Book Review

  • World War Z, Max Brooks

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Crown, 2006, 342 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-307-34660-9

    It’s regrettable that up until recently, the zombie had been a creature of filmed horror rather than written horror. For many, zombies are first associated with the Romero films with little prose equivalent. But given the low-budget limitations of horror film-making, this has stunted the evolution of the zombie as a monster: when it’s impossible to show the magnitude of a zombie plague, films has traditionally resorted to isolated locations and a very limited scope. Exploration of the full repercussions of such an event was usually impossible to fit inside a two-hour-long motion picture. But as the zombie genre gained some renewed attention in the early years of the century, a few books dealing with the subject trickled into bookstores.

    A first such attempt to gain mainstream attention was Max Brook’s Zombie Survival Guide, a deadpan parody of paramilitary “survival guides” that never blinked at its reader even as it coolly discussed how to decapitate zombies and discussed the likelihood of a “zombie planet”. Alternately chilling and amusing, The Zombie Survival Guide occasionally attained a pleasant narrative velocity, leaving readers wanting more.

    “More” is now here as World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, a follow-up tome describing a world-wide zombie uprising via interviews and narratives from survivors of the event. This scattered way of describing the events works in favour of the story: The structure frees Brooks from following certain characters through the least interesting events of their adventures, while the scattered viewpoints allow him to focus on the dramatic high-points of the story regardless of where they take place on the globe. A few characters make return appearances, but most vignettes are self-contained.

    Those who are unfamiliar with The Zombie Survival Guide shouldn’t worry: World War Z is not really linked to its predecessor and may even work better without knowledge of the first book. (Among other things, the “solanum” virus is never mentioned and the “secret history” revealed in the last section of The Zombie Survival Guide doesn’t seem to be a prequel to the events of the second book.) What does carry through is Brooks’ clear imagination for the consequences of a world-wide zombie plague: Not content to describe the apocalypse, Brooks takes the next steps and imagines how humanity could fight back, and what kind of world may be left once the “War” is won.

    Working in a more obviously fictional context also allows Brooks to be merciless in how he portrays the war. The vignettes of his oral history are usually strong (with a small number of exceptions) and take us where things are happening, around the world or above it. A scene late in the book describing an Alamo-type military engagement at a town called “Hope, New Mexico” leaves an indelible mental picture: World War Z was reportedly optioned for a movie adaptation, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the scene as the movie trailer’s money shot, right after the title card.

    It’s the completeness of Brooks’ vision that gives the book its edge, even despite the fascinating subject matter and the smooth writing: Beyond the usual “fighting zombies” scenes so familiar from countless movies, Brooks goes beyond those clichés and dare to imagine the rest, from how to maintain discipline in a demoralized Russian army to “Quislings” unable to cope with the menace to frozen or seaborne zombies. Delicious!

    Readers may be surprised to find fleeting but strong criticism of the current US administration in the early part of the novel, as it’s shown ignoring the problem, then promoting a false sense of security and then falling apart when the cracks start to appear. A friend of the administration makes a bundle of money and runs away when his scam is unveiled. Still, justice seems to prevail by the end of the novel, as the former chief of staff is interviewed in a fairly appropriate job for someone of his moral alignment.

    A further fascinating aspect of World War Z is how it tackles the zombie theme with a rigour that wouldn’t be out-of-place in a hard-SF novel: Beyond the obviously fantastical element of zombification, the rest of the novel is wonderfully steeped in reality: While some will prefer the more action-packed segments of the story, I found myself oddly fascinated by the tangents about how the US rebuilds its industrial infrastructure, how the nightmarish “Redecker Plan” is adopted as official war policy, or how monetary policy is re-established after the fighting. Glimpses of the post-war world are at times encouraging (a more community-based world, with a renewed interest in environmentalism) and horrifying (a Russia gone back to theocracy).

    It’s a shame that by virtue of being published as a mainstream book, World War Z will fly over the radar of genre readers: it’s, by a significant margin, one of the best and most unique reading experience of 2006: don’t be surprised to read it almost straight through.

  • Visionary in Residence, Bruce Sterling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Thunder’s Mouth, 2006, 294 pages, C$21.50 tpb, ISBN 1-56025-841-1

    So, Bruce Sterling has a new short story collection. Do you really need to be told to go read it?

    It’s true that you may not be aware of Sterling’s reputation as a hip writer of cutting-edge fiction, sometimes in Science Fiction and sometimes not. As one of the young turks of cyberpunk, Sterling was the voice of the eighties’ generation of SF writers. Since then, he has matured comfortably into the role of an elder statesmen of the genre, a top-notch writer who has lost none of the fervour that animated him twenty-five years ago, nor the world-wide span of attention that earned him the short story collection title Globalhead.

    It’s also true that you may have read most of Visionary in Residence‘s short stories already. The opening “In Paradise”, a charming little story blending a universal translator and Homeland Security threats with an inter-ethnic love story was republished in at least one “Year’s Best SF” anthology, and so was “Ivory Tower”, in addition of their initial publications in (respectively), F&SF and Nature. “Luciferase” and “The Scab’s Progress” were both first published online at SciFiction, and so on. Sterling’s been selling steadily over the seven years covered by this collection (the first one since 1999’s A Good Old Fashioned Future) and good SF readers had to work deliberately to avoid reading any of the 12 stories reprinted here. Only one, “Message Found in a Bottle”, a short-short originally written for Nature, is here published for the first time.

    Roughly divided in eight sections, Visionary in Residence effortlessly shows how Sterling has grown larger than anything describable with the mere label “science fiction writer”. At he points out in the introduction to the mainstream nerd romance “Code”, the commonplace used to be strange, and mind-blowing before becoming strange. When Sterling now turns his talent to “Fiction about Science” with “Luciferase” (a story about the mating cycle of insects), the results can still be fascinating. Even a series of memos between cubicle workers can emerge as something else in “User Centric”: “There are no happy endings. Because there are no endings. There are only ways to cope.”

    But don’t think that our man’s Sterling has gone all softy-real on us. Two of the book’s most successful SF stories are to be found in the “Cyberpunk to Ribofunk” section, in two collaborations (“The Scab’s Progress” with Paul diFilippo and “Junk DNA” with Rudy Rucker) that don’t push the edge of SF as much as they shake it really hard. “Junk DNA”, in particular, is weird and scary and disgusting and cool in ways that can only be explained in gooey post-dot-com ways, with high biotechnology, Russian immigrants, dodgy financial details and wasted genius. It may or may not be the volume’s best story, but it’s certainly the most visceral. It’s also, in fine Sterling/Rucker fashion, almost compulsively hilarious.

    Only one section, frankly, seems to leech some energy out of the blend: The closing “The Past is a Future that has already Happened” ventures into historical, even fantastical terrain. I didn’t find this section as interesting as the rest of the collection, but that may be due to fatigue as much as anything else –reading this collection straight-through is not recommended.

    With Visionary in Residence, Sterling delivers another concentrated blend of hip technological trend-spotting, sharp writing, steady laughs and mid-expanding consciousness. In recent years, Sterling has spent less time dealing with out-and-out science-fiction and more time trying new and unusual occupations: he has spent time in a design school, gotten married again, travelled the world widely, spoken at conferences… truly embracing the strange new opportunities that the twenty-first century can throw at a scribbler of invigorating fiction. There’s seldom been any less genre material in Sterling’s fiction, and yet it’s rarely been so at the very cutting edge of the future. This is not a paradox: it’s the nature of SF as it exists now.

  • The Patron Saint of Plagues, Barth Anderson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2006, 372 pages, C$18.00 tpb, ISBN 0-553-38358-2

    This is my least-favourite type of book to review.

    No, it’s not as if I hated it: If I had, it wouldn’t be difficult to fill a page about how this or that didn’t work, or how the story didn’t make sense or any of the problems that are so obvious in bad novels. But no: I respect Barth Anderson’s The Patron Saint of Plagues a lot and think that it’s a perfectly respectable first novel.

    I’m just not very enthusiastic about it. And beyond a few superficial blanket statements, I’m still not sure why, exactly, I wasn’t more deeply taken by the book.

    It does deal with interesting issues: As the name indicates, this is a Science Fiction novel with contagious deceases at its core, an engineered plague going through a future Mexico City (renamed Ascensión) even as the Mexican federal government can’t or won’t do anything to fight the problem. When expert virus hunter Henry David Stark is brought in from the North to look at the issue, he eventually realizes that beyond the lack of official help lies a far more serious problem: He’s not fighting a disease as much as he’s matching wits with another expert –one that, as it happens, Stark already knows very well.

    But beyond the plot, there’s also a lot to like about Anderson’s unusually bleak future. Not only has Mexico turned into a dictatorship heavily tinted with theocracy, its standards of living now tower above those of the decadent United States. The border now blocks Americans from seeking good fortune in the South, as the crops die up north and the Americans are left to wonder what happened. (In an often-annoying bit of futurespeak, Anderson has his American characters sound dumber by speaking an ungrammatical version of English.) Heck, one of the subplots even concerned the Mexican Government’s hunger for even more land up north, whether or not the US government is ready to cede it. The Mexican population has the advantage of being linked together through always-on neural communication networks, though this carries along vague mystical yearnings satisfied by “Sister Domenica”, who may become the titular Patron Saint of Plagues.

    Yet that fun world-building pales a bit compared to the in-your-face tension that Anderson manages to depict as his investigators try to crack the plague that is killing thousand. The overwhelming feeling is one of obsessive determination being the only thing keeping the virologists from dropping dead from exhaustion. Anderson manages to present a portrait of his heroes as a bit crazy, but necessarily so in order to keep working at it. His depiction of the inner workings of virology is similarly intriguing, doing much to present the subject without riffing off too obviously from The Hot Zone and other similar books.

    So: not a bad book.

    Still, I’m having a hard time mustering up any enthusiasm for it. As smart and skillful it is, The Patron Saint of Plagues is nearly as exhausting as the disease preying upon is characters. Even at 370 pages, it feels long and unfocused. While unarguably Science-Fiction, the simple “Fiction” moniker on the spine and a back cover blurb that starts with “this biological thriller of the near future” clearly show that this was marketed not exclusively to the SF crowd; maybe a smart move, but one that suggests the relatively pedestrian nature of the story inside. As I was making my way through the book, I was stuck both at the laborious pace of my progress, and an unbidden question: if this novel had all the right elements, why wasn’t it more interesting? Though relatively well-written by the standards of SF and/or thrillers, the novel also leaves the impression that it’s overwritten: Too many words obscuring the story.

    And so I’m left without satisfaction, wondering what went wrong either with the book or with my reading of it. I’m curious about Anderson’s next book, of course. But his first novel will remain a mystery.

  • Nervous System, Jan Lars Jensen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Crown, 2004, 273 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 1-55192-687-3

    They say that Science Fiction can make you crazy, or that only crazies are interested in Science Fiction. They may be wrong, but it’s not a book like Jan Lars Jensen’s Nervous System that will convince them otherwise.

    Observers of the Canadian Science-Fiction scene in the late-nineties probably remember the name: Jensen, after all, was one of the genre’s rising starts, with a few stories in the Tesseracts anthologies (including the deeply disturbing “Domestic Slash and Thrust” in Tesseracts 5 and the Sterlingeseque “Moscow” in Tesseracts 7) His first novel, Shiva 3000, was released in 1999 and then… nothing.

    Well, not much from a publishing perspective. In his own life, Jensen was literally being driven crazy by the publication of his first novel. Nervous System is his story: how he became convinced that his novel was going to usher in a new world war, how he attempted suicide and eventually checked himself in a psychiatric institution. His arrival at the psychiatric institution is described in Chapter One: The rest of the book explain how he got there and how he managed to break himself out of his particular madness.

    There’s nothing funny about the events described in Nervous System, but you wouldn’t know it by reading the book, which carries a straight edge of dark humour throughout the book, sort of a “Aw shuck, jus’ went crazy of a while: all better now” kind of comfort. This is far more effective than the alternative: not only does it remove the first impulse of simply feeling sorry for Jensen, it allows us to understand what happened a lot better than a drier description of the events.

    I was unnerved by how easily I bought into the logic of Jensen’s apocalyptic reasoning. As a sometimes-novelist who actually enjoys the cognitive dissonance of living in two universes at once, I had no trouble seeing how a writer can, to put it charitably, spend far too much time in one’s head. Popular prejudice is that all writers are a bit crazy anyway, and his increasingly frantic discussions with his agent seems to bear out this cliché as he’s reassured that there’s really nothing to worry about. (Alas, the beauty of paranoid reasoning is that this is exactly what they would say.) Heck, his reasoning —that his book would be branded as disrespectful to a major religion and that the consequences of the religious protests would escalate into a nuclear exchange— doesn’t even seem so far-fetched after the “Mohamed Cartoon riots” of early 2006.

    I was far more concerned about Jensen’s inability to read for pleasure while deep in his episode: Like many writers, Jensen is foremost a reader, and to see something so basic disappear seems like a betrayal. Despite the subject matter of Nervous System, nothing else in the book quite compares to that episode.

    I was very impressed at the readability of this book, and the way Jensen comes across neither as a victim or a hero: His writing is lucid, well-structured in how it gradually spirals out of the initial admission at the psychiatric clinic, believably detailed and almost too clear in how he manages to explain what happened. There is a lucidity to his progressive madness, and one of the book’s strengths is how we can both live inside his state of mind and yet realize how off-reality it is: By the time Jensen suspects that government snipers are stationed outside his place of work, just waiting to take him out, it merely seems like a logical development to the reader.

    Jensen, or his editor, are very careful not to even write the words “Science Fiction” until very late in the book: before then, we get hints than Jensen love Stephen King and that Shiva 3000 is a work set in the future, but the actual expression “Science Fiction” is left for after we come to understand what happened to Jensen. Almost as if mentioning the gremlin too soon would cause the readers to reach for unwarranted conclusions.

    As it is, I expect that the readership of the book will split in two parts: Those who already know Jensen through his SF publishing history and those who don’t. I’m not sure which group will be best-served by the narrative. On one hand, it’s good to know what happened to Jensen after Shiva 3000: may he come back to literature (any genre, any style) soon enough. On the other hand, it does nothing good to correct the impression that SF appeals to off-kilter minds and upsets them some more. Which may be a badge of distinction to some (who wants to be normal, after all?), but surely not to the extent of a psychotic episode. Regardless of your own fondness (or not) for SF, Nervous System finds a place of choice on the literary autobiographies bookshelf: There has never been a narrative quite like this before. I’m stuck by the idea that if Jensen’s first book may have been the trigger to his madness, his second one may be the keystone of his recovery.

  • Tiger Cruise, Douglas Morgan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Forge, 2000 (2002 reprint), 289 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56859-1

    Sometimes, reviewing the book’s story isn’t as interesting as reviewing the story about the book.

    For instance, there are a number of pleasant things to say about Tiger Cruise, but nothing particularly outstanding: It’s a competent military thriller, unusually accessible for civilian audience. It feels too short and linear, but those end up being small flaws in a generally enjoyable piece of good reading.

    It starts at Diego Garcia, the major US base in the Indian Ocean. It’s a festive time: The USS Cushing is coming back home after a long deployment, and a group of civilians has opted to spend some time aboard the destroyer. This “Tiger Cruise” is supposed to be uneventful, but that’s without counting on the ambitions of a group of terrorists intent to seizing the destroyer and its arsenal of “special weapons”. Cruising through one of the most dangerous seas on Earth quickly has consequences: the ship is boarded and it’s up to the crew, cut off from the rest of the world, to fight back against the pirates. Meanwhile, the Australians are taking their own dispositions to make sure that no one escapes with a bunch of nuclear missiles…

    The best thing about Tiger Cruise is that it’s pure beach-side entertainment. Not too demanding, not too silly, with just enough characterization to do the job and credible details about life on board a modern destroyer. “Morgan” knows enough about the way the military works to describe it well, but isn’t so obsessed with ranks and rivets to make the book inaccessible to civilians. The tension is cranked effectively, and the basic plot flows along smoothly.

    Where it doesn’t work so well is when the story wrap up to a conclusion: After a promising start, the pirate onslaught whimpers out and the heroes are able to counterattack relatively easy. Readers may feel that there’s an extra twist missing, especially when the arrival of the much-anticipated Australian strike force fails to have much of an impact on the situation. Tiger Cruise ends too quickly, sailing to a smooth finish almost as if it couldn’t be bothered to make the most out of its setup. Those with good memories for action movies may mutter something about this not being much different from the Steven Seagal vehicle Under Siege.

    And that, in a nutshell, would be the review of the book.

    But something interesting is revealed when you start poking around the web for more information on Tiger Cruise‘s “Douglas Morgan”: He doesn’t exist.

    Or rather, he’s a pseudonym for none other than husband/wife writing team Debra Doyle and James D. McDonald, the latter of which is widely know both as a co-editor of the popular “Making Light” blog, and for his own writing advice as “Uncle Jim”. Better yet: The acknowledgement page shows that none other than Teresa Nielsen Hayden co-edited the book, adding another layer of “but I know this person!” to the entire story-about-the-story.

    But wait! It gets better: Reading through the lines, it becomes clear that Tiger Cruise was meant as a novelization of a movie script, which makes the entire shortcomings of the story come into focus. “Morgan” (or rather Doyle/MacDonald) took on the job of fleshing out a story already developed by Pamela Wallace and Susan Feiles. Suddenly, the straightforward plotting and the simplistic ending of the book all make sense when viewed through the lenses of a novelization from a story developed by others.

    But wait! It gets even better: Look around the Internet Movie Database for a movie called “Tiger Cruise”, and you will find reference to a 2004 Disney Channel original film (!) describing the aftermath of the September 11th attacks on the civilians and crew of the USS Constellation aircraft carrier. No terrorists, which may be explained by the fact that this is an entirely different film with a different production crew. Are you confused yet?

    Even so, I have the sneaking suspicion that there’s even more to this story that hasn’t made public: If Pamela Wallace is a well-known writer, Producer “Susan Feiles” remains an enigma with a scant web presence. Was the Disney film a hacked-together attempt to revive the title? What happened to the original script concept? Is Douglas Morgan going to write another techno-thriller? Should we ask Uncle Jim?

  • Mirrorshades, Ed. Bruce Sterling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1986 (1988 reprint), 239 pages, C$5.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-53382-5

    Short story collection may be a staple of written Science Fiction, but few of them pass the test of time. Year’s Best SF collections have their place, of course. Sometimes, theme anthologies can be good for a giggle or two. But very few of them can outlast their print runs. Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions duo still reigns supreme as a genre landmark, but those were original anthologies published at an unusual junction in the field.

    Then there’s Mirrorshades, which has sailed through two decades to still end up as one of the defining cyberpunk books. Not many 21st-century readers may have held a copy in their own hands (it took me years to find even a battered water-stained paperback edition), but it’s still listed as one of those books you have to read in order to understand the bright flicker of what was cutting-edge Science Fiction in the eighties.

    This is an achievement made even more remarkable by the fact that Mirrorshades is a reprint collection where even Bruce Sterling’s all-new introduction is a summation of what he was writing in his “Cheap Truth” fanzine. Mirrorshades is a classic collection: It’s meant to be the distillation of an attitude, the portrait of a movement and the dawn of a new Science Fiction. With time, it has become a time capsule. It’s hardly a definitive cyberpunk anthology (anything missing “Johnny Mnemonic” is incomplete, almost by definition), but it’s there to make a statement more than a curriculum document for English Literature students.

    Reviewing Mirrorshades is a bit useless: It’s so closely tied up to a historical sub-genre that fans already know that they want to read it, and those who could never stomach cyberpunk know better than to try. One might as well write a study of the sub-genre and how it has diffused in the rest of SF.

    Hence this non-review, which will simply run down the list of contributors to the anthology and see where they are, twenty years later. This of this as a VH1 special, without any of the sex and drugs. (You too can obtain the following information via simple web searches, with special stops at Wikipedia and the locusmag.com site.)

    • Tom Maddox (“Snake-Eyes”) last prose science-fiction credentials date from 1996 (with two “X-Files” episode co-written with William Gibson in 1998 and 2000), but he’s currently doing well in occupations related to technology and writing, specifically in the field of “identity management”.
    • Lewis Shiner (“Till Human Voices Wake Us”, “Mozart in Mirrorshades”) is reportedly still writing, though his latest fiction seem to be mainstream novels dealing with music. The last one was published in 1999.
    • Though Pat Cadigan (“Rock On”) has published steadily since the eighties, her output has been sparse for the last decade, and her last three novels have been novelizations (Cellular, Jason X) and a sequel to a novelization (Jason X: The Experiment)
    • Looking at Marc Laidlaw‘s (“400 Boys”) bibliography for the last decade, you may think that he’s been out of the SF game entirely. But that would be entirely misleading, because Laidlaw’s words have possibly been heard/read by more people than the rest of his Mirrorshades colleagues combined: As a video game writer/designer, he has worked on the Half Life video game series, which has gone on to become one of the classics of modern computer gaming.
    • John Shirley‘s (“Freezone”) career has become far too eclectic to describe properly, buzzing between splatterpunk horror, media novelizations, music and a new novel just out in late 2006.
    • Rudy Rucker (“Tales of Houdini”) is still writing steadily, and his hip blend of mathematics and all-out weirdness continues to amaze readers in and out of genre. His latest novel, Mathematicians in Love, was published in late 2006.
    • James Patrick Kelly (“Solstice”) has become a formidable short-story SF writer, recently enjoyed a Hugo Nomination for his 2005 novella Burn, was recently interviewed in Locus Magazine and continues to be an active participant in the genre. His short stories often appear in “Year’s Best SF” anthologies.
    • Paul Di Filippo (“Stone Lives”) has steadily gained stature as a prolific genre writer, with a number of award nominations to his credit. He is also regarded as one of the best critics in the SF&F field.
    • Greg Bear (“Petra”) is still recognized as one of Science Fiction’s foremost hard science fiction writer, although his reputation has dimmed somewhat since the mid-nineties. His latest few novels have marked an attempt to gain a mainstream thriller readership, with mixed results. (His latest novel, Quantico (2005), had trouble finding an American publisher.)
    • William Gibson (“The Gernsback Continuum”, “Red Star, Winter Orbit”) was already a superstar at the time Mirroshades was published and now enjoys something akin to mainstream respectability. Since Neuromancer, his novels have steadily moved away from Science Fiction to mainstream reality… an evolution whose irony has not been lost on anyone.
    • And finally, Bruce Sterling (Preface, “Red Star, Winter Orbit”, “Mozart in Mirrorshades”) now reign supreme as one of SF’s best and most influential writer. His fiction was quick to move away from cyberpunk, and the past decade (since his Heavy Weather renaissance) has shown him as a writer at the top of his game, surfing over the world’s constant changes like few other SF writers are able to do.

    And so the future histories of the young punks that defined Mirrorshades have come to illustrate the impact of their anthology, their writing and their genre. Technology still plays a heavy part in the Mirrorshades diaspora: Who could have imagined that one of them would go on to become a video-game writer/designer in one of the most acclaimed franchise of computer gaming? Who could have imagined one of them working in the very cyberpunkish field of “identity management”?

    The mainstreaming of those writers also holds true for those who stuck to regular printed prose. Greg Bear and Pat Cadigan, in their own fashions, are now writing in the present. Lewis Shiner and John Shirley have been able to embrace the “punk” in cyberpunk like few other. The two superstars of Mirrorshades, Gibson and Sterling, often give the impression of pacing ahead while the rest of the world catches up: Their last two novels (including Gibson’s upcoming Spook Country) have stuck close to “the real world”, though a real world even more bizarrely amazing than what they set out to describe in either Neuromancer or Islands in the Net.

    Not everyone can be so lucky, of course, but there are remarkably few “Where are they now?” questions about the Mirrorshades alumni. Like cyberpunk itself, they have weathered the storm that they foresaw, and cannot simply be tagged with genre labels. The world has seen their technology, heard their music, heeded their call for rebellion and decided it could find its own uses for all of that. Cyberpunk is dead because everyone now lives in it. Mirrorshades, even twenty years later, remains relevant… and that’s even throughout talking about the qualities of its stories. No wonder amazon.com (which wasn’t even an idea twenty years ago) won’t sell you a copy under US$30.

  • The Five Fists of Science, Matt Fraction & Steven Sanders

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Image, 2006, 112 pages, US$12.99 tpb, ISBN 1-58240-605-7

    I may be getting older, but part of me still identifies with the fourteen-year-old nerd that I was back in high school. You know, the one with the huge glasses, a fascination for 16MHz IBM PCs and an unshakable faith in the power of Science! with a capital S and the exclamation point. I may be re-reading these words through laser-reshaped corneas staring at a multi-gigahertz P4, but my faith in the pure power of Science! remains unshaken.

    This may explain why I got such a kick out of The Five Fists of Science, a standalone graphic novel that describes how Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain once teamed up to fight (with Science!) a supernatural menace led by J.P. Morgan and Thomas Edison. Yes, it’s pure steampunk fun, not entirely dissimilar to Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But whereas Moore’s exceptional series often felt more like a literary stunt, The Five Fists of Science has far more audience-friendly goals: It’s designed as smart entertainment, the graphic novel equivalent of a blockbuster film.

    From the lovely opening pages onward (“…so save the e-mail complaining about fact and accuracy. We are in the business of verisimilitude –and that cannot be constrained by pedantry.”), we’re in for a ride that winks at history as much as it profits from it. This is what Wild Wild West could have been like had it been entrusted to clever people. This is a historical fantasy where even the short introductory character biographies are worth reading.

    Though the story may take place in 1899, the storytelling is very contemporary, with winks to superheroes, eldritch horrors, giant robots and a snappy sense of dialogue. The delightful mixture of contemporary hipness and historical detail goes a long way in putting us in the right frame of mind to appreciate this story.

    At times, though, the storytelling may be a bit too contemporary, if by “contemporary” you mean “verging on incoherence”. For all of the wonderful premise, fun writing and interesting characters, The Five Fists of Science often feels disjointed and fuzzy. Some abrupt scene transitions don’t feel natural, plot developments are unclear and it’s not uncommon to re-read a few pages in order to understand what’s happening. This problem gets particularly frustrating during the last action scene, where everything gets jumbled up without proper build-up. I suspect that both writer and artists lacked time and space to do justice to their ambitions: As it stands now, the graphic novel is a few dozen pages too short, compressed in too small a space for comfort.

    The uneven quality of the art doesn’t help the flow either. Though I’m clearly no expert on visual art, I was frustrated at how parts of The Five Fists of Science flowed smoothly while others seemed to present a jumble of indistinguishable faces. I often had the impression that the colouring of the pages compensated for some rushed line work. Once again, this problem is never so obvious as during the last action sequences, where readers have to slow down and carefully make sense what’s happening, where and why. Here too, a bigger page-count would have been helpful in fleshing out the plot in a better-flowing fashion.

    What’s even more frustrating is that the execution of the novel doesn’t quite do justice to its premise. These, after all, are the Five! Fists! Of Science! It’s pushing buttons that the fourteen-year-old in me didn’t even have at the time! In some aspects, Fraction and Sanders may have fallen in one of the less-obvious traps of cool: the dangers that the premise overwhelms the result, that the actual pages can’t come up to the expectations of the readers.

    At this point, I can find no references about a second volume in the series. But don’t let the above misgivings fool you: I really want to purchase and read a follow-up. If Fraction and Sanders can manage to wrangle a few more pages from their publisher, if they can smooth out the rough edges of the art and writing, nothing will stop them from delivering something that will live up to its potential: as it stands now, The Five Fists of Science may satisfy my inner fourteen year old, but the jaded reader that I’ve become is heartless enough to ask for more.

  • The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Golden Gryphon, 2006, 313 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 1-930846-45-2

    The first problem in talking about The Jennifer Morgue is trying to establish how unique it is. The word-blender approach (“geek humour plus Lovecraft horror plus Bond thriller”) works well, but it leads to a second difficulty: the audience either goes “cool: I’m off to buy it” or looks puzzled. The buyers don’t need to be told anything more, while the puzzled are unlikely to ever get why it’s such a cool and unique and wonderful book.

    In a sense, The Jennifer Morgue is review-proof: the audience self-selects according to the high concept, their opinion of Stross’ fiction in general, or their take on the prequel volume The Atrocity Archives.

    But to briefly recap the elements of the series so far: The world as we know it is susceptible to invasions from other strange dimensions, and advanced mathematics are one of the surest ways to open portals between dimensions. To protect the rest of us sheep against those extra-dimensional threats, governments around the world have set up secret agencies. “Bob Howard” (not his real name) is a member of the British “Laundry”, and his geek personality makes him an odd fit for the shadowy world of spooks. The Atrocity Archives was his introductory adventure, a mixture of nerd hilarity, high horror and knowledgeable nods to the spy genre as written by Len Deighton.

    In this follow-up adventure, Bob finds himself assigned to a mission where he gets to live out the Ian Fleming lifestyle more or less against his will. Fighting a high-tech villain in the Caribbean may sound like fun, but for Bob it’s more of a distraction keeping him away from computer screens. His discomfort quickly becomes something more serious when he finds himself bonded (er…) to an American female demon with unhealthy feeding habits. His sanity becomes at stake, not to mention his relationship with his girlfriend.

    Laughs, thrills and chills are once again to be expected from Stross in this second entry in the Laundry sequence: The Jennifer Morgue manages to find new and interesting areas to explore in the chilling mythology of the series while parodying another strain of British spy thrillers. This time, it’s Fleming’s James Bond series (along with the film adaptations) that provide much of the book’s structure and humour, although Stross is too clever to keep this from staying strictly a joke for the readers: there is an ingenious in-story reason (which I’d trying really hard not to spoil) why the plot veers into Bond territory and stays there… though maybe not conventionally so.

    I was particularly impressed at how far The Jennifer Morgue was willing to go in order to explore the consequences of its premises. One of the strengths of the series so far is that it features a lot of very disturbing material right underneath the veneer of geek humour. Here, Stross occasionally presents very disturbing developments and though Bob’s narration may soften the blow (“I’m not cleared for sex magick,” [P.90] he protests), it doesn’t make it any less dramatic. This unease also goes deeper than the simple horrible-monsters level: Bob is in a committed romantic relationship, and the implications of having a Bond-like adventures on his domestic life form a significant part of the novel’s underlying tension, which carries through to the very last pages of the book.

    Also impressive is how Stross manages to fit the entire Bond connection into the existing mythology of the Laundry universe. The underwater focus of the novel is both very Bond-like, and rich in occult possibilities: The first half of the novel crams in clever ideas about humanity’s true place on the planet, and through this aspect fades as the novel advances, it’s gradually taken up by the Bond mechanics and Bob’s reaction to those clichés.

    The Atrocity Archives was my favourite book of 2004, so it’s not a real surprise if The Jennifer Morgue doesn’t manage to out-do its predecessor’s impact in putting together this wonderful mixture of geek culture, deep horror and thriller parody. But this follow-up is satisfying in its own way, and not simply as a continuation of Bob Howard’s adventures. Not many novels, after all, feature death-by-PowerPoint: That should probably be a selling point for the eventual paperback edition.

    …and that brings us back to the critic-proof nature of The Jennifer Morgue: Are you more likely to read a book if it comes with a sticker warning “Contains death-by-PowerPoint”? If so, my job here is done. Otherwise, there’s nothing I can tell you to top this.

  • The Android’s Dream, John Scalzi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 396 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30941-6

    Things can change quickly.

    Two years ago, John Scalzi was “just” a popular blogger to most of the SF community, one whose first novel, Old Man’s War, was about to be published by Tor. His blog spoke for itself, but he was still unproven in matters of fiction: While Agent to the Stars (his first “practise novel”) was freely available on his web site, SF fans and pundits waited for the real thing.

    These days, Scalzi is also known as “best-selling, Campbell Award-winning John Scalzi”. Thanks to the runaway success of Old Man’s War and its follow-up The Ghost Brigades, Scalzi quickly found a place as a bright new writer. Agent to the Stars was re-issued as a hardcover. Fans accumulated from within and outside the genre readership. With the release of The Android’s Dream, Scalzi cements his reputation as a reliable source of solid SF entertainment. A comic thriller in the avowed tradition of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard, Scalzi’s latest novel is pure SF delight from beginning to end.

    Trying to explain the intricate details of the plot in a few words would serve no one, but you can rest assured that within a few chapters, all of the required thriller elements are in place: a competent man with a dangerous history, a damsel-in-distress with more than a few skills, an unusual MacGuffin, shadowy organizations with immense resources at their disposal, and enough wheels-within-wheels to ensure copious crossfire. Add to that some SF elements to juice up the action sequences, setting and stakes, and you’ve got all that’s required for a terrific piece of entertainment.

    But SF thrillers are a dime a dozen on the shelves. Some argue that they’re one of the dominant forms of the genre. What sets The Android’s Dream apart from the rest?

    Part of it is the humour. Despite the high stakes, character deaths and implacable opponents, The Android’s Dream keeps things as light and breezy as they need to be. The tone is set by the book’s now-infamous first paragraph (“Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out.”) and if the end result isn’t quite so ridiculous, the novel lives up to this promising start.

    The quality of the writing is also tied to the novel’s easygoing tone. Scalzi has a good pen for amusing banter (especially between his romantic leads) and his prose manages the impressive feat of balancing both the humour and the suspense that are essential to this type of novel. A technique that he uses to good effect is to introduce a character and then unwrap his past history from the deadpan perspective of an omniscient narrator: It works better than you’d think at generating both the laughs and the background exposition.

    For some reason (maybe the high-density dialogue), I kept picturing the book as a big-budget action film: Sequences like the “Arlington Mall” chapters have the feel of a purely cinematographic action sequence, down to the obvious set-up and the wisecracks. Even the omniscient unwrapping of characters kept reminding me of a certain post-RUN LOLA RUN school of collage film-making. (I also flashed back on THE FIFTH ELEMENT during the cruise starship sequence, but that’s just me: in terms of allusions, the title of the book itself is a better subject of contemplation.)

    As a piece in Scalzi’s career so far, The Android’s Dream fits comfortably next to Agent to the Stars and his two other military-SF novels: The pacing is similar, the humour is in the same vein and the accessibility of Scalzi’s fiction carries through even as Scalzi refines his prose style. You could give The Android’s Dream to a non-SF reader and they wouldn’t have any trouble parsing the content: While this may not give jaded SF readers their jolt of rarefied sense-of-wonder, it will work well on a wide variety of readers. The “Scalzi brand” is taking shape: solid Science Fiction entertainment that clearly works well within the protocols of the genre, while remaining accessible to readers who may not have dedicated the past decades of their live reading SF. Not only does the genre need new writers like John Scalzi, it needs more of them.

  • Infoquake, David Louis Edelman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pyr, 2006, 421 pages, US$15.00 tpb, ISBN 1-591-02442-0

    As computer graphics are becoming increasingly photo-realistic, an unexpected phenomenon has dogged ambitious attempts to faithfully re-create humans: Viewers of animation movies such as FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRIT WITHIN and THE POLAR EXPRESS have reported unease at seeing the “creepy” human characters. Here, artistry meets psychology as humans seem to have strong built-in distaste for creatures that are almost, but not quite human-like: this “uncanny valley” is an evolutionary protection mechanism against mutations that is now forcing computer animators to either favour caricature (like in THE INCREDIBLES) or even longer R&D development efforts (such as James Cameron’s long-awaited “Avatar” project). In approximating reality, there is a point where almost perfect is worse than rougher approximations.

    This relates to David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake insofar as, during the book, I started thinking about the difference between good and great novels, and how a good novel that’s almost great will appear worse than it is. Call it the uncanny valley of quasi-greatness, where reviewers spend way too much time thinking about small niggling details.

    There is little doubt that Infoquake is a good and solid SF debut that should put Edelman in consideration for the Dick and Campbell awards. The opening segment is a furious retelling of the dot-com boom as applied to biotechnology: Our characters are members of a plucky start-up trying to fend their way through a hyper-competitive jungle, and their only advantage seems to be a leader without any ethical restraint. Edelman has obviously paid attention during his own dot-com experience, and the result is a science-fiction novel that has fully internalized the lessons of the past decade.

    Another significant achievement is in presenting a protagonist, Natch, that is as fascinating as he’s loathsome. Natch (we come to learn) is a type A+ personality, a born competitor uniquely suited to fight in the cut-throat business world. In a stroke of savvy structure, the first section of Infoquake chooses to show him through the eyes of his employees, allowing us to feel his impact well before we can understand what made him so.

    Fluent in the languages of business and information technology, Infoquake is a ride through a fresh future, a strong debut from a promising writer, and a proud representative of Pyr’s early line-up. It’s worth a look.

    But.

    But as I was reading the novel, I kept thinking about how some elements of the story kept interfering with other ones. Through the novel takes place hundreds of years in the future in a world radically re-set to accommodate strange new social structures, it struck me that many of the most interesting things about Infoquake would have been more powerful had they occurred in a universe more closely tied to ours. While Edelman’s meticulously-described future history is original and intriguing, Infoquake may have found greater resonance as a pre-Singularity middle-future thriller. Setting the story in a far future with unusual new political forces (some of them unrealistically “all-powerful and obeyed”) takes away the impact of the novel and places it closer to fantasy. I read SF in large part for commentary on reality: the far-future setting fudged a number of promising resonances, especially given the spot-on first section.

    But.

    But this is the first volume of a series (explicitly so, as the cover specifies “Volume I of the Jump 225 Trilogy”), and trying to figure out my issues with this novel has only reminded me why I don’t like to read first volumes without having the rest of the series on-hand: Infoquake‘s deep world-building (partially explained in a series of appendices) contains enough philosophical/spiritual hooks to suggest that we haven’t seen anything yet. I have the suspicion that Edelman has kept a number of cards up his sleeves, and that many of the above objections are likely to be answered or nullified in the next instalment. Edelman may very well take his series in a specific direction where he’ll exploit or subvert many of the certitudes first introduced in Infoquake. As it is, the novel is never too far away from tongue-in-cheek irony: I’m wary of taking it too seriously.

    So you can attribute the above hesitations to “incomplete information: not enough data” and assume that I’m on-board for the rest of the trilogy. Natch may be an amoral bastard, but he’s a fascinating one. I can’t wait to see if Jara will make it out of his orbit of influence without too much damage. Certainly, this is one area of the novel where the uncanny valley of criticism doesn’t apply: Good characters, interesting story and a promising future. Not many novels make it this far up: let’s avoid dwelling on the idea that this is an almost great SF novel and focus on the fact that it’s a very good one.

  • Sun of Suns (The Virga series), Karl Schroeder

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 318 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31543-2

    After three solid hits with Ventus, Permanence and Lady of Mazes, I can state with confidence that Karl Schroeder writes the kind of Science Fiction that keeps me a fan of the genre: Intelligent, literate extrapolations of technological trends, with strong narrative qualities and intriguing relevance to the way we live. Schroeder’s fiction is dense and (initially) difficult, but it’s challenging on a number of philosophical, social and creative levels and ultimately rewarding in ways that are unique to the Science Fiction genre.

    (Not that you can trust me when it comes to Karl Schroeder: I’ve known him for years, and can’t pretend to any objectivity when it comes to reviewing his fiction. You’ve been warned.)

    With Sun of Suns, Schroeder tackles a looser style, with more attention paid to adventure and visual special effects than to deep intellectual concerns. Unlike his three previous novels, this one has been conceived as pure entertainment in the planetary romance tradition, even despite the conspicuous absence of a planet. Think of it as a micro-gravity swashbuckler and you won’t be too far-off.

    Imagine a gigantic sphere of tough carbon material floating in space. Now fill this sphere with air and put a blazing sun in the middle. Now put in tons of water, organic material, nanotechnology as well as, oh, people and let everything evolve for centuries. Now peek inside.

    You may find that this sphere, Virga, has evolved in ways not entirely dissimilar to nineteenth-century empires, loosely arranged around smaller peripheral suns. You will see people travelling from one spinning wooden city to another by way of wooden ships and pedal-powered personal flyers. You may find courtroom intrigue, piracy, naval battles, rich characters, outsiders and hints of higher technology coming from outside Virga.

    At least that’s what you’ll get in Sun of Suns. Schroeder has cleverly invented a brand-new hard-SF setting (reminiscent, but not similar to Larry Niven’s Integral Trees) and has filled it with an environment ripe for adventure. As a piece of entertainment, Sun of Suns is pure delight: the world starts making sense almost immediately, and part of the fun is in seeing Schroeder work out the implications of his creation, with all of the consequences and rich dramatic possibilities that they imply.

    A fascinating group of characters are lucky enough to inhabit this fantastic new world. An orphan with a revenge fantasy; an avowed manipulator who misses courtroom backstabbing; a scientist with secrets to hide; an admiral that can be both driven and friendly; and a nondescript man with skills no one can predict: all come to form the backbone of the novel’s appeal, making Sun of Suns more than an empty exercise in world-building.

    But don’t think that Schroeder has completely abandoned the type of high-end intellectual speculation that has marked his fiction so far. Beyond Virga’s astonishing world-building (including a spectacular segment from the point of view of a “lost” bullet), he suggests a number of intriguing possibilities about the world outside: A line about a “Chinese Room Personality” had me grinning for minutes, while other hints about “flexible realities” outside Virga remind us that Schroeder’s favourite themes may not be as far away as we think.

    While this may not be Schroeder’s most intellectually fulfilling book, it’s his most accessible solo novel so far: The adventures of the characters are thrilling, the guided tour of Virga’s strange new environment feels exhilarating and the novel’s steady forward momentum will disappoint few readers. I was pleased to note that the novel’s “click point” (the moment at which the background makes sense) was only a few pages in, compared to Lady of Mazes which required a substantial reading investment before paying off. It suggests that Schroeder will be able to re-use this “new” sense of fun and accessibility (which should be no surprise to readers of The Claus Effect) to further enhance his next works of fiction. If everything works well, Sun of Suns will earn Schroeder a legion of new fans and happy critics.

    Your mind will be satisfied and your swash will be buckled: what more could you ask for, a sequel? Well you’re in luck, then: Queen of Candesce is coming out in 2007, with a third volume coming up sometime later.

    [September 2008: Queen of Candesce is a bit better upon re-reading in novel form after the Analog serial, but there’s no denying that it feels like a side-show after the events of Sun of Suns. It follows dangerous Venera Fanning as she ends up on a decaying habitat rife with small conflicts; they don’t stand a chance against her political instincts and the unbelievable coincidences that propel her from one advantageous position to another. The mystery of the bullet is solved, not entirely satisfactorily. Some of the chapter transitions are choppy, but the feeling of rousing adventure remains.]

    [October 2008: Volume three, Pirate Sun, feels more like a true follow-up to Sun of Suns, but suffers from its own internal side-show moments. Following Admiral Chaisson Fanning as he escapes from captivity and returns, disgraced, to his homeland, it too has the usual amount of swashbuckling goodness we’ve come to expect from the Virga series (albeit with a bit more material about the Artificial Nature that threatens the habitat from outside). But some parts feel useless, especially when they don’t amount to much. It’s a good read, but nothing more, and the newness of Virga is wearing thin. It’s time for Schroeder to return to meatier subjects.]

    [March 2024: I apparently thought so little of the fourth Virga volume The Sunless Countries when I read it back in 2010 that I didn’t even think of leaving a note here.  My contemporary notes suggest that the book dragged a bit, something not helped at all by a cliffhanger ending.  Well, I finally made my way to fifth and final Virga volume Ashes of Candesce fourteen years later and it does wraps up the series-so-far on a good note.  The cliffhanger is resolved, most of the series’ characters are brought back for one more grand adventure protecting Virga against the destructive agents of Artificial Nature, and the finale does leave things in a satisfying place.  As usual, Schroeder is at his most compelling when speculating about future political systems and technology, this time unveiling everything there is to know about how Virga compares to the universe outside. He is comparatively weaker at the swashbuckling adventure portion of the novel, though: as a largely cerebral writer, Schroeder can’t quite manage the trick of giving full weight to the physicality, fun and impact of his action sequences.  It takes a while to understand what’s going on (something inherent to the complex setting), and there’s a sense that other writers could have done better at squeezing the material for all it’s worth.  Still, I can’t dislike the result: there’s a lot of delicious extrapolation in describing how even flowers and trees can benefit from their own Artificial Intelligence agents, or why it’s important for omnipotent beings to leave some place in the universe for limitations. Virga would make a terrific setting for an ambitious video game.  Still, enough is enough and Schroeder thankfully hasn’t returned to the series since 2010. With the addition of the fifth volume, the fourth one finds its true meaning, and the original trilogy is expanded into a satisfying steampunkish pentalogy that ends up hewing much closer than initially expected to Schroeder’s other high-technology novels.]

  • Foop!, Chris Genoa

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Eraserhead, 2005, 293 pages, US$17.95 tpb, ISBN 0-9729598-9-0

    I get book recommendations from the strangest places. In this case, it was at a panel on Cyberpunk at the 2006 Worldcon. Well-known SF author John Barnes was exploring the differences between older and younger readers, and how many younger readers are fond of “flip and dip” reading, essentially approaching a book like a loose collection of passages that can be read in any order. He recommended Chris Genoa’s Foop! as one of the big underground hits among younger readers, and a book likely to be dismissed by older readers. That sounded like a challenge: I jotted down the reference and later asked my local bookstore to order a copy.

    It turns out that Foop! is a Science Fiction comedy. Or at least tries to be. And Barnes certainly has a point when he identifies the book as a test for readers.

    Set in a future often indistinguishable from our present, Foop! is about the timeless problems facing young single men, what happens when their bosses puts them on a “special project” and why, sometimes, there really isn’t any other option but to kill Abraham Lincoln.

    That’s because our narrator, Joe, is a junior tour guide at an outfit that provides time-travel tourism packages and his job requires him to make sure that his clients are happy, even when they mess around with history. But that particular job is almost normal when compared to what’s waiting for him back at the office: A shiny new position as Chief of Probes, the first probe being finding out why his own boss is being most unpredictably and uncomfortably, er, probed. More trouble starts piling up as he tries hitting on a cute girl at the office and (in a possibly unrelated development) finds himself stalked by two strange characters on the subway ride back home.

    But trying to impose a plot on Foop! is disingenuous, because the book never works better than as a surreal collection of loosely related riffs. Like many film comedies, the plot is just an excuse to get from one funny sketch to another. It works well most of the times, even if some chapters stand out as being particularly out-of-place — especially if you make the mistake of trying to make sense out of the book as being more than a collage of amusing situations. Chapter 12, featuring an excretory ghost that only serves to send the narrator out of his apartment, is a particularly frustrating example of this tendency to flash-and-forget.

    Such deliberate nonsense also serves to illustrate why, if Foop! is futuristic and funny, it’s barely comic science-fiction: Genoa’s casual indifference to consequences and coherence is such that the imagined universe of his novel never serves a larger thematic goal. Sheckley and Adams this isn’t, despite segments that may feel similar. It’s not necessarily unpleasant as long as the gags keep coming up, but it’s eventually a disservice when the novel attempts meatier heartfelt segments (such as the “dawn of time” sequence late in the book) or when the reader tries to assess the book as a whole rather than snippets of it.

    Which is a shame, because most of Foop! is hip, hilarious and a pleasure to read. It’s difficult to hold a grudge against a book that keeps up the laughs. Despite the nihilism and the swearing, it’s a likable book: I still get a kick out of the Joe/Warren bit (or all of Chapter 6) and wish that it could have led to something else later on.

    But, in an illustration of the whole concept of surrealism, Foop! is as frustrating as it’s endearing: The indulgence of its readers in putting questions aside in the hope of a latter payoff is never satisfied. Foop! practically defines what is a cult classic. In the end, I can see John Barnes’ point about younger and older readers and how Foop! represents a certain style of writing influenced by film comedies and fast cutting: If a joke is boring, well, there’s always a new one coming up. ADD is an advantage for Foop!‘s readers, especially if it makes them forget everything that happened more than five pages before. Reluctantly, I’ll have to throw my support to “the older readers” generation, and hope that when the younger readership will put us up in old-age homes, they will forget to lock the doors as they go on reading their new-fangled blipvels.

    Gee, I feel old.

    (I should probably note that the small-press origins of Foop! are a bit too obvious to be glossed over: Beyond the physical feel of the binding, the lower-quality printing and the scattered editorial oversight on the content, the font of the book itself sometimes changes from paragraph to paragraph, subtly passing to a bigger point size without changing line height values. I have no idea why this is so –although I suspect late-minute modifications to the electronic manuscript–, but it’s another vexing reminder that Foop! may have made it out in the world with insufficient quality-control.)

  • Blindsight, Peter Watts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 384 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31218-2

    After years of knowing the author, I’m hardly the most objective reviewer any more when it comes to Peter Watts’ stuff. Still, even I didn’t expect him to bat it so far out of the park with Blindsight, a strong contender for best-SF-novel-of-the-year accolades. It’s a crackling good read, a compendium of dangerously counter-intuitive ideas and the best novel yet from a writer at the top of his game. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s also a work of hard Science Fiction that provides good arguments to anyone arguing in favour of the literary merits of the genre.

    The premise is immediately familiar to anyone with even the slightest experience in the genre: decades from now, an alien ship is detected. A crew of specialists is sent to meet and greet the extraterrestrials. It doesn’t go well. Pure first-contact scenario, the bread-and-butter of SF-specific stories.

    (Warning: Thematic spoilers ahead.)

    But don’t jump to conclusions yet. Because the aliens may not be understandable, and the humans on board the exploration vessel may be even stranger than the extraterrestrials. Clearly, Watts is after more than a simple fuzzy story of first contact. After a while, his theme becomes clearer, as every character illuminates a different facet of non-standard consciousness. The title already alludes to actions that escape rational thought: the rest of the novel explores the same area. Before the novel is through, hard-SF fans will feel the pleasant sensation of hitting the floor nose-first as the rug is pulled from under them: For Blindsight uses the oldest SF scenario in the book in order to question one of hard SF’s core assumption: What if conscious thought wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be? What if consciousness was a wasteful illusion? What if consciousness wasn’t a way to solve problems but was, in itself, the problem?

    Readers of Watts’ previous “Rifters” trilogy-in-four-books already know that the author isn’t afraid to follow implications where they logically lead. Even if the conclusion ends up indistinguishable from existential horror. But Watts’ fondness for deeply disturbed characters also allows him to explore issues through destructive testing. Here, the human crew is so far removed from baseline human stock that they each become a different way to ask the central question of the book in different ways.

    This is more interesting than it first appears to be, especially considering how Blindsight embraces the type of Science Fiction that sticks closely to current science. Locking the novel in a straight-jacket of reality gives a convincing edge to the book’s speculations, but the impact of Blindsight‘s hard-SF elements goes beyond that: Indeed, one can make the case that hard-SF is the only mode of expression that can reliably explore the characters that Watts posits. Their interactions become thought experiment given dramatic form, thier personal quicks becoming wedges of illumination. There is something fascinating in how this novel understands the rules of the hard-SF game and uses them to its advantage. If anyone ever starts questioning the literary value of scientifically-knowledgeable authors, just give them this novel.

    It helps that Watts has never written tighter, more steadily compelling prose. Told by an unreliable narrator, Blindsight appropriately plays tricks of perception, directly addresses its audience (“Imagine that you are…”), skilfully presents exposition into dramatic scenes and works wonders with scientific metaphors.

    In many ways, this is the most remarkable accomplishment in Watts’ career so far, displacing even his short story collection Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes as a defining expression of his favourite themes. Biological determinism, a lack of sentimentality and playful pessimism have always been components of the Watts oeuvre, but here they find a clarity of expression that will convince even those who want to disagree with his conclusions. The inevitable nature of Blindsight‘s final chapter will resonate a long time with its readers, virtually ensuring the novel’s impact as anything but a safe and comfortable commodity in the genre SF assembly line.

    Even in a year where SF fans were well-served by new novels such as Charles Stross’ Glasshouse and Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, Blindsight stands as one of the highlights of the year. Crammed with jazzy ideas, fully fluent in genre conventions and written to a compelling polish, Blindsight ought to land straight on the Hugo nominee list and find its place as a reference in the hard-SF genre.

    You don’t even have to take my word for it: Blindsight is freely available on Watts’ web site. Read it. Think about it. Hold on to your illusions.

  • The Prestige, Christopher Priest

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1995 (2006 reprint), 360 pages, C$18.95 tpb, ISBN 0-765-31734-6

    Given how often movie adaptations of good books are disappointing, a saner way to think about it would be to see adaptations as lavish advertisements for the humble book that inspired it all. For those without any knowledge of the story, why not upgrade the experience by going from the film to the book?

    That’s part of the reason why I deliberately held off on reading Christopher Priest’s The Prestige until after I had seen the film. Given my knowledge of the Science Fiction genre, it’s rare that an SF film adaptation will tackle a book that I haven’t read: I thought it would be fun to do the plebeian thing and pick up the movie tie-in reissue.

    At this point, I could spend a lot of time discussing the meticulously well-constructed machine that is Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of THE PRESTIGE, but most of it boils down to two conclusions: First, the book and the movie are substantially different. Second, the film was far more satisfying than the book.

    Not that the book isn’t a success: Here, Priest plays around with the notion of feuding Victorian-era stage magicians, and the result is fascinating. More or less told through two diaries within a contemporary first-person framing device, The Prestige describes a duel between skilled illusionists who turn their obsessive nature to one-upping and humiliating each other. Their quest to defeat each other’s illusions gradually takes them in increasingly fantastic territory –although the “fantastic” here isn’t always related to science and technology.

    Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the novel is its exploration of the world of Victorian stage magic. At a time predating most of what we now regard as “mass entertainment”, stage magic was a big deal: It’s easy to imagine the whole of London looking on as Priest describes the routine of the job and explain the prestidigitator’s trade. (Though without explaining their tricks –another way the film is more satisfying.) The atmosphere is top-notch, and the illusion of verisimilitude is perfect.

    The diary format also allows Priest to delve deep into the minds of his unreliable diarists (which may serve to explain why the duller contemporary narration is less interesting) and give them all very different characteristics through simple use of language. Viewers of the movie won’t have any problem identifying the characters, even though the adaption takes liberties with at least one character by sheer necessity. Writing-wise, The Prestige is a pleasure to read, the Victorian-era language never overpowering the compulsively readable nature of the narrative, even for those who think they know the upcoming surprises.

    But there are some very important differences between book and novel. Even for such a twisty story, the plot turns and revelations are arranged in a different order, and the book contains at least two extra surprises that take the story much deeper into the Science Fiction genre. I’m not convinced that these extra twists are essential, though: By the time we’re back to the contemporary frame, the last surprises seem a bit inconsequential and superfluous: If the film has a particular strength, it’s to rearrange the revelations in such a way that they give an extra thematic meaning to the story: I particularly loved the way that the film one-ups its high-tech twist by one of the oldest double-switch trick there is.

    While the book is good and pleasant and immensely readable, it meanders without making optimal use of its own strengths. The film may be short and simple and predictable (to some), but it has the luxury of extracting the diamonds in the rough draft of Priest’s story, and stringing them along for a stronger narrative. Both stories are successes in their own chosen storytelling modes, but the film has an extra kick that can only leave viewers shaking their heads in admiration. (There’s probably an extra generalization to make here about what distinguishes good adaptations from bad ones, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.)

    Looking at my database of books read since 1994, I realized that I had never read any book by Christopher Priest before The Prestige, a curious oversight ill-explained by the confidential distribution of his books in North America. Whatever the reason, I have now started correcting the situation: Priest’s The Separation is now on my bookshelves. The Prestige, while a paler double of its own adaptation, convinced me to see out the rest of the author’s backlist.

  • Why Should I Cut Your Throat?, Jeff VanderMeer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Monkeybrain, 2004, 335 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 1-932265-11-2

    Jeff VanderMeer has finally hit critical mass in the past few years, with the publication of a few books by major publishers and widespread attention from the SF blogosphere. Naturally, this “overnight success” only counts if you haven’t been paying attention. If that’s the case, his nonfiction collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat? is ample occasion to catch up on VanderMeer’s career so far.

    The pieces included here roughly cover four types of writing: Convention reports, autobiographical pieces, reviews and criticism. In a stroke of editorial genius, convention reports bookend the three other sections, offering an evolving portrait of VanderMeer. From the brash young man who storms into Atlanta’s Georgiacon 1990 finding fault with everyone he meets, to the seasoned pro who spends a good chunk of 2002 on the road with family and friends, this book could have been subtitled “Evolution of an Author” if the current “Excursions into the worlds of science fiction, fantasy & horror” wasn’t descriptive enough.

    The book works better if you already know and admire VanderMeer’s other publications. The book’s first section is about the writer and his work, and is filled with references to his existing bibliography: A lengthy article alone details the problems that VanderMeer had in realizing his vision of City of Saints & Madmen with a POD publisher: an odyssey of several years and nightmarish efforts. I found it fascinating, but then again there’s a copy of the book sitting on my shelves. Knowing all about VanderMeer’s work is much easier now that he’s being published by major publishers such as Tor and Bantam Spectra, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying the rest of the book. It helps that VanderMeer writes with clarity and enthusiasm: Chances are that even if you only know the outline of his career, you ‘ll be able to follow along.

    Most of the VanderMeer-specific references become less important in the latter two sections of the collection anyway: The “Reviews” section should be of interest to any literary fantasy fan, with short takes on a variety of pieces from various SF&F novels to individual issues of magazines. As a reviewer, VanderMeer is well-informed and fearless: as a result, it’s perhaps easier to enjoy his take-down of Martin Scott’s Thraxas than his admiration of M. John Harrison’s Light. But he certainly knows what makes a story tick, as demonstrated by his even-handed considerations on China Miéville’s The Scar and Iain M. Banks’ Look to Windward. A trio of “Read This!” pieces for the New York Review of Science-Fiction offers quick take on a variety of topics.

    The “Criticism” section is hit-and-miss, though I suspect that this has more to do with my lack of knowledge in classic fantasy literature than to any failing in VanderMeer’s own pieces. To his credit, he has managed to convince me that I should have a look at Edward Whittemore’s Jerusalem Quartet. Unfortunately, he hasn’t managed the same trick with Angela Carter in either of his lengthy appreciations. I was rather more inspired by the polemics “Horror: Alive or Dead?” and “The Death of the Imagination?” —though I came away from the latter convinced that I suck as a reviewer. Not that this will ever stop me.

    But let’s go back to the convention reports, because they’re the pieces who glue the book together. Four report, four stops along the way of VanderMeer’s career. I must admire his guts in allowing the first two convention report being republished presumably as-is: Sometimes, they read much like a lengthy version of “Here’s What I Hated During My Summer Holidays”. VanderMeer takes potshots at a bunch of people, is dismissive of the convention scene and can’t figure out what he has in common with those people. But those are the adventures of a young writer: The latter two reports are far more generous, and reflect VanderMeer’s growing stature in the field. What’s more, all reports are very well-written, and the first two contain their moments of laugh-aloud hilarity. They say things that may occur to anyone stuck at bad conventions and even lousier panels. No fantasy convention, after all, can withstand the scrutiny of a non-fan.

    With time, VanderMeer has become somewhat more diplomatic, though not entirely so: A look at his current on-line presence shows that he remains blessedly candid about what he dislikes and channels the more outrageous stuff through his “Evil Monkey” alter-ego. Why Should I Cut Your Throat? is not just a glimpse at his growth as a writer, but it’s the kind of book fit to transform any existing reader into a fan. I may never know as much about fantasy as VanderMeer does, or ever write anywhere near his level, but I’m glad that he’s out there figuring it out and showing the way. With luck, we’ll get another non-fiction book collection from him soon.