Book Review

  • A Princess of the Aerie, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Aspect, 2003, 319 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61082-8

    Veteran John Barnes readers were shaken by A Duke of Uranium. the first volume of his “Jik Jinnaka” series: Here was a John Barnes with no horrid violence, no non-consensual sex, no last chapter that killed everyone in sight. In fact, the novel was practically a Heinlein juvenile with a bit more sex and action: an old-fashioned SF novel that tried real hard to please everyone and made a serious stab at the YA market. Knowing Barnes’ tendency to drop the hammer on his characters when they least expect it, could he sustain such an atmosphere in further volumes of the series? Follow-up A Princess of the Aerie answers that with a resounding “Oh, you knew what was coming…”

    But before explaining what didn’t turn out so well, let’s take a moment to be grateful for what has been carried over from the first novel. The quasi-Heinleinian narration is back, with its mixture of future world-building, unusual slang, snappy dialogue and efficient prose. It doesn’t take much time to be sucked into A Princess of the Aerie, especially not when Jak gets a cry for help: His old girlfriend (previously established as a princess in the previous volume) needs his help in dealing with a big problem, and Jak’s covert training is perfect for the job.

    So far, so good. But the wind starts to turn once Jak gets to the Aerie: Much to his dismay, he avoids being killed, discovers that the cry for help was an authentic fake, and that his ex-girlfriend is now deeply into kinky domination games. Barnes’ streak of books without non-consensual sex ends shortly in A Princess of the Aerie as Jak is manipulated into sexual mind-games for his ex-girlfriend’s unabashed entertainment. (The unspoken moral of the story is something like “don’t let a super-powerful girlfriend mess with your brain chemistry, despite the hot sex you may think you’re getting out of it.”) Suffice to say that the novel solidly establishes itself as one that all Young Adults will want to read… despite their parents’ objections.

    It’s handled with a smile, but a bittersweet one. Jak eventually realizes the extent to which he has fooled himself, and what an absolutely corrupt person his ex-girlfriend has been all along. But he doesn’t get much time to think about it: before realizing it, he’s exiled on what’s called an important covert operation on service to the Aerie.

    That is the breaking cue for another interplanetary travel sequence that may bring back memories of the first volume. Some characters return and some familiar games are played, leaving readers with an impression not only of deja-vu, but also of a broken plot: why spend so much time on Jak’s betrayal if the real story is going to take place elsewhere?

    Jak and friends eventually end up on Mercury, where Barnes explains what he didn’t have to in the first volume: In the world of Jak Jinnaka, Mercury ends up being the lowest rung on the lowest ladder, a hellish place where everyone is naturally exploited by physics and the way the economy is structured. The planet’s only output is precious metals, and the working environment isn’t for wussies: Everyone works hard and dies young. Police enforcement is practically non-existent. Amazingly enough, things are getting worse: The normally metastable power dynamics of the competing factions is upset by the arrival of a ruthless new faction, and it’s up to Jak and his few friends to correct the problem. Class credits may be at stake.

    Jak’s universe constantly gets darker and more dangerous throughout the novel, and if the outcome of his mission is never truly in doubt, the real meat of the novel is in the sacrifices he has to make in order to settle the issue. Progressively, we come to understand the bitterness of the opening foreword in which Jak is dismissed by his ex-best friend. As Jak progresses, he finds out the lies and dangers in being turned into a hero. Poor guy: finds out his ex-girlfriend is a witch, loses his friends, has his reputation trashed on system-wide media…

    And yet, one comes away from A Princess of the Aerie with the unaccountable feeling that this is, in fact, a pretty fun book. Despite the plot that goes awry, despite the gathering clouds, despite the foreboding that Jak is going to be way over his head in the third volume, the reading pleasure of this volume remains intact. I may still not be convinced by the girlfriend’s abrupt revelation as a Machiavellian sociopath, but I’m not going to complain (much) either. What is noticeable, though, if how the series now seems more aligned to Barnes’ known track record. Despite knowing better, I’m really looking forward to In the Hall of Martians Kings.

  • Year’s Best SF 12, Ed. David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    EOS, 2007, 484 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-06-125208-2

    “The theme of the year is catastrophe and how to recover from it” warn editors Hartwell and Cramer in the introduction to their latest Year’s Best SF volume, and they’re not kidding. Of the twenty-six stories assembled here, a good chunk deal with The End… regardless of whether it’s followed by a new beginning or not.

    Apocalyptic fiction isn’t a new subgenre of SF, of course, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that the chosen few of this anthology are writing about fresh horrors a privileged knowledge of what it feels to go through a catastrophe. Unlike the writers who wished the Cold War away by describing nuclear Armageddon, every writer represented here has seen the World Trade Centre fall; has waited for SARS to bloom into something bigger; has seen the United States invade another country on thin pretexts; has seen a tsunami wipe out hundred of thousands of people; has mentally scratched New Orleans from their holiday destinations. The first few years of the twenty-first century have been rough on everyone, and this Year’s Best SF is showing the accumulating damage. The goal is no longer to triumph against adversity, but to cope with it.

    In many ways, the opening story of the volume tells you everything you need to know about the anthology: Nancy Kress’ “Nano comes to Clifford Falls” describes the economic dislocation that comes with the arrival of SF’s archetypal nano-technology economy. It’s both a fresh and fascinating shorty story, and a small wonder insofar as it has taken up to 2006 for someone to tackle an issue that’s been obvious to everyone since the first glimmers of nanotech. The writing is crisp, and the story deals with real issues. The end state is unlikely to please everyone, which makes the story that much stronger.

    But it’s far from being the last good story of the volume, and even farther from being the last catastrophe story. I have discussed Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” in my review of his Overclocked collection, but the story remains the same: As catastrophic events mysteriously (some will say “arbitrarily”) isolate a community of hackers from an outside world that stops responding, it’s up to them to hold everything together… even if they’re not too sure if that’s the right thing to do. I still get a chill out of the last paragraph.

    Other stories in the post-apocalyptic vein include Claude Lalumière similarly improbable “This is the Ice Age”, in which quantum ice ravages Montréal. Michael Flynn’s Hugo-nominated “Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth” hits a distinctly post-9/11 nerve despite being being about something very different: It’s perhaps the clearest example of how, in the wake of September 2001, everyone has become far more adapted at seeing the ramifications of catastrophe. Daryl Gregory makes a welcome returns appearance with “Damascus”, which goes all the way through coping with catastrophe to study those who embrace it. “Expedition, with Recipes” by Joe Haldeman isn’t much of a story, but the conceit fits perfectly with the anthologists’ thesis. On a smaller scale, Ian R. McLeod’s “Taking Good Care of Myself” is about being confronted to one’s death in a very literal way. The more we read into this Year’s Best SF, the more we seem stuck in disaster. Even Robert Reed gets into the spirit of things with “Rwanda”, which looks at the wreckage left in a curious post-invasion future.

    Even the stories that don’t directly feature some kind of apocalypse aren’t a cheery basket of kittens. Heather Linsdley’s “Just do it!” (which gets my vote as one of the volume’s top stories) is pitch-dark social satire with a twist that’s almost too mean to stomach. Superb. Meanwhile, Alastair Reynolds’ detective story “Tiger, Burning” manages to temper a victory of sort with a strong sense of melancholy.

    At some point, one starts to wonder if the apocalypses that lurk through the book aren’t contaminating the rest of the stories. Even the usually jubilant Rudy Rucker seems down this year with a funny story that also happens to deal with ultimate catastrophe. It’s amusing, uplifting and indescribably weird… but it still deals with the end of the world. Again.

    But don’t reach for that straight razor just yet: The last word belongs to Charlie Rosenkrantz’s “Preemption”, a darkly amusing catastrophe tale that seems even funnier give the grimness of the preceding stories. Hartwell and Cramer are seasoned pros at the anthology business, and the placement of that story alone earns em extra points for style.

    But all you truly need to know is that for those who can take the depressing nature of the year’s story, Year’s Best SF 12 is once again a superior best-of anthology. The thematic component seems unusually strident, but that’s almost a bonus feature. What’s no catastrophe, though, is the selection of the stories. Once again, Year’s Best SF trumps the official Hugo-nominated selection, with only a few overlaps.

  • Secret Justice, James W. Huston

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 2003, 450 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-000838-5

    [Note from your usual reviewer: As I was reading in one of the departure lounges in Chicago’s O’Hare airport, waiting for my flight back to Ottawa, a man sitting next to me finished his paperback novel, nudged me and said “You should read this one”. I couldn’t let that opportunity slip by and asked why: what follows is a transcription of what he told me.]

    The problem with novels there days is that’s they’re just too soft. We’re at war, all right? The camel-heads just want to blast us away and all these fluffy pinko authors can do is wring their hands about how it’s not right to destroy them. I’m with the President on this: if we don’t teach them a lesson, they’ll never learn. It’s just business. Capitalism, baby. In my line of work, we buy companies before they buy us. Kill’em first, that’s what I always say.

    I spend nearly half my time flying around the country, and with the stupid rules about “electronic interference”, I end up reading a lot of books. You wouldn’t catch me dead with romance, but these days it looks like females are writing half the thrillers out there. Me, I want the good stuff. Stuff written by military guys. Those who have been there and can tell it like it is. Huston’s the real deal. He’s been in the Navy. He also became a lawyer and I can’t stand those bastards, but nobody’s perfect.

    I’m not sure what Huston’s written before, but Secret Justice‘s just the kind of books we should force people to read. Starts somewhere out there in the desert, with US troops getting a bunch of terrorists. Not all of them, though: the big guy, the Osama of the gang has been able to slip out and the others won’t tell what’s happened to him. Well, guess what, the hero of the book doesn’t wast his time meowing like those pussies I saw at our new factory yesterday: He grabs one of the terrorists and start dunking his head underwater until he starts blabbing. Five minutes later, wannabee-Osama’s in the bag.

    Of course, the first weak-ass terrorist dies because of some crap torture-related thing, but it doesn’t matter: The hero comes back with wannabee-Osama and everyone’s happy. For a while, everyone’s able to focus on the real problem: The terrorists are about to attack America, and wannabee-Osama knows something. It’s up to the hero to run around the world to stop the problem.

    But when Fox News tells you that the real problem with our country is the liberals, they’re not kidding: The doctors who discovered the dead terorrist starts emailing the euro commies over at Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders to complain about the torture. Pretty soon, the liberals are winning: the hero is accused of murder and he’s stopped from going after the real terrorists. The dumb doctor even pays for a lawyer to defend wannabee-Osama, who suddenly starts saying that he’s not the real kinda-Osama.

    But that’s all right, because the hero gets to go away on missions between breaks in his murder case. He briefs the presidents, romances his girl, fights the terrorists and tells the liberals to go screw themselves: that’s a hero. Now, it gets a bit confusing after that, because wannabee-Osama isn’t the real kinda-Osama and that makes the doctor feel better about his dumb no-torture attitude, but it doesn’t matter: Pretty soon, the hero gets to torture the real kinda-Osama, and gets to stop a big terrorist plot.

    And you know what? That’s the real-world for you. Sometimes, even the good guys have to take a pair of pliers and cut off people’s finger if that’s what’s needed to save the world. The lawyers, the bleeding hearts, the code of justice are just garbage we use to make ourselves feel better. That book knows that, and man I was happy to read a novel written by a real man for once: none of that “oh, we must be sensitive to the enemies, meow, meow, meow” bull. You know, sometime you’ve got to suck it up: Yesterday, I saw grown guys cry after being told their factory was going to be closed and shipped off to India. Hell, if you can’t take it like a man, you don’t deserve to live in America. We’re a country that gets result; screw everything else.

    I’m definitely picking up Huston’s next book. Anyone with the guts to say that he’s pro-torture will get money from guys like me.

  • Black Powder War, Naomi Novik

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2006, 365 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-48130-5

    After the long trip to China in Throne of Jade, it’s good to see Naomi Novik come back to a more conventional military novel in Black Powder War, the third volley in the Temeraire series. Given that the high concept of the series has been “the Napoleonic War with dragons”, it’s only fair that at least one novel would take place in the trenches of the war itself. If the first volume was a book of discovery rudely interrupted by combat and the second was a voyage to China capped by a bit of palace intrigue, this third volume sends Temeraire and captain Laurence on the Eastern European battlefields.

    It starts as Temeraire and company are enjoying life in China after the events of the latest volume. Suddenly, a courier appears and orders them back home by way of the Ottoman Empire: Three dragon eggs there await transport back to the home islands as quickly as possible. If the voyage to China took place over sea, the trip back will have to go overland, straight toward the eastern front lines of the war.

    Naturally, the trip proves to be far more complicated than simply “bring three eggs back home”. Events in Turkey don’t go as planned, stranding Laurence and crew in Eastern Europe even as Napoleon’s armies are doing well on the battlefield. If the Temeraire series has been amiable so far, circumstances soon spiral into desperation as the British crew is forces to care for the eggs in its custody, forage for food and help their allies as much as they can. Unexpected allies and even more unexpected enemies don’t make things any easier.

    At this point in the series, there’s no doubt about the appeal of Novik’s prose: It’s accessible, it’s gentle, it’s fun to read and makes a good attempt at replicating the flavour of Regency-era narrative without losing the directness of more contemporary writing. Black Power War is no exception, despite the inevitable loss of the novelty effect. In terms of plotting, Novik is starting to allow herself longer dramatic loops than in the first two volumes, and the return appearance of Lien makes for a nice bit of continued tension. The narrative is not always interesting or gripping, but that may be a consequence of the events of the book themselves: No one will be fond of seeing Temeraire and Laurence stuck in the mud in Eastern Europe, so it’s only natural to wish that thing could move a bit more quickly during that time.

    On the other hand, it allows Novik to showcase even more historical details about her chosen time period, and the way she integrates her fantasy elements in that framework. Napoleon himself has a walk-on role in the middle of the narrative, and there are a few intricate descriptions of dragon-boosted military operations.

    Thematically, the series is also developing on a number of social issues. Temeraire is an independent thinker, and the impact of seeing how the Chinese treat their dragons is starting to be felt even as he returns home. I wouldn’t be surprised if dragon emancipation ends up forming a significant portion of the upcoming arc of the series, with consequent social commentary.

    From an external perspective, it’s worth noting that this third volume of the Temeraire series is the last in Del Rey’s initial push for the series. The fourth one has been delivered and is currently making its way through the editorial process, but Black Powder War was the last volume written more or less in isolation, before the series earned widespread acclaim, got optioned by Peter Jackson and earned Novik a spot on the Hugo/Campbell ballot. It will be interesting to see how the feedback loop starts affecting the series from now on.

    One thing is certain: this isn’t a closed trilogy. It’s obvious from the end of the third volume (let alone the special sneak preview of the fourth book bundled at the end) that the Napoleonic wars continue, and that Temeraire has a number of adventures ahead of him. While the series remains a bit light and has not managed to resolve the internal contradiction of being a “Napoleonic war… with dragons!” alternate history, it remains a piece of solid entertainment, and shows little signs of fatigue as it heads toward a fourth instalment.

  • Storyteller, Kate Wilhelm

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Small Beer Press, 2005, 190 pages, US$16.00 tpb, ISBN 1-931520-16-X

    If you’re not familiar with the subculture of Science Fiction writing, it can be difficult to explain the reputation that the Clarion Writers’ Workshop enjoys within the SF community. Clarion was the first big SF writing workshops for neophytes, and still remains (even after its mitosis into Clarion East and Clarion West) one of the finest. For six weeks, a small community of aspiring writers congregates in a campus, living as a group and spending their time either writing short fiction or critiquing the work of their fellow participants. It’s an intense experience: imagine living and breathing genre fiction for six weeks with little pause for anything else. (Now imagine the let-down of a return to normal life, and understand why a web search for “Post-Clarion Stress Syndrome” will net a dozen hits) Nearly every Clarion participant emerges from the experience a much better writer, which testifies about the workshop’s effectiveness.

    Since the beginning of the workshop, dozens of the genre’s best writers have been to Clarion, many of them returning to teach a few years later. The program now benefits from academic sponsorship, widespread recognition and institutional respectability. But it wasn’t always so, and part of Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller describes how the Clarion workshops developed from humble beginnings and through some rocky years. The other part of Storyteller is a compendium of Wilhelm’s writing advice, distilled from numerous Clarion workshops and her own considerable experience writing in and out of genre fiction.

    The impatient will turn to the penultimate chapter, “Notes and Lessons on Writing”, as a handy summary of the writing advice offered through the book. How and where to begin a story, how to realize characters; how to describe setting; how to develop a plot. Wilhelm explains the distinction between the various forms of stories and takes some time in exploring the means and meaning of living like a writer. It’s simultaneously simple and complex writing advice. Simple, because it can be boiled down to a few pages of self-evident advice. Complex, because these axioms were derived from years of experience, and numerous attempts in finding out what works. We’re left with the results, but the proofs are left to the students.

    Veteran of how-to-write books may not find anything startlingly new here, but it doesn’t matter as much as you think: the basics of writing are universal, and Wilhelm’s voice is entertaining enough that she’s captivating even when explaining the obvious difference between a novel and a short story.

    But there’s also the historical-Clarion side of the book to consider. For some students of the genre, this is the part of Storyteller that makes the book worth its price. Wilhelm and her husband Damien Knight were, for decades, the backbone of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Storyteller is her memoir of life at Clarion, through cohorts of students, evolving teaching methods and variously supportive environments (for a few years, Clarion students were so rowdy that the workshop was never allowed to take place more than once at the same place).

    For fans of the genre, anecdotes about budding writers are what makes Storyteller sparkle. Page 151 alone is crammed with affectionate memories: “Ted Chiang, quiet and mostly silent, who never missed a word or a nuance… Kim Stanley Robinson, already deeply serious, and George Alec Effinger, who never was… Lucius Shepherd, a mobile disaster zone… Robert Crais, as debonair and handsome then as he still is.” (Yes, that Robert Crais went to Clarion.) More interesting are the unnamed participants, those who fell by the wayside and were never nominated for Hugo awards: “the woman who seduced everything that moved, then apologized to the director because she had run out of time before getting to him.” [P.152] (Well, I’m assuming she was never nominated for a Hugo.)

    Those moments, the water-gun fights and concerns about places to eat, the story of “The Red Line of Death” and dormitory troubles, are what sets Storyteller from other books, and possibly why the book earned Wilhelm a Hugo Award in 2006 for best related non-fiction book. It’s a short but perfectly enjoyable read from the fine folks at Small Beer Press, who continue to publish quirky books that may not have much of a chance otherwise. If you can’t make it to Clarion, have a look at this book. It’s decades of writing advice and experience compressed in less than two hundred pages.

  • Foundation’s Triumph, David Brin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Torch, 1999, 392 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-105639-1

    Necrophilia is a terrible thing, but some people can do anything as long as enough dollars are dangled in front of their eyes. As I write this, the “latest-last-conclusion-we-promise!” of “Frank Herbert”’s Dune series is in stores, where it takes up valuable shelf space alongside a wholly-unneeded sequel to A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan and Spider Robinson’s “collaboration” with Robert A. Heinlein. If there’s any comfort in this sad state of affairs, it’s that these cash-in experiments thankfully fade away in time and there is little better proof of this transience than the “Second Foundation trilogy” that briefly blipped in bookstores at the end of the nineties.

    This time, it’s Isaac Asimov’s corpse that is up for ritual desecration. Oh, hired writers may ward off critical sarcasm with such noble incantations as “authorized by the Estate”, “I, at first, declined the contract” and “We’re the ‘Killer Bs’ of hard SF and none of us are named Kevin J. Anderson”, but the fact remains that nobody wanted another Foundation trilogy more badly than Asimov’s estate. Self-serving rationalizations about “exploring issues left open by Isaac” conveniently leave out the fact that the entire Foundation concept was invented in the 1940s and then patched up (to growing critical dismay) by Asimov himself until his death in the early nineties. If Isaac couldn’t fix it himself, what makes you think that you’d do a better job?

    I lack the patience and innate cruelty to fully review all three books in the series. Oh, I could go on and on about Gregory Benford’s Foundation’s Fear and how it was twice as long as it needed to be, with a dumb subplot about artificial intelligences that seemed cut-and-pasted from another novel. (And that’s saying nothing about another useless monkey-sex subplot. Yeah, you read me right.). I could be even meaner about Greg Bear’s Foundation and Chaos and how it was 100% too long and represented yet another of Bear’s “Bad Bear!” books. But why drive the knife even further when it’s enough to state that David Brin’s Foundation’s Triumph is the least disposable tome of a wholly unnecessary trilogy?

    Sometimes, it’s not enough to say that the story is dull, that the characters are not sympathetic, that the “plot” is not interesting. Sometimes, you have to go all the way up and question the very assumptions that underly a project.

    Yes, there are problems with the Foundation series. Logical problems, moral problems, political problems. As a piece of pulp magazine SF in the forties, it was exceptional. As a historical marker in the history of the genre, it remains essential. But SF has moved on since Asimov’s teenage years, and what should have been left alone wasn’t. First Asimov got the supremely ill-conceived notion of tying together all of his fiction, patching up the holes between his Imperial, Robots and Foundation series with a series of rationalization that became shakier with time. Alas, the buyer’s appeal of the “Foundation” franchise did little to dissuade Asimov from adding to the mess with later novels that became less and less worthwhile.

    But death is no obstacle once scruples can be papered over with lovely green banknotes. Benford, Bear and Brin thought they could continue the story, patch over even more holes and make a few points about the human condition within an increasingly artificial Foundation universe. So they bring in another layer of conspiracies, fancy new socio-technical concepts, a nonsensical plague, artificial personalities, more robots and even alien creatures in an effort to fill in the tiny holes in Hari Seldon’s life left unspecified by Asimov’s work.

    But even if some of the rationalizations are very clever (even Trantor’s population density is explained), trying to patch Foundation’s badly broken model is like putting spoilers and nitro boosters on a Model T Ford: It may look modern at first glance, but the framework isn’t built to accept the add-ons and tears itself apart during the first serious test drive. If the chief appeal of “The Second Foundation Trilogy” is conceptual, so is its biggest failing.

    Alas, the trilogy isn’t really better as genre entertainment. Faithful to their respective reputations, Benford’s book is overlong, Bear’s book is dull and only Brin’s book comes closest to entertainment (although even his amiable writing style is no match for the other writers’ leaden concepts). This is easily some of the weakest work all three authors have ever produced: Little wonder if the trilogy has been practically forgotten less than ten years after publication. Simply put, reading this series is a waste of time, unless you’re fresh off the entire Asimov oeuvre and wouldn’t mind nearly fifteen hundred pages of further aggravation.

    That, in a more rational publishing universe, would be a warning against literary necrophilia. But as the current state of the SF shelves in bookstores indicate, there’s still more than enough money in the SF industry to make hungry authors writer whatever desecrations are authorized by the estates…

  • Eifelheim, Michael Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 320 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-765-30096-6

    Michael Flynn is a very, very smart man. Perhaps too smart for us, in fact.

    One of his early success in the Science-fiction genre was a novella called “Eifelheim”, a 1986 story about two modern scientists deducing an alien visit in Black Plague-era Germany from historical evidence. “Eifelhem” earned a few bravos from Analog readers and went on to be nominated for a Hugo Award. Now, twenty years later, Flynn has turned the novella into a much longer novel.

    A much, much longer novel.

    On one hand, it not possible to just dismiss Eifelheim-the-expanded-story. Flynn has obviously done his research, and the novel’s most distinctive trait is how it really manages to describe life in Dark-Ages rural Germany. Even before the alien’s arrival, Flynn painstakingly describes the true state of society and technology at the time and how the characters relate to each other. This in itself isn’t what you’d expect: Flynn overturns a number of commonly-held beliefs in what the Middle Ages were like, and the result is a rich strain of historical fiction describing a way of life that is far more alien than anything we can imagine on other planets.

    When the aliens land (for them, a sad case of being broken down somewhere in the galactic boondocks), the culture clash is profound, though maybe not as much as you would expect: Flynn’s protagonist, a scholar named Dietrich, is instrumental in smoothing out the problems between the stranded aliens and the superstitious villagers. As the alien work to repair their spaceship, Dietrich maintains the peace even as other powerful human entities start paying attention to what’s happening in the small village… and that’s without counting on the ever-popular black plague.

    Meanwhile, in a “Now” section more or less reprinted from the original novella, a couple of scientists uncover traces of the alien presence through historical records, allowing one of them to make a fundamental breakthrough in theoretical physics.

    I have said that this is a novel from a smart man, but it bears repeating. Looking at the mass of research that has been crammed into Eifelheim, one can’t help but feel overwhelmed. An entirely different alien race, plus historical fiction, plus modern fiction about the inner working of science? Gee, Flynn must be not just be smart, but a bit of a masochist. The details, the details…

    So I do feel like a chump for thinking that the entire novel is a bit unnecessary. Even though the “Now” segments are saddled with an annoying voice-of-God narration that reminded of Flynn’s insufferable The Wreck of the River of Stars, I found them more interesting than the medieval bulk of the book. A sufficiently determined reader could chapter-skip the historical chapters and still get a satisfying story. At times, if you’re not overly fascinated by medieval history, Eifelheim feels like show-off fiction, like an accumulation of trivia designed to make you go “wow!” in amazement.

    It makes up for a curiously fragmented reading experience. I might had had a different reaction had I encountered Eifelheim in the wild, but this has become, almost against everyone’s expectations, a Hugo-nominated novel against much-lauded competition. Comparisons between it and the other nominees are inevitable, and not necessarily flattering: Of the five novels in the running, Eifelheim feels like the slowest, the least accessible and the least fun.

    But I suspect that this is as much a reflection of my own reading tastes (not necessarily partial to historical fiction) than any serious problem with the novel itself. Looking belatedly at the other reviews around the web, I see that many reviewers liked the medieval plot and dismissed the modern subplot. Oh well. I’ve always considered Flynn an uneven writer, capable of the best and the dullest. Eifelheim is no exception.

  • Move Under Ground, Nick Mamatas

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Prime, 2004 (2006 reprint), 158 pages, US$14.95 tpb, ISBN 0-8095-5673-1

    (Also freely available at www.moveunderground.com )

    As I get older/wiser/crustier, I’m making efforts to change my reading habits. Schooled in the typical genre mindset that “plot is king”, I realize that sooner or later, I’ll have to appreciate reading the words themselves. Not every author wants to write according to plot, and the sooner I can accommodate that, the happier a reader I’ll be.

    Move Under Ground is definitely part of my education. It may be a lot of things, but it’s not a novel built to amaze readers through mind-bending plot twists. The high concept here is “Jack Kerouac meets H.P. Lovecraft”, and if you think that plot has anything to do with those two writers, you may want to pay more attention in class next time. What if a burnt-out Kerouac, years after On The Road, journeyed back across America to save the world from an Elder God invasion? Would that be literary horror or ghastly comedy?

    Well, why not both?

    It’s fair to say that most allusions in this book flew way over my head. I don’t worship Kerouac’s On The Road (in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read it), I usually find H.P. Lovercraft unreadable and most of what I know about William S. Burroughs comes from the movie adaptation of Naked Lunch. If copyright included the right to decide what kind of reader should read one’s work, Mamatas would have been justified in instructing vendors to forbid me from buying his book. (Worse yet: Since I purchased the last copy of the book on Prime’s table at L.A.Con IV, you can make a case that a more deserving reader was deprived of Move Under Ground because of my actions. Shame!)

    And yet, despite those handicaps, I still managed to enjoy this novel. Mamatas’ pastiche is, of course, completely wasted on me, but the elliptical fashion in which he tells a pretty standard “Road Novel/Heart of Darkness” story seems fresh and inventive: I’ve never read apocalyptic gunfights between humans and monsters quite like the ones in Move Under Ground. Even not knowing much about the high concept can’t hide some of the coolest elements in Mamatas’ story: As a reader, one of my biggest thrills of the year so far was seeing William S. Burrough barge into a scene with guns in both hands, killing off would-be murderers with a split-second timing that has to be deduced from Kerouac/Mamatas’ matter-of-fact narration.

    In fact, one of the particular pleasures of the book is in how it presents a conventional horror story with a off-beat writing style, looking in directions that are quite unlike what we’d expect from genre horror. Sometimes, it’s disconcerting: action scenes start in the middle of lengthy paragraphs, and are over just as quickly. The narration is, frankly, more interested in other things. Apocalyptic horror scenes are described with staccato minimalism, whereas musings on the American dream and mundane details of physical movement get far more attention. And through it all, Mamatas’ blend of humour and horror hits a note of pure uneasy joy. Even in marrying two clear influences, this is quite unlike any novel I’ve ever read.

    Since I spend a lot of time complaining about the excessive length of many novels these days, I should note that Move Under Ground is exactly the right length for what it is: Any shorter, and the story would be closer to a novella; any longer and the high concept would become tiresome.

    Keeping in mind that I’m almost the wrong sort of public for the novel, my generally satisfied reaction to Move Under Ground should be a good sign that the novel is, in fact, accessible to less-educated minds like mine. It also promises good things for my continuing effort to read for the words more than for the plot. In fact, I’m now tempted to go back and have another look at Kerouac’ On The Road…

  • Century Rain, Alastair Reynolds

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2004, 532 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-575-07691-7

    After a series of grim and lengthy space operas set in the far future, Alastair Reynolds breaks from “the usual” with Century Rain, a novel largely set in an alternate 1950s Paris where the Second World War never happened. Fans of the author shouldn’t worry about the different setting, because not much has actually changed about their man’s prose: the tone isn’t necessarily more cheerful and the novel is once again far longer than it should be. Despite initial expectations, this is routine material from Reynolds.

    At first, we’re allowed some doubt. After all, Century Rain isn’t a part of Reynolds’ best-known “Inhibitors” series. Here, the Earth has been devastated by a nanotech plague, and there’s a serious conflict between two post-humans factions regarding what should happen to the human race. In the first few chapters, archaeologist Verity Auger sees her expedition to the surface turn horribly wrong as one of her teammates is killed. Disgraced, she’s offered a chance to move away from the spotlight for a while: someone powerful at an undisclosed location wants her expert services.

    Gradually, Verity discovers that scientists have found a pre-Nanocaust alternate Earth, and that her expertise is needed to find out what has happened to one of the agents already installed in place. Teaming up with a local detective, she discovers hints that there may be another post-human group at work in alternate Paris, and that the other side may be building a weapon of unknown capabilities. But things are about to escalate. Stuck on another world without access to any advanced technology, how will Verity manage to learn the truth and go back home without bringing back the enemy with her?

    Century Rain plays a long time with a mixture of futuristic action/adventure and alternate universe noir. It does seem perilously close to a conceit at time: dealing with travels to alternate universes, it’s always tempting to ask “Why just one? And why that one?” The richness of the alternate Paris setting is enough to make one guess that Reynolds first set out to play with a certain jazzy detective fiction archetype, and then wrapped up that particular atmosphere in the more familiar SF rationale. Fans of 1950s Paris will be charmed out of their socks; those who aren’t so fond of the city may have to cling to the more generally familiar action/adventure plot featuring killer children and mysterious engineering projects. Century Rain begins and ends in high-tech settings, so don’t think that this is “just” an alternate-universe story.

    Like all of Reynolds’s other novels so far, Century Rain is perfectly adequate Science Fiction marred by a lack of concision. There is little reason for this novel to crack the 500-page mark: a thinner, slimmer, faster edit of the novel would be easier to read and leave a stronger impression. As it is, Century Rain is often spent waiting for something to happen. Waiting for Verity to travel to the alternate Earth. Waiting for Verity and her detective sidekick to agree to collaborate. Waiting for the clues to fall in place. Alas, those part of Century Rain are very familiar: making us wait for their inevitable occurrence just prolongs the reader’s growing exasperation.

    But once everything has been revealed and all the elements are finally in place, Reynolds once again shows why he’s one of the most reliable mid-listers of British Science Fiction. His use of genre elements is fluid, his prose and characters are up to contemporary standards, his post-human political conflicts are interesting and his narrative delivers a satisfying conclusion. Not everyone will be so taken by his alternate Paris, but the novel itself is enjoyable provided one has a lot of time to read through it all.

  • The Last Coyote, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1995, 408 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-95845-5

    The third volume in my continuing “Michael Connelly Reading Project” (One book per month until I’ve caught up!) is one of the keystones of the Harry Bosch series: a deep and complex investigation that reaches in Los Angeles’ history to illuminate Bosch himself.

    Having read The Concrete Blonde a few years ago, it took me a few pages to get back up to speed with Bosch’s tumultuous life, and there’s a lot to learn. His girlfriend’s gone, his earthquake-damaged house has been condemned, he’s been taken off the force and forced to undergo psychological evaluation: you can imagine how well he’s taking that. Driven to drink and despair, Bosch anchors himself to an unsolved case: the murder of his own mother, thirty years earlier. Against everyone’s advice, he starts digging in the case once again, pulling at threads that many people would rather leave undisturbed.

    The first chunk of The Last Coyote isn’t particularly pleasant. Bosch has never been a particularly cheery character, but even this particular situation seems like the bottom of the barrel. Loveless, homeless, jobless: It’s no wonder if his investigation into his mother’s death quickly becomes an obsession. For a while, it seems like a wholly historical exercise: digging into LAPD archives, interviewing people who may or may not remember anything about the event, chasing down the investigating officers and so on. But there’s something unusual about the case: as he learns more about it, Bosch becomes convinced that the true events have been covered up. And those who have ordered the cover up are still around…

    If the beginning of the novel can be exasperating and depressing, The Last Coyote quickly claws its way back on top of the Bosch sequence as it becomes more and more directly concerned with the detective’s life. This novel becomes the most personal of Bosch’s adventures as he learns the truth about his mother and the people she used to be with.

    It’s also Bosch most difficult investigation in that he has to bluff with way through it without the benefit of a badge. He risks a trip to Florida. He acts as if he’s still in the force. He uses someone else’s credentials. He knows that if someone peeks too closely into what he’s doing, he may be fired from the force —permanently. And that’s without considering that the people who ordered the cover-up may still be around, in positions of power.

    Soon, the novel lets the historical background fade in order to let the events play out in contemporary L.A. Harry’s action have consequences: a recurring character is killed because of the trail Harry leaves behind him. Soon, it’s Harry himself who’s stuck in a desperate situation. Internal Affairs investigations are just the least of it.

    Through it all, Connelly’s top-notch prose does wonders at pulling readers in for “just one more chapter”. Once past the ho-hum opening, the novel just keeps getting better and faster. The focus also shifts from Bosch’s mother to Bosch himself, earning the novel not only a good place in the Bosch series, but also a dramatic resonance that bring to mind other classic L.A. noir novels. The Last Coyote grows in the telling, building upon the image implicit in the title to deliver a novel that, ironically enough, works better because it’s part of a series and not despite of it. Bosch’s unresolved issues with his mother’s murder have been hanging around since the beginning of the series, and the repercussions of the case are likely to be felt in subsequent volumes.

    As I’m finding out with this “Michael Connelly Reading Project”, it’s going to be hard finding a Connelly novel that is less than mesmerizing. The Last Coyote brings all sorts of threads together and even acts as a fair conclusion to Bosch’s early novels. Next up isn’t The Poet or Trunk Music (since I read those years ago), but Angels Flight. We’ll see if the streak continues.

  • The Duke of Uranium, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Aspect, 2002, 290 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61081-X

    There was a time, early in John Barnes’ career, when Science Fiction commentators tried to nominate him as one of the numerous “New Heinleins” that were supposed to take the grandmaster’s place. The comparison never quite fit (Barnes’ depiction of violence alone would disqualify him, let alone the pessimism that can mark some of his work), but there has always been something in his prose to prompt the association.

    With The Duke of Uranium, the potential for comparison is even more obvious than usual: It doesn’t take more than a chapter to understand that this is what a Heinlein juvenile would look like had it been strained through the past fifty years. Living in a space colony called The Hive where collectivism is the norm, Jak Jinnaka is a young man who loves to play the bad boy, something that’s less charming now that he’s at the end of an educational cycle. But his life spins out of his control when he learns that people around him aren’t all what they appear to be: His uncle is a spymaster and his girlfriend is a princess. Both of these relationships comes into play when he’s instructed to go rescue his kidnapped girlfriend.

    What follows is a romp through part of a far-future solar system, and this is where the classic John Barnes touch truly distinguishes itself. The Duke of Uranium could have been just another middle-drawer SF adventure to feed the undemanding hordes browsing the SF section, but here a simple adventure becomes a canvas on which several fascinating ideas can play off each other. There’s The Wager, for instance, an ill-defined set of maxims and conventions that have come to rule human society. There’s the aftermath of the Human/Rubahy war looming over everyone, as remote arbitrators may decide to wipe out both races for daring to go to war against each other. The solar system is a collection of fragmented entities and social systems that somehow manage to work together. A good chunk of the book is spent in-transit from the Hive to buck-shot Earth by way of Mercury, but we see only a small part of the whole picture. Further entries in the series will presumably map other areas of the solar system.

    Depsite my aversion to series, this is a good thing: If you like The Duke of Uranium, you will be asking for more. Further inviting comparisons with Heinlein, Barnes here adopts a crystal-clear narration that wisely lets the characters speak in all their chatty charm. Barnes uses future slang like few other writers would have the guts to do, but it does hang together well, and after a while it just becomes another element of hanging out with Jik and his toves. (Language geeks will have fun trying to piece together the various roots of the slang.)

    The prose style has an old-fashioned feel to it, almost golden-age SF but handled with a modern post-Varley sensitivity. Such contemporary touches include fairly liberal sexual mores among Jik’s cohort and hints of fairly dark forces at play somewhere above our characters’ heads, which will probably become more important later during the series given Barnes’ fondness for nastiness. (A prologue suggests that Jak will become notorious, reckless and not universally loved.)

    Fans of Barnes work are probably going to tear through this book in the hope of catching some of Barnes’ usual social speculations, and they won’t be disappointed: beyond the intriguing world-building mentioned above, there is eventually some fascinating material about conspiracies to influence human society (a very, very illegal thing to do in this universe) and hints of deeper developments later on. For ex-fans of John Barnes put off by his occasional bleakness, this is one of his “safe” novels: the relatively tame violence mostly happens to people who deserve it, the sex is consensual and no apocalypse happens during the book, though we’re led to understand that this is an unusually calm period in human history.

    It adds up to a very satisfying book with the roaring pace of a YA novel, infused with enough big ideas to keep even the most reluctant adult SF readers interested. This may not be a classic in any sense of the term (indeed, it almost feels like a vacation for everyone involved), but it’s a novel in which everything clicks: the setting, the characters, the prose and the plotting all achieve a nice synergy, and the result is good enough not only to keep us coasting to the end, but to make us look forward to the sequel. Bring on A Princess of the Aerie!

  • Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pantheon, 2003 (2007 translation), 352 pages, C$29.95 tpb, ISBN 0-375-71483-9

    Ask around for graphical novels recommendations, and everyone will mention at least one title: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which used comics as a way to tell the story of a Holocaust survivor. The subject matter made it respectable for audiences far more diverse than just “the comic fans”, the meta-complexity of Spiegelman’s narrative ensured that it would remain a hit with the intelligentsia, and the accessibility of the tale made it a perennial favourite in bookstores. Don’t expect it to go out of print soon.

    Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis has a number of superficial common points with Maus: Both are true stories in graphic novel form, both became breakout books with mainstream audience, both have something to say about totalitarian regimes, both use an iconic black-and-white approach to their visual presentation. But Persepolis also shares with Spiegelman’s masterpiece a deeper connection: Both use biographical comics as a way to show that history is something that happens to people.

    Persepolis starts in Tehran at the end of the seventies. Marjane Satrapi is a ten-year-old girl, coping with the aftermath of the Iranian revolution. Through a series of short chapters, we come to learn about her family, her school, the circumstances surrounding the revolution and the immediate impact of it. During the second half of this first volume, as the story enters the eighties, we get to see the effect of the Iran/Iraq war on Tehran and Marjane’s life.

    The Marjane in the first volume of Persepolis 1 is an irresistibly cute girl with a smart mouth and privileged circumstances. Distantly related to old Persian royalty, her immediate family is relatively well-off and is able to avoid the worst of either the revolution or the war. But not everyone survives, and the events reach everyone. During this first volume, Marjane is a victim of circumstances: The anecdotes that she relays are more powerful than even the most complete histories of Iran in making us feel why and how the revolution occurred.

    Things are different in Persepolis 2: Sent to Europe to get a better education, 15-year-old Marjane has a hard time growing up alone and away from her family. Still smarter than most of her acquaintances, Marjane soon fall into a bad crowd, tries her hand at drug-dealing, quits school, is kicked out of her residence and touches bottom soon afterwards, living homeless for three months. Pushed beyond her limits, she returns to Iran, where she gets to re-experience the religious regime.

    Persepolis 2 isn’t as cute as the first tome, but it’s more affecting: Marjane is now the person most responsible for what happens to her, and the smart little girl has turned into a self-destructive teen trying to find her place. As a young adult, her talents are still challenged by the society in which she lives. After a brief spell in which she thinks she can get along in Iran, she comes to realize that she will never belong, in Iran or anywhere. The entire series ends in 1994 as she leaves for France, where she still lives today.

    It’s the story of a life, but it’s really in the telling that Persepolis comes alive. A crafty writer, Satrapi navigates a tone between innocence, confession and veiled outrage: By showing rather than proselytizing, she’s able to capture the essence of what life must have felt in Iran. She shows, by example, the inanity of a regime that considers its population to be childish and untrustworthy. She re-tells events such as the Iran/Iraq war and the Gulf War from an Iranian perspective, giving an extra dimension to history that Western audiences don’t know very well.

    It’s all tremendously affecting, and carries with it the impact of an excellent narrative. The storytelling is top-notch, and even the deceptively minimal art is effective: Characters are immediately recognizable from a few iconic details, and the abstraction of the art enhances its universality. Best of all, though, is the way Persepolis is able to make us feel what it was like to be an young Iranian girl during the revolution, a pre-teen during the war, a teenager exiled in Europe, and a young woman back under the veil. It’s the kind of story to make us realize that beyond textbooks and newspaper headlines, history has victims. Persepolis is earns a place next to Maus on the “graphical novel classics” shelf, and it’s easy to see why. Don’t miss it.

    (Some will be surprised to learn that I read Persepolis in English when the original version was published in French. The explanation is purely pragmatic: The relatively scarce four-volume series of trade paperbacks in French would have cost me around $130, whereas the two widely available hardcovers in English set me back “only” $45. Feel free to quote me the next time you contemplate the role of market economics in cultural assimilation.)

  • Target Lock, James Cobb

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Jove, 2002, 490 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-515-13413-9

    Describing the plot of this book is impossible to do with a straight face. It’s about, after all, a female American naval officer who falls in love with a pirate. If this was a movie, you would expect musical numbers, lush cinematography, situational comedy, and maybe even a “yarr, my darling!” or two.

    Yet this is the fourth entry in the “Amanda Garrett” series of military techno-thrillers. The natural audience for this book is not going to be the same than for Romance novels: Imagine steely-eyed conservatives, military personnel and chickenhawk nerds like me hoping for a follow-up to the excellent Sea Fighter and finding themselves with… a pirate romance.

    Judging from the Amazon comments, some were baffled, many were pissed and only a few were amused. Predictably, I find myself solidly in the “amused” camp. Through I have a lot of respect for the first three novels in the series (even calling them some of the best military thrillers of the mid-nineties), my attachment to them isn’t quite that strong: if Cobb decided to mess with the formula with Target Lock, the best thing to do is sit back with a bucket of popcorn and watch the show.

    Certainly, the macro-level premise of Target Lock is interesting. After the dirty little coastal war in Sea Fighter, US government grows concerned about piracy in Indonesia and wisely sends Amanda Garrett back to the sea. Tasked with solving the problem and helped along by a US Navy task force, Garrett eventually realizes that a modern-day “pirate king” is to blame for the attacks.

    Up until “pirate king”, this was a wonderful premise: the piracy problem is indeed a growing issues in southeastern Asia, and it presents an interesting challenge even for someone with the latest technology at her fingertips. Heck, even with “Pirate King”, it’s a promising setup: a strong antagonist has to be involved (and vanquished) at some point for a dramatic conclusion.

    But it’s all in the way things are presented. And this is where the “pirate romance” bit takes a toll: It’s one thing to speak of a novel that’s not as exciting, not as tightly focused as the previous books in the series. It’s quite another to compound that with incongruous scenes in which the formerly unflappable heroine of the series suddenly takes on the mantle of James Bond and self-consciously seduces a wealthy powerful man who just could be the Pirate King. Readers thus jostled out of the book’s spell can then start making wisecracks, dismissing the book’s complex problems with an easy “Yarr, my darling!”

    This being said, I can’t help but wonder what role gender politics can play in such sarcasm. The Amanda Garrett series was distinctive partly for its portrayal of a female heroine in a modern naval setting. It has also been true that the attempts at romance between Garrett and other characters were tepid and not entirely believable. But what role does the madonna/whore archetype play in dismissing romantic entanglements for the series’ heroine? I wonder. I may think that this whole seduction business is a weak subplot clumsily inserted in a novel that didn’t need it, but I can’t account for my own invisible biases, and that worries me.

    Not that this is the biggest problem with the book. The crystal-clear action sequences that made the previous books so memorable are here muted and infrequent. The final “attack in paradise” is suitably apocalyptic (and the Chris Moore cover of the book’s UK edition is lovely), but there isn’t much here to gnaw upon. Even my favourite character of the series, the wonderful Christine Rinaldo, doesn’t get much to do this time around. The result is a weak novel, even if you don’t add the pirate romance aspect, or the hints that another admiral may be romantically interested in Garrett.

    It amounts to a disappointing novel by anyone’s standards, especially given the strong impression left by the first three books of the series. As of this writing, five years later, this is still the final chapter in the Garrett series, and Cobb has limped along on unrelated books that skirt the edge of self-publishing. His big return, planned for fall 2007? A Robert Ludlum “collaboration”. Uh-huh. He can do much better.

  • Death by Hollywood, Steven Bochco

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 2003, 239 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-46687-X

    Sooner or later, it seems that every writer who passes through Los Angeles ends up with the irresistible ambition to run to New York publishers and sell them a revenge novel about Hollywood’s excesses. Find a screenwriter with prose ambitions and you will probably find someone looking to settle a score or two outside the normal power structures of Hollywood. And watch out if an established novelist goes to Hollywood for a while… Sooner or later, they come back wide-eyed with a novel or at least a short story on the madness of Southern California. (Get Shorty, anyone?)

    The twist with Steven Bochco is that in Los Angeles terms, he’s more a member of the TV middle-class than the cinema elite. But he’s from Hollywood anyway, so the revenge fantasy novel aspect still holds true. Bochco may not be writing directly about TV production in Death by Hollywood, but he’s still skewering the same celebrity-obsessed mentality that seems to permeate the L.A. bassin.

    A relatively short novel at a time where 350-450 pages is the norm, Death By Hollywood is as long (or as short) as it needs to be. Told from a first-person point of view that at first seems disconnected from the action, Death By Hollywood is about murder (fittingly enough for the creator of “Hill Street Blues”, “L.A. Law” and “NYPD Blues”), but also about the cult of celebrity and the way in which a person without scruples has a huge advantage over anyone who does.

    It starts with voyeurism, as a screenwriter watches a naughty scene turn violent, then deadly. Obsessed with the idea of a killer script premise, the screenwriter inserts himself in the developing story, all the while plotting how he’s going to influence the events for the best dramatic effect. If it means getting friendly with the lead investigator in the case and getting very close to the murderer, well, why not?

    Played half with a smile, half with a cynical sneer, Death by Hollywood wastes no time in getting into the heads of characters willing to do the worst to others if it just means taking a step closer to success. Never mind that the plot never quite makes sense (announcing what you’ve done to the world isn’t a terrific idea for a criminal, script or no script): the emphasis here is on the satire, the description of how Hollywood corrupts everyone who’s touched by its illusions. Even the characters who should be the most trustworthy aren’t any better than the others, we discover. The language of the book is crude, and the action sometimes pauses for ribald scenes. This is both a macho-noir narrative and a satire: it’s not to be taken too seriously.

    Yet part of what makes the charm of the novel is the accumulation of details about life in Hollywood. I’m always very fond of the alternate Hollywoods developed by fiction writers as they weave details that may or not correspond to real-life celebrities. The nature of celebrity being so extreme, the difference between reality and fiction is never too clear nor too clean. Suffice to say that Bochco writes with the weariness of someone who has spent decades in the business: the asides of his narrator alone are worth the short time it takes to read the novel. (Though I wonder if Death By Hollywood would have been different if Bochco had tackled TV series production. Is there a reason why he didn’t, or was it just a better story this way?)

    It’s hardly a perfect novel (among other things, the omniscient point of view seems a bit presumptuous from the narrator, especially when he tries to justify how he learned all of that information), but it’s a very enjoyable one. It may not be worth the price of a hardcover unless you’re building a collection of Hollywood revenge novels, but it’s a great excuse for going back to your local library, or to hunt the bargain bins. Steven Bochco won’t ever by known for his novel over his TV series, but Death by Hollywood certainly isn’t a dishonour. In fact, I wonder if he’s ever going to write another one…

  • Throne of Jade, Naomi Novik

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2006, 398 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-48129-1

    Sometimes, sarcasm is the quickest way to the truth.

    So when I say that reading Throne of Jade is like being stuck on a slow boat to China, I’m not being mean as much as I’m being as descriptive as possible

    Nor am I being negative given how much I enjoyed the novel despite its lopsided structure.

    Because Throne of Jade does take place on a slow boat to China. After the events of His Majesty’s Dragon, Will Laurence and Temeraire are faced with a new threat: the Chinese government has learned that Temeraire, formerly a gift to the French government, has fallen in English hands. They’re not happy and the English government isn’t necessarily feeling better about it. Soon, a plan is hatched to send Laurence out of England and in China, where negotiations with the Chinese emperor can most efficiently settle the issue.

    There’s a catch: during an eighteenth century where most of Europe is at war, sending a major delegation to China can only be done by boat, around Africa and the Indian Peninsula. For the duration of the trip, Laurence, Temeraire, their entire crew, the English delegation, the Chinese diplomats and everyone’s support staff are stuck on a flotilla going to China.

    It’s not a smooth voyage: beyond culinary matters (as Temeraire comes to appreciate Chinese cuisine), the ship is attacked by pirates, dogged by traitors, wracked by dissension and enlivened by all sorts of other incidents.

    Still, we’re on a slow boat to China.

    This changes two-third of the way in the book, as China looms over the horizon and the palace intrigue begins in earnest. Almost too quickly for comfort, various conflicts are introduced or revealed, along with significant revelations about why Temeraire was sent to Europe. As a few roughly-paced actions scenes show, all is not well in the Chinese court,. Temeraire makes a permanent enemy, but manages to make things end happily for everyone else. If you’re looking for a plot, you’ll find it in the last hundred pages of the novel.

    Fortunately, the chief attraction of the Temeraire series is still world-building, character and prose rather than plot. Novik is still fond of short-loop drama (though one hopes that the introduction of a recurring antagonist may change things slightly) and the structure of her second novel is lopsided, but she still writes entertaining prose, and the deepening characters of Laurence and Temeraire are doing much to keep us in the story.

    Temeraire may often be too good to be true, but his growing awakening to the true treatment of English dragons (especially when compared to their Chinese brethrens) introduces a few elements that may eventually develop into satisfying plot lines. I’m still vaguely unsure if the human/dragon relationships are meant to satirize a certain view of male/female power dynamics, or if they’re meant to map onto other privileged/oppressed relationships. But then again, sometimes a dragon is just a dragon… and on that score, Throne of Jade does much to stretch the reader’s imagination: Temeraire’s arrival in China is a glimpse into yet another series of conventions regarding dragon accommodations. Compared to His Majesty’s Dragon, the feeling of “cheating” alternate history is lessened given my lack of familiarity with Chinese history at the time.

    But even despite my quibbles about the plot and structure of the novel, I still had a lot of fun reading Throne of Jade, and that ends up trumping all other concerns about the book. Novik has, once again, delivered a solid series book that shows that the readability and richness of her first novel weren’t accidents. It doesn’t stand alone, nor is it meant to: her story may be shifting gears in anticipation for later instalments. Black Power War is up next, with its deliciously ominous title.