Book Review

  • 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.

  • The Street Lawyer, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Island, 1998, 452 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-29565-3

    Oh, that wily John Grisham. That clever, manipulative, populist, puppy-like John Grisham. No wonder why he’s said to be one of the nicest guys in the business. No wonder why he sells books by the truckload. No wonder why he’s been at the top of the game for ten years.

    A flat description of The Street Lawyer would make you shake your head in sorrow: It’s about a young lawyer! Who rebels against the system! And sues big bad corporations on behalf of the people! And fights crime! It’s like all the other John Grisham novels ever published so far! It’s packed with coincidences, familiar plot structures and an ending you can see coming from half the book away! Plus, it’s written with short sentences and a vocabulary of less than a thousand words: it’s guaranteed to be understandable by 95% of reading-age Americans!

    But boy, does it work.

    Forget your yearnings for fine literature, break out that Nietzsche dust jacket you use to camouflage your commuting reading and jump head-first in The Street Lawyer. You will know within pages if this is going to be a good ride.

    It certainly starts on a high note, as our young lawyer protagonist is taken hostage by a homeless man with a grudge against his legal firm. The siege soon ends thanks to the timely intervention of a sniper, but the impact lingers on for our protagonist who, thanks to a hideous series of coincidences we rarely see outside the movies, finds himself divorced, laid-off and somewhat on the run. Tell no one, but The Street Lawyer is a keenly disguised mainstream novel about a character undergoing a major life crisis: dissatisfied by his money-grubbing career, he descends through society to find himself helping the poor through his mad legal skillz. A street lawyer is born, but this being a Grisham novel, you can bet that there’s a major civil lawsuit just waiting to make an appearance. Will our hero find a way to stick it to the man, help improve his city and find love in entirely expected places? Well of course: we wouldn’t have it any other way.

    The Street Lawyer is a cleverly manufactured book that gives us exactly what we expect, and it’s hard to disrespect something like that. Every step of the character’s changing life is carefully telegraphed, described and significant: If it takes a random car accident to make sure that the protagonist finds himself painted in a corner, well, why not? But what could have been exasperating in the hands of a different writer here comes across as par for the course. The attraction of the book is not in its conclusion, but in the way it hits the appropriate beats with exact timing.

    It helps a lot that the writing is so crisp. Many of Grisham’s contemporaries could learn from the way he shapes his scenes and consciously avoids any stylistic flourish: the non-nonsense first-person narration echoes The Rainmaker, while the interest in an odd corner of the law (here, lawyers for the very poor) recalls his previous Runaway Jury (though without the intensity of that previous work.) Here again, we find dozens of small and telling details about the life of an everyday lawyer, bolstered with eloquent pleas in favour of greater social equality. (But not too eloquent: In a telling scene, the protagonist finds himself commiserating with a homeless man whose life story suggests that homelessness can happen to anyone… only to find that he’s a fake.)

    Compared to previous Grisham novels, The Street Lawyer fits comfortably in the middle of the pack: It doesn’t have the clockwork elegance of The Partner, but remains more polished than Grisham’s first few books. What’s obvious, though, is that Grisham will have a long and successful career as long as he can keep delivering books like this one. The point is not that he’s better than other writers working in the same field (you and I can both name at least a dozen authors who somehow “deserve” as much success), but that he can deliver what’s expected of him, year after year. As far as I’m concerned, this is another successful entry in Grisham’s post-Runaway Jury revival: Expect more reviews of his books here, continuing with The Kings of Torts.

  • Grave Secrets, Kathy Reichs

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 2002, 366 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-02838-3

    Condemning with faint praise is a favourite sport of reviewers everywhere, and so let us start by saying that I come to talk about Kathy Reichs’s fifth novel with no intention of burying it. For once.

    It’s no secret that I’m not Reich’s biggest fan: After a promising start in Deja Dead, Reich’s next few novels took a rapid turn for the worse, repeating themselves and ripping off headlines with less than admirable grace. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and so it grew tiresome to see Quebec-area headlines being recycled almost wholesale in her novels. Worse yet was Reich’s lazy approach to plotting, in which newly-introduced relatives of the heroine inevitably found themselves in mortal peril before the end of every single novel. There were other things too, but my memory has since thankfully blanked them out.

    So imagine my surprise in saying that Grave Secrets is not entirely horrible.

    For one thing, Reich leaves Quebec to set her story mostly in Guatemala. This is not a sudden abandonment of her “stealing from real-life” strategy as much as it’s a displacement: Reichs (for all her flaws as a writer) is a real-life forensic anthropologist, and she has worked in Central America to resolve past crimes through cadaver examination. From a French-Canadian perspective, it makes her fiction just a touch stranger, and stronger for it. (On the other hand, Guatemalans are probably reading her stuff and shaking their heads in much the same way that Quebecers are wont to do with her previous novels.)

    What Reich’s perennial narrator/protagonist Temperance Brennan discovers in Guatemala, beyond the ubiquitous maggoty corpses, is evidence of a small-scale conspiracy. Expression-du-jour “stem cells” is brought up and then never go away, along with the expected stuff about conspiracies in high places, abusive local officials, a Canadian connection and a small trip back to Montreal that actually feels refreshing in the middle of the rest. The protagonists’ so-called love life is once again unearthed as a fake source of sexual tension that is as ridiculous as it’s ineffective. Unsurprisingly, Brennan finds out that her police partner in Guatemala turns out to be (hear this!) an old high-school chum of her perennial lust interest Andrew Ryan. No less.

    But that last clumsy misstep aside, Grave Secrets at least has the decency to avoid actively insulting its readers’ intelligence with nonsensical developments. The superficial thriller mechanics are in place, and Brennan’s own moment in jeopardy late in the novel is feebly justified, but mercifully brief. The techno-thriller part of the plot is too obvious to be credible –and comes along with a half-hearted defence of Bush’s stem-cell ban.

    Still, it’s worth noting that “not being bad” is still some distance away from “being good”. In this case, we still get a novel that’s far too chatty for its own good (often inanely so, especially when it comes to the attempt at a romantic sub-plot), erring in too many red herrings and the usual contrivances.

    Reich may have produced a novel that doesn’t make me want to claw my own brain out, but Grave Secrets will not be mistaken for anything more than an average piece of criminal fiction. Beyond the premise, the different setting and the broad strokes of the plot (not to mention the convenient coincidences), there isn’t much worth remembering in the novel. You may argue that rapid forgetfulness is the best that Reich can hope for at this point in her career, is it not better to be talked about badly than not talked about at all? All I know is that I’ve got an entire bookcase of books to read, and there’s not a single Reichs left in it.

  • Wings of Fire, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 2002, 446 pages, C$37.99 hc, ISBN 0-399-14860-4

    The problem with Dale Brown’s work is not that it’s incompetent: The problem with Dale Brown’s work is how inferior it is to what he’s capable of writing. Wings of Fire, for instance, is a frustrating mixture of the good, the bad and the silly. Brown has a few good ideas, but wastes them in a story that struggles to be interesting.

    While I’ve often criticized military thrillers for being inextricably tied to American foreign policy, I had forgotten to consider the alternative: American military forces fighting a meaningless made-up conflict between two other countries we struggle to care about. Here, Libya takes on Egypt for oil interest, but Brown tips the scale by making Libya’s leader (not Qaddafi) a fundamentalist poseur and Egypt’s president a beautiful Egyptian/American ex-fighter pilot with a background in intelligence operations. Uh-huh. Not that this is the most unlikely character in the novel: Ubergeek protagonist Jon Master here faces his match thanks to a precocious nine-year old with a bunch of doctorates. If you’re laughing, just wait until she gets to teach Masters about the finer points of high-energy physics: The dialogues alone are fit to make you howl (or hurl). Or at least seriously consider whether Brown is just screwing with his readership.

    As usual, most of the problems stem from Brown’s insistence in continuing a dead-end series that has gone on for too long: The accumulated weight of the series’ established continuity is now so burdensome that Brown has to cheat and selectively forget elements of his background to raise dramatic stakes. A subcutaneous gadget allowing personal private communications between protagonists of the series is conveniently forgotten, except in one scene where the president thinks nothing about chatting up protagonist Patrick MacLanahan for a while. Alas, other gadgets are not so quickly forgotten: The quasi-magical “Tin Man” armour suit is almost always on-screen, recycling a one-book idea far past the point of no return. All of Wings of Fire, of course, is supposed to take place somewhere near 2002. Readers won’t be surprised to learn that despite a mention in the book’s dedication, there is no mention, nor even an acknowledgement of the events of September 2001. We’ll have to read the next book in the series to be sure, but it’s entirely possible that Brown’s has retreated so far in his imagined universe of super-powered gadgets that even the real world won’t be able to reach him.

    And that raises a paradox: Brown has seldom been better than while being profoundly unrealistic: Re-read Day of the Cheetah or Silver Tower for proof. And yet he here manages to make even the extraordinary seem commonplace: Airborne lasers vapourizing anything in sight? Bah, whatever. It doesn’t help that Brown seems to have forgotten how to write dramatic action scenes: Most of his books are now taken up by gadget demonstrations in which the character just gosh themselves to contentment by staring googly-eyed at the destruction they’ve wrought.

    To raise dramatic tension in the middle of this snore-fest, Brown kills off a few character, wasting what could have been affecting moment in Patrick MacLanahan’s evolution to a few throwaway scenes lost in the desert. It struck me that even as Brown seems to be writing his novels on autopilot, I’m reading them through similar inertia. The problem is that I’ve long since stopped caring about any of the characters: killing those faceless names just doesn’t do anything, even if I find myself thinking that they deserved a better send-off than what happens to them in a book as insubstantial as Wings of Fire. The last Brown novel to kill off main characters was Fatal Terrain: It may not be a coincidence that it was also the worst Brown novel until Wings of Fire.

    I’m skipping over a lot of my problems with the book just because I don’t want to bore you even further with the details. There’s the silly presidential stuff; the unrealistic depiction of middle-eastern politics; the padded narrative; the lazy approach to characterization (once, just once, I’d like to see a foreign leader whose moral alignment is not rigidly mapped to their attitude toward American hegemony. Just once.); the lack of soul-searching from our mercenary heroes; the casual use of neutron bombs; bad dialogues; and so on. What’s worth remembering is that this is an unremarkable novel, even by Brown’s increasingly indistinguishable standards. Given how tightly integrated it is to his previous Warrior Class, only self-identified Brown fans will get anything out of the book –and dissatisfaction is likely to be what they’ll take away from it.

  • Make Your Own Damn Movie!, Lloyd Kaufman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2003, 329 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-312-28864-6

    In the world of independent, low-budget cinema, Troma enjoys a solid reputation as, well, a purveyor of schlock. It specializes in films made on a shoestring and often regrettably unbridled imagination. Troma’s subject matter, as the name suggests, is not for everyone, though everyone will be offended at one point or another: Grotesque monsters, nude actresses, gory violence and foul subject matter are where Troma films start: it may be best not to imagine where they end. You may not have seen any of Troma’s films (indeed, I had to seek them out to see what the fuss was all about), but don’t feel too bad about it: Troma’s entire business strategy is to gain a cult following, not mainstream acclaim. If SOUTH PARK is too rough for you, then consider that Matt Stone and Tray Parker’s CANNIBAL: THE MUSICAL is one of the tamest things in Troma’s distribution inventory.

    But you don’t have to know Troma, or even to enjoy it in order to get quite a kick out of Make Your Own Damn Movie!, an inspirational tutorial on how to make your own low-budget film. Troma owner/director Lloyd Kaufman has more than thirty year’s worth of experience in the field, and every single page of the book contains some hard-won experience that is of interest to any amateur filmmaker: Far from Hollywood’s excess, most film-making is a matter of sweat and perseverance, not star trailers and personal assistants. You don’t need to be anywhere near New York or Los Angeles to pick up a video camera and make your own damn movie… and that’s the point of the book.

    Co-written with Adam Janhke and Trent Hagar (who both play the role of long-suffering assistants to Kaufman’s dictatorial megalomania), Make Your Own Damn Movie! is far, far away from a dry film-making tutorial. Thanks to Troma’s patented tastelessness, the book is crammed with unsavoury allusions, bad language, rollicking anecdotes and a parade of jokes. From a relatively solid structure and useful advice, Kaufman and company have crafted a compulsively readable homage to low-budget film-making. While I can guess that the pressures of making a film on a nonexistent budget aren’t always a treat (let’s just say that the making-of documentaries on Troma films can be more harrowing than the movies themselves), they make for excellent conversation points, and the chatty style of the book makes it hard to stop reading.

    Now, don’t worry: I have no intention of making my own damn movie. But I do enjoy looking at the inner workings of cinema, and Make Your Own Damn Movie! carries its own weight as an unflinching examination of the lower rungs of movie-making. While DVD special features have been a blessing in looking behind the scenes of major Hollywood productions, those studio films are only a tiny percentage of the total number of films made every year. Most productions do end up like a Troma shoot: tiny budgets, ill-paid cast and crew, baling-twine production values and a rushed schedule designed for nervous breakdowns. Make Your Own Damn Movie! may be cracking wise with jokes and masochistic suffering, but it’s a great deal more realistic than the average Hollywood shoot. As an insight in what goes into making average films, it’s invaluable.

    It’s also uniquely inspiring for any aspiring filmmaker: By the end of the film, even I felt empowered to grab a digital camera and go shoot a first reel. (Fortunately, I reminded myself in time that all I want to do is write.) For cinephiles, Make Your Own Damn Movie!‘s vivid writing is a pure treat, and possibly the beginning of an invigorating discussion. Low-budget filmmakers, having nothing to lose from current conditions, are constantly looking for the next technological innovation. So it comes naturally that among many other things, Kaufman and Haaga entertain a book-long argument about the merits of digital video (which hilariously devolves into name-calling) and Kaufman offers a worthy digression on the current state of copyright and the studio’s overreaction to digital file-trading.

    Of course, the book is also a good promotional pitch for Troma movies. But while you may or may not like Troma’s offerings, there is a lot more to this book than make-up tips on how to fake gory effects. Every page contains a joke, a minor revelation, a fun anecdote and a tip to make you own damn movie: it’s impossible to resist.

  • Free Fall, Kyle Mills

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 2000, 466 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-109802-7

    At first glance, there really isn’t much to distinguish Free Fall from dozens of other run-of-the-mill thrillers. Here’s a presidential campaign; here’s a young woman targeted by a conspiracy; here’s a renegade policeman who breaks all the rules; here’s a top-secret document that contains explosive secrets. No, Free Fall isn’t particularly original: from crooked politicians to evil henchmen, it uses stock elements from Central Plotting.

    But why be original when you can be good?

    The magic words on the cover are “Kyle Mills”: While I haven’t been enthusiastic about any of his books (Heck, I felt so indifferent about his Burn Factor that I filed it in my library without reviewing it), there’s a better-than-average quality to his work that’s hard to dismiss. Rising Phoenix had a fascinating premise about poisoning America’s drug supply, while Storming Heaven involved a conspiracy from a sect that was not called Scientology. But those starting points were backed-up by a solid execution, most notably in the characterization of series protagonist Mark Beamon. While the only distinctive thing about Free Fall‘s premise may be the MacGuffin (Hoover’s secret FBI files), Beamon is back here in a third instalment that builds upon the strengths and consequences of his previous adventures.

    I know that I’ve been hard on some thriller authors for endlessly recycling their heroes in adventure after adventure. Most of the time, there is a solid basis to that complaint: All too often, the authors reset all or part of their universe from one book from another, trying to leech off their protagonist’s popularity without dealing with the consequences of their actions. But Mills won’t have it like that: The consequences of Storming Heaven are a big part in Free Fall‘s setup as Beamon starts this novel under the glare of public scrutiny (including the federal government) for his role in the leak of dozens of very damaging telephone conversations. His reputation at the bureau both destroyed and enhanced thanks to the events of the previous novel. Part of the fun in Free Fall is seeing him exploit and suffer from his fame. Now that’s how to continue a series.

    Mills’ typical gift for characterization and his keen sense of politics also help him flesh out the essential dynamics of the novel to a better extent than many of his colleagues: Beamon is exceptional as a series hero, believably intuitive and clever enough to think his way out of trouble with a certain hangdog style. Meanwhile, Free Fall earns the distinction of portraying a corrupt politician in a way that almost seems refreshing. As a third-party presidential candidate, it’s easy to guess that David Hallorin is a bad guy (it almost always ends up that way in American political fiction), but Mills is frighteningly good in portraying the mechanics of demagoguery: Hallorin’s official speeches and policies don’t sound bad at all. Even better: The last few pages of Free Fall are a neat little trick of political complexity, pitting unpleasant characters against each other not in order to secure a win, but to balance out the evils in the hope that everything will hold together just a bit longer. For those who think that “final solutions” (often in the form of a bullet) are an overused tool of suspense novels, this is nothing short of a lovely cap to a satisfying novel.

    But more than individual coups, it’s the way that Free Fall is put together, often surprising and keeping us off-balance, that makes it all worthwhile. There are coincidences, stereotypes, abrupt reversals, conventional mechanics and overused ideas, but they’re put together and tweaked just so that they appear almost afresh. The dialogues alone are better than average. It also helps that Mills’ own pet obsessions are featured in the novel: A rock climber himself, Mills has included a number of mountaineering scenes in Free Fall and if it’s often difficult to visualize the mountaineering action, it’s described with such crackling passion that even the fuzziness doesn’t matter.

    Written like a rocket, with enough suspense both visceral and intellectual, Free Fall is enough to make me wonder why I haven’t looked for any of Mills’ last few novels. While it doesn’t carry with itself the electric shock of a thriller packed with innovations, it’s more than able to play with preexisting conventions. Don’t be surprised to find yourself reading it after hours.

  • The Dark Wing, Walter F. Hunt

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 468 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34069-0

    [January 2007: I wrote the following while cranky. This is one of those reviews that tell you more about the reviewer than the work being discussed. While I stand behind my disappointment with the novel, I acknowledge that the sarcastic riffs below are unfair to the author.]

    Now here’s an interesting achievement: A military Science Fiction novel that isn’t, and a book with plenty of annoyances that somehow kept my interest until its increasingly dull ending. I still wonder how that happened.

    At first glance, Walter F. Hunt’s The Dark Wing is straight-up military SF with all the obvious clichés of the sub-genre: Bad aliens, imperial government, military heroes, big space navies and so on. Comparisons with the Honor Harrington series are too obvious: It took an entire sub-genre to raise this novel, and at first there isn’t much to distinguish it from countless other run-of-the-mill SF adventures.

    The imperial system of government is particularly grating, especially given how it seems to accompany every single “space navy” series: To heck with representative democracy! One yearns for Victorian England all over again as the good old macho way of fighting wars. But that’s also lazy wordbuilding: Why bother with the complex accountability mechanisms build into our modern governance systems when it’s much, much easier to set up an emperor thanks to some nebulous historical event, and give that emperor a big shiny navy to play with? No one will be surprised to learn that right-wing politics are also featured as a necessary plot point: As The Dark Wing begins, those pesky unreasonable aliens have just invaded human space again, thanks to the wussy “peace agreements” signed by the cowardly hippie politicians, clearly showing that the only good alien is a dead alien. This is familiar to the point on contemptuousness, especially when an admiral is tasked with the final solution: complete xenocide to get rid of the problem. Hey, it’s the only way to be sure.

    But The Dark Wing is a long book. A very long book. Eventually, most of the novel’s early assumptions are overturned. The human campaign of extermination against the aliens, for instance, is entirely too successful, leading the aliens to believe that a long-held prophecy is taking shape. (…sigh… what is it with those alien prophecies in SF? Heck, what is it with those nice square alien monolithic societies in which pretty much every single alien believes the same thing, without any differences in sub-culture, age or education?) Before you know it, the human characters have to play nice so that the entire alien race (no kidding: the entire alien race) don’t commit ritual suicide out of dishonoured spite.

    More alien characters also mean more alien passages with nouns that seem randomly pecked on the keyboard. I often speed-read those passages and this habit didn’t do me any harm in The Dark Wing, where dozens of pages are wasted on things that could be summarized far more interestingly from the human point of view. (I call it the italics skip: If it’s longer than two or three lines and it’s in italics, chances are that it’s not useful material, probably duplicates the human-side information and can thus be skimmed with minimal loss of context.)

    Of course, the more the aliens become familiar, the less the author will be willing to blast the living smithereens out of them. And in an unusual switch from my usual goody-goody yearnings, I ended up mourning this lack of xenocide. I’ve read enough stories in the past in which big bad aliens suddenly become our fuzzy friends that I’m in the market for a novel that promises and delivers a full, undiluted, even-the-alien-dogs-and-chickens massacre. If they’re so bad, let them stay bad and let’s indulge in our basest instinct of extermination. Worked against the Neanderthals, I believe: let’s try it again.

    (Oh yes, I’m being inconsistent in the very same review. Try it; it’s pure joy.)

    To heck with Ender’s guilt, to heck with my objections to standard military SF: Let’s kill some bugs. But then the novel has this wonderful moment in which part of the rug is pulled under our feet, and all we’re left wondering is What, what? What just happened here? How is that possible? Lighting-fast reflexes of deduction honed by years of reading SF quickly allow us to deduce that there’s a third player in this game, one pulling off a neat game of solitaire with humans and aliens as puppets. This is also the point where The Dark Wing switches gears from military to mystical –not a switch that I fully endorse (I use “mystical” as a reliable synonym for “gibberish”), but one that certainly realigns the novel in another direction.

    But that direction is to be found in another novel, because for all of the book’s 450+ pages, its latter half grinds to an anticlimactic halt. It all becomes setup not just for another volume, but for three more books in a series that may or may not end there. At this point, I just don’t know if I’m tempted to go further. The story so far has too many twists and turns to dismiss out of hand. But the annoyances are real (if contradictory) and I doubt that they’ll smooth over in the course of a four book series. What little I’ve read about the other books doesn’t inspire confidence either. I suppose I’ll let the power of used book sales guide me in making a decision…

  • The Ghost Brigades, John Scalzi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2006, 317 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31502-5

    Writer/blogger John Scalzi made quite a splash in early 2005 with the release of Old Man’s War, a straight-up military Science Fiction novel that went on to very successful sales and favourable critical acclaim. Barely a year later, the sequel The Ghost Brigades is already available on bookstore shelves, raising all sorts of questions about Scalzi’s superhuman writing skills.

    Not the least of which is “how does he manage to keep it up?” Old Man’s War wasn’t cutting-edge SF, but it could boast of compulsively readable prose and a roaring rhythm. At a time where unputdownable is as overused as it’s ungrammatical, Scalzi is the real deal: someone who can deliver a fast, fun SF story that remains accessible and doesn’t take you for an idiot. With Old Man’s War, he showed that he could do it once; with The Ghost Brigades, he proves that he can do it again.

    Set in the same universe as Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades takes a step deeper into the inner workings of the Colonial Defence Forces first introduced in the earlier book. A minor character gets a more substantial supporting part here, though the hero is entirely new in more ways than one: Jared Dirac is a force-grown clone, originally meant for a top-secret imprinting experiment, but then recycled in the CDF’s special forces . Meant to be someone else, he has to confront who he’s supposed to become.

    While The Ghost Brigades can’t duplicate the delicious feeling of discovery that so characterized Old Man’s War (this time, we’re familiar with the universe and with Scalzi himself), it’s easily just as good in terms of narrative efficiency: Jared’s training is less military than social, and his subsequent combat adventures are enhanced by a different personal dimension than Old Man’s War‘s John Perry. Scalzi is skilled in quickly raising a number of issues related to his chosen theme of identity and consciousness: while some of them will feel old-hat to a number of veteran SF readers, they’re discussed so briefly that they don’t linger too long..

    As is the case with nearly all of Scalzi’s writing to date (and here I’m lumping together his fiction alongside things like his blog and The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies), the prose is crystal-clear. Moments of humour are well-handled, along with a number of sly reversals —such as a good part of the first chapter. But don’t think that The Ghost Brigade is one big funny romp: One of the most satisfying aspects of the book is how it explores the darker side of the series’ universe, with its unforgiving realities (ie; let’s kill them before they kill us) and complicated politics. Doubts are raised as to the righteousness of the CDF (and never quite dismissed), simultaneously taking in account some of my problems with Old Man’s War and showing the way toward a third volume in the series.

    Scalzi shows a good grasp of the genre’s gadgets and conventions, acknowledging a number of authors here and there while manipulating techno-military jargon with fluid ease. It’s important to note that Scalzi, while immensely respectful of the military, doesn’t share the rigid right-wing politics of many military SF writers: As a result, his fiction is filled with nuances and caveats that simply make it more interesting to read. Alternatives are discussed and characters genuinely anguish over their actions. As a result, even liberals come to understand when it’s time to lock up any doubts and fire at full automatic.

    As good as it is, The Ghost Brigades comes with a few caveats: It is a bit on the thin side and may be more appropriate as a paperback than a full-price hardcover. As entertaining as it is, it also raises an interesting question: When will Scalzi try his hand at a more ambitious project? As coldbloodedly professional as he appears to be in his approach to his career, I doubt that he will suddenly drop everything else to produce an insanely ambitious 500-page work of art ready to challenge, say, Ian McDonald’s River of Gods. But I wonder. I wonder because I’ve seen what he’s capable of doing (twice) and I can’t wait to see him tackle bigger and better things.

  • The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Torch, 2001, 502 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-81860-4

    I approached Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion by reminding myself of the old conundrum about an irresistible force encountering an immovable object. Regular readers know that I’m not a fan of generic fantasy. Books in that genre first have to convince me to overcome my usual prejudices and only then can they start being evaluated on their own merits. On the other hand there’s Lois McMaster Bujold, who has rarely written something I haven’t liked. Even her most ordinary efforts, like Diplomatic Immunity, are comfortably above the average SF novel. She masters characterization like few others and her prose style is so smooth as to be irresistible.

    And yet, most of her fiction output has been set in the “Miles Vorkosigan” SF universe. How would she do in a brand-new setting? While The Curse of Chalion is not her first foray in full-length fantasy (her little-known novel The Spirit Ring claims that honour), it seemed to mark not just a change of genre, but a new step in her career. (From Baen, she switched to Harper Collins for this novel and all latter ones; plans to return to Baen and Miles Vorkosigan, are as of yet unknown). So how did she do? How did I do?

    Turn out that the immovable object was moved: The Curse of Chalion easily overcame my usual objections against fantasy in mere pages, and got better as it continued. It starts and ends with great characters; the rest naturally takes care of itself.

    The standout hero of this story is Cazaril, an experienced warrior with plenty of scars: Abandoned by his own side, he returns to familiar grounds as the story opens, trying to find a new place for himself with scarcely nothing more than rags on his back. Fortunately (and “fortunately” is a word that plays heavily in a story dominated by gods), he still has a few friends: Before long, he finds himself assigned to be secretary-tutor to a princess. But there is a reason why his own side left him rotting in a foreign country: secrets that influential people still don’t want made public…

    For its first half, The Curse of Chalion isn’t much more than palace intrigue with fantasy trappings. I write this as if it’s a bad thing, but it means a compulsively readable thriller thanks to Bujold’s capable hands. Cazaril is many things, but he is first a dependable character: The novel revolves around him (indeed, he’s the only viewpoint character) because he’s such a bedrock of common sense. Strong, battered, seasoned to the point of flippancy against impossible odds, he makes his choices and sticks to them whatever the consequences. It’s page-turning stuff, even if the “fantasy” label seems a bit weak.

    And then something quite wonderful happens, turning the entire novel into something else. It’s not really a twist given how we don’t learn anything that overturns previous assumptions. But The Curse of Chalion suddenly delves far more deeply into the nature of its mythology, with very real religions and associated magical powers. Cazaril himself is transformed by this turning point, elevated to a position that is at odds with everything he’s known this far. And yet, he keeps pushing back, always fighting for what he swore to do. Romantic themes are gradually weaved into the story, alongside some more intrigue and high-level strategy. It ends as you may wish for, with a battle and a triumph.

    Still, I remains of two minds about the book’s (over)use of chance and coincidence as plot drivers. On one hand, it becomes a real thematic element of the novel’s meditation over the role of gods in a world where their influence cannot be denied. What are mortals but mere puppets? On another hand, some of the plot developments still stretch credulity and do knock some structural supports out of the story. On yet another hand, most of those coincidences would have been perfectly fine in a novel twice its length showing the details preceding The Curse of Chalion… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I would have enjoyed reading it all. In the end, it’s better to nod along and consider all of it as divine intervention.

    What’s not so attributable to divine intervention, however, is Bujold’s gift for characters and effortless prose. The Curse of Chalion is professional-level fantasy, attractive to even non-fans of the genre. In the age-old question, we now know that irresistible is stronger than immovable.

  • On, Adam Roberts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2001, 388 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07177-X

    What little that I’ve read of Adam Robert’s fiction so far has been heavy with two distinguishing characteristics. First; some gentle stylistic exploration (the implicit ur-narrator in Stone and Salt, for instance) and second; a thirst for world-building. While On doesn’t do much in terms of stylistic experimentation, it’s certainly side-heavy with one strange environment.

    In young protagonist Tighe’s life, everything revolves around the Wall. The Wall on whose ledges he and his village live, seeing the sun ascend all day long, not knowing much about what’s above, below or to the side of them. Gravity is paramount, especially when cattle (or people) fall off the ledges. This is not a prosperous life: humanity, in this novel, has been reduced to subsistence living, clustered in theocratic tribes. Tighe is supposed to be quasi-royalty in this village, but the first few chapter only show us a teenager unable to fit in a group that can’t afford secrets or dissent. Perhaps inevitably, he comes to fall off the edge of the Wall.

    And so his picaresque adventure begins. Miraculously saved from a hard landing lower down the Wall, he heals and is then sent off to war, soldier in an army bigger than he could ever imagine. Through his adventures, we come to understand the world, discover its secrets and go through a number of most excellent adventures. Precariousness, Adams tells us in an accompanying note, is the keyword of this novel: Tighe’s position is never secure, never stable, never comfortable. He is thrown from an adventure to the other: few of his companions stick around for more than a few pages. Many die horribly.

    I wouldn’t so far as to say that world-building is one of Science Fiction’s unique pleasures (Fantasy does it too, in addition to countless historical novels, or even stories set in unfamiliar societies), but On certainly plays the game with a lot of energy: You get used, eventually, to a vertical world and what it implies. This being said, I was never particularly convinced by elements of the basic premise, despite a laborious technical appendix detailing the how and why of On‘s particular situation. (In particular, I kept wondering where water would come from: On horizontal worlds like ours, aquifers are replenished by gravity, which just isn’t possible in On.) Vertical worlds aren’t completely new (K.W. Jeter’s Farewell Horizontal comes to mind, for instance, though that was set on an artificial environment where verticality definitely wasn’t normality), but they have rarely been as all-encompassing as this one. Despite my resistance to stories set in primitive settings, I actually went along with the ride, oohing and aahing whenever Adams wished.

    It helps that Adams is a slick professional whose prose clicks effortlessly. There is good forward momentum, and a number of very good scenes: I’m still quite creeped out by a sequence in which one of Tighe’s friend is eaten alive by a Very Large Bug. Sure, On often has the disconnected feel of a novel made out of various vignettes, but it’s reasonably fun to read and seems to be heading somewhere. The prose is uncluttered and it’s almost short enough to avoid overstaying its welcome.

    Almost, I said. It may be just a bit too short and leading a bit too far, in fact: the last fifty pages turn into a very different story, one that starts, then stops, then starts again. The last chapter has a curiously unfinished feel to it, almost as if we’d reached the end of the book but not the story. It’s a arguable choice given how the rest of Tighe’s adventures also carry this unfinished feel, but it still feels incomplete. Maybe even silly, if you look at it the wrong way.

    This ambivalence may serve to explain how I’m left neither disappointed nor impressed by the novel. Original premise aside, it’s a competent story that is well-handled without any pyrotechnics. Pure mid-list SF, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the lack of stylistic flourishes makes me yearn for Adams’ other efforts. Maybe Polystom, the next one on my list, will be more ambitious.

  • The Shark Mutiny, Patrick Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Torch, 2001, 493 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-103066-X

    Faithful readers of these reviews already know how little I think of Patrick Robinson’s so-called military thrillers. Bad plotting, lousy characters, awful prose: Frankly, I just keep reading them because they make me laugh and point. And so it struck me, a third into The Shark Mutiny, how much better the whole series would be as a sitcom. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I was writing an episode for…

    CRAZY NAVY!

    Episode 4: The Guppy Mutiny

    We open on ADMIRAL MORGAN, the lovable old coot who’s the hero of this series. MORGAN is snappily dressed in a red, white and blue suit made out of American Flag fabric, an outfit that blends seamlessly with the decoration of his office. His white beard is cut in a fashion halfway between Uncle Sam’s and Colonel Sanders. Reading the newspaper, he sees something that makes him look up abruptly.

    Morgan: Kaaathy!

    From the cheers and clapping from the audience, we know it’s already a series catchphrase.

    Kathy enters the office. She is a “spectacular redhead who, for three years, have refused to marry him.” [P.58]

    Kathy: Oh Admiral! Have you called me to ask me in marriage?

    Morgan: Yes, damnit!

    Kathy: I told you before, darling; not before you’re retired!

    Morgan: Grrr! This flirting is making me want to nuke someone!

    Kathy: And how is that different from your usual sunny disposition, darling?

    Morgan: Good point, but I still want to nuke someone. Who’s our enemy today?

    Jimmy Ramshawe enters the room. He is a young earnest intelligence Lieutenant with a slight Australian accent.

    Jimmy: Sir! I have uncovered evidence that the Iranians and Chinese are planning to mine the strait of Hormuz and block the worldwide transport of oil!

    Morgan: Hot diggity dawg! What’s your evidence, lieutenant?

    Jimmy shows a stack of invoices.

    Jimmy: Receipts for Russian underwater mines, sir! It stands to reason that if they bought it, they’ll use ’em!

    Morgan: What an enlightening insight in contemporary tactics! But wait- you speak like a foreigner!

    Jimmy: I’m from Australia, sir! But I’m good enough to be privy to American secrets! My father is a kick-ass Admiral! I’m dating the ambassador’s daughter!

    Morgan: Do you want to nuke someone too?

    Jimmy: Er… what normal boy wouldn’t, sir?

    Morgan: Good stuff! You’re all right! Kaaathy! Get me a secret camera in the Chinese navy briefing room!

    Behind him, the wall reveals a video screen. It lights up to a meeting of Iranian and Chinese officials.

    Chine Official: Death to America! Bwa-hah-ha!

    Iranian Official: Whee! Death to America!

    The screen is replaced by a view of the globe between China and Iran.

    Morgan: Damn! I’m “always completely mistrustful of the men from the Orient!” [P.138] What fiendish plot are they planning? Where will they strike next?

    A courier brings a message to Jimmy, who reads it before shouting out.

    Jimmy: Sir! A tanker just exploded in the strait of Hormuz!

    Morgan: (shrugging) Eh, that happens.

    Another courier.

    Jimmy: Sir! Another tanker just exploded in the strait of Hormuz!

    Morgan: (shrugging) Well, what can you do?

    A third courier.

    Jimmy: Sir! Another tanker blew up!

    Morgan: It’s war! Yay! Send the entire American fleet to the Persian Gulf! We’ll teach them to mess with our imperialistic stranglehold on the world supply of oil! Kaaathy!

    Kathy: All done, darling. Anyone can now walk from the UAE to Iran on top of our carriers!

    Morgan: But I still haven’t nuked anyone today. Why can’t I get any satisfaction? We’ve gone too long without nuking someone! Let’s hit that oil refinery! Get me the bestest of the best SEALs!

    Kathy: How about just a good one?

    Morgan: No! The bestest of the best!

    Kathy: How about any one of the US Navy’s superbly trained SEALs?

    Morgan: NO! I SAID I WANT THE BESTEST OF THE BEST!

    Kathy: All right.

    A tall blond Aryan man is delivered in the room with a forklift. He remains ramrod-straight throughout.

    SEAL #1: US NAVY SEAL! SIR YES SIR!

    Morgan: Soldier, “these guys are not just stepping lightly on our toes! They’re running us over with a fleet of [flippin’] rickshaws, and I’m not having it!” [P.158] So go ahead and nuke’em.

    SEAL #1: SIR YES SIR!

    The forklift retreats along with Navy Seal #1.

    Morgan: Good thing done.

    A moment passes, and then: Another courier.

    Jimmy: Sir! The raid is a complete success! Parts of the refinery are headed for orbit, and the other parts are going straight to the center of the earth! We’ve created a new volcano and killed thousands of civilians!

    Mrogan: “Consider the sound made by a cupful of gasoline on a bonfire just before you toss a lighted match into it –and then multiply that sound by around 40 million. That’s loud.” [P.54]

    Jimmy: But two of our SEALs died! Including the bestest of the best!

    Tears fill Admiral Morgan’s eyes.

    Morgan: That devastates me. I loved that man like no others, at the possible exception of Ted Kennedy. In a strictly heterosexual way, of course.

    Jimmy: Of course, sir.

    Morgan: This makes me so angry, I just WANT TO NUKE SOMEONE!

    Another courier.

    Jimmy: Sir! China has invaded Taiwan!

    Morgan: Yes! Nuke’em!

    Kathy: But darling! All of our forc
    es are near the Persian Gulf!

    Morgan: Curses! The mines were a trap! Foiled again by these devious foreigners!

    Jimmy: Um, sir? What about our forces in Japan, the Philipines, Diego Garcia-

    Morgan: Shut up, Jimmy! I’m trying to figure out why China would invade Taiwan.

    Jimmy: Because this ends what they see as forty years of internal rebellion from a rebellious splinter group they never formally acknowledged because it also claimed to be China’s official government?

    Morgan: That’s poppycock, son! It’s obvious to everyone that they invaded Taiwan for the precious treasures in their national museum

    Jimmy: What- what? Treasures? Where did that come from?

    Morgan: Hush, little boy! Look at the screen!

    Another view of the Chinese and Iranian officials.

    Chinese admiral: “WANT TREASURE BACK! WANT TREASURE BACK!” [P.278]

    Morgan: See?

    Jimmy: I humbly stand corrected.

    Morgan: You better be. Kathy, anyone else to nuke?

    Kathy: Well, the Chinese are still in Taiwan.

    Morgan: Right! Let’s nuke Taiwan! Kathy, get me the red button!

    Jimmy: Sir? Wouldn’t it be better to sent a SEAL team?

    Morgan: You’re right son! I loves them SEALs! Get me the bestest of the best SEALs!

    Kathy: Dead, darling. Don’t you mean the second-best of the-

    Morgan: BESTEST OF THE BESTEST MEANS STILL ALIVE, KATHY!

    Kathy: Working on it.

    Another SEAL is hauled in the office.

    SEAL #2: SIR YES SIR!

    Morgan: Go destroy stuff. Try not to get killed.

    SEAL #2: SIR YES SIR!

    He exits.

    Morgan whistles, waiting for a big boom. Finally, a communication comes onto his screen.

    SEAL #2: Admiral Morgan! We’ve got a problem, sir!

    Morgan: Have you destroyed stuff?

    SEAL #2: SIR YES SIR!

    Morgan: Then what’s the problem?

    SEAL #2: The commander of our submarine had gone nuts! He thinks he’s the reincarnation of some French loser!

    Morgan: Wow, that’s crazy.

    SEAL #2: What should we do, sir?

    Morgan: Ask him if he can nuke part of China for me.

    A pause.

    SEAL #2: He says no.

    Morgan: Crazy! Shoot him!

    A gunshot is heard.

    Morgan: Outstanding work, sailor! You just saved us eighty pages of a stupid last act that has nothing to do with the rest of this story.

    He closes the screen and wipes his hand.

    Morgan: And that’s another triumphant day for American hegemony.

    He puts his hands on his hips and strikes a triumphant pose.

    Jimmy: But Admiral! Taiwan is still held by the Chinese!

    Morgan: Who cares? It’ll all be forgotten in time for the next episode.

    A final courier.

    Jimmy: But sir! 9/11! Afghanistan! Iraq! Terrorists are the new enemy! Our imagined world of 2008 as seen from early 2001 doesn’t even make sense any more!

    A pause as Morgan thinks it through.

    Morgan: Yay, a new enemy to nuke! Come on, Jimmy and Kathy, let’s bellow our favourite song!

    They lock arms and begin high-stepping, singing the series’ signature FUN-DAMENTALIST ANTAGONISTS! musical number.

    Curtains descend.

  • The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking, 2005, 652 pages, C$42.00 hc, ISBN 0-670-03384-7

    Let’s get something out of the way: I’m a singularitarian. I believe in technological acceleration and its effect on society. The historical evidence seems clear enough: I hop in anticipation of the upcoming impact of what Joel Garreau calls the GRIN technologies (Genetics, Robotics, Informatics and Nanotechnology) I may not believe in the strong version of the Singularity (the so-called “Rapture of the Nerds” after which everything is supposed to be sweet and perfect), but I’ve read too much SF not to anticipate fundamental changes in my forecast lifetime. Even before cracking page one, I approached Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near as confirmation, not persuasion.

    But that book is not written for me. It’s written for well-educated people who may understand how technological progress is accelerating, but don’t read Science Fiction and aren’t familiar with Vernor Vinge’s concept of the ever-accelerating technological singularity. It’s written to convince politicians, entrepreneurs and other decision-makers that there’s a new future knocking at our doors, a new future that has nothing to do with the weak beer of STAR TREK or, for that matter, most of the conventional visions of things to come.

    It’s no accident if almost half of The Singularity is Near is spent looking at the historical evidence of technological acceleration. Kurzweil’s background is in computer science, and arguments derived from progress in transistor size, density and cost make up a backbone of his thesis. See Moore’s Law, for instance, which lives on despite ever-dire predictions of its obsolescence. See the rapid adoption of cell phones, the Internet, DVD and MP3 players in far less than a decade, compared to dozens of years for television and automobiles. Everyone knows that technological progress is increasing. The only question is; what’s the destination?

    Kurzweil then continues his exploration of What We Know in biological science, establishing to his satisfaction that there is nothing special about consciousness, hence the inevitability of its recreation in an artificial medium. My lack of familiarity with neurobiology made this chapter significantly less accessible than the others, but its intent remains crystal-clear: it clearly establishes the background for Kurzweil’s vision of the Humans 2.0: Re-written DNA, redesigned bodies, enhanced intelligence, transferable consciousness, artificial intelligence and so on. Whew.

    This is old stuff for SF fans, but what’s important about Kurzweil’s book is how it’s developed from the ground up, from real-world headlines onward. The Singularity is Near bridges the gap between SF fantasies and real trends, grounding speculations in palpable trends. (iPods as drivers for the Singularity. Discuss.) This is a book that can dropped in boardrooms, one that plants stakes in the consensus vision of the world.

    And an optimistic vision it is. At a time when the space age is historical, when the coming energy crunch is so worrisome, when ecological collapse seems all too likely, the idea of ever-increasing progress seems quaintly anachronistic. It won’t be an easy road, warns Kurzweil (amongst many other chills, The Singularity is Near posits a positively alarming solution to the gray goo problem), but it’s an inspiring one.

    Richly argued and accessibly written, The Singularity is Near takes its place alongside (and building upon) previous futurology books such as Future Shock, and The Engines of Creation —along with a dash of The Physics of Immortality. It has already sold widely and created its own talkstorm of argument for or against the Singularity, recoming a standard reference text on the subject.

    As previously stated, I’m already convinced. Belief in the Singularity often boils down to, well, faith: Do you believe in progress, or not? There are certainly enough hints and trends pointing away from the Singularity, not the least of them being the Fermi Paradox: If intelligence is so common, if the Singulariy is so inevitable, why haven’t we seen any evidence of alien Singularities? Kurzweil’s pat answer (“We’re obviously the first! Ta-da!”) is one of the most unsatisfying aspects of the book.

    But the Singularity can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Books like this one, by suggesting what can happen, are an important part of how we collectively define where to go next. Have a look.