Book Review

  • Vectors, Michael Kube-McDowell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2002, 370 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-29824-0

    The end of a story is important.

    Maybe not as important as some unsophisticated audiences may think it is: it’s not as if a happy ending can magically transform a bad story into a masterpiece of fuzzy comfort. It’s not as if an ending where everyone gets hit by a bus somehow imbues literary qualities to an incoherent novel. There’s no magical axis with good stories on one side, and some types of endings on the other.

    But at the same time, there are many novels on my shelves that are memorable for everything save the ending. I will remember premises, characters, scenes and specific quotes, but the ending itself remains a blank. Even who dies or not can fade away with time. Endings are less important in novels that are sure-footed from the get-go. It’s those tightrope novels (“Is it this or that? Do I like it or not?”) that really live or die on the basis of their endings.

    Appropriate endings solidify the effect that the author was looking for. Mishandled endings leave behind a doubt, either in the value of the story or in the skill of the storyteller. One particularly toxic type of ending, for instance, negates the entirety of what came before, making the reader feel as if the story was a big waste of time. You can’t kill your thriller protagonist, leave your romance heroine single or allow your Dark Lord to triumph without expecting some reaction from your readers.

    As you may expect, this long-winded introduction does have some relevance to any discussion of Michael Kube-McDowell Vectors, a novel that teeters on the precipice of… something during almost all of its length, only to be pushed into the void by an ending that simply resolves which kind of novel it truly is.

    At first glance, it looks like one of those good old follow-the-extrapolation Science Fiction novel, much like Kube-McDowell’s collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Trigger. Here, a scientist studying the nature of consciousness (through means that are only rationalized by an adequate amount of techno-mumble-mumble) lucks out by finding provocative evidence of reincarnation. After initially refusing to acknowledge the consequence of his discovery, our protagonist comes to embrace the evidence.

    From this trite summary alone, it sure looks as if this is classic SF stuff, not too far away from Robert J. Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment or any of the stories in which previously-rational scientists are confronted with very upsetting ideas. I’m actually a sucker for that kind of tale, which (when done right) can illuminate the difference between belief and reality, between theory and truth. For a while, Vectors works well on these terms.

    It may not be a particularly sophisticated piece of work, but it’s readable enough, and can hold anyone’s interest. The writing is a bit rough in the usual SF fashion, but it’s clear enough that it scarcely matters. Far more troubling is the whole fast-love/quick-death subplot, which feels far too contrived to be effective. (From the first hot torrid glances, it simply sounds too good to be plausible.) There’s also plenty to say about a seemingly interminable segment at mid-book in which the protagonist goes in the wilderness to learn about reincarnation from real pros.

    But even as our hero takes action to crack the puzzle and solve the problem, doubts begin to grow as the number of remaining pages dwindles down without much movement forward. The ending, when is comes, finally lets the novel fall into a different territory –that of a meditative, almost moody piece on the nature of consciousness. One that feels as if it stops right at the moment where things finally got interesting. The ending crystallizes incipient disappointment and (much like the main character fears) does feel like a cop-out, an absurdly easy ending that could have happened two hundred pages earlier, compressing much of the story to components that would have been perfectly well explored in a short story.

    It is obviously a deliberate ending. One that is is foreshadowed, however weakly, in the earlier parts of the book. But much as the author may feel satisfied with the way he has chosen to end his story, the reader can be allowed some disappointment. Does the ending work? It does. Does it work in the same way the rest of the novel does? Maybe not.

  • Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches, Ed. Mike Resnick & Joe Scilari

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    ISFIC Press, 2006, 309 pages, US$30.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-9759156-3-9

    In Science Fiction fannish circles, much is made of Worldcon’s place as the convention of the year for all SF fans. Regardless of your sub-genre affiliation, Worldcon is “the gathering of the tribes” of Science Fiction, the one general-interest convention where all fans can find something interesting to do. Worldcon has been running yearly since 1939 and one of its greatest achievement has been to expand and embrace the myriads of sub-groups that have sprung from the original crucible of SF fandom.

    In this context, a collection of Worldcon Guest of Honor speeches has an interest that runs deeper that the merely fannish. What editors Mike Resnick and Joe Scilari have done with this book is give us a rare oral history of the genre, tracking it year after year as it evolved in a society itself in constant change. Some of the language of the book reflects its era all too well, for instance, as casual sexism is prevalent in the earlier half of the book, and racial issues in the Sixties are discussed (positively) as “the problem of the Negro”. Stilted language and period references to now-forgotten celebrities add to the flavour of the collection.

    A number of speeches attempt to confront the genre and its place in contemporary society, which is interesting to compare as the decades move on. Robert A. Heinlein’s famous 1941 speech (you know, the one that said “even the corniest of [SF]… no matter how badly it’s written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change.”) marked a way of thinking about Science Fiction. Later, Robert Silverberg would confront the social turbulence of the late sixties by encouraging SF writers to “transform our readers with the intensity of what we see.” Reading those speeches is like getting a pure dose of manifesto fever, fit to inspire you about the possibilities of the genre as social driver and literary force.

    Some other speeches are pure inner-fandom wankery: The opening salvo of the book couldn’t have been better chosen: Frank R. Paul’s address exemplifies the type of “fans are slans” thinking that came along the early days of SF fandom (and, by the same token, the first recorded geek groups): “The Science Fiction Fan may very well be called the advance guard of progress.” Paul isn’t the only one to stroke fans’ egos like this –though by the latter half of the book, you can sense a number of speakers consciously working against the temptation.

    Other Guests of Honor want to change the world, and use their speeches as platforms. Many of the suggestions haven’t survived the years well: A.E. Van Vogt suggestions for self-improvement now smell like a mish-mash of positive thinking and straight-out woo-woo. Harlan Ellison’s (pre-written) exhortation to fight for the ERA now seems both noble and insignificant. Other suggestions to take SF and bring it closer to contemporary social problems (such as Silverberg’s) are generally more interesting.

    Then there are writers who take full advantage of their tribune as Guest of Honor to talk about, well, themselves. Reaction to those pieces is unpredictable: I found George R.R. Martin’s 2003 childhood recollections to be uninteresting, but Joe Haldeman’s 1990 “How to Get a Job Like Mine” career overview was fascinating. Lest we forget, the SF community is a big extended family where the top writers generally know each other: Tales of SF careers usually bring along dozens of anecdotes about other SF names, and it takes a fan to enjoy this.

    Two speeches are not speeches but interviews: One can understand the strange atmosphere of the Strugatsky Brothers’ 1987 interview (through an interpreter handling the English-to-Russian-and-back translation), but the result on the page isn’t all that interesting. Far more successful, at least in written format, is the 2002 Vernor Vinge interview by Gregory Benford: It’s a fascinating slice of two top-notch minds at play, peppered with scientific jokes and tossed-off concepts.

    Then, finally, there are the one-off speeches, sui generis to the point of being unclassifiable. The most memorable of them is certainly Theodore Sturgeon’s 1962 speech, a piece best experienced than described, even in text form. (It must have been an amazing performance.)

    The collection’s biggest disappointment is that Resnick and Scilari, despite what I assume must have been heroic efforts, have only managed to collect maybe half of all Worldcon GoH speeches: the rest are either lost or forgotten, though they haven’t stopped looking and hope to produce a companion volume when they finish collecting what can be discovered. I find it amazing that some of their “lost” speeches include numerous ones from the nineties (in fact, the book has nothing between 1990 and 2000), and I truly hope they’ll be able to find as many of them as possible. I also wouldn’t mind seeing even a “wrong” transcription of Harlan Ellison’s actual 1978 Iguanacon II speech rather than the explanation/article that took its place.

    But Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches also makes one long for another type of book: An oral history of Worldcons in general, of infamous incidents, of organizational problems and small triumphs, of fannish scandals and professional woes. I was lucky enough to be there at a few of this century’s Worldcons, but I wouldn’t mind learning a lot more about the previous ones.

  • Lint, Jeff Aylett

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Thunder’s Mouth, 2005, 225 pages, US$14.95 tpb, ISBN 1-56025-684-2

    Seen from afar, Steve Aylett’s Lint is a wonderful concept: A mock biography of wholly fictional Science Fiction writer Jeff Lint, from his beginning in the pulp era to his death in the mid-nineties. The potential for satire in mock biographies is rich (Robert James Bakker’s Boy Wonder is a fabulous example of the form, as it takes on Hollywood through the form of a mock oral history), and SF is what’s known as a target-rich environment.

    Seen from up close, in randomly-selected sentences, Steve Aylett’s Lint is a small laugh-a-minute masterpiece. Small quotable gems such as “When the abyss gazes into you, bill it” or “On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death.” can be found here and there in the text.

    But it’s somewhere between the concept and the epigrams that Lint fails to reach complete success. Rather than cohere, Lint runs from one gag to another without building up to something bigger. It never quite works as a biography, even a mock one. Those foolishly hoping for a sustained satire of the SF scene are going to be disappointed. Part of the problem lies into Aylett’s own style… but let’s rewind and take another look at the book as a whole.

    Yes, “Jeff Lint” is more than a bit inspired by Philip K. Dick, especially in his progression from schlocko pulp writer to literary darling. More pointed jokes such as a reference to an “episode” in the seventies further fuel the resemblances. But don’t go into Lint hoping to find a roman-à-clé about Dick, because Lint is really just an excuse for Aylett to riff on post-WW2 American pop culture. Leaving SF behind, Lint features lengthy passages such as a digression about a truly “Magical Bullet” that manages to hit political assassination targets over a century-long period, a bit of Lint as gonzo journalist without any of Hunter S. Thompson’s talent, a discussion of progressive rock music and so on.

    The good thing is that Aylett gets his references right. SF fans with good memories are going to chuckle over such things as John W. Campbell being misheard saying “Poppet, for a male you know how to dress.”, Lint getting his big break by submitting stories as “Isaac Asimov”, or the various pulp magazine titles imagined by Aylett: Awkward and Inconvenient Stories, Baffling Stories, Meandering Tales, etc. More in-jokes follow as Aylett/Lint takes on the world of TV animation, Comic Books, Star Trek, alternative music and Hollywood.

    But it seldom amounts to more than a series of punchlines and weird word chains. Aylett’s usual comic style, it seems, is to join words that don’t necessarily go together, in the hope that the collision will somehow result in something funny. That’s not always true: Read over more than a few pages at a time, Lint quickly loses its interest. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Mark Leyner’s first two books, before Leyner disciplined himself, wrote more sustained pieces and produced his best work to date.

    As an imagined biography, Lint remains a disappointment: The narrative is written with eccentric turn of phrases that aren’t that far removed from Lint’s quotations, and when this uniformity of style carries over to every other quotation, there is little room for featured lunacy. Conventional humour benefits greatly from reaction moments, and if everyone in the narrative is just as crazy as Lint, how do you highlight Lint’s distinctiveness?

    It’s probably unfair to criticize Aylett for what he (judging from his other work) has no intention of doing: Sustained satire probably wasn’t anywhere near the top of this book’s objective, nor was anything like sitcom comedy. Perhaps it’s best to simply enjoy the punchlines (a few pages at a time) and stop worrying about how it could have been a far more enjoyable book. If all else fails, blame yourself and take a break from reading.

    At least the book is decently packaged: In addition to the text itself, Lint comes complete with a number of illustrations, fake book covers, a collection of Lint quotations (they’ll save you the trouble of browsing through the whole book to quote the good bits) and some framing material —including an amusing fake bibliography. Surprisingly enough, a serviceable index is included, though it too has its share of fake and funny stuff.

    Though Lint certainly isn’t for all tastes, it really works when it does work. The dense prose, careful vocabulary and humour-through-confusion takes a lot of energy, but the result is often worth it. If nothing else, read Chapter 10, “Catty and the Major”, for a representative dose of Lint. Those who already know about Aylett’s hyperactive non-sequitur style can rejoice in the thought that he’s been able to sustain it for more than 200 pages. Everyone else can hop in for the ride and see how it goes.

  • The Jenny Casey Trilogy, Elizabeth Bear

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2005, ??? pages, C$??.?? mmpb, ISBN Various

    Hammered, Bantam Spectra, 2005, 324 pages, C$10.99 pb, ISBN 0-553-58750-1
    Scardown, Bantam Spectra, 2005, 368 pages, C$10.99 pb, ISBN 0-553-58751-X
    Worldwired, Bantam Spectra, 2005, 398 pages, C$10.99 pb, ISBN 0-553-58749-8

    In his introduction to his 1995 critical anthology Look at the Evidence, John Clute calls for “excessive candour” in criticizing science-fiction. He argues that even if the SF&F field is too small for the reviewers to avoid being in friendly contact with the authors, reviewers have to stay honest and avoid sugar-coating their judgement: anything else would doom the field to a counter-productive spiral of self-congratulations.

    Clute first came up with the idea of excessive candour in the late-eighties, at a time when SF criticism was -despite the presence of fanzines- a far more exclusive club than it is today. Things have changed in nearly twenty years: now, it just takes a LiveJournal account to be able to write reviews that (thanks to search engines and ego-surfing) are almost certain to be read by the authors. More significantly, it also allows writers (once remote and distantly glimpsed at conventions, if at all) to appear far more accessible to readers: It’s almost too easy, these days, to read the blog of an author on a daily basis, see them struggle through life like everyone else, fool yourself that you know the person and let that perception colour the reading of a finished work.

    It’s hard to avoid mulling over such issues when considering Elizabeth Bear’s Jenny Casey Trilogy. Published in 2005, the trilogy marks Bear’s smashing book-length entrance in the SF&F field after a string of successful short stories. On-line, it’s hard to avoid Bear’s web site, or her frequently-updated blog. Its focus on the craft of fiction writing makes it an essential read for the entire SF&F community, and this high profile has paid dividends in terms of name recognition: Bear earned a well-deserved John W. Cambell Award for best new writer in 2005 and the 2006 Locus Award for Best First Novel for the Jenny Casey trilogy.

    This makes it hard to pick up the Jessy Casey trilogy as “just another SF trilogy from a new author”. It makes it even harder to jot down a not-entirely-positive review. With time, the probability of her reading these words approaches certainty… and she’s known for blogging about reviews of her books.

    [December 2006: A bit later than I thought, the review makes it to Bear’s blog on December 4th: “Christian Sauve mostly worrying about whether I’m going to find the review or not. …there’s some shallow sort of irony there, I guess. Curse you, Google Alerts!” Hee, irony.]

    And that, in a specific example, is why Excessive Candour is more important now than it has ever been. It take a particular type of deliberation to review in a panopticon. It’s easier to be all sugar and honey when They’re Watching. It’s even easier to say nothing at all if something doesn’t work.

    So: The Jenny Casey Trilogy is interesting, but not without its problems.

    At first glance, from the first volume’s back cover, it just sounds like another half-baked cyberpunk derivative, ten years too late and a few ideas short : As a “former Canadian special forces warrior” brought back from a self-imposed exile through coercion and the promise of better cybernetic implants, Jenny Casey doesn’t look very different from many other SF heroines. The surface similitudes with Kristine Smith’s “Jani Killian” series (which features a similar cybernetically-enhanced heroine) are further highlighted by the same cover illustration boot-and-weapon motif.

    But look closer: Beyond the initial inner-city setting, there’s a lot more at work here. Jenny herself, as an embittered veteran who has seen everything, isn’t quite the poster girl for hip female action heroines. The plot itself soon moves away from the cyberpunk or military-SF aspects some readers may have expected. By the time the trilogy reaches its conclusion, the overall feel is one of a general-interest SF novel that can’t be fitted in a pre-existing template. Unfortunately, these shifting goalposts can often make entire swaths of the story feel like sideshows. I first intended to review the books separately, but held off after feeling that the first volume was just revving up to other things. The irony is that after reading the entire trilogy, I still feel much the same way: The first volume contains a lot of material that isn’t strictly necessary and could have been axed by a more ruthless editor. Most of the Hartford scenes after Jenny has left the city are like that: intriguing at first, but increasingly irrelevant as the story moves on. The impression persists throughout the trilogy. A lot of material initially seems promising, but doesn’t truly pay off. (Then again, I usually feel that most trilogies can be distilled to single 500-page books, and this one is no exception.)

    This lack of speed and focus does have advantages, though: It allows Bear to spend more time on characterization, and that’s where readers of the trilogy will find much to like. If the trilogy escapes the confines of its first impressions, it’s partly because Bear spends so much energy defining and developing her characters. She pays attention to emotional resonance with a grace that lacks from the work of many current SF writers, reaching for the throat of her audience with an unnerving assurance. Volume Two ends on an audacious tragedy that many writers would have tried to soften… but not here. Throughout all three volumes, Bear allows us to get into the mind of her characters like few other genre writers are able to sustain. I was seldom bored.

    But not being bored isn’t always a mark of complete satisfaction. Unanswered background questions and constant annoyances can be very effective in keeping my interest up.

    For instance, the trilogy takes place in a future where Canada has somehow emerged as the balancing superpower to China. Given how Canadians always crave attention from their American cousins, this is exactly the type of detail to make me purr and roll around with the book —after checking twice that the author is not, in fact, Canadian. (Though we may grant her honorary citizenship if she keeps it up.)

    Alas, some of those same likable background details don’t make much sense. I kept waiting for an explanation why the United States weren’t the dominant power around, and got nothing much beyond the usual “religious right rising, urban fighting, etc” scenario. Worse; third-volume exposition drives home the fact that even in 2063, Canada’s population is still around thirty million people while the US weighs in at about 250 million: I have a hard, hard time imagining how Canada could develop as a major superpower (much less take the US’s place) with that population differential. Vague hand-waving about massive immigration from Europe and South-Asian support for Canada doesn’t cut it, nor does it explain why the US hasn’t simply taken over its neighbour in stark desperation. Oh well; at least “superpower Canada” has a nice ring to it.

    But there’s something else. Something that will likely bother only a few dozen reade
    rs over the trilogy’s commercial life-time: The French. Not Oh-no-French-I-can’t-understand-it, but Oh-no-French-I-can-understand-it-and-it’s-wrong. Jenny, after all, grew up in Montréal and is supposed to be a fluent Francophone. Alas, her French is nothing like what a francophone may say. While bad enough in the expletives (“Thank God”, for instance, is translated as the formal “merci à dieu” whereas “dieu merci” is -by far- the preferred form in colloquial French-Canadian. “Putain de marde” is a weird mid-Atlantic mash-up that just looks weird. And just try to use “trou de coul” [sic] on a French Canadian for guaranteed hilarity.), the trilogy’s “French” is riddled with elementary mistakes throughout, which severely affects the flow of the text. The climax of that problem is reached late in the first volume, where a tender lovemaking scene turns hilarious thanks to the ungrammatical French spoken by the characters in the heat of passion: It certainly had an impact on me, but not -I guess- the one that Bear intended. Thankfully, the other two volumes ease up on the quantity of French… though its quality doesn’t improve much.

    But I’m not really holding the poor French against Bear for two reasons.

    First, nearly every unilingual writer gets it wrong. From Robert Ludlum (The Bourne Identity) to Dan Brown (Digital Fortress) to Robert J. Sawyer (Frameshift), every character speaking French in English-language fiction is addled with bad grammar, inappropriate use of the language and expressions that only make sense if you back-translate them into English. Writers without frequent bilingual interactions seldom have the sense of when it’s appropriate to switch back and both between languages, let alone master the finer point of grammar. Bear is no exception, and we can hardly blame her for something that happens all the time.

    But as a French-Canadian, I also have to admit that there’s some cachet in seeing one’s mother tongue mangled by Les Anglais once again: It’s one thing to be a plucky minority on a continent dominated by English, it would be completely disheartening to find out that French can be picked up just like that (snaps fingers) by just about anyone. Ah, the self-esteem of obscurity…

    Chances are that the vast majority of the trilogy’s readers won’t even mind: They’ll simply see French words and be charmed by this particular bit of exoticism. It’s those few dozen francophone readers who will spend a good part of the trilogy blinking, sighing and back-translating. I assume that part of the effect is intentional, to make the passages more accessible to English-language readers. On the other hand, I can assure Bear that “Enfant de chienne” is the right translation for “son of a bitch” on this side of the Atlantic.

    But this kvetching aside, I remain reasonably happy with the trilogy. There’s a decent plot, fabulous characters (Elspeth rocks) and a number of other nice touches. (Bear uses Richard Feynman as the basis for her AI character, which just kept me grinning through the entire trilogy.) It may not be cutting-edge SF in concept, but the English-language prose is a bit better than the current standards of the genre. If nothing else, it should find a decent cross-over audience as entry-level SF: The usual props of the genre are nearly all in there, remixed to the author’s specifications but not out of reach for casual readers. As a first novel, the Jenny Casey trilogy is an auspicious debut for an author who will go on to do wonderful things. I may not be convinced enough to overcome my usual genre preferences and try Bear’s fantasy, but I’ll pick up her next SF book Carnival.

  • Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2002 (2008 revision), 368 pages, C$16.95 tpb, ISBN 0-7653-1771-0

    (Also available online at http://www.scalzi.com/agent/ )

    Trunk novels. Just about every writer in the business has at least one: those early efforts that weren’t good enough to warrant publication and so await patiently, in the trunk (so to speak) to be reworked or abandoned entirely. Some writers eventually manage to revise and publish them while others seem happy to let them age away unseen. I know of one red-hot hard-SF writer who reportedly has ten of them, which is the kind of stuff that makes me feel better when I read his stuff and wonder how his “first” book out of the gate was so unbelievably good.

    But in these wild and woolly Internet times where information actively schemes to be free, more and more writers are turning to a third alternative: Releasing the novel on the Internet as a free sample of what they can do and a piece of must-read history for their fans. Campbell Award-winning John Scalzi is now officially one of SF’s most sensational new writer, but the runaway success of Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades masks the fact that those weren’t his first two novels: Another one, Agent to the Stars, was written in the late nineties and and released as a free download on his wildly popular web site in 1999, where it attracted attention and some generously donated money.

    But then Scalzi sold other novels, which did quite well on the marketplace. This, in turn, raised Agent to the Stars‘ profile high enough that the fine folks at Subterranean Press crunched some numbers and figured they could make a profit re-publishing the novel as a special limited edition. There are rarely second chances for books, but there are also exceptions: this is one of them.

    Those of you worried about quality can rest easy: While Agent to the Stars doesn’t quite make it as a first-rate SF novel, it’s good enough by itself, and quite reasonably good for what is, after all, a trunk novel. Scalzi is such a professional that it’s hard to imagine him releasing anything that wasn’t good enough for public consumption.

    It’s also one of those relatively rare creatures: A light-hearted Science Fiction novel. The hook is simple: Successful Hollywood agent Thomas Stein is a bright young darling at his agency, and he’s lucky enough to have at least one rising superstar under his wing. Things are looking up for him, until he’s called into his boss’ office for a special assignment: Find a way to “sell” a race of slimy smelly aliens to the human public. The agent job of a lifetime… if Tom can handle it. Fortunately, the aliens are friendly (pretty funny, actually) and Tom seems reasonably confident that he can crack the problem. But this is Hollywood, and things have a way of not going quite right.

    Before long, tragedy occurs and Agent to the Stars heads to grounds that will feel familiar to seasoned Scalzi readers: Ethical dilemmas arise, and with them the ideal excuse to use SF as a tool to explore a few big “What If?”s. The warm and gooey aliens end up teaching two or three things to Tom about what it means to be human, bringing the novel to a conclusion that will satisfy everyone.

    On a writing level, Agents to the Stars is deceptively simple: The prose is immediately accessible, and Scalzi knows how to put his characters in genuinely amusing situations. The balance between comedy and drama is tricky to get right and if the tonal shifts can rough at times, the skill of the conclusion more compensates for it. Scalzi has a lot of experience writing about movies and he uses that knowledge to paint a convincing portrait of the daily life of a Hollywood agent: Movie buffs won’t be the only ones who benefit from Agent to the Stars, but the novel will pack a special fun for them.

    This being said, it remains a trunk novel, even if it’s exceptionally pleasant to read. It’s a bit linear and fluffy (though less so than you can imagine, thanks to the dramatic turn taken in the second half of the book), with a few dramatic shortcuts that make sense in a comedy but wouldn’t pass inspection in a more rigorous tone. The speculative elements are few, though well-developed and reasonably consistent.

    But as a Scalzi fan, I’m just thankful that he’s been generous enough to allow random readers to have a look at his first effort. In some ways, I suspect that Agents to the Stars reflects Scalzi-the-author a bit better than his first “official” novel Old Man’s War: it’s funnier, looser, a bit more explicit in its ethical concerns and not as worried about mass-market appeal. As time passes, I think that Agents to the Stars will find its place not just as an unusually good “free novel on the web”, but as an essential piece in the Scalzi bibliography, the one piece that announces a strong career.

  • Digital Knight, Ryk E. Spoor

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 2003, 378 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7434-7161-X

    Nowadays, everyone struggles under the shadow of Buffy.

    Hey, it’s what happens when a sub-genre gets strip-mined. Vampire hunters (or, more generally speaking, monster-slayers) have been with us for a long time in popular lore: As you imagine horrors, the next step is someone who will protect you from it. But as the nineties evolved, as Buffy and The X-Files took over the fantastic sub-genres for easily digestible weekly stories, it became simultaneously trivial and impossible to re-imagine the genre. Suddenly, you couldn’t walk into a bookstore’s horror section without being clobbered by dozens of sexy vampire hunters who may themselves be vampires, alongside other furry tentacled critters who may or may not be prime relationship material.

    Half a decade later, the situation isn’t much different. Anyone tackling the contemporary monster-slayer sub-genre has to contend with the dozens, maybe hundreds of other writers who each had their own unique take on the idea. And so it goes with Digital Knight, a contemporary monster-slaying book with its own particular strengths that still feels as if it’s playing with well-worn material.

    I may not respect that sub-genre too much, but I didn’t pick up the book by accident: Ryk E. Spoor, under a different alias, has been a long-time contributor to the Usenet literary SF community, and I was curious to see if his incisive commentary on genre fiction would carry over to original fiction. Would he manage to escape the shadow of Buffy, or not?

    “Maybe” ends up being the most charitable assessment I can give.

    First, the good and favourable impressions: Spoor can write the type of accessible prose that has come to exemplify the Baen line. His hip and sarcastic tone carries well to his chosen protagonist, an information specialist with a number of similarities to those most likely to read the book. If nothing else, Digital Knight is a lot more information-aware than most of its brethren, and that give it a nice little edge, a truly contemporary flavour that seems to be missing from a lot of vampire-hunting stories seemingly stuck in a Stoker mindset. Better yet: Protagonist Jason Wood is a geek, and I can identify with that.

    What’s more, Spoor’s approach to his stable of critters is a lot more science-fictional than fantastic: Among the biggest strengths of the book is the acknowledgement that actions have consequences. One of the early stories sees Wood develop a werewolf sensor: later on, the devices are selling briskly as the world realizes that there are such creatures out there. As far as monster-slaying stories go, this is pretty much the way things should be.

    But.

    But this is a first novel, and an episodic one at that: More fix-up than sustained narrative, Digital Knight is consciously structured around what we could call episodes, each one developing and extending the mythology of the series. It could work as a miniseries, but as book form it leaves readers with an assortment of unfinished or hastily-tied plot threads. On the writing front, the book never totally shakes a certain lack of grace in the prose, which isn’t as important as you may suppose, but does nothing to enhance the experience. Beginner’s stuff, probably less intrusive in the next novel.

    Then there’s the Buffy factor, or (broadly speaking), the idea that despite the neat touches and the contemporary gadgets, we’ve seen all of this before —ad nauseam. Jason Wood can be the best and hippest monster-slayer on the block, he’s still working in a clearly identifiable mythology mash-up where everything is readily recognizable despite the twisted allegiances and careful justifications. If you’ve had enough of “that stuff”, Digital Knight remains “that stuff”, however well it’s handled.

    I suppose readers with a higher tolerance for this sub-genre will enjoy Digital Knight a lot more than I did, much like I tend to be far more generous to hard-SF books than to other types of stories. Otherwise, well, I’m happy to see Spoor working professionally and earning money for the wit he demonstrated on Usenet… and I’ll certainly consider any hard-SF book he cares to pen. But as far as monster-slaying is concerned, I’ll stay on the side-lines a while longer.

    [December 2006 update: Ryk E. Spoor wrote to clarify a few details, some of which I knew but didn’t acknowledge properly in the review. With his permission, here are excerpts of his message…

    [Digital Knight] *was* written as separate stories originally (the first three were “Gone in a Flash”, “Photo Finish” and “Viewed in a Harsh Light”; the other three sections were added in two months after Jim Baen expressed interest in it but said that it was too short). I felt (and Eric and Jim agreed) that given the type of story it worked reasonably well in an episodic format and thus I didn’t do a huge amount of work to somehow try to integrate it into some overarching plotline.

    “Gone in a Flash” was written in … 1989 – 1990, I think, while “Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies”, “Live and Let Spy”, and “Mirror Image” were all written in one short stretch of 2002. (From my PoV, of course, it’s the X-Files and Buffy who are the latecomers; the two genre influences I would credit with Jason Wood’s birth would be the Nero Wolfe novels (for Jason’s tone) and Kolchak the Night Stalker (for the basic concept).

    [Digital Knight] is also, as I’ve also put it to other people, a sort of “compressed intro” to my multiverse. Jason Wood intersects (sometimes unknowingly) with just about every important aspect of my multiverse in his career, and his stories get correspondingly more complex as time goes on. Even apparently quite minor events have more significance than may appear at first glance.

    Mr. Spoor’s graciousness in dealing with my review was enough to make we go out and finally buy his follow-up novel Boundary, which I’d been meaning to get for a while.]

    [January 2009: After spending years on my reading stack, my double-authographed copy of Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor’s Boundary proves to be classic, enjoyable, light-hearted adventure Science Fiction. It may be predictable and too long by about a hundred pages, but it’s SF that will make long-time readers smile. Good sympathetic characters, intriguing glimpses at the lives of scientists (in this case, an archaeologist whose discovery almost proves too revolutionary to be taken seriously) and straight-ahead narration make this a pretty good choice for a wide readership.]

  • Night Fall, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 2004, 692 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61662-1

    Looking over my notes about Nelson DeMille’s fiction, I keep seeing a common theme: DeMille is not just a reliable thriller writer, but he often manages to find success where other lesser writers would flounder. His books are regularly longer than they ought to be, deal with themes that shouldn’t be interesting, use the same repertory of characters from one work to another –and yet DeMille is one of the surest values in the thriller market, churning out hit after hit.

    With Night Fall, he comes perilously close to failing –although I haven’t yet made up my mind about it, and I don’t expect to for a long while yet.

    The first and most important difference between Night Fall and the rest of DeMille’s oeuvre is that he sets it against a very specific time period: The action begins on July 17, 2001, five years after the TWA Flight 800 explosion. Returning protagonist John Corey (Plum Island, The Lion’s Game) heads out to a memorial celebration in company of his wife, but she’s got a complete show-and-tell in mind. By the end of the day, Corey has determined that there’s something rotten about the way the TWA investigation was wrapped up, and decides to investigate further. Warnings from superiors quickly come and are discarded at some peril.

    The first question that readers should ask is why DeMille would want to pick Corey as a protagonist and very specifically why we would want to set a novel in 2001. The answer, of course, is obvious… and so the book takes on a very special quality of impending doom, a quality that becomes more and more obvious as the characters make plans that bring them to That Place on That Day.

    As suggested above, Night Fall isn’t an unqualified success. On one level, it certainly places the novel on a different register. DeMille knows that by his specific story choices, he can bring the reader to do most of the emotional heavy lifting of the novel. We know what’s coming and the character doesn’t (though the author certainly does, as demonstrated by the number of references that are obvious now but weren’t then.) and that is the very definition of suspense and dramatic irony. The novel rushes along to its inevitable conclusion even as the reader hope against all other evidence that something will happen to prevent the inevitable.

    But the very same factors that given strength to Night Fall also contribute to the impression that DeMille is blindly cheating his readers. Think back to the reasons why DeMille, after nearly a dozen novels loosely tied to contemporary times in general, would specifically tie himself to a specific time period. Why show a protagonist uncovering a conspiracy three years before the publication date of the book, if we know perfectly well (reading the morning newspaper) that the conspiracy is not going to be exposed in time for 2004? As the novel started building steam toward an ending and the days were counting down to That Day, I found myself contemplating the upcoming crash and muttering darkly that DeMille really shouldn’t go there nor do that.

    But he does, and arguably negates the preceding investigation, burning up 600 pages in smoke because Something Else happens that, of course, Changes Everything. Did he lock himself in a box and only thought of burning up the box because nothing else worked? I can’t say. I can only testify that Night Fall left me unsatisfied, which is probably a first in the entire DeMille oeuvre. Worse yet is the feeling that this is completely deliberate: DeMille knew what he was doing, and it falls to the reader to decide whether it worked or not.

    If I’ve spent so much time discussing the ending, it’s because everything else is up to DeMille’s standards: The crystal-clear prose, the engaging characters, the sardonic narration, the beautiful integration of exposition… it’s all there, slickly developed. There are a missteps or two, like the unlikely reappearance of a character for pure pummelling purposes, but the rest is DeMille solid gold.

    It’s just the ending that stick out like an undigested bone, and it’s not inconsequential because it hangs over the book like an albatross. The date tells you to expect it and dramatic theory suggests that it’s going to be pretty tragic. But it’s hard to avoid the feeling that DeMille has chosen the easy lazy way out.

    In this light, I’m really curious to see if DeMille’s next book, Wild Fire, will acknowledge or even confront some of those issues. It’s said to feature the same characters in (once again) a free-flowing contemporary setting: we’ll see if Night Fall will have any lasting impact on them, or if the big Reset button will be pressed.

  • Star Dragon, Mike Brotherton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2003, 352 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34677-X

    Some comparisons can hurt as much as they help. If I say that Mike Brotherton’s Star Dragon is a book in the purest tradition of Robert L. Forward’s hard-SF, is that a rave or a rant?

    Some some, it’ll be a buy-on-sight commendation. Forward was long known as the hardest or the hard-SF writers, an author whose books could be enjoyed as pleasant diversions by College-level Physics students (as I myself found out while reading Dragon’s Egg during a Physics 201 course dealing with high-energy magnetic field lines.) SF readers of the hardest variety can often be heard bemoaning the lack of “old style” Science Fiction where you really got your degree’s worth of extrapolation.

    But Forward’s fiction has simultaneously alienated at least a generation of readers through shaky characterization, textbook dialogues (as in “reading from textbooks”), indifferent prose style, amusement-park plotting and lack of literary depth. This isn’t a slam as much as it’s an acknowledgement of Forward’s intentions. Science Fiction is large and contains multitudes: if someone wants to push the envelope of rigorous scientific exploration, why not celebrate that achievement rather than criticize the book for a lack of virtues that neither author nor ideal reader particularly care for?

    And that brings us to Star Dragon, Mike Brotherton’s debut novel. Like Dragon’s Egg, it’s a novel about a bunch of humans investigating an exotic alien life form living in a very different environment. Like Forward’s work, it’s exquisitely well-researched and backed up by solid mathematical equations. Unlike Forward’s work, it attempts characterization. Like Forward’s work, alas, it will fascinate whoever is fascinated by this sort of things, and leave the rest of the audience groaning for some relevance.

    It starts promisingly enough, on a future Earth where biotechnology has become a dominant science. Brotherton’s imaged tomorrow is a wonder of icky soft surfaces, custom-grown biological tissue and easy body manipulation. Our protagonist is a top scientific mind who is offered an unusual mission: A centuries-long trip to another star where strange phenomenons (probably not entirely artificial) have been detected. It’s a chance to do real science, but it comes at a price: a few years of travel spent with only a few other people, and a one-way trip hundreds of years in the future thanks to the marvels of relativistic space travel. As setups go, this is classic but promising. While the prose style has a certain initial stiffness, it suggests a fun hard-SF adventure.

    But things start to sour between departure and arrival, as the six main characters are locked in a sentimental psychological drama that, blandly speaking, fails to engage. The AI is modelled after Hemingway while the five humans have serious psychological problems that proves that future personnel screening in this novel owes a lot more to psychological sadism than to mission objectives. (It’s as if the HR director of the mission was trying to put together a cast for a reality TV show.) On one hand, I have to compliment Brotherton for attempting some human drama in a hard-SF tale. On the other, I have to wonder what was he thinking. Given the choice between flat characters and others that are flat-out insane (seriously planning to impregnate the entire human female population, for instance), I may pick and choose the dull ones, because I can at least empathize with dull people. This is one area where Brotherton may still have something to learn from Forward.

    But that, as they say, it not the main presentation. That comes later, when our intrepid dysfunctional crew is faced with the alien life-form orbiting SS Sygni. There the comparisons with Forward kick in high gear: If you’re fascinated with star dynamics and impact thereof on wholly hypothetical living creatures, then Star Dragon is the book for you. Others (myself included) are likely to feel their eyes glaze over and whimper “too much… too much…” In some sense, here’s a favourable review: “This hard-SF will break even so-called hard SF fans.” Sensawunda? Sensawhoaaah.

    But I’ll allow for some leniency, given how my reading conditions for this novel were less than ideal and how hard-SF tales often require a specific frame of mind. Star Dragon still feels like a bunch of good ideas ill-presented, in sore need of tighter editing and less psychological silliness. But as a debut, it’s promising and not without its share of strengths. I may not rush out to buy Brotherton’s second novel, but I’ll pay attention to the reviews. Writers who write adequately are a dime a dozen, but writers who can play alongside Robert L. Forward are rare and precious, even if their work can be problematic at times.

  • The Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Orbit, 2002, 424 pages, £6.99 mmpb, ISBN 1-84149-141-1

    Few topics continue to frustrate and fascinate Science Fiction critics like the definition of the genre. Like most literary categories, “Science Fiction” means nothing and everything —from the stereotypical “stories in the future” to the more interesting “stories that SF fans love to read.” The Nebula Award-winning Speed of Dark won’t do much to calm down the debate given how it puts interesting fuel in the fire.

    In a few words, it’s a story about an autistic narrator, Lou, who comes to decide whether he wants to be “cured” or not at a time where such cures are medically feasible. Lou isn’t your usual autist, though: functioning at a reasonably high level, Lou has been able to turn his condition in an asset, working as an analyst for a big corporation. For the longest while, Speed of Dark is a mainstream novel about autism taking place in a future world not terribly different from our own. Despite the high-tech details, this is chiefly a novel about autism: the strictly SF element is raised late in the story, and has a measurable impact only in the last few chapters.

    Consequently, proponents of a “purer” definition of SF may have a hard time seeing this book as Science Fiction. It’s very, very tempting to re-label this book as, essentially, a mainstream writing exercise in SF clothing: In this theory, Elizabeth Moon (herself the mother of an autistic son) wanted to write a novel about autism but knew it wouldn’t sell ten copies on the mainstream market. A few conventional SF elements later -tada!- there’s something fit to be sold to the usual genre markets where she made her reputation. Pure cynicism, but plausible enough. The Turkey City Lexicon even has an entry for the “Abbess Phone Home” syndrome: “Takes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream story with a gratuitous SF or fantasy element tacked on so it could be sold.” And bang.

    But such a glib dismissal fails to take in account that the relationship between SF and its audience if far more complicated than a checklist of elements that may or may not be present in the story. It also fails to take in account the power of Moon’s writing in this novel. Lou, simply put, is a character with whom many Science Fiction readers will identify.

    I myself could relate to Lou’s impatience about the sillier elements of everyday life and so-called “normal” people. There is a fabulous grocery store sequence in Chapter Five which pretty much describes all of my pet peeves about going to the supermarket. I could certainly recognize in Lou’s habits most of my own tendencies pushed to eleven. By making her protagonist a high-functioning autist, Moon has also made a savvy decision to go after the readership most likely to identify with her protagonist –Science Fiction fans.

    It’s well-known, for instance, that self-identified SF fans are liable to be measurably more obsessive than “normal people”. Less patient with everyday trivia. More likely to identify with concepts than people. Less socially gracious, to put it mildly. The preponderance of people affected with Asperger’s Syndrome is usually higher in SF fandom than any other normal sampling. We already know that: Obsessiveness has been a fundamental part of fandom (any fandom) since its very beginning.

    And so we come to an amusing conclusion: the best possible audience for a novel about an autistic protagonist and his struggles with daily life is the existing community of SF fans, already quite used to the idea of “special” and “normal” people. If I could recognize myself in Lou, you can bet that I’m not the only one. In some ways, Speed of Dark is a novel about the SF community more than it is an SF novel. That it happens to be an exceptionally readable, warm and engrossing story is just a special bonus on top of a book that goes straight for its audience’s throat. It doesn’t matter that Speed of Dark may or may not be a mainstream story with a sprinkling of future fairy-dust: It matters that Speed of Dark is liable to be a book that SF audiences want to read.

  • Soundings, Gary K. Wolfe

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Beccon, 2005, 415 pages, US$35.00 tpb, ISBN 1-870824-50-4

    As a dilettante critic/reviewer/guy who likes to sound off, I simply can’t get enough book-length collections of SF&F reviews. Yes, I’ve got the entire John Clute oeuvre on my bookshelves: but what else is out there? The audience for such works of SF criticism probably numbers in the hundreds, which is about the size of the print runs for the rare books that are published on the subject.

    Fortunately, small presses are made for that sort of narrowly-focused special-interest publication. After the critical and (slight) commercial success of John Clute’s Scores, small British publisher Beccon is at it again with Soundings, a collection of Gary K. Wolfe’s reviews for Locus Magazine between 1992 and 1996. Wolfe, of course, if Locus’ reviewer-in-chief: He gets his pick of whatever interests him, and spins a monthly column that leads off the magazine’s criticism section.

    Amusingly enough, one of the book’s least fascinating aspects is to illustrate his growth as a reviewer, mostly because there is very little here that could be considered a beginner’s mistake: coming at reviewing from academia, Wolfe hit the ground running and even his first reviews are solid pieces of work. Perhaps the only remaining hints of early jitters are Wolfe’s protests as he’s asked to sum up the year and how he’s unqualified to do so: pages later, he’s busy knocking down the trends and clichés emerging from the genre.

    Wolfe’s tenure at Locus is well-deserved: He can talk intelligently about any genre or sub-genre, he’s got the intellectual muscles to go head-to-head with John Clute (his argumentative reviews of Clute’s encyclopedias are a wonder to read, as most reader -myself included- are content to simply gawk in awe at them) and his columns are frequently enlivened with touches of dry humour that cuts deep as much as it amuses. (A typical example: “Even though none of us are very good at articulating what SF is, we don’t hesitate for a moment when it comes to selecting its best examples.”)

    Wolfe may not be as dazzling as Clute, but the underpinning of his reviews are just as solid. His usual approach is to combine reviews of several books in a single column, sometimes developing a common theme and sometimes not. This allows for a format that adapts to the material, through the column’s expanding length also accounts for some of that flexibility. His approach is incisive, and his academic background gives him the vocabulary and rigour required to get to the essence of a book. (Compare and contract that to the seat-of-the-pants “Did I like this or not?” approach practised by yours truly.)

    One of the book’s best qualities is how it doubles as a critical capsule studying SF&F in the mid-nineties, as the genre was trying to redefine itself in the wake of cyberpunk. The whole New Mars movement occurs almost in real-time, the book being practically bookended by reviews of Red Mars on one side and Blue Mars on the other. Some writers don’t fare too well in this compressed format: We get the sense, for instance, that Wolfe doesn’t think as highly of Orson Scott Card in 1996 than he did in 1992. This is practically a half-generation of SF under the microscope, in a relatively comparable format that allows for easy comparison. (Even John Clute doesn’t have this luxury: aside from the one-shot encyclopedias, his reviews are scattered over dozens of periodicals and use different approaches that aren’t so readily unified.)

    One thing that did bother me about the book was the inclusion of Wolfe’s year-in-review pieces before the columns for that given year: It previews the coming attractions, but also lessens the surprise of some judgements. Perhaps worse, it introduces a number of temporal loops in the reading, and can complicate the summation or a few arguments developed over the year. I think that I would have preferred a strictly chronological approach, even with the inevitable repetition. (Of course, nothing was stopping me from reading the book in that order.)

    But what I really want are the next volumes in the series, all the way to 2006 and beyond. Wolfe is still writing monthly columns for Locus and while I’m now a happy subscriber, I really would appreciate more collections of critical essays from him or others. If Beccon is good and lucky, Soundings will turn a better-than-modest profit, and the series will continue. Where can I pre-order my copies?

  • Archangel, Robert Harris

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Arrow, 1998, 421 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-09-928241-0

    Robert Harris’ early reputation was based on Fatherland and Enigma, two thrillers that delved deep into history for inspiration. Fatherland, of course, is the poster cover for accessible alternate history (Nazis triumphant! Fear the thought!) while Enigma used WW2-era Bletchley Park as a handy setting for a thriller. With Archangel, Robert Harris gets further away from WW2 by setting his story in the present, but don’t think for a minute that he has shrugged off historical research: While contemporary, Archangel pretty much revolves around the legacy of Joseph Stalin.

    The putative protagonist of the tale is one “Fluke” Kelso, a historian with credibility problems who, while passing through modern-day Moscow for a conference, finds himself the recipient of an unexpected barroom confession: Incredibly enough, a man tells Kelso about Stalin’s secret diaries and where they may be buried. As Kelso gulps down information that could lead to a significant historical discovery, the plot is set in motion. It’s hardly surprising to find out that other people are very, very interested in those diaries, and that their goals are dramatically opposed to academic research and publication.

    But things are seldom simple, especially in contemporary Moscow. In the hall of dark mirrors that is post-communist Russia, who’s being manipulated by who? In due time, Kelso find himself tracking down an man who has disappeared, running away from the state police along with two untrustworthy allies: a dangerously bitter woman and a journalist with an agenda of his own. Worse yet: what started out as a search for a historical document eventually becomes a confrontation with the ugly possibility of a resurgent Soviet empire.

    It won’t surprise anyone to find that Harris’ third novel is heavy on historical research, and a bit softer in the thriller department. Even casual Soviet history buffs will find much to contemplate here, as Harris is able to dig down deep in the murk of Soviet history to wrap up an entertaining historical mystery with grave contemporary implications. The desperate atmosphere of present-day Russia is well sketched, with plenty of evocative details and believable characters, some of whom taken from the pages of history.

    The more conventional thriller elements of the novel, unfortunately, aren’t so satisfying. Harris often lets his sense of detail and his research overpower the need for forward momentum, and Archangel leaves the reader with the impression of a short book padded with too many side tangents. The beginning takes its time to heat up, and the ending is particularly long in coming after the final secrets have all been exposed, with an extra-special character who seems clearly too far-fetched to be credible given the authenticity of the rest of the novel.

    More significantly, Harris is a bit too glib in supposing how his historical menace could become a future peril for all of Western Civilization: Politics have a way of never turning out how you would expect them, and it’s not as if modern history isn’t crammed with “sure-fire candidates” who ended crashing down with a whimper, especially if they’re not quite sane.

    Archangel also ends up on an abrupt ambiguity that doesn’t really matter one way or another, so low is our attachment to the characters. Harris’ novels are most notable for their Big Ideas rather than their talking-heads, and this one is no exception: Readers are more likely to raise their shoulders as the final shot goes off, sufficiently satisfied at the way the historical treasure box was unwrapped.

    Generally speaking, it’s a solid thriller –sufficiently interesting not to be forgotten the next day, but too plodding and generic to really make an impression. Harris doesn’t step all that far away from his area of expertise with this story, so his regular readers are unlikely to find themselves in unfamiliar territory. It’s probably a little bit more interesting than Enigma (time will tell), but still a distance away from Fatherland, which is likely to remain Harris’ best-known novel for quite a while. But who knows? Maybe Harris’ following book, Pompeii, will change everything…

  • Jennie, Douglas Preston

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1994 (1997 reprint), 312 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56533-9

    This is definitely not the first novel you would expect from Douglas Preston. Now firmly established as a thriller writer (usually, but not always collaborating with Lincoln Child on yarns such as The Relic, The Ice Limit or The Cabinet of Curiosities), Preston can command a sizable audience and a regular spot on the bestseller lists: his readers can rely on his name for slick thrills and mass-market entertainment.

    But his first novel, published one year before the runaway success of The Relic, proves to be a very different book. Though it’s concerned about death, it’s hardly a thriller. Its form and execution is very different from the rest of Preston’s work.

    Taking the form of an oral history, Jennie starts by putting its readers in a frame of reference that may or may not be our real world. Though careful pseudo-historical references and self-insertion in the story as the researcher pulling together the accounts of several witnesses, Preston manages to create a reasonable doubt that the story he’s about to tell is historical truth.

    It begins in 1965, as an anthropologist goes to Africa and brings back a chimpanzee, the titular Jennie. Thanks to the circumstances of Jennie’s birth, the anthropologist decides to raise her as a member of his own family, applying his theories about primate intelligence to an authentic subject. As the book advances, we follow the family’s efforts in dealing with Jennie’s maturation, and the effects she has on the people surrounding her. People may not forget that Jennie isn’t completely human, but what if Jennie herself doesn’t realize it?

    The real intent of the novel, of course, is to tug at readers’ hearts and make them feel that the differences between animals and humans are far thinner than they can expect. You can probably fill in the blanks of the plot yourself, especially if you’re familiar some of the more sentimentalist fiction about primates. Yes, Jennie proves to be just as smart as her human siblings. Yes, some humans act in a cruel and despicable fashion. Yes, the tale ends on a very somber note. Few will be surprised to find that the Author’s Note at the end of the book has pages of contact coordinates for organizations dedicated to the protection of primates. I suppose that some readers will either find the “provocative questions about our relationship to, and treatment of, other species” (thanks, Library Journal) either trite or self-evident, depending on their own preexisting prejudices. Some of the story beats are repetitive or contrived (it’s a handy thing to have a minister as a neighbour when you want to discuss matters of death and faith), especially given how the tale progresses toward its inevitable ending.

    But if I’m less than enthusiastic about the novel’s overall dramatic arc, there’s no use denying that it’s effective, in large part due to the way it’s told. The fictional “oral history” of Jennie’s life allows Preston some room for literary games and showy prose. The characters of the story don’t speak the same way or reflect upon the events in quite the same manner. There’s a fun sense of triangulation in trying to piece together the “real” story from the different viewpoints of characters who can’t stand each other. Dr. Pamela Prentiss, the driven behaviourist who comes to act as a foil for the rest of the characters, is a particularly entertaining character to follow.

    While Jennie is based on numerous case studies (and, in a sense, could be viewed as a romanticized compendium of such experiments), it helps a lot that a certain “Douglas Preston” is, from the beginning “Note to the reader”, a character in his own book: a writer who tries to interview as many people as possible about Jennie, making significant efforts to track down and meet his subjects and (eventually) occasionally being shut off from any further contact. (“Turn that goddamn tape recorder off. I mean it. Now.” [P.290]) The sense of two stories mixing together is very satisfying, and adds another level of interest in the book.

    I may not personally understand the fascination with primates, but the book will find a natural audience with those who love stories featuring chimpanzees. And yet, while I’m obviously no fan of sappy “Aren’t those animals just like us humans? Aren’t us humans just like animal?” stories, Jennie still manages be a gripping read with a conclusion that is far more affecting that I would have thought from a description of the book alone. In that particular respect, at least, Jennie exhibits the qualities that would late make of Preston a best-selling authors. While Jennie is very different from his best-known thrillers, it’s more than worth a look for fans of good popular fiction: even if you know where it’s going, it’s a memorable ride.

  • Camouflage, Joe Haldeman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2004, 296 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 0-441-01161-6

    That the 2006 “Best Novel” Nebula Award went to a relatively unknown novel rather than any of the deserving ones isn’t really a surprise. The SFWA’s Nebulas, after all, have long ceased to have any relationship to actual literary worth, instead boldly embracing a growing reputation as the leading industry back-scratching contest. Any relationship to what readers love to read, or what informed critics think is among the best SF/fantasy of the year, is purely coincidental.

    So if you haven’t read Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage, don’t feel as if you missed anything spectacular: At best, it’s a competent SF novel that doesn’t insult the intelligence of savvy readers. At worst, it’s just another brick in the Great Wall of the SF mid-list and perhaps a further proof of Haldeman’s hypnotizing powers over the rest of SFWA. It doesn’t really deserve any top award, but what are you going to do? The Nebulas, after all, can’t even be bothered to focus on any single calendar year, nor have a sensible nomination process.

    But if you do find a copy of Camouflage, perhaps at a remainder sale, have a look. You can do worse.

    It begins decently enough, with some guy telling another about a mysterious artifact buried underneath the Pacific Ocean. Raising it to the surface is no problem, but dealing with it once it’s over the ocean gets to be an issue since the object it many more time denser than even the outer reaches of the periodic table of elements. Various exotic engineering tricks are required to actually put it somewhere it can be studied, and once it’s in place, no one can figure out how to get any information about its composition. Diamond bits and industrial lasers don’t even leave a scratch, leaving the scientists curiously flustered even as media attention is focused on their efforts. Set in a relatively near future (2019), this section of Camouflage makes good use of Haldeman’s travels in Samoa and ends up being a very enjoyable hard-SF tale tending toward old-school hard engineering fiction. It’s told in a crisp no-nonsense fashion that side-steps the feeling of déjà-vu by not wasting our time.

    But as it turns out, it’s not even half of the novel’s story. No, Camouflage is really about one alien shape-shifter who, after spending various umpteenth years swimming around, finally comes aground in the early twentieth century to study those human creatures. Somewhat ignorant of social graces, it makes a number of mistakes (some of them fairly serious) before learning to cope with the rest of humanity. Its apprenticeship is long, fascinating and takes us forward ninety years as we figure out how the alien and the ship are linked. This section of the novel distinguishes itself by the way it snakes through nearly a century of history, and by the various details of a shape-shifter’s methods. There is a limpid logic to Haldeman’s writing in Camouflage that makes a lot more interesting that it ought to be, even when it side-steps into irrelevancy.

    Such as when it tips the scale even more by introducing a second shape-shifter, a creature of almost comical evil that has also managed to survive throughout all of human history. It, too, is very interested in the alien ship… and you can bet that it’s the sworn enemy of our first shape shifter. We follow this second shape-shifter’s progress through history is such condensed fashion that it’s easy to see Haldeman pull the wool over our eyes. Gee, do you possibly think that it could become someone who figures in the first plot thread of the novel?

    All three subplots eventually merge in the last few chapters, with a sudden and improbable romance that leads straight to a final confrontation and a conclusion that seems to say “that’s it, show’s over!” more than anything attempting a satisfying conclusion. At least it’s a relatively short book.

    Camouflage certainly doesn’t do anything to heighten my opinion of Haldeman’s recent production. It’s middle-list fodder, exactly the type of novel we think about when we gesture in the direction of “all of those SF books out there”. In some ways, its primary purpose in the field may be as a yardstick, to make the really good stuff look good and the really bad stuff look bad..

    And yet it’s written with a sure-footed assurance, plenty of crunchy details and interesting twists on the old shape-shifting idea. Looking at more information about Camouflage, I found that it actually won another award, walking away with half of the 2005 Tiptree Award. Given the treatment of shape-shifting romance in the novel, I can actually understand that. So amend that whole “doesn’t deserve any top award” crack with “(except the Tiptree)” and give me some time as I reflect upon the fact that I read and generally enjoyed a Tiptree-winning novel. Now that wasn’t something I expected.

  • Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 364 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-85684-9

    A lot of people were waiting for this book, with good reason: Over the years, Vernor Vinge has become a visionary with a new brand of future, a prophet for the Singularity. In the SF field, few will dispute his success: His last two novels both won the Hugo Award, and so did two of his novellas in 2002 (“Fast Times in Fairmont High”) and 2004 (“The Cookie Monster”). At this point in time, any new story by Vinge is an event. With Rainbows End, he doesn’t disappoint.

    While it shares common elements with “Fast Times in Fairmont High”, Rainbows End is a reworking of the earlier novella’s themes, using the same setting and characters, but digging much deeper in the details. (Readers already familiar with the earlier story may experience some disorientation as the two appear to take place in closely placed parallel universes.) The first chapter of Rainbows End is a little gem of pace-setting: In a few short paragraphs, the stakes are raised again and again: Someone out there has developed effective mind-control technology and so the European secret service hire a very shadowy entity called “Rabbit” to track down and eliminate the treat. There’s one small hitch, though: The guy ordering the hit is the same one who’s developing the technology… and “Rabbit” is definitely more than he appears to be.

    But as it turns out, this global framework is just there to allow Vinge to go back to Fairmont High School, and show us the wonders of his barely pre-Singularity future. The year, improbably enough, is just 2025 —but already everything is taking off. Some (but not all) debilitating diseases can be cured, high-school students can access manufacturing capabilities still beyond the reach of today’s governments, overlaid realities are far more popular than the un-augmented world, fine-grain wireless connectivity is everywhere and there just may be something artificial lurking in the channels of the global communication network…

    And yet, despite its considerable ambitions, Rainbows End is about a small group of characters. There’s Robert Gu, an unpleasant man rescued from the abyss of Alzheimer’s just in time to give us contemporary readers a taste of a future experiences for the first time. There’s Miri Gu, his grand-daughter, an ambitious teenager who’s about to get in deep trouble. There’s Juan Orozco, the prototype of a teenage nerd fully exploiting the resources at his disposition. Then there’s Alice and Bob Gu, (how fitting for a computer scientist to name two characters Alice and Bob… I kept expecting Eve to eavesdrop) just waiting to be involved in the plot as the military is called to the rescue…

    Many so-called SF novels try to give you a good dose of future shock, but Rainbows End actually delivers. For one thing, it’s set in a near-enough future that the tech on the ground often looks like better versions of current prototypes. For another, Vinge manages to cram an awe-inspiring density of ideas, concepts and eyeball kicks in a relatively slim but dense volume. I hope you’re up in your Google and Wikipedia skillz before attempting this book, because Vinge’s future is in large part a vision of massively collaborative computing: small entities, all contributing a tiny part to something far bigger than themselves. Computing capacity allows real-time virtual overlays through special contact lenses (I want my Epiphany OS!) and a substantial part of the job market seems to belong to people who can do stuff for others. Naturally, themes of identity become integral to the entire experience, as virtual presences can be shadowed, altered or even completely taken over.

    Reading Rainbows End taps onto the main vein of Science Fiction thrills. It’s like taking big gulps of ideas and experiencing the sugar rush of new concepts. Late in the novel, a military action takes on a radically new form that both trivializes a lot of the current vogue of military SF and momentarily gives us a glimpse into what true informational war may become. At a time where young punks like Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross are the living emblems of the new information-dense SF, it’s amusing to see Vinge (who’s near retirement age) being able to out-hip his younger colleagues with cutting-edge work.

    Even better: Vinge is smart enough to balance his universe with doses of humour and horror: For all the neat things that Vinge keeps on throwing in the air, his future is one that thrives on sink-or-swim competition, along with terrible new weapons and dumb ideas written large. One of the novel’s most darkly amusing scenes (for “hair-raising” values of amusing) is a take-off on destructive scanning techniques consisting in digitalizing a library by shredding its books and deep-scanning the resulting “shredda”. Yikes.

    Yet, for all my enthusiasm for Rainbows End (and make no mistake: I think it already belongs on the Hugo Awards ballot), it’s hardly a perfect novel. After the continuous shocks of the first half, the story seems to lose its way shortly after the midpoint, ultimately settling for a scattering of sub-plots that don’t always mesh harmoniously with one another. It also becomes apparent, as the novel settles to a conclusion, that far too many threads are left dangling: Indeed, Vinge has stated that a sequel in in the work. Much as I usually prefer singleton works, I really can’t wait to see what’s next. (On the other hand, this is the second almost-fabulous novel in a year, after David Marusek’s Counting Heads, to loses points for setting up an unannounced sequel.)

    Vinge is also known as a fairly hard-core techno-libertarian, and as a passport-carrying Canadian, I’m just bound to have problems with some of his basic assumptions. Vinge is far more bullish on free-market economics than I am: Like many libertarian ideas, his usually make abstraction that actual people are involved. In this context, there are a number of ideas in Rainbows End that I’d like to kick around in a context that allows for a touch more oversight and accountability.

    But debating ideas like this is a huge chunk of what’s fun and fresh with Rainbows End. Forget about most of the other books in the “Science Fiction” section: This is the one you’re looking for. It’s SF for this decade: a dangerous cocktail of fun and speculation, wrapped up in good style. Vernor Vinge is back, and the wait has been worth it.

  • Polder, Ed. Farah Mendlesohn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Old Earth Books, 2006, 308 pages, US$40.00 hc, ISBN 978-1-882968-34-4

    It’s impossible to pick a name and say “there’s the best science-fiction writer of our generation”: there are too many good ones, too many styles, too many different approaches. But it is possible to say “John Clute is the best science-fiction critic of our generation”, because it’s true: no one else comes close. No one else has co-written a standard reference encyclopedia (twice!), churned out enough critical essays to fill three books, even redefined the common language of genre criticism. He is a literary singularity; I feel blessed for having met him a few times at conventions over the years. And there’s another measure of success for you: How many other critics have their own fans?

    With Polder, the time has come for the biggest fans of the Clutes (John and Judith) to come together and pay homage to the couple and their flat.

    I’m not terribly familiar with Judith Clute’s work, but I suspect that text-heavy Polder isn’t the best way to do so: a coffee-table book may be the best way to discuss a visual artist’s work. In my case, I even lack to vocabulary, so I won’t even try.

    Similarly, I’ve never been near 221B Camden High Street in London, so I can only shrug amiably at the reverent description of a flat crammed with bookshelves, art, a cat named Pepys and the Clutes themselves. Interestingly enough, Polder ends up presenting a number of stories and segments of SF novels where the flat figures prominently. Snippets of published works by M. John Harrison, Elizabeth Hand, Geoff Ryman or Kim Stanley Robinson are a testimony to the central location 221B Camden occupies for SF professionals passing by London.

    A few stories were written specially for this volume, all of them taking the form of light-hearted pieces with good roles for the Clutes. Brian Aldiss’ “An Audible Anagnorisis” is a fun mainstream piece that reminded me of Wodehouse, whereas Ian Watson’s “What actually Happened in Docklands” enlists John Clute in a fight against evil. But the award for the most amusing story surely goes to Sean McMullen’s “Electrisarian”, an anecdote that tells what happened when a certain Sean McMullen started repairing 221B’s telephone system…

    For those who want to learn more about the Clutes, a dozen of their friends got together to write warm and effusive portraits of the couple. Candas Jane Dorsey, Scott Bradfield, Neil Gaiman, Jack Womack, Ellen Datlow and Roz Kaveney offering fascinating recollections of their times with the Clutes. Kaveney’s piece is particularly interesting insofar as she describes the process of working on The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and even offers a version of how the word polder entered SF’s critical vocabulary.

    This of course, leads us to Polder‘s considerable value as one of the best work of SF criticism (even meta-criticism) published lately. This is, after all, a book at least a third concerned about a critic. It goes without saying that many other big-name SF critics grabbed Farah Mendlesohn’s invitation as an excuse to discuss their fine art. Clute’s own critical work often inspires them directly: Graham Sleight talks about First and Last SF while Edward James muses on Thinning. At other times, it’s Clute himself who’s the subject of attention: Rob Latham double-tracks on his assessment of Clute’s New Worlds criticism, Damien Roderick does a bit of historical contextualizing, Javier A. Martinez shares his love of the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (I could tell a similar tale about the Second Edition), Andrew M. Butler and Gary K Wolfe separately muse about Clute’s influence on the genre. And yet it’s Bruce Sterling who burns up the barn with his review of Clute’s Scores, a review that ends up as a springboard to a wider discussion of genre deficiencies. Just try to find a better all-star roster of SF critics in any other book this year.

    Alas, it’s a bit of a let-down to see so many problems with this labour of love: Despite Old Earth Books’ best intentions, the finished product is peppered with typos, missing punctuations and other problems. The endnotes present a particular issue: Not only are they all relegated at the end of the book when footnotes would have been far more accessible (or even, at a minimum, chapter-by-chapter endnotes), but an error at endnote 110 makes it so that the remaining 60 footnotes are two digits out-of-sequence. Knowing John Clute’s impeccably-organized mind, I suspect that this mistake will bother him far more than the content of the book.

    But content-wise, Polder achieves what it sets out to do: recognize people who deserve the acclaim. I’m a regular fanboy when it comes to Clute’s work, so there is no doubt that I will nominate this book for the Non-Fiction Hugo Awards next year: Polder may be for a very specific readership, but it hits all the right notes.