Book Review

  • The Info Mesa, Ed Regis

    The Info Mesa, Ed Regis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    W.W.Norton, 2003, 268 pages, C$39.00 hc, ISBN 0-393-02123-8

    I have no perceptible interest in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but contemporary science interests me and I’ll read anything by Ed Regis… so that’s how I ended up with The Info Mesa, an exploration of “Science, Business, and New Age Alchemy on the Santa Fe Plateau”.  It’s a non-fiction account of how science is increasingly being funneled through computers, as shown through the biography of four men who founded high-tech companies in Santa Fe.  As with other Regis book, it couples engaging portraits of scientists at work with broader consideration of science as it is being practiced today.  Much like other Regis books, The Info Mesa is sometimes superficial and often more triumphant than latter events (or an impartial observer) would suggest.  But as far as science nonfiction goes, it’s another pleasant read and it even has a few things to teach its readers.

    The story of how Santa Fe became a hotbed of scientific research begins with the Manhattan project, which grew in the nearby city of Los Alamos.  With such a formidable gathering of scientists, it was only natural that some of them would remember the area fondly and propose it years later as a location for a research institute specializing in unusual problems.  Whenever there’s a research institute, there’s also high probability of start-ups, and that’s how Santa Fe (population: less than 200,000 in the entire metro area) ended up with a small specialized number of companies specializing in high-end computer research as applied to science.

    The broad scientific development that Regis tackles in The Info Mesa, beyond some wonderful descriptions of Santa Fe that would make the local Chamber of Commerce give him an honorary membership, is how science has gradually shifted its research in the digital realm.  This happened early in physics, as computer simulations of physical events were relatively easy to model in software: Nuclear explosions are non-trivial to simulate well in silico, but they’re considerably easier to clean up than the real thing.  Meanwhile, the computerization of fields such as biology and chemistry would have to wait for a few crucial developments: The wide availability of powerful computers, and the codification of a common descriptive language.  One of The Info Mesa’s most fascinating tangents is about how David Weininger refined a way to codify the presentation of chemical compounds.  SMILES (Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry Specification) neatly cuts through centuries of chemical confusion to present an unambiguous, human-readable and machine-usable way to present complex chemical compounds.  It’s nothing less than a small study in human ingenuity.

    It’s also a neat entry in the biographies of the four men that Regis follows in an attempt to illustrate the development of the Info Mesa.  Weininger is described as a rock-star scientist: He flies his own jet planes (one of them, a decommissioned Russian fighter jet, bought cash-in-hand on an airport tarmac from a weapons dealer), lives in a house that once belonged to SF/Fantasy writer Roger Zelazny and helped build a molecule statue in front of his company’s building.  Meanwhile, The Info Mesa also tracks the lives of Anthony Rippo, Stuart Kauffman and Anthony Nicholls, writing warm portraits of them as scientists and entrepreneurs as they transform knowledge into money.  (Regis is notably glib about the latter, and scrupulously avoids discussing the darker side of, say, bulk-patenting molecules.  But that’s another book in itself.)

    The net effect of efforts like those from the Santa Fe companies is that biology and chemistry research is now, in many ways, susceptible to primarily take place within computer simulation.  Drug research stems from new molecules, and digital simulations allow to generate reams of “dry” theoretical data (seeking which molecular structure would bond with a certain neuro-receptor, for instance) in far less time than it would to perform actual “wet” chemical experiments.  Properly applied, computers can speed up vital research by orders of magnitude, and the field is still young.  Apply those same computers to data mining large amount of existing data, and you may even find something new and invisible to earlier methods of analysis.  (In between the gosh-wows, I couldn’t help but notice how many of those innovations post-dated my own formal science education.)

    An expansion of Regis’ own Wired June 2000 article “Greeting from Info Mesa”, The Info Mesa is another readable account of how science, technology and humanity interact in new ways.  It’s occasionally scattered, obviously present the best side of everyone involved and probably overestimate their importance in the grand scheme of things, but there’s plenty of fascinating stuff here to make up for the rest.

  • Bitter Chocolate, Carol Off

    Bitter Chocolate, Carol Off

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House Canada, 2006, 326 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-679-31319-2

    If you think my online bibliomania is obnoxious, imagine how I must be in everyday life.  Friends, family and colleagues have come to dread my frequent visits to the bookstore, as I cannot stop myself from showing off my latest discoveries: “Look at this book!  Isn’t that cool?”  Most of them humour me (what else can they do?), but showing off Carol Off’s Bitter Chocolate and explaining what it’s about (“The exploitation of third-world cocoa farmers!”) got me some unusual push-back: “No! I don’t want to hear about chocolate exploitation!  I like chocolate!  I want to keep enjoying chocolate!”

    The good news, I suppose is that it’s hard to be a semi-cognizant first-worlder these days without having internalized the notion of inadvertent exploitation.  Practically every single product or service that relatively affluent member of the North-American middle class can enjoy depends on some degree of layered suffering.  The products we buy are shelved by minimum-wage employees without hope of a rewarding career; they’re brought to the store by overworked and underpaid transport workers; they’re made by child workers in oppressive factories; and don’t ask about the raw materials, because it gets even worse the deeper you dig in the production chain.

    As it turns out, this is also the case for chocolate, and it has been so for a very long time.  As Off’s introductory history of chocolate makes clear, cacao has almost always been a luxury product, from its Mayan origins to its European introduction to its most recent transformation into the stuff that creates country-breaking market cartels.  The history of chocolate production has always involved overworked farmers who can’t afford the end product of their labour, colonial exploiters overexploiting growing regions before moving somewhere else, and of complicit hordes of consumers.  Like many tropical crops favoured by first-worlders, exploitation seems written deep into chocolate’s history.

    Much of Bitter Chocolate revolves around Off’s first-hand reporting from Côte d’Ivoire, a cocoa-producing country that has suffered from its share of problems since its 1970s heyday.  She is able to link the country’s tumultuous history with the changing fortunes of its cocoa production, particularly how government attempts to guarantee a minimum income for farmers have led to reprisals by a coordinated group of buyers.  Since then, the one-sided market has led to predictable abuse: child labour bordering on indentured slavery, rampant corruption and warring political factions.  (Coincidentally, Côte d’Ivoire was heavily in the news as I was reading the book, reeling from the aftermath of a contested late-2010 elections.)  Off goes on the ground with pisteurs to interview local actors and report from the cacao frontlines.  She comes back with stories of disappeared journalists and government officials destroyed for their opposition to exploited labour.

    None of this is pleasant, but none of this is unexpected either: It’s the same logic of exploitation that occurs whenever rich countries want something from poor countries.  Bitter Chocolate has the merit of making the links in the chain just a bit more explicit.

    Nit-pickers will note a few errors, at least in the chocolate-jacketed hardcover edition: Off claims a etymological origin for cacahuatl that seems dubious to experts, and at one point makes the absurd claim that cacao “beans could grow anywhere within a twenty-kilometre belt north or south of the equator” [P.58], which is quite a bit different from the true figure of twenty degrees from the equator (or roughly 2210 kilometres).  I’m nit-picking, but that’s part of the obnoxious reviewing services I provide: If those were mistakes that I could catch after just a casual reading of Wikipedia’s cocoa bean page, what other errors are in the historical section of the book?

    Still, there’s no denying the quality of the first-hand accounts, or the accumulation of historical evidence pointing to chocolate’s very bitter history.  It’s enough to make anyone feel slightly better about New Year’s resolutions to avoid chocolate, or be considerably less glib about the chocolate that they consume without a thought.  I personally ended up feeling less furious about the ways mass producers of chocolate are finding ways to reduce the actual chocolate content in the candies they present as chocolate; it also led me to buy a bar of “Maya Gold” fair-trade certified chocolate.  It’s not because we accept our role as unwitting exploiters that we can’t feel guilty about it.

  • Rigged, Ben Mezrich

    Rigged, Ben Mezrich

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2007, 294 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-125272-3

    What?  Another heavily-fictionalized account of an East-Coast young man making a lot of money?  It must be time for the latest Ben Mezrich book!

    Oh I kid, but I kid with the Stockholm-syndrome grin of someone who now owns all of Mezrich’s non-fiction bibliography.  I may have issues with his repetitive use of fictional narrative devices to dope otherwise perfectly interesting non-fiction accounts, but when truth-seeking confront entertainment, I usually break in favour of having a good time: Mezrich’s books are a lot of fun to read.

    Faithful readers will be happy to note that Mezrich expands his horizons a bit with this latest entry Rigged, which tells the sort-of-true story of a Brooklyn-born finance analyst who gets hired by the New-York based Mercantile Exchange, where he gets to put together a proposal to create the Dubai Mercantile Exchange.  The protagonist is named David Russo, but he’s loosely based on John D’Agostino, who gets to minimally fact-check the narrative in a signed afterword.

    This being Mezrich’s fourth non-fiction book, it’s interesting to note how carefully he now acknowledges the novel as having heavily fictionalized components.  Unlike previous works, which tried to elide the fictive manipulations, Rigged recognizes up-front that some things have been changed or added, from an amalgam of antagonists to a tightening of events to, most likely, a number of ominous threats made against the protagonist.  There’s also quite a bit of lowest-denominator exposition-setting: It’s a bit insulting to read about two finance professionals discussing the basic point of mercantile trade; while readers don’t necessarily know those details, it’s ridiculous to pass the exposition as on-the-job training between two guys who really should know better.  (On the other hand, oh, that’s how oil is traded.)

    But if it’s so fictionalized, is it better, then, to consider Rigged primarily as fiction?

    Not really, because if Rigged is dramatized as a novel, it doesn’t necessarily make good fiction.  The plot threads are coarse, the characters are dull, the threats are strictly low-grade (the blackmail scheme is particularly obvious) and the book doesn’t quite know what to do with its second viewpoint protagonist, a young Dubai trader from who proposes a project to our lead character.  As financial fiction, it would be weak beer, and not even Mezrich’s rapid pacing, anecdote-heavy plotting and pleasant prose could patch up the lack of substance and simplistic structure.  No, the book has to somehow convince us that it’s about something real if it has any chance of surviving in our minds.

    Too bad that there isn’t more to Rigged (a dull title, barely alluding to oil rigs and not at all to market manipulation) than a description of the trader life and a look at Dubai that feels repetitive to those who have already read other similar non-fiction accounts.  There’s plenty of yuppie macho posturing in the book and an allusion to the increasingly computerized nature of exchanges, but it seems like a throwback to a time where the trading floor reigned supreme.  (1983’s Trading Places is referenced more than once).  Modern finance is a game of automated high-frequency trading where even the physical location of computer servers can be crucial –it would be interesting to see Mezrich write about that, but in order to do so, I suppose that he’d have to find a way to feature a Boston-educated whiz kid making tons of money.

    It may be that Mezrich’s formula is wearing thin.  Rigged uses so many of the same narrative devices (the threat; the mentor; the money-fuelled excesses) that it feels familiar even when it tackles a different kind of money-rich environment.  The foundation of the Dubai Mercantile Exchange is an important moment in financial history, but it seems like an afterthought to the kind of material already covered in movies like Boiler Room or plenty of other non-fiction titles of the past few years.  Mezrich’s money-is-interesting formula dissolves in meaninglessness if you don’t subscribe to its core value.  Add to that the uneasy balance between fact and fiction (Do I want information, entertainment or a disappointing mixture of both in which the presence of one nullifies the other?) and Rigged, albeit readable, still ends up feeling like the slightest of Mezrich’s non-fiction.

    One notes, with some amusement, that his next book, The Accidental Billionaires, would leave the financial world behind to tackle the newest social media zeitgeist.  The one after that, Sex on the Moon, goes on to describe a moon-rock heist.  As you may expect, I have already bought them both.

  • Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold

    Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 2010, 345 pages, C$28.99 hc, ISBN 978-1-4391-3394-1

    Was Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cryoburn one of the most eagerly expected Science Fiction novels of 2010?  As far as its publisher is concerned, the only clue you need is the triumphant cover that heralds “A New Miles Vorkosigan Novel!”  The enormously popular series had, after all, lain dormant for much of the past decade, ever since Bujold followed up 2002’s Diplomatic Immunity with six fantasy novels set in an entirely different universe.

    After such a lengthy real-world pause, Cryoburn fittingly picks up seven years after the events of Diplomatic Immunity: Miles has grown into a respected imperial auditor, a devoted husband and a father to several kids.  Not that the domestic aspects of his personality get much play here, as he spends most of the book on Kibou-daini, a planet noteworthy for the extent to which it has invested in cryogenic preservation techniques.  The catacombs under the city are filled with frozen people, and that’s where the novel confidently begins in media res, with Miles blindly stumbling about after a failed kidnapping attempt.

    Once the dust settles down after an initial volley of typically Vorkosiganian adventures, the shape of the plot becomes clearer: Miles is investigating various corporate shenanigans on behalf of the Emperor, and solving the one he’s been sent to settle doesn’t preclude taking on another more interesting conspiracy when it comes to his attention.  Miles is nothing but a hyperactive problem-solver, and dangling further corporate malfeasance in front of him is an excellent way to get an adventure.  He is fortunate to be accompanied by his faithful armsman Roic, who gets his share of the narrative viewpoint while suffering through Miles’ elaborate schemes; and Jin, a Kibou-daini kid with a missing mother and a refreshing perspective on familiar characters.

    Cryoburn is a minor Vorkosigan novel more or less in the mould of Diplomatic Immunity, with enough hard science to justify a background for Miles’ adventures but without series-changing developments until its sucker-punch conclusion.  Kibou-daini’s fascination for cryogenic preservation is a solid excuse to explore the stranger social consequences of that scientific innovation—the best one being the logical consequence of proxy voting rights transfer from the frozen many to their holding corporations.  We also get to see the thawing process in two tense sequences, with enough plausible technical details to make it feel satisfying to the harder-minded SF fans.

    This being said, most readers coming back to the Vorkosigan series with Cryoburn will read it for the characters, not the fictional science.  Miles is thankfully back in full form, plunged in the kind of complex power-play that allows him to be as devious as he likes.  Roic’s viewpoint is most useful in feeling the impact that Miles can have on people who know him best, whereas Jin’s viewpoint is played for the emotional impact of characters who aren’t necessarily indestructible by virtue of being series protagonists.

    Yet notions of invulnerability inevitably lead us to the abrupt epilogue of the book, in which an amiable but minor Vorkosigan adventure suddenly becomes something else.  It’s not an entirely unexpected development: Thematically, Cryoburn is about death… and Vorkosigan fans will be able to piece together the upcoming revelation solely on the basis of what a series protagonist of Miles’s age should experience.  But while the development is intriguing, it still makes Cryoburn feel unbalanced, far more so that previous adventures in the series.  This isn’t a major entry in the Vorkosigan series, but the ending suggests that the next novel will be.  Until the next Bujold novel shows up in bookstores, there’s no avoiding the wait and assorted speculations.

    Fannish expectations will vary enormously: Those who care deeply about the Vorkosigan series may find that Cryoburn feels like light throat-clearing before another major entry.  People without that much attachment to Miles and company will find it to be an entertaining adventure with intriguing elements and an accomplished writer’s deft touch with plotting and characterization.  It may have been one of the SF’s most eagerly-awaited novels of 2010, but it’s not likely to remain one of the year’s major works (although, knowing Bujold fans, a few award nominations are definitely possible.)  One thing’s for sure: I can’t imagine any fan of the series not wanting to read the next novel as soon as they’re done with Cryoburn.

  • Unit Omega, Jeff Rovin as Jim Grand

    Unit Omega, Jeff Rovin as Jim Grand

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 2003, 277 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-19321-7

    As the year grinds down to a halt during the December holidays and as I reflect on the number of books I have read and reviewed this year, I find myself fascinated not by a big thick meaty masterpiece, but by a trifle of a thriller.  Part of the attraction is due to surprise: Packaged as wide-scale military fiction, Unit Omega turns out to be a small science-heavy adventure that almost works better when its two protagonists are just talking to each other.  It’s charming and refreshing, and it’s completely unlike what I was expecting when I purchased the book.

    Unsurprisingly, I got it from a used book store: Long out of print and now unavailable except through specialized sellers, Unit Omega was apparently published in late 2003 and quickly sank without a trace shortly thereafter, leaving in its wake a scant six customer reviews on amazon.com.  None of them were particularly positive, much of the hostility having to do with a misleading cover promising military action from a United Nation unit specializing in “investigating unusual scientific phenomena”. (“The military is facing an enemy like none ever seen before.”)

    The true nature of the novel, after a perfunctory mysterious prologue, quickly becomes something of a laugh.  Because the “unusual scientific phenomena” unit of the United Nation ends up being one lone young scientist holed up in the basement of the United Nations headquarters in New York, idly contemplating writing science-fiction novels on the job while his putative boss tries to get him a real budget.  Harold Collins is bright and enthusiastic about pushing back the frontiers of science, but he’s stuck in a miserable situation.  Opportunity strikes when a phone call is patched to his office: A once-respectable scientist has reason to believe that the Loch Ness legend has a grain of truth to it and wants a third-party to investigate what she has found.  Bored out of his mind, Collins spends his yearly travel budget on a trip to Scotland, and manages to convince a young and attractive magazine editor to come along.

    Number of transatlantic flights spent stuck in coach: One.  Number of military helicopters in the novel: Zero.

    Their investigation unfolds as a deliciously low-tech affair, with consumer-grade camera equipment and wet suits rented from the local dive shop.  The plot is just as threadbare: Collins does discover something, figures out what it is and comes back.  A comfy epilogue quickly follows, complete with the promise of another novel in the series.  If you were expecting explosions, fighter jets or even a military uniform, you may spare yourself some trouble and reset your expectations accordingly: Unit Omega is one of those rare techno-thrillers with no military involvement whatsoever.

    It’s best to call it low-grade science-fiction: The “Loch Ness anomaly” is a natural scientific phenomenon, implausible but generally well-developed.  The protagonist seems to have absorbed the ideas and attitude of classic genre Science Fiction, and a shortened version of his simple adventure wouldn’t have felt out-of-place in as a novelette in Analog magazine.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s part of the appeal: Collins is a likable nerd, and his budding romance with his travel companion (obviously designed to reach fruition much later in the proposed series) is conventional but entertaining.

    In fact, most of Unit Omega is just plain fun to read.  The undermining of the “elite United Nation unit” trope is fit for giggles and the novel plays up those subverted expectations throughout the rest of the narrative.  As a story, it has a substantially more likable personality than the usual generic military thrillers it’s meant to evoke, and it reminded me of the kind of boyish adventures that SF used to do so well.  It’s not, in other words, a particularly deep or meaningful novel… but it’s rewarding and memorable in its own fashion.

    It’s worth noting that “Jim Grand” is really (as per the Copyright page) Jeff Rovin, a professional writer with one of the most diverse bibliographies you’re likely to see.  It’s a shame that he doesn’t seem to have a permanent web presence: I’d love to read him talk about his work, and how he manages to write a few books per year.  Unit Omega has exactly one follow-up to date, the similarly mis-marketed Operation Medusa published a month later.  I think I’ll start lurking in used book store to find a copy.

  • Old City Hall, Robert Rotenberg

    Old City Hall, Robert Rotenberg

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Touchstone, 2009, 372 pages, C$29.99 hc, ISBN 978-1-4165-9285-3

    Like many Canadians who don’t live in Toronto, my feelings about the city are a mixture of envy and distrust.  Toronto is, in some ways, Canada’s most important city –which is fine: after all, it’s tough to be anything else when about a sixth of the country’s population lives nearby.  (What’s less endearing is Toronto’s tendency to assume that anything not within commuting distance of the CN Tower might as well be on another primitive planet.  But I digress.)  Toronto is an order of magnitude bigger than my Ottawa hometown and I can never completely get used to its scale and density.  On the other hand, recent years have taught me that Toronto can be a lot of fun when approached the right way, and that while I could never live there, it’s an awesome place to visit a few times a year.

    These considerations aren’t completely foreign to Robert Rotenberg’s Old City Hall, a crime-fiction debut that lavishes attention on its characters –the most important of them being Toronto itself.  For everyone who wished the Torontonian equivalent to Robert B. Parker’s Boston or Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles, don’t look any further than Old City Hall.

    It begins with a celebrity radio host accused of murdering his wife.  The evidence against him is overwhelming, not the least being the seemingly-incriminating statement “I killed her”.  But don’t jump to early conclusions: Old City Hall soon reveals itself to be an old-fashioned mystery/procedural that describes almost everything about the subsequent trial.  Witnesses, policemen, lawyers, and journalists all become involved in trying to discover the truth behind the crime.

    The best part of the novel for anyone reasonably familiar with Toronto is the care and detail through which Rotenberg describes his hometown.  From the Don Jail to the titular Old City Hall, though details about traffic to the city’s fascination for the hapless Maple Leafs, Toronto comes alive and those who have wandered around its downtown district will be able to picture the backdrop to many of the novel’s sequences.

    But even for readers without much knowledge of Toronto, Old City Hall shines for its lavish attention to characterization.  Nearly every character of significance is sketched with skill and depth, providing full backgrounds to even the most inconsequential witnesses.  I was particularly struck by “Albert Fernandez”, a young Crown attorney who’s insanely ambitious, yet strangely likable and, ultimately, honourable in his own fashion.  It helps that Rotenberg writes clearly, with constant narrative momentum and mysteries.  Why isn’t the radio host talking?  What are the policemen missing?  Who’s lying?  Will the Leafs win the Stanley Cup?

    Unfortunately, the last fifty pages of the book feel like a messy let-down once the various parts of the plot are resolved.  Rotenberg’s problem is in attempting to do too much at a time where readers could have been satisfied with far less.  Not content with revealing the crucial circumstances of the events, he piles up overly complicated family drama far past the point where readers will care.  From a careful and enjoyable procedural crime thriller, Old City Hall becomes a jack-in the-box of unneeded and useless revelations; the novel would have ended on a stronger note without most of them.

    But that’s a late and minor sour note to a debut novel that promises much from Rotenberg’s next efforts.  The ensemble of characters introduced in Old City Hall seem rich enough to warrant a continuing series, and Toronto can always use one more high-profile crime series.  In the meantime, Old City Hall is a joy to read, and it’s a decent paean to Canada’s largest city.  Even for those of us who don’t live there, and never intend to.

  • How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu

    How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pantheon, 2010, 239 pages, C$27.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-37920-7

    It used to be that Science Fiction was something best enjoyed by a small self-selected bunch of geeks.  Nothing wrong with that; in fact, I’m often tempted to argue that SF in its purest essence is best when it’s meant to be literature for nerds who otherwise wouldn’t crack open any fiction.  Every genre serves a purpose, and SF’s reason for existing may have been to provide entertainment to the techno-scientific subculture.

    That, however, stopped being true a long time ago.  As SF movies got more popular, as SF television series multiplied, as SF took over video games, Science Fiction has diffused itself into the world, earning some permanent space in the mind of every reasonably-socialized citizen of the western world.  SF won; hurrah!  Call it a snowball effect: as SF becomes more popular, it becomes more accessible to more people; as it becomes more accessible, it grows even more popular.

    But there are consequences to such pervasiveness, and the biggest is that people will use Science Fiction for their own purposes.  While a common snotty stereotype among the SF fans is that popularity will invariably dumb-down the material, there is also a possibility that it will spur some truly oddball creation using SF tropes in ways that would never be imagined by old-school SF fans.

    I know nothing about Charles Yu except that he’s under 35, and that’s enough to make a few safe predictions: He has lived in the American cultural matrix all of his life.  No surprise if his brand of literature is influenced by a boiling cauldron of SF-flavoured references.

    How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is one of those increasingly common novels that use Science Fictional elements with a good understanding of how they work, but don’t quite fit the straightjacket description of genre SF.  Unlike previous generations of SF novels written by mainstream writers with a distant, incomplete or dismissive view of Science-Fiction, Yu’s cohort simply picks what they want to use from SF’s bag of tricks in the service of what they’re trying to do.  Yu’s first novel is playfully meta-fictional, intensely self-reflective (to the point of having a narrator sharing his name with the author), doesn’t attempt to deliver a fully-imagined reality and doesn’t really want to play by the stylistic or narrative guidelines of the genre.

    It’s nominally about a time-travel machine repairman who gets in trouble when he kills a future version of himself, but that’s really just a narrative framework on which to hang reflections on personal destinies, a process of self-growth, funny snippets about the nature of science-fiction universes and an interesting look at a protagonist who knows that something very unpleasant is about to happen to him.  There are plenty of nods to classic SF writers in-between “Holy Heinlein” [P.160], a “Niven Ring” [P.162] and “Holy Mother of Ursula K. LeGuin” [P.213], plus some cleverness in skewering the narrative conventions of SF world-building with the titular passages.

    The meta-fictional games (referring to the novel by its own page numbers, or as a book to be written by the narrator who’s aware that he’s writing one) are the extra proof that Yu’s novel is meant to be taken as literary diversion rather than hard-edged speculation.  As such, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe works more often than it should: If the novel feels shorter and les substantial than narrative-heavy classical-mode SF novels, that’s a prejudiced reading from a genre-SF perspective.  It may be more fulfilling to consider the book as a playful mainstream novel that fully engages with a science-fictional trope.  It’s certainly a joy to read –not for the story, but for the moments, digressions, references and new ways to look at familiar issues.  Despite the novel’s emo-mopey attitude, I smiled quite a bit more than I expected, and I’m going to carry the amusing bits longer than the maudlin ones.

    For those taking a wider-spectrum view of the novel and what it means, I note that it fits well between Michael Ruben’s  The Sheriff of Yrnameer, Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife and Larry Doyle’s Go Mutants! (not to mention Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) as hip quasi-mainstream novels that take a somewhat light-hearted approach to blending genre or genre-friendly elements into a literary framework.  The generation that grew up on VHS horror movies, Nintendo gaming, Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Gulf War is finally finding its voice… and it has a vision of the present that’s influenced by Science Fiction.  Gernsback and Campbell wouldn’t necessarily approve of the result, but they’re not around to complain.

  • Fade, Kyle Mills

    Fade, Kyle Mills

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2006 paperback reprint of 2005 original, 344 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-93418-1

    Kyle Mills may not be a best-selling thriller author, but he’s certainly an interesting one.  His bibliography shows a preference for tackling unusual subjects with an off-beat sensibility:  His best work to date may be Smoke Screen, a low-intensity comic thriller taking place within the smoking industry.  In other novels, he has featured characters poisoning the US drug supply, taking on Scientology-like cults, discovering Edgar J. Hoover’s secret files or publicly helping terrorists.  While not everything he writes is of equal interest, even his most forgettable novels have one or two elements worth mentioning.

    Fade won’t rank as one of his best, but it certainly shows the way Mills can take familiar thriller elements and rearrange them in an unusual fashion.  The main character of the novel is, at first glance, the kind of guy you find at the middle of just about every modern American thriller: A super-competent Special Forces operative, a one-man army capable of winning the War on Terror by himself.  Except that Salam al Fayed (“Fade”) has been wounded in action years ago and sent to retirement by a government too cheap to pay for surgery that would avert his eventual paralysis.  When former best friend Matt Egan comes knocking to ask him to perform one last mission, he’s unaware that Fade has nurtured his resentment to a dangerous level.

    Most thrillers would then go on to that last mission, to the promise of healing, to friendship between brothers-in-arms.  But this is where Fade goes off the rails: Our protagonist vehemently refuses to accept that last mission.  When the government tries to take him in through a local SWAT force, Fade kills most of them, leaving their team leader (an attractive policewoman) alive.  Contacted again by Egan, he vows deadly revenge against his ex-friend and whoever authorized the botched SWAT raid.

    But there’s a further flip in store, because while most thrillers would take painstaking efforts to paint Fade as an outright villain, Mills turns him into a strangely likable anti-hero; witty, desperate for a date with the policewoman he spared, not above acute gadget fever and definitely not deadly when he can be vengefully funny.  Fade, can often be read as a comic novel, especially when a plan for poisoning his enemies turns into a somewhat more lax experience, or when Fade hires colourful mechanics to transform his car into something more spectacular.  There are strong echoes of Smoke Signal’s smirking tone in the way much of the novel unfolds, with amusing dialogue between characters that should hate each other but seem to get along quite well, and unusual sequences that sometimes threaten to veer into absurdity.

    As far as simple reading pleasure is concerned, Fade fares well despite the often-tangled web of loyalties the reader is asked to consider.  The novel has a few standout sequences and nice character moments, such as the tense negotiations between Fade and Egan as to whether the latter’s family should be kept out of the revenge equation.  Contrarily to much of Mills’ bibliography, Fade’s intimate focus has little interest for world-shaking theatrics when there’s a character with real problems to solve within the American heartland.

    But the tension between the novel’s sometimes-serious plotting and sometimes-silly sequences eventually lands Fade in a narrative dead-end from which there’s only one unpleasant exit.  Its conflicted hero is equally deadly as he is charming, and that helps make the novel’s final moments feel bittersweet.  On the other hand, they’re a further mark of distinction for an author who doesn’t seem to want to play by the same rules of so many other interchangeable modern thrillers pitting reliably white American operatives against just-as-reliably Arab antagonists.

    Fade is less predictable than most other novels in its category, and that makes it quite a bit intriguing.  On the other hand, it remains to be seen if that kind of unorthodox approach is what has kept Mills from hitting greater sales numbers.  The danger is always that his Bookscan numbers would dip under what publishers consider to be viable threshold.  Without access to the sales numbers, it’s still easy to note (with some worry) that Mills doesn’t have an upcoming novel listing despite a last publication of two years ago.  Hopefully this is just a blip…

    [Trivial bibliographic note, but: The first edition of the mass-market paperback has an error on the copyright page stating that the “St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition” was published in “May 2005”… that is, one month before the release of the first hardcover edition.  Amazon.com has the proper May 2006 release date.]

  • Level 26: Dark Origins, Anthony E. Zuiker and Duane Swierczynski

    Level 26: Dark Origins, Anthony E. Zuiker and Duane Swierczynski

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dutton, 2009, 406 pages, C$33.50 hc, ISBN 978-0-525-95125-4

    Some novels are unexplainable, but this isn’t one of them.  It doesn’t take much more than a look at Level 26: Dark Origins’ dust jacket to understand that this is a book about money, the corporatization of entertainment and a repellent vision of the future of prose fiction.  Pompously billed and trademarked as the world “first Digi-Novel™”, Dark Origins’ main narrative hook is entirely external to the story: This is a novel with multimedia extensions.  If you want the so-called “full experience”, you need to log onto a web site and sell your soul to the Penguin Group (or at least engrave your email address in their marketing databases) to watch video segments, email snippets and other assorted miscellanea.

    (Actually, it’s even more pretentious than that.  Let me quote from the dust jacket: “Level 26 takes the best features of books, film and interactive digital technologies and roll them all into a raw, dark, and intense storytelling experience we’re calling the world’s first “digi-novel™.”)

    This has the sole virtue of feeling new.  But not really; also published in 2009, Jordan Wiseman and J.C. Hutchins’ Personal Effects: Dark Arts also tried to expand the putative “boundaries of the novel” by providing a pouch full of fake credit cards, photos and other documents (some of them with web addresses and phone numbers set up expressly for the book) that meant to provide a supplement to the prose narrative.  Like Dark Origins, Dark Arts (what’s with the Dark fascination?) was billed as a collaboration between an experienced thriller novelist and a creator best known for other kinds of entertainment.  Anthony E. Zuiker created the CSI series; Jordan Wiseman led several Augmented-Reality Games.  It starts to reason that both books would attempt to extend a novel through a mixture of ARG tropes and short multimedia clips.

    In both cases, I deliberately approached the novels as their own narratives, ignoring the included or web-accessible miscellanea.  Neither novel did particularly well when considered as just-novels.  Dark Arts was a run-of-the-mill supernatural thriller, with a few good scenes but not much in terms of narrative interest.  Dark Origins, on the other hand, is quite a bit worse… to the point where it’s easy to think that it wouldn’t have been worth publishing if it hadn’t been doped with multimedia supplement and a truckload of hype.  (In an article, Zuiker refers to Dark Origins as the “world’s first interactive crime novel”, which betrays an appalling comprehension of the word “interactive”: Passive consumption, even across multiple linked media, is not interactive.)

    Level 26 is underwhelming starting from its very premise: A super-competent retired FBI profiler is brought back in service to track down a super-competent serial killer…  Yes, indeed, “visionary creator” Zuiker couldn’t be bothered to do better than yet another Thomas Harris rip-off as the basis of his “bold new creation”.  If you haven’t yet overdosed on quasi-supernatural serial killers and the tortured profilers who can’t stop tracking them, then Dark Origins may push you over the edge.  All of the usual components are there: The family suddenly threatened by the killer, the inexplicably rich and competent psycho, the elaborate games that the antagonist plays with the police… it’s all there, down to the reluctant ex-boss, regular doses of meaningless gory deaths, kidnapping of the hero’s love interest, final horrific confrontation, and so on.

    But Dark Origins can’t leave a clichéd formula alone without adding its own special brand of stupid sauce.  Perhaps the worst is the titular “Level 26”, which presumes a scale of evil from 1 to 25 so finely graduated that we can just imagine FBI psychologists arguing the merits of a 17 rating versus a 16.  (To quote, once again, from the tedious dust jacket: “It is well-known among law enforcement personnel that murderers can be categorized as belonging to one of twenty-five levels of evil, from the naive opportunists starting out at level 1 to the organized, premeditated torture-murderers who inhabit level 25.”) But the “Level 26” nonsense also has to compete with a vision of the world so warped (even by the noir standards of serial killer glorifications) that it includes the presence of Homeland Security goons who follow the hero around with an explicit mandate to kill him if he stops tracking down the serial killer.  With allies like those, why bother having a serial killer?  Few will be surprised to find out that the killer’s formidable resources, available time and multiple competencies are never explained, since narrative coherence and logic were discounted in favour of video clips.  That’s how it goes in Digi-Novels™.

    (More pettily, that serial killer is seriously referred to as “Sqweegel”, bringing about unfortunate associations with Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.)

    For readers who quite like prose narratives and resist the corporate push to commoditize novels like other bits of safe and predictable multimedia entertainment, the creative bankruptcy of Level 26: Dark Origins as a novel is a bit of a balm.  It doesn’t herald anything like the “book of the future” nonsense that had been bandied about by breathless press clippings –This isn’t much more than another curiosity whose interest will go extinct at about the same time the novel goes out of print and the web site is closed down by the publisher. (I’ve got an entire bookmark folder filled with online supplements that didn’t last five years.)

    Attempts to reinvent the novel via trademarked multimedia gizmos are doomed to failure for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that it’s useless and expensive: the novel is not a broken form of entertainment, and attempts to shackle it to other audiovisual pieces that –significantly- take far more resources to produce than a-guy-typing-away are curiosities at best, shameless “intellectual properties”-building at worst.  I will note (with some schadenfreudian cackling) that adding a multimedia component to a book’s marketing campaign also increases the sell-through required to break even.  Dark Origins is billed as first novel in series: Given the results, I’m not seeing it going much beyond the contracted-for trilogy.  Unless the marketing database of email addresses ends up being more valuable than the royalties…

    So what’s left to say, other than Level 26: Dark Origins is a dull piece of fiction that’s not worth your time as a narrative nor as a “digi-novel™”?  That the commercial intent of the project reeks of desperation?  That Zuiker should leave books alone?  That the business model is flawed from conception? Maybe all of those things, but mostly none of those things: It’s not a fearless prediction that this project will sink without a trace and leave the rest of the industry unaffected.  Meanwhile, go read another novel without multimedia add-ons, celebrity endorsements or unwarranted self-importance: it’ll last longer.

  • The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

    The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2010, 330 pages, C$34.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-575-08887-0

    Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief was easily the most-anticipated first SF novel of 2010.  Helped along by enthusiastic praise by People in the Know (starting with Charles Stross, who not only provided an eye-popping cover blurb, but started talking about the novel months before publication), The Quantum Thief was eagerly awaited; an anomaly given the author’s thin bibliography at shorter lengths –The last first SF novel with so much buzz was Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, and it came after several Hugo-nominated short stories.

    A quick look at the cover blurb is enough to sustain any enthusiasm: We’re promised an exciting future adventure filled with reliable SF buzzwords from bizarre post-humans to dazzling hard SF.  Charles Stross’s cover blurb is designed to make any jaded hard-SF fan perk up (“Hard to admit, but I think he’s better at this stuff than I am.  The best first SF novel I’ve read in many years.”), and virtually everything else about the book seems optimized to appeal to genre SF quirks.  Almost as an afterthought, we’re led to understand that the plot outline has something to do with a super-competent gentleman thief, a daring prison escape and an even more daring heist.

    After reading the book, a few things are still true: The Quantum Thief is indeed the debut SF novel of the year and it does herald the arrival of a major new talent.  It’s invigorating, it’s filled with ideas and it’s firmly steeped inside the core assumptions of the genre.

    But you’re going to have to work in order to enjoy it, perhaps a bit more than you may expect.

    In-between gevulots, googols, Tzaddikim, Sobornost and spimescapes, there’s enough new vocabulary in The Quantum Thief to make you feel as if you’re learning a new language in order to appreciate the novel.  The opening segment is like being thrown in a lake with vague instructions on how to swim.  For a while, the narrative hovers at the edge of understanding, with just enough connecting tissue to keep going, but with a strong sense of alienation that underscores how different this future can feel.

    But this is a classic case of how high-end genre Science Fiction should work: From incluing to demonstrative definitions, SF has developed its own strategies for presenting imagined worlds, and Rajaniemi is playing that particular world-building game as well as anyone else currently writing.  It’s a challenge, but it’s a challenge that SF readers will relish; indeed, it’s one of the reasons why a lot of us read Science Fiction in the first place.

    At least there’s some comfort to be found in the plotting.  While the setting of The Quantum Thief is strange, its heist-based narrative structure is far more traditional: Our gentleman-thief protagonist is clearly inspired by Arsène Lupin, and the amateur-detective going against him cleanly echoes the traditional narrative structure of those novels.  No matter how tangled the technology and its resulting society, the storytelling heart of Rajaniemi’s debut is pure classical form.

    Still, I suspect that the main complaint against The Quantum Thief will be that while world-building is a good thing in theory, it’s no excuse to make the novel harder to read than it should be.  Rajaniemi is showing off with this first novel, and his prose style calls attention to itself by being a bit more difficult (dense, verbose, indulgent; take your pick of adjectives) than SF’s usually more transparent standards.  It feels a lot like early China Mieville’s work in how it delights in baroque prose pyrotechnics; but readers will note that current-day Miéville seems eager to strip down his style.

    While I have my own reservations about the final result, there’s little doubt that as a debut SF novel, The Quantum Thief is a solid success.  Rajaniemi is writing from the perspective of someone who understands and loves Science Fiction, and so the novel is aimed squarely at other genre-SF readers.  It reminds me a lot of Stross’ own debut Singularity Sky, and considering the progress that Stross has made since then, the parallel suggests that Rajaniemi is a major author in the making.

    Constrained to a city on Mars, The Quantum Thief offers only a glimpse at the universe Rajaniemi wants to play with: The inevitable sequels have an entire universe to explore.  Considering that Rajaniemi has already sold an entire trilogy, we can only imagine how good he’s going to be by the time we’ll get to read the third one.

  • Age of Wonders, David G. Hartwell

    Age of Wonders, David G. Hartwell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1996 revision of 1984 original, 319 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86151-6

    I must have read Age of Wonders three times in either of its incarnations, so I’m a bit surprised that I have never formally reviewed it on-line.  But my own search engine tells me that I haven’t… so here’s a quick recommendation for one of the best book ever published on the American Science Fiction genre and its subculture.

    (I might as well make a few pre-emptive disclaimers before going any further, since there are a number of links between Hartwell and myself: : I’m on a quest to collect all issues of his New York Review of Science Fiction magazine, he has edited novels by people I consider to be friends, I’ve got a handful of his books personally dedicated to me, we have shared a number of conversations throughout the years, I have moderated at least one panel with him and he has –briefly- driven me around Orlando.  We are, in other words, just a bit more than nodding acquaintances.)

    Originally published in 1984, Age of Wonders was last revised in 1996 to incorporate a number of changes in the field.  While that revision is now fifteen years old, don’t let the pre-Web publication date distract you from the book’s vast and timeless understanding of Science Fiction.  Its first point of interest is the way it explains why “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve”.  It’s at that age, after all, that bright teenagers pick up a chronic reading habit, a reading regimen that often contains a large proportion of Science-Fiction.  From his understanding of the field, Hartwell shows how disaffected teenagers often find in SF a literature that appeals to their sense of the world, and how they never completely let go of their affection for the genre after that.  Ask around SF conventions, and you will often find people who correspond exactly to this profile –including myself.

    Hartwell then proceeds to sketch a history of the fannish subculture that has, since the beginning, surrounded the Science Fiction genre.  It has forever been in the nature of SF’s readership to communicate among itself, and the presence of fandom is one of the things that still makes the SF genre so different from other literary fields: It fosters SF’s awareness of itself as a distinct entity, structures the conversation within the field and provides authors with encouragement that, in some cases, is more valuable than the potential monetary rewards offered by a wider readership outside the genre.  Science-Fiction fandom is small, but it’s concentrated.

    Age of Wonders also spends quite a bit of time discussing the nuts and bolts of the impact that SF has on its readers.  Hartwell dedicates entire chapters to the study of the “Sense of Wonder” so particular to SF, to the tortuous relationship that Science Fiction has with real science and reality, to the reasons why clear prose has long been SF’s dominant stylistic requirement and to the biggest historical controversies within the field.

    Hartwell illustrates those points with anecdotes drawn from fandom’s long history, quotations from other writers, informed opinions and, in one case, a deconstruction of a short story to see how it works.  It’s worth noting that Hartwell writes Age of Wonders from a well-rounded perspective drawn from his experience as a fan, an academician and an active editor within the field.  While the book is immensely useful as a pedagogical resource (it comes with a few appendices to provide a solid bibliography of essential works), it’s clearly written and immediately accessible to non-academician.  Its affection for the genre is obvious, but that doesn’t blind it to some of SF’s structural faults.

    Whether you’re an insider looking for a theoretical framework, or an outsider trying to understand what makes Science Fiction so different, Age of Wonder is an essential resource. Reading though it once again, I was struck by how much material I once knew and had forgotten since then: it reminded me that, without any doubt, Hartwell has forgotten more about SF than I (and most other people) will ever know.

    Fifteen web-dominated years after its publication, it’s worth pointing out that in many ways, Age of Wonders reflects a certain experience of Science Fiction that will remain of its era.  Today’s SF fan is markedly likelier to discover the genre through media sources (film, TV or video games) than to come across paperback spinners at their local drugstore.  The factors leading to a chronic teenage reading habit (ie: isolation, boredom) may not be as acute given today’s multiplicity of web-driven entertainment options.  The experience of fandom has also changed dramatically over the past decade and a half, web sites taking the role once played by local generalist conventions as gathering places for the casual fan.  Conventions have grown at once bigger and more specialized, as Hollywood-dominated Comic-Con now makes headlines while literature-focused Readercon can still thrive.  Most notable, however, is the way the geek experience that Hartwell describes has become a fairly mainstream lifestyle in-between massively successful entertainment such as Halo, Inception and The Big Bang Theory.

    I would be the first in line to buy a third edition of Age of Wonders.  Any update would have to navigate a path between a historical acknowledgement of the fannish experience, and the way geek culture has become just another market segment.  Is there anything in the written SF subculture that still distinguishes it from a more casual acquaintance with SF media?  Is written-SF still a vital side-stream of American culture, or is it merely another competing entertainment option?  Is there still something significant to a love for Science Fiction that links with a lust for the future, sympathy for technology and a self-imposed marginalization from society?

    Leaving aside the still-hypothetical question of a third edition, 1996-era Age of Wonders remains an essential component of any serious non-fiction collection about Science Fiction.  It clearly and usefully describes the genre, its readers, its reasons for existing and its essential inner workings.  It’s good enough to re-read every decade, no matter which edition you can get.

  • Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton

    Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Weekend, 2010 reprint of 2009 original, 419 pages, C$13.99 tp, ISBN 978-1-55468-811-1

    A close look at Michael Crichton’s bibliography shows a sometimes-baffling mixture of commercial instincts and contrarian beliefs.  Crichton always wrote to market, and this eventually came to justify novels that challenged orthodoxy; his belief that he was smarter than everyone else meshed well with the commercial opportunities offered by controversy, and that’s how we ended up with carefully crafted alarmist screeds such as Jurassic Park, Prey and Next, or critic-baiting reactionary tracts such as Rising Sun, Disclosure or State of Fear.

    Pirate Latitudes, published after Crichton’s death, is another, happier kind of commercially-driven project.  Seizing upon the perennial craze for pirate-related material, it’s a novel that delivers swashbuckling action and adventure in a strictly conventional fashion ripe for cinematic adaptation.  It’s a lot like Congo or Timeline in that it exhaustively explores the dramatic opportunities a place and time (17th century Caribbean), every chapter showcasing a new thrill.  Stripped of political controversy and free to exploit the new dangerous technologies of a bygone era, it’s a novel that lets readers enjoy the core strengths of Crichton’s writing without suffering from any of its assorted baggage.

    The hero of Pirates Latitudes is a capable British privateer named Charles Hunter, hired by the Governor of Jamaica to take advantage of an unusually profitable opportunity: A Spanish galleon has been left behind by the main fleet, and is believed vulnerable to attack while it’s moored at a nearby island.  Gathering capable crewmembers, Hunter prepares his expedition and sets out for plunder.  As you may expect, the way to the treasure and back won’t be simple or easy: The 17th century Caribbean is a dangerous place, and readers are right to expect a steady rhythm of thrills and adventure on the high seas.

    Whether it’s navigating shallow waters, taking on other ships in naval combat or fighting off a kraken, Pirate Latitudes delivers everything we’d expect from a pirate-themed novel.  It’s perfectly balanced between fiction and fact, with a sea monster and an uncommon series of adventures on one side, and careful descriptions of the era and nautical details on the other.  Crichton’s fiction has seldom been subtle, but it has usually been skilful and the way Pirate Latitudes can exploit the popular idea of the pirate (as depicted in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, most notably) to develop it half-realistically is one of the novel’s most charming aspects.  There’s a ton of trivia about navigating sail ships cleverly meshed in the narrative, and it’s surprisingly enjoyable.

    Narratively, the novel is almost a complete success, save for the initially curious ending.  Unlike what you’d expect from a pirate novel, it doesn’t actually end with a massive naval battle and an all-out boarding assault: those occur earlier in the novel, as do the sea monster attack, dangerous island expedition and triumphant assault on the gold-filled ship.  As the first section makes it clear in rounding up the members of the expedition, Pirate Latitudes is structured around a caper plot rather than a more conventional kind of pirate adventure.  The ending will seem underwhelming if you’re not familiar with the kind of vengeful double-cross that the form dictates.  The characters are all exceptionally accomplished in their own way, which creates a lot of opportunity for extraordinary acts and solid dialogue.

    It all amount to a fun novel: not terribly deep nor as meaningful as Crichton’s other controversy-seeking contemporary thrillers, but a decent companion to some of Crichton’s more entertaining books.  It’s also, in its own way, a decent send-off for Crichton, who deserved better than the bitter aftertaste of State of Fear and Next as his final send-off.  One last novel by Crichton reportedly remains to be published, but it’s going to be assembled from notes and a partially-written manuscript: Pirate Latitudes is the last novel truly written by Crichton, and it’s a reminder that before he became the darling of contrarians, he had an impressive career as a fine popular entertainer.  Readers might as well enjoy the experience of a master craftsman deftly delivering one last crowd-pleasing work.

    Even if you can’t read, don’t worry; it’ll be adapted as a movie sooner or later.

  • Zendegi, Greg Egan

    Zendegi, Greg Egan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2010, 332 pages, C$24.99 tp, ISBN 978-0-575-08618-0

    After two quasi-incomprehensible novels that pushed the edge of what even jaded hard-SF fans were willing to stomach, Greg Egan’s latest novel Zendegi is a return to a more accessible style that will remind his faithful readers of Teranesia.  Set in a near future and focusing intensely on mid-step technological issues, it’s notable for its attention to characters, openness to non-western culture and pessimistic contradiction of previous Egan novels.

    Structurally split between a first third set in 2012 and a second section set in 2027-2028, Zendegi first spends time with Australian journalist Martin Seymour as he travels to Iran and gets involved in a second Iranian revolution.  While this first half is mostly told as a techno-thriller set five minutes in the future, a subplot featuring Nasim, an expatriate Iranian scientist working in neurobiology, suggests the novel’s ultimate SF goals.

    Fifteen years later, the novel comes closer to the kind of future imagined in Egan’s other novels.  Virtual Worlds are now fully immersive, and new techniques are helping digitize aspects of human behaviour as semi-autonomous agents.  It’s not quite artificial intelligence, but it’s steadily getting closer.  So close, in fact, that when Seymour is diagnosed with a potentially incurable cancer, he contacts Nasim to be partially recorded in order to provide guidance to his soon-to-be-orphaned son.  Meanwhile, the convergence between human brains and virtual models is raising both hopes and controversy –leading to a few scenes of virtual vandalism with a darker purpose.

    With Zendegi, Egan takes a closer look at the middle-steps on the way to the kind of fully-digital futures he described in books such as Diaspora.  SF traditionally assumes an intermediate “…and something magical happens…” in-between the present and an AI-enabled future, but a few writers are occasionally willing to dive into the morass and set stories in the messy interim period.  (Recently, both Robert J. Sawyer with his WWW series and Ted Chiang in The Lifecycle of Software Objects have treaded upon similar themes.)

    Accordingly, there’s nothing simple or optimistic about Egan’s treatment of the subject in Zendegi.  Various approximations, shortcuts and compromises are required before having even the simplest simulated personalities up and running, and much of the effort is motivated by strictly mercenary gain as various online services compete for profit.  The main plot of the novel itself is a mournful race against time, and it doesn’t end as optimistically as you would expect –especially if your idea of Egan’s fiction was shaped by his earliest novels rather than the more nuanced material he’s been writing in his short stories.

    The best thing about Zendegi as compared to Egan’s latest Schild’s Ladder and Incandescence is that Egan has taken a step back from the abyss of incomprehensibility and delivered an accessible novel with credible human characters.  It feels a lot like Teranesia in that it allows Egan to dial down the speculation and develop a richer recognizable extrapolation of our present.  With its deep immersion in Iranian culture, Zendegi also suggests that Egan can write near-future globalized SF à la Ian McDonald.

    Unfortunately, Zendegi also leaves itself open to more common criticism.  If Schild’s Ladder and Incandescence could use “I didn’t understand most of it” negative reviews like badges of honour, Zendegi won’t benefit so much from charges that it is short story material padded to novel length.  Focusing strictly on the SF elements, it’s possible to lose much of the novel’s first third, a good chunk of the redundant segments set in the Zendegi virtual world itself, and considerably shorten the remainder of the novel.  The resulting novella would feel a lot more energetic while delivering the same extrapolative charge; it would also feel closer to Egan’s recent short fiction than his novels.

    While the finished results will please readers looking for either a more realistic take on the near-future of mind uploading or globally-aware genre fiction, Zendegi also carries a penalty by virtue of being published under the Egan brand name: It’s more timid, less fizzy, and nowhere near as interesting as much of his other books.  It is, in many ways, a wholly average SF novel.  Not bad, not fantastic; just ordinary.  This will be a relief to some, a disappointment to others, and maybe even both at the same time.

  • Tales of the Madman Underground, John Barnes

    Tales of the Madman Underground, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking, 2009, 532 pages, C$23.50 hc, ISBN 978-0-670-06081-8

    One of the paradoxes of genre publishing is that it can be as comforting in its ghetto-like nature as it can stifle those looking to try something new.  Genre fans can provide a certain predictable sales baseline, but convincing them to try something outside the boundaries of the genre can be difficult.  For every Dan Simmons able to write equally well in science-fiction, horror, fantasy and mainstream, there are a plenty of other SF writers getting no success trying to sell techno-thrillers.

    Then there are those who seem to relish breaking genre conventions.  John Barnes is, in many ways, the model of a mid-list SF genre writer, but his lengthy bibliography is filled with oddities and small surprises.  In addition to a solid core bibliography of Science Fiction novels written for adult and young adult audiences, Barnes also wrote less conventional speculative fiction: From a trilogy of men’s adventure thrillers to a light-hearted fantasy to a meta-SFictional tall tale to hard-SF novels written in collaboration with Buzz Aldrin, Barnes manages to defy and subvert expectations once every two or three novels.  I’ve got most of his bibliography (Heck, I even have his early obscure “Time Raider” trilogy in my stack of things to read) and I’m still surprised by what he dares to do.

    Now, with Tales of the Madman Underground, he turns his attention to mainstream young adult fiction.  Taking place in 1973 Ohio, this YA novel shows a few hints of Barnes’ SF pedigree: The main character read Philip K Dick and has to turn to a convention-going classmate for explanations.  A few other references can be read as reassuring winks to Barnes’ existing audience (who may be familiar with Barnes’ other young-adult Science Fiction novels), but Tales of the Madman Underground is otherwise a completely mainstream teen novel.

    It takes place over the first six days of Karl Shoemaker’s senior High School year.  He has the best of intentions: To be normal.  “Normal”, in Karl’s case, is a challenge.  Not everyone lives with an unstable widowed mother and dozens of quasi-feral cats.  Not everyone works five jobs and has to hide their money from their flighty mom.  Not everyone is a recovering alcoholic teen.  Not everyone has been branded a psychopath, sent to group therapy and pre-emptively condemned to a permanent psychological record.  Karl’s goal is to take his last year one day at a time, and be as normal as possible to avoid returning to “the Madman Underground.”  It’s not that his best friends aren’t Madmen… but he’d rather try to be normal for a while.

    I’m not going to attempt guessing how much of Tales of the Madman Underground is nostalgia for Barnes (who was 16 in 1973); it’s more useful to note that this is a novel by an experienced novelist, and that the result is a solid success.  The atmosphere of a small Midwestern town is described with idiosyncratic flavour and the characters that surround Karl are richly sketched.  The titular Madmen may have been designated as broken minds by the system, but the novel shows how even the most distressed of them can depend on each other for support and so deserve our sympathy.  (In one of the book’s best scenes, they show up the school’s newest therapist… and find out that she’s an unexpected ally.)  Karl himself is a likable protagonist, emboldened and hardened by situations that others would find desperate.  We root for him to a rare degree, and the small victories that constitute his ultimate triumph are earned many times over.

    Karl’s narration is direct, suitably profane, and addictive from the very first few pages.  The terrific dialogue is a joy to read, making the 500+pages book seem much shorter.  The narrative flow isn’t complicated, but it’s enlivened by numerous subplots (many of them relating to Karl’s numerous side-jobs) and a series of stories about the Madman Underground’s most memorable adventures.  Set in 1973, it seems just as relevant today.

    Anyone who has read more than two Barnes novels knows that he can write dark-and-repulsive like the worst of them.  And while Tales of the Madman Underground has its share of uncomfortable moments (including a sequence where we’re temporarily brought to doubt the reliability of the potentially-psychotic narrator), it features one of Barnes’ most sympathetic character yet and it leads to an unusually triumphant conclusion.  The obstacles facing Karl are formidable, but they’re overcome fairly and the last few pages are smiles upon smiles.  It adds up to one of Barnes’ most enjoyable books yet, and a rare one of his that can be described as unabashedly upbeat.  Even die-hard genre SF fans willing to genre-hop and follow Barnes in his historical adventure will get much out of it.

  • Under the Dome, Stephen King

    Under the Dome, Stephen King

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scribner, 2009, 1074 pages, C$39.99 hc, ISBN 978-1-4391-4850-1

    Frankly, there’s just one thing you need to know about Stephen King’s Under the Dome:  It’s big.  It’s really, really big.  Count the pages and recall the two other King novels of similar heft: The Stand and It.   The page count shows that Under the Dome is King’s third-longest novel, and it certainly feels epic.

    The premise is simple: When a small Maine town is cut off from the world by an invisible but impassable barrier, its residents struggle to understand what’s going on and survive the experience.  But such a plot summary glosses over the totality of King’s presentation of the event.  He’s got two thousand viewpoints to play with, and if the action wisely focuses on half a dozen main protagonists, at times it feels as if the omniscient narration gives us a glimpse of every single citizen of Chester’s Mill.  The first chapter alone takes a kaleidoscopic view of what happens when the dome falls, with crashing vehicles, cut-off body parts, interrupted streams, accidents of fate locking some people in or out and other assorted phenomenon.  The omniscient narration can be chatty, but it also goes quiet when it’s time to focus on the main characters.

    Because there’s a lot more to Under the Dome than a town physically cut off from the rest of the world: Chester’s Mill has its share of bad apples, and they control the place.  When media attention brought on the city following the fall of the dome threatens to expose secrets that the guilty would rather keep hidden, the dome itself becomes less dangerous than the people inside … Psychotic murderers, crystal-meth entrepreneurs, power-crazy policemen and panicked citizen all show their true colours during the days that follow the fall of the dome.

    But it’s the details through which King tells his story that make Under the Dome such an impressive and frustrating book.  On one hand, there is enough time and space here for elaborate plotting, reversals of fortune, copious inner monologues and ample character growth.  When King activates his omniscient narration, it’s like floating above a small town and having direct access to two thousand minds in all their diversity.  On the other hand, that amount of verbiage slows the action down and frequently makes readers wish for the next plot point.  King pulls a bit too obviously on familiar plot threads about religion, serial killers, corrupt authority and civil unrest to avoid a feeling of familiarity throughout much of Under the Dome.

    There is, however, quite a bit of allegory going on under the surface of the text.  It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see the parallels between an isolated and paranoid Chester’s Mill and Bush-administration America.  The division of power between a ruthless sheriff and incompetent politicians has real-world parallels, and much of the popular hysteria cuts a bit too close to headlines of the last decade to be entirely accidental.

    Where Under the Dome doesn’t do so well is in its ultimate justification for the Dome.  It moves the novel from the Horror to the Science Fiction genre.  This is not by itself a bad thing, but it will make a number of more rigorous readers cringe given the thinness of the premise and the somewhat arbitrary way the novel is resolved.

    Still, that ending is preceded by an apocalyptic sequence that leaves few people standing, so it all evens out.  While Under the Dome can occasionally be exasperating, annoying and underwhelming, it’s also a novel that disappoints because it attempts so much: Even if he misses a few targets along the way, King still manages to hit plenty of them.  The result may not have the quasi-mythical heft of The Stand or the tight focus of “The Mist”, but it’s the kind of wide-screen horror/thriller that has become a bit too rare lately.  King being King, it’s also a book written with clean prose, compelling characters and a thicket of plot developments.  It is, in short, a perfect book for those who want to sink into a lengthy reading experience and blink their eyes back to reality a long time later.

    In its own four-pounds fashion, it’s also a powerful advertisement for ebook readers.