Book Review

  • 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.

  • Radio Freefall, Matthew Jarpe

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2007, 318 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-7654-1784-1

    As a reviewer, I’m not too fond of using “It’s a first novel” as an explanation. After all, I don’t know how many previous novels sleep in the trunk of the author. Excusing something as “a first novel” seems to trivialize the effort of the author who has worked so hard on a book, and sets up expectations for follow-ups. It ignores the efforts and knowledge of the book’s editor, and presupposes a bunch of easy fixes that more experienced authors could see –as if even first-time authors didn’t know how to read. So I try to avoid the expression, except as a strict description.

    And yet, and yet, the first thing that comes to mind when I want to write about Radio Freefall is… it’s a first novel. It’s a likable and engaging mess of a book that shows why Matthew Jarpe will be one to watch even if he has trouble putting the pieces of his story together. It’s full of surprises, and some of them leave a better impression than others.

    The first surprise is set up by the book’s marketing. From the cover blurb, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a novel in the Moon is a Harsh Mistress mold, with a plucky bunch of orbiting rag-tag rebels showing one or two things to an overbearing Earth regime thanks to the power of rock-and-roll. Allen Steele blended with Heinlein, or something like that.

    Now imagine the shift as you realize that this is really a rock-and-roll novel with a third act set in space.

    I’m not complaining. Not at this point, anyway. I’m unaccountably fascinated by rock-and-roll novels, and seeing Radio Freefall turn into one is like finding a particularly enjoyable prize in a cereal box. The trials and tribulations of the Snake Vendors as they instantly become the world’s biggest rock band (led by a mysterious bluesman known as “Aqualung”) make up for instantly compelling reading. Despite rock-and-roll’s declining stature in today’s pop-culture, there’s still something quasi-mythic about touring rock bands, and that’s even before they start battling evil world governments.

    It follows that as a good rock-and-roll novel, Radio Freefall is also a story of revolution. In Jarpe’s thinly-imagined future, someone has taken control of the Internet, and that logically leads to a stifling and unaccountable world government that must be defeated. But I’m getting ahead of my snark: for the moment, it’s enough to imagine a renegade rock band led by a man with elite tech skillz, facing down an all-powerful enemy. Concept albums have been put together for lesser reasons.

    Before getting into the reasons why Radio Freefall doesn’t work as well as it should, let’s take a look at what does work: The rock-and-roll theme certainly brings a lot to the novel, and gives it a unique feel that’s not to be found elsewhere in recent SF. It helps that Jarpe knows how to write clean and compelling prose: On a sentence-by-sentence writing level, this is probably the most steadily interesting debut novel I’ve read this year. The characters are generally likable, even when they turn out to be unreasonably heroic figures. (It fits into the bigger-than-life rock-and-roll aesthetics.)

    There’s so much to like here that it’s doubly frustrating to see when some elements just don’t work.

    The most obvious problem is structural: After a bit more than half the novel spent on Earth, things change and abruptly bring us in orbit. The transition plot point is botched (remarkably, few people think of asking “where’s the body?”, and Jarpe’s hand-waved riot isn’t much of an explanation), but the entire novel does little to prepare readers for the venue change. Freefall should be a place we should be looking forward to visiting; instead, it feels like a surprise that’s not entirely welcome.

    But the most grating problem is the ham-fisted way Jarpe provides antagonists for his story. The cheap shots at world government don’t bother me; after, the novel is written by an American. But the “Unification” model is so badly broken in concept that it never feels like a credible threat. Worse yet; it’s controlled by a single person who has found a way to take control of the Internet by stealing someone else’s work. Uh-huh. Compound the cartoonish villains with the pocket-universe problem (where all power in held by a handful of people who all somehow know one another) and Radio Freefall suffers from a severe credibility problem. It’s never too clear how much of the novel we’re meant to take seriously, and if we’re not, why the satire isn’t better handled.

    And so I end with a diffuse impression of a novel with qualities that are overwhelmed by other parts of the novel running in all directions, a confused impression that is best described, for better of for worse, by the expression “a first novel”, immediately followed by “I’m looking forward to the next one.”

  • The Skinner, Neal Asher

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2002, 424 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-35048-3

    There are a number of early clues about the gruesome nature of The Skinner, but perhaps the clearest sign of the novel’s true nature comes midway through Chapter 1:

    Peck, the 180-year-old mechanic, had been attacked by a leech and it had unscrewed a fist-sized lump of flesh from his leg —a lump of flesh he had, after beating the leech to pulp, subsequently screwed back into place. The wound had healed in minutes. [P.10-11]

    Yes, Spatterjay lives up to its back-cover blurb as “the most dangerous planet in the galaxy”. Given that it’s set in Neal Asher’s typically gruesome “Polity” universe, you can imagine that this one goes up to eleven on the yuck-scale. The rationale goes like this: In an ecosystem where things get nastier and nastier, nearly everything on Spatterjay is a super-predator, and the only effective way for prey to exist is for it to develop super-regenerative capabilities. That means being able to survive severe damage and regenerating quickly. In another scene, the human characters gnaws a chunk to eat out of the local wildlife, then throw it back in the ocean knowing fully well that it will likely grow back what’s missing. The key is a virus that radically changes one’s inner biology, with the added complication is that it’s possible for a human to be infected with the virus. In that case, the human stops being human and effectively becomes immorbid.

    And that’s just the setting. As The Skinner begins, a motley crew of opponents have converged on Spatterjay, from semi-enslaved operatives to a woman contemplating her impending immortality, to war criminals, aliens, robots, at least two sets of post-human intelligences and various representatives of the planet’s native life-forms. Not surprisingly, nearly everyone wants to kill everyone else, which makes for bizarre alliances and a final battle that runs on for entire chapters and follow several characters to their destruction. Notice that I haven’t said anything about the sentient hornets or the still-alive head in a box. The most amusing character ends up being a war drone with a tenacity of its own.

    It’s a lively novel.

    It’s also one of the most blackly amusing book I’ve read this year, constantly hovering somewhere between disgust and a few winks at the reader. It’s hard to deny the over-the-top nature of the novel’s excess. Anyone who has glanced at Asher’s other work already knows that this is an author who’s not afraid to throw ichor and sharp-teethed worms at the reader, but The Skinner almost approaches self-parody. It’s not always easy to read: besides the “ick!” factor, there’s a density of complicated piece-shuffling that discourages casual reading. As planetary adventures go, this is an above-average one, though not one that will win unanimous applause. Patient readers with strong stomach will be rewarded.

  • The Nanny Diaries, Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2002, 368 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-98307-7

    Who thought chick-lit could be a battleground for the war between the classes?

    Actually, that’s not much of a stretch. Accepting the all-encompassing definition of check-lit as being fiction about the struggles of contemporary young women, it would be difficult to avoid issues of wealth or status, or lack thereof. Genre poster girl Bridget Jones had to choose between money and, er, more money. The Devil Wear Prada‘s Andrea Sachs is seduced away from her humble life by the high-flying pace of work at a fashion magazine. Even genre grandma Jane Austen had one or two things to say about class and privilege.

    But few novel cut so deeply into big-money satire as The Nanny Diaries: by delving into the child-raising habits of the New York upper-class, McLaughlin and Kraus go straight to what made F. Scott Fitzgerald say “The rich are different from you and I.” As the unnamed narrator (always called “Nan”, but presumably as a diminutive for “Nanny” rather than “Nancy”) gets more deeply involved in the life of a jet-setting Manhattan family, she comes to discover the nasty secrets and deep-seated callousness of those who surround her. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but there are sharp claws under the smiles.

    In some ways, it’s also a novel of anthropological discovery. Narrator Nan is not a newcomer to the New York upper set: herself raised in a comfortable middle class family, Nan goes into the nanny business knowing fully well what’s going on. The first chapter is a generic description of how those interviews usually go and which characteristics are most prized by the client parents:

    I am white. I speak French. My parents are college educated. I have no visible piercings and have been to Lincoln Center in the past two months. I’m hired. [P.5]

    It’s not as if Nan is being hired to take care of the kids while the mother is working, though: She’s been hired by a family whose mom is more interested in the socialite game than in the dirty business of raising a child. In fact, Nan is being hired as a surrogate mother, and therein lies the seething rage of the novel. Forget about the strict rules, the impossible schedules and the ridiculous pay: What really makes Nan furious is that the kid she’s been hired to supervise has no family ties to speak of: Dad’s working, Mom’s busy trying to recapture her beauty-model past and the kid’s just going to be a chore to them until he graduates college and makes enough money for the parents to brag about. The rich are different indeed, and if the largely middle-class bus-riding child-raising readership of the book isn’t seething at this abandonment of parental responsibility, then the authors haven’t succeeded. There’s also a bonus question: If Nan leaves, who’s going to keep the young one from growing into exactly the same person than his parents?

    Because, oh yes, the parents are a walking collection of problems. Lady X is a predictable collection of neuroses, while Mister X isn’t particularly concerned with plebeian moral values such as fidelity. When Nan literally walks into those secrets, the tension cranks up. She may have taken the job for the money, but she’ll be lucky to escape with her grades, her morals and her sanity intact.

    Plot-wise, there isn’t much going on here but the typical innocent-discovers-perversion storyline we’ve seen in so many permutations over the years. On the other hand, that template is a perfect canvas on which to paint scenes of New York upper-class madness. Nan is asked to do plenty of truly stupid jobs during her time serving the Xs, and every single one of those is a further glimpse into the casual cruelty of those used to exploit other people as a matter of day-to-day living. The prose is clean, the details are telling and the characters are effectively caricatured.

    Ironically, it’s the protagonist herself that stops the novel from being completely successful as social commentary. Nan’s family is relatively comfortable, and yet the narrator seems to have a blind spot when it comes to that particular facet of her existence. Does she need the money so desperately when she could borrow some from the rest of her family? Is there such a gap between her clients and her family? Would the novel have been improved or diluted with a lower-class protagonist?

    Of course, the danger with an even more rational protagonist is that she may not have lasted more than a week and a half as a nanny, and that would have been a much shorter novel. Never mind, then: Have a look at The Nanny Diaries if you’re looking for a glimpse at an alien subculture, or if you want to see how genre fiction can tackle bigger issues with a smile and a stiletto. That nanny in the corner may be working for you, but no amount of money may be enough to make her like you.

  • Ragamuffin, Tobias S. Buckell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2007, 316 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1507-6

    Isn’t it great when authors write second novels that exceed the expectations set by their first ones?

    It’s even better when it happens to genuinely nice guys. Even in a field where I wish every new author the best of luck, I’m in the grandstands cheering for Tobias Buckell: I think that he brings something new and vital to the SF genre and I genuinely enjoy reading his writing. His debut, Crystal Rain, was a promising start, highly enjoyable but consciously restricted in scope. As a planetary adventure on a far-away planet with intriguing aliens and plenty of derring-do, it was a success and promised even better things.

    Now Ragamuffin blows open the doors unlocked by Crystal Rain. Suddenly, we’re not stuck on the backwater planet of Nanagada; We’re in space, deep inside the Satrapy Hegemony where humans eke out a subsistence living in the cracks of an empire that doesn’t particularly care for them. From planetary adventure, Buckell moves on to space opera, setting up a fascinating universe filled with powerful alien forces, plucky resistance heroes and allies to both sides.

    Our anchor during the first half of the novel is a powerful woman named Nashara, a specially-trained operative with dangerous secrets and even more powerful capabilities. On the run after killing a member of the ruling class, she’s looking to make contact with the rebel forces. There are complications along the way, including space battles, a trip through a decaying space colony and a multiplication of Nasharas.

    As a reading experience, that first half is everything one could ask from a contemporary space opera: It’s fast-paced, it presents intriguing characters, it features interesting scenes and ideas, and it’s packed with action. The set-piece of that first half is pictured on the cover: A thrilling chase/shootout sequence in the microgravity environment of a spinning space colony that’s as much fun as SF ever gets. It helps that Nashara is one of the most interesting characters to pop up in recent SF.

    Things change slightly past the half-point mark, as Buckell interrupts the action to rejoin the protagonists of Crystal Rain on their home planet, and brings both sets of characters together. This is where the narrative stumbles, as the flow of Nashara’s story is completely halted and readers are asked to stretch their memories back to Crystal Rain in order to catch up with the story. It takes a while for the characters to get up to speed, and I wonder if there wasn’t a better way of blending both plot strands together.

    But thing soon accelerate again as various factions are brought together and set against each other. By the end of the book, the stage is set for even bigger adventures in the Satrapy universe, along with Nashara and the terrific Pepper, who’s back from Crystal Rain. This is very much a transition volume, and while readers of the first novel will be pleased by the way things a getting bigger and more important, those who want to read a complete story may want to wait until the third novel comes out to dive in.

    Buckell’s prose in this second book seems even cleaner than the first book; it helps that things move along more quickly, and that the scope in inherently bigger. Thematically, Buckell deals well with themes of oppression and alienation; I particularly appreciated the way humans are portrayed as being very minor player in a known universe otherwise controlled by far more powerful players. This is the kind of things that helps break SF out of its current doldrums.

    All told, it amounts to a second novel that’s better than an already quite enjoyable first novel.

  • City of Bones, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 2002, 421 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61161-1

    Reading series fiction offers a number of pleasures and complications that just can’t be replicated in single novels and, indeed, may owe more to TV series structure than to traditional prose characteristics. There can be macro-plot and micro-plot considerations, for instance, as narrative elements can be developed over several volumes even while each book offers a complete story. Balancing character growth against the need to offer a continuing dramatic environment can be a challenge, especially when the two start working against each other. Is it any wonder if series structure breakthroughs are often featured in sub-standard standalone stories?

    Michael Connelly, for instance, is best known for a taciturn LAPD detective named Harry Bosch. Bosch is smart, determined, secretive, rough and has a problem with authority. But one of the continuing dramatic driver of the series so far has been the paradox between Bosch’s distrust of authority versus his inability to exist in an environment without a clear hierarchy. Bosch’s been badly treated by the LAPD, but has put up with it so far. City of Bones tests this tension to the limit.

    It starts horribly, as most Bosch investigations usually do. A body is discovered in the hills of Los Angeles and Bosch is put in charge of the investigation. The body of the victim, a teenage boy, has been left undiscovered for two decades. The murderer seems long gone. But as in most Connelly novels, the path to the truth can be strange, twisted and damaging.

    Alas, City of Bones is a frustrating novel in that it blends the good and the not-so-good in a story with major consequences for Bosch. It often feels like a novel rushing to a predetermined conclusion, and the nudges required to push Bosch toward particular story points are often done in less-than-graceful fashion.

    For instance, there’s a rushed quality to the romantic subplot that is tacked to Bosch’s life in this novel. The detective, of course, has never been terribly lucky in his romances (we even see him deal badly with an ex-girlfriend early in the book), but this one is easily the worst. Unfortunately, the fate of this book’s girlfriend seems written on her head as soon as she walks into the novel: it’s almost a cameo appearance with an all-too-obvious ending. Such lack of skill is unusual for Connelly, and it’s troubling in how it unsettles his normally rock-solid plotting.

    Fortunately, Connelly does as well as usual elsewhere in the novel: his chapter-by-chapter plotting is solid, his prose style is still a model of clarity and it’s hard to stop reading even throughout the weaker moments.

    But there’s a new elements at play here: a foreboding feeling that something truly unsettling is about to happen. By the end of the novel, our worse suspicions are confirmed, as Bosch finally takes a decision that had long been coming. Where this will leave the series is a question to be answered in the next volume.

    As for City of Bones itself, we’re left with a lopsided novel, one where the smaller plot elements are rushed in order to advance the evolution of the larger series. It would have been less obtrusive had the character of Julia Brasher had been introduced in an earlier volume (or even given a less-obvious family name); more room to let the character breathe would have allowed it to be more than a cheap plot device among others.

    But in the end, we’re left with a new series framework, another closed case for Harry Bosch and a superior reading experience for procedural mystery fans. Connelly fans will tune in for the next exciting episode, whatever it may be.

  • The Last Colony, John Scalzi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2007, 320 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1697-4

    At a time when most new writers in the SF&F field are writing fantasy rather than science-fiction, John Scalzi has quickly become a reliable value for top-quality SF. Since his first professionally-published novel in 2005, Scalzi has already produced a remarkable and distinctive body of work: The Last Colony is his fifth novel, and the third in the universe launched by the Hugo-nominated Old Man’s War. All of Scalzi’s novels so far have shown an entertaining blend of competent SF, crystal-clear writing, snappy dialogue and terrific pacing. Scalzi’s gone from hot new talent to reliable pro in a ridiculously short amount of time, and The Last Colony is another strong entry in the list of reasons why Scalzi belongs on your reading list.

    Not simply content in repeating past successes, The Last Colony evolves the “Old Man’s War” universe rather than try to repeat a familiar formula. The first novel attempted a straight-up military SF formula. The second, The Ghost Brigades, meshed special forces heroics with musings on personal identity. This third entry more or less abandons the swords in favour of the ploughshares, as it follows past protagonists John Perry and Jane Sagan while they establish a new colony on Earth’s behalf.

    This is a risky proposition. Readers of the series so far will recall how the galaxy is filled with competing alien races and how most of them wouldn’t mind seeing the humans disappear. It’s a tough Darwinian universe out there, and the humans are not among the most powerful hunters in the neighbourhood. Since colonization is so rigidly controlled by the galactic powers in charge, a new colony is almost an act of aggression. From the onset, it’s not too clear how official this effort is meant to be, or who’s telling the truth to the protagonists.

    Scalzi’s tendency to pencil in details of his universe in previous books here comes handy, as he’s able to extend the reach of his world-building to include savvy diplomatic brinkmanship. Hints and allegations and ominous details finally pay off here, as potentially-silly details from previous volumes (such as the lack of communications between Earth and the colonies) are explained away in a reasonably coherent fashion. It eventually culminates in a joyously bridge-burning conclusion that will radically change the shape of the future books in the series. (As I revise this, Scalzi is reportedly at work on a fourth volume, Zoe’s Tale, due mid-2008.)

    Fortunately, the prose and chapter-to-chapter pacing of the novel are up to the structural success of the novel. Scalzi’s most distinctive writing trademark is a compulsively readable style and The Last Colony is no exception. Despite the less militaristic focus of the story, Scalzi has no trouble pulling in his readers; the mystery surrounding the colony is enough to get the narrative started, and the procedural aspects of colonization are intriguingly described. Science Fiction has often played around with the concept of planetary colonization, but aside from The Legacy of Heorot, I can’t recall such a detailed nuts-and-bolts approach to the first few moments of such an event. It’s surprisingly engaging, and holds out interest just long enough for the third-act betrayals and explosions.

    Scalzi’s ability to pose relatively complex conceptual and ethical issues in accessible language also remains intact. Like few other working SF genre writers, Scalzi is able to combine state-of-the-art speculation with a prose style that can reach much wider audiences than seasoned SF fans. And yet he’s able to do so without dumbing down anything, which is a harder trick than you’d expect.

    Picker readers will probably ask a few questions about the rationale for 18th-century colonization equipment when “wireless communications” is the thing to avoid: the state of today’s mechanical design (especially for third-world environments) is such that better solutions could be used for 2Xth century colonies. But what’s a Science Fiction novel without at least one detail left to pick for argumentative fans?

    What’s unarguable is that Scalzi is already an utterly dependable writer, one who keeps stretching the boundaries of his universe while delivering the same qualities that have attracted readers to his earlier work. Scalzi’s not just a hot new SF writer; he’s a model to follow if SF has any chance of surviving as a cohesive genre category in the twenty-first century.

  • Titan, Ben Bova

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 464 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30413-9

    Ben Bova is an old man. That, in itself, is not a problem nor anything to be ashamed about. Old age will happen to all of us, and it’s truly bad karma to start pointing it out in other people.

    But I think that it’s entirely reasonable to point our that the assumptions of a generation can put off another. Kids do it all the time, as their newfangled habits mystify their elders. So if I say that Titan is SF written by a grandparent for grandparents, it’s not an insolent remark as much as it’s a description, and maybe even a hint for the marketing department.

    Ben Bova, of course, is one of the Science Fiction genre’s elder statesmen. He edited Analog before I was born, and his bibliography looks endless. If he hasn’t done everything in the field, he’s come close. But reading his fiction is invariably a throwback to the old-school Campbellian streak of SF. Engineer fiction, simply written for a generation fascinated by the Race to the Moon.

    Much as I’d like to trumpet those values, there’s also something fatally dated about them. The stately Apollo program paradigm is a product of its time, and it doesn’t seem particularly relevant to a world where the iterative chaos of the Internet has imposed itself as a metaphor for the modern world.

    This is relevant to Bova’s Titan insofar as this novel feels as if it had been written right after the Voyager 2 flyby of 1978. Aside from a few new scientific details that we didn’t know back then, Titan seems stuck in the seventies, and not even the hip seventies: the reactionary seventies as seen by the conservative nerds who still hadn’t come to grip with feminism.

    Case in point: Titan takes place aboard a colony ship in orbit around Titan, a 10,000-people habitat more or less exiled from Earth. As the novel picks up (it’s part of a series, which may be a bit of an obstacle for readers coming in cold), the colony is thinking about loosening the rigid zero-population-growth rules that have (somehow) been imposed on the entire population. This becomes a major political issue in the elections taking place aboard the ship: As the politicians make their steely-eyed calculations, they simply assume that all the women will vote for repealing the reproductive ban, but all the men will take some convincing. Or, as Bova writes as dialogue for his heroine, “’I don’t see how we can expect the women of this community to give up having babies.’” [P.155] and then, later, to a mostly-female political rally audience, “’Women make up forty-seven percent of the habitat’s population. If we get all the women to sign the petition, we only need two thousand men to sign up.’ That silenced them. Holly could practically hear them thinking; Two thousand men. How are we going to get two thousand men to agree with us?” [P239-240] The novel’s trite answer to that question is the stuff of bad jokes.

    That’s the point where it becomes obvious that Bova hasn’t paid any attention to the real world in the past few decades.

    It’s certainly not the only such detail, though: In the aftermath of a major political debate, there’s this little gem:

    …he walked back into the living room. Elsa was watching Holly Lane’s speech again.

    “Are they rerunning it?” he asked.

    “No, I recorded her speech.” [P.231]

    This dialogue isn’t even relevant today, at a time when YouTube, news media and even candidate sites carry entire streaming videos of debates. The idea of a massive 2095-era colony ship being stuck with a broadcast mass media is dangerously ridiculous, because picking at it can unravels many of the novel’s assumptions, including the idea of a massive colony ship. Better to leave it alone.

    But if we leave that alone, it means that we’ll have to avoid speaking about the female characters obsessed about weight and reproductive issues, or the dumb-as-rock AI paradox that’s been taken straight out of Star Trek episodes. So let’s be nice and say that Bova’s prose is clean and unobtrusive, that his fascination for scientific details will please hard-SF geeks and that he generally knows how to plot. Even if his characters are almost uniformly nice (even the stock fundamentalist villain), even if some AI-POV chapters are entirely superfluous and even if the whole thing isn’t much more than middle-of-the-road SF from a time capsule.

    Still, would you believe that this thing has won a Campbell award?

    Maybe there are more grandparents in the Campbell jury than I thought.

  • Seeker, Jack McDevitt

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2005, 360 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-441-01329-5

    All right, dear reader, take out your white gloves and put them on: it’s time to give SFWA a little golf clap.

    Why? Well, in a two-year period that saw the publication of superior works of science-fiction such as Peter Watts’ Blindsight, Charles Stross’s Glasshouse and Accelerando, Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin or Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, SFWA has deemed that Jack McDevitt’s Seeker is the best novel of 2005-2006.

    Bravo, SFWA. Well done. (Golf clap)

    But then again, we already know that as an organization, SFWA’s hopeless at -hm- pretty much everything that doesn’t get shoved under the usual “Griefcom-Writer’sBeware-MedicalFund” litany. (As I write this, the organization is doing frantic damage control to minimize the PR disaster that was the indiscriminate “DMCA takedown” of texts on a file-sharing site.) (And as I rewrite this, weeks later, SFWA is still stuck in another entertaining damage-control exercise about presidential candidates. Dumb SFWA, duuumb.) But SFWA particularly sucks at giving out awards. The mental midgets that log-roll each others on the nomination ballot have recently picked such all-time classics as Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose and Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage as somehow being “best novels” of some sort.

    Memo to SFWA members: “Novel of the year” is not the same thing as “most average novel of the year”.

    Without any particular expectation -and reading Jack McDevitt will do wonders to extinguish particular expectations regarding his work- Seeker is not a particularly bad novel. It’s not particularly good, but it’s still a cut above anything I can remember from McDevitt’s post-Engines of God period. Most of the typical McDevitt tropes are there, but they’re acknowledged and even weaved in the theme of the novel.

    But calling it “best novel” is foolish, and doesn’t just reflect badly on the ones giving the awards.

    But let me take a deep breath. I banish the Nebulas from my mind. Happy thoughts. Okay.

    Since this review has already spent far too much time bashing the Nebulas, let’s just talk about Seeker itself. If you’re already familiar with McDevitt’s fiction, you already know what you’re going to get: An adventure tale of far-future archaeology, using stock characters and as few changes from today’s world than are required in order to tell the story. McDevitt’s brand of science-fiction is comfort food for those who grew up reading the mainstream branch of SF and just want to replicate the experience. He’s not interested in genuine speculation, and I find it telling that his far-future characters usually spend their time looking at events in their own history.

    So Seeker becomes an above-average McDevitt novel in acknowledging and integrating this fascination into its thematic thread. As the protagonists track down an artifact from a supposedly-lost spaceship, they too get some time to wonder how and why their civilization has remained stagnant. The answer isn’t too comforting. Props be given to the man, McDevitt can be pretty dark in his ruminations: There’s a limit to the Golden-Age-SF comparisons we can make about his work.

    But I suspect that the novel works best as a Science Fiction procedural adventure, in which a tiny clue comes to reveal yet another tiny clue, which eventually (through a series of risky adventures) unravels an entire mystery. There’s adventure for all: aliens and lost spaceships and despicable antagonists and a plucky narrator to tell it all. Once firmly launched, Seeker is a pleasant read, and McDevitt is an old pro at playing with the usual SF elements. The prose is clean, the characters usually stand out, and if the story could easily be tweaked to a contemporary Tomb-Raider-style thriller, few fans will be put off by the result.

    On the other hand, readers can certainly be disappointed if they’re expecting more than an above-average McDevitt potboiler. There’s little that’s innovative, new, threatening or even exemplary about this novel. Of all the SF novels published in 2005-2006, Seeker doesn’t fit in my recommended Top-10 and I can’t find anything in it that would justify such a distinction. And that brings us back to the whole “Nebula Award” business. There are ways to rationalize it: If the Nebula has become “an award we give to our own members in order to thank them for services rendered to the organization”, then there’s little we can say about SFWA’s decision. But then they shouldn’t be surprised to find out that no one takes their little clubhouse award seriously. Serious readers will go hunting elsewhere for a reliable list of novels that represent the best that Science Fiction has to offer.

    (Since you ask: After a few years in the wilderness, the Hugo Awards are once more relevant, but I think that the best awards in the business are consistently the Locus Awards: Their top-15 long-list, subdivided in SF and fantasy novels, is a reliable guide to what’s worth reading every year.)

  • First Among Sequels, Jasper Fforde

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Hodder & Stoughton, 2007, 398 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 978-0-340-75201-2

    What I find most remarkable about Jasper Fforde is the way every one of his novels feels like a never-to-be-topped bravura performance. Given that he’s now written seven of them, that’s a more impressive achievement than you may think. Lesser authors may squeeze trilogies out of thin concepts, but Fforde seems determined to top the Van Vogtian ideal of a new idea every 800 words. A savvy mix of literary references, genre concepts, crystal-clear prose and good clean fun, Fforde’s novels don’t have plots as they have an avalanche of plot complications and conceptual set-pieces. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as “a Fforde fan who has only read one of his books”: Usually, reading one Fforde means collecting them all. His fan-base is rabid, and it’s easy to see why.

    First Among Sequels is the fifth book in the Thursday Next sequence, but it’s not quite a direct sequel. For one thing, it takes place in 2002, fourteen years after the climax of the fourth book. But Thursday Next is living in a universe where five novels have been adapted from her life: four volumes drenched with sex and violence, followed by a fifth “kinder and gentler” tome which sank without a trace. But that’s the least of Thursday’s problems, as she struggles at ACME Carpets, which is really a front for an officially-disbanded SpecOps. But even that is a cover of sorts for Thursday’s continuing activities as a Jurisfiction agent.

    But wait! Thursday’s problems don’t stop there. There’s still a do-nothing teenage son to contend with (especially given how he should have started climbing ChronoGuard’s corporate ladder three years ago), cheese smuggling, a resurgent Goliath corporation, a dangerously stupidity-free government, a ghost with a message, declining readership, a husband suffering from writer’s block, more trouble in the world of fiction (including a sudden death for Sherlock Holmes) and a Jurisfiction partner who is nothing less than the fictionalized representation of Thursday herself.

    The first hundred pages are a bit slower than usual, but that’s partly because they’re dedicated to an updated tour of Thursday’s universe, twelve years later. There’s a lot of stuff to remember, but Fforde does a fine job at holding our burdened minds through a refresher course in how his elaborate hodge-podge of concepts works together. (No, I’m still not convinced that it all fits together. No, I don’t think that’s important either.) Once again, we’re shown SpecOps, Jurisfiction, the Great Library, the Council of Genres, Text Grand Central, the Well of Lost Plots…

    It’s a lot of stuff to juggle, but Fforde does it with aplomb and practised chaos. One of the continued pleasures of the Thursday Next universe is how the crises all seems to take place on different levels at once: At home, at work, elsewhere in Next’s “real world”, in Jurisfiction, across time… Most of those subplots end up being extensive justifications for elaborate set-pieces, but as long as the pages turn (and believe me, they turn quickly), who’s to complain? (As usual, it amuses me that authors count for nothing is Fforde’s grand mythology. This remains, first and foremost, a series for readers.)

    I won’t spoil all of the conceptual gags and set-pieces that pepper the book, but the first two are worth a tease. First is a small passage in which the Thursdays feel what it’s like to be in a passage read by a superreader (“a reader with unprecedented power of comprehension; someone who can pick up every subtle nuance, all the inferred narrative and deeply embedded subtext in one tenth the time of normal readers.” [P.72]), a concept nearly certain to be explored anew in a latter volume. (The nice thing about Fforde’s prose is the way it makes even average readers feel like superreaders.) The second good piece is a “refit” sequence describing how books are regularly maintained and overhauled “every thirty years or a million reading, whichever is soonest.” [P.93], a segment giving a new sense to “critical re-evaluation”. But I’ll remain coy on the two madcap tricks in Chapters 36-37, both of which are worth loud “I can’t believe he’s doing this” laughs.

    It all amount to another smooth and easy success for Fforde, who takes up a universe that seemed tapped-out and gives it another cool spin. There’s plenty of good material here (including bits of choice political satire), and the only bad thing about Fforde’s books is that they end far too soon. One warning, though: this is for those readers already familiar with Thursday Next’s universe. Everyone else should start back at The Eyre Affair.

    What seems clear is that First among Sequels is, fittingly enough, the first of another cycle of Thursday Next novels. Not only are a number of new issues raised and left hanging (including the infamous X-14 cheese), but the book ends on what is nearly a cliffhanger, and ends up being a clear slingshot into the next book. Impatient readers beware: They may want to wait until all of the new Next books are in bookstores before starting to read.

  • Spook Country, William Gibson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 2007, 371 pages, C$32.50 hc, ISBN 978-0-399-15430-0

    By now, saying that William Gibson is writing ever-closer to the present isn’t much of a revelation. Each of his three-book cycles so far have moved closer to the present, and after the roughly-contemporary Pattern Recognition, Spook Country is now gently historical fiction, back in the woolly old days of early 2006. It is also part of the same universe than Pattern Recognition; a third volume is not impossible at this point.

    It’s perhaps more useful to say that Gibson has always wanted to write about a certain type of universe, and that the universe has caught up to him. The “real year” of Gibson may end up being 2002 forever. He is now more comfortable writing about the weirdness of the present, what with its post-911 homeland insecurity, emergent cyberspace and terminally hip designer labels.

    And so from a deck jockey named Case, we end up with a rock star turned journalist, a junkie with Russian/English translation skills and an ex-Cuban freelance intelligence agent. The common thread between all three is a mysterious shipping container making its way around the world’s oceans, with vague rumours concerning its content. iPods containing information are exchanged, non-existent magazines may end up being a front for a private intelligence-gathering operation and “the world’s smallest organized crime family” is up for hire by the highest bidder. Welcome to the winter of 2006. Whatever little science-fictional content left here is something about the virtual space invading the physical world.

    But if Gibson has deserted science-fiction, it’s not true that he’s moved on to thrillers. Much like Pattern Recognition was a thrill-free thriller, Spook Country is a spy story with a shaggy dog ending where the stakes are actually much lower than what they may initially appear. Gibson, we sense, is not interested in thrills, maybe not even interested in plot (if he ever was). Gibson is about feel and texture, atmosphere and the feeling of being bewildered by what surrounds us. It makes him less of a genre writer (though his sensibilities are pretty much those of a genre fan), and more of a hip writer-of-the-now.

    The problem with defining such a niche is that the resulting books leave the vapid impression of a dream: the prose is exceptional, but not a lot happens to those characters. As even one character complains…

    “I though it was going to be terrorism, or crime in some more traditional sense, but it wasn’t. I think that it was actually… A prank. A prank you’d have to be crazy to be able to afford.” [P.351]

    The upside of being a hip writer without much regard to plot is that the books become spoiler-proof: The Gibson audience is winnowing itself to a bunch of readers who want to experience his prose, not be shocked or surprised by a bold new take on the future, or even the present. Spook Country, despite the ominous title, is a descriptive novel of the present by someone who has given up on making sense of it. It’s a profoundly passive book, as all characters are manipulated and re-manipulated by people who may not even be doing anything important.

    There’s a message there about the seductive superficiality of the world and how it can lead one to refuse to engage with any deeper meaning. But in his own review of Spook Country , John Clute has called the book a comedy, and he may be on to something. Not only are the stakes revealed to be ridiculously low, with little if any practical consequences for the characters, you can almost feel Gibson dangle an Important Plot in front of his readers before yanking it away with a “just kidding” smile. Another writer, faced with the same elements, would have been able to plot a thrill-packed action thriller with his eyes closed. But Gibson refuses to go there, refuses to play with the money, enjoy the power of his characters, refuses to delve into the minds of the bored powerful men that lurk off-screen in Spook Country. You would think that anyone couldn’t resist the allure of private intelligence operatives as it takes place in the real world, but that’s exactly what Gibson does with a smirk and a “Please don’t bother me” doorknob sign.

    It’s been a long way since Neuromancer, and there’s no going back for Gibson or his readers. He’s become a Writer of Our Times, and as such has escaped the easy protocols of genre. Reading him today appeals to completely different skills. A few more novels, and he’ll be writing historical novels about the eighties that are going to be indistinguishable from Douglas Copeland’s work.

  • The Darkening Garden, John Clute

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Payseur & Schmidt, 2006, 162 pages, C$40.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-9789114-0-9

    In the world of SF criticism, John Clute is the alpha dog: Few others have been able to re-shape the language by which we’re able to discuss genre fiction. For that matter, few people have their names on two genre-defining encyclopedias and three volumes of collected reviews. Clute has introduced a number of genre-specific critical concepts (“real year”, “thinning”, “polder”, etc.) and established a solid framework through which we can consider genre fiction. His work has become an essential part of how we discuss speculative fiction.

    Having settled the matter of science-fiction and fantasy, Clute has now turned his cool intellect to the issue of horror. The Darkening Garden is the first articulation of this interest. It’s not an “Encyclopedia of Horror”, though that may follow eventually, nor is it a definitive statement on the subject. It’s a bunch of notes in progress, a first attempt at articulating the nature of the genre put out there for discussion. Typically for Clute, some entries are brilliant, some entries are baffling, and most entries are both at the same time.

    It’s also as much an object than it is a book. Published by a small press with a first print run of only 500 signed and numbered copies (I’ve got 190), The Darkening Garden is the kind of cute book that is to be admired as much for its design than for its content. Indeed, each of the thirty entries in this very short lexicon is illustrated, with a variety of artists each showing up once. The outside design is simple: a small, self-effacing black hardcover with a band announcing the title. Inside, the text is laid out with a judicious choice of font and margins, all reinforcing the impression of a small jewel-book carefully set to highlight the content. This is not a mass-market book (it even lacks those ubiquitous bar-codes for easy retail scanning), which is fitting for content that is not for mass consumption either.

    Let’s open the book at a random entry and transcribe just one sentence, shall we? Here it is, from “Strange Stories”: “The examples given are not entirely heterogeneous, for the inner creative bent of most of those who have used the term is toward the writing of tales of estrangement rather than AFFECT HORROR as such.” [P.138] Well, actually, that’s not too bad. Clute has often been derided for the complexity of his language and The Darkening Garden is no exception. This is not a book for easy reading; it’s meant to build arguments, map out new territories and stretch minds in new critical directions.

    The overarching thesis of the book is a model for horror fiction as a whole. It’s an inversion of Clute’s well-established pattern for fantasy: Whereas that goes from WRONGNESS to THINNING to RECOGNITION to RETURN, Horror (argues Clute) goes from SIGHTING to THICKENING to REVEL to AFTERMATH. (With a side order of VASTATION.) This argument forms the the backbone of the book, and what remains from a first read.

    I may lack the critical tools and depth of knowledge required to make sense of it, but at first glance it does seem to make sense. The stereotypical horror film, for instance, signals something wrong with the world during an initial SIGHTING, gets more unnerving as the presence of the supernatural THICKENS, attains a paroxysm of sorts during the REVEL when characters are plunged deep into the new logic of the wrong world, and finally ends with an AFTERMATH where bodies are counted and the evil may or may not return. It’s not a bad model (albeit one would be careful to hammer an entire genre in it), and the best thing about The Darkening Garden is how it offers the theory for evaluation, daring other reviewers to make use of it if it pleases them. (Or criticize it if it makes them even happier.)

    I’m not so sure about the other, more tangential elements of the lexicon. (Did we really need an entry on “Picture books”?) Another of Clute’s developing theories is the sense that genre fiction exists at a particular point in human history, that it only became possible as we started making sense of humanity as a story to be told (or understood? I’m not sure about that myself.) That’s where the lexicon brings in the Holocaust and tremendous vastation. I’ll refrain from judgement, except for noting that Clute is growing older, and that as with many people on the wrong side of fifty, he’s more and more apt to say that some things will not outlive him —such as Science Fiction, said to have died years ago.

    Casual readers won’t get much out of The Darkening Garden except for a headache and the sense of an unfinished argument. But serious students of genre (and there are more than enough hooks here to link Clute’s arguments about horror to SF and fantasy) will enjoy a new theory of horror. Clute fans owe it to themselves to get a copy of this book, but other shouldn’t worry if they let all 500 copies sell out: I’m sure that this material will pop up again, revised and expanded, in some future Clute encyclopedia or another.

    [October 2007: My web server tools detect a vast and cold wind blowing over this site. What could it be? Yes, John Clute sees this review and mentions it on his blog. There are no comments, but my embarassment is considerable. I resist the urge to change the review or replace it with a series of apologies.]