Book Review

  • America, Stephen Coonts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2001, 436 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-98250-X

    Genre fiction is often an exercise in balancing realism against excitement. Real life is boring, doesn’t make sense and shows an annoying reluctance to pay off in dramatic satisfaction. Yet fiction that relies too heavily on dramatic conventions is more easily dismissed as unrealistic. Hence the tightrope act of any fiction writer in balancing the demands of reality versus the thrills of a good story. Ideally, it’s best to establish just enough reality to suspend disbelief, and then step hard on the dramatic accelerator.

    This balance between reality and fiction is tricky to get right in any genre, but military thrillers present their own particular problems, and it’s a mark of the sub-genre’s low storytelling standards that even its best-selling authors have such a hard time succeeding. Too much realism, and the novel sinks in impenetrable jargon, uninteresting details and amiable characterization featuring idealized martial clones. Too much action, and the novel leaves reality as we understand it to end up in a paranoid fantasyland where every non-American is best killed with extreme preemptive prejudice. Dale Brown is particularly bad at this, but he’s far from being the only one.

    Stephen Coonts has usually been more successful than most of his colleagues in delivering solid stories with just enough real-world foundations. While he’s been slipping as of late (Saucer and Hong Kong certainly weren’t his best efforts), the early Coonts managed a good mixture between believable realism and big-screen thrills. America, unfortunately, is closer to a disappointment than a success, even though all the elements are there for something much better.

    It begins as the United States’ newest nuclear submarine, the USS America, is boldly hijacked by a group of terrorists. That in itself would be bad enough, but what’s in the launch bays makes it even worse: a bunch of cruise missiles equipped with EMP warheads.

    This premise by itself wouldn’t be a bad start to a crackerjack thriller. There’s an element of originality, a built-in tension (especially if the missiles are launched in separate waves) and a good hunter/killer element. Find a good antagonist and the rest of the novel practically writes itself.

    Alas, Coonts chose to burden his scenario with too many elements that only serve to defuse the tension and increase the giggle factor. There’s an underwater satellite recovery subplot that scatters the story in a direction it didn’t need (and suffers in comparison with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Bright Star), along with money-grubbing villains (some of them French, of course) whose motivations and methods don’t even make sense.

    What also contributes to America‘s failure is Coonts’ annoying tendency to re-use the same characters in novels set in the same universe. I’m rarely a fan of loose series, and they make no sense in the military thriller genre: Once you’ve nuked a city, killed a president or fought a war with China, what’s left to do? Coonts has been bitten by this bad habit before (resurrecting Castro for Cuba after killing him in Under Siege) and his habit of trotting out Jake Grafton, Toad Tarkington and Tommy Carmellini for little more than secondary roles is truly starting to grate.

    Worse yet is America‘s flat-line dramatic tension. The writing is limp and without energy, with scenes strung along a thin clothesline of plot. Hampered by their existing back-stories, the recurring characters are simply not placed in good positions to follow and intervene in the action. Everything feels removed, distant and telegraphed. It’s only too easy to see where the novel’s good sequences (a cruise missile attack on New York, an underwater submarine duel, a failed assassination attempt) could have been strengthened with just a little bit more dramatic glue. Instead, America often feels like the product of a tired author, a formerly hot novelist now phoning them in for an undemanding audience. After the dramatic drop in quality of his previous few novels, I can’t say that I’m surprised or even disappointed.

    Still, what’s especially frustrating about Coonts is that he’s not completely clueless. Unlike Dale Brown or Patrick Robinson, his plotting is serviceable, and there are hints that he still understands the demands of dramatic tension. His writing seldom slides into jargon-heavy militarism, and intermittent flashes of interest show that there may still be hope for him. Unfortunately, I’m thrice-burned, twice-shy on his stuff. If I end up reading the follow-up Liberty, it’ll be by pure used-book-sale happenstance: like so many of the young techno-thriller punks of the late eighties, Coonts has become and old tired warhorse practically fit to be put to pasture, defeated by the twin inability to keep it real and keep it interesting.

  • Clade, Mark Budz

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2003, 372 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58658-0

    The publishing industry has evolved a lot over the past decade, and one of the most profound changes has been nearly-invisible to end-readers. The consolidation of book distribution to just a few players has wreaked havoc on mass-market paperback distribution in non-bookstore outlets, which means that if your corner convenience store may once have boasted a well-stocked paperback section, today’s books are selling primarily in bookstores and nowhere else. Financially, this has destroyed the niche for mass market paperback, concentrated the buying public in bookstores visitors and driven publishing toward higher-priced formats, hence the explosion in hardcover and trade paperback publishing. The classic mass-market paperback survives, but as a second life for books already very successful on the hardcover circuit.

    Alas, this squeezes out newer and mid-list writers who had, up until that crunch, relied on sales from truck stops and drugstores to make up their numbers. Today’s mass-market paperback original is a solitary and beautiful creature in danger of extinction.

    Which brings us to Clade, a first novel by SF writer Mark Budz. I know that I should pick up more first novels by unknown writers as a matter of principle, but I can claim no such lofty intention for buying Clade: I just loved Stephen Youll’s luminously futuristic cover. That, and the fact that Budz’s second book, Crache, was neatly shelved right next to it, with matching cover art. Who can tell what will work in convincing people to pick up strange new books?

    As it turns out, I’m not displeased at all by this debut novel. The central conceit of Clade is simplicity itself: what if we end up using our knowledge of biotechnology to enclave ourselves? Social classes are already a fact of life, but what if poor people could be made to be sick in rich people’s presence? Wouldn’t that be an efficient way to clean the room for the rich? But why stop there? Why not codify racism as an allergen responses? What if the presence of a certain ethnic group can truly made you sick?

    Not a fun future, but one worth pondering. Despite SF’s claims as an all-inclusive literature, class issues don’t often pop up as a issue of interest to its writers. (Cynics will say that as a middle-class American literature, SF loathes to cut too close to the central assumptions of its readership: the very thought that America is a class-stratified society is so taboo that everyone pretends it’s not there.) In Clade, Budz doesn’t shy away from a future where Caucasians are in the minority, where the rich use everyone else for their own purposes and where ethnic/social/cultural barriers are accepted with scarcely more than a resigned shrug.

    Calling a novel “post-cyberpunk” nowadays is doing no one any favour, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to see the common links between this novel and the Gibson generation of the late eighties. The world awareness, the dirty side of technology, the idea that corporations certainly aren’t our best friend: These ideas, now familiar, permeate Clade and yet do much to give it the feel of a contemporary piece of Science Fiction.

    Given such high and exciting ambitions, it’s perhaps no surprise that the execution of the novel can often be disappointing. Budz’s writing betrays a lack of polished experience, and the structure of the story can be a bit clunky: the ending, in particular, seems rushed and pat. It is a conclusion, but one that seems to leave a lot of material up in the air. (Crache is billed as an independent sequel –we’ll see what that means.)

    The other problem with the book is that it works as long as you’re willing to grant the author a bit of indulgence. When words like “ecocaust” figure heavily in the novel’s backstory, it’s a good hint to stop worrying about consistency and just enjoy the ride: Standard post-apocalyptic SF reading protocols suggest that said catastrophe frees the author to do whatever is necessary to required to set up the world of the story. That the “cades” and “pherions” of the story aren’t plausible isn’t the point: The point is using those tools to tell a story about something. It’s just a shame that it’s impossible to believe in this future as anything but authorial decree, a feeling that the sometimes-silly thriller mechanics don’t do much to dispel.

    But I still enjoyed the book: as a debut novel, it’s got good energy, a few terrific idea and -perhaps most importantly- the willingness to engage with some vital issues. Crache is up next on my reading stack and I’m looking forward to it. While Clade may not blow open any doors nor any minds, it’s a perfect example of the type of good solid mid-list SF that is threatened by the disappearance of mass-market paperbacks. Do yourself a favour: The next time you’re in a supermarket, have a look at the paperback originals on the wire racks.

    [June 2006: Alas, sequel Crache isn’t nearly as interesting. While more complex, better written and gifted with higher stakes than the prequel, Crache is far less grounded in reality, and that ultimately takes away a lot of Clade‘s initial appeal as a champion of the lower classes. There are three plot-lines in Crache and the only one I found constantly interesting was the one about “L. Mariachi”, a former rock star now surviving as a migrant worker. The rest was hit-and-miss, damaged by lengthy interludes, wonky plot mechanics intersecting hard science (including programmable matter, straight from Will McCarthy’s speculations) with quasi-mysticism in which a guitar song can cure cancer. (Well, maybe not cancer, but at least an otherwise incurable disease.) Some aspects of the book are stronger than Clade (something I have to admire), but the overall impact is muted. Though billed as an independent sequel, Crache uncompromisingly re-uses so much jargon and setting from the first novel that people reading this without the required background may find it a hard slog.]

  • The Merchants of Souls, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 398 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-58969-6

    John Barnes’ work may have polarized readers, but his career has been fascinating to follow. Now solidly ranked in the Science Fiction mid-list after a promising debut in the late eighties, Barnes has written everything from hard-SF blockbusters (Mother of Storms) to glorified men’s adventure (The Timeline Wars trilogy), with an orthogonal side-step in fantasy fable with One for the Morning Glory. And yet, over a career that now spans two decades, his most solid work may be the cycle initiated by Ten Thousand Doors: four novels charting the life of special operative Giraut Leones as he works in a far-flung future where humanity has colonized thousands of planets.

    The first novel in the series was interesting and almost charming, but the second one (Earth Made of Glass) ended on such a terrible note that it felt like a sucker punch: The double whammy of a failed marriage and a failed mission, with the likely death of an entire planet as a consequence. Not the kind of stuff that’s worth cheering for, especially when it looked like the end of the story for Giraut.

    But it wasn’t the end of the story. As The Merchants of Souls picks up, Giraut is still reeling from the aftermath of his divorce and what has since become known as “the Briand disaster”. Friends get together to cheer him up, but nothing works like getting back in the saddle again. Before he can catch his breath, Giraut is once more an Office of Special Projects operative. This time, he’s headed for Earth and its billions of inhabitants at centre of human civilization. But he’s not working alone, and this time he’s trying to stop all of human society from making a big mistake. What’s more, he has no clue who his true enemies are, or what they’re up to…

    Beyond the “portal” technology linking all thousand planets together, the most distinguishing feature of Barnes’ “Thousand Cultures Universe” has been the “psypyx”, a device allowing another mind to “ride” a functioning human. This usually takes place for medical purposes, as a clone is force-grown for a psypyx personality back-up: To train their mind, resurrected personalities undergo a period of apprenticeship by re-learning human skill in someone else’s skull. Perhaps the best thing about The Merchant of Souls is how it plays with the concept, both as a plot driver and as am innovative feature of the narration.

    Giraut gets fitted with a psypyx not only to help out a friend who is about to be re-born, but also to demonstrate (on OSP’s orders) something vital to the teeming population of Earth. As humanity has retreated further and further in entertainment-driven lives, some are pushing for psypyx exploitation: imagine the lure of millions of lives saved on silicon, ready to be popped into the entertainment console for cheap thrills. The fact that those are human lives and not ready-made casual entertainment barely resonates among those pushing for the exploitation of that particular natural resource: in fact, they’re denying that psypyx images are even sentient. Giraut, allowing an old childhood friend (Raimbaut) access to his mind and body, hopes to convince the decision-makers that this isn’t the case. From a special operative, he’s reluctantly forced into the role of a lobbyist.

    And so The Merchants of Souls goes on, with the added narrative twist that the tale is told by two narrators sharing a single body. This makes for curious scenes and ellipses, as Giraut may go to sleep just to allow Raimbaut to do his thing (or vice-versa). Hilarity ensues when both of them end up falling for different women. While the mechanics of body-sharing can be a cause for some head-scratching, it adds another layer of interest to a novel that, for a long time, seems to spin its wheels.

    Let’s be clear about this: The Merchants of Souls is never dull, but there are times, especially in the middle third, where it looks as if the plot is just idling and waiting for something to happen. If it’s an intentional ploy, it works remarkably well: When the third act kicks in, it does so with an event so shocking that it sends the novel spinning in another direction entirely. Suddenly, psypyx-drilling becomes a front for something much more dangerous. While this part of the tale isn’t flawless (Barnes can be a bit abrupt and gloss over crucial details when the action starts firing up), it strengthens what had been, up until then, a moderately good but unspectacular SF novel.

    It also made me reconsider a number of things I didn’t initially enjoy about the series. Now that I’ve seen where Barnes intended to go with this book, Earth Made of Glass suddenly feels a lot more appropriate as a step away from the innocence of the first novel. With its juiced-up ending, The Merchants of Souls fulfils its potential and promises much for the fourth volume, The Armies of Memory, which made it in bookstores as I was reading this volume. You can be sure that it’s going on the pile of things to read.

  • Rebel Without a Crew, Robert Rodriguez

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Plume, 1995, 285 pages, C$22.50 tpb, ISBN 0-452-27187-8

    As a certified fan of director Robert Rodriguez (I saw THE FACULTY in theatres; I’ve got ADVENTURES OF LAVA BOY AND SHARK GIRL on DVD), I had meant to pick up his tell-all non-fiction account Rebel Without a Crew for a while. The story of Rodriguez’s 1992 debut EL MARIACHI is now well-known, but anyone who has sat through one of Rodriguez’s entertaining audio commentaries already know that the man can be a show of his own: Who better to tell the story of Rodriguez’s breakout than Rodriguez himself?

    Rebel Without a Crew mostly take the form of a diary detailing Rodriguez’s adventures while making EL MARIACHI, and then what happened to him as he was courted by Hollywood studios. It began as Rodriguez consciously decided to make an ultra-cheap feature film for the Spanish-language video market —as nothing more than a practise movie. Strapped for cash and free time, Rodriguez then volunteered for medical experiments (a thirty days stint in which he hoped to make money and write a screenplay), travelled south of the border and shot an entire film in two weeks without the benefit of a film crew. Most of the film’s $7,000US budget went to pay for the film stock: Rodriguez’s contacts and personal charm helped do the rest.

    Strictly speaking, the story of the making of EL MARIACHI isn’t unique to Rebel Without a Crew. A trip to the local video store will net you the DVD edition of EL MARIACHI, complete with enough special features to give you a complete picture of how the movie was made. In the book, the shooting phase of the film barely takes 17 pages: the real story comes after, as Rodriguez drives himself sick editing the feature on primitive equipment, then goes off to Los Angeles to find a buyer for the feature. But then something very weird happens: thanks to an unbelievable series of coincidences, contacts and a really good film, Rodriguez caught the eye of major studios players. (As the subtitle states, this is How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player) The bulk of the story is seeing Rodriguez negotiate his way to a contract, even as things are grim at home. In a poignant moment, Rodriguez is forced to hock his prized film camera even as the studios are promising him a six-figure contract.

    Then it’s the whirlwind of film festivals, audience acclaim, media frenzy and the unbelievable experience of seeing that $7,000 feature film (suitably sweetened) released nationwide. Day by day, entry by entry, we see Rodriguez stumble upon wild success, bewildered by the changes in his life. As a rag-to-riches story, Rebel Without a Crew is hard to beat. As a look inside the mechanics of the film industry, it’s invaluable. Legend has it that the book has quietly become a cult item for the last generation of independent filmmakers: it’s not hard to see why thanks to Rodriguez’s indefatigable optimism, awe-inspiring determination and personal charm. Much as I defy anyone to listen to Rodriguez’s DVD commentary without feeling admiration for the man, it’s impossible to read Rebel Without a Crew and escape the contact high of a supremely confident artist. Few of us are as brilliant as Rodriguez (who can write, draw, compose and direct), but we can all learn a lesson from his experience.

    (Rodriguez makes it sound relatively easy, but it’s worth remembering that he didn’t get up one morning and decide to make EL MARIACHI: he had been shooting video, drawing and writing since childhood. It’s no accident if EL MARIACHI, even today, feels more self-assured than most of the slick straight-to-video trash you can find in video stores: Rodriguez had already mastered storytelling before shooting his feature film. This may serve to explain why there hasn’t been a glut of Rodriguez-level talent recently despite the wide availability of digital video cameras and material such as Rebel Without a Crew. For extra credits, cinephiles may want to compare Rodriguez’s approach and results with Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma-tic Make Your Own Damn Movie!)

    As a straight-up narrative, Rebel Without a Crew is a great read, even for those without film-making experience or intent. Rodriguez is an enormously likable narrator, and it’s all too easy to root for him as he’s slowly noticed by Hollywood’s hype machine. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending: Today, Rodriguez reigns as a filmmaker at the threshold between niche and popular success. At 38, he already has two successful film trilogies under his belt, a handful of standalone features and seems poised for Tarantino-level stardom with the success of the first SIN CITY film. As if that wasn’t enough, a look at his DVDs shows that he’s making exactly the films he wants to make, with a home-grown studio and a low-budget cleverness that protects him against studio interference. If Rebel Without a Crew, proves something, it’s that it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

  • Wry Martinis, Christopher Buckley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 1997, 294 pages, C$20.00 tpb, ISBN 0-06-097742-6

    April 2005, all told, was a pretty good month for Christopher Buckley: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, the movie based on his 1994 novel, enjoyed a wide release across North American theatres. It may not have been much of a hit, (Budget: $6.5M. Box-office results: $23M), but the associated sale of the novel must have been a nice little bonus. Buckley, of course, is well-known for being a humorist, a journalist and an editor: Those who may know him only through THANK YOU FOR SMOKING may want to have a look at Wry Martinis, his non-fiction collection, to see what else he’s been writing.

    Whimsically illustrated around a Martini theme, Wry Martinis begins with an introduction that purports to describe Buckley’s search for a good collection title, but ends up describing nearly everything in the book before smoothly moving over to the acknowledgements. Subdivided in several sections, Wry Martinis brings together a number of Buckley’s pieces published over twenty years, from the serious to the very, very funny.

    The serious pieces may surprise some: Buckley, after all, is best knows for his satirical novels. But there’s a lot of heartfelt material in Wry Martinis, and some of it is bound to trip readers who are expecting a cover-to-cover laugh riot. The serious material ranges from travel writing (“One Way To Do the Amazon”) to straight-up reportage (“I Visit the Nimitz”) to op-ed (“What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?”). Buckley is never deathly serious, of course, but some pieces do mix real-world material with a keen eye for hyperbole. “Driving Through the Apocalypse” manages to make fun of bodyguard training, while “How I went Nine Gs in a F-16” is a hilarious take-off on a day-trip most of us would pay dearly to experience. Other pieces are more somber, even reflective: “Macho is as Macho does” discusses the trappings of a manly attitude with something approaching melancholy, an interesting reflexion on some of the most testosterone-driven material elsewhere in the book.

    As a mostly reformed fan of Tom Clancy, I thought that one the highlights of the book was the “Homage to Tom Clancy” section, a series of pieces about the author. It begins innocently enough with “The Ego Has Landed”, a mostly-sympathetic piece on Clancy as a new writer in the wake of the boffo success of The Hunt For Red October, and continues in a similarly affectionate vein with “Tired Gun”, a wickedly funny take-off on Clancy’s usual writing style. But Buckely then unsheathes the knives with “Megabashing Japan”, a hilariously mean review of Clancy’s Debt of Honor that hits all of the book’s sore points. This, in turn, leads to “Fax Fire”, the only piece in the book not authored by Buckley: It’s a fluffy newspaper piece detailing the acrimonious exchange of faxes between Clancy and Buckley that followed the publication of the piece (complete with Clancy’s final apology) Taken together, those pieces illustrate Buckley’s strengths in Wry Martinis: a willingness to tip over sacred cows, a ferocious sense of observation and a sense of wit that cuts to the essential.

    As with most humour columnists, the shorter pieces take on a free-form quality that can go from fake new reports to bestseller list parodies. Fans of Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking will enjoy “How I Learned to (Almost) Love the Sin Lobbyists”, a description of the research Buckley undertook to write the book, up to and including portraits of the real-life lobbyists Buckley interviewed for background material. Finally, a number of portraits betray Buckley’s more serious writing, from memories of his mother (“Mom, Fashion Icon”) to a profile of the woman behind “Ann Landers”.

    If there’s an problem with the collection, it’s that it remains a prisoner of the context in which its individual components were written. Topical humour seldom remains relevant for longer than the current issue of the publication in which it appears, and so younger readers may need a refresher on two decade’s worth of cultural icons before making sense of some material in here. (I recommend a healthy usage of Wikipedia for the Reagan years.)

    But all in all, there is a lot to sip in Wry Martinis for both Buckley fans and newcomers. While the inclusion of more serious articles can be surprising to those who know the author solely for his humour pieces, it’s a testimony of Buckley’s writing that the serious pieces can be just as fascinating as the more overly humorous texts.

  • A Paradigm of Earth, Candas Jane Dorsey

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 366 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87796-X

    As regular readers of these reviews already know, I’m not much for fuzzy-huggy Science Fiction that deals with grand statements on what it is to be human. I’ll leave that to others who are fascinated by the idea: they’re probably as uninterested in what does fascinate me, and that’s perfectly okay. Science Fiction is big enough to accommodate all type of readers, and the only mistake lies in criticizing what is obviously best suited for others.

    No, I didn’t expect much from Candas Jane Dorsey’s A Paradigm of Earth: Her previous Black Wine had left me shrugging, and there wasn’t anything in her latest novel’s premise to get me interested. In some way, A Paradigm of Earth is yet another variation on the old “first contact with alien serves to illuminate human nature” SF story. In this case, a dozen alien infants are left on Earth (roughly distributed around the globe) to learn everything they can about humanity. As it happens, one of them ends up in Edmonton, Alberta, where it’s assigned to a social worker named Morgan. Morgan, as it happens, is a woman with a number of unsettled issues: the recent death of both of her parents has left her without any clear goal, and even the vast house she has inherited isn’t much comfort. But when the alien decides that he’d rather stay at her place rather than at the government facilities, she realizes that she’s humanity’s representative… no matter how ill-prepared she feels for it.

    While I can respect the quality of Dorsey’s writing, she is obviously writing for a very, very different type of reader. A Paradigm of Earth is the type of quiet and contemplative story that, most days of the week, would send me running to faster-paced works. But great writers can be recognized in how they can cross boundaries and reach readers of all type, and so I felt myself sucked into A Paradigm of Earth almost despite myself, gradually wondering what would happen next to the characters.

    There is a very comforting Canadian-ness to A Paradigm of Earth, a quiet matter-of-fact quality that seems almost calculated to trump traditional genre expectations. No explosions, no “aliens are going to destroy the planet unless we show them how worthy we are” histrionics. The alien decides to live in a boarding house, and the Prime Minister thinks it’s a splendid idea; how much more Canadian could this novel be? Heck, one of the protagonist is even a bureaucrat with tremendous depth of personality. Despite the murders that pepper the narrative (!), this novel has a comfy feel: call it a “cozy first-contact” novel. Dorsey’s stripped-down style chugs forward despite some plot lulls, leaving no barrier between reader and story.

    Readers of Theodore Sturgeon’s story will feel at home with this book: Though well-labelled as Science Fiction, A Paradigm of Earth uses aliens as an excuse to explore humanity and how they react to this new situation. Love of people permeates this novel from beginning to end. But Dorsey’s slice of humanity, as is happens, is not the type of overachieving clean-cut atomic stereotypes so prevalent elsewhere in SF: They’re a diverse bunch of misfits, rebels and dissidents. Even the policemen and bureaucrats, defenders of the orthodoxy, often prove to be as unusual as their charges.

    Gender issues are raised (the alien has no specific gender, which makes an odd match given Morgan’s own preferences), although the impact of those issues remains diffuse: The quiet intensity of the novel tends to make the gender issues disappear in the background of the novel, as just another piece of the alien’s education. As a reader who’s not particularly interested in gender issues, I remain unsure how I was supposed to be affected by this material, or if I was supposed to have strong reactions to a number of scenes that, to me, just blended with the rest.

    But as I said, I’m not the kind of reader who’s supposed to be enthusiastic about this type of novel. That it worked well enough on me is enough of a compliment: Imagine what an effect if could have on you, if you think you wouldd enjoy this type of stuff!

  • The Summons, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2002, 373 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-24107-3

    For a writer often decried as a populist hack, John Grisham sure stretches his grasp a lot wider than some critics may be willing to acknowledge. After a few debut novels so similar in tone that they made Grisham a sitcom gag, readers were delighted to find a slightly different style following The Rainmaker: Novels that were as much characters studies as social critiques, coming at the “southern legal thriller” label from very different directions. Then came even looser works such as the straight-up family drama A Painted House or the holiday comedy Surviving Christmas. The Summons is another successful entry in Grisham’s post-Rainmaker renaissance, still a southern legal thriller, but with yet another emphasis.

    It starts as law professor Ray Atlee receives a letter: His father, a well-known judge in a small rural Mississippi community, is dying and wants to see his two sons. Summoned to his childhood home, Ray makes two shocking discovery: First, that his father died before he could meet his sons a last time; second, that there are millions of dollars in cash hidden away in the house. Where does the money come from? And who else knows about it? As a comfortable academic, Ray doesn’t really need the money… but it sure would be handy. But it’s not simply a matter of picking up the money and depositing it at the nearest bank: as the threats pile up and the mystery of the money’s origin becomes more dangerous, Ray may have to do a lot of hard thinking in order to keep the money… or his life.

    But there’s more to The Summons than just a thriller about a man and three million untraceable dollars in cash. Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the novel (beyond its awesome page-turning appeal) is how it engages in a moral discussion about money and how it affects people. Ray Atlee is a decent man, but his first thought at the sight of millions of dollars is to hide and keep it all. Potentially complicating his actions are his doubts about the origins of the money: was his father part of a criminal ring? Was he bribed for a decision? Was he holding on to the money for a shadowy acquaintance? As Ray takes stock of his own life (divorced, comfortable, perhaps a bit lonely), the money -even left unspent- starts having an influence. For the reader, a lot of time is spend on the razor’s edge, wondering about Ray’s likability. Much like Scott B. Smith’s A Simple Plan (which is even acknowledged in Chapter 19), The Summons is an attempt to square off morality against or alongside money. Unlike Smith, however, Grisham isn’t so dark or so blunt to assume that money is evil: His thinking leads to a conclusion that twists without snapping believability and brings along an interesting moral reversal. Not since The Partner has Grisham played so well with expectations.

    There are other treats here and there in The Summons, of course: Ray is an amateur pilot, and so we get a glimpse of life at ten thousand feet aboveground. Ray’s brother is what could be called a professional addict, with all the consequences and detox details that this implies. The portrait of the elder Atlee’s lingering influence in a small town is a nice piece of atmosphere that probably owes much to A Painted House. A late-book visit to a multimillionaire lawyer nicknamed “The King of Torts” oozes contempt.

    As a thriller, The Summons isn’t Grisham’s best, but that’s unlikely to be much of a bother: it wouldn’t be a Grisham novel without the author’s usual terrific style. The Summons reads at two hundred pages an hour, propelled forward by an easy prose style, solid structure and a good bunch of characters.

    Still, there is a bothersome aspect to the final revelations, which satisfy on a moral standpoint but leave a lot to be desired in terms of plausibility. Worse; a number of questions about the how of the deception are casually dismissed by a reference to two hoodlums conveniently kept off-stage. After the red herrings raised earlier in the book, it all seems a bit quick, a bit pat in order to bring along the last few pages on which Grisham wanted to end. A slight problem in a book otherwise so fun to read it’s hardly worth the trouble to complain.

    What more satisfying is the constant appreciation of how Grisham is leveraging his strengths and limits into a series of highly enjoyable books. After his blockbuster success during the nineties, it’s good to see that Grisham is still stretching the envelope, still playing along with his chosen areas of expertise, still delivering good entertainment to fans and readers. The Summons may not be anything more than a good thriller, but it’s satisfying enough as it is.

  • Air Battle Force, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2003, 426 pages, C$39.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-009409-5

    Let us resolve, from the onset, that people in the military are, as a group of people, worthy of our admiration. After all, they’re doing dangerous jobs that would make most of us readers cower in helpless fear. Let us also maintain that military hardware is often a thing of beauty, marrying human ingeniousness with fearsome power. (Like power tools, except cooler). Furthermore, let us state blandly that military fiction, when properly written, can combine the best of several traditions, marrying slam-bang adventure with clever commentary on the nature of power and competition between nations.

    This being stated, let’s now turn our attention to why Dale Brown’s Air Battle Force is not just a career low for Brown (which takes some doing after stinkers like Fatal Terrain or Wings of Fire) but is also one of the most inept piece of military fiction I’ve had the misfortune to read so far.

    Most of the book’s problem stem from Brown’s now-ridiculous obsession in continuing a series that should have been put of of its misery a long time ago. Having locked himself far away in his imagined universe, Brown now finds himself unable to engage meaningfully with the issues of the day: Explicitly set in 2003, Air Battle Force declines to even recognize the events of 9/11 (save in the acknowledgements) despite mentioning here and there that the American government has spent years and millions of dollars chasing down the Taliban. Beyond the cartoonish dullness this gives to Brown’s “Air Battle Force” military unit, this refusal to acknowledge contemporary geopolitics betrays an author that may be unable to engage with current reality.

    His skills as a storyteller certainly aren’t improving. While he doesn’t repeat some of Wing of Fire‘s stupidest moments (no nine-year-old PhD. in Air Battle Force), Brown here struggles to even define an exciting story. In boldly examining the US Air Force’s future in unmanned vehicles, Brown has also taken his heroes out of the action. Protagonist Patrick MacLanahan only get in danger once in the prologue, and that’s following Yet Another Dumb Command Move. Otherwise, Brown’s series is becoming a series of fancy technological demonstrations in which the back-room boys look on as their unmanned weapons remotely kick whatever anti-American ass there is to kick.

    This doesn’t help Air Battle Force‘s pacing one tiny bit. For a 426-page novel, not a lot happens: Despite the interesting rumblings of an upcoming presidential campaign between Thorn and Martindale, Brown loses himself (and his readers) in dull back-water geopolitics that can be skipped one chapter at a time. Brown has never been an elegant stylist, but even his low standards are slipping with passages in which character viewpoints switch from one paragraph to the next. Brown has struggled with plot even since Storming Heaven, but Air Battle Force marks an even bigger failure than usual. By the end of the novel, all that remains is the impression of having read an extended prologue to the next novel. Brown shows no sign of actually being willing (let alone able) to fix what’s wrong with his fiction. Even by the undemanding standards of military fiction readers, Brown has reached the bottom of the barrel and seems intent of clawing his way even further down. His characters are as bland as ever and he can’t even write a decent action scene with whatever new toys he has. Add that to his inability to adapt his fiction to the new shape of the real world and one question remains: Why would anyone want to read anything by Dale Brown ever again?

    I have long considered Brown’s post-Hammerheads output as being inferior to what he’s capable of writing (which truly dates us), but now has come the time to consider (reluctantly) that this may be as good as it gets; that Brown will never again be able to write the kind of stuff he did so well earlier in his career. It speaks volume that in sinking lower and lower, Brown has never acquired the kind of inspiring right-wing craziness that now makes Clancy so much fun to read: He has simply become a rambling, boring writer coasting on the laurels of better books long past gone (and possibly a percentage of Dan Brown’s new fans.) I’ve got two more books by Brown on my shelf, bought well before he went in his current death spiral: I can’t wait until I’m done with them.

  • The Snow, Adam Roberts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2004, 297 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07181-8

    Canadians enjoy a worldwide reputation as easygoing, unflappable, even dull people. It’s long been a national contention that our long winter have something to do with this placid nature. Good government and central heating really do sound like excellent ideas in a country that spends at least four months per year in freezing temperatures. But don’t think we can’t be scared out of our wits. If you want to give nightmares to a Canadian, just start talking about a winter that never ends.

    That’s exactly how The Snow begins. Snow starts falling on September 6th… and never stops. Our narrator for most of the novel, Tira Bojani Sahai, is a young English woman of Indian descent that manages to survive the snowfall as London gets buried under a blanket of snow of glacial thickness. Not that the rest of the world has done much better, she finds out once she’s rescued after this harrowing first section: As far as anyone knows, the entire globe is now encased in an icy shell. And yet humanity endures. But to what purpose?

    As the stuff nightmares are made of, The Snow is top-notch. Straight in the conceptual footsteps of J.G. Ballard’s catastrophe novels, Adam Roberts’ fifth novel starts off by killing billions of people. Promising start, delivered with matter-of-fact prose that only makes the horror more obvious. But those of you expecting the hard-SF version of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW may be disappointed: In Roberts’ typical fashion, this is a novel about precariousness, weird environments, unreliable narrators, ludicrous plot twists and unsatisfying developments. As with the author’s previous novels, it’s both lovely and frustrating in equal fashion, praiseworthy and damnable for never doing the expected thing. One thing is for sure: this is not a boring book.

    The narrator alone is a piece of work: While it’s easy to feel a lot of initial empathy for Tira as she struggles through a situation that would kill most of us, latter developments refine her personality in increasingly complex fashion. We come to doubt her narrative, a doubt that is rewarded late in the novel as her unreliability is exposed in a short heartbreaking conversation. As far as characters are concerned, Tira is one of Roberts’ most achieved creation.

    A shame that one can’t be so complimentary about the story that surrounds her. The Snow may be a clever metaphor for many different things, and that’s part of the problem: Readers flail around like Canadians without snowshoes, sucked into a bottomless pile of fluffy stuff.

    Reigning in my runaway metaphors, it suffices to say that The Snow goes nowhere for a while, spends some time describing yet another repressive regime, spends more time doing nothing, backtrack to a current-day narrative (a first for a Roberts novel) then goes on a wild tangent in which the real story behind the real story of the Snow is exposed. The end takes a loony turn that is as endearing (in a “Whee!” fashion) as it seems clobbered out of thin air. Lengthy delirious passages leading to the conclusion don’t do much to prepare anyone for the last few twists.

    By this point, you can figure out that The Snow leaves a scattered impression. Parts of the novel are brilliant, and other parts feel like filler. (A digression about skin colour never quites gels, even as an instance of the narrator’s unreliability) As with most other Roberts novels, there is a hidden narrator between the text and the reader: Here, an unseen censor peppers the text with [Blank] character names and a few [expletive deleted], warning the reader of dire consequences if those top-secret pieces are read by unauthorized personnel. Interesting, although the tell-all epilogue takes away part of the fun.

    In some ways, The Snow is the best thing that Adam Robert has done. The initially endearing narrator, the suffocating first fifty pages, the layering of an unseen layer of interpretation are all top-notch. Heck, even some of the disappointing elements are pure genius. But the final result lacks cohesion even as the novel works overtime to drive readers away. While it’s easy to appreciate Roberts’ constant refusal to do the easy thing, how hard would it be, once in a while, to throw a bone to his audience? Could that explain why, even after a string of disappointing novels, I keep coming back to his stuff in the hope that this, finally, will be his novel that truly satisfies all expectations?

  • Counting Heads, David Marusek

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2005, 336 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31267-0

    2005 has been an embarrassingly good year for high-end science-fiction: Stross’ Accelerando, Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes… Gee! And now, like a cherry on top of an excessively rich sundae, here’s Counting Heads, David Marusek’s long-awaited first novel. While it doesn’t completely live up to its advance expectations, Marusek’s novel is a head-spinner of the first degree, a vision of the future with three times the idea density of other solid SF works. Despite a number of misfires that would doom a lesser novel, it’s also a lot of fun.

    Counting Heads spins rather directly from Marusek’s excellent 1995 novella “We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy.” Slightly revised and included as the first part of the novel, the original story tells of one Samson Harger and his union with an unbelievably powerful woman named Eleanor K. Starke. Ten years after publication, the novella doesn’t seem so fresh (signs of evolving genre expectations, now that people like Charles Stross are writing entire novels in that exuberant style), but it’s still a delight to read. I compared the revised version with the original and the changes, at one searing exception, seem limited to a stream of line-editing corrections that neither add nor subtract much from the 1995 version.

    The real plot of Counting Heads begins nearly thirty years later, as a assassination plot kills off Eleanor and severely wounds her daughter Ellen. In a deliciously intense scene, Ellen’s skull is preserved in its own crash-proof helmet, setting in motion the rest of novel: In a few words, Counting Heads is a treasure hunt in which the prize is Ellen’s cryogenically preserved head.

    But the book can’t be reduced to a few words, because Counting Heads quickly takes on the quality of an amusement park ride. In a world where nanotechnology is a fact of life, life isn’t as easy as you’d expect. Unemployment is prevalent, money is hard to come by, and being poor in a society of abundance can be even more maddening than living in a backward society. (Plus, there are good chances that you’re genetically identical to thousands of other clones bred for personality quirks) The threat of rogue nano-bugs (“blooms”) makes today’s fears about terrorism seem laughable, leading straight to the book’s humourless “HomCom” police forces. Eleanor Starke’s assassination turns out to be the opening salvo of a “correction” among the affluent populations of the novel, with consequences that are still very much in play by the end of the novel.

    Because, oh yeah, Counting Heads is the first volume in a series, even through you’ll find no hints of this anywhere in the book. While the story reaches a resting point of sorts, most overarching threads are left dangling, with the identity of Starke’s enemy still a point of contention by the last page. (Careful readers will have a rough idea of who’s to blame, but there are no definitive answers here.)

    This unfinished quality severely harms the novel’s impact. For all of its clever details, cool ideas and amusing sight-seeing, Counting Heads leaves the impression of an unfinished work. The high-flying virtuosity of Marusek’s speculation carries along its own dangerous possibility: that it may fail in the next instalment, that the ride may not lead anywhere. As it stands Counting Heads‘s last fifty pages betray a lot of movement and not much development: any further evaluation will have to wait until the conclusion, whether it comes in the second volume or much later.

    This makes me hesitant to recommend Counting Heads as a standalone unit. I certainly can’t get enough of that type of Science Fiction, but I freely acknowledge that cool ideas can often overshadow more significant problems in my appreciation of any work of fiction. I’m not sure what less dedicated readers may think of the novel: This is a dense piece of work both conceptually and visually (to save money, the designers crammed an extra 20% of text on every single one of the book’s 336 pages). My unconditional love for the result is, well, unconditional: not everyone will be so taken with the result.

    What is certain, however, is that I’ll be one of the first in line to buy the sequel. Counting Heads may only leave half an impression, but it’s one heck of an impression.

  • Word of Honor, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1985, 738 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-30158-2

    Every book review presents its own special challenge, but taking on Nelson DeMille’s Word of Honor presents challenge of its own. Simply put, this is a book that shouldn’t work. Describing it will send you in a coma and make you wonder how it can possibly be a pleasant reading experience. And yet it is. And yet it works.

    For fans of DeMille’s books, this won’t be much of a surprise: While most of his books could be cut by half without much sacrifice, DeMille seldom deliver anything less than excellent novels. Despite the lengths, the indulgences and the sometimes tepid pacing, DeMille means entertainment. Word of Honor may be a bit less interesting than his other books, but it’s still crackerjack good stuff.

    Writers are often advised to “start the story at the beginning, but no earlier” and the first page of Word of Honor is a textbook example of that axiom as Manhattan middle-manager Ben Tyson sees a fellow commuter reading a nonfiction book about Vietnam. Upon verification, Tyson is in the book, highlighted as a commanding officer who allowed a wartime atrocity.

    And so it begins. The book outrages a segment of the American population and forces the US military brass to do something: before long, Tyson finds himself recalled to duty and in serious danger of being court-martialed. The obvious question, of course, is just what happened back there and then: what is the truth behind those so-called atrocities? Could there be some more to the story than wholesale massacre?

    Of course there is. This is a DeMille novel, after all, and anyone who’s read works such as The General’s Daughter knows that the author can spin quite a yarn from the most ordinary beginnings.

    But frankly, Word of Honor is more about soul-searching than plot. DeMille has been to Vietnam and if his latter Up Country remains a classic exploration of the conflict’s lasting legacy, Word of Honor can be seen as the first draft of his feelings about the war. War makes losers of everyone, seems to be saying DeMille, and there are no statue of limitations on atrocities. Ben Tyson may have become a well-adjusted, moderately successful all-American protagonist after Vietnam, but Word of Honor is the story of consequences for what he’s done. The perfunctory plot is just an excuse to think about what happened and continues to happen.

    Doesn’t sound too riveting, right? Can you imagine more than seven hundred pages of that stuff? Contrarily to other DeMille novel, there aren’t too many crazy twists in here: The story progresses linearly to its conclusion, with the expected revelation late in the book and the protagonist’s just punishment. Even The Explanation, when it comes, seems underwhelming.

    And yet Word of Honor is never boring. DeMille’s natural storytelling abilities are such that every page is a delight, that every character is worth understanding. Tyson may be a bit rough around the edges (the sarcasm so prevalent in DeMille protagonists seems muted here, often taking the form of anger rather than flippancy), but he’s worth caring about throughout his entire odyssey. As a Vietnam novel, it’s tremendously effective.

    This 1985 book has aged a lot, but not in the way you may think. In these brave early days of the twenty-first century, it’s impossible to read without making parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. As with Up Country, reading Word of Honor brings along the certitude that the American invasion of Iraq is another national traume in full bloom: We know that there will be further stories of atrocities in the years to come. We know that in some ways, many people have learned nothing from Vietnam. Word of Honor has not aged in twenty years. If anything, it has become even more current.

    So don’t let the lack of plot of the book discourage you. Just sink into the novel’s easy narration and enjoy, if that’s truly the appropriate feeling, DeMille’s sure-handed storytelling. It’s an unconventional novel, but one that delivers solid satisfaction. It shouldn’t work, but it does so magnificently.

  • Learning the World, Ken Macleod

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2005, 303 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31331-6

    Stories of first contact between humanity and extraterrestrial civilizations have been a staple of the Science Fiction genre ever since the very beginning of the genre. It’s one of SF’s central myth: what happens when different mindsets meet. While the classic “First contact” story usually involved the aliens coming to us (“Take us to your leaders! No, wait, let’s land on the White House front lawn!”), it’s not rare to see the scenario played in reverse: In Vernor Vinge’s Hugo Award-winning A Deepness in the Sky, for instance, a nomadic human delegation encountered the aliens on their own turf, precipitating a technological revolution.

    For better or for worse, Ken MacLeod’s Hugo-nominated Learning the World has a lot of superficial similarities with Vinge’s novel: It, too is a novel of first contact in which the humans are the visiting party. It, too, features a brand of humanity that is almost unrecognizable to us stock humans. It, too, takes a keen interest in the social consequences of first contact. (The title itself comes from the first obvious lesson to be gained from First Contact, and what it means for basic world-view assumptions.)

    But Learning the World is a novel that comes five years after A Deepness in the Sky: It’s much shorter and has a different agenda in mind when comes the time to confront the issues of First Contact. High on its list of priorities is a set of reflections on the Fermi paradox and what it can possibly mean. As a piece of twenty-first century SF, it’s fluent in economics (the humans of the novel think nothing of describing their interactions in financial terms, with a constant impact of how they act and perceive their actions) and is very familiar with the accumulated mass of other First Contact scenarios. (Heck, the industrial-era alien characters are big fans of “engineering fiction”) It doesn’t innovate as much as it revisits a familiar scenario with the latest lingo and plenty of conceptual cross-breeding: the visiting humans, for instance, are genetically modified immortals traveling on a generation starship. As with MacLeod’s other novels, it’s often the details that make the story worthwhile: tantalizing hints of “fast burn” civilizations and of a society indissociable from ultra-capitalism. There are more than a few good laughs as the First Contact scenario escapes all careful planning. Heck, a good chunk of the novel is made of, essentially, blog posts.

    Unfortunately, all of these good bits can’t amount to a spectacular novel. For such a short book, Learning the World is thin on plot: Not much happens in the first half, and the alien viewpoint chapters can often feel superfluous. Most of the novel’s truly interesting material comes in the last few pages, and even then they roll in a casual “hey, isn’t this interesting?” fashion. Heck, there’s an overall lack of danger, of passion from this book: It ends up passing through as a gentle first cozy contact novel featuring entirely rational characters without much at stake. (“Why, yes, we will break up our society… but everything has to be done for tea-time”) Indeed, some of the final plot developments take on a “ha, aren’t humans silly?” quality for which I’ve never had much use. Looking back upon the entire book, I remain surprised at how so much good material can feel so inconsequential: Is it worth asking if a more dynamic writer would be able to make more out of those same ideas? Or should I feel disappointed for feeling so disappointed?

    I’ve had problems with MacLeod’s fiction before (it’s no accident if I hadn’t read anything of his since The Sky Road), and if Learning the World is a bit more accessible than his other books, it still doesn’t give me much reason to be enthusiastic about his fiction. Simply put, Learning the World has the impact of a minor work, with the slight advantage of being a completely standalone novel. MacLeod is a frighteningly smart guy, but this novel reads almost as a half-sketched first draft, with potential for more but a weak execution. It’s been nominated for a Hugo; great news for MacLeod, but there are at least two other better books on the ballot. I’m glad I read it, but no more.

  • Crystal Rain, Tobias Buckell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 351 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31227-1

    So this is the twenty-first century. Doesn’t feel much different from the last one so far, doesn’t it? Still no giant robots, lunar bases or flying cars. But sometimes, things change profoundly even when they don’t seem to. Attitudes evolve. New ideas come in. It may be more important to shift our understanding of the world as it exist than try to change it radically. As a genre, Science Fiction is no exception. While it too is pushing forward, it’s also changing from within, opening up to cultural backgrounds other than plain old white boring Anglo-Saxon roots. Look carefully, and you can see the first young wolves of twenty-first-century Science Fiction, and they’re thinking differently even when they’re following the good old recipes.

    Tobias Buckell, for instance, doesn’t stretch any definition of Science Fiction with his first novel Crystal Rain. A good old rollicking adventure across a primitive landscape littered with relics of a high-tech past, Crystal Rain is not particularly original or innovative. But it it succeeds at what it attempts and benefits from Buckell’s atypical background.

    It all takes place on a planet which, as far as we know in this first volume, is inhabited by two very different civilizations: The dominant Azteca and isolated Nanagada. As the story begins, the Azteca (who, as the name suggests, have pretty much adopted everything from the Aztecs… including ritual sacrifice) launch an invasion against Nanagada’s peaceful peninsula. They’ve got number and ruthlessness on their side, but there’s more to Nanagada than a small militia and a capital at the end of the railways: There’s John deBrun, our protagonist, a man who has managed to rebuild his life after being found at sea without memories. There’s a lot more to him than the simple existence he lives, and events will soon push him from one discovery to another.

    An adventure story in a somewhat pulpish tradition (though with far superior prose), Crystal Rain reads like a bucket of fun. The characters are well-drawn, their adventures rarely let up and there’s a satisfying progression to our understanding of the world they live in. The cover jacket illustration has a man with a hook and a gun, parrots, airships and plenty of colour: the novel inside isn’t much different. The cultural nature of the feud between Nanagada (heavily based on Caribbean culture) and the merciless Azteca is a welcome change of pace that does much to distinguish this novel from other planetary romances. Despite a few beginner’s missteps (such as the explanatory conversation in Chapter Two), Buckell’s writing is crisp and self-assured: Don’t be surprised to wrap up this novel in a single afternoon. One fair warning: Buckell’s characters often speak using broken syntax and while the effect is a pleasant reminder of Caribbean accents, it may be distracting to some.

    Unlike superficially similar novels like Karl Schroeder’s Ventus, Crystal Rain has no aspirations at pushing the SF envelope: It delivers the goods, promises more for the sequel and then stops while it’s still ahead of the game. I’m not too fond of series fiction, but don’t be worried by this volume: There’s a satisfying end to the story in this book even as some of the implications of the background suggest a much larger canvas for latter volumes. The Aztecan gods, for instance, are very real and very inhuman: Nanagada’s centuries-long isolation portends nothing good for the rest of the human race. We’ll probably learn more about it in the sequel. (And hopefully make sense of some details that look like contrivances: The focus of this novel is so tightly focused on Nanagata that it often feels like a series of arbitrary authorial decisions: “See, there’s a chain of Wicked High Mountain here… from one sea to another. Yup. Aztecas had to dig through for a hundred years. Couldn’t go above or beside it. Sea-to-sea mountains. Wicked High Mountains.” Best not to scratch the background too deeply here: just enjoy the adventure.)

    But all told, this is an praiseworthy take on the good old Science Fiction adventure genre, with enough action and gadgets to make this a fun read. It doesn’t do anything new, but it does so well, and thanks to Buckell’s own cultural heritage, provides a setting with a welcome difference from what we’re used to. Others may push back the conceptual limits of SF, but Buckell is changing it from within —making it a more diverse, more accessible, more enjoyable genre. That’s not to dismiss lightly.

  • Digital Fortress, Dan Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1998, 430 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-99542-3

    There it is. Dan Brown’s first book, well before The Da Vinci Code, and the last one of his I still hadn’t read. Closer to Deception Point‘s techno-thriller feel than either one of the Langdon adventures, Digital Fortress is still nonetheless all about codes and how to break them. Unfortunately, it also seems to be about how many stupid mistakes one can stuff in a novel and still claim to have done research.

    You don’t need to know much about the plot, especially if you’ve read other Brown novels: It’s about an unbreakable code, a disabled assassin, a honest man and a honest woman trying to uncover a conspiracy and enough twists and turns to make anyone’s head whiplash. Oh, and it’s also about how, in Brown’s novels, the mentor is always the bad guy. No, seriously.

    But what you do need to know is that the technical details are completely ludicrous. I don’t know much about cryptography, but it doesn’t take much knowledge to realize, not even fifty pages in the novel, that Brown is simply ignoring some of the most fundamental axioms of the field. The idea that you can brute-force any unidentified encryption algorithm without understanding its inner workings is moronic. (Hey, what if they’re using one-time pads, hm?) Cryptography experts will suffer while reading this book, but computer specialists won’t do any better: Brown mis-uses elementary concepts (“virus” instead of “worm”, for instance) and still believes, poor child, that computers can ignite when they overheat. (Free hint: fuses.) And that’s not even talking about the hideous security mechanism that seem to be standard procedure at Brown’s NSA… yow.

    While a number of those details get overturned by latter plot developments, they still don’t make sense in the story’s internal logic: Our characters, super-brainy cryptography experts they are, should know much better: That they let those things pass without comment only serves to highlight plot holes and deliberate authorial mistakes, not clever hints or deliberate gotchas. What’s worse is when the so-called smart characters blindly flail around trying to pierce together clues that are blatantly obvious to the rest of the readers.

    Where those glaring technical problems really hurt is that Brown is trying to position himself as a trustworthy Knower of Stuff, and yet anyone who knows the stuff can clearly see that he’s deliberately making it up. This faux-geek dissonance is enough to break any suspension of disbelief that is a large part of the unspoken pact between reader and writer. You can compare and contrast, if you wish, Brown with authentic nerd-chic authors such as Neal Stephenson: they rarely mess around with the basics, and there’s usually a good reason when they do, as with Cryptonomicon‘s “Finux”.

    If you do get past the nonsensical technical details, the novel isn’t particularly well-written or refined. Plot-wise, it seems to be made up of random plot beats taken out of a hat, regardless of sense and plausibility. It just keeps going on until the very last page, which features a “twist” that serves no purpose whatsoever. As far a characters are concerned, it’s all surfaces and clichés: If you want fat Germans tourists, obese computer hackers, well-groomed university teachers and workaholic spinsters, don’t look any further than this book.

    But I’ll give one thing to Brown: Like his other novels, Digital Fortress is impossible to drop down once it starts heating up. The short chapters carry along a delicious sense of “just one more…” compulsiveness and Brown’s habit of ending them in false cliffhangers is crudely effective. (One eventually gets the sense that Digital Fortress is plotted like those cheap comic books, with a page ending with “Look out!” and the next one continuing “…isn’t that a pretty flower?”) Brown may have a number of faults, but creating forward momentum is one of his strengths. The writing is simple, the prose is uncomplicated and to undiscerning eyes, the techno-babble must sound impressive. (Much like, I fear to think, the historico-babble in The Da Vinci Code sounded plausible to me.)

    It’s unfair to point out that the book flopped when it first came out in 1998 and that it only lives on today on the coattails of its far more famous sibling. And yet I have to wonder who was the original audience for the book: Clumsily written down to what seems to be a broader audience, Digital Fortress is untenable for technical readers, and barely-palatable to techno-thriller fans who know enough about this stuff. (You can’t seriously try to sell the NSA as an ultra-secretive organization to thriller readers; that Brown tries to do so on page 9 either smacks of naiveté or condescension.) But, hey, it’s by that guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code!

  • Polystom, Adam Roberts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2003, 294 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07179-6

    Part of the reason why I’m still blathering reviews on this web site after ten years (what, you didn’t notice our ten-year anniversary? Aw.) is that I remain fascinated by the mysteries of reading. I’m not an overly analytical reader, so I always end up discussing a variation on So, how much did I like it? Even after years of voracious reading, there are always a few surprises in store. For instance, why I can go nuts for dull thrillers that don’t do anything new (see above for John Grisham) yet feel dissatisfied by ambitious novels.

    Which brings us to Adam Roberts’ Polystom.

    I’ve been following Roberts’ work with some interest this far: Salt On Stone were imperfect novels, but short and quirky enough to warrant a bit of admiration. Additionally, Roberts is a keen critic (I still haven’t found any of his paper-based critical essays, but his annual examinations of the Clarke Awards short-list for Infinity Plus are always a joy to read) and his pseudonymous work writing literary parodies such as The McAtrix Derided are simply a lot of fun. Would Polystom be Roberts’ big breakout novel?

    No.

    Under a different form, it could have been Robert’s big breakout short story. But as it stands, it’s simply too problematic to be anything more than a disappointment.

    Oh, the setup is interesting. Taking place in an alternate pocket solar system where the rules of physics allow air travel between planets and moon, the world of Polystom is one that seems charmingly stuck between Victorian England and World War One. Our eponymous hero is one of the upper classes, owner of a vast estate and absolute master over a population of servants. But Polystom is an unlucky fellow even in love: his new wife turns out to be unbalanced (though what part Polystom plays in the unbalancing is left to the reader) and the marriage flounders. Further shocks are to come when his uncle, a genius-level scientist, is murdered by parties unknown. Soon enough, Polystom finds himself stuck on Mudworld, dodging bullets and leading his own servants to serve as cannon fodder.

    If the above sounds interesting, reflect upon the fact that it’s about as exciting as the novel ever gets. Some novels draw in their readers from the first few pages and never let go; others tempt the audience with cryptic events that will hopefully make sense later on: Polystom is definitely in that second category, though it doesn’t exactly make sense once it’s all over. Worse; it’s actively disjointed. Consciously divided in three parts, Polystom moves from love to murder to war with picaresque abandon, only to end with a metaphysical twist that is not without raising memories of The Robertski Brothers’ work. I don’t begrudge the final twist: the four pages appendix is a neat little literary/scientific joke, easily the most amusing thing about Polystom. But said twist can seem to exist simply to distract our attention from all the frayed threads: One gets the mental image of confronting Roberts with explanations, only to be answered by “Oh, look at that comet!”

    There is another possibility, of course, one that I am far too proud to consider at length: that all the answers are there, that Polystom is a tight little piece of literary Science Fiction and that I’m simply too dull/stupid/ignorant to get the references. Maybe the hand-shaped hole means something. Maybe the uncle/father slip-up means something (well, beyond the obvious). Maybe the names are all highly significant in a literary tradition I’m ill-equipped to follow. Maybe the late-third ghosts all make perfect sense. Maybe the metaphysical twist brilliantly ties everything together. Maybe.

    But my first feeling after closing the last pages of the book is that Polystom is the chatty first draft of something else. That Cleonicles’s info-dump is a clumsy re-thread of On‘s wizardly explanations, although without that book’s interesting adventures. I’m glad to see that Adams’ usual world-building prowesses and gentle stylistic experimentation are back, but I’m sorry to find out that they’re not used to significant impact. And that’s too bad, because I keep hoping that Adams will turn out a book that I will be able to enjoy whole-heartedly. As it stands, I’m still partial to Salt and Stone: Maybe The Snow will be a step in the right direction.