post-New Wave Science Fiction, Rucker pushes the limits of what genre readers are ready to accept as being plausible.  A mathematician/computer scientist by training and madman of the imagination by choice, Rucker has been at the periphery of SF for decades, and The Ware Tetralogy is a splendid career omnibus summing up the groovy, the bad and the wacky.  Bringing together Software (1982), Wetware (1988), Freeware (1997) and Realware (2000), it’s also a wild trip through the recent past of SF’s cutting-edge.

    Reading Software today is an intriguing trip back to the founding texts of cyberpunk, at a time where SF writers were first trying to grasp the new ideas that the personal computer revolution were making accessible.  Mind as software?  Digitizing personalities and storing them as information?  Software was there before the rush: Given how thoroughly those notions now permeate the genre, it’s probably impossible to read it today and grasp how innovative this must have felt at the time.  Significantly, Software also happens to be the most accessible of the four books bundled here. It’s weird, but approachably so: There are a few chuckles at the chronology (lunar-based robots having rebelled by 2001, and mind-digitizing being common by 2010), but the protagonist’s issues are recognizable, and much of the (ahem) hardware is familiar.

    This stops being true as Wetware and its two follow-ups unfold.  Technology growing ever-weirder in the universe of the series, humans start using drugs to merge at the cellular level, robots evolve into a kind of smelly malleable plastic compound, hyper-dimensional aliens stop for a chat and reality-bending technology (similar to the one imagined in Rucker’s own 1999 Saucer Wisdom) messes up everything.  The characters become increasingly incomprehensible (with a few exceptions, the most sympathetic being a perverted redneck with bad taste in partners) and so do their actions.  Reading The Ware Tetralogy at that point becomes a race from one comprehensible stepping-stone to another, trying to keep up with a flood of gratuitous strangeness.

    It does help that as Rucker grows older, his stories become less mean.  Software’s biggest flaw is the way it suddenly races through its third act in order to deliver a bleak resolution.  Much of the same also happens during Wetware, as the shiny new toys he plays with are abruptly discarded, outlawed or destroyed by clueless characters.  This, in fact, becomes a distinguishing point between Rucker and much of his SF cohort: Despite its fanciful extrapolations, The Ware Tetralogy frequently turns its back on progress, and never so blatantly than during the final volume.  The result, unfortunately, is never a series we can trust to deliver the expected SF thrills: All four books have a tendency to pick up their toys and go home just as we’re starting to have fun.  Fortunately, Realware provides a conclusion that’s both satisfactory and kind –if nothing else, this should be reason enough to read the story to the end.

    This being said, many of Rucker’s other writing tics are more admirable: If nothing else, he understands that humans in general are dumb, perverted and prone to taking counterproductive decisions that harm everyone.  Sexual obsession is a constant here, as are dim-witted characters struggling with future shock.  This may clash with SF’s brainy technophilic tendencies, but it does make Rucker a finer chronicler of the human experience than many of his colleagues.  (On the other hand, this advantage quickly turns to exasperation when characters doing really dumb things all lead to a small exclamation of “You idiot!”)  That’s the point of being a cyberpunk punk.

    The Ware Tetralogy is a great example of everything that characterizes Rudy Rucker’s Science Fiction, both good and bad.  My own previous experiences reading Rucker have been hit-and-miss: While his extrapolations are usually top-notch, their packaging has often been maddening.  Trying to get back to his bibliography after years of neglect, I floundered on his most recent Postsingular/Hylozoic diptych.  Most Rucker novels begin rationally, and evolve into something much stranger: If you miss the exit to Bizarroland, you can find yourself stranded in a narrative in which seemingly retarded characters spout childish nonsense to each other.  I suppose that SF needs a mad genius or two, but the price to pay may be novels that are more ambitious than successful.

    Still, I’m happy that, after years of casual book-hunting, I have finally managed to read the entire Ware series: Prime has done a fine job bringing back all four novels into print as one unified package (even though a few OCR errors made it through, the worst being the inversion of 2053 for 2035 at a crucial establishing moment), with an enlightening afterword by the author detailing the sources of inspiration and subsequent re-evaluation of each novel.  This afterword is said to be excerpted from Rucker’s upcoming (2011) autobiography Nested Scrolls, which I am now really looking forward to.

    If you’ve got even the slightest interest in experiencing The Ware Tetralogy for yourself, you can download the entire massive four-book series from either the author’s web site in PDF or in many more formats from ManyBooks.

  • True Lies (1994)

    True Lies (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On DVD, July 2010) I hadn’t seen True Lies since it was first released in theatres, and while it has visibly aged since then, it hasn’t lost much of its appeal.  Beginning like a competent James Bond clone featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the film soon takes a then-unusual turn in portraying a secret agent dealing with matrimonial issues.  While this trope isn’t so fresh now after such films as Mr and Mrs Smith (and was adapted from French film La Totale in the first place), it’s still rich in possibilities that True Lies exploits relatively well.  Unfortunately, what seems more obvious now are the pacing issues: There’s a mid-film lull that more or less coincides with increasingly unpleasant harassment of the lead female character by her husband, and even the reversal/payoff later in the film doesn’t completely excuse the bad feeling left by the sequence.  On the other hand, the action scenes are almost as good as they could be despite some dated CGI work: True Lies may be among director James Cameron’s lesser work, but it shows his understanding of how an action scene can be put together and features mini-payoffs even in the smallest details.  The last half-hour is just one thrill ride after another, culminating in a savvy Miami high-altitude ballet.  In terms of acting, it’s fun to see Eliza Dushku in a small but pivotal pre-Buffy role as the hero’s daughter or Tia Carrere as an evil terro-kitten –although it’s no less strange to see Jamie Lee Curtis get a few minutes of screen time as a sex symbol and I can’t help to think that Schwarzenegger, however great he is playing up to his own archetype, is singularly miscast as a character who should look far meeker.  Uncomfortable mid-film harassment sequences aside, True Lies nonetheless holds up fairly well more than a decade and a half later, thanks to a clever blend of action, humor and married romance.  What really doesn’t hold up, though, is the bare-bones 1999 DVD edition, which is marred by a poor grainy transfer and a quasi-complete lack of supplements.  We know about James Cameron’s reputation for excess during the making of his movies: There’s got to be an awesome documentary somewhere in this film’s production archives.

  • The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files #3), Charles Stross

    The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files #3), Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2010, 312 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-441-01867-3

    There are books I look forward to, and then there are new books by Charles Stross.  From the moment I saw The Fuller Memorandum in my local bookstore (a few days ahead of its official publication date), I knew that the rest of my day would revolve around finishing the book.  As an excuse to pull up a comfortable chair, a jug of ice tea and read uninterrupted for a few hours, I couldn’t have asked for anything better: I consider Stross’ two previous Laundry Files novels to be among the most enjoyable Science Fiction books of the past decade, and they’re only a part of why he’s one of the best SF authors working at the moment.

    Initially launched at Golden Gryphon with The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue, Stross’ Laundry Files series blends together an unusual mixture of geeky humor, lovecraftian horror and espionage thrills.  Narrator Bob Howard starts as a geek whose explorations of higher mathematics landed him an irrevocable job within a British secret agency dedicated to protecting the world against para-dimensional Evil Ones.  The ideal target audience for this series is equally able to giggle at UNIX jokes, feel the vertiginous awe at alien horrors and appreciate the twists of spy-novel pastiches.  In short, the target audience looks a lot like me, and part of why I like the Laundry Files novels so much is the knowledge that I’m catching references that others aren’t –and missing out on quite a few as well.  (SF fans will be pleased to see The Fuller Memorandum nod briefly at David Langford, and give a much more substantial homage to Mike Ford.  Other chuckles include Bob’s weakness against shiny Apple products, and the real reason why the Laundry is so hilariously paranoid about paperclip requisitions.)

    Still, the most interesting thing about The Fuller Memorandum as an entry in The Laundry Files is how it pivots Bob Howard’s adventures from two loosely connected larks to a much longer sustained series.  The narration is darker, the action stays close to the Laundry’s London HQ, Howard is physically damaged by the events of the volume and we’re starting to see how a number of threads are starting to fit together.  Many of them concern the terrifying Case Nightmare Green mentioned almost as a throwaway in the previous volumes, and that’s no laughing matter.  Among The Fuller Memorandum’s big revelations is the true identity of Angleton, and that has a number of unpleasant implications for the rest of the series as well.  Perhaps more significantly, it’s a volume that definitely exists as a part of a series: While The Jennifer Morgue could be enjoyed on its own as a Fleming/Bond parody, the Anthony-Price-inspired The Fuller Memorandum does its best to provide essential context but fits better in the continuity of the Laundry Files.

    For instance, Howard’s growth as a narrator is best appreciated by those who have seen him discover the terrors out there during The Atrocity Archives and lose quite a bit more of his innocence during The Jennifer Morgue.  By the time this third volume ends, Bob has become something… very different and considerably more dangerous.  His relationship with now-wife Mo is further tested, and even his place as a narrator of the series isn’t quite so secure: Thanks to an elegant narrative sleigh-of-hand, Stross gradually trains us to be less reliant upon Bob’s first-person narration and that shift of perspective proves essential during the three-ring circus that is the climax of the novel.  The result, along with a far darker outlook on the universe of the series despite a just-as-light narration, is reminiscent of Stross’ other Merchant Princes series in how it chips away at the foundations of the series, and trends toward ever-grimmer plot developments.

    The result is that even if The Fuller Memorandum doesn’t quite manage the kicks-per-page density of its predecessors, it’s very satisfying and lays down the groundwork for a promising series without locking the author in a repeating pattern.  Case Nightmare Green provides an anchor point for the next few volumes –and if Stross’ past stories are an indication, we may get a truly wide-screen apocalypse by the time the series reaches a conclusion.  Which is why, as I finally let go of the book after a pleasant afternoon of uninterrupted reading, I am satisfied but barely satiated by this third entry in the Laudry Files series.  Stross hasn’t even finished writing The Apocalypse Codex yet, and already I can’t wait for it.

  • Knight and Day (2010)

    Knight and Day (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, June 2010) A breezy summer action comedy doesn’t have to do much to charm me, but the mess that is Knight and Day tests the limits of my indulgence when it comes to those kinds of would-be summer blockbusters.  It’s not that the film isn’t enjoyable: It’s good-natured, leaves its stars free to grin madly and does present an enjoyable escapist fantasy.  There are interesting things to see in the action sequences, and a few laughs here and there.  But something feels off about the way the film is directed and edited: Director James Mangold has an intriguing way of showing (or rather, not showing) what happens in the film, but this kind of experimentation doesn’t fit with the far more conventional thrust of the movie and is hampered by some fairly obvious CGI work.  Furthermore, the editing is so choppy that it feels as if crucial connective tissue has been left out of the script or the final cut: Knight and Day feels rushed and borderline incoherent, in-between zippy changes of scenery, abrupt shifts in tone and characters whose unhinged nature seems more forced by dialogue rewrites than anything like psychological complexity.  (Even the title almost defies explanation, and you have to squint really hard at the last lines of dialogue to figure it out.)  So far removed from the moviemaking process, it’s tough for viewers to know where to assign blame: the script was reportedly re-written almost a dozen times, passing through a number of proposed stars before settling on Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.  Neither do too badly, although Cruise overdoes his preening while Diaz seems happy to squeal dizzily through much of the film.  The result is about a third good, a third charming and a third mystifying: not exactly the ideal mixture for a formula movie that should have been an easy slam-dunk.

  • Julian Comstock, Robert Charles Wilson

    Julian Comstock, Robert Charles Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2009, 413 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1971-5

    We’re all familiar with the disappointment when a book we were primed to like doesn’t live up to expectations.  But what about the surprise when a book that didn’t look all that good turns out to be quite a bit better than expected?

    I steeled myself before reading Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock.  Even though I quite like most of what Wilson writes, the recent duds of Axis and the not-growing-any-fainter trauma of Darwinia temper certitudes about any new book of his.  Then there’s the fact that Julian Comstock is an expansion of a previous novella that had left me cold, along with my general lack of enthusiasm for post-apocalyptic futures.  None of this amounted to any burning desire to read the book, which helps explain why it was the last of this year’s Hugo-nominated slate to be taken off my shelves.

    Most of my apprehensions were justified: Julian Comstock is, after all, an exercise in using a Science Fiction framework to tell another kind of story.  Set in a post-apocalyptic 2170s where America (and presumably much of the world) has regressed to late-nineteenth-century levels of technology and political sophistication, Wilson’s novel is really an old-fashioned Victorian adventure set in a future engineered to foster those kinds of stories.  Any attempt to criticize the world-building, the regression of current social values and the almost-complete lack of technology beyond 1870s sophistication takes a back seat to the realization that Wilson is manipulating his future to tell a story, not writing a dour prescription for everyone foolish enough to ride in an SUV.

    It helps a lot that the story is told in a sympathetic faux-naif style that makes even the cruellest deprivations sound like just another character-building obstacle.  Julian Comstock may be the hero of the novel, but it’s being told by Adam Hazzard, a young man with literary ambitions who rides alongside his friend “Julian Conqueror” as major events happen to them both.  The style, entertaining and funny, polishes a depressing setting into a far more interesting second-level read.  This blend of ironic narration and bleak world-building is what prevents Julian Comstock from falling prey to the same air of déjà-vu that makes other earnestly catastrophic books so unpleasant to read –I’m looking at you, Hugo-nominated The Windup Girl.  For a future in which most of us would be condemned as heretics, it’s a surprisingly charming and funny novel.

    So it is that within pages of starting Julian Comstock, I found myself unexplainably enthralled by the power of its prose, slowing down my usual reading speed in order to appreciate the subtleties of the sly humour, offhand references to hideous bits of future history and stone-faced put-downs of contemporary values (“Business Men, Atheists, Harlots and Automobiles” [P.211])  There’s nothing fun about much of Julian Comstock’s world, but the adventures narrated are gripping, and faithfully follow the form of classic adventure novels.  The story spends a bit of time in Montréal (with funny snippets of French) before setting out to the Saguenay and Newfoundland after a detour in New York.  In the background, weighty issues of political infighting, dynastic succession and church/state conflict play out: It’s quite a balancing act to put those into an otherwise light adventure of wartime heroics and coming-of-age discoveries.

    But balance and subtlety are, after all, what Wilson does best, and the result this time around is an odd novel that dares to do things that others wouldn’t even consider.  There are allusions here to historical figures and genre literature that I’m ill-equipped to evaluate, but those won’t slow down readers who suspect nothing about Julian the Apostle and William Taylor Adams.  It’s also, again in the Wilson tradition, quite a bit different from anything he’s done before.  And while I don’t quite love the result (see above regarding residual concerns about the world-building), I respect it quite a bit more than I expected from early reports about the novel.  Considering a 2010 Hugo Best Novel nominee slate dominated by books with significant problems, Julian Comstock is the best-rounded of them all, with the added advantage of considerable charm.  Guess where my vote is going?

  • Boneshaker, Cherie Priest

    Boneshaker, Cherie Priest

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2009, 416 pages, C$20.50 pb, ISBN 978-0-7653-1841-1

    Anyone going to SF conventions this year has realized that the most popular costume themes of 2010 are zombies and steampunk.  Everyone loves zombies!  Everyone loves steampunk!  What if you tried combining both?  Ah, the possibilities…!

    So it is that Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker takes place in an alternate 1870s Seattle where, sixteen years earlier, a mad science experiment has led to the release of noxious gases transforming people into… zombies.  The city core has been walled-up, but the zombies remain.  As the story begins, the teenage son of the scientist determined to uncover the truth about his father sets out to explore the walled-up city; his mother quickly follows, pursued by a healthy dose of swashbuckling adventure.  Zeppelins, zombies, mad scientists and post-apocalyptic landscapes are soon involved.

    There are probably no more back-handed compliments as “fans of this stuff will like it”, but that’s still a pretty accurate reflection of what I’m left thinking at the end of the novel.

    I should start by admitting that I have no particular affection for steampunk, either in content or form.  Content-wise, steampunk is a case of arrested technological development: There’s a reason why we got rid of (messy, unwieldy, dangerous) steam technology as soon as we found something better.  It doesn’t help that recent attempts to justify worlds in which Victorian technology endures are usually closer to contrived wish-fulfillment fantasy that any kind of reasonable SF.  I’m marginally more sympathetic to the aesthetics of steampunk, but my own preferences run along the clean neat lines of Apple/IKEA.  That leaves us with steampunk’s considerable potential as criticism of Victorian or contemporary social attitudes, but that aspect usually gets short thrift in the recent steampunk revival.  Add to that the idea of steampunk as a bandwagon and you’ll find me on the outside of the party, wondering when it will move on to something new.

    Also: Zombies?  I’ve seen enough of them for the next ten years.  Played-out.  Give me something else.

    But it’s a disservice to reduce Boneshaker to its simplest zeppelin/zombies components.  The raison d’être of the book is adventure, and I shouldn’t begrudge anyone their fun in riding hot-air machines to blow up the un-dead.  Cherie Priest is obviously having fun playing in the catacombs of Seattle and scratching a few irresistible creative itches.  If it doesn’t happen to run along my own obsessions, well, at least I can recognize the fun being had here.  My indifference to the result isn’t a reason not to mention the strong female protagonist (maternal action heroines are a rarity, and this one should be celebrated), the attention to racial diversity and the overall maturity of the prose.

    On the other hand, maybe there’s an issue here if the novel hasn’t managed to reach out of its intended constituency.  At 416 pages, the book takes forever to get going and advance just as slowly once it has set up its plot.  The many peripheral characters could have been tightened, some of the early scene-setting is blunt to the point of being obvious (Oh, hello Mister Journalist; let me tell you everything readers need to know.) and the epilogue only reinforces how little has actually happened by the end of the novel.  (This may be explained by an announced sequel.)

    It all amounts to a book that feels considerably less substantial than I could have wished for, which wouldn’t have been a problem if it had somehow managed to reach one of my own pet passions.  But Boneshaker remains what it wants to be, and not a lot more.  I can hear readers squeee in satisfaction at the result and am happy that they’re having as much fun as I do when I read a novel that does manage to hit my own squeee-points.  But I won’t feign enthusiasm either for something that leaves me curiously unsatisfied.

    (One final note, so petty it shouldn’t even be mentioned except for the significant annoyance factor: Whoever at Tor thought that it would be a good idea to print this book in brown ink may not have spent enough time on public transit, where imperfect fluorescent lighting leads to a scatologically delightful brown-on-yellow low-contrast reading experience.  Don’t do that again.)

  • Harry Brown (2009)

    Harry Brown (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, June 2010) The best reason to see this art-house exploitation film is to watch Michael Caine, visibly showing his age, reprising some of his stone-cold killer mannerism.  There isn’t anything more about this film, after all, than a revenge fantasy featuring a freshly-widowed pensioner taking revenge on a bunch of teenage hoodlums.  Starting from a paranoid view of the world, Harry Brown doesn’t spare a tut-tut while describing the depravity of today’s youth.  It does get quite a bit more enthusiastic, however, in showing its protagonist use his old Marine training to take down the worst of the local teens.  Caine with a gun is always fun to watch, even though the movie around him remains an uneasy blend of art-house drama and genre shoot’em-up.  The flaccid pacing, sure-footed cinematography and attention paid to Caine’s center-stage performance are more in-line with Oscar-baiting movies than the sudden bloody violence, squalid setting and unintelligibly profane characters.  Like many modern vigilante-justice films, Harry Brown remains stuck between condemning violence and indulging into the sheer thrill of it: Different kinds of viewers will have different ideas as to what are the film’s best sequences.  While the result doesn’t escape a few flaws (including a finale that seems to reach for unnecessary connections between characters), it’s a watchable film that is perhaps most interesting in comparison with other vigilante films, other British crime dramas and other Michael Caine tough guys.

  • The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi

    The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Night Shade Books, 2009, 361 pages, $24.95 hc, ISBN 978-1-59780-157-7

    Two definitions submitted for your consideration:

    • Spring-loaded cat: In horror movies, a moment during which audience and characters alike are momentarily horrified by the sudden appearance of what turns out to be a cat.  Essentially: a cheap scare.
    • Spring-powered future: In science-fiction novels, a moment during which the reader realizes the hollowness of a dystopian future thanks to a telling detail that turns out to be nonsense.  Essentially: a cheap scare.

    Over the past few years, Paolo Bacigalupi has become the hot new Science Fiction writer of the moment.  A string of Hugo nominations for dour and depressing short stories paved the way, but in 2010 he finally hit the big time thanks to Nebula and Locus Awards for his first novel The Windup Girl (set in the same world as many of his short stories), along with a Hugo nomination for the same novel.  As I write this, he is the odds-on favourite to win the award.

    It’s probably impossible to discuss Bacigalupi’s stature in the Science Fiction field without dwelling on the fact that the genre, as a whole, has grown much bleaker in the past decade.  Year’s Best SF anthologies filled with catastrophe stories, a fascination for fascism and environmental collapses, as well as a sharp uptick in both post-apocalyptic stories (often with zombies) and retro-looking steampunk are some signs of the times.  In this context, Bacigalupi’s bleak post-peak-oil stories and depressing themes fit with the contemporary tune of the genre.

    Being temperamentally opposed to gratuitously downbeat futures, I had no plans to read The Windup Girl until it swept the awards raffles.  I did so out of duty, and mention this so no one gets any false ideas about my prejudices going into the novel.  The best that I can report is that Bacigalupi’s first novel is exactly what it attempts to do, and isn’t uninteresting to read.  Alas, it’s also a pile of nonsense that never engaged my suspension of disbelief.

    The problems start early on: In The Windup Girl’s post-oil Thailand, humanity is forced to scrounge for energy sources having conveniently forgotten all about nuclear power.  So much so that we’re asked to believe in a “kink-spring the size of [a] fist that hold a gigajoule of power” [P.5]  Except that such a gadget is impossible: I had been warned about those magical springs by other savvier readers, but elementary calculations confirm how ludicrous an idea this is:  A gigajoule of power is equivalent to about 26.5 litres of oil, and would be enough to send almost 20 kilograms in geostationary orbit.  (Thank you Wikipedia.)  You can’t stuff that amount of energy in fist-sized metal springs, no matter the amount of hand-waving about revolutionary coating: the only way to get that type of energy density would be with a fist-sized fusion reactor.  But impossible springs charged through inefficient animal labour are only a symptom of bigger world-building problems.  This is a book that features bioengineering good enough to synthesize quasi-human characters, but nothing like biofuel-producing algae.  A book in which zeppelin shipping is somehow cheaper than barges.  A book in which bioengineered plagues that somehow escape national retribution co-exist with carbon taxes that are paid because (one presumes) national retribution still works pretty well.  Other contradictions multiply, but I would simply be repeating myself:  Coherent world-building, obviously, is best reserved for optimistic people.  Then again, I have higher standards for unreasonably pessimistic political viewpoints with which I disagree.

    Not that the thin coherence of this bleak future is any surprise.  Bacigalupi has obviously tricked the deck in favour of his preferred outcome (which, to repeat, would be that we’re doomed, doomed, doomed) and written a novel around this thesis.  If humanity was as stupid as it’s made to be in The Windup Girl, then it would deserve to die.  Anyone who needs convincing only has to make it to the grim end of the book, which manages to pull off a downbeat ending out of a resolution that could have gone otherwise.  Oppressors and victims jostle for attention as characters, and it’s no accident if the most sympathetic of them is taken out early on.  The titular character’s role is to suffer abuse until she can’t take it any more… and given the leisurely pacing of the book, that means a lot of abuse.

    This being said, readers who enjoy depressive episodes and bleak visions of the future will be charmed by the novel, in part because despite its other faults, it’s decently written and manages to fulfill every single one of its own objectives.  The prose is above-average for a genre that values simplicity, and some of the dramatic sequences have a good narrative kick to them.  (Great cover, too.)

    Still, this is a novel that is carried by the quirks of our time, and will suffer for them as well.  Readers with long memories may recall a similar vogue in downbeat eco-catastrophism in the seventies –those novels haven’t aged very well, and despite the success that The Windup Girl may enjoy at the moment, I doubt that it will survive as freshly in a decade or so.  (About the time we will all go “Hey, remember the fuss about peak oil?  Wasn’t that a lot of short-sighted panic?”)  The Windup Girl is a novel of its time, but then again our times suck.

  • Wake, Robert J. Sawyer

    Wake, Robert J. Sawyer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking, 2009, 356 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-670-06741-1

    [The usual disclaimer: I’ve known Robert J. Sawyer since 1995.  He knows me well enough to know that I take it as a compliment when he teases me in front of a crowd at one of his book launches.]

    Every time I read a Robert J. Sawyer novel, I have to brace myself for frustration.

    I know that I’m going to find enough fascinating material to justify reading the novel.  I also know that Sawyer’s writing techniques will run counter to my own preferences.  The usual suspense is whether the fascinating will outweigh the frustrating.  I’m usually left focusing on what’s interesting about any given novel rather than try to balance the positive against the negative.

    So it is that the most interesting thing about Wake is its emphasis on its protagonist, a bright blind teenager named Caitlin.  As a budding nerd in the best sense of the word, she’s not completely dissimilar to the middle-aged scientists who usually form the bulk of Sawyer’s protagonists… but her blindness and young age set her apart.  Freshly emigrated from Texas to Waterloo, Caitlin is in many ways a typical high-school girl.  In others, though, she’s a Science Fiction fan’s favourite: an inquisitive geek who suddenly gets a chance to try an experimental procedure that may restore her sight.  Things don’t turn as expected, though, and before long she’s communicating with an entity that lives in the lost packets of the web, a brand-new intelligence who has to learn how to see the world at the same time as Caitlin.

    Compared to previous Sawyer novels, what’s different about Wake is the time it spends playing around with a more restrained idea.  In what is almost certainly a symptom of a first volume of a trilogy, this novel explores a relatively limited premise in greater detail, and takes its time in developing its storyline.  It’s not exactly slow, but by the end of the book, not much has actually happened and at least one subplot doesn’t lead anywhere yet.  Readers looking for traditional conflict may have to wait until the sequels.

    On the other hand, that pacing allows Sawyer to fully sketch out the process through which Caitlin learns to see, and the precise steps his native web intelligence uses to develop its own consciousness.  It’s not always credible (the reams of colloquial English writing available on the web makes it unlikely that an emergent web intelligence would speak in older public-domain cadences, however amusing the idea) but it occasionally leads to impressive scenes: Caitlin’s vision breakthrough is a fine piece of scene-building, compensating for a number of overdone first-person passages best read using William Shatner’s voice.  (“Being… but not becoming.  No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in the boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception…” [P.1])

    Of course, many of Sawyer’s usual tics remain obvious: As with many of his latest novels, it’s deeply stepped into cultural references (both pop and geek) that immediately date it to 2009.  Sawyer’s obvious nationalism also pops up thanks to a heroine whose seemingly sole reason for being American so far in the trilogy is to provide a running commentary on what’s different between the US and Canada.  Furthermore, Sawyer’s tendency to not just make lousy jokes, but explain them immediately betrays a grating amount of hand-holding for readers who may not be familiar with his references.  This, to me, is the most frustrating aspect of Sawyer’s writing these days: I don’t doubt that it’s a conscious set of techniques to appeal to a far larger readership than just the core genre SF readers, but it does make the reading experience far more frustrating for those who are already a step ahead of others.

    Still, who am I to complain about techniques that have obviously proven successful?  Sawyer seems to be outselling most of his core-genre colleagues, and earning far more mainstream attention than genre-oriented writers usually get.  He’s also, significantly, earning quite a bit of popular affection within the SF genre community as well –Wake won the Aurora Award, and is now nominated for the Hugo as well.

    All of this is a useful reminder that even if Sawyer’s writing style is often annoying enough to send me gnawing on the nearest chill-pill, his core strengths remain unarguable: Intriguing speculations, accessible prose style, optimistic outlook (something that Hugo voters can only appreciate this year) and an addictive quality that makes even frustrated readers coming back for just one more book.  Or two more, as this new trilogy would have it.

  • Your Movie Sucks, Roger Ebert

    Your Movie Sucks, Roger Ebert

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Andrew McMeel, 2007, 338 pages, C$20.99 pb, ISBN 978-0-7407-6366-3

    As a reviewer, I’m not sure how I feel knowing that unfavourable reviews will be more popular than favourable ones.  Roger Ebert has made significant contributions to film criticism, but why is it that the first book of his I’ve bought new is a book of the film he hates?  What does that tell me about the value of reviewing in an entertainment-driven world?

    Still, such doubts don’t last long once racing through Your Movie Sucks, an anthology of nearly 150 of Roger Ebert’s least-favourite films of 2000-2006 from Battlefield Earth to The Hills Have Eyes.  (For earlier stinkers, refer to Ebert’s similar I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie) The blunt title and Ebert’s hangdog expression cover photo set the stage for seven years of terrible films, each rated one-and-a-half-stars or less.  The selection is generally made of dumb comedies and terrible horror films, but it also has its share of art-house misses, big-budget action stinkers and manipulative dramas.

    The opening section of the book has a few of Ebert’s greatest feuds, from the slam-dunk that is his infamous review of Rob Schneider’s Deuce Bigalo: European Gigolo that titles the book (“Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.” [P.xi]), to the spirited exchange after Ebert’s no-star review of the horror film Chaos, to “The Brown Bunny Saga” in which an Ebert pan of a preliminary cut shown at Cannes ends up becoming a three-star review of a much-improved film.

    It’s impossible to read through Your Movie Sucks without gaining an appreciation for the elements of a good movie, even if only by opposition to what Ebert describes here.  Movies that have no redeeming qualities past their shock value; movies so ill-conceived that they lower the entire level of moviemaking; movies that don’t work despite their intentions, and movies made for a crass buck rather than any artistic or popular worth.

    As it happens, I have been reviewing films fairly consistently during the period covered by the book, and it’s a particular experience to be reminded of films that I hadn’t thought about in years (or, worse, being led to wonder if I had in fact seen said movie before a quick check of my own web site cleared that up.)  It doesn’t prove or even mean anything, but Ebert and I don’t often completely disagree: At most, he’ll hate pieces that I consider to be decent little genre pictures (such as Resident Evil or Behind Enemy Lines).  But even in disagreeing, we often see the same flaws: we just weigh them differently.  (On the other hand, I wouldn’t dare compare “Best movies” list with Ebert.)

    As you may expect (and as every reviewer knows), it’s far easier to be cutting, sarcastic and plain-out funny when slamming something worth hating.  So it is that Your Movie Sucks could have been subtitled “More than a hundred of Ebert’s funniest reviews” without missing a beat: There are quite a few gems in his invectives (ah, that Freddy Got Fingered passage about finding the bottom of the barrel and then digging even lower… “This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.” [P.111]) and there’s nothing quite like reading him rip into a film that deserves it: I had forgotten a good chunk of his classic Battlefield Earth review, but reading it again made it all come back.

    While the gimmick of the book may wear thin after a while, there’s no denying that it’s interesting enough to read cover-to-cover, and makes great bathroom reading.  Now, to atone for my sins of only paying attention to Ebert’s bad reviews, I have ordered Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert from Amazon.  It seems the very least I can do.