Book Review

  • Glasshouse, Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2006, 335 pages, C$32.50 hc, ISBN 0-441-01403-8

    After the massively successful Accelerando, expectations ran high for Charles Stross’ follow-up SF novel Glasshouse. Would he try to top his wide-screen vision of a post-singularity future? Would it even be possible to go even one step beyond Accelerando? Wisely, Glasshouse doesn’t even try. Instead, it heads for a different territory with a more focused narrative and an intent to satirize.

    It begins more or less hundreds of years after the events of Accelerando, in a comfortably post-human empire scattered around the galaxy. Our narrator is learning the world again, fully conscious that his latest incarnation has had entire chunks of his memory removed. That doesn’t worry him all that much, through: Simply being human is a challenge enough after a lengthy period being something else. To heighten the experience, he declines regular personality backups, risking everything on his continued existence. The first chapter even has a sword fight, just to keep things hopping. As it turns out, the biggest problems with amnesia is that you can’t remember your worst enemies…

    But there may be a way to hide away for a while, as his medical advisers have an idea to facilitate his recovery. Why not, they suggest, volunteer for a harmless psychological experiment? Nothing serious, of course: just a few years locked-up in a fabricated environment, interacting with other volunteers according to a predefined set of experimental social rules. A good way to take a break from the infinitely mutable, constantly evolving post-human diaspora. Completely harmless. Completely safe.

    Oh sure. Just as the opening quotes by Kafka and Hitler are there completely by accident. Just as the Zimbardo references are purely coincidental. Things are about to go bad really quickly for our narrator, and they indeed do from the start of the experiment: Waking up with no memory of actually signing and backing its mind up, it also finds itself stuck in a weak female body after a long stay in a succession of powerful male bodies. But then it has to contend with its fellow lab rats…

    Glasshouse quickly turns into a nightmare as the narrator slowly comes to realize the insanity of the experiment, recover bits and pieces of its previous memory and pieces together a sinister motive behind its current situation. While deceptively simple at first, Glasshouse eventually comes to reveal itself as a narrative simultaneously working on different levels, as Science Fiction thriller, as post-human speculation and as social satire.

    Because, you see, the micro-society in which the narrator finds itself turns out to be American Suburbania, circa 1950-2000. Built from fragmented records, of course, given how few reliable accounts of the period survived the various information wars that followed the Acceleration. As a female, our narrator finds itself relegated to the role of a housewife, weakly built and socially ostracized. But then she finds out what’s really going on…

    If, at first, Glasshouse seems a step back after Accelerando, it eventually becomes obvious that this is, in many way, a more complex novel: Voluntarily mirroring Accelerando in regressing from a post-human future back into something innately familiar to us, Glasshouse then uses its not-quite-contemporary setting to deliver, in interweaving instalments, both a social critique and an affecting military SF thriller.

    The satire is easy to perceive, especially as the narrator can’t figure out the massively counterintuitive social mores of suburban America. The gender roles are inefficient, the religious and social restrictions are insane and the technology is brain-damaged. There are a number of smirks and gags in store as readers get to see a post-human try to cope with our restrictions. As an alienating device, it works well. Given how Glasshouse seems to target a quasi-mythical cold-war American way of life that died with the sixties, it’s not hard to emphasize with the narrator while taking along the points that are still valid today. Gender roles, in particular, are thrown in a blender and whirred around: It will be interesting to see if the book manages to make it on the Tiptree Awards lists next year.

    But there’s also an espionage/military thriller lurking in the back of Glasshouse as hidden identities are revealed and the protagonist’s own mind reveals its mysteries. This is where Glasshouse, for all of its hyped-up links to Accelerando, is more likely to remind readers of Stross’ own Iron Sunrise in its grim depiction of a post-humanity that nonetheless keeps all of its pre-human brutality. The protagonist’s flashbacks offer the equivalent of a military SF novelette in which fancy weapons do their best to destroy anything that can be called human. One particular scene in which heads have to be decapitated in order to be saved is likely to remind some readers of a related scene in Richard Morgan’s Broken Angels. As a writer now fit to be compared to Morgan, Stross fulfils his growing reputation as a writer able to be, even in the same book, both hilarious and horrifying.

    The non-flashback thriller also succeeds brilliantly, especially given how it has to take place in a panopticon environment. Plotting an escape, or even a hassle-free life, can be a real problem if you can reliably be expected to be under surveillance all the time, whether by unseen experimenters or by fellow experiment subjects. Some scenes carry a real thrill as the narrator plots and schemes how to reach set objectives while trying to avoid detection. There are even unexpected payoffs in the form of bonus points for craft. But the penalties for being caught can be high, especially when your enemies have complete access to your brain chemistry…

    It goes without saying that Stross’ similarly-renowned ability to cram four times as much speculation as other SF writers is also on display here: although he lightens his prose after the mega-pascal intensity of Accelerando, there is still plenty of good crunchy speculation, fancy gadgets, excellent techno-fluidity, appalling back-stories and shock-a-minute ideas. The narrator literally perceives suburban life differently. It’s one of the book’s small treats to hear perfectly ordinary objects being described using ultra-technical vocabulary.

    Given all of the above, it almost seems petty to complain about weak plot points. But the sometimes rough caricatures of the antagonists (relying on the ever-popular wife-beaters or religious leaders) aren’t particularly sophisticated and take away some of the creeping horror of the situation: It’s one thing to show normal people being manipulated in committing hair-raising horror, but its a different, lesser thing to simply show monsters without conscience running free. Worse still are at least two coincidences essential to the plot: The narrator meets and then recognizes two powerful allies in ways that seem awfully convenient. (Though I may have missed an unseen manipulation: this book isn’t light on unseen controls and made-up contrivances, after all.) &ldqu
    o;Awfully convenient” is also a good way to describe a mid-book discovery which facilitates plotting in a panopticon environment, or the way the villains seem unusually forgiving of perceived threats.

    But every Stross book seems to top the previous ones, if not in scope then at least in execution. Here, the theme may not be a broad as Accelerando, nor as guilt-free as The Atrocity Archives, but Stross is showing even more maturity in how he tackles his story on several different levels, weaving and shuffling his stuff without pausing for breath. Reading Glasshouse is a lot like seeing a card trick being performed right in front of your eyes: focus on this, focus on that, oh didn’t see this coming didn’t you? Stross has recently been a regular on the various SF awards ballots, and you can expect Glasshouse to go on to similar success. It’s a strong entry in a year already blessed with plenty of good science fiction books.

  • Act of War, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2005, 384 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-075299-8

    Finally! After more than half a dozen increasingly awful novels set in the the same tired universe, Dale Brown finally comes to his sense, ditches the Patrick McLanahan series and starts afresh. At a time where military thrillers readers are increasingly reluctant to “take a chance” on unfamiliar characters, it’s tempting to give grudging respect to Brown for doing what he should have done ten years ago.

    But don’t be so sure that he’s stretching or being audacious. For one thing, Act of War is not a pure act of literature: Sharp-eyed readers will read the copyright page and notice that “Act of War” is a trademark of Atari Interactive, Inc. Those with a gaming background will already know about the “Act of War” Real-Time Strategy game. In other words, this is a tie-in novel, whether Dale Brown contributed to the game or vice-versa.

    For another proof that the author’s not being too ambitious, consider that we’re not too far away from Brown’s pet toys of late: Starting from the “Real-World News Excerpts” that open the novel, we’re back into the “armoured exoskeleton” shtick that Brown has carried along since The Tin Man. Yup, it’s all high-tech robots from there to the end of the novel, as valiant Americans battle terrorists who dare take on the Empire. A new universe? A departure? A stroke of marketing genius? Eh, you decide.

    And yet, despite Brown’s unwillingness to stray too far from what he has come to know best, there is an undeniable sense of freedom to be found in this departure. The book opens with a bang, as terrorists set off a tactical nuclear warhead to destroy a petroleum facility in Texas. Then the new characters take over, and for a while it’s fun to see where the tale goes now that McLanahan is nowhere in the way. New protagonist Jason Richter isn’t a big switch from McLanahan, mind you: Younger and more technologically sophisticated, Richter otherwise shares the same personality template with Brown’s best-known protagonist. Rebellious to a degree that seems implausible, Richter gets repeatedly chewed out for disobeying orders but, like McLanahan, always ends up vindicated for using his giant robots against the evil terrorists. Naturally, it’s no real surprise if big robots end up being the perfect solution for everything.

    This naturally raises the question of finding out which part of the novel wags the other around. A clumsy mixture of the strategic and the tactical, Act of War initially sets out to re-fight the War on Terrorism on pure wish-fulfilment. As the story advances, we get the feeling that Brown thinks that Bush is a big kitten in national security matters, and that only decisive actions can truly save the American way of life. As Brown’s President seems gung-ho on declaring war on a concept (literally, despite those accursed civil-rights advocates in Congress), it seems obvious that this high-level muck is just there to justify the giant robot antics of Richter and his gang. The alternative -that this ridiculous pap is meant to be taken seriously- is almost too ridiculous to contemplate. Considering that Act of War is a video-game and that the point of video-games is blowing up stuff real good (a task uniquely suited to giant robots), one gets the sense that there’s a bigger dog wagging the novel around.

    This being said, I’m trying really hard to avoid painting this as yet another video-game novelization. The prose style is all Brown, including the stiff prose and lack of technical prowess. The characters are generic and if the plotting is generally better than any of the author’s previous half-dozen novels, Act of War still suffers from jerky pacing, and a single-minded obsession about giant robots. It doesn’t help that Brown’s vision of terrorism remains hopelessly quaint: Unlike what we’ve come to expect from the real world those past years, the acts in Act of War take on a cartoonish quality as they are masterminded by an evil cabal too clichéd to feel real. Even in a “hard-hitting” post-2001 novel about terrorism, Brown infantilizes the issue and can’t face the real forces at play.

    And yet, even as lousy as it is, Act of War represents a definite step up for Brown. The first few pages of the book carry a little frisson, as it looks like Brown will finally take the next step up. Free of the McLanahan shackles, the novel stretches a little bit and gets back to the wide-screen feel of the author’s first few books. There is a surprising amount of hidden agendas and ambiguous motivations to be stripped off on the way to the true “terrorist-vs-USA” plot and if the end result is another disappointment, the indifferent impression ultimately left by the novel was not a foregone conclusion. It may not be enough to make me read the next one… but it’s sufficient to stop me from discounting the thought altogether.

    [February 2009: When you’re got a hammer, all problems look like nails, and ever since Brown ditched his B-52s for Giant Robots, it looks as if he wants to take on every single issue of national interest with his cool toys —including illegal immigration. So don’t expect Edge of Battle to be any better than his previous novels. In fact, it’s markedly worse: bad characters, dumb situations, reams of spurting exposition and some ill-advised plotting all combine to bring this book down. The robots aren’t the worst part, actually: nearly every attempt to use them backfires. No, it’s the attempt to combine innefectual Mexican political leadership with an evil Russian terrorist/criminal that really sinks the novel beyond its lack of entertainment value. And yet, from time to time, we get some exposition that suggests that Dale does understand some of the issues he’s dealing with. It’s just that he never follows up on his best ideas, and that the comic-book plotting of the novel never seems to be adressed to adults. We are, clearly, a long way away from the guy who wrote Hammerheads.]

  • The King of Torts, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2003, 472 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-24153-7

    There is, at first, a comforting familiarity to John Grisham’s The King of Torts, especially if you’ve read most of the Grisham oeuvre: A young lawyer stuck at the Public Defender’s Office gets saddled with a dead-end case that ends being a lot more important than anyone can guess. Pretty soon, hey, we’re back in the old usual groove: The lawyer’s client was on experimental drugs, and the pharmaceutical company sends one of its top fixers with an offer to our hero: a few million dollars in exchange for a quick and jurisprudence-free resolution.

    If this would have been an early Grisham novel, you could probably write the end yourself: Lawyer tells fixer to get stuffed, takes the case to court, triumphs over Big Pharma, avoids client’s death penalty, gets hot girlfriend and strikes one victory for the common people. The end, soon to be followed by a major Hollywood adaptation.

    But this isn’t early Grisham. Ever since The Runaway Jury, Grisham has been playing around in the legal thriller sandbox, writing variations on a populist theme. Here, we get a bit of The Street Lawyer before slamming into the concrete facade of a few million dollars. Because, oh yes, our young plucky protagonist jumps on Big Pharma’s offer faster than you can say “tort reform”. Just a few millions, he thinks, and he’ll be set for life. Just a few.

    Set squarely in an American society where legal matters are often indistinguishable from fiscal ones, Grisham’s novels have often revolved around vast sums of money. The Partner‘s protagonist is only interesting because he’s sitting on a pile of hidden cash. The Runaway Jury and The Rainmaker both revolved around multi-million dollar settlements. More directly, The Summons recast sudden wealth as a morality play: What if you abruptly found yourself in possession of a small fortune of dubious origins? Would it destroy you?

    The King of Torts is a thematic sequel to The Summons in more ways than one. Faithful Grisham readers will remember Patton French, the “King of Torts” lawyer whose mastery of mass torts earned him hundreds of millions of dollars and a short but memorable supporting role. French makes another appearance here as a mentor of sorts, counselling our lawyer protagonist as he gets caught up in the high-flying world of mass tort lawyers and a lifestyle where private planes are de rigueur. (Another element back for a return engagement is the dangerous “Skinny Ben” obesity pill.)

    From one familiar arc, we jump to another. There is little doubt that the money will come to poison our protagonist’s life: All that remains is to hop along for the ride, tasting luxury with the self-congratulatory certitude that it’s temporary. Pretty soon, after all, our boy-hero will find himself brought back to the pasture where most of us graze. The only real question of importance is in wondering if the protagonist will be very, mostly or slightly redeemed by the time the ending rolls along.

    It plays as you would expect. Grisham’s prose style may not be sophisticated, but it’s astonishingly good at what it sets out to do. This is reading as pure entertainment, packed with details about the world of mass torts and the crazy impact that sudden money can have on people. The Summons tracked the impact of a mere two or three million dollars (as a physical object, even), but The King of Torts kicks it up one or two orders of magnitude. Crazy money means crazy people, of course, and part of the fun of the novel is seeing a down-to-earth protagonist being corrupted by so much wealth… and then finding that there is never such a thing as “too much” money.

    Technically, The King of Torts slips up from time to time, breaking away from a restricted third-person POV to sequences from a broader perspective. On the other hand, there are a number of fascinating supporting characters, though most of them are unceremoniously abandoned in the rush for the entirely-expected ending. The disappearance of “the fixer” from the narrative is especially disappointing, given all sorts of questions raised about what he knew… and whether part of the plot was a set-up.

    But in the end, this is another solid hit for Grisham, who keeps producing surprising results from a limited palette. Gripping from start to finish, The King of Torts is Grisham remixed, almost a compendium of the author’s other work. Think of him as a jazz musician, spinning variations on a few solid themes. Who can go wrong by talking about “too much” money?

  • Year’s Best SF 11, Ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    EOS, 2006, 496 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-06-087341-8

    While I’m a pretty faithful purchaser of the Hartwell/Cramer “Year’s Best SF” series, I seldom review them: For one thing, I’m never too fond of reviewing anthologies: my satisfaction for them, even Year’s Bests, usually takes the shape of a nice bell curve. Why review only half a book of good stories when I can’t find anything nice to say about the other half?

    But Year’s Best SF 11 is an exception. Maybe it was just me, unusually “clicking” with story after story. Then again, it is possible that the selection for 2005 was better than for other years. One thing is for sure: I had a lot more fun reading through those stories than making my way through the Hugo nominated material.

    The collection starts on a high note with David Langford’s New Hope For the Dead, a short (800-words) piece originally published in the “Nature” scientific journal as part of their recurring “Fiction” column. “Nature”, ironically enough, ends up being the source of nearly a dozen stories in this Year’s Best volume –more than any other source. The short-short story ends up being an ideal length for punchy explorations of a big idea. Langford takes on a net.joke and makes a delicious treat out of it, a broad description that also applies to Greg Bear’s “Ram Shift Phase 2”. Amusement also comes with Larissa Lai’s “I Love Liver: A Romance”. Meanwhile, Ted Chiang tackles predestination in “What’s Expected of Us”, another creepy/fun story that fits right into Chiang’s exceptional track record. Big ideas in short texts mean big fun, as demonstrated in Oliver Morton’s “The Albian Message”. Elsewhere, Vonda McIntyre has “A Modest Proposal for the Perfection of Nature” that muses on the uniformity of utopia, even as Tobias Buckell crams an entire geopolitically-aware space program in “Toy Planes”. Not to be outdone, Bruce Sterling imagines the hair-raising results of a 10Kilo-scientist commune. The “Nature” shorts are so much fun that I’m hoping that someone, somewhere, will put together an anthology of those “Futures”. I can understand why Hartwell and Cramer would choose so many of them –twelve story for the space of two!

    But as good as those quick-and-snappy short-short stories are, a few of the longer pieces are nothing short of remarkable. A good number of them are slow burns: stories that initially don’t seem to make sense, but eventually reach escape velocity. Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Deus Ex Homine” is the first of them –a story that works even when it looks that it shouldn’t. But nothing quite summarizes the impact of Daryl Gregory’s “Second Person, Present Tense”, which quite unexpectedly hits you on the head midway through and never lets up until the end: It goes from “this is not going to work” to “best story of the year” in a few pages, and that’s nothing short of remarkable. Sometimes, the stories grow on you after they’re over: I didn’t think much of Bud Sparhawk’s “Bright Red Star” while reading it, but the last few lines and a few days’ worth of hindsight make all the difference.

    There are also a slew of stranger stories that show how wide an umbrella the term “science-fiction” now encompasses: “When The Great Days Came” by Gardner Dozois shows the apocalypse from the perspective of those who will inherit it all: rats. Small mammals make a further appearance later on with “Mason’s Rats” a not-so-funny tale of farming trouble and tool-using rodents. If you think that’s weird, just wait until Rudy Rucker’s “Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch”, a romance whose title tells you nearly everything you need to know. Then there’s the irreverent madness of Adam Robert’s “And Future King…”

    There are also more conventional tales of good old-fashioned SF in stories like Matthew Jarpe’s “City of Reason” (Kuiper belt pirates! Arrr!), Lauren McLaughlin’s “Sheila” (AI in-fighting!), Joe Haldeman’s “Angel of Light” (Christmas, Muslims, pulp SF and aliens, oh my!) and R. Garcia Y Robertson’s “Oxygen Rising” (“Hey, human, time to earn your pay!”) Combining straightforward SF story telling with Dickian mind-twists is Alastair Reynold’s “Beyond the Aquila Rift”, another contender for best-story-of-the-year status.

    In fact, I ended up reading Year’s Best SF 11 concurrently with this year’s crop of Hugo-nominated short stories and was struck time and time again at how much better the stories in this volume were compared to the works up for the Hugo. For SF fans, this is the one book of short stories you have to grab to get a lot of good SF in one handy package. Year’s Best, and one of the best Year’s Best for Cramer and Hartwell.

    [June 2006: A final note: Mark your calendars! This June 2006 release is the first book I’ve bought that feature the ISBN-13 number of the book. Get ready for the future… (And this happened, in an odd coincidence, on the same weekend the Ottawa area switched to ten-digit phone dialling…)]

  • Barracuda 945, Patrick Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Torch, 2003, 498 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-008663-7

    There are five stages to reading a Patrick Robinson novel.

    The first is surprise. Surprise that any editor, anywhere, would still be publishing Robinson after reading any of his previous novels. Robinson, after all, is the ultimate anti-writer: the clunkers he serves under the optimistic label of “novels” are nothing more than an exploration of mistakes to avoid for any budding writer of military fiction. Awful writing is only a beginning for him: what usually follows is a parade of undistinguished caricatures in lieu of characters, impulsive militarism standing in for actual thinking and geopolitics that would make blood-thirsty right-wing pundits blanch. Plotting, for him, is just a series of steps to get from Cool Idea A to Cool Idea B… except that both of those Cool Ideas would best be described as daydreams from a sub-literate moron actively enjoying psychopathic megalomania. The biggest surprise, of course, is that someone out there is still buying those books: I’ve never paid more than a full dollar for a Robinson novel because I keep finding them at used book sales. And yet, someone must be buying them new if they keep showing up for a second sale, right?

    The second stage is bemusement. Bemusement that Robinson hasn’t learnt anything from his previous novels, and that no one has deemed it appropriate to tell him what’s wrong about his books. As Barracuda 945 gets underway, the first hundred pages are all about the book’s main villain, Ray Kerman, a top SAS operative forced to defect after killing one of his own men during a raid in Southern Israel. Despite a thoroughly Western education, Iranian-born Kerman proves surprisingly adept in becoming the next Top Terrorist, although Robinson’s favourite protagonist Arnold Morgan is quick to point out that you really can’t trust anyone who’s not of solid Anglo-Saxon material. And so it goes. Kerman (soon rechristened Ravi Rashood) is, of course, intensely reminiscent of USS Nimitz and HMS Unseen‘s Benjamin Adnam… but that’s hardly the only recurring feature from the rest of the series. Morgan’s back, of course, and so are fluffy bride-to-be Kathy and Jimmy Ramshawe, a randy young analyst who can figure out the obvious faster than anyone else. As for the other characters, the only one of interest is the lovely (yet predictably deadly) Shakira, an ex-housewife whose interest for American movies merely matches her tactical genius. I could detail how she finds her way in the novel and Kerman/Rahood’s arms, but then you would accuse me of lying.

    Moving on: The third stage in reading a Robinson novel is dismay. Dismay that Robinson can still rely on the same tired tricks without being called on it. Dismay that he’s really not getting better at either the plotting or the writing of his novel. Here, the focus of the so-called plot is a fiendish plot to strike at America’s power sources from the stealth of a missile-armed submarine. Never mind that China and Iran once again team up to buy two top-notch nuclear submarines to give to a turncoat terrorist. Never mind how the US Navy could ping the heck out of the West Coast to find out where the submarine’s hidden. (Heck, never mind how the listening posts could pinpoint the launch coordinates of any sea-launched missile.) It doesn’t really matter: Barracuda 945 has maybe five important plot points and the rest is filler. Filler written with the glee of a thirteen year old who’s just telling his friends what a neat neat idea he’s just had for their next D&D campaign.

    The fourth stage is amusement. Amusement at Robinson’s worst excesses and his uncanny tin ear for either dialogue or humour. Barracuda 945 features a few scenes that were probably intended as humour, but end up making the author look like an idiot with tons of unresolved issues. Right in the middle of a military thriller, Robinson takes a break on P.388-392 to describe an Academy Awards ceremony, with jokes that fall flat more quickly than you’d ever imagine. Robinson may think he’s funny, but there’s still a long way to go from his brain to the reader’s mind. Then there’s the screamingly funny bit at the end of Chapter 10 where the action grinds to a halt and Robinson’s favourite characters all rant and rail against Clinton’s decision to scrap the military restrictions on GPS. As they scream epithets against Clinton and find themselves very funny (as indicated by Morgan’s “ability to bring the house down” [P.364]) the scene only reveals Robinson in an unguarded moment of pure insanity. (It doesn’t help that one character points out the benefits of military-grade GPS for everyone, shutting up the characters for three lines before they start railing against Clinton again.) As Robinson shows, the problem isn’t with conservatives; it’s with dumb conservatives. In the meantime, you can just read the passage out loud to friends and wonder how that ever got past his editor.

    But why worry? After all, the fifth stage of reading a Patrick Robinson novel is author-specific pyromania.

  • A Scientific Romance, Ronald Wright

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Picador, 1997, 352 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 0-312-18172-8

    As a unapologetic genre reader, few questions fascinate me more than the relationship between genre fiction and so-called “literary fiction”. What distinguishes a novel written from inside a genre from a novel written by a generalist, even though the two stories may share common elements? Part of the difficulty in answering the question comes from the idea that genre has its own gravitational pull: genre writers often start as young genre readers and keep reading in the genre (steadily but not exclusively, one hopes) until they’re ready to put pen to paper. It’s exceedingly rare that someone without any knowledge of a genre will write in it.

    So when a book like Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance makes it in print, it offers a unique case study in how a smart outsider can write science-fiction without it necessarily being shaped by classic science-fiction. Wright is not a child of the SF ghetto: he’s a trained historian, an essayist and an academic. As an orphan work standing in the genre but not being linked to it, A Scientific Romance offers a glimpse into the common, sometimes unexamined engines of SF.

    Actually, it’s not completely true to say that A Scientific Romance is not linked to genre SF: it’s just that its inspiration goes back a few decades earlier than most quick Heinlein knockoffs. A Scientific Romance uses no less an authority than H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine as an explicit jump-off point (it must help that Wells is widely acknowledged as a literary giant). Here, our academic narrator gets is given a previously-unknown Wells letter announcing the return of the putative Time Machine. Everyone else thinks it’s a joke, but our narrator (haunted by the memory of a dead girlfriend) wants to believe. Carefully arriving at the appointed time and place, he finds the machine and starts refurbishing it, planning ahead for a little trip in the future.

    The problem with using Wells as a distinguished ancestor is that you’re likely to miss out on what’s been done since, and so Wright pointedly ignores the whole body of SF time-travelling tales. This, interestingly enough, doesn’t damage the book as much as you may think: It allows A Scientific Romance to go places without being burdened by the baggage of genre SF, and helps give the book a very different flavour.

    Alas, it’s a flavour leavened by endless rumination. Wright is an intellectual and so is his narrator, so it’s not sufficient to sketch a love triangle, a dead girlfriend and a twisted personal history. Oh no: There has to be pages after pages of endless introspection, of flashbacks, of self-pity and recrimination. Personal guilt is the fuel of literature, and there’s plenty of that in this novel, starting from the fact that the book is written as to the narrator’s dead girlfriend. At some point, you just want to slap the poor sap and tell him to be a genre protagonist, suck it up, buy survival equipment, step in the time machine and go get himself a foxy girl from the future.

    By the time he actually cranks up the time machine and goes off flying in 2500, we have almost forgotten that this in fact supposed to be a time-travel novel. But if you were expecting the wonders of an advanced civilization or the wide-screen spectacle of an evolved humanity, brace yourself: Wright is a serious literary writer, and so his future London can only be abandoned, half-destroyed and overgrown with tropical abandon.

    The most interesting element of this second part is seeing the protagonist use his training as an archaeologist and slowly piece together the factors that led to the fall of civilization. Clues can be found in the most unlikely places, and if the novel has a sharp commonality with genre fiction, it’s in those sections describing the future past in bits and pieces. A few scenes of uncommon power are to be found here and there, such as the brief passage where the narrator finds a building with four tall chimneys and, nearby, a bulldozer. Brrr. [P.202]

    But this interest progressively phases out, even as the narrator meets the devolved remnants of the English people, indulges in a bit of anthropology, gets crucified for his sins and discovers what happened to him in another future. Naturally, human hubris gets blamed, along with the dangers of modern science and yadda-yadda: Someone should tell Wright that this story has been done before. Despite a good final chapter with flashes of interest, the novel sinks in the same self-introspective morass that nearly doomed its first section. In the manner of ruminative literary novels anywhere, there is no victory, no breakthrough, no palpable happy ending; just resignation at impending death, and a shrugging acceptance of the end of civilization.

    In genre SF terms, there isn’t much in A Scientific Romance that hasn’t been done better elsewhere. The book is interesting, but more as an exercise in contrasts than a pure reading experience… although mileage may vary according to attachment to genre fiction. There’s a reason why genre readers don’t care too much for introspection, defeatism or knee-jerk rejection of science: It’s dull and, from a certain perspective, it’s exactly the kind of things that genre Science Fiction seeks to disprove.

  • The Codex, Douglas Preston

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2004, 404 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34629-X

    Over the years, Douglas Preston has established himself as one-half of the Preston/Child team behind such preposterously entertaining thrillers as Relic, The Ice Limit or The Cabinet of Curiosities. But he also has a number of solo works on his shelves, The Codex being the latest of them.

    Fans of the Preston/Child thrillers will certainly feel right at ease as soon as the premise of the novel is explained. From the moment the three mismatched Broadbent brothers are summoned to their rich father’s side for a mysterious meeting, our interest is sparked: why is said father missing, his house empty of its treasure trove of valuables? It takes only one videotape to clear up the mystery and start the adventure: As a team-building exercise, their dying father has squirrelled away most of his fortune and hidden it somewhere in the world, in what will either become their inheritance or his tomb. Their only chance to retrieve the vast family fortune is to unite their forces and go treasure-hunting.

    A more straightforward thriller would see the three brothers shake hands on the deal and set off for primitive countries. But such a thriller would last about fifty pages and please no one. So the brothers all decide to forget about it and return to their lives. But the idea stays on, and it doesn’t take much time for all three brothers to either initiate the chase or be manipulated into following their father’s trace. They won’t go alone, of course, and it’s their companions that will determine their chance of success. From that moment, it’s the good, the bad and the clueless: Tom is the no-nonsense veterinarian reluctantly pressed into service by a young woman and the promise of invaluable medicinal information, the “codex” of the title. Philip is a haughty academic who soon finds himself way over his head as the quasi-prisoner of the private investigator he hired to help things along. Meanwhile, placid third brother Vernon bumbles from one adventure to another as his guru seems unusually concerned about the One Hundred Million Dollars! at the end of the chase. The three brothers separately set out to get the treasure, but they may not be alone in their quest…

    The cover blurb on the cover of the paperback edition bills the novel as “Raiders of the Lost Ark meets The Amazing Race!” and indeed, the novel is never as gripping as when the initial pieces are placed on the table, and we are promised a vast chase across the jungle as different teams all race toward the treasure. It’s a fabulous hook for a thriller, and for a while it looks as if The Codex is destined for great things.

    What follows is not exactly a disappointment, but it’s not quite up to the initial expectations. As all adventurers make their way deeper in the jungle, the usual adventure thrills are all here to be found: natural dangers, isolated tribes, character infighting and so on. Making everything a bit better are a few surprises to shake things up, and a number of amusing supporting characters. But the teams soon converge and end up with the classical good-versus-evil face-off, with too much book left to string along. The last act really stretches things a bit past the point of comfortable disbelief, creating a nagging sense of let-down.

    It doesn’t help that some subplots never achieve liftoff. A lengthy stateside digression involving a CEO is notable for an atypical ending, but it seems superfluous in the context of this novel. Worse: its interaction with another subplot where a troublesome love interest is morally dismissed smacks of cheap plotting.

    Nevertheless, The Codex is still a lot of fun, especially if it’s been a while since your last jungle-bound adventure. As for myself, I ended up reading it in unfortunate proximity with James Rollin’s earlier Amazonia (which sports a Douglas Preston blurb on its jacket, interestingly enough) and that may just be too many jungle thrillers to handle in the same fortnight.

    Taken on its own, though, The Codex is a serviceable thriller: exactly the kind of page-turner that’s a delight to read on the bus or on the beach. Its easy fluency with genre elements augurs well for Preston’s solo career. Indeed, back-cover indications show that Tom Broadbent makes a return appearance in Tyrannosaur Canyon. We’ll see about that.

    [June 2006: What about James Rollin’s Amazonia, you ask? Well, here’s the paradox: Even if Rollin’s curiously similar book (down to paternal matters) has a grander scope and a better pacing, it’s not quite so much fun to read as The Codex. Rollin’s characters are a bit flatter, and if his ideas are generally more wild and interesting than Preston’s, he is seldom as slick as his colleague in delivering the expected adventure. On the other hand, Amazonia is one of Rollin’s top books so far, proving that he’s getting better with time.]

  • Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, Mil Millington

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Flame, 2002, 338 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-340-83054-9

    You really can’t argue against name recognition. Years ago, Mil Millington started a web site on which he started posting short humorous snippets of his daily arguments with his German-born girlfriend. The web site was a big hit, up to and including being ripped off in one of Britain’s biggest newspaper. Apologies, compensation and writing gigs from competing newspapers soon followed, along with a book deal. When looking around for a title and subject matter, Millington played it safe and resorted to the good old “write what you know” axiom: His first novel shares both a title and a basic premise with the web site that launched his career.

    Narrated by ordinary Brit bloke Pel Dalton, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About is not too dissimilar to the post-Bridget Jones wave of chick-lit, or the Nick Hornby “male confessional” sub-genre: Tales of young adults lost in today’s society, trying to do the best they can with what life handed over. Pel is the classic underachiever, working in IT for a university library and trying to do as little as possible in order to make it from one day to another. His self-deprecating narration is immediately sympathetic, but he’s hardly the star of the novel.

    Oh no, that honour would have to go to Ursula, his German girlfriend. Much like what we know of Millington’s home life through his web site (though Millington assures us that it’s not an autobiography), the two of them are constantly arguing about the most ordinary things. Pel, of course, never wins. But don’t get the impression that the two of them are unhappy: As Pel’s work life becomes increasingly chaotic, the comforting crazy routine of his home life is just about the only thing keeping him grounded. In an interesting twist on the usual fictional relationships, they argue because they feel so comfortable together, not because it’s driving them apart.

    But the plot of the novel itself is nothing more than a clothesline on which to hang a series of humour vignettes. A trip to Germany is nothing but an excuse to riff on Anglo-German relations, in-laws, ski accidents and travel woes. Pel’s troubles at the office keep escalating to an absurd crescendo of wild circumstances that wouldn’t be misplaced in a thriller. Naturally, everything just keeps getting funnier as his life goes from bad to worse. If you’re looking for a laugh-aloud novel, this is it. Pel’s narration is packed with good lines, and there’s something for everyone as he goes from a rotten office job to a home life that’s no less stressful. A good assortment of supporting characters does a lot to complicate Pel’s situation… and crank up the laughs. The fact that Pel himself isn’t the most competent character around is funny, but the increasingly dysfunctional characters that surround him are even funnier. It’s a fast read, a good read and Anglophiles will find a lot to love in the dry British narration.

    The only problem with the novel is both minor and significant. As the novel unfolds, Pel gets embroiled in stranger and stranger problems at work, cumulating functions, learning dangerous secrets, rubbing shoulders with unsavoury characters and earning the enmity of his colleagues. Naive readers may expect all of this to reach a conclusion of sorts, as absurd or contrived it may be. But no: Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About simply stops even as everything goes up in a storm. It’s an absolutely deliberate gag: the point of the novel is to show how, even as they argue during the worst crises, Pel and Ursula are inseparable. But the effect is still one of disappointment, a vague sense of having been cheated of a resolution even as Millington took pleasure in making life hell for his protagonist with no intention whatsoever of resolving the various problems. Your tolerance for ambiguous endings will determine whether this is a book-throwing problem.

    But once you ignore the ending, Mil Millington’s debut novel is perfectly adequate: fans of the web site will recognize the style and the premise, fans of modern humorous romance will be satisfied and more generalist readers will enjoy the vignettes. Purists will also note that Millington’s hardly a one-trick writer: two other novels followed this one, with no end in sight.

  • Stupid White Men, Michael Moore

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Penguin UK, 2002, 281 pages, C$16.00 tpb, ISBN 0-141-01190-4

    I know, I know: Even if you’re an avowed liberal, chances are that you don’t like Michael Moore. Can’t say I blame you, really: If Moore can be bitterly amusing to watch, his loose relationship with truth has hurt his cause over the past few years. With his cultural stature after BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE and then FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (to say nothing of books such as Dude, Where’s My Country?) everyone feels entitled to a pot-shot or two in his direction. He’s fat; he lied; he got sued by that guy; he said this or that silly thing. As one of the most preeminent voices from the American left, he gets the enmity of conservatives and the dubious glares of the liberals trying to appease the centre. Ah, the wages of success…

    One of the sparks for that celebrity was the publication of a book called Stupid White Men, back in the woolly old days of 2001. Riffing on turn-of-the-century America, Moore offers observations on the “sorry excuses for the state of the nation” and targets the Bush administration before it actually had the chance to turn ugly. The UK edition of the book, here reviewed, offers a post-9/11 introduction and epilogue in which Moore bravely portrays himself (and the book) as nearly-censored victims of a timid publisher. Otherwise, Stupid White Men has already become a quaint time capsule from a pre-“War on Terror” period.

    Reading Stupid White Men five years after its original date of publication is often an exercise in futility. Moore’s denunciation of the way Bush won the 2000 elections seems so passé, much like his warnings about various members of the Bush cabinet. Over and over again, readers will want to grab a phone line to early 2001 and tell Moore that he hasn’t seen anything yet. That whatever outrage he musters over this or that minor incident should be marshaled for even worse abuses to come. On the other hand, Moore seldom shies away from criticizing the Clinton administration, which is an useful reminder that Bill only looks good in hindsightful comparison.

    And yet Stupid White Men isn’t completely past its expiration date. One of the greatest tragedies of an era where terrorists are hiding behind every security checkpoint is that this single-minded obsession with one particular (and relatively rare) problem has sweept everything else under the rug. Education, wages, racism, environmentalism, corruption: these are all valid issues, except that no one has been paying any attention to them when the GWOT swats everything else aside. Stupid White Men, at its best, it a reminder that -oh yeah- there are other, far more prevalent issues to solve.

    Alas, to get to those points you will have to wade through a lot of misplaced humour. Moore’s style has often relied upon buffoonery to make a point –-much to the dismay of everyone who would like to take Moore seriously. It’s not that Moore is incapable of being funny: it’s that he seldom seems to know when enough is enough. Stupid White Men is filled with passages where Moore keeps going farther away in absurdity when more restraint would have served his point a lot better. It’s difficult enough to balance the demands of hyperbolic humour with the factual accuracy of political commentary, but Stupid White Men is often too goofy for its own good. It doesn’t help that Moore’s satire can be so convoluted as to be indistinguishable from actual conservative rhetoric.

    This tension between class-clown humour and loftier social criticism eventually takes its toll: The cheap shots, the silly lists, the name-calling can be fun in small column-sized doses, but they get tiresome over the course of a full book. Even those who are on Moore’s side may come to appreciate what his opponents are claiming. In the political exposé/satire genre, Al Franken was generally more successful with Lies and the Lying Liars that Tell Them, reaching a better balance between facts and humour (though TeamFranken probably had a lot to do with the careful research.) It’s also worth noting that Moore’s follow-up, Dude, Where’s My Country?, is also generally better that Stupid White Men. So take heart, all Moore doubters: there’s still hope for him yet.

  • Valhalla Rising, Clive Cussler

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 2001, 517 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-18571-0

    I find it very difficult to be overly critical of Clive Cussler’s novels. Despite flaws that would doom any other writer, Cussler is just as daring as his alter-ego Dirk Pitt [TM] when comes the time to deliver the goods. Repetitive plots? Impossible technology? Ridiculous villains? Cartoonish action? Cookie-cutter characterization? Unbelievable twists? Everything-but-the-kitchen-sink plotting? It’s all pure Cussler routine, and after more than a dozen novels following the exact same template, it’s hard to be upset when the exact same features keep popping up from one book to another.

    If you want a true look at Cussler’s ambitions, read his interview in the Dirk Pitt Revealed companion guide. Cussler, an old advertising veteran and businessman, knows exactly what he’s doing and has no shame in delivering what’s expected of him. He’s found both an audience and a niche: why should he even mess with the formula? His readership is, by now, so large that he can farm out the Dirk Pitt name to collaborators and still use his royalties to go on real-life treasure hunts. Bully to him: he’s living his life the way most people would like to… and what’s a small thing like literary quality to stand in his way?

    Valhalla Rising is yet another thriller to come out of the vast Cussler Inc. Assembly line, and it begins exactly like the earlier ones: With a pair of historical prologues in which disaster strikes from a mysterious source. But before we can dwell too long on what this means for the rest of the novel, we’re off to the Pacific Ocean, where a dastardly plot ensures the sinking of a luxury liner. Is it the end for all passengers? Why, no, not when Dirk Pitt[TM] is around to perform a death-defying rescue. One thing leading to another, Pitt once again finds himself embroiled in a vast adventure that will lead him from the depths of the seas (twice) to a dogfight over Manhattan. Whew!

    In doing so, Cussler also stretches the limits of permissible plotting. It’s not enough for him to give himself a cameo in his own work, he also has to act as a convenient deus ex machina to rescue his heroes from one impossible situation and lead them to the next plot coupon. (Mysteriously disappearing when it’s convenient to do so.) It’s not enough to give one big techno/historical reward to his characters: they get three or four of them at the same time, from evidence of American Viking settlements to the real-life Captain Nemo to quantum displacement technology that would revolutionize modern science if this was a novel that actually took science seriously. (No wonder that NUMA’s Turing-bashing AI barely raises any eyebrows when it’s featured as a supporting character.)

    But all of the above pales in comparison to the end twist where, with less than ten pages left in the novel (SPOILERS!), a young man and his sister appear out of nowhere, lending a patina of of foreshadowing to Dirk Pitt’s[TM] book-long ruminations on age and his unsuccessful relationships. Yup, they’re his long-lost twin children, born of a mother everyone assumed dead. Cue a few hugs and the promise of a new generation of Pitt[TM] adventures. This is the type of thing that can destroy other writers’ books. With Cussler, it’s just another day on the job. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Chutzpah! is the guy’s middle name.

    It’s not all good, of course: Even allowing for Cussler’s customary craziness, Valhalla Rising feels a lot like Cussler’s last half-dozen novels in terms of writing: As Dirk Pitt’s adventures have gotten longer, the prose seems slower and the action scenes seem to balloon out of proportion: It’s now bad enough that you can just skim along the first lines of each paragraph and not miss anything important. Cussler could do forestry a favour and trim his novels by half just by tightening up his writing while leaving the plot alone. Heck, he may even discover that this makes up for faster-paced novels. In the meantime, it’s all to easy to gloss over the action scenes, picking up careful reading only when Pitt lets loose with one of his typical quips. Either Cussler’s writing keeps getting worse, or my patience is wearing thin.

    Otherwise, well, it’s the same-old, same-old Cussler. There are nice passages (I particularly liked the Manhattan dogfight and the trip to the Jules Verne archives) and good lines of dialogue in this overwritten mess, but in most other aspects it’s a Cussler that’s equal to all others. Some will see this as a boon, others as a problem, but no one will be disappointed or surprised by what they’re getting. Cussler has made himself immune to parody by delivering it himself. And that’s why, in all the ways that count, it’s hard to be overly critical of any book sporting Dirk Pitt’s TM.

  • Hidden Talents, David Lubar

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Starscape, 1999, 213 pages, C$8.99 tpb, ISBN 0-765-34265-0

    I know that I don’t read enough young adult fiction. The problem is that I have enough adult fiction in the queue that I practically would have to be given a YA novel before I’d consider reading it. That’s exactly what happened with David Lubar’s Hidden Talents, a young adult fantasy novel that had stayed hidden in my stack of unread books ever since the 2003 Worldcon, where it was handed over to all attendees. Why did it sit unread so long? Your guess is as good as mine –though there are books in that pile that have been languishing there since the mid-nineties.

    In any case, I have no one to blame but myself for missing out so long on a perfectly enjoyable fantasy story that happens to star teenagers. Hidden Talents is an exceedingly clever book, and one that does much to raise my opinion of YA fiction.

    It starts as narrator Martin Anderson is dropped off at Edgeview Alternative School, the “last chance school” for his area’s losers and misfits. Each of them has proved to be unteachable by conventional means: now Edgeview is where they’ve been placed in the hope that they will either get better or older enough to let them go away. Martin is smart, but he’s got a mouth big enough to get him kicked out of four schools in rapid succession. But if Martin’s got a talent for being a smart-alec, the other students he meets have other problems. One is a recreational pyromaniac; yet another is a compulsive cheater. Then there are the bullies and the teachers of dubious competence: Harry Potter never had it so bad.

    In a few short chapters (and a variety of interstitial material such as letters, notes, drawings and transcripts), Lubar paints a vivid portrait of good kids stuck in a school gone wrong. There is, of course, more to their alleged problems than just attitude. Martin discovers, midway through, that the problems of his friends have rather… paranormal roots: The kid nicknamed “Cheater” isn’t one: he’s just a telepath who plucks answers out of his neighbours’s heads. “Torchie” is a pyrokinesic, “Flinch” is clairvoyant… and so on. None of them, of course, have ever recognized their abilities, leading them in all sorts of behavioural problems.

    As a premise, that’s fantastic stuff for a YA novel, tapping directly in a few teenage anxieties about being exceptional and how to best use one’s abilities. As a dramatic driver, it’s nothing short of brilliant, especially the way it’s developed by Lubar. Martin is dubious about his findings, but that’s nothing compared to how his friends react to his suppositions: they can’t even bring themselves to consider the possibility of their powers and what it would mean to control them. It takes a pretty spiffy demonstration of scientific thinking for them to even begin to acknowledge the truth.

    For a novel that can be read in less than ninety minutes, Hidden Talents seldom skips good characterization. Even filtered through Martin’s perception, most of the characters are sharply drawn and somewhat sympathetic: for misfits they’re just a lot of fun to read about. While Lubar’s plotting is hardly perfect (the first half of the book is a bit slow as Martin struggles to understand the situation, while the last act is marred by a predictable save-the-school subplot), it’s more than good enough to keep things hopping along.

    Ultimately, it’s this charm and easygoing narration that keep Hidden Talents afloat for adult readers: It’s all too easy to use a book in order to tap onto one’s hidden teenager and wonder how unbelievably cool it would be to discover hidden powers. Lubar’s treatment of superpowers through doubt, demonstration and training is a believable real-world approach when such fantasy usually leaves little doubt as for the power of paranormal abilities. The narration is sharp and compelling. While Hidden Talent is unlikely to leave any lasting memory beyond its clever premise, it’s a lot of fun to read. Maybe I should make room in my stack of stuff to read for a few more YA novels…

  • American Backlash, Michael Adams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking Canada, 2005, 230 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-670-06370-3

    I don’t think it’s possible to be too laudatory about Michael Adams’ previous book, Fire and Ice: Canada, The United States and the Myth of Convergence. By putting some statistical rigour onto a national feeling that had been growing for years, Adams crystallized the Canadian zeitgeist at a time where it finally manifested itself. It’s a bit pretentious to say that 2003 was the year that Canada grew up, but it certainly stands as a significant moment where (thanks to marijuana, same-sex marriage and staying-the-hell-out-of-Iraq) the country realized it was truly different from the United States. That it wasn’t just not converging with the US, but actively moving in a different direction. Sharply written with a mixture of structured polling results and pop-culture references, Fire and Ice went to to earn wide acclaim and healthy sales.

    American Backlash is more or less a direct sequel to Fire and Ice, except that the analysis focuses almost exclusively on the United States. Once again, Adams takes a look at the results of his periodical household opinion surveys and draws inferences about the American character. What’s that fuss about culture wars? Is it true that, socially, the US is made of very different regions? Is the US growing more nihilistic by the minute?

    As a Canadian, I’m almost disturbed at Adams’ presumptuousness in daring to psychoanalyze another country, especially if that country is the US. Through written and published for Canada, American Backlash takes on the risky task of finding out what Americans think, and if Canadians know one things very well, it’s that the US never, ever reacts favourably to outside opinion. Wouldn’t it be better, asks the polite Canadian, if we just avoided the subject altogether? I wouldn’t enjoy reading Adams’ hate mail after the publication of this book. It’s hardly surprising if the book still hasn’t found an American publisher.

    But never mind my nervous fretting of hands. What does Adams have to say about the US?

    One of his early conclusions is that the so-called culture war in the US is taking place upon the least important social axis. While Adams finds clear differences between self-identified conservatives and liberals (although those differences are almost orthogonal to one another: “liberals have issues while conservatives has values” he memorably coins on page 156), committed voters on both sides are very similar in terms of aspirations and community engagement. The real difference comes when you study voters versus non-voters: Perhaps predictably, non-voters are more likely to be hedonistic, consumerist and accepting of violence. It’s not such a stretch to assume that those evils that conservative and liberals are arguing against are to be found not in each other, but in this politically disengaged third group. (Ha! And you thought gansgta rap fashion was just an aberration, not a personification!)

    At a thin 230 pages (only 177 of which are the main text, the rest being taken up by notes on methodology, sources and an index), American Backlash doesn’t have much more space for other subjects. It still does manage to study regional characteristics of America (suggesting that the stereotypes about this or that area of the US are largely based on real differences) and present a short history of political trends in twentieth-century America. (Hence the title, painting a picture of American politics mostly defined by what it opposes rather that what unites: the modern conservative movement as an overreaction against the evils of those “liberal hippies” of the sixties, just as the hippies were overreacting against mainstream values of the fifties…)

    Unfortunately, American Backlash is not designed to speak about Canada, or how the US compares to other nations. Beyond cursory mentions of increasing liberalism everywhere else in the first world, Adams remains focused on the American national character. Readers hoping to catch a glimpse of Adams’ 2004 survey results for Canada will have their appetites whetted but left unfulfilled: you can bet good dollars that those results will have to wait until Adams’ next book. (In the meantime, Adams shows a sharp turn toward authoritarianism in the US from 2000 to 2004, and suggests a similar, but not as extreme trend in Canada.)

    This being said, I think that fans of Fire and Ice will be the most disappointed in American Backlash. While the book is interesting and relatively solid, it does cover a lot of ground already explained in the previous book, and adds only a few points of interest. I supposed that many American readers will be offended by the besmirching of their national character, but then again they will have to make an effort to get the book from its Canadian publisher. For everyone else, it’s an interesting analysis of the social mood south of the border: will it be proved right just as Fire and Ice found its own vindication?

  • Plan of Attack, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2004, 345 pages, C$39.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-009411-7

    Long-time readers of these reviews may ask why I keep reading Dale Brown’s novels if I obviously hate them so much. Part of the answer lies in my admiration of Brown’s early novels: If he was able to do it once, why not again? But the real answer is elsewhere: For years, I just kept purchasing Brown’s books whenever I found them at used book sales, piling them up unread and always thinking that I’d end up reading them all sooner or later. My mistake was in assuming that they would get better. Now I have to tough it out until the very end.

    And Plan of Attack, if I’m to judge from Brown’s web site, is a temporary end of sorts: The last Patrick McLanahan novel before Brown’s newer series. You would think that this would be good news: after all, haven’t I spent the last mumble-mumble reviews of Brown’s books complaining about how the McLanahan universe is now completely irrelevant to the new geopolitical reality? Wouldn’t it be great to see Brown properly dispose of McLanahan and his cohorts? The only problem is that I’m not convinced Brown is done with McLanahan yet. Then there’s the fact that even just one last lap may be too much to bear again.

    Picking up where Brown’s last half-dozen snooze-fests have left off, Plan of Attack begins with Yet Another Stupid Move by McLanahan, one that results in another international incident in McLanahan’s long career. This time around, though, this very career takes a hit as McLanahan is busted down a grade and shuffled to another area of the Air Force. Still, you can hardly count him out, especially when he discovers evidence of an audacious plan by Russia’s president to bomb America’s strategic nuclear arsenal…

    Said Russian president is insane, of course, and so is the novel. While Plan of Attack is generally more interesting than Brown’s previous three novels put together, it’s the kind of interest caused by train-wrecks or forensic reports: it’s horrible, but fun to piece together why such a bad thing happened.

    The main problem, of course, is that Brown’s fictional universe has long lost any relevance to the current geopolitics. McLanahan has now battled enemies in eleven novels stretching all the way back to the last days of the Cold War: Any attempt to reconcile it with real-world event is doomed to failure. (And so is any attempt to point out that the plot is pure paranoid nonsense.) Yet Brown piles on the incoherences by weaving 9/11 in the narrative, though without it having any impact on the characters or the environment in which they work: Brown’s “American Holocaust of 2004” [P.340] ends up casually dwarfing 9/11 and that’s that. A better, more confident writer may have used this premise as the basis for an alternate history novel set in a different Reagan era, but one gets the sense that Brown isn’t interested in pushing the envelope, just in delivering a pat novel that does exactly the same thing as any of his previous novels.

    Unfortunately, those would be the exact same things that made his previous novels such painfully uninteresting piece of work. The overdose of jargon and minutia; the wretched dialogue (“’This is unbelievable!’ President Anatoliy Gryzlov shouted. ‘I cannot believe the sheer audacity of these Americans!’” [P.330]); the reliance on fantasy technology like the “Tin Man” suits; the indifferent characterization; the flat prose; the lack of interest in following the story where it truly leads (you will never read a less involving nuclear war novel); the way the high tech equipment makes it easy for the protagonists to kick ass without any personal danger or involvement. Whatever was promising in previous instalments is constantly neutralized and defanged: if you were expecting a political showdown between President Thorn and Martindale, you can forget it as one of them (you’ll guess who) simply steps aside off-stage to let the Republican take charge. Lazy plotting doesn’t stop there: When two powerful commanders league up to stop McLanahan, they are neatly taken out of the plot by a convenient plane crash.

    I like to be lenient on military thrillers and enjoy them for that they try to be, but there’s a limit to being complacent: After a steady string of failures, enough is enough: it’s safe to assume that Brown’s not aiming particularly high any more.

    If there’s any consolation to the fact that I’ve got yet another Brown book in my stack of stuff to read, it’s that Act of War promises a brand-new hero and a focus on the war on terrorism. As long as Brown keeps recycling McLanahan, he’s at a dead end. It’s high time for him to do the honourable thing and let McLanahan retire. Or else Brown himself can start thinking about doing something else and leaving the novel-writing business to professionals.

    [March 2009: After two off-McLanahan novels that were substandard even by the low standards of his late career, Brown returns to his favourite series in 2007’s Strike Force, but brings back links to nearly all of his unconnected novels so far, ignoring huge chunks of his backstory for the sake of bringing all of his novels in one continuity. The increasingly self-satisfied solipsistic nature of his writing gets worse, and the result is a novel so awful that I’m thinking that enough is enough: for the near future, I’m done with Brown. Anyone in the market for a full run of his hardcovers?]

  • The Gold Coast, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1990, 626 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-36085-6

    As I slowly make my way through Nelson DeMille’s oeuvre, two things strike me about his books: The first one is that they all succeed to a degree or another. Some of his books are less interesting than other, but they’re still well worth reading even with the skimming and the speed-reading. But the second thing about DeMille is the most fascinating: His books work even when they shouldn’t.

    Even though we could point at Word of Honor and Spencerville as other books that shouldn’t be as gripping as they are, The Gold Coast is the clearest example so far of a story that simply shouldn’t be as preposterously readable. A bare plot description is trite beyond belief: it’s about a rich middle-aged man who starts doubting his life and finds uneasy comfort with a new friend. I shudder to imagine how many awful novels have been written about mid-life crises, especially once you start looking at literary novels written by middle-aged academics. To imagine DeMille, master of the contemporary thriller, tackle such a subject is almost beyond description. Where are the guns? Where are the thrills?

    As it turns out, you may not need any of the above –though they do make an appearance at some point. No, the big surprise is that The Gold Coast is a middle-age crisis novel written by a writer who’s a pro at holding his readers’ attention. Protagonist John Sutter is like every other DeMille narrator so far: self-deprecating, smart-alecky, perhaps a bit too smart for his own good. He’s living in a curious situation, having married well above his class: he makes a decent living as a Wall Street lawyer, enjoys his boat and drives nice cars, but his wife is the one with the real class, being the latest in an old-money family living on a Long Island estate that dates back to an earlier and more glorious time. For Sutter, trouble starts once his new neighbour moves in: Frank Belladonna, an old-style Mafia don who starts taking a bigger and bigger portion of Sutter’s life.

    Belladonna, of course, is a magnet for danger. When guns finally make their appearance in The Gold Coast, they come courtesy of the Mafia. But that happens relatively late in the book: what really makes up the meat of the novel is DeMille’s description of the last remnants of old-style American aristocracy, compared and contrasted by the similarly dying nobility of the New York Mafia. Sutter see this through the troubled eyes of a besieged man, with a wife that grows more distant and tax troubles that are not coincidental to the tug-of-war between his neighbour and the federal government. Sutter lives at the edge between the world of the super-rich and the rest of us: an outsider to all, he makes a rich narrator who notices everything.

    And indeed, the interest of The Gold Coast comes not from the late-book thrills, but in the vivid study of a way of life, of characters living down an era. DeMille’s characterization is impeccable: don’t be surprised if you’re seduced by the rough-hewn charm of Belladonna even as he’s clearly more trouble than Sutter can handle. The Gold Coast is a trial by fire for Sutter, and part of the fun is seeing him harvest the just deserts of his life so far. Scenes after scenes of delicious characterization make this novel a lot more fun to read that you’d expect from a 600-page novel about some rich guy undergoing a mid-life crisis.

    And so I remain astonished at DeMille’s capacity to wring interest from an unpromising premise. Unlike some of his novels (The Lion’s Game being the worst offender), he also maintains our interest through the entire duration of the book: It’s hard to look at any 600-pages book and not think that it should be cut by a hundred pages, but trying to guess where to cut in The Gold Coast would be an exercise in futility. Suffice to say that it’s a book that will never be too far away once you start reading it. DeMille’s prose here is like popcorn, with a very real “just one more chapter” quality.

    In short, The Gold Coast makes an unexpected entry at the top of DeMille’s oeuvre: Well-written, endlessly fascinating and surprisingly engaging, it shows what happens when genre writers turn their sight to more prosaic literature: perfect pacing and sharp characterization in the service of a story for the ages. It shouldn’t work, but it certainly does.

  • The Draco Tavern, Larry Niven

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 304 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30863-0

    Long-time Larry Niven readers only need to be told one thing about The Draco Tavern: This is another one of Niven’s mostly-reprint anthologies, but it’s much better than the other ones. Even the newer stories don’t suck as much as you would expect.

    Niven’s career, by now, is a case study in wunderkind turned has-been: From fresh, vivid and compulsively readable material in the sixties and seventies, Niven began a steady slide into mediocrity and beyond starting with The Ringworld Engineer in 1982, a decline only stemmed by a number of collaborations —although even those have started to stink since The Gripping Hand. The latest development has been his repackaging of linked short stories in a series of themed anthologies revolving around specific characters or universe: While N-Space and Playgrounds of the Mind were decent best-of collections, books like Crashlander, Flatlander and Rainbow Mars could be dismissed in one damning sentence: Collection of several good stories from the early Niven, followed by an unreadable new story by the later Niven. Sequels like The Ringworld Throne did nothing to enhance Niven’s tarnished reputation, to say nothing of “original” works like Destiny’s Road or collections of recent sub-standard work such as Scatterbrain. So imagine the low expectations upon reading The Draco Tavern.

    As usual, the beginning of the book plays to expectations: Niven’s new introduction is rambling and repetitive, whereas the early stories are classic Niven from his prime. Many SF writers try bar stories at one point or another and it’s not hard to see why: the classic set-up involves a world-weary but removed narrator, inebriated guest stars and stories that -being told twice-removed- may or may not be true. (Arthur C. Clarke packaged his bar stories into one of my favourite books, Tales from the White Hart, whereas Spider Robinson turned his Callahan’s stories into a career.) Niven states that he designed the Draco Tavern cycle as a way to explore the Big Issues, and the first few stories do justice to his ambitions, regaling us with ideas and speculations about life, the universe and everything in-between. I still vividly remember those stories from the classic Niven era, from the punchline of “The Green Marauder” to the unsettling core idea of “The Subject is Closed”.

    Then, true to Niven’s career, the level of quality of the stories begins to slide down. The freshness of the Draco Tavern stories turns bland. The action occasionally moves away from the tavern itself (“Table Manners”), with mixed results. Niven transforms his narrator, Rick Schumann, into an active participant —but fails to develop his character unless it serves the stories. Packaged closely together like this, the stories in The Draco Tavern offer the outline of a dramatic arc as Schumann gets married, has a kid, sees the tavern get destroyed at least twice and then rebuilt. Unfortunately, it remains only a faint outline: particularly disappointing is the lack of attention paid to Schumann’s personal life, which barely gets more than a passing mention except when it’s meant to be a plot driver. (See “Playhouse” for an example.)

    But the big surprise is that even if the late-Niven stories aren’t nearly at neat (nor as readable) as the first ones, they still maintain a basic level of interest. Unlike most of Niven’s short fiction since the early nineties, the more contemporary half of The Draco Tavern is still a good read. The verve is gone, but it still works somehow. Readers who were disappointed by Niven’s most recent collections won’t feel as cheated by this one.

    Still, there’s still plenty to criticize in the last half of the book. The jarring introduction of contemporary references to Toshiba laptops and 9/11 terrorism strips away some of the timeless quality that such a collection should have. Niven’s increasingly cranky politics also muscle their way in the narrative with a conspicuous lack of cleverness. There’s a tin-eared reference to Saddam Hussein on page 257 that makes Niven look like an idiot who overdosed on Fox News. Those details pile up so that, in the word of another Niven story, “the magic goes away”.

    But these false notes and atonal passages are almost reassuring: it just wouldn’t do to assume that “Niven’s back!”, wouldn’t it? It may be just a bit better to feel that the time-tested template of the Draco Tavern stories was enough to keep the brain-eater at bay, just for this one book. For those who wondered where the early Niven went, The Draco Tavern won’t offer any happy explanation… but it just may be enough to feel that he still has a few more good stories left in his head.