Book Review

  • The Electric Church, Jeff Somers

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Orbit, 2007, 465 pages, C$14.99 tpb, ISBN 978-0-316-02172-2

    It’s possible to read far too much in a new publisher’s first book. In ten years, no matter what kind of critical reception awaits Jeff Somer’s The Electric Church, few people will even remember that it was the first title ever published by the US imprint of Orbit, the legendary UK SF publisher now replacing Warner Aspect on the North American continent after complex corporate shenanigans. The novel will ultimately stand on its own: we shouldn’t read too much in its failings.

    It just wouldn’t do to dismiss US Orbit as a bread-and-butter publisher of conventional genre fiction based on a single data point, right?

    It’s particularly unfair since Somer’s novel is unusually susceptible to external factors. In this case, I ended up reading The Electric Church too soon after Richard Morgan’s Black Man, and the similar territory covered by both novels (as “tough-guy Science Fiction”) made it hard not to make comparisons, usually to Somers’ detriment. While The Electric Church novel is not unsuccessful, it’s a surface read that seems to remain content with shoot’em-up heroics and cardboard dystopia.

    So let’s try to focus on just this novel rather than burden it with expectations of what it means for the future of genre publishing in general.

    The Electric Church largely takes place in the kind of dystopian future that can be appreciated only with gen-X cynicism and a thirst for fighting the power: After blurry social upheavals, most of New York has reverted to a city-wide blend of anarchy and authoritarianism, with criminals trying to fight their way through life and avoid being trapped by the debilitating weight of the central authority. Rich and happy people presumably exist elsewhere, but those might as well be abstractions for protagonist Avery Cates, a professional assassin who has survived an increasingly unlikely life in the streets of Manhattan.

    As the novel begins, Cates narrowly escapes a police raid, reflects upon his sorry life and runs afoul of the titular Electric Church, a growing cult that promises eternal life to its recruits at the cost of their individual selves. Hints abound that the conversion process may not be entirely voluntary if ever the Church sets sight on a specific recruit. Cates soon gets the chance to dig deeper in the Church after getting a particularly dangerous assignment from an even more dangerous client.

    The rest of the story is a familiar riff on caper crime drama and hardboiled heroics, with the recruitment of helpful rogues, early reconnaissance skirmishes, ever-rising stakes and dramatic shootouts. As Cates comes closer and closer to his targets, the body count rises and the guns get bigger. An increasing number of assassins crowd the cast of characters as The Electric Church leaves behind low criminality in favour of high insurrection.

    I’ll give it as much: The style is deliciously noir and the pacing steadily pushes forward. Somers, through Cates-as-narrator, isn’t afraid to be hardboiled to the point of self-parody and it certainly gives a distinct flavour to the prose. The short chapters (written for serialisation) make for easy reading, and the plot is efficiently structured around its twists and revelations.

    On the other hand, this is all very familiar material, without much depth or originality. The setting seems taken from the “it’s a good future for being a bad person” bin and smacks more of teenage video-game alienation (with guns and authority figures to shoot down) than any serious attempt to piece together an extrapolated future. Science-fiction as a backdrop to gunfights rather than a way to explore issues. It takes all kinds, I suppose: Most casual readers shouldn’t care as long as the entertainment value is there (and it is), but crankier readers who have seen this type of material many times before may feel their eyes glaze over. Superior alternatives like Morgan’s Black Man only deepen the dissatisfaction.

    But I’m measuring the novel against unrealistic standards. Giving The Electric Church what it deserves without unfair comparisons, it’s a promising debut from a writer who’s got potential as long as he shakes off the more derivative aspects of his fiction. The prose is enjoyable, the characters are generally well-drawn and if the plot owes too much to familiar genre mechanics, it’s executed with competence. I may not be particularly looking forward to the upcoming direct sequel The Digital Plague, but I’ll pay attention whenever Somers breaks away from that particular dystopian future.

    [June 2008: As feared, The Digital Plague is more of the same: While the adventure is slightly less linear, it kills off most of the secondary characters and ends up being tiresome. The prose style is still more interesting than the actual story, which promises much for Somers as soon as he gets out of the Avery Cates rut.]

  • The Wild Shore, Kim Stanley Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1984, 371 pages, C$2.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-88870-4

    As an avid reader, I obsess about things that are completely meaningless to the rest of the world. I wonder, for instance, about how tastes change over time. About how genre familiarity destroys some books and enhances others. About how it’s possible to be unimpressed by an author, only to re-discover him years later with surprise and pleasure. Even if my tastes have remained largely unchanged over time (sometimes to my dismay), authors like Kim Stanley Robinson give me reason to hope that I’m become a better reader.

    I wasn’t overly impressed, eleven years ago, with his first short story collection The Planet on the Table. But as the years went on, I found more and more to like in his fiction, until he became a standby in my list of authors to buy on sight. I don’t think I would have appreciated The Wild Shore as much ten years ago; I may even like it more in another ten. Who knows what else I’ll know by then?

    For instance, The Wild Shore is best appreciated with a knowledge of post-apocalyptic fiction. Here, a nuclear attack has devastated the United States sixty years prior to the events of the novel, plunging the country in a primitive collection of city-states carefully monitored by foreign powers. We eventually discover that the lack of advanced technology is not an accident: bad things from space tend to happen to anyone who attempts to re-develop advanced technology on American soil. The Japanese keep patrols on the west coast to make sure that things stay under control.

    This state of affairs soon proves unbearable to young Henry, who emerges from a generally content childhood in Orange County, California, with ideas on how to fight foreign influence. Dragged in an emerging war between neighbouring cities and the Japanese overseers, Henry sees a bit of the world, undergoes a number of adventures and grows up a bit. There’s not much more to the plot, but it’s competently portrayed.

    The Wild Shore remains Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel and structurally it’s not quite as tight as it could be. Among other annoyances, the novel includes several chapters of a travelogue by an American travelling around the world, which take away from Henry’s tale. The attack that destroyed America isn’t particularly believable (3000 suitcase nukes?!?), and some passages rely heavily on coincidence, such as Henry’s unbelievable luck in meeting his friends after a nautical odyssey.

    But the book is more interesting when it’s measured against so much of the nuclear post-apocalyptic sub-genre that formed such a part of SF in the seventies and eighties. In The Wild Shore, the American nationalists who want to rebuild America to its former glory are misguided. Indeed, the first surprise of the book is in seeing how pleasant Henry’s life seems to be. This first volume is meant as the “post-apocalyptic” element of the trilogy, but things aren’t always as bleak at they appear.

    (The quarantine of the United States by other countries is seen as a necessary evil, and that particular idea finds a justified resonance in Robinson’s follow-up volume The Gold Coast. Among other things, Robinson has intended The Wild Shore to be part of an unusual trilogy: Three views of the future, set in California’s Orange County, more or less independent from one another. )

    In terms of prose, though, it’s easy to recognize in this first novel the same prose style (not entirely dispassionate, not entirely exempt from showy cleverness) that would follow during most of Robinson’s career. The Wild Shore is hardly a perfect novel, and the nuclear theme may not be entirely credible today, but it’s a fine book and a good portrait of the author as a budding utopian. I’m glad I read it today rather than years ago, and I’m looking forward to the day where I’ll be able to re-read it with even greater pleasure.

    [March 2008: And now I know something I didn’t when I read The Wild Shore: its kinship with Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague” (1912). Thanks to Donald Alexandre for pointing out the parallels at an ICFA presentation.]

  • Hard As Nails, Dan Simmons

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin Minotaur, 2003, 357 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-99468-0

    It’s a widely-held belief that Dan Simmons can excel in any genre he chooses to write. While that’s not always true, it’s hard to find counter-examples. (In hindsight, his foray in techno-thriller, Darwin’s Blade, was enjoyable but ultimately ridiculous thanks to an accumulation of talents in its protagonist.) With Hard as Nails, Simmons at least keeps proving that he can write a hard-boiled mystery series as well as anyone.

    This is private investigator Joe Kurtz’s third adventure, and it’s just as harsh and unpleasant as Hard Case and Hard Freeze. Buffalo-area Kurtz’s life so far has been filled with shootouts and broken bones (his and others), so we know that Hard as Nail is going to remain true to form when the novel begins with “On the day he was shot in the head, things were going strangely well for Joe Kurtz.”

    Both Kurtz and his parole officer end the first chapter at the hospital, badly wounded. But Kurtz wastes no time in getting pampered by the American medical system: he self-checks out a few pages later, popping aspirins and putting himself on the case. It’s not as if he’s got too few enemies to suspect: in between decades of lousy behaviour, a stint in prison, and the events of the first two novels, Kurtz is going to have more trouble finding out who doesn’t want to kill him. Especially given how most of those who don’t want to kill him always add “…yet.” to their reassurances. By mid-book, headache-ridden Kurtz has been promised death so many times that it looks as if his first-chapter survival was just one more bit of bad luck.

    It wouldn’t be a Kurtz book without multiple antagonists, and so Hard as Nails multiplies the complications, landing Kurtz in the cross-hairs of rival criminal gangs, a mafia princess, the police and a serial killer who enjoys what he does. Recurring paid assassin “The Dane” is soon added to the mix. If you think that Kurtz will need an army to make it to the end of the book, well, you’re not wrong.

    The muscular nature of hard-boiled mysteries is ably reflected in the author’s no-nonsense prose, which charges forward without fuss or fanciness. Simmons is a professional, and he knows when to stick to efficient prose: At a snappy 357 pages, Hard As Nails is a pleasure to read and a remarkable page-turner.

    It’s also, obviously, a bit of a mess. There’s a price to pay for outrageous plotting, and Hard As Nails often goes over the top. As in Hard Freeze, the mixture of straightforward mob crime drama and grotesque serial killer mystery remains a challenge to manage efficiently, and it’s the serial killer angle that ultimately exasperates with self-conscious labels such as “The Artful Dodger” given to the serial killer in question. There’s also a tendency for the plot to become so complex that readers will stop trying to piece it together and just accept what happens, shrug, and go on. It would also be best for new readers to read all three Kurtz novel in short order in order to keep in mind all of the various bit players in Kurtz’s life. It may be no accident if the ending comes as a bit of a melodramatic deus ex machina that cuts through complications with a precise kill, exactly like the end of the second volume.

    All of which may explain why, five years after publication, Hard As Nails remains the last volume in the Joe Kurtz series. I presume that Simmons’ well-demonstrated desire to keep writing new things is at play here (Hard as Nails was followed by the SF dyptich Illium/Olympos, then by the horror-thriller The Terror), but genre fatigue may also be a factor when it looks as if every single hardboiled plot device has been crammed in those first three books.

    But even if this ends up being the last Joe Kurtz adventure, the result is a generally enjoyable third volume in an equally good series. Joe Kurtz has taken more damage than anyone would reasonably expect: A little rest can only do him good.

  • Black Man, Richard Morgan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2007, 546 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 978-0-575-07767-6

    Anyone can get an idea, but the measure of true professionals is what they do with it. It’s the difference between luck and talent: how an author masters the tools of the trade in order to deliver a satisfying experience. If anything, Black Man shows how much progress Richard Morgan has made over five novels, from a gifted amateur to a solid professional.

    At first glance, Black Man struggles to distinguish itself from so many thriller/SF hybrids: It’s a serial killer novel. It’s a genetic discrimination novel. It’s a buddy-cop story. It’s a near-future thriller with chases and fights and mysteries and United Nations operatives. Worse yet: whatever elements do come up in plot summaries are the kind of tedious clichés seen so often seen in naive small-press Science Fiction: a race of men genetically engineered to be killers, an America divided between liberal blue and conservative red states, and so on. We’re far from the high-concept sleeving of Altered Carbon and its two sequels, or the corporate advancement through car combat in Market Forces.

    But don’t let any of this fool you: Black Man is written by a professional, and there’s a lot of clever material under the surface sheen of this SF thriller. Morgan is able to take all of those elements and spin them into a thought-provoking, genre-savvy exploration of issues that even seem fresh once he’s done with them.

    The hero of the tale is one Carl Marsalis, a genetically-engineered “variant thirteen” whose talents include an innate propensity toward violence. This seems to be a good asset in his chosen career as an enforcer for the United Nations. Though never called a “blade runner”, his job is to track down and take care of unregistered thirteens. Things don’t always go well, however, and within chapters of the opening, he’s in a Florida prison for moral offences against the ultra-conservative government of the “Red” United States. When agents from the “Blue” States come to him with an offer to track down a thirteen who came back from Mars and left behind a trail of partially digested bodies before even landing on Earth, he’s unusually receptive to their offer.

    The ensuing chase takes place on three continents and in virtual reality, but Morgan has much more in mind than a simple adventure tale. Before even realizing it, we’re tackling speculations about the feminisation of western society, the need for aggression in protecting metaphorical flocks of sheep, the role of genetic determinism, the place of politics in shaping our futures and the lasting consequences of what seemed like good ideas at the time. As the title of the book suggests, it also has something to say about racism and gender. (Although regular Morgan readers may be excused if their first though upon hearing “Richard Morgan’s Black Man” is thinking “cool; covert ops” before seeing the more literal meaning of the title.)

    Best of all, Black Man discusses those issues in ways that ground their pedestrian description in credibility. Setting a novel in a world where “Jesusland” is a reality smacks of cheap Internet memes given form, but it works really well in the novel itself, as the reasons of the split between the two United States feel plausible (indeed, the “Blue” states are the breakaway states) and are described with enough detail to make them feel natural. Much of the same care is spent in making the “genetic determinism” issue more complex that it may seem at first glance. Marsalis himself is a classic Morgan protagonist stuck between his alpha-male base impulses, his awareness of his flaws and everyone else’s view of him. In the end, there isn’t much to differentiate him from other humans, and that, of course, is the entire point. (And so is the recognition that violence is a non-optimal problem resolution strategy. In a chase thriller. Now that’s either being clever or hypocritical.)

    If there’s a significant flaw with Black Man, it’s to be found in the amount of prose it takes to tell its story. As complex and nuanced as Morgan may want to make his story, no thriller actually deserves to go over 600 pages. The numerous tangents do nothing to tighten the impact of the story, and the consequent impact on the novel’s narrative drive is unpleasant. The contrast with the rush-ahead pacing of Market Forces is telling.

    But even with superfluous hundred pages, Black Man still manages to find a place atop the year’s best SF novels. It’s particularly impressive for the way it manages to overcome overused SF elements and make something worthwhile out of them. Morgan’s attempt to look at his own tough-guy preoccupations is just another facet of his growing effectiveness as a writer. There may not be anything radically new or original in Black Man, but the end result is worth a look, and even a thought or two.

  • Unlikely Utopia, Michael Adams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking Canada, 2007, 180 pages, C$34.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-670-06368-0

    Despite occasional setbacks, the twenty-first century has been a remarkably good time to be Canadian. Steadfastly progressive politics despite occasional conservative leadership, strong economic indicators and amazing social cohesion: for a country that many counted for dead in the early 1990s, Canada has bounced back and a new feeling of smug nationalism has swept the land. One of the cheerleaders of this new conception of Canada is pollster Michael Adams, whose perspective on the opinions of the land make him a privileged commentator on current trends. His 2003 dissection of Canada/USA differences, Fire and Ice, remains one of the most illuminating essay on the social differences between both countries.

    After 2005’s American Backlash, which tried to apply many of the same polling results to analyze the American character, his newest pop-sociology book is Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism. As the unsubtle subtitle indicates, this is “a good-news story about Canadian multiculturalism”. Contradicting many, Adams attempts to prove that the Canadian experience in dealing with immigration is producing exceptional results.

    This is a faintly daring thesis for a number of reasons. Over the past few years, national evening news have relayed a stream of mini-crises and events almost designed to make us feel as if the Grand Canadian Experiment with multiculturalism was reaching saturation point: Controversies over religious (ie: “non-Christian”) symbols in schools, the Herouxville debacle (in which a tiny Quebec town passed an explicitly racist code of conduct), racially-tinged crime reports in Toronto, public hearings on cultural accommodation in Quebec, and so on. Not knowing any better, one would think that there was nothing to do but turn back the clock, barricade the borders and go ask the Queen for advice.

    Then there’s the typically Canadian gift for self-doubt. Adams scores the book’s first rhetorical victory early on when he points out that Canadian have a quasi-pathological need to put themselves down. Few Canadians will agree that their national social model is inherently superior: for every success, Canadians will feel obligated to ward off accusations of smugness by pointing our the country’s failing in dealing with first nations, with immigrant’s educational equivalents, with the country’s history of racism, with systemic discrimination. “Canadians seem to expect, if not downright savour, bad news.” [P.xviii]

    Adams sees things differently. In the first of the book’s four chapters, he looks at recent immigrant survey results and finds more cause for celebration than concern: 85% of respondents would still come back to Canada if they had to do it again, 75% of all Canadians think immigration had a positive effect on the country (a result far above other countries) and 85% think that multiculturalism is important to our national identity. He finds evidence that the average Canadians think the system is in trouble for other people, but not for them.

    In the second chapter, he looks at numbers from Statistics Canada to find out that so-called “ethnic enclaves” in Canada are hardly homogeneous, but reflect the increasing diversity of Canadian cities. Further finding show that immigrants consistently rank the weather as what they like least about Canada, that Canada is doing better than other western countries in integrating foreign-born residents in politics, and that intermarriages between ethnic groups are skyrocketing, having “increased by 35 percent between 1991 and 2001.” [P.82] “If Canada is becoming a hopelessly segregated society, rising rates of intermarriage are a strange symptom of the alleged disease”.[P.85]

    Chapter Three focuses on Muslims in Canada by presenting the results of a special survey conducted in late 2006. Again, Adams finds few causes for concern: Large majorities of respondents are proud to be Canadian (94%), think that Muslims are better treated in Canada than in other Western countries (77%) and believe that most Muslim want to adopt Canadian customs (58%). In fact, Adams finds little cause to think that the Muslim experience in Canada is any different from any other group of immigrants.

    Finally, Adams, looks at Quebec’s own complex feelings about multiculturalism, concluding (not unreasonably) that the frenzy of controversy about “reasonable accommodations” is more a reflexion of Quebec’s own insecurities as they see their culture as being already threatened by the English-speaking masses outside the province’s border. To that, one should add Quebec’s ringing rejection of religion as a dominant cultural force during the past few decades, giving rise to self-consciously secular society that also seems threatened by both the immigrant arrivals and the conservative forces outside Quebec.

    But beyond the data, there’s a lot to like in the way that Unlikely Utopia is written. Pop-sociology has rarely been so much fun to read, and considerable praise should be heaped on Adams’ shoulders as he manages to bring all the numbers together in a coherent thesis. Unlikely pop references abound, as do common sense put-downs and snarky attacks against paranoid right-wing pundits.

    Unlikely Utopia is amusing, clear and rhetorically deft. Adams must have a fantastic team of beta readers, because time and time again, the book manages to spot and handles objections even as they come up in the readers’ mind. For instance, Adams answers the questions raised by the Paris riots by pointing out at the lack of ghettos in Canadian cities, and deals with the obvious question of “home-grown terrorism” by pointing out that such things are always statistical outliers that don’t reflect majority opinion or social trends. He adds “If -horribly- a terrorist attack does occur on Canadian soil, there is no need to throw out this book; nothing in it will necessarily have been proven false. But if one day you wake up and read on the front page of the newspaper that tens of thousands of cars have been burned by angry, excluded youth in the suburbs of a Canadian city where unemployment among ethnic minorities approaches 40 percent, by all mean throw the book out. I’ll have already used mine as kindling.” [P.145]

    The other bit of Unlikely Utopia that is worth pondering is the supposition that “diversity seems to work better the more there is of it. As American society has shown us, a society with only two major racial groups – one affluent, the other persistently much less so – is anything but easy to manage. In Canadian society, although we have a long way to do, the sheer scale of our diversity may come to offset issues of prejudice and discrimination – or as one commentator put it, we may one day simply have too many races for racism to survive.” [P.60]

    Some will find this ridiculously optimistic, but I think that Adams is on to something here, and that his entire book presents are far more nuanced portrait of the situation than the evening news choose to highlight. The unseen majority of the immigrant experience in Canada is uneventful in the way most lives are lived in Canada. As a diversity-loving multicultural liberal, I happen to be in
    Adams’ target audience for Unlikely Utopia, but the numbers seem to be on our side for once.

    But for all of my admiration for Adams’ work here, I’m stopping short of recommending the book as a purchase. Like American Backlash, the amount of material in the book’s slim 180 pages hardly warrants the high price tag. Wait for the paperback or put yourself on the waiting list at the nearest library. It’s an entertaining book with a positive message and a fantastic sense of the New Canada growing under all the chaff thrown up in the media, but it’s hardly worth $34.00. You can get a far cheaper illustration of the triumph of Canadian multiculturalism by looking over the food court at the nearest mall.

  • Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pantheon, 2007, 287 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-375-42486-1

    Superhero revisionism is in. Which is in keeping with the times, really: Following the success of the first X-Men movie in 2001, superheroes jumped from the comics page to mass pop-culture consciousness, leaving open the door for reinterpretations of the concept from the execrable MY EX-SUPERHERO GIRLFRIEND to the instant-classic THE INCREDIBLES. But true superhero revisionism waits for no movies, going back to Allan Moore’s Watchmen and Robert Meyer’s Superfolks, if not earlier to DC’s own self-parodies. Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible is the newest brick in that particular wall.

    I’m not going to go over the plot: Once you know that it’s going to be a superhero novel, you can guess that this will boil down to the classical ur-plot about a madman taking over the world.

    But what Grossman tries to do here is to meld the sensibilities of hip mainstream fiction with the kind of overblown plotting we usually in superhero comics. Alternating between the viewpoints of super-villain Doctor Impossible (he’s not evil, just deranged) and super-heroine Fatale (she’s not just cannon-fodder, honest), Soon I Will Be Invincible takes the superhero world as given and then tries to make it sound credible.

    Which isn’t the same thing as parody. In fact, one of the novel’s best feature is how it works both as a pastiche and a homage, depending on the baggage you bring to the book. Those who already find superhero comics to be the dumbest sub-genre on the face of the planet will find plenty of ammunition for their disdain here; others with a forty-dollar-a-week habit at the local comic book store will just enjoy the book as a prose version of their favourite stories. Everyone in-between will be able to find some satisfaction in Grossman’s work.

    Certainly, the prose style is amusing enough to make this book a fast read. Both characters are an excellent excuse to explain the super-hero world in all of its unsavoury details. Being a super-villain isn’t as much fun as one would assume, and being converted from an ordinary woman to a super-powered cyborg carries along its slice of psychological trauma.

    For comic-book fans, part of the fun is in finding where Grossman’s mythology is meant to intersect with existing superhero canon. Superman, Batman and Wonder-Woman are predictably easy to spot, but don’t think that this is just a JLA story under a new name: Grossman’s modified mythology allows him to have more fun that could have had if he had set out to write a straight parody. Doctor Impossible’s biography is crammed with the kind of eventful memories that can only result from a monthly publication schedule, but trying to map a specific Marvel/DC super-villain to his past isn’t helpful: He’s an archetype for all super-villains, including the usual grandiose plots and unnerving escape abilities.

    Fatale, on the other hand, is a far more specific superhero, a superhuman cyborg with a shady past that too-conveniently turns out to be related to the matter at hand. Her role isn’t as active as Doctor Impossible, and it’s partly because she doesn’t work alone: Through her viewpoint, we get to learn all about “The Champions”, the team of superheros trying to track down and stop Doctor Impossible before he does take over the world. It’s a lively bunch, especially when past squabbles keep bubbling to the surface.

    Unfortunately, Grossman’s approach carries along it own problems. The structural decision to go back and forth between Doctor Impossible and Fatale is often problematic, especially at the end of the book where a more sweeping perspective on the climax would have been more helpful. Instead, Grossman has to cut his chapters more closely, which results in a conclusion where we almost miss what’s happening. Another problem is that Doctor Impossible’s viewpoint is generally more interesting than Fatale’s characters, which doesn’t sustain the pacing of the novel very well. On the other hand, Doctor Impossible often sounds annoyingly emo, in a whiny “I was beaten up in school; I will take over the world” fashion. Through a powerful message against bullying, it does smack of an easy rationale for turning irremediably evil.

    (On the other hand, Grossman’s integration of technological, noir and fantastical elements reminded me that comic-book superheroes may have been the first and dominant form of slipstream, or genre fusion, for decades now. Now that’s an insight I wasn’t expecting from a comic super-hero romp.)

    But little of that matters in the novel itself, which is fun and hugely enjoyable to read. It may not be as good as it could have been, but it’s still a terrific piece of entertainment for anyone with any awareness whatsoever of the rules of super-hero stories. Which, given the resurgence of such movies, may very well be all of us by now.

  • Lost Light, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little Brown, 2003, 360 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-316-15460-1

    Many readers expected things to change with Michael Connelly’s newest Harry Bosch novel. Bosch, after all, resigned from the police force at the end of City of Bones, and having him investigate anything without official support would be a break from Connelly’s well-oiled police procedural mode. But Bosch fans may not be ready for a far more dramatic change: Having Harry narrate his newest investigation.

    That’s right: For the first time, we get into Bosch’s head, and it may be a bit too close for comfort. It’s not the first time Connelly has shown us his best-known detective through another viewpoint: In A Darkness More than Night, Harry appeared filtered through the perception of another investigator and the result was a far scarier Bosch than usually portrayed by the sympathetic third-person narration.

    But this first-person POV allows no distance between what Harry thinks and what he does, and the result is perhaps a bit too revealing. Bosch, after all, is a taciturn introvert. His thoughts and his actions often differ dramatically. Who would expect one of mystery fiction’s great tough guys to say:

    “I am fifty-two years old and I believe it. At night when I try to sleep but can’t, that is when I know it. It is when all those pathways seem to connect and I see the people I have loved and hated and helped and hurt. I see the hands that reach for me. I hear the beat and see and understand what I must do. I know my mission and I know there is no turning away or turning back. And it is in those moments that I know there is no end of things in the heart.” [P.3]

    But let’s give Harry a break: After all, he’s retired. At the beginning of Lost Light, he takes on a private investigation out of boredom and a sense of unfinished business. Years before, Harry investigated the murder of a young woman and never solved it: now he wants another crack at the case. But unsolved mysteries have a history of blossoming into complex and unpredictable adventures for Harry, and this case in no exception. Before long, we’ve touched upon the movie industry, money counterfeiting, covert video surveillance and that newest gadget in the mystery toolbox: homeland security.

    Harry, of course, is working without official protection. He may bluff his way around like a veteran policeman, but he’s on thin ice and that never gets more obvious than when the FBI decides to rough him around after too many impertinent questions. From the guy who books criminals, Harry finds himself in a holding cell at a place that is barely officially acknowledged. He doesn’t appreciate the experience, and few things could have highlighted the added difficulties of operating without a badge.

    As far as Connelly whodunits go, Lost Light is a capable entry in the Bosch series, ending with a spectacular shootout the likes of which we have rarely seen in the series. It does seem to suggest a transition of sorts for Harry, who may or may not go back to the uniformed life after a while on the civilian side. Bosch, as has been obvious since the first Connelly novel, distrusts authority but can’t operate outside a hierarchal structure. Add to that the difficulties in dealing with his ex-wife, and there’s still plenty of juice ahead for dramatic complications in Bosch’s life.

    After the disappointing City of Bones, Lost Light feels like a better-controlled novel and welcome evolution in the Bosch saga. I’m not sure that the P.I. model is sustainable, but Connelly is able to play upon a few crucial differences in Bosch’s status as a retired cop and that brings an added layer of interest in this particular investigation. Harry as a narrator is a risky conceit, but the Michael Connelly Reading Project (“one book by month, until we’re done”) is proceeding apace. Who knows what surprises await Harry in the next novel?

  • The Quorum, Kim Newman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1994, 311 pages, £4.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-85242-6

    It takes some skill in which to write a satisfying horror novel in which no one dies.

    (This isn’t a spoiler as long as you remember that there are fates worse that death.)

    Most people, after all, entertain a vague idea of karmic retribution: Do good, and good things will happen to you. But what if, through supernatural intervention, this wasn’t true? What if the persecution of a specific person could ensure success and happiness? If you’re intrigued by the idea, mull on this: What if you were the persecuted person?

    Such is the Faustian bargain at the heart of The Quorum, a wholly unconventional and unnerving horror novel from Kim Newman. At times, it looks as if the unpredictable Newman excels at everything he does, and it’s not The Quorum that will diminish his consistently brilliant reputation. It works as a horror novel, as a time-capsule of Britain between the sixties and the nineties, as social satire and as a mesmerizing page-turner.

    From the second chapter (past a creepy prologue introducing Derek Leech, the game-player behind the scenes of this novel), we understand that things aren’t right. As three childhood friends spend their time talking about a schoolmate’s bad luck, we’re led to understand that there is a connection between all of them. And so the first section of The Quorum describes how four friends meet at a boarding school, go through the usual trials of an English education, and end up splitting up on a winter night. One of them is left in a car; the three others as seduced in making a chilling deal with Leech: success against misery. Their success, their friend’s misery.

    There are rules, but the intent is horrifyingly simple: As long as their friend suffers, the three other men will succeed. As the book begins, one’s a comic-book artist, another is a television star and the third one is a well-regarded novelist. (Some resemblance with Newman’s contemporaries may not be accidental, but is definitely not mean-spirited.) Meanwhile, their victim struggles through life after disastrous romantic affairs, a series of mysteriously terminated jobs and a higher-than-average run of bad luck.

    One of The Quorum‘s best aspects is how it naturally leads to a contemplation of luck and the flow of lives. The little accident that lead to big decisions, the small inflexion points where someone could play dirty tricks. The ways in which another person’s life can be made unbearably miserable.

    This having been established, The Quorum moves into another phase as the more supernatural elements of the tale are revealed. Derek Leech is a devil with a purpose, and his victim-by-proxy has a specific place in his plans. But is it possible to torture someone eternally? What happens when there’s no more suffering to extract?

    The last section of The Quorum is dramatically weaker than the other ones: The conflicts have been more or less settled, all that’s left is retribution. How quickly can success turn sour? And yet, through this triple descent into madness (literally, in most cases), it’s Newman’s wit that holds the novel together. It’s seldom been more fun to see deserving people fall from grace. In fact, Newman does it so well that we can’t help but feel a bit of compassion for the new victims, regardless of their absolute cruelty in the first sections of the book.

    While the English cultural references can fly thickly, The Quorum remains a deceptively smooth read, with a surprising amount of narrative momentum given that the dramatic apex of the book takes place two-third of the way through. After an initial muddle of “M”s, all characters are clearly defined and go through their own dramatic arc. There’s even a solid romance to sweeten the whole book, and a happy ending for some.

    This isn’t your typical horror novel, and it’s definitely more successful because of it. At time vertiginous in the way it deals with lives and luck, The Quorum is yet another example why Kim Newman remains a solid choice despite a body of work that seems to sprawl everywhere.

    (Sharp-eyed readers will even spot that Derek Leech narrates another of Newman’s book, Life’s Lottery. The links between the two novels aren’t accidental, although Life’s Lottery places the reader in the position of the torturer who makes the choices manipulating the book’s protagonist for simple entertainment.)

  • The Rising and City of the Dead, Brian Keene

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Leisure, 2004-2005, ??? pages, C$??.?? mmpb, ISBN Various

    The Rising: 2004, 321 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-8439-5201-6
    City of the Dead: 2005, 357 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-8439-5415-9

    One of my goals in attending the 2007 World Horror Convention in Toronto was to learn more about the field of horror, and to which authors I should pay attention. As it turned out, one of the most interesting panels of the entire convention was a round-table discussion about zombies starring writers such as David Wellington and Brian Keene. Wellington’s work still awaits in my stack of books to read, but if it’s anything like Keene’s debut novels, I’m in for a treat.

    At first glance, there’s not much to distinguish The Rising from other traditional horror fare: Evil has escaped, the dead are coming back to life and the survivors must band together against evil. We’ve seen this story before.

    But we haven’t seen it quite like Keene had in mind. Because Keene has seen those movies. He’s read those books. He’s familiar with those clichés. So what we get is a self-aware, hyped-up take on zombie mythology. Keene has been credited with part of the recent resurgence in zombie horror, and The Rising‘s full-throttle forward drive shows what a clever writer can go with that material.

    It helps that there’s a strong plot-line at the heart of the story, beyond the usual “civilization falls!” atmosphere. In The Rising‘s first chapter, Jim Thurmond receives a cell phone call inside the makeshift bunker where he’s holding off the undead hordes. It’s his son, a few states away, calling for help. There’s no chance that Jim will make it there alive and even less of a chance that his son will still be intact when he does. But he has to try, and The Rising is the story of this quixotic quest.

    There are complications, of course. One of Keene’s innovations is that the zombies retain a good chunk of their intelligence, leading to car chases, firefights and ingenious traps. Worse yet, humans aren’t the only ones coming back from the dead: anything bigger than a mouse is also trying to get a chunk of living humans, and that makes THE BIRDS look like a prologue.

    Thanks to a good cast of characters (including a scientist who, like those poor saps in so many science-fiction stories, opened the gateway to hell with high-energy physics experiments), we get a sweeping view of the post-apocalyptic landscape, of the desperate bands of survivors trying to figure something out, and of the chilling organized threat that the zombies represent. There’s a delicious whiff of military techno-thrillers and science-fiction in The Rising, another sign that Keene is aware of the tropes he’s playing with.

    There’s also enough gore, drama and action throughout the book to satisfy everyone. Despite a few lengths, most of The Rising is a solid horror thriller and a spectacular debut for Keene. Yet nearly every single review of the book has to mention the ending, which steps back from the abyss and remains suspended in mid-air. It’s not that it’s a pessimistic ending; it’s that it’s not an ending. But even Keene admits the problem in interviews, and got the chance to fix it with City of the Dead, which uses The Rising‘s epilogue as its first chapter. Don’t make the mistake of reading the first book without having the second one in reserve.

    While City of the Dead isn’t as intense as The Rising, it gets points for a number of amusing set-pieces (including a man with a carnal interest in zombies), and for ending like The Rising should have ended. The mythology behind the zombie uprising gets a massive upgrade, which allows Keene to get chills from plants moving on their own.

    But both of those books, as entertaining as they are, are early example from Keene’s career. The author’s biography now includes over a dozen books, from publishers known and less-known. The folks at the World Horror Convention weren’t just mentioning him in panels to be nice; they were simply talking about one of the genre’s hottest writers. Expect more reviews of Keene’s work here soon.

  • Dread Empire’s Fall: Conventions of War, Walter Jon Williams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    EOS, 2005, 677 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-380-82022-1

    I may be one of the few who still remembers that in the wild and woolly days of 1997, Walter Jon Williams launched a short-lived on-line SF criticism magazine called “Hardwired”. It was meant to be by and for working SF writer trying to advance the state of the art and warn against the perils of commercial publishing. The second issue was dedicated to Fat Fantasy, the pernicious tendency of fantasy to be spread over lengthy volumes. (The magazine disappeared from the web in 2005, but The Internet Archive remembers everything!)

    But fast-forward ten years later, and even the snarkiest writers can do things that their earlier selves might have found ironic. So it was that between 2002 and 2005, Walter Jon Williams saw the publication of a space-opera trilogy called Dread Empire’s Fall. A big straight-to-paperback 1,500-page trilogy.

    There are probably excellent reasons for this. Despite William’s continued brilliance, he has never completely caught fire commercially. Brilliant early-nineties novels like Aristoi might have anticipated the post-human SF craze that gave rise to Charles Stross’ Accelerando by a good thirteen years, but they haven’t made Williams a best-selling SF writer. The post-Aristoi phase of William’s career was marked by attempts to broaden his scope as a writer, but those efforts didn’t pan out as planned: His ambitious fantasy trilogy begun with Metropolitan remains unfinished (a victim of publishing industry reorganization, we’re told), and the fat disaster novel The Rift (by “Walter J. Williams”) wasn’t followed by any further attempt at the mainstream thriller market.

    What we got next was Dread Empire’s Fall, a trilogy going after the same military-SF audience that have made David Weber a bestselling author. Clever career move? Maybe. As a reader, I’m only qualified to say that the trilogy felt less interesting than Williams’ previous novels, and the thing that fascinated me the most about it was how it wobbled more than what it did well.

    I haven’t reviewed the first two volumes of the series in part because they seemed a bit light: The plot-to-page ratio felt closer to Fat Fantasy than to most contemporary SF. As Williams set up his universe, his characters and his plot, the trilogy seemed stuck in one set piece after another.

    (For reference, a nutshell summary of the trilogy: The last of the galaxy-controlling aliens dies, plunging the “Dread Empire” in a civil war that’s roughly humans-against-nasty-aliens. Against that backdrop, competent but badly-connected captain Gareth Martinez falls in love with the ruthless pilot Caroline Sula. Numerous complications due to the highly rigid nature of their society make their love difficult and their military career dangerous.)

    The good news is that Conventions of War delivers a satisfying (albeit not happy) conclusion to the entire trilogy, and that it ties up the subplots that took so long to set up in the first two thirds of the trilogy. Williams writes entertainingly no matter what he does, and so Conventions of War is a pleasant diversion from beginning to end. His characters alone are worth the ride: Martinez is sympathetic yet beholden to an awful system, whereas Sula is a force of nature that’s as deadly as she’s worth cheering for.

    But the series feels like a badly-controlled experiment, and the third volume is worse than the others in reinforcing that feeling. At roughly 50% longer that the first two volumes, Conventions of War physically gives the impression of a story that has sprawled out of control. The move away from space battles into ground-side resistance and shipboard murder mystery also smacks of a runaway plot: in order to give interesting alternating chapters as he flips between his two protagonists, Williams finds himself spreading the story thin. And, throughout, the same thoughts bubble up: Is there a point to making this story 1,500 pages? Couldn’t this have been done in a single volume?

    Because even with the triumphant space battles at the end, even despite the amusing details about a society engineered to be rigidly hierarchical, Dread Empire’s Fall feels like a minor work, a writer playing games on his readership. The society described here feels too stunted to survive long (it does change during the trilogy, though not enough to preclude further volumes) and the overall feel is closer to a comfort fantasy trilogy than an authentic work of extrapolative science-fiction. But, then again, this is meant to be a military space-opera, and as such, Dread Empire’s Fall is more interesting than most examples in the genre. Williams certainly earns point for delivering an uncomfortable conclusion that remains true to the emotional arc of the characters.

    Not having access to Bookscan numbers, I can’t say whether this side-trip in Fat Space Opera has been fruitful for Williams. It’s certainly not a complete artistic success despite good moments here and there. But that only makes my anticipation for his next book even bigger: What will he try next?

  • Ender’s Shadow, Orson Scott Card

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1999, 379 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86860-X

    Over the past few years, it has become acceptable in some Science Fiction circles to deride Orson Scott Card as, to put it bluntly, a homophobic pro-Bush religious nut who -as a side cheap shot- doesn’t write anything worth reading anymore. Look on the web (better yet, search for “Orson Scott Card” and any of these keywords) and you will find a deep and widely-shared assessment that, at the very least, Card doesn’t write novels like he used to. The glory days of Ender’s Game and Speaker of the Dead are long past, and Card’s latest work doesn’t seem to appeal to the largely left-wing secular SF constituency.

    This makes 1999’s Ender’s Shadow fascinating for all sorts of reasons: Billed as a “parallax novel”, it follows more or less the events of Card’s classic Ender’s Game, but from the perspective of another character rather than Ender Wiggins himself. Cynics like me are usually quick to see the lucrative possibilities of such a novel and hindsight proves us right: the built-in name recognition automatically attracted attention and virtually ensured best-selling numbers. Ender’s Shadow even made it on the New York Times’ famed hardcover bestseller list. At a time where the only ways to sell SF books seems to be to capitalize on sequels, series, media tie-ins or celebrity names, a “parallax novel” seems like just another way to make a living.

    So you can say that I came to Ender’s Shadow with low expectations. But the surprise is that, even with a number of significant annoyances, this is a novel that ends up working well, and meshes better than you may think with the existing framework of Ender’s Game.

    It’s partially a triumph of emotional manipulation. Card’s success has often felt grounded in cheap deliberate stunts that leave little room for interpretation: By touching upon taboos, stock situations and easy unpleasant sentiments, Card has often been able to exploit built-in prejudices in his audience. Ender’s Game itself seemed like a product deliberately designed to appeal to the Science Fiction readership: The archetype of a poor misunderstood super-genius hero who ends up saving the day despite himself is, shall we say, deeply comforting to a number of SF fans.

    And if it worked once, well, it can work again: Card doesn’t seem to have any scruple in making Bean an even smarter and even punier protagonist than Ender Wiggins. This is often pushed to a ridiculous extent: Bean isn’t just a small smart kid: he’s a genetically modified ultra-genius who escapes from an eeevil lab at an age when he crawls better than he walks. Then it’s the life of a homeless kid in a hellishly socialist Europe for him, where he’s eventually saved by a nun and packed off to meet Ender Wiggins in orbit… but not before encountering yet another exceptional genius who will give him trouble later on.

    From afar, Ender’s Shadow teeters on the edge of credibility. But Card hasn’t become a New York Times best-seller without some writing skills, and the biggest surprise of the book is how readable it remains even as it covers familiar events with a slightly skewed perspective. It goes without saying that Bean, being a super-genius and all, figures out the “twist” to Ender’s Game long before Ender, which scatters the cards somewhat for the readers who come into the book already knowing the outline of the story. But it works, and the characterization holds together so well that when I went back to re-read the original “Ender’s Game” novella, Bean’s role still fit perfectly well with the extra knowledge of Ender’s Shadow.

    Which isn’t to say that it’s a particularly good novel. The religious rants from “Sister Carlotta” are tedious, and the smarter-than-Ender shtick wears thins. Ender’s Shadow remains a stunt for everyone who would pay again to relive Ender’s Game: Comfort fiction meant to push the same buttons than the previous experience. But as derivative products are concerned, this one is better than most. Better yet, it marks a significant notch in Card’s decline as a favourite writer of the SF crowd. In retrospect, you can see hints of the opinions he would loudly adopt during the Bush presidency; Ender’s Shadow may have been Card’s last acceptable book before his entire mental framework turned inside-out.

    [January 2008: Alas, the trilogy that follows Ender’s Shadow gives further comfort to the “Card can’t write anymore” crowd: After making my way through Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets, I’m not particularly motivated to read, much less pay any kind of money to get any further book in the series. The focus of Ender’s Shadow is gone, and what’s left is basically a game of Risk starring teenage protagonists and an increasingly sillier view of geopolitics. The bad traits of Ender’s Shadow are magnified, and there’s little to make up for it. Neither the prose nor the characters rise above the dull plotting, and the increasingly strident echoes of Card’s obsessions do much to leaden the reading experience.]

  • Axis, Robert Charles Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2007, 303 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-0939-6

    Robert Charles Wilson fans anxiously waiting to pounce upon this sequel to the Hugo-nominated Spin may want to temper their enthusiasm, take a deep breath and maybe even wait a year or two. Axis is a follow-up to a book that didn’t need one, but it’s obviously the second volume in what could be a trilogy and unlike Spin, it feels like it’s setting up something else.

    It begins much like Spin. The echo of a young boy witnessing an extraordinary phenomenon at night carries from the previous volume, even though in this case it’s ash falling rather than the stars disappearing that causes concern. Things get more interesting when the ash fall is revealed to be made of decayed alien machinery which crumble to dust. Clearly, the mysterious alien influences that drove the events of Spin are still being felt, and it’s up to the human characters to figure out what’s happening.

    They are not the same characters that we followed in Spin. At one exception, this is a new generation of explorers, obsessives and drifters that have ended up on the new world where humans are struggling to understand their new place in the universe. The colony’s government isn’t completely benign, the question of the genetically modified Fourths continues to be controversial and the mystery of the alien presence continues to float above the plot.

    But never mind the ideas, because the emphasis here is on characters. The woman looking for the truth that made her father disappear. The boy who discovers his superhuman abilities. The man who’s got nowhere else to go but the frontier. The elderly Fourth who hopes to avoid repeating the mistakes that still haunt her. Axis throttles back on the density of ideas and keeps up the emphasis on the people living through it all, a move that recalls Wilson’s first few novels. It’s no coincidence if Axis feels like a much smaller book than Spin.

    The result, unfortunately, is also a novel that feels emptier than its predecessor. There isn’t as much to discuss, and whatever is in the novel seems to be waiting for the third volume before blooming to its fullest. The conclusion itself reads like a muddy abstraction, enough to mark the end of the novel but not clearly enough to provide much closure. It’s a frustrating state in which to leave readers, and I suspect that this wait-and-see attitude won’t reflect well on the novel until the next book comes out. As it stands, Axis doesn’t hold up very well without knowledge of Spin, and it feels unfinished. It would have been nice for the marketing geniuses at Tor to acknowledge a “second volume in a trilogy” mention somewhere on the book, but they haven’t done so yet on other novels, so why should they start being honest now?

    Fortunately, there are other good reasons to read Axis: The characterization, as previously mentioned, is up to Wilson’s best standards, and so is his prose. Wilson’s matter-of-fact writing is just as accessible as it’s ever been, and the storyline is just compelling enough to lead from chapter to chapter. But this is definitely a novel that leads into the next one, so don’t expect a satisfying reading experience until you have the sequel on-hand.

    Don’t expect much critical consensus on this novel either. This is Wilson’s first attempt at a series, and even if Axis is up to his prose standards, it doesn’t succeed as a standalone book and will depends on its as-yet-untitled sequel to satisfy reader expectations. In the meantime, there just isn’t much to say about the book. It’s like trying to decide the worth of an entire novel after reading a particularly uneventful middle third.

  • Halting State, Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2007, 351 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-441-01498-9

    I love the feel of sizzling neurons in the evening.

    People read Science Fiction far various reasons. I’m in it for the rush I get when SF knocks a few new ideas in my head, links them to the world at large and asks if I’m ready to deal with them. It’s a cognitive pleasure that is seldom seen elsewhere in fiction, and Charles Stross excels at it. Even when he’s dealing with occult horrors or dimension-hopping economies, Stross is never too far from the “use the future to think about the present” ethos of the best SF. With Halting State, Stross attempts the most dangerous game imaginable for SF writers: a near-future thriller.

    It’s a risky dare, because it carries along its own metric for failure. Never mind that Stross isn’t attempting to be a futurist: a surprisingly large number of falsely sophisticated readers will read his novel as a grab-bag of predictions and pass judgement on how closely his extrapolations will match our real-world 2010s. And there are no ways to win at this game: The slightest errors will be highlighted, and what does survive may not be detectable from the then-mainstream. (There are surprisingly few rewards for being prescient in SF.) Halting State is a novel with an ever-closer examination date.

    It seems, at first glance, like a departure from Stross’ three existing strands of fiction. It’s not far-future post-Singularity SF like Accelerando, it’s not occult horror/thriller like The Atrocity Archives and it’s not a fantasy of finance like the series launched with The Family Trade. But look closer, because the links with his other fiction are all over the place.

    First, Stross is still fascinated by how economics shape our societies. The trigger to Halting State is theft. Virtual theft, as an attack on a bank set in a virtual role-playing game results in a police and insurance investigation. This may be virtual money theft, but it quickly has real-world consequences as the lead investigative team is assembled: A computer expert who knows on-line gaming, an insurance investigator who wields a mean sword and a police investigator who finds herself bemused by the whole case. These three characters each get alternating viewpoint chapters, rounding out our perspective on a case that becomes more complex than anticipated. Because this isn’t just a game.

    And this is where Halting State takes off, as it riffs on the nature of reality and fantasy like the best of Stross’ SF work so far. The theft is the tip of a much deeper business, one that has links to the setting of the novel. As it turns out, Stross doesn’t set his novel in a newly-independent Scotland just for the local atmosphere. SF used to dream about how the real could shape the virtual, but the current crop of genre fiction (including William Gibson’s surprisingly similar Spook Country) is busy describing how both the real and the virtual interact until it all becomes one single augmented reality.

    But this vertiginous realization comes with the understanding that virtual universes have been with us for a long time, and that “The Great Game” keeps extending its reach as computers end up forming part of our identity. That’s the point at which Halting State is revealed to be tightly linked to Stross’ “Laundry” espionage/horror series, and where his usual mixture of horror, humour and speculation finds its ultimate expression.

    Stross keeps on getting better with each novel, and Halting State is a tour de force in many ways: Stylistically, it’s more audacious than it has any right to be with a second-person narration, but even that works after a while. Thematically, it vigorously explores Stross’ usual preoccupations. Narratively, it features a number of strong scenes and carefully-measured revelations. Conceptually, it proves that high speculation is not incompatible with near-future settings. It’s a good thing that Stross is able to temper his extrapolations with a heavy dose of humour, because some of the speculations in here are enough to drive anyone to full-blown paranoia (an approach explored in Ken MacLeod’s not-dissimilar The Execution Channel.)

    So who said that SF was running out of future? There are more fresh ideas in this “near-future thriller” than in most “far-future science-fiction” published this year. Stross made a dangerous bet in looking at a future well within the lifetime of most readers, and it looks as if he’s well-placed to win. Even if reality catches up to this novel (and I’m hardly the only one who caught recent news of virtual bank thefts in Second Life), doesn’t it suggest that you too should read this novel as soon as possible?

  • Rollback, Robert J. Sawyer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2007, 320 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-765-31108-5

    From time to time, I like to think about well-known authors in terms of ecosystems: Once past a certain level of longevity or notoriety, the author earns a niche and becomes part of the vast machine of publishing. Truly well-known authors even become references for booksellers and casual readers. Stephen King means horror. Tom Clancy is still, two decades after his best work, Mister Technothriller. Dan Brown has become the first recommendation for contemporary historical thrillers. Here in Canada, Robert J. Sawyer has become the voice of Science Fiction in no small part due to a deliberate effort to write a type of science-fiction that is designed to appeal to the book-buying majority.

    If a middle-aged reader walks in a bookstore casually looking for a science-fiction novel, Sawyer is an automatic recommendation: His fiction is cleanly written in straightforward prose, generally take place in familiar near-future settings and tackles issues of interest to the well-educated middle-aged readers statistically most likely to buy books. Add to that Sawyer’s uncanny media savvy and you end up with a natural, safe choice for everyone.

    His latest novel, Rollback, clearly shows why Sawyer is at the top of his game. It’s a novel that couldn’t have been written by anyone but Sawyer, and it clearly illustrates Sawyer’s core preoccupations. It’s accessible in form, content and atmosphere, featuring a classical approach to science-fiction that many casual readers won’t find in many other contemporary works of genre Science Fiction.

    Like many Sawyer novels, Rollback finds its plot in high technology and old-fashioned matrimony: When an astronomer working on SETI messages is offered a chance for expensive rejuvenation, she negotiates a similar treatment for her husband. But dramatically enough, her treatment fails even as her husband sees the decades roll back. But youth doesn’t always go well with experience as he deals with the unique complications of being an old man in a rejuvenated body. Home life is messy, and the world outside doesn’t offer much respite for a man out of time. Meanwhile, the decryption of the SETI messages reveals a surprise about the nature of the aliens at the other end of the line…

    Readers of Sawyer’s post-Frameshift period will immediately feel at home: The prose is limpid, the protagonist is a Toronto-area baby-boomer and the themes once again revolve around philosophical questions. Sawyer has long been a proponent of “Phi-Fi” (“Philosophical Fiction”), and this attitude finds its best expression so far in Rollback as it describes questions of longevity and morality in a way that will feel relevant to most readers. Sawyer’s treatment of “old man in a young body” is rich in speculation, yet feels considerably more down-to-earth than most similar tales. Among other strengths, Sawyer is able to present solid Science Fiction without necessarily burying casual readers in a deluge of genre conventions. Combined to the easy style and the baby-boomer cultural references, it makes it easy to see why Sawyer is so successful in his chosen niche.

    But this choice also carries consequences that will be most visible to demanding genre readers. More than any other Sawyer novel so far, Rollback feels like a book aimed at a specific demographic niche: The sheer accumulation of Toronto-area English-Canadian middle-class baby-boomer pop-culture references can be irritating at times. Some of the plot contrivances feel forced: it’s hard to believe that a successful rejuvenation patchwork of treatments would resist downward price pressures for so long given the near-universal demand for them. (But it can give rise to some interesting back-of-the-envelope calculations: How expensive could such procedures be?) Sawyer’s straightforward plotting can be obvious at times: Lenore Darby’s second appearance in the novel blatantly telegraphs her plot purpose. Rollback‘s adherence to Sawyer’s core themes can also becomes repetitive, as I couldn’t help but be amused at the revelation of the alien message content: “The aliens are interested in the very same things that fascinate Robert J. Sawyer? What are the odds?!” And while few casual readers will complain about Sawyer’s straightforward prose style (which is clear enough to be read in a distracting hotel lobby environment), it’s yet another element that sets Sawyer’s work apart from the generally more ambitious genre SF novels aimed at readers with tougher literary standards.

    In some hilariously ironic sense, it’s possible that Sawyer has consciously limited himself to an mainstream-friendly, best-selling niche. In a sense, his novels are critic-proof: They reach their audience, give them a good time and so encourage the sales of his next novels. Better yet, they can’t be dismissed easily by the more nitpicky genre readers, who will still find something to like in the middle of specific cultural references and familiar Sawyer tics. If Robert J. Sawyer has become an ideal gateway to Science-Fiction readers, it’s appropriate that Rollback ends up being an ideal gateway to Robert J. Sawyer’s specific brand of SF.

  • Chasing the Dime, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little Brown, 2002, 371 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-316-15391-5

    Well, they can’t all be perfect.

    Followers of my “Michael Connelly Reading Project” (one book per month, every month, until we’re done) probably remember how I’ve been impressed by every Connelly novel so far: despite occasional dips in quality, every Connelly book is worth reading. Chasing the Dime is far from being a catastrophe, but it proves to be the most ordinary novel that Connelly has written to date.

    It’s one of Connelly’s off-Bosch novels: After the drama of City of Bones, Bosch is off to a well-deserved break as Connelly plays around with a different protagonist. Not explicitly connected to the rest of the Connellyverse, Chasing the Dime features Henry Pierce, engineer and founder of a nanotechnology start-up. Pierce may be at the cusp of a business breakthrough as his company seeks investor money, but he has other personal issues to deal with: Freshly separated from his wife, Pierce moves into a new apartment as the novel begins. One of the things to do in the process is to get a new phone number, and that’s where the trouble starts: calls start coming in for a mysterious Lilly, who proves to be an escort.

    Listless, perhaps even depressed (and, unfortunately, motivated by a secret from his past), Pierce decides to investigate the calls. If Lilly is gone, can he find her? As unfortunate hints accumulate, our charmingly inexperienced protagonist keeps digging. But he’s messing with dangerous people: Before long, shady characters are sending him threats… and then enforcers who see no problem in using some physical violence to send a clear message. Pierce isn’t about to stop, of course, but the deeper the digs, the worse it gets for him and his company.

    As a premise for a thriller, it’s both conventional and promising. The idea of an ordinary man being stuck in underground machinations through happenstance is something that most readers will be able to appreciate. In this case, Pierce seems determined to solve Lily’s disappearance by boredom, curiosity and the need to escape from the pressure at his start-up. Alas, Connelly can’t resist the urge to do something else with the story, and that’s why Chasing the Dime is generally better during its first half than its second. It’s also why it makes more sense when its at its most chaotic.

    Explaining this fully would take us into serious spoilers, so let me take refuge in generalities and structural meta-principles. Take the role of coincidences in plotting, for instance. The traditional view is that coincidences (or bad luck, or arbitrary author intervention) is perfectly acceptable as long as it throws the protagonist even deeper in trouble. It’s also generally more acceptable at first, when putting the pieces of the plot in place. After that, favourable coincidences are dramatically unsatisfying: They reveal too much of the author’s influence on the plot, they resolve situations for the protagonists and don’t allow the characters to work out their problems.

    But it’s possible to take this anti-coincidence attitude a bit too far into conspiracy territory, where every single thing that happens can be tracked back to a mastermind manipulating his characters in a grandiose plot that leaves little to happenstance and decisions. Chasing the Dime arguably falls into that category: It turns out that the innocent man trying to get himself out of a bad situation isn’t so innocent, and he’s definitely being nudged deeper in trouble by people he knows.

    It doesn’t help that the second half of Chasing the Dime becomes far more predictable: A lengthy exposition sequence about nanotechnology is clunky both for the pages of technical information dumped in the narrative, and for the way it sets up the scene for the book’s final confrontation. Savvier readers will wait out the last suspense sequence by wondering when the protagonist will use a piece of technology so lavishly described earlier.

    Fortunately, Chasing the Dime escapes complete disappointment through Connelly’s usual strengths: His prose is as compulsively readable as ever, his characters are effectively sketched, his pacing is strong enough to pull readers in, and the wealth of procedural details is compelling at the notable exception of the info-dump mentioned above.

    This doesn’t make Chasing the Dime a bad novel (goodness knows that most suspense writers can’t even write a novel of this calibre), but it certainly makes it one of Connelly’s least-impressive ones. He has led his fans to expect something better, so it can be a bit of a shock to realize that, yes, the man can be humanly fallible from time to time.