Book Review

  • 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.]

  • The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Firebird, 2006, 234 pages, US$9.99 tpb, ISBN 0-14-240722-4

    I didn’t know it, but I’ve been waiting for this book a good chunk of my life.

    I should explain that I got tired of straight-up high fantasy early on: After the second or third dozen plot-coupon quest, it’s easy to give up on the genre and go read something else. But other people stuck with it, and sometime during the making of the Grant/Clute Encyclopedia of Fantasy, collaborator/proofreader Diana Wynne Jones came up with A Concept parallel to the Encyclopedia: A tourist guide to generic Fantasyland. Alphabetized, cross-referenced and sarcastic to a degree you wouldn’t believe.

    A first edition of the Tough Guide to Fantasyland sprung up in 1996 and was promptly nominated for a Hugo Award. Now, a revised and updated edition has appeared on shelves just in time to protect unwary tourists from the newest horde of Tolkien wannabes. Having missed (but heard) about the first edition, I finally managed to snag a second edition copy and read it cover-to-cover.

    There’s one word for this book and it’s brilliant.

    The concept itself is sheer genius: if generic Fantasy is so, well, generic, wouldn’t it be possible to list all of the common clichés, obliquely blaming “The Management” for certain conventions and highlighting how certain things behave far differently in Fantasyland than in the Real World? And that’s exactly why the book is so clever: it’s a mixture of ironic shrugs and quiet sarcasm, a demonstration of silly clichés and a call for intervention at the same time. Why should people eat STEW when it’s so bloody hard to prepare even in the best of conditions? Who actually raises the ubiquitous HORSES that behave like motorcycles? Why should COLOR CODING be so reliable? Reading the entries in this guide is enough to make any fantasy reader nod in recognition as clichés are described, explained and dissected. (Don’t miss the ten possible kinds of SWORDS.)

    It’s just beautiful. From ADEPT to ZOMBIES, Diana Wynne Jones has staked a fake genre on the ground and pounded a stake through its derivative heart.

    No review of the book would be complete without a word about the fabulous design of the book. Someone obviously spent a lot of time thinking about how to present the information contained within, and the result is a small masterpiece of paperback design complete with side margin tabs, quick reference icons, pleasant typography and just enough graphic pizazz to make the entire book pop out. Alas, the acknowledgements are not forthright on who did the interior design of the book, though Tony Sahara is listed at the cover and map designer. (The book also has jokes in places you wouldn’t expect. Don’t miss The Map, or “Other Tough Guides”)

    The only problem with The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is that it’s a book to read in small doses: The common thread unifying the whole book is sarcasm, after all, and the basic joke can turn repetitive. There’s also a Point to most of the entries, and it can be useful to pause and reflect upon that Point, especially if it’s made in an oblique fashion, or by inference with other entries. Expect to spend at least one early reading sessions flipping back and forth through the book to follow the best or most unusual leads. Can you say “perfect bathroom reading”? Yes, you can.

    I’m always impressed by those who can combine critical insight with entertainment value, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a near-perfect union of the two. It’s very funny, it’s very smart and it acts as an antidote to all of the bad fantasy clichés that have been allowed to contaminate the genre. Why can’t SFWA buy crates of this book and send it (free of charge, as a public service) to every budding fantasy writer? Think of it as a decontamination program, and a call for more stringent quality control. For writers, I expect this book to become an error-checking reference. For readers, a step up toward higher critical thought. For reviewers, something to hold on during the next awful trip to Fantasyland in the hands of a careless Management.

  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Raincoast/Bloomsbury, 2003, 766 pages, C$43.00 hc, ISBN 1-55192-570-2

    Faithful readers of these reviews will remember my contrarian approach to the Harry Potter juggernaut: See the film in theatres, then read the book. It’s been an interesting experience so far: The movies provide the plot and the images, while the books expand upon the characters and the background. It’s an approach that allows the movies to stand on their own, sometimes for good, and sometimes not: after a few problems in instalment 3, the fifth entry in the series was the most incoherent film yet. Making sense of it required a consultation with two Potter experts (ie: my siblings) and a trip through the brick-sized book. As one of my Potter consultants remarked: The thickest book of the series yielded the shortest film so far.

    Fortunately, there’s a lot more to the book than simply explaining the film. The Harry Potter series has, for me, become critic-proof: Knowing that I have nothing new to bring to the discussion in some sense frees me from trying to rate the books. I’m left to relax and enjoy the book purely on entertainment terms.

    And despite this being “the thickest book of the series”, I had a lot of fun reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It’s obvious from the first hundred pages (which barely cover ten minutes of screen-time) that the book is going to be a far more leisurely, far more complete experience than the book itself. While the director couldn’t make up his mind between starting the plot or stopping the film for minutiae, Rowling simply goes ahead and writes another year at Hogwarts, complete with minor character, academic anxieties, quiddich and yet another house-elves subplot.

    At the book unfolded like a well-weathered comforter, a minor revelation occurred to me: I’m not reading the Harry Potter books as genre fantasy as much as I’m reading them as a novel of setting and characters. Yes, that’s the heresy of it: I’m enjoying Potter more as general literature than genre fiction. The richness of the series is in how Rowling develops her cast of characters, in how she develops her imaginary world (itself a character, one could argue) and the ramifications of her vision. It’s just as well: aside from Hermione, my favourite characters in this book (or even in the Potter series as a whole) are often the secondary or even tertiary players who just have to suffer through the whole return-of-Voldemort stuff: The Patil sisters, Angelina Johnson, Minerva McGonagall, and so on. Most of them end up on the chopping block of the movie adaptation. Here, they get a bit of space to breathe. New character such as Nymphodera Tonks and Luna Lovegood are much better-developed in the book, and the impact is far more profound than simply seeing magical light-shows on the screen.

    Notable subplots cut from the film also add tremendously to the depth of the story. The prefect subplot deepens Potter’s sense of alienation, especially at the beginning of the story. The quiddich subplot adds even more to Umbridge’s meanness and Harry’s isolation. Poor Firenze never made it on-screen, and neither does Dobby and the vast majority of his fellow house-elves. More significant is the near-evacuation of the growing unease in the wizard world. The simple “good-versus-evil” conflict of the movies is nuanced into something that looks a lot like a civil war, leaving families divided —including the Wesleys. St Mugon’s Hospital? Gone. A good chunk of the fascinating academic details are also lost to the film’s length, leaving aside some excellent character moments. (I was particularly fond of Harry’s Patronus spell during his OWL examination, and the final exit of the Wesley twins is far more satisfying in the book. McGonagall’s role is also much more interesting in the book.) In the film, several plot twists appear out of nowhere; the book has the luxury of developing them properly. Umbridge? She’s even more infuriating in the book, and that’s saying something: “Hem-hem”.

    Some plot-lines don’t work on the page and on paper: anything involving Hagrid just grates on my nerves (which, I think, is a good reflexion of the series having outgrown the the character), and Dumbledore’s double-dumb plans are inane regardless of how many special effects or chapter-long apologies you throw at them.

    But all told, I really enjoyed those few hours spent at Hogwarts. I liked spending time with the characters, and that’s pretty much all I need to say in terms of critical judgement. Once more, like after every book so far, I’m tempted to just rush out and finish the series. But it will pass, and I will just wait for the next movie to come out. (After all, I pretty much spoiled myself rotten about book 7: It’s not as if the series has any surprises left.)

  • Safe Area Gorazde, Joe Sacco

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Fantagraphics, 2000, 227 pages, C$29.95 tpb, ISBN 1-56097-470-2

    For all of our outrage at the Holocaust, at autocratic regimes, at genocides and massacres and civil wars and bloody uprisings, we’re not very good at actually caring about the ones that are currently going on. SCHINDLER’S LIST came out in 1992 and everyone vowed “never again” even as Rwanda and Yugoslavia went up in machetes and machines guns. We vowed “never again” anew as details of those conflicts made it in the mass media, and yet Darfur, Iraq, Palestine continue to make the evening news even as I type this. It’s enough to make anyone despair about whatever passes for humanity.

    And if you think that this is depressive thinking, well, you haven’t just finished reading Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde. An illustrated non-fiction account of the last days of the the Bosnian War, Sacco’s book defies convention and is different enough to still shock the reader. His unique brand of “comics journalism” appears harmless at first, but give it an inch and it will slip under your skin and remain there for a while.

    As the book open in fall 1995, Sacco is abroad the contingent of western journalists making their way to the “safe area” of Gorazde, a mostly-Muslim enclave deep inside Serbian Bosnia. Gorazde is unique in that it has held against Serb ethnic cleansing. In other words, not everyone has been killed. As the UN tries to impose a cease-fire and maintain the supply lines as they make their way through Serbian territory, Sacco interviews the people left in the bombed-out city. As the book advances, they open up and gradually tell the story of three years of war. Three years in which neighbours turned against each other, in which the city was destroyed by its former inhabitants, three years during which the West gesticulated uselessly as more and more people got killed.

    The Gorazde in this book is hollowed-out in many ways. It’s filled with craters, bullet holes, destroyed houses and burned-out cars. The bridge has a second ramshackle bridge underneath to protect pedestrians against snipers. And the people are in no better shape: having endured unimaginable horror, they are afraid of even believing that it’s over. Having seen their neighbours rise up against them once, they have no trouble imagining that it could happen again.

    The stories that Sacco tell in each chapter can range from history to absurdity to full horror. He explains the roots of the Bosnian war, but he also giggles with the “Stupid Girls” as they wish for American jeans and has problems of his own trying to make his way back outside the Serb perimeter. Gradually, the inhabitants of Gorazde tell him their own stories of survival and grief. The stories get much, much worse as the book advances. Two chapters in particular, “The First Attack” and “Total War”, are as gory as anything I’ve seen outside of Geoff Darrow: Don’t be surprised if your first impulse after reading them is to leave the book aside and go do something else for a while.

    That’s the genius of Sacco’s book; a single man at a drawing table making us see the terrible cost of a civil war in a way that is far more affecting than just a series of prose pages. Sacco doesn’t give himself a heroic role in the narrative. Indeed, he portrays himself as a short, round-faced man with prominent lips and eyes perpetually obscured by blank round glasses. Indeed, there are few pretty people in this book. But they are ordinary people, and when things go back to a new normal by the end of the book, we’re glad for them. Their friends and family may not have made it out alive, but they themselves get to sing, study and go back to a normal life. But as one of them says, “I don’t want any nice things. I don’t want a nice place or nice furniture. In the end, probably it will all be destroyed.” The Gorazde diaspora has learned the hard way and they will never forget; never forget that it has happened, and never forget that it can happen again.

    Safe Area Gorazde is not an easy book to read: not just because of the violence, but also because of the proximity of the events. This has happened less than fifteen years ago, less than a thousand kilometres away from Rome. And still we read the book and watch the movies and vow “never forget”… but we will.

  • Burden of Proof, John G. Hemry

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2004, 293 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-01147-0

    I really enjoy being surprised by some books, and Burden of Proof is an unusual kind of surprise: A book that shouldn’t work, but does so far better than anyone could suspect. Who could expect such an enjoyable book from a surprise-free plot, a blandly heroic protagonist, superfluous SF elements and a exposition-heavy prose style?

    The lineage of the novel might have been a clue. John G. Hemry’s Burden of Proof is, after all, the second book in a series after the satisfying A Just Determination, which did similar wonders with just about the same elements. Together, the series charts the career of Paul Sinclair, junior commissioned officer in a 2100-era United States space navy. As Sinclair is tasked with shipboard judiciary duties, you can see how the series has the feel of a hybrid between legal drama, military procedural fiction and nuts-n-bolts science fiction. A number of on-line references to this series call it “JAG in space”, and while I’m not sure it’s the series’ official title, it certainly fits the plot.

    The first book succeeded despite a number of elements that should have worked against it. Its earnest prose style and likable characters did much to shore up the clumsiness of some passages and the predictable nature of the plot. Those flaws and qualities are also in Burden of Proof, where they’re joined by another growing problem: self-conscious repetition.

    Because structurally, A Just Determination and Burden of Proof are like twin brothers. Both see Sinclair as he progresses through the ranks, assists a captain’s mast session, witness an incident and volunteers for unpleasant court martial duties. The events are different (the accidental shooting of civilians in the first book; a shipboard accident in the second), but the formula stays the same. Even the characters comment that it’s just bad luck to be involved in two court martial procedures in such a short amount of time.

    And through it all, the tone also remains the same. Hemry is not interested in juiced-up Hollywood drama, daredevil characters or extraordinary threats. His series is about people doing their jobs, and doing their best to operate within the system. Paul Sinclair tries really hard to follow the rules; it’s just bad luck that people around him can’t seem to do the same. There is a basic verisimilitude to this series that is comforting no matter how pedestrian it seems: who needs alien invasions, doomsday weapons and vast space battles when a court martial for gross dereliction of duty can be so thrilling? I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: This series should reach far more than the usual military-SF crowd in how it portrays military personnel as real people faced with real problems. Even more so here than in A Just Determination, the enemy that most directly threatens Sinclair is not another country, but the incompetents on his own ship.

    Take away the almost-useless SF window-dressing, and you’ve got a tale that could be published as straight-up military fiction. The “space navy” is the sugar pill required to sell this book to SF audiences, but it holds together surprisingly well without it. Whether it’s an advantage or not is still unclear to me at this point, but I can certainly testify that the book as a whole is utterly pleasant to read regardless of genre. Despite the linear plot, the cheap twists (including an investigating officer with a huge conflict of interest) and the repeated overuse of Sinclair’s internal monologue, Burden of Proof is a smooth piece of fiction. Far smoother than anyone would expect given all of the elements running against it. And yet, despite my growing conviction that this series is going to run its concept into the ground, I’m on board for at least the next two volumes in the series.

    We’ll see if the trend continues, or even improves.

    [September 2007: I wasn’t so fond of Rule of Evidence, the third volume in the series, which really seemed to recycle everything all over again to little effect. Once again, the lack of basic monitoring equipment puts all characters in trouble, and good old Paul Sinclair has to rescue the situation. It’s still very readable, but the ritualized plot structure starts to grate.]

    [October 2007: Interestingly enough, the fourth volume, Against all Enemies, is a neat wrap-up to this first phase of Paul Sinclair’s career as he leaves the USS Michaelson at the end of his tour of duty. The plot isn’t necessarily less of a formula, but there’s a real sense of growth and evolution here, in addition to the series’ usual strengths. There may or may not be any further volumes in the series (sales will determine that), but any fifth volume will likely be very different from the first four. In the meantime, the series as a whole is an interesting hybrid of legal/military/SF thriller, and it’s worth a look even given the third-volume ennui.]