Book Review

  • Chasm City, Alastair Reynolds

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2001, 524 pages, C$26.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-06878-7

    There are killjoys out there who will argue, at length, that the modern word processor has killed the novel as it ought to be. Those spoilsports will keep saying that the ease with which modern writers can just keep typing and editing without physical consequences (that is: sore fingers and the consumption of draft paper) has made it too easy to overuse words. These entirely fictional straw men (er, “older curmudgeon whose opinion I claim to have heard”) will tell you that real men once hacked out fifty-thousand words in stone tablets with a chisel, and that even Hemingway was a big softie for using a typewriter.

    It’s a silly argument, but it’s hard not to think about it when looking at Alastair Reynolds’s brick-sized novels. Helped along by Gollancz’s habit of using thicker paper stock, Reynolds’ books intimidate well before they’re cracked open. So many words! The story inside has to be important: Other writers have described the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in fewer pages!

    Yet Reynolds’ novels are nothing but good old-fashioned space-opera with modern polish. Solid thriller plots with SF twists and alien locales. In Chasm City, this means another man on the run from dangerous criminal forces: hardly the stuff that justifies a book an inch and a half thick.

    Of course, that means that you get a whole lot of thrills for your money. Expect to spend at least a week of reading time in Tanner Mirabel’s company as he first pursues an assassin, then finds the chase turned against him. His trip eventually leads him to a nightmarish alien environment: the eponymous Chasm City in which humans are prey and stranger forces lie beneath the mist… and that’s not even counting the other story interleaved between Tanner’s run: What could possibly be the link between those subplots? As Chasm City goes on, little blips in the narration lead us to a bigger revelation that conveniently twists the usual certitudes of a thriller.

    It’s long, it’s overwritten and it can get pretty exasperating at times, but Chasm City is a solid middle-of-the-road SF thriller. Those looking for a good example of genre fiction could do much worse: this one has good dollops of sex, action, violence and grimness: Reynolds isn’t afraid to pull punches, and the atmosphere of his books has little to do with the shiny futures once imagined by Science Fiction. The prose is verbose but well handled. Although a shorter book may have strengthened our grasp of the novel’s universe (rather than diluting it with sheer verbiage), this one does a pretty good job at carrying the reader from start to finish. The events keep piling up, Tanner is a tough protagonist, and the mystery of the intersecting plotlines is enough to keep anyone reading.

    Readers of Reynold”s debut novel, Revelation Space, will get a related novel that’s just as competent, dark and intriguing than its predecessor. Despite my constant harping about the length of Chasm City, it’s more focused than Reynolds’ first novel, with more consistent bursts of action. It amounts to a prototypical example of the “New British Space Opera” at the turn of the century. There is strong kinship here with other writers such as Richard Morgan and Neal Asher: Reynolds may use twice as many words in making his atmosphere noir and his aliens squishy, but the feeling is similar.

    All isn’t lost, though: Latter Reynolds novels, post Absolution Gap, show clearer signs of self-control –at least when it comes to page length. His last two novels, for instance, don’t even crack a comparatively slim 460 pages. (The Prefect is even down to 410 pages.) Since the length of Reynolds’ work is just about the only thing worth complaining about, you can bet that I’ve got his entire oeuvre on my shelves… even though I’m understandably reluctant to pick up one of his tomes when shorter books beckon. But we’ll get there eventually. Hopefully before retirement age.

    [January 2008: I’m not even going to review Redemption Ark at length, as disappointed as I am with the way Reynolds has blown up a perfectly enjoyable space opera into an interminable slog. The conclusion wraps it up together decently, but there’s some serious fat to be trimmed off this novel.]

  • The Einstein Papers, Craig Dirgo

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1999, 388 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-02322-5

    Sometimes, I can’t even figure out why I’m reviewing a book. Craig Dirgo’s The Einstein Papers is a perfect example: Today, eight years after its publication, I doubt that even the author cares about it. It’s the exemplary paperback thriller, literally made in the Clive Cussler mold of action-adventure novels. It has no deep message, no memorable scenes, nothing beyond an intent to entertain its reader well enough to convince him to buy the next book in the series.

    In fact, the publishing matrix in which this novel is set is far more interesting that the book itself. For years, Clive Cussler has been shaping the thriller field with a series of formulaic novels that are never particularly exciting, but always consistent. The formula works in that it provides the framework for the witty dialogue, exciting action sequences and silly premises that form the texture of the modern American beach thriller. Even when followed to the letter, the formula still manages to entertain. Heck, Hollywood is based on the same concept. It may not be good art, but it’s great business in this age of extruded entertainment products.

    This brings us to Craig Dirgo’s Einstein Papers insofar as the novel is Dirgo’s attempt to file off the serial numbers of the Cussler formula and run with it under his own name. (Don’t think that Cussler doesn’t approve: they collaborated on two books before The Einstein Papers, and two more after that.) The rugged middle-aged hero, John Taft, is nothing but Dirk Pitt under a new name (indeed, several in-jokes make the filiation abundantly clear. At the end of Chapter 23, when questioned about his name, Taft answers “Dirk Pitt”.) His job as an anti-terrorist expert is designed to sustain a series of books —though the underwater aspects quickly pops up again in the finest NUMA tradition. Even the relationship he’s got with a team of supporting characters, including the requisite sarcastic non-WASP sidekick, is nothing but setup for handy helpers in book after book. Obviously, Dirgo has learned from the master.

    But what Dirgo still hasn’t figured out is the formula. The book begins with a too-long set-piece deep in China, an escape sequence which acts as a stuffy prologue to the book’s real story: a hunt for papers left by Albert Einstein, papers which (predictably enough) could mean a terrifying new weapon. Less terrifying should it stay in the hands of the United States, more terrifying should it go to those all-purpose-evil Chinese. The papers are discovered, fall into the wrong hands, and the chase begins. Meanwhile, the Middle East is once more thrown in chaos. The action starts and sputters, finally going along merrily to its expected end.

    (There’s also some silly subplot about the weapon being developed while waiting for the crucial papers, as if scientific research could hop along on government funding and a missing theorem. But if you’re reading The Einstein Papers for an accurate portrait of the scientific/military establishment, boy have you got the wrong book in your hands. And oooh, let’s not talk about the geopolitics of the novel. No, let’s not.)

    It all amounts to, well, an ordinary beach thriller. Nothing crazy, nothing wild, just the equivalent of an action film bound in a paperback format. It passes through the brain like a breeze, temporarily displacing lighter concerns but ultimately leaving no trace. As a piece of literature, it’s a non-entity. I can’t imagine that it took much more than a few weeks to write: certainly, the editing appears to have been completed in minutes.

    As a piece of Dirgo’s career, it’s may remain a failed experiment. Though he has recently written another solo John Taft novel (Tremors), most of his latest books have been “collaborations” with Clive Cussler. It’s a career, I suppose, somewhere in the gravitational pull of another author, unable to escape even when writing solo novels. I may not be able to figure out why I’m reviewing this novel, but I hope there’s at least five digits on the reason why Dirgo wrote it.

  • Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    DC Comics, 2005, 256 pages, C$19.99 tpb, ISBN 1-4012-0458-9

    I’m both the best and the worst kind of reader for this particular super-hero comic book.

    Worst because frankly, I’m not much of a superhero comic book fan. I know the archetypes, but I never had a steady weekly habit at the comic book store, never followed the history of the characters and don’t care much about them either. Identity Crisis is many things, but it’s partly a homage to an entire era of comic books, the Sixties’ “Silver Age” in which many of the conventions of the genre were refined in time to reach the baby-boomer generation. So when the story starts messing around with the lives of particular C-list characters, I’m left on the sidelines going “Oookay, whatever.”

    But this same detachment also makes me a member of another audience for the book. Identity Crisis, I’m told through its Wikipedia entry, was a major event in DC comics continuity. It upset a number of conventions, changed the lives of several characters and -best of all- messed with the heads of comics fanboys. It made the DC universe a slightly uglier place and brought some consequences and realism to a stunted sub-genre that was doing very well without them.

    Written by thriller author Brad Meltzer (whose Zero Game wasn’t bad at all), Identity Crisis is set in motion by the violent murder of a superhero’s wife. In a terrific first chapter, Meltzer establishes the characters right before the crisis and sketches the first few consequences to the crime by hopping back and forth in time around the “now” of the corpse’s discovery: it’s some of the finest comic-book writing I’ve read so far in my admittedly meagre experience.

    The victim was carefully chosen (I’m told) among the most innocuous characters in the DC repertory. But the death sets in motion a number of even more shocking developments, including a revision of classic superhero history that will make most readers squirm in their seat. During Identity Crisis, the DC universe’s carefully limited spectrum of good versus evil was nudged toward the “evil” side: murder and rape became possibilities against which the superheroes themselves weren’t immune, and even the least-dark characters became complicit in shared shames. (Ironically, it’s Batman, dark anti-hero par excellence, who becomes a victim of the least-heroic moment of the series.)

    And that, frankly, is the reason why I’m so satisfied by Identity Crisis despite its loaded baggage in the field. I don’t need to be told how this miniseries was carefully engineered for monetary purposes. I have read the infamous “the rape pages are in” essay, and I don’t disagree with its conclusions. But the darker turn marked by Identity Crisis represents an identity crisis of sorts for the entire superhero industry, and it’s about time that it starts to confront its own schizoid nature.

    Summarily put: Superhero comics are made for retarded teenagers and their commercial viability has meant that for decades, the surest way to keep printing the dollar bills was to make sure that nothing changed. The essence of melodrama is that despite the tears and the screams and the flying plates, nothing ever chances. Think about it: Superman is an archetype. For all of the various plot developments, he hasn’t changed much in decades, so that the commercial potential of the character remains intact across all potential profit-making ventures (in comic books, yes, but also in movies, books, posters and lunch-boxes). Superman is doomed, by marketing fiat, to remain static. This means that he can never be too affected by any story. This means that the stories themselves have to be superficial. The very kernel of story-telling (“characters undergo events that change them forever”) is absent from superhero comic-books.

    Now repeat the same reasoning for all characters in the superhero stable. They are archetypes, not evolving creations. Even if marketers agree to mess around with the characters, fans start frothing at the mouth, unable to cope with the end of their comfort reading.

    Dramatically satisfying stories are almost impossible in that locked format; all that remains is a stunted type of sideshow where city blocks get destroyed but nobody gets killed, because true consequences are feared by both the marketing geniuses who advertise the product and the fanboys who keep buying them. Perfect deadlock, leading straight down a spiral of ever-loonier denial. If that’s the way the superhero comics industry has to be, I’d rather see it crash and burn. Perhaps, after, things wouldn’t be so bad.

    But there’s an alternative, and Identity Crisis is part of it. Raise the stakes. Face the consequences. Get rid of the fans who can’t take it. It doesn’t mean rape and murder on every page: it means a comic book field that grows up and starts responding to a wider segment of the population. Imagine if written novels had to be tailored toward the type of fan who buys comic books…

    Timidly, I see that the post-Identity Crisis comic book industry has started to evolve. Not much, and it remains to be seen how much of it is driven by marketing decision … but it’s a step in the right direction. (The recent Civil War story arc was interesting, but not quite handled elegantly enough: part of the problem was that the story arc couldn’t be confined to a tight story and had to sprawl in all nooks of the DC universe. Once again, marketing screws up storytelling.)

    These considerations aside (to go back to the subject after the longest tangent on record), Identity Crisis is worth a look because it’s a well-written, well-drawn miniseries. I’m disappointed about the identity of the killer, and it’s obvious that I’m not getting even a quarter of the references in the series, but those inconveniences are more than outweighed by what’s good and impressive about the story. The only superhero battle in the entire book is handled in a very unconventional fashion, the storytelling is fully exploiting the possibilities of the comic form, there are a few terrific moments and images (I’m very fond of the close-up on Batman’s faux-printed photo) and there’s almost a conceptual breakthrough in how Meltzer re-uses a hoary “body-switching” event as a hair-raising imperative for indefensible moral choices. He almost highlights the absurdity inherent to superhero comics, but then turns into something that leaves a bitter taste of reality.

    And that, in the end, is why I can’t help but respect Identity Crisis. As stated in the book’s afterword, it’s a story that takes something silly (the whole concept of secret identities) and justifies them. It’s both an intricate homage and a step forward. Of course, it could end up meaning nothing. There’s nothing quite as meaningless as “a comic book death”, especially in a field where continuity is always adjusted retroactively. But for the span of 256 pages, it’s a mean new world for superhero comics, and I’m both the least and most appreciative of readers for that type of thing.

  • Cusp, Robert Metzger

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2005, 517 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 0-441-01241-8

    Some novels don’t have to be good if they’re completely insane.

    Case in point: Robert Metzger’s Cusp, the type of book for which craaazy has been invented.

    Consider the prologue: Thunderstorms! Earthquakes! Entire continents torn asunder! One billion deaths! When the dust clears, Earth’s geography has been forever altered: It’s now circled by two massive rings of what looks like reactors, their tip reaching above the atmosphere.

    That’s the prologue. Eleven pages into the novel.

    Then twenty years years pass before the first chapter begins and things get even craaazier.

    Trying to give you an idea of the subsequent plot would be a challenge of van Vogtian proportions, so let me tease you with some buzzwords: Lemur-evolved Aliens. Bill Gates as a dinosaur. Planets used as engineering components. Humans “punching through” the singularity. And many, many more, including familiar SF tropes: Police state America, AI-augmented brains, robot servants, spaceship to Mars, evidence of time-travel, etc. A glossary of terms would have been helpful. Cusp is crammed with cool ideas and big-scale thinking: if only for that, the novel ends up with a marginal recommendation.

    But readers may have to struggle through entire chapters of unconvincing developments in order to get to those ideas. One of Cusp‘s most visible signs of craaaziness if how it flips back and forth between a pretty big cast of characters, arbitrarily sending them from one planet to another in order to keep the plot moving forward or sideways. The demands of the plot pieces outweigh the character development: it’s all a frantic rush through five hundred pages.

    I have alluded to van Vogt above, and the most pleasing quality of Cusp is indeed the way it never pauses for consideration. Absent an editor and most common-sense, it just keeps slamming along, adding even more elements to the mix regardless of how appropriate they are to the entire story. Sometimes it works: For every few artificial plot point, there are a few spectacular scenes that really focus the novel. A scene in which a woman manages to go post-singular is both vividly described and completely terrifying. Another action set-pieces involves an AI-augmented cop surfing down a rain of debris from an exploding air vehicle. Things turns spectacularly nasty at the end of the book as characters outdo themselves in order to engineer a pre-ordained tragedy. And through it all, readers will be left wondering how much craaazier this is going to get.

    The answer is very craaazy. By the time planets are moved around like billiard balls to complete (or thwart) million-year-old plans, veteran SF readers will be too exhilarated to care about the suspicion that the plot makes no sense at all. Rings to move the Earth around? When a simple earthquake can destroy an entire countryside? What’s the point? In many ways, Cusp is high-tech fantasy dressed up in Hard-SF wording. And I’m not even going near the character motivations. Though it is satisfying to see Bill Gates get his head bashed in. Sort of.

    (On the other hand, the grimness of the novel almost ends up working against it: You can forgive practically everything to an author who keeps smiling, but it takes a lot more fortitude to stay nice to those who pile bodies up like cord-wood. Not that this is quite Cusp‘s problem, of course…)

    In more competent hands, Cusp would have been a blockbuster. In Metzger’s hands, though, all it’s got is its craaaziness. Despite the high-fructose energy of the plotting, the book itself can be tough to read and even harder to follow. This isn’t Metzger’s first novel and it’s not Metzger’s first disappointment either: his Picoverse was similarly dogged by undisciplined writing and outlandish plot developments. Cusp is just a bit better, but still a fair distance away from satisfaction. If seasoned SF readers will stick through it for the cool visuals and the demented plotting, casual readers are likely to swear off the whole thing after a few incoherent pages. I’m not blaming Metzger as much as I’m surprised Ace wasn’t able to find an editor good enough to reign him in. Because, as much fun it is to find van Vogt-level craziness in twenty-first century science-fiction, it would be even better to be able to read a good SF book and not feel guilty about it.

  • Map of Bones, James Rollins

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 2005, 523 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-076524-0

    The runaway success of Dan Brown’s 2003 thriller The Da Vinci Code had terrifying consequences: an entire cohort of copycat novels. Suddenly, mixing history with big thrills (preferably with a side order of religious conspiracies and high tech gadgets) was the genre’s favourite recipe. A number of new authors appeared on the scene with trunk novels that just happened to catch the right wave, while other veteran authors suddenly found themselves encouraged to write a certain type of novel.

    It’s presumptuous to link James Rollins’ Map of Bones directly to The Da Vinci Code: Without priviledged access to the author, who can really say that Rollins saw Dan Brown climb up the charts and decided he could do just as well? The only thing we have to go on are the right dates (allowing for a two-year publishing cycle, Map of Bones could have been written as a response to Brown’s early success), explicit cover blurbs and eerily similar thematic elements.

    Consider this: A terrorist attack on a German catholic church with supernatural overtones. Another terrorist attack on an American military base with a high-tech secret. A scientific investigation that reveals historical clues. A top-secret organization within the Vatican. Another shadowy organization that seeks ultimate power beyond organized crime. Maps with secret clues. Gunfights and chases down subterranean structures. Tons of “factual” details. Oh yes: Even if Rollins was never inspired by Dan Brown’s success, his marketers aren’t shy about making the comparison twice on the back cover, and readers will definitely feel similar thrills.

    The irony is that I may be harping about the novel’s derivative nature, but Rollins has seldom written anything better. His first few novels felt like standard-issue thrillers, sometimes a bit too ludicrous to be taken seriously. But with Map of Bones, Rollins finally finds his way to a superior thriller. The action is tighter, the characters are more distinctive, the details are more interesting and the pacing never flags. The union of historical clues with high-tech gadgets is well-handled, and Map of Bones simply rockets forward. As a result, it easily rockets to the top of my list of his novels.

    You can even say that it’s better written than Brown’s novel… although that’s not saying much, of course.

    It’s not perfect, of course. The scientific justification for the quasi-supernatural elements that rocket the plot forward is almost painfully stupid and won’t earn any bonus points from anyone with at least high-school physics. Worse, though, is the novel’s conclusion, which resorts to the hoary “there are things man isn’t meant to know, yadda-yadda” cliché to refuse its readers a world-shattering explanation even though the entire novel’s been building toward it. We’re left with a bright flash, a few lines of pseudo-lyrical description and a hole in the ground: another triumph for the small-mindedness of thriller writers looking to the sequels.

    Of course, there are sequels. Rollins is now up to his third “Sigma Force” novel, The Judas Strain, proving to the world that he has absolutely no shame left in exploiting flash crazes. Good for him: if we’re lucky, we’ll even get a passable novel out of the lot. Heck, I didn’t expect much from this one and ended up pleasantly surprised. If he can keep it up, maybe I’ll have to stop making all of those Dan Brown references.

  • Overclocked, Cory Doctorow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Thunder’s Mouth, 2007, 285 pages, C$19.95 tpb, ISBN 1-56025-981-7

    This is Cory Doctorow’s second short story collection, but there’s a big difference between the Doctorow who wrote the stories in 2004’s A Foreign Place and 8 More and the one who wrote the stories in 2007’s Overclocked. In retrospect, the earlier Doctorow seems more scattered than the newer one: his early stories range from comic surrealism to nerdcore hard-SF, with a diversity of theme and effect that brings to mind a young writer still finding his true calling.

    Things are different with Overclocked. As the title suggests, it’s an all-nerdcore collection. Following on the footsteps of “Ownzored”, Doctorow has spent the latest period of his writing career giving his fiction a thematic unity with an activist edge. Doctorow’s real-life work has turned him into political lobbyist, arguing in favour of free culture against interests that would seek to monetize or restrict it. In this light, it’s almost natural that Doctorow’s fiction output would match the set of issues for which he has become an Internet celebrity.

    The six stories in Overclocked, all published between 2005-2007 (though specific publication credits regrettably aren’t included in the collection) all relate in some way or another to free culture. This isn’t a mere question of being allowed a few free music downloads: Doctorow makes it clear that he’s arguing for nothing less than civil liberties at a time where the expression of thoughts is becoming currency.

    “Printcrime” may be one of those Nature short-short stories that fits in three pages (four, if you include the introduction), but it’s a quietly angry shot at whoever would think about restricting civil rights in the name of making an extra dollar buck. It may not be long, but it delivers Doctorow’s thesis in its distilled essence.

    “Anda’s Game” is likely to become one of the centrepiece stories in any of Doctorow’s future career retrospectives, not because it’s a particularly fine story (It struck me as obvious the first time I read it, and only slightly better the second time), but because it’s been re-anthologized a number of time, even in non-SF venues. Most of all, it exemplifies one of Doctorow’s central themes, which is how SF is uniquely placed to comment upon the present by re-casting it in the future: The story discusses the very real phenomenon of virtual game gold-farming, with a few tweaks and gadgets to make it feel five minutes in the future. It’s no accident if the entire collection is subtitled “Stories of the future present”.

    “I, Robot” got a similar amount of attention within the SF community (earning Doctorow a Hugo nomination), but feels even more ham-fisted. Questions Isaac Asimov’s assumptions is interesting, Doctorow’s point feels obvious and trite given the length of the tale. At short story lengths, it might have worked better. As it is now, we just wait too long before hearing the other shoe falling. At least it’s readable enough: few Doctorow stories are anything less than crystal-clear in their prose.

    “I, Row-Boat” takes the concept even farther and manages to one-up its predecessor, in some ways confirming my doubts about Doctorow’s sledgehammer subtlety. The story is somewhat more unusual than Doctorow’s typical settings, and the unlikely characters are quite unlike anything seen so far. It takes Doctorow’s reflexion on sentience on non-obvious tangents, and satirizes the obvious rhetoric. It may not be as immediately accessible as the other stories in the collection, but it’s more effective at engaging the reader. Which, considering the place of the human characters in the story, is not an obvious conclusion at all.

    “After the Siege” almost feels like a return to sledgehammer rhetorics with a tale of copyright-driven warfare, but Doctorow mitigates that feeling with a powerful depiction of a population under siege. The old-fashioned feel of the story is intentionally derived from the horror of WW2 Leningrad. For all of the future gadgets and fancy justification, it’s the atmosphere of war that lingers on after the story is over.

    But for atmosphere, it’s hard to beat “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, a post-apocalyptic story that imagines the reaction of Internet system administrators locked inside a data centre during and after a major civilization-ending event. Though the event itself is hazily described, the end-of-the-world feeling is terrific, bringing to mind a number of classic British cozy catastrophes. As someone neck-deep in the IT industry, I ended up unexpectedly moved by the story and its characters. The laconic last few lines are a killer: “Tomorrow, he’d go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not? It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.” Beautiful.

    And in some ways, that resonance explains why, despite my hesitations and problems with Doctorow’s stories, he remains one of the SF writers who most closely track my own conception of Science-Fiction, what it’s good for and who it speaks to. Doctorow’s the bull geek of SF, and Overclocked shows us why he’s important.

  • The Bureau and the Mole, David A. Vise

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002, 272 pages, C$40.95 hc, ISBN 0-87113-834-4

    The real story of Robert Hanssen is the type of material from which spy thrillers are built. For decades, Hanssen sold US state secrets to the Russians. He sold out American spy networks, betrayed critical contingency plans, passed reams of technical information to the other side and probably caused a number of agents to be arrested or executed. As a tech-savvy senior agent within the FBI, Hanssen had unparallelled access to a wealth of government material from a variety of sources, multiplying the damage of his actions.

    And yet, Hanssen fit none of the popular expectations of how a spy should behave. Not only was he married and father of two children, he was an active member of the ultra-conservative Opus Dei catholic sect. And yet there was another layer behind the austere and righteous facade: Hanssen had a relationship with a stripper, had a fixation on Catherine Zeta-Jones and posted amateur pornography on Usenet groups. Even today, trying to make sense of Hanssen remains a challenge.

    And yet that’s what David A. Vise attempts to do in The Bureau and the Mole, one of several non-fiction books to document Hanssen’s covert career. Pushed by the release of the film BREACH, which also tackles the Hanssen affair (don’t miss the exceptional performance by Chris Cooper as Hanssen), I dug into my pile of books to read and came up with this one. Call it documentation selection by proximity.

    I’m sorry, in a way, that I don’t have anything but a movie and the official story to compare to the book: Trying to evaluate non-fiction without other references is always risky.

    But I can still tell you that The Bureau and the Mole is a bit of a mess, especially if all you were hoping to get was the story of Hanssen’s life. As the title suggests, Vise soon makes an attempt at opposing virtue to Hanssen’s perfidy: To this end, the narrative spends what seems to be an inordinate amount of time lionizing FBI director Louis Freeh in between the looks at Hanssen’s occult career. Interesting idea in small doses, but the extent to which the FBI’s general history comes to dominate the narrative eventually feels like padding more than context. Describing the FBI’s ironically thwarted efforts to find the traitor within their ranks is fine. But spending a chapter on the FBI’s anti-mafia efforts feels superfluous.

    There is little doubt that the book is well-researched. Vise does have a Pulitzer prize under his belt and there’s a lot of good material here and there in The Bureau and the Mole, gathered from interviews with people in the know and other sources who can’t be acknowledged. One of the most embarrassing revelation in the book is the transcription of a pornographic story about his wife that Hanssen posted, apparently using his own name, to Usenet groups. (Just when the story couldn’t get any weirder… no wonder even the movie doesn’t dwell on the subject.)

    Yet the book still feels padded with barely-relevant material. Worse yet are the usual sins of disappointing non-fiction: lack of an index, simple theories out of thin facts (a long chapter on Hanssen’s relationship with a stripper seems vaporous, unrelated and overly moralistic) and few discussions about deeper motivations.

    For all of the facts and the context, one comes away from The Bureau and the Mole unsatisfied by the result. We understand that Hanssen saw spying as a way to prove his intellectual superiority over his less-capable colleagues. But Vise often seems too eager to wag his finger at Hanssen, momentarily distracted by shiny events in Louis Freeh’s life or the FBI’s history. The book intrigues more than it satisfies, giving the impression of a dynamite magazine article stretched over two hundred pages. Too bad, given the inherent interest of the Hanssen story. Looking at the inflated Canadian price tag of the book, I’m even more happy than usual that I’ve been able to get a cheap copy at a used book sale.

  • The Broker, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2005, 422 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-24158-8

    It must be good to be John Grisham. Sign a contract with a publisher, take a long trip to Italy, see the local sights, write a novel about the experience. Final step: Profit, as the book sells zillions.

    It’s not such a bad deal even for us readers: Grisham hasn’t allowed success to destroy his ability to write competent thrillers, and some will even argue that the latter-period Grisham is even better than what his first few novels promised. While his fiction still revolves around familiar themes (lawyers, money, ethical concerns), he has also shown willingness to stretch the envelope a bit and play around with different elements. Grisham has been able to deliver both what his readers expect, and -presumably- what he’ s been wanting to write.

    The Broker stretches the Grisham oeuvre in two different ways. For one thing, it’s closer to a straight-up thriller than to the type of judicial thriller that Grisham readers are used to. The story revolves around a complex baiting game in which the US government frees a prisoner with too many secrets in order to find out who’s most keenly interested in killing him. Spy satellites and foreign interests are involved.

    But the prisoner has no intention of being so cooperative in his own demise. Initially led by US government contacts to the sunny skies of a Northern Italy city, our protagonist soon starts making other plan. But not too quickly, which leads us to Grisham’s second distinctive departure for this novel: The Broker often reads as a travelogue of northeastern Italy as the action grinds to a halt and our protagonist plays tourist.

    It’s not unpleasant, mind you: Even when he’s not busy advancing the plot, Grisham writes engagingly enough that even descriptions of churches and small cafés are interesting. The atmosphere of the novel, even loosely wrapped in a thriller outline, is one that feels like a vacation. Even as our protagonist’s enemies close in, as he rebels against his minders and turns the tables on the US government, The Broker is the very definition of escapist entertainment. I suspect that not all readers will be so lenient, but Grisham has a gift for reasonably entertaining prose. If that takes the form of a travel memoir with thriller bookends, well, so be it. It’s all fun to read anyway.

    More serious problems arise when considering the overall MacGuffin that precipitates the plot: Some kind of ultra-secret satellite network that can be hacked by a bunch of post-grads, while mystifying both the US intelligence services and their hackers. There’s a reason why Grisham doesn’t dwell all that much on those background thriller elements: They don’t make much sense.

    But if you’re the forgiving type, as you probably need to be in order to enjoy this novel to the fullest, it’s worth ignoring the wobbly setup and the lengthy travelogue to get to the final section of the novel, which hails back to the types of high-stakes negotiations and bluffing games that formed the backbone of previous Grisham novels. Once again, it leads to a fuzzy moral conclusion where (Grisham seems to argue) it’s best to run away without money than remain a slave of the system, or something like that. Someone could do a thesis on how many of Grisham’s novels conclude with “and then he/she/they ran away”.

    But if you’ve been following the Grisham oeuvre so far, The Broker remains a new and interesting brick in the wall. It’s got most of the Grisham pet obsessions and introduces a number of new wrinkles that may very well play out in future novels. It’s not quite what most people will expect, but it’s a lot of fun to read.

  • One Shot, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2005, 466 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-24102-2

    It’s with a novel titled One Shot that I realize that Lee Child is no one-hit wonder. The irony kills me.

    Of course, I’m a latecomer to the Child party: One Shot is his ninth novel and only the second one of his that I’ve read after Persuader. But it shows that Persuader wasn’t a fluke and that Child’s compulsively-readable blend of genre-savvy thrills is likely to hold up in his other novels.

    Not that this is much of a surprise: Persuader was such a professional piece of work that it was hard to imagine an author capable of that level of competence slinking back to lesser work. One Shot deftly follows up the adventures of Jack Reacher, an ex-military policeman turned drifter and gun-for-hire. Reacher, of course, is the classical Competent Man: laconic, intelligent and ridiculously skilled in a number of areas. No permanent attachments make him an ideal series protagonist, as he’s able to slip in and out of various situations with ease.

    In this case, the novel opens with a hail of bullets as a sniper shoots down five people in the downtown area of a good-sized Midwest city. Enough evidence is left at the scene of the shooting that within pages, the police has made an arrest. But before anything else can happen, the suspect tells his captors “They got the wrong guy. Get Jack Reacher for me” and conveniently slips into a coma.

    Clearly, something is up. For the first half of the novel One Shot deftly plays with genre expectations, zig-zagging from one plot point to another, revealing some things but not others. Who really fired the shots? Was it really a random killing spree? As Reacher digs deeper and deeper in the city’s underbelly, he finds himself confronted with the local mob: Are they prepared to face down a man of Reacher’s talents?

    The most immediate appeal of One Shot is the high-speed pacing of its first half. Child has some serious plotting skills, and the novel races past plot twists that would have taken less-confident authors a lot longer to reveal. This is partly a way to obscure the real structure of the novel: Once the fog begins to lift, the true plot of the novel becomes clearer and a bit more predictable. The second half is less interesting: Despite an engaging procedural investigation, more revelations and a final action sequence that recalls a western as much as a contemporary thriller, One Shot feels a lot more conventional.

    Still, it remains a superior read. One of Child’s most distinctive skills is his ability to integrate odd bits of knowledge in his narrative. This leads to some splendid scenes where Reacher out-thinks his opponents, whether it’s about winning a bar brawl, or deducing when and where an old acquaintance will choose to stay during a business trip. Added to the easy tough-guy prose, it makes One Shot an example of what the best contemporary thriller are capable of doing.

    I’m not a big fan of series novels, but the Jack Reacher sequence is two-for-two at this point, giving me enough of a reason to start hitting the used bookstores to complete my series. Lee Child is no one-shot wonder, and it’s about time that I start tracking the hits.

  • Spin Control, Chris Moriarty

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2006, 456 pages, C$16.00 tpb, ISBN 0-553-38214-4

    Writing a review can be a declaration of victory over the work being discussed. It’s a way to come to a conclusion, to shape a final opinion. Whether it’s a rave or a rant, a review is a way of declaring to the world –There it is, I have figured out what this is all about, and how it relates to me. Case closed. Next.

    And that makes Spin Control all that harder to review. For despite this reviewer’s best intentions, Chris Moriarty’s sophomore effort seems to fall into the morass of mid-list SF novels, solid enough to deserve upper-tier publishing but not sufficiently memorable to float above the rest of its contemporaries. Worse yet: Spin Control isn’t much better (or worse) than Moriarty’s previous Spin State, which inspired similar feelings of ambivalence.

    Part of the blah can be tracked to the quasi hum-drum nature of the books’ premise. Spin State recast issues about coal mining in outer space, whereas Spin Control rehashes the same Israel/Palestine conflict three hundred years in the future, without much by way of change. While not completely implausible by middle-eastern standards where every ideological nut seems to have thousand-year-old grievances, the sheer pedestrian nature of the book’s main axis of conflict sucks interest out of the remainder of the book. Moriarty brings little that’s new or original to this issue (though her description of “Enders” is a nice SF nod) and the feeling is a lot like being spoon-fed bitter cough medicine: While it may be good for me, it’s hardly any fun.

    This isn’t helped by the glacier-fast pacing of the book, which stretches in time even as the plot demands a faster pace. That problem also plagued Spin State, but the difference between ideal and actual pacing seems even more pronounced here given this sequel’s heightened intent as a thriller. Spin Control, at nearly five hundred pages of dense typography, overstays its welcome by at least a hundred pages.

    Perhaps the best thing about the novel is how it really attempts to create a hybrid out of espionage thrillers and Science Fiction. Many, many, many recent authors have trodden down this path lately, from Richard Morgan to Charles Stross, but Moriarty is less focused on gadgets and more on the toll that official secrets can take on individual lives. This is where the grim ponderousness of the novel pays off, heightening the novel’s credibility as an espionage thriller in the vein of classic John Le Carré: how spying isn’t about the fancy gadgets and the high stakes, but about barren lives, the absence of certitude and the brutality of the business. Moriarty may crank up the tension for too long, but when the spring finally unwinds in the last few pages, the results leave almost no one unscathed.

    Moriarty generally does better when it comes to the SF content of her story: The science is exact, the references are interesting, and the purer SF moments are handled with professionalism. It still could have been cut and edited down to a smoother-flowing rhythm, but hard-SF readers will not be disappointed by Moriarty’s grasp of science and the speculations she spins off her contemporary sources. (A reference bibliography is included.)

    But trying to pin down Spin Control in a coherent “recommended/not recommended” verdict is a frustrating exercise: There are enough better books out there covering roughly the same terrain that it would take a long time for any reader to make it down to Spin Control before next year’s crop. On the other hand, Spin Control is a professional work of fairly good science-fiction, mature and polished enough to appear in a big publisher’s lineup without surprise. I wish Moriarty would strip down her prose and tackles issues that can’t be heard in contemporary news bulletins, but really, I just want to see her next novel.

  • The Constant Gardener, John Le Carré

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Penguin, 2001, 570 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-14-100169-0

    Hello John Le Carré. It’s been a long time.

    I first tried to enjoy Le Carré’s fiction as a teenager, and almost invariably bounced off of it: Too long, too dull, too bleak, too ponderous. In still remember some of the titles: A Small Town in Germany? Eek. Never mind Le Carré: I just read something else.

    But parallel development can be healthy. On one hand, Le Carré has successfully weathered the end of the Cold War, reportedly having tremendous fun with its New World Order aftermath (The Tailor of Panama), and even getting angry at the state of the War Against Terrorism (Absolute Friends). But it took me a movie, a really good movie to bring me back to Le Carré’s prose.

    Seeing the pitch-perfect adaptation of The Constant Gardner on the big screen remains one of my favourite birthday memories so far: With its blend of contemporary geopolitics, growling anger, strong emotional content and low-key thrills, THE CONSTANT GARDNER landed near the top of my list of 2006 movies and got me thinking that I really should re-visit Le Carré’s latest fiction. Hence the call of the cheap paperback.

    For all the usual vitriol directed at book adaptations, it truly seems as if the last decade or so has seen a marked improvement in the quality of such adaptations. More and more, screenwriters and producers seem to understand how to preserve the nature of the story as it makes its way from one medium to another. If everyone does their job properly, if the producers are confident enough not to meddle with the original material, the resulting adaptation can feed back into the novel by providing another framework for the reader: It’s easier to portray the characters, follow the structure of the story and enjoy the style of the writing without worrying so much about the story.

    So is the case with The Constant Gardener: Reading the film after seeing the movie is like getting and second, more complete run at the story. In light of what we already know about what happens in The Constant Gardener, Le Carré’s choices in telling the story seem even more surprising than if we’d encountered them for the first time. The first section, for instance, is told almost entirely from a would-be adulterer’s point of view: a secondary character in the film, here given first point of view. The novel also gives more time to some of the film’s most intriguing characters: I was particularly happy to see Ghita get more screen time, as it were, in this version of the story.

    Reading the novel only increased my admiration for the screenwriters who adapted it, as much for what they kept than what they didn’t: the weakest part of the novel, a trip to Canada, has been almost completely excised from the finished film –though a radically reworked but no less ridiculous version of the sequence subsists in the DVD’s cut scenes.

    But what’s also obvious, regardless of whether you’ve seen the film or not, is that The Constant Gardener is a superb example of the modern thriller, freed from the usual terrorists and old-fashioned villains: It tackles issues of contemporary sensibilities, with a resigned but not impotent rage at the ways the world is designed. Character-wise, it will stun you. Writing-wise, Le Carré’s never been better.

    But then again, you knew I’d say that. After fifteen years, it may just be time for me to go back and take a look at the rest of Le Carré’s fiction.

  • Gil’s All Fright Diner, A. Lee Martinez

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2005, 287 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-35001-7

    Saying that this book is pure fun diminishes it somehow. As if the bland truth failed to account for the full experience. As a plot-driven reader, I can often find myself out of vocabulary when comes the time to discuss atmosphere and characters. Gil’s All Fright Diner is one of those book: Though it has plenty of narrative ideas, it sticks in memory for the prose and the good fun of the protagonists.

    It starts in a pickup, which is appropriate considering that the novel takes place in a small Texas town where the scenery is made out of sand. Our two travelling heroes, Duke and Earl, aren’t your usual redneck drifters: One’s a werewolf, the other’s a vampire, and together they can fight the even worse kind of undead creatures. As they settle down for a late dinner, they quickly find out that their host has unusual pest-control problems. But it’s not the diner as much as it’s the city… especially when there’s a teenage witch running around stirring up trouble.

    The novel truly hits its rhythm as the heroes face off against the undead. Friendly banter, sharp prose, amusing ideas and folksy charm all combine to form a hybrid of Terry Pratchett and Joe Landsdale. Undead cows get a short time in the spotlight as the young female antagonist has to make do with what’s at her disposal: It’s not easy trying to destroy the world when you’ve got schoolwork, no shopping outlets for magical supplies and a minion whose only reason to stick around is trying to get in your pants.

    Character-wise, it’s easy to give Duke and Earl the full benefits of character sympathy: Their aw-shucks shtick, equally made of jaded weariness and buddy-buddy dynamics, is immediately likable, and they make terrific protagonists: Not too cowered, not too cocky, with enough amusing banter to plaster a big permanent smile on anyone’s face.

    There’s a comic-book sensibility to the entire novel, which is horror without being horrific, and comic without being comedy. Gil’s All-Fright Diner apparently won a YA award, but this should be a guide to the unpretentious nature of the story rather than to the thematic content: There is plenty of undead gore, harsh language and unwholesome lust here to please everyone, including the teenage boys in the audience. There are a few scenes of ichor-mopping here and there (the fights are fun, but it’s the cleaning up that really sucks) and the teenage witch has no compulsion at using her body to get what she wants… which includes the protagonists of the story. Add to that a vampire who hasn’t had a date in ages, a moping ghost as well as a feisty diner caretaker who knows how to get satisfaction and the result is, as I never get tired of writing, a whole lot of fun.

    Could it be better? Probably. Some of the comic ideas get old really fast, such as the Pig-Latin spell-casting. As with all horror/comedy hybrids, the tone can be uneven as it races from splatter to silliness. There is an almost-complete absence of weightier thematic concerns, which really isn’t a prerequisite for this type of novel, but could have made it even better. Although, as I write this, it occurs to me that Gil’s All-Fright Diner is almost a point-for-point parody of the latest urban-horror vogue. By taking the usual monsters-fighting-monsters plotl and setting it in small-town constraints, Martinez indulges in a clever reversal of the usual clichés.

    Still, there’s a lot to be said for a small perfectly-formed piece of entertainment that delivers exactly what it promises to do. In many ways, Gil’s All-Fright Diner reminded me of TREMORS with its small-town atmosphere, redneck banter and mixture of action, terror and humour. Sam Raimi, in his earlier phase between EVIL DEAD II and DARKMAN, would have been the perfect director for a cinema adaptation of this novel. As it is, it’s sufficiently close to a charming B-Movie aesthetics that many media horror fans will feel right at home.

    But Gil’s All-Fright Diner is more than a good book that ends well: it’s the kind of story that, only a few pages in, lets you know that you’re about to enjoy this experience and doesn’t disappoints afterwards. Everyone will make it to the end with satisfaction, perfectly happy that everything went well. It’s a great debut novel by an author who obvious knows what he’s going. Don’t miss it if small-town horror comedies are your idea of a good time.

  • Chronospace, Allen Steele

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2001, 320 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-00906-9

    The beauty of time-travel stories is that they’re purely intellectual games. Despite tantalizing speculations from time to time, there is little factual evidence that time-travel is scientifically possible, making the entire concept indifferent to new discoveries. Unlike other types of Science Fiction, the time-travel sub-genre is essentially feeding upon itself in sort of a game in which authors bring their best ideas to the table. It’s one of the purest example of the kind of conversation that can be found in literary genres. Sort of the SF equivalent to closed-room mysteries: every writer’s got to do one at some point. So when Allen Steele tackles time-travel in Chronospace, he better both acknowledge the ongoing state of the genre and bring something new to the discussion.

    Steele being a proud and acknowledged hard-SF genre writer, he doesn’t miss a trick to show that he’s done his homework in the time-travelling genre: he name-checks not only Analog magazine (in which one of his protagonists publishes a thought experiment with far-reaching consequences), but also gives SF writer Gregory “Timescape” Benford a small walk-on cameo. References to past concepts and stories make it clear that Steele is riffing off familiar tunes and playing by genre rules. A bibliography of sources (historical, scientific and science-fictional) completes the book. It helps, in some strange sense, that the novel is an expansion of a previous short story published in Analog, “Where angels fear to tread”: you really can’t hammer down Chronospace more firmly in the genre playground if you tried.

    But what does Steele himself bring to the discussion? In some ways, the genre references are part of it: Chronospace is in part a reflexion on the power of Science Fiction in potentially altering our future (and, positing time-travel technology, our past as well). The title of the third section, “Free Will” alludes to the other big subject of contemplation that’s become one of the central paradoxes of time-travel as a dramatic concept: What if the malleability of history removes the assumption that free will exists? Steele, as he travels between past, present and future, mulls over such issues and has some fun with the established conventions of time-travel as it inevitably leads to alternate history. For confirmed SF fans, it’s like hearing a good cover of a music piece we particularly enjoy, with a number of extra twangs and zings to make it different.

    On the other hand, Chronospace (like many of Steele’s novels) doesn’t venture all that far away from comfy familiarity. As familiar as it seems, it’s also a bit dull in the way so characteristic of mid-list SF fillers, lacking either the intellectual inferno of first-grade Science Fiction or the top-notch writing of superior fiction. It’s readable and interesting enough, mind you, and there’s a public for that type of thing. (A public that even includes me most sunny days of the week.) But if Steele does a fine job a contextualizing where Chronospace takes place in the SF discourse, he doesn’t do much to advance the discussion. In convention panel terms, Chronospace is the guy who summarizes well the discussion so far, but is timid in venturing any further.

    Even in historical terms, Steele’s carefully-researched details fail to convince. The Hindenburg as a crucial piece of Nazi resolve? Allow me my doubts as I point to an entire geopolitical framework. On a smaller scale, the characters make stupid mistakes that seriously belies their putative professionalism at the whole time-travel business. Meh. Welcome to by-the-numbers plotting.

    But I’m being too harsh. Not every book has to change the genre as we know it: As a certified genre SF geek, I should be happy that someone is stoking over the coals of time-travel and throwing another log on the fire: It keeps the conversation going and it gives us something to do during lazy Sunday afternoons. For a type of discussion that’s been feeding upon itself since H.G. Wells, a competent recap really isn’t all that bad.

  • The Alien Years, Robert Silverberg

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    EOS, 1998, 488 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-105111-X

    This book is designed to annoy you.

    Not that this is a bad thing. Think of Robert Silverberg’s The Alien Years as part of the great big genre Science Fiction conversation about alien invasions, reaching all the way back to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The whole initial point of alien invasions, of course, is to show the dynamics of imperialism as applied to us first-world readers. A truly realistic alien invasion novel isn’t supposed to be jolly: we get conquered/killed, The End. Extra points for believability can be given to those stories when the aliens just blast the Earth to little bits without pausing to negotiate or even say hi.

    But what’s the fun in that? It may not be a surprise if, since the pulp era of science-fiction all the way up to half of Baen’s SF lineup, most alien-invasion stories have been about winning against overwhelming odds. It’s one of SF’s core myths, and one which, post-Vietnam and almost post-Iraq, may not be as implausible as critics of the BEM-Killer sub-genre may think. Alas, most contemporary alien-invasion stories now fall into such common story-telling patterns: They are so far off the original intent of the story template that they’ve flipped over to comfort fantasy.

    So when grandmaster Robert Silverberg sets out to write new alien-invasion novel, it’s not implausible to expect him to have something more on his mind than writing another shoot-em-up novel in which the plucky human send the BEMs packing home in a matter of days.

    For one thing, you can depend on the invasion scenario, but you can’t depend on your protagonists: Within pages, Silverberg kills off the first viewpoint character to witness the alien’s initial invasion. Then it’s fast-forward in the future as the aliens don’t leave and there’s nothing the humans can do to change their mind. Everyone’s hopes for negotiations remain unfulfilled: the aliens aren’t talking and whenever they think humans are getting too uppity, they flick a magical switch and shut down all electricity around the planet. Billions die. Years pass. Another chapter begins.

    Against such overwhelming odds, most humans give up. Some of them throw in their lot with the aliens. Others just try to ignore the problem. Not all of them, though: Around the world, pockets of resistance try and try again. A particularly hardy bunch cloisters around the Carmichael compound in Southern California, where various plans are discussed to bring down the invaders.

    But it’s in the nature of The Alien Years that whenever someone gets too close, something happens, plans fail and the action skips forward a few years later. The novel gradually takes on the mantle of a family epic, as the original players die and are replaced by another generation, and then another. A dramatic heft settles upon the novel as Silverberg plays with the expectations of the alien-invasion sub-genre, gravely intoning that the little comforts of such stories are just there to make us feel better.

    It’s not, however, a complete success: So all of its dour contrarian attitude, The Alien Years often resorts to its own share of clichés and dramatic shortcuts. Somehow, the impassive aliens manage to talk to humans Quislings without communicating with anyone else. Silverberg’s cyber-hackers and orphan assassins all seem awfully convenient. And, for all of his genre self-awareness, Silverberg wraps up his novel too conveniently, leaving little explanation and even less satisfaction besides the good old sub-genre template. In some ways, The Alien Years is a novel that runs out of convictions.

    One the other hand, Silverberg may be too much of an old pro to go to the logical end of his intentions: If readers are bound to be annoyed by this novel as it exists right now; imagine how they would have felt had The Alien Years really tried to overturn alien-invasion novel clichés. It would have been a five-page short story with hundreds pages on which to note your frustrations.

  • Carnival, Elizabeth Bear

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2006, 392 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58904-0

    Even when authors make a spectacular entrance, it can take a while before they deliver books that can truly be called their own. For every William Gibson forever cursed with a first novel that can’t be topped there’s a Greg Bear whose breakthrough novel comes years after their debut. Even the most promising writers can take a while before shaking off their inspirations and set out in a territory of their own creation.

    It’s possible to say plenty of good things about Elizabeth Bear’s debut SF trilogy, but “original” would be stretching it: While competently imagined and vividly written, Hammered , Scardown and Worldwired often felt like good-quality remixes of ideas, genres and situations already familiar to genre readers. Good reading, but sometimes indistinguishable from so many other mid-list SF novels. Middle-of-the-pack material, with the added advantage of excellent characterization.

    Carnival is something else. Something better. It manages to find a place in SF tradition and improve on it.

    It finds a place in Science Fiction’s stream of feminist writing, though as a further argument rather than an imitation. As our two protagonists, agents for an unwholesome human hegemony, step on the planet of New Amazonia, we’re led to contemplate what could have very well been a creation of past feminist writers: a strong matriarchy in which weapons are practically mandatory and where males are either neutered or put down. But if you think Carnival is just going to be a tour of a strange new society, think again: There’s a strong thriller engine at the core of this novel, and it never stops purring. Our two protagonists have agendas that don’t necessarily mesh together, to say nothing of a thorny personal conflict between them. As if that wasn’t enough, New Amazonia thankfully isn’t a monolithic utopia where everything is aligned perfectly: factions-within-factions are at play to radically change the nature of its government, even as there may be an extra surprise or two buried in the planet’s alien ruins…

    The plotting gets complex at times, but Bear’s non-nonsense style does wonders at drawing the readers in, then keeping everything interesting even as the complexity of the political intrigue increases. Strong personal conflicts mesh with overarching social issues to produce not only a vigorous thriller, but a Science Fiction genre novel that acknowledges its predecessors while engaging into a sustained argument with them. Carnival works as an extension to the feminist utopia genre, while brining a degree of political complexity that allows us to look at utopian assumptions with a new light. You can almost hear Bear adding to the genre discourse with a well-placed “But it’s not so simple!”

    There are a number of good SF ideas thrown into the mix too: A radical solution to environmental problems; fascinating character names; matter-of-fact use of utility fogs; heavy-duty plague engineering; and so on. The alien presence on top of all that may be a bit too much, but it plays into the complexity of the story, and places the characters in difficult choices… which seems to be what Bear’s fiction is all about.

    All in all, it adds up to a very satisfying novel; either Bear is breaking through to a superior level, or my brain is calibrating itself to what she’s doing. Either way, I’m buying a copy of her upcoming Undertow as soon as it comes out.